Directors:
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Jules Dassin, Terence Davies, Rolf de Heer, Manoel
de Oliveira, Brian De Palma, Vittorio de Sica, André de Toth, Guillermo del
Toro, Jonathan Demme, Jacques Demy, Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin,
William Dieterle, Walt Disney, Xavier
Dolan, Stanley
Dabernig, Josef – filmmaker
By Andréa Picard from Cinema
Scope
“Someone ought to do a Dabernig Derby soon,” a North American friend and
colleague recently exclaimed. And right he is. Aside from a sprinkling of
screenings at obscure American underground film festivals and his inclusion in
a group show at the corridor-shaped, formidable Storefront for Art and
Architecture (www.storefrontnews.org)
co-designed by Vito Acconci and Steven Holl in NYC, Josef Dabernig’s renown has
not crossed the Atlantic. His name, unfamiliar even among cinephiles and art
cognoscenti in
Dabernig’s short films have concurrent themes and motifs, each recognizably, unmistakably his. A cross between Béla Tarr, Jacques Tati, Samuel Beckett, and Aki Kaurismäki, these works ranging in length between seven and 24 minutes rely on minimalism to fashion portraits of modernist decay and the banal scenarios that occur amidst their structures. As much about architecture and history in place as they are about the ridiculous inherent in ritualistic exchange (between people, landscape, technology), Dabernig’s films exhort contradictions with every twist of road. A deadpan treatment of these existing and fabricated scenarios further distorts a definitive worldview, which, while puzzling, is alluringly bizarre and foreboding. The farcical elements, often physical, are laced with a dark, existential confusion—not only one which questions existence but every social interaction and prescribed decorum. A Monsieur Hulot-type character, played by Dabernig himself, often figures in the work, embarking on a set task which seemingly exists in a fully formed universe, but the audience is welcomed in perhaps mid-way through the endeavour (it is not clear). Much remains blurred in the work, but the repetition of imagery—of cars, trains, desolate and decaying landscapes, abandoned buildings and semi-futuristic, socialist architecture—suggests an ongoing narrative whose structural expectations are all but abbreviated in any given film. Difficult to situate, Dabernig’s films reside near the boundaries of both narrative and avant-garde filmmaking, resting unsure of either’s hypothetical position in today’s art world.
Wisla (1996) begins with a large, blocky, concrete structure jutting into the composition, a modern ruin standing proud despite its neglect. The camera then pans insistently to the left, surveying tops of structures barely penetrating the frame composed of a big, grey sky. Shot in soft black and white, the film looks and feels old, itself an implied remnant from another time. Two men in suits and ties walk through the concrete catacombs of a dilapidated, brutalist football stadium, to the coach’s bench, “Wisla” clearly labeled on the side of the glass structure where they settle and sit. This is the home of the famous Polish football team; off-screen sounds (Italian!) erupt as the game gets underway. Boisterous cheering and loudspeaker refereeing conjure the visuals of the match as the camera remains focused on the two men who are somewhat awkwardly playing out the clichés of a soccer coach and training assistant. Registering nervousness and frustration, their gestures are exaggerated and unrealistic. And yet, they are amusing, never maddening, nor nearly as unbelievable as the real thing. Dabernig’s character gets up, calmly walks to the edge of the playing field and signals to his make-believe players, and the camera responds to his order by quickly panning up to reveal row upon row of empty seats. This game (the imaginary football match and the film’s precise sound-image play) continues for a few more minutes until the two men rise, walk up through the bleachers and greet dignitaries watching the game. A series of handshakes takes place, and the two Wisla members walk off-screen, the camera pulling out to expose the barren stadium. Wisla ends as the Italian football commentary continues through the credits, which appear at the end of all of Dabernig’s films in a typewriter-like, anachronistic font. An introduction into Dabernig’s self professed “no-man’s land,” Wisla depicts the un-depicted, where familiarity is elided in exchange for the geometry of human-made interventions into the natural order.
Two years later, Dabernig co-directed Timau with German photographer Markus Scherer, a 20-minute, black-and-white, tripartite vignette which has been called a “workers’ melodrama.” The first shot reveals two men driving in a car through a beautiful, but treacherous, mountainous landscape, with lyrical lightplay being performed upon their car’s windshield. The sleepy passenger shifts to reveal a third person in the backseat—the entire film, like all of Dabernig’s, relies on a revelation-concealment structure. As they drive, we hear the distinctive but undetermined sounds of the car radio and see wondrous ruins like aquaducts and bridges from a distant era. Driving through tunnels, the passengers are alternatively obscured by darkness and obliterated from sunshine, this chiaroscuro peek-a-boo exchange acting as dramatic highpoint to the film’s uncertain storyline. Finally, they park next to a rock face that displays a mysterious rectangular delineation seemingly drawn with chalk, and fetch their gear from the trunk. As the tension for narrative builds, the second section of the film draws out the desire for story and refuses quick fulfillment. The three men, dressed in some kind of uniform, continue their journey on foot, lugging briefcases. The leader of the trio uses ski poles to help him climb the hilly, landscape. Timau adopts a silent film aura as they mount the brush ever upward, their steps unheard on the soundtrack, the quiet contradicting the arduousness of their hike. This oddly tranquil ascent seems to go on forever until eventually they reach a dark tunnel and the sound is restored. The light from the opening casts their plodding outlines in sharp contrast, and there is very little to see on screen except for shafts of light alternatively illuminating the top of their heads and then their feet. Laborious and claustrophobic, their trudging is enhanced through the sounds of heavy breathing. When they at last emerge into daylight again, the camera explores the jagged rock faces and catches a slithery snake as it cowers beneath a rock, this observational gaze belonging to none of the men.
The third section reveals what the three men have come to do, an uncanny denouement which is sealed through a formal pact (whose echoes will reappear later on at the end of Rosa Coeli, one of his best and most fascinating films). Deed done, wistful romantic music concludes this odd, elegant tale, the end of which I will not spoil. But it’s a typical Dabernig motif: the paradoxical coming together of old and new worlds. Unsurprisingly, his oeuvre has occasionally been read as a fabled Western excursion into the East; his camera and Hulot-esque character representing the European sophisticate (though awkward and misplaced) casting a peculiar look upon former Soviet states stuck in a time warp. While the aesthetic collision of rural and urban, and of traditional structures and modernist buildings recurs, the dividing line between old and new is not the dominant theme. Anything askew is.
Jogging (2000), for example, is wickedly strange. Again we begin in the car, this time in striking, saturated colour. Twentieth century orchestral music plays from the stereo as the car travels through a decrepit landscape marked only by unidentified communist architecture; the mood grows steadily eerie. The music, now haunting and gothic, grows louder as the camera voyeuristically glances through the sideview mirror, catching the reflection of buildings hovering in the background, compulsively observing the driver’s hands, pausing on the dashboard, and looking out the windshield from the backseat. The editing grows quicker as the collage of bizarre imagery (drooling and barking wild dogs, a herd of goats) increases with the music, culminating in an all-consuming state of disquiet. The ultimate destination is Renzo Piano’s UFO-inspired Stadio San Nicola, built for the 1990 World Cup. The car suddenly stops, and the Adidas-sporting driver (we never see his face) steps onto the pavement with his puffy black sneakers; the camera goes mad. Swirling out of control, the ethereal music still soaring, the camera finally rests upon the big blue sky as the film ends in a L’Eclisse extended finale shot, the doom of modernity hanging indeterminately in mid-air.
Two less successful works followed, Wars (2001) and automatic (2002), before Dabernig’s most ambitious film, 2003’s Rosa Coeli. (In between, Dabernig made a six-minute short, Parking, but I was unable to locate any information on it, let alone a screening copy.) Though sumptuously shot in pristine black and white, Wars is a bit goofy, with the service staff of a passenger train going through the motions with too much self-inflection, the props too perfectly positioned, and the end result stilted. The trademarks are all there: the unsigned landscape framed by a series of windows, the title of the film physically located in the space—this time over a baggage compartment and on the back of the seats in the empty restaurant compartment—the boredom and monotony, the rehearsal of motion and movement through time and space. It’s not tossed off by any means (how could it be with gleaming, precise cinematography that reveals the train compartment as a work of lacquered art?), but it is minor. The same can be said of automatic. Made with the music group G.R.A.M., the film is a drum-and-bass, pulsing, automotive musical taking place in a ramshackle parking garage. A road movie that never sees the road, this pared down curio is oddly reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), but the revved up homoeroticsm is here replaced by solitary and silly art-making. But the crafty interplay between diegetic and non-diegetic sound is remarkable, and reminds us of Dabernig’s clever and intricate use of sound overall. It’s not incidental that the car audio tape player (now virtually obsolete) figures so prominently in his works—that, and the chugging of trains, like the rhythmic mechanized sound at the beginning of Rosa Coeli.
A man (Dabernig) sits on a train ostensibly reading a newspaper. German voiceover recites his private thoughts, a dense and poetic text written by Bruno Pellandrini which lasts the duration of the film. En route to a small Moravian town, his birthplace, to bury his recently deceased father, the protagonist conjures his past inside his head as he physically goes through the motions of settling the formalities over his father’s death. A rumination on childhood, tinged with regret, sorrow, and existential longing, the beauty of the text is rendered elegiac through the masterful compositions highlighting the wonders of the land. As the village’s past and the ruining of its eponymous monastery, named the Celestial Rose (after which the wine of the region was christened), emerges through this internal monologue, the camera dissects this snowy, sleepy town, its feeble-bodied villagers, and the anachronisms of its interior design. Like Timau, the signing of a pact is the concluding gesture, but Rosa Coeli is imbued with the weight of psychological solitude, a Baudelairian recoil for which there can be little sense of accomplishment. A cloaked sense of irony surely lays hidden amidst this picaresque tale, but as it’s so different from Dabernig’s other works, it’s difficult to detect.
The same cannot be said of his latest film, the magisterial-farcical Lancia
Thema (2005), showing in the Wavelengths program at this year’s
Dabis, Cherien
BOMB Magazine: Cherien Dabis by June Stein June Stein interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2009 (excerpt)
January, 2002:
Columbia University’s graduate film school. The winter sun flashed through the
mini-blinds in my classroom, spilling slatted bars of light onto the beautiful
face of a stranger in the corner. Who was she? It was a new
semester, but “Directing Actors,” the class I teach, is a full-year course and
I don’t allow new students to join midstream. Rules are rules, but I didn’t
bargain on the likes of the force about to be born. Cherien Dabis stayed,
busted her ass, and ate every pertinent molecule in that room. As my colleague,
professor and filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann said: she was incredibly diligent,
dogged, and determined to learn the screenwriting form. She’d rewrite, rewrite,
rewrite. She was tireless. She just didn’t give up on her ideas until she got
them right. Her great determination and focus were a huge factor in how she got
her first feature made. Because she’s tenacious. Power to her.
Amreeka, a comedy/drama, premiered at Sundance in
2009 and played as opening night of New Directors/New Films at MoMA and the
Film Society of Lincoln Center. At Cannes in 2009, it was awarded the
prestigious FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize. The film is a universal journey into the
lives of immigrants searching for a better future in America’s promised land.
Muna, a single mother, leaves the West Bank with her son Fadi only to find
undreamed-of challenges in a new world full of seismic changes.
I thought of my own
young artistic ambition as I trudged up 85th Street, past a FedEx depot that
used to be Merkin’s, a jazz-and-drugs bar. Bizarrely, Cherien’s apartment was
in the exact same building that I had moved into exactly 40 years ago when I
first came to New York, before Cherien was even born. Here’s the old
wrought-iron fence! And the crooked little entrance facing the elevator that I
got attacked in! God, the lobby hasn’t changed at all. I feel old, but proud.
Cherien answers the door and we horse around, do some girl talk, and apply lip
gloss for a photo shoot. Then she cracks a joke that she is clearly fond of, so
please, LOL.
One
on One: Najwa Najjar and Cherien Dabis | Sundance Festival 2010
Huffington Post Sundance Interview Melissa Silverstein interview at Sundance from The Huffington Post, January 21, 2009
New York
Magazine, "Arab in America: Cherien Dabis" Kera Bolonik interview from The New York Times magazine,
INTERVIEW:
Amreeka's Cherien Dabis | Film Independent
Carolyn Cohagan interview from Film
Independent,
Out
director Cherien Dabis brings Arab Americans to the screen ... Jen Sabella from After Ellen,
Director
Cherien Dabis straddles two worlds -- latimes.com Reed Johnson feature and interview from The LA Times,
Authenticity,
Intimacy and Realism: Cherien Dabis Talks 'Amreeka ... Interview by indieWIRE,
'Coming to Amreeka' Michael Archer interview from Guernica magazine, September 2009
BOMB Magazine: Cherien Dabis by June Stein June Stein interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2009
Cherien Dabis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
AMREEKA B 87
The title is the Arabic word for America, so
this film plants its feet firmly on an idealization, using a series of small
real life incidents to help re-visualize a new image of what it is to be an
Arab-American. At least for me, I much
preferred the opening sequences that took place in Ramallah, which show
geographically how the Palestinian territories aren’t one continual land mass,
but separate little entities, like islands, each of which is separated by an
Israeli checkpoint. Imagine traveling
from Connecticut to Rhode island, but being unable to pass through any major
cities, as 99% of Palestinians can’t travel through Jerusalem without an
Israeli permit, so have to be diverted but also pass through several different
checkpoints along the way where the guards have the authority to hold you
indefinitely for as long as they want, intentionally leaving some travelers
stranded for hours at a time, all under the security imposition that each
Palestinian is a would be terrorist. So
a trip that might normally take 45 minutes ends up taking several hours
instead. (See a detailed map from “Around Jerusalem to Ramallah” on August 18,
2006 by Ben here: B o s t o n t
o P a l e s t i n e ...,
where a 30 minute trip requires an hour and a half detour, and this is before
you hit the checkpoints) It’s very
difficult to live and work under those conditions, but Palestine has been
occupied for over half a century or more, forty years by the Israelis and
twenty years before that by Egypt and Jordan, and still can’t rightfully call
itself home. Nonetheless, there are
nearly 3 and a half million Palestinians living in the occupied territories of
the West Bank and
Newcomer Nisreen Faour in her first film is the
slightly pudgy Muna Farah, an extremely warm and overly affectionate mother of
a high school son Fadi (Melkar Muallem) living in Bethlehem with her own
elderly mother. Implications are that her
husband has left the family for a younger, skinnier girlfriend under unpleasant
circumstances that remain unspoken. When
she wins the
With only
benign trace notes of political discourse mentioned anywhere throughout the
entire film, this becomes instead an intimate family portrait where the idea of
America becomes the focus of Muna’s journey, where she enters the country with
such naïve, open-minded anticipation, eagerly believing she has finally found a
place of acceptance, except she runs into a wall of resistance. She begins to see herself in pathetic terms,
as does her son during his own confrontations with bullying kids, as both are
made to feel less than human. The film
appears rooted in realism, where the discord outside finds its way inside,
where families are challenged by the fundamental indifference and ostracism
shown to them by their neighbors, where your problem is not my problem, so why
should I care? It is here that the film
falters somewhat, as it doesn’t really dig deep enough into the bitterness that
develops when nothing but scorn is heaped upon you at every turn and in every
layer of American bureaucracy, where people find themselves in a no-way-out
pit, especially when they have no one and nowhere else to turn. But this is not a political film, instead it
uses warmth and humor to win our affection, where Muna’s smile alone is enough
to brighten anyone’s day, and how could anyone not love Muna, who is simply a
force of good will? America is still too
deeply mired in the Middle East war efforts and is not exactly ready to embrace
a film that takes a pro-Arab stance, which is exactly the point of the film,
where facing everyday prejudices becomes part of the human dilemma. There is a sweet contextualization and
something of a contrived Disneyland ending, using a liberal American school
principal Joseph Ziegler, similar to Richard Jenkins in THE VISITOR (2007), to
become a bridge between different cultures, where all things work out in the
end, but also a terrific performance by an Americanized Palestinian cousin
Salma (Alia Shawkat) who dates a black guy, so there is a United Nations
goodwill feel to all of the characters, where the single-minded xenophobic
white notion of what it is to be an American is seriously challenged.
User comments from imdb Author: hprockstar from
This story follows a Middle-Eastern woman as she struggles living in an
military-occupied
Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review
The thriving subgenre of immigrant displacement dramedy gets a
confident new spin from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian-Jordanian raised in the
Paper Magazine,
"Amreeka, the Beautiful"
Rachel Syme from Paste magazine,
September 3, 2009
Growing up in small-town
Two decades later, Dabis has made a film her teenage self would
be proud of: Amreeka, a runaway hit at
Moving Pictures: Cherien Dabis - Amreeka Article by Cherien Dabis from Moving Pictures magazine, December 2008
This past November, the country that Arabs call
"Amreeka" proved that it's not what it had appeared to be. And, in
doing so, it surprised the world by ushering in a whole new era - the era of
hope. It is in this era that my first feature film, Amreeka, will make
its debut. Though it was conceived during troubled times, much like Obama's
presidency, it was born out of a desire for change and the hope for something
better.
A first-generation Palestinian/Jordanian American, I grew in
Then the 1991 Gulf War hit, and the question that plagued me became the fire that fueled me. Virtually overnight, my family became "the enemy." My father lost many of his patients because people suddenly decided they didn't want to support an Arab doctor. We got death threats on a daily basis: "Love it or leave it." And: "We know what to do with you Saddam-lovers." But the icing on the cake was when the secret service came to my high school to investigate a rumor that my older sister threatened to kill the president. My eyes were opened to the racism that can result from the stereotypes that the media propagates. Not only did I start paying close attention to the ways in which Arabs were portrayed in the news and in Hollywood movies, I realized that I wanted to have a hand in changing the images that were (and still are) associated with being Arab.
It was in this spirit of activism that I discovered the power of
filmmaking, the power to bridge cultures and bring stories to the masses, the
power to use the universal language of emotion to effect change. A decade
later, I moved to
Thus "Muna" was born. Inspired by the strength and optimism of my aunt who immigrated to the U.S. in 1997, Muna is a woman who doesn't see her own differences but rather assumes a sense of belonging everywhere she goes. She'll do anything for her family, except let them down. And though she starts off eager to run away from her problems back home, she learns that she must face them and stand up for herself. It's through her that I set out to uncover the truth of our shared humanity in a film that ultimately is a gesture of love for my own family and community.
Five years, countless drafts of the script and more than half a
dozen development labs later (from the Film Independent Director's Lab to the
Sundance Middle East Screenwriter's Lab to Tribeca All Access), I was in
production. I'll never forget the feeling of pride that overwhelmed me when I
stood on set watching my incredible international cast as we recreated - at
least in part - my 1991 reality in Celina, Ohio. I couldn't help thinking that
my true hope is that this movie be seen in small towns across the U.S. Naïve?
Perhaps. A few years ago, I would have never thought it possible. But as Obama
declared at Grant Park on election night, "Change has come to
America." That gives me great hope for Amreeka.
review Caryn James from The Daily Beast, September 1, 2009
In the Sundance favorite Amreeka, a single mom goes from the West
Bank to White Castle. The Daily Beast’s Caryn James on this fall’s most charming
indie film.
Muna, the down-to-earth heroine of Amreeka, arrives in the United States from the West Bank with her 16-year-old son and offers only smiling agreement to an obtuse officer at passport control. “Citizenship?” he asks. Eager, endearing, speaking fluent but imperfect English, she says, “I don’t have.”
“Then you don’t have a country?” he says sarcastically. She cheerfully nods, and explains she’s from the Palestinian territory. And when he moves on to ask, “Occupation?” she innocently answers, “Yes, it is occupied, for 40 years." That’s as overtly political as this witty little film about Palestinians coming to America becomes.
Even though the movie pointedly takes place just as the U.S. is invading Iraq in 2003, politics creeps in quietly. First-time writer/director Cherien Dabis leaves it to us to notice the sign outside the White Castle burger joint where Muna works. With a couple of strategic letters missing, it reads “SUPPORT OUR OOPS.” (If only Bush’s famous banner had read “Oops!” instead “Mission Accomplished.”) But Dabis’ own girlhood as the daughter of Middle Eastern immigrants in small-town Ohio, which inspired the film, adds a valuable dimension we never see on screen.
The earliest scenes, set in the West Bank, make the film seem more blatantly political than it is. Muna has to pass through checkpoints to get home from her bank job, and when her son, Fadi, makes a wisecrack to the guard, the boy is hauled out of the car at gunpoint. Muna worries that in America, “We’d be like visitors,” but Fadi says, “It’s better than being prisoners in your own country.”
Even in this fraught political atmosphere, though, the film’s focus is on Muna herself. She is the kind of willful person whose determination has to overcome her lack of self-confidence; a pudgy middle-aged woman who calls attention to her recent weight gain before anyone else can, who is still wounded that her husband has traded her in for a younger, skinny wife. A new life is just what she needs. (Nisreen Faour, unknown here, makes Muna entirely sympathetic and real.)
She finds a different ordeal in Illinois, where she and Fadi move in with her sister and brother-in-law, and their two thoroughly American daughters. Muna is so embarrassed at having to mop floors and flip burgers for a living that she tells her family she is working at the bank next door. The family is mistaken for Iraqi and finds an anonymous threat in the mailbox. Muna’s brother-in-law, a doctor, begins losing so many patients that he can’t pay the mortgage.
Even the kindest characters display unexamined bias. Fadi’s high-school principal, who develops an instant crush on Muna, tries to reassure her when Fadi is bullied, telling her that kids ignorantly assume all Muslims are terrorists. Muna quietly says, “We’re not even Muslim.” Dabis makes all this part of the fabric of her characters’ lives, along with other strands as ordinary as Fadi getting stoned with his American cousin and learning how to dress so he’ll look cool.
As Amreeka was making the festival rounds, including Sundance and the opening night slot at New Directors/ New Films, Dabis often talked about how her girlhood shaped the film. (She has written for the Showtime series The L Word, but Amreeka is her first movie.) The daughter of Jordanian and Palestinian immigrants, she was 14 during the Gulf War. Her father, a doctor, lost patients; the family received death threats. And in an incident more dramatic than any on screen, the Secret Service investigated a rumor that her 17-year-old sister had threatened the president. It’s startling to realize how easily she was able to transport those memories intact from the first Iraq war to the post-9/11 world. But like the sign outside White Castle, Dabis’ memories enhance a film that is fundamentally quite cheerful, taking its cue from the ever-optimistic Muna as she successfully finds her way in a new country.
On the scale of current Iraq-themed movies, Amreeka is far less skewering than the gleefully anti-Bush In the Loop, but more opinionated than the determinedly apolitical soldiers’ story The Hurt Locker. Giving a fresh twist to the evergreen story of immigrants, Amreeka shows how politics infuses daily life, and how the muddled image of Middle Easterners in this country has persisted from that first Iraq conflict straight through to the Big Oops war of today.
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Christian Science Monitor (Andy Klein) review
CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]
filmcritic.com (Norm Schrager) review [3/5]
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3.5/5]
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B] also seen here: Dark Horizons review and here: DVD Talk
Screen International review David D’Arcy
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]
Huffington Post Sundance Interview Melissa Silverstein interview at Sundance from The Huffington Post, January 21, 2009
Out director Cherien Dabis brings Arab Americans to the screen ... Jen Sabella from After Ellen, August 25, 2009
'Coming to Amreeka' Michael Archer interview from Guernica magazine, September 2009
Authenticity, Intimacy and Realism: Cherien Dabis Talks 'Amreeka ... Interview by indieWIRE, September 4, 2009
BOMB Magazine: Cherien Dabis by June Stein June Stein interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2009
San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review September 4, 2009
Director Cherien Dabis straddles two worlds -- latimes.com Reed Johnson feature and interview from The LA Times, September 4, 2009
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times, "Settlers from Afar, In Land of Lincoln" Stephen Holden from The New York Times, September 4, 2009
New York Magazine, "Arab in America: Cherien Dabis" Kera Bolonik interview from The New York Times magazine, August 16, 2009
Palestinian territories - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Demographics of the Palestinian territories - Wikipedia, the free ...
Demographics of Palestine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
B o s t o n t o P a l e s t i n e ... “Around Jerusalem to Ramallah" by Ben, August 18, 2006
Dag,
Umut
KUMA B- 81
aka: 2nd Wife
Austria (93 mi) 2012
‘Scope Official site
An exposé on Turkish culture in an Austrian film is quite a novel
undertaking, an extremely detailed slice of life, unraveling like a Turkish Madame Bovary, another realist work that
was the subject of obscenity attacks in its era, written in mid 19th
century France. Similarly, the religious
backwardness ingrained in these small Turkish sects existing today almost in
secrecy brings ancient customs and beliefs into stark contrast with the modern
world. The story revolves around the
idea of Turkish husbands taking a 2nd wife, something outlawed in Austria,
yet continues to be practiced, albeit infrequently, outside the gaze of
unsuspecting government officials. What
starts out as a festive, wide-open, country wedding in Turkey (where perhaps
money changes hands) soon takes a quick turn for the worse, as the alleged
bride and groom, the beautiful young Ayse (Begüm Akkaya) and handsome Haslan
(Murathan Muslu), are quickly ushered back to Vienna with Haslan’s mother Fatma
(Nihal G. Koldas) where we learn the wedding is a sham, as Ayse is really the 2nd
wife of Fatma’s husband, the aging patriarch Mustafa (Vedat Erincin), already
with 5 children, where the two older grown daughters, perhaps more Austrian
than Turkish, disapprove of the younger Ayse from the moment she enters the
house, turning this into a claustrophobic chamber drama. Written from a woman’s perspective by Petra
Ladinigg embellishing the director’s story, this is a small scale, realist work
that eventually becomes suffocatingly melodramatic.
The widescreen pan of the mountains of Turkey quickly give way to a secret, closed-off world that likely conflicts with Muslim practices as well, but are holdover family customs. Fatma is extremely ill with cancer early on, as her condition is deteriorating with chemotherapy, requiring surgery, where she welcomes and embraces Ayse even over her own daughters, suggesting if anything happens to her, she wants Ayse in charge of her family. Making matters more uncomfortable, the family must prepare a bed in the living room for the wedding to be consummated, where every sound reverberates through the thin walls, but Ayse is soon pregnant. Like Cinderella, she is still treated within the family as a scrub lady, doing all the cooking and cleaning while everyone else has the freedom to live their lives. Even when she visits the grocery store, she is labeled arrogant and snobbish by the Turkish women in the community for not engaging in the local women’s gossip, and she’s afraid to speak as she’s still learning the Austrian language. Despite her best efforts to please her own family, she is constantly ridiculed and humiliated, as if she is the cancerous growth within the family. The director, in his first feature film, plays on the audience’s expectations, offering a few plot twists that come unexpectedly.
Pitting the old against the new, raising relevant but often embarrassing
questions, each generation has to face its own challenges, where you’d think
Ayse might be steered towards other 2nd wives, many of whom might be
undergoing similar resentment, each having no one they can turn to, as their
very presence is an abomination in strict Austrian society. The featured characters are Ayse and Fatma,
as it’s really their story, where the performances of both are standout. Director Umut Dag, of Kurdish descent, aided
by cinematographer Carsten Thiele, displays a special interest in the plight of
his female characters, effectively making a ‘women’s film.’ Not welcomed and faced with overly harsh
options are typical immigrant stories, where the severe treatment often
backfires, forcing characters into making more reckless choices they’d never
otherwise have considered. The small,
baby steps that Ayse has been taking throughout the picture suddenly turn into
leaps and bounds, as the film takes a strange turn towards the end, but one
which is telegraphed throughout, sending tensions literally skyrocketing
through the roof, becoming an intimate portrait of women’s hysteria, where Hell
hath no fury like a woman scorned. The
film is a wrenching glimpse of the underside of humanity, often tightening the
noose around their own necks when they become the arbitrary enforcers of
morality.
User reviews from imdb Author: tandrei2001 from
I recently saw this movie at TIFF in my hometown. Although it gets a little
time to get into the slower pace it deserves every inch of it. It is also a
good insight of Turkish traditional family, although emigrated with strict
rules that are carried on even in western countries. The film develops the
drama slowly until the climax towards the end. The acting is very solid,
although they are all Turkish actors. I don't know how famous are they in their
own country, but I would give credit to Nihal G. Koldas as Fatma, the
authoritarian mother of the family, and Murathan Muslu who plays Hassan, the
hard working son hiding a secret that wouldn't be tolerated in such
conservative environment. The biggest surprise is the 21 year debut Begüm
Akkaya in the role of Ayse , a young Turkish woman sent out for marriage abroad
by her family. Her performance is stunning, incredibly fresh and brilliant. I
hope to hear more of her in the future. If you have the chance, go for it, you
won't regret for sure. andrei
Screen
International [Fionnuala Halligan]
Kuma means ‘second wife’ in Turkish, and Umut Dag’s debut feature is
indeed a claustrophobic domestic drama about a second wife, although, in the
way of the Turks living in
Exposure may well be limited, but this turns out to have enough heft to guarantee festival profile at the least. The events onscreen are greatly enhanced by a distinctive shooting style which presses in on the viewer in the subtlest of ways, until the limitations and tensions of the lives led onscreen become palpably real.
Kuma starts out wide, with a wedding in a Turkish village; amidst the clamour and the colour, several facts reveal themselves. Fatma (Koldas) is very ill; her son Hasan (Muslu) has just married a local girl called Ayse (Akkaya), which his sister Nurcan (Karabayir) resents; and they are all travelling back to Vienna where they will live together.
On their return, however, it becomes clear that all this is an elaborate ruse, and the young Ayse has been brought to Austria to become second wife to the ageing family patriarch, Mustafa (Erincin), with the full blessing - if not connivance - of his ailing first wife Fatma, who also has a son working in Germany, a married daughter in an abusive relationship, a teenage girl and a 10-year-old boy.
Once in Europe, the film quickly cuts from a wide shot of the mountains of Turkey to a closed-off world - the apartment, the local halal shop, the playground. This isn’t so much a film about integration - effectively, there is none, although Ayse does slowly learn to speak German - but the old ways and the new, the past and the future.
In this sealed-off Turkish community, appearances are everything and everybody guards their secrets, but the timid and well-meaning Ayse, brought in as a glorified housemaid, may yet effect a change.
Kuma isn’t evenly paced, and some of the early establishing sequences can tend towards the plodding. With a lot to shoulder, performances from the two leads are crucial and strong, although Koldas, as the somewhat saintly Fatma, only really makes her full mark in the final denouement - but it’s quite a mark.
Young Akkaya is certainly a face to remember, as is Muslu, as Hasan, her ‘husband’. Director Umut Dag, himself a Kurd, displays a marked sensitivity for the plight of his characters, turning in fundamentally what used to be called a ‘woman’s film’. In his efforts, he is much assisted by intriguing camerawork from Carsten Thiele and a screenplay of some unexpected depth by Petra Ladinigg.
Hollywood
Reporter [Deborah Young]
Director Umut Dag's quiet drama, which opened the Berlin Panorama, tells
the story of a village girl who is recruited as a second wife.
An innocent village girl is secretly recruited as the second wife, or kuma,
of a Turkish pater familias in
If it’s hard for Westerners to swallow the idea of co-existing wives, one
suspects modern Muslims have a few problems, too. Perhaps this is why Ayse’s
(Akkaya) wedding to a nice, anonymous white-haired gent is passed off as a much
more appropriate marriage to his handsome son Hasan. Only the family knows the
truth: The pretty teenager is being shipped off to
In
The children’s reactions (two are already grown up) provide a reality check
on the surreal situation. Though they still wear tightly wound headscarves out
of doors, the two younger girls appear to have been born in
Just when things are settling down, a major plot twist sends the story rocketing off in a new direction. The second part of the film splits wide open in the kinky way Austrian films tend to do, raising all sorts of embarrassing social questions no character is prepared to answer. Finally, after all Ayse’s Cinderella-like masochism and self-sacrifice and the family’s outrageous bad faith, tensions explode in a highly satisfying, knock-down fight that sends genuine old Turkish values flying out the window.
The fine cast is exceptional in creating a closed-circuit world in which hidden passions can explode. Koldas’ mature performance is full of unspoken, repressed feelings, making an ideal foil for Akkaya’s blank-faced country goodness and apparently will-less compliance. The camera and tech work are modest no-frills.
Dahan, Olivier
THE PROMISED LIFE (La vie promise) B+ 90
aka: Ghost River
France
This had the makings of a great film, as it has the magnificent Isabelle
Huppert in an unforgettable performance, with exquisite photography by Alex
Lemarque, making this a truly gorgeous film to watch. But along the way, we are subject to
repeating expressions of flower images which grow burdensome after awhile, also
some musical miscues, especially some overly explanatory American folk music,
which was out of synch with the emotional complexities of Huppert’s
performance, which was dark, mysterious, emotionally spare, distant,
agonizingly protective and silent.
Huppert plays a street prostitute whose daughter, who has been living in
a foster home, returns unexpectedly with disastrous results, causing an
immediate getaway. The rest is a road
movie taking them into the rural regions of France Alps , near the Swiss border. Huppert doesn’t remember much about her past,
but her memories slowly reassemble before our eyes through a series of
flashback montages sparked by visiting people she hasn’t seen in years. While this journey is problematic, as her
past is filled with heartbreak, Huppert lights up the screen, providing an
electrifying character that is deeply troubled, yet holds our interest through
every frame. Her 14 year old daughter
(Maud Forget) is rebellious yet resilient, and may be more than her mother can
handle. In fact, everything seems to be
more than she can handle. “I feel like
I’m living through someone else’s life.”
But little by little, small bonds of affection and trust bring them
closer together. So while there are
moments of quiet subtlety, the power of the performances was compelling enough
to make up for the film’s deficiencies.
The near wordless closing sequences are strung together by a single
piano piece by Modern Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis, sounding very much like
Glenn Gould playing Bach, very controlled, yet effortless, then breaking into
small jazz riffs as the film emotionally comes together at the end, returning
to the precision and beauty of Bach.
User comments from imdb: fha-2 (fha@bigfoot.com) Pt
"La Vie
Promise" ("The Promised Life") is among the French actress'
Isabelle Huppert's finest accomplishments. This amazing masterpiece presents
Huppert in a character, which is a combination abrasiveness and vulnerability,
she is both exasperating and at the same time pathetic, monstrous, and saintly.
It is difficult to envision another actress who could embrace the complexity of
her character and yet still present her persona in such an intriguing paradigm
of humanity who magically captures our full attention while taking our breath
away.
It seems palpably unfair when such other female film stars as
Huppert's role is that of Sylvia, a sullen prostitute walking the streets of
Nice in
Sylvia seems in charge of her life until the appearance of her 14-year-old
epileptic daughter Laurence (Maud Forget). Laurence is in foster care and
Sylvia would prefer to have her out of her life, which becomes obvious by her
callous rejection and disrespect even though it was Laurence's birthday.
Laurence, desperate for attention, turns up again unexpectedly in Sylvia's
apartment and observes her mother's pimp pummeling her. When the pimp's
associate turns his attention to Laurence by sexually attacking her, she
fatally stabs him, thus compelling mother and daughter to hastily leave town.
Eight years earlier, Sylvia had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized after
giving birth to a son. The boy's father (whether he was married to her or not
is not clear) lived in the north of
The film has the inspiring appeal of a half-told chronicle where significant
and intriguing passages are casually left unexplained. The full meaning and
resolution of Sylvia's relationship with Laurence and Joshua's criminal career
remain delightfully obscured; leaving us just enough information to maintain
our interest, yet preserving the mystery that tweaks our attention. The
audience must search their own repertoires of imaginations to conclude the
story.
Director Olivier Dahan is daring enough to bring his camera into tight
close-ups leaving Huppert's character displayed in unflattering poses while
wearing harsh make-up and in poor lighting. Huppert does not attempt hide behind
the cheap make-up in order to present a good performance. Her talent is
sufficiently powerful to reveal Sylvia's inner strength and bring her true
character bubbling to the surface. Her painted exterior suggests one stereotype
while her eyes tell yet another story. This is an extraordinary film not to be
missed.
LA VIE EN ROSE
aka: La Môme
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Olivier Dahan's sprawling portrait of the life of Edith
Piaf is the kind of grand, passionate historical drama that no one seems to be
able to pull off any more. Dahan does so magnificently, thanks largely to a
brilliant performance by Marion Cotillard.
Discovered singing on a
Cotillard plays the legend from 20-year-old street singer
and hard-living urchin to superstar concert-hall vocalist to frail icon, bent
and palsied from a life of drink, drugs and high living without ever losing the
spark of the sassy street kid who muscled her way into polite company. Even
when planted in front of a microphone, she stands aggressive and defiant, as if
holding her ground and staring down the audience while belting out her stories.
The sprawling historical epic slips back and forth through
her life, leaping from traumatic moments to quiet reveries with little apparent
pattern. It tends to confuse her timeline, which already skips over her
legendary work with the French Resistance during the German occupation. It's
really less a biography than the sketch of a melodramatic life of triumphs and
tragedies and a passionate woman who favored emotion and impulse over reason
and restraint.
But no, she has no regrets, or so goes her signature song
and lyric epitaph. While Dahan's take on her final moments may contradict the
defiant lyrics of that song, Cotillard convinces that Piaf lived by that
romantic and heedless philosophy.
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
Uplifted
beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum
biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie En Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf
the legend rather than the woman. It's not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders
between Piaf's undeniably scarred life and her relentless gift for revisionist
autobiography. By any measure, France Paris
Piaf
was a brawling mess who parlayed the pain she wore on her sleeve into a
glittering career as France
La Vie
En Rose
trudges dutifully from one costumed "defining" event to the next,
building to a kind of Piaf theme park that plays out like a bad parody of
Dickens or Balzac. Slack-jawed proles wearing artistically grimy faces drop
everything to gawk as the tiny waif belts out "The Marseillaise" on a
street corner, followed by copious shots of rapt and bejeweled audiences in
Paris's cavernous Olympia Hall as Piaf finds the voice and the style that seal
her phenomenal success.
Quite
aside from her towering vocal range and forcefulness as a populist interpreter
of the French chanson, Piaf was an instinctive social leveler (she hobnobbed
with Cocteau, but the love of her life was a married middleweight boxer and pig
farmer) who became a unifying romantic voice for war-torn France
Cotillard
doesn't do her own singing—who, after all, could replicate the soaring rasp
that burst fully formed out of that tiny body? In a sense, every scene in La
Vie En Rose is a holding pattern for the next ballad, which would reduce
the movie to a musical were it not for Cotillard's command of character. Though
she's far prettier than Piaf at any age and has to be heavily made up to come
close to the bug-eyed jolie-laide that was la Môme, Cotillard not only
has her fluttery mannerisms down, but the fragile sense of self that kept her
always on the edge. With shoulders hunched, head tipped, and hands flung
forward, Cotillard gives us a Piaf stranded between the mutinous child she
never fully outgrew and the crowd-pleasing supplicant who could never get
enough audience love. If Piaf was an empty shell, she knew how to put on a
show, on and off stage. Channeling the shell, the performer, and the shambles
in between Cotillard raises France
Critique. La vie en rose
by Olivier Dahan. Emmanuel Burdeau
from Cahiers du Cinéma
Reverse Shot [Chris Wisniewski]
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
The Lumière Reader Diane Spodarek
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
Time Magazine (Richard Schickel)
La Vie en Rose [La Môme] Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Creative Loafing Atlanta [Felicia Feaster]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Reel.com DVD review [Chris Cabin]
Austin Chronicle [Toddy Burton]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Dahl, Gustavo
UIRÁ, AN INDIAN IN GOD’S FOREST (Uirá, Um Indio
Brazil
Film Update Robert Stan from Jump
Cut
Dahl's second feature, UIRA is a work of what the director calls
"anthropological fiction." Based on research by the Brazilian
anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, UIRA tells the story, set in 1939, of an Urubu
Indian who, in despair over his son's death at the hands of whites, departs
with his family in search of Maira, the Indian Creator-God living in
In Gustavo Dahl's able hands, Uira's journey becomes a pretext for a ringing critique not only of the Indian policies of the Brazilian government (although the story is set in 1939, little has changed), but also of white capitalist civilization in general. Through Uira's astonished eyes, Dahl reveals to us the strangeness of our own customs — the strangeness of finding human nudity obscene or titillating, the strangeness of wage slavery and capitalist commerce. UIRA, in short, is an exercise in cultural relativism, a critical look at our civilization from the standpoint of La pensee sauvage. Avoiding the twin extremes of racist vilification and noble savage idealization, UIRA treats its native subject with rare respect and dignity, even while it offers a provocative critique of our own civilization and values.
Dai, Sijie
BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE
SEAMSTRESS (Xiao cai feng) B+ 90
China France
A French-Chinese
co-production, this film features some lush cinematography by Jean Marie
Dreujou, filmed in the remote Phoenix mountains area during the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, where two friends, one the son of a “reactionary
intellectual,” are sent to a Maoist re-education camp, a forced labor camp,
where they are the only ones who can read, who know what a violin is, so they
find out immediately that if they want to play Mozart on the violin, then they
have to name the song, “Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao.” They meet a local village seamstress, read
her some stolen, reactionary literature of Balzac, and it plays almost like a
fairy tale of what could have been in the labor camp, a love story intertwined
in the dreams and recollections of the two young men. There were some beautifully constructed
scenes, especially when the two boys were sent to view North Korean films,
returning to re-tell the local villagers, who were none the wiser when they
used these elaborately re-constructed stories of the forbidden reactionary literature
to amaze them all. This must be
considered an overwrought, idealized, high drama, the style of film that should
never work, but it worked for me, largely due to the gorgeous remote locations,
some interesting storytelling, and a few magical moments that can only be
described as the wonder of cinema.
Daldry,
Stephen
THE HOURS A- 93
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Day In The Life Sheila
Johnston from Sight and Sound, February
2003
THE
READER B+ 91
USA Germany (123 mi)
2008
If
people like you can’t learn from people like me, then what the hell is the
point? —Professor
Rohl (Bruno Ganz)
A decidedly somber work, which is appropriate, as the subject touches on
the Holocaust, where in an unusual choice, Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a
Nazi prison guard who is brought to trial twenty years after the war
ended. What makes this even more unusual
is a flashback sequence that opens the film in the late 50’s when she is working
as a train conductor and has a summer affair with a 15 year old boy, Michael
(David Kross), a young student at the time who has just recovered from scarlet
fever. Though they meet for sex, it’s
clear her favorite activity is listening to him read classic literature to her,
where she is frequently moved to tears from the stories she hears. Unexpectedly, she disappears without a trace
before that summer is over. Michael goes
on to study law where his class visits a Nazi war tribunal in the late 60’s
where Hanna Schmitz is on trial for war crimes.
His emotional upheaval is the subject of the film, which brings into
question the role of working class Nazi’s during the war, as some 8000 worked
in the prison camps, but only a few dozen were actually tried or convicted of
war crimes. Winslet’s status as one of
the leading actresses of her generation lends credibility and a bit of extra
added emphasis to the role, and she does not disappoint, never excusing what
she did, but also questioning what choice working class women had during the
war, where prison guard work was probably one of the few reliable sources of
income.
Adapted by David Hare, THE HOURS (2002), from a novel by Bernhard Schlink, the film has a low key
sense of detachment, which matches Michael’s moody introspection. In this light, Hanna’s orderly existence with
a boy twenty years her junior does not seem all that unusual, and certainly the
effect she had on him was profound, but he got on with his life
afterwards. When she re-enters his life
so unexpectedly, he is ashamed yet at the same time immeasurably moved by the
experience, leaving him deeply haunted by the trial. At one point he revisits Auschwitz today,
which has been left as is, with the shower rooms, broken down beds, and the
tens and thousands of shoes all neatly piled up. One wonders if showing these scenes exploits
the uniquely powerful impact in a fictional film, if it in fact diminishes the
power of the event itself? Yet it is
done wordlessly and with utter detachment, without any added effect, simply
shown without comment as if seen by any observer. It can’t help but add an extra dimension to
the film, as the camera takes you right there to the scene of the crime. When it becomes clear that Michael has
information that might effect the trial outcome, in particular the sentencing,
he can’t summon the courage needed to act, which only makes him more ashamed of
himself, as that’s precisely the crime of ordinary German citizens during the
war.
In fact,
Michael’s behavior is suspect throughout his adult life, as he has a failed
marriage (his wife is never seen), and an estranged daughter that he doesn’t
see enough of, remaining largely closed off to her as well, so he is a man that
lives behind layers of walls that he has built for himself, which perhaps
defines how anyone copes with traumatic events in their lives. Ralph Fiennes as the adult Michael has made
his career out of wordless subtlety, and his growing sense of unease is exasperating,
as one wonders why he doesn’t visit Hanna in prison, why he doesn’t confront
his own past, and perhaps why he can’t forgive her. The trial itself is exposed as a sham,
because Hanna did nothing any differently than thousands of others, but unlike
the other guards, she actually came forward and acknowledged her crimes. Much is made of how different people
perceived her actions, as she was the victim of a lynch mob mentality, as
people so needed someone to blame, and others would just as soon put a bullet
through her head. Michael’s quandry is
more personal, but he’s just as indecisive about how the law applies to her
actions. Her sentence carries with it a
degree of certainty that the court got it right, that justice delayed is still
justice served, but Michael remains in a moral fog, as does, I suspect, a
majority of the audience, as it’s simply not appropriate to sympathize with a
Nazi prison guard. They personify how
routine the Holocaust became to ordinary German people where one carried out one’s
responsibilities and never thought to ask questions. Only in hindsight were questions asked. To its credit, what the film really shows is
that we still can’t begin to fathom any answers.
Christian
Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review
[B]
Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novel "The
Reader" is about how the German generation born after the Holocaust coped
with its legacy of guilt. The movie adaptation by screenwriter David Hare and
director Stephen Daldry starts out choppy and overdrawn but develops a
cumulative power. It's about a 15-year-old boy, Michael (David Kross), who in
1958 has a passionate affair with Hanna (an uneven Kate Winslet), a
working-class woman 20 years his senior. Eight years later, while a law student
observing the Nazi war crimes trials, Michael – played as an adult by Ralph
Fiennes – is shocked to discover that Hanna, whom he had lost track of, is in
the dock admitting her role as a guard at Auschwitz. The emotional core of
"The Reader" is how Michael copes with this fact. His emotional
transformation is not easily rendered on film but Fiennes knows how to do
nuance. He brings to the role a shimmering subtlety.
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
People can give
themselves away with a single word. Early in "The Reader," which is
about words and literacy, and much more, Hanna Schmitz, a German tram conductor
played by Kate Winslet, comes upon a teenage schoolboy who's obviously ill and
takes him into her flat. "Have you always been weak?" she asks. The
word sounds a faint alarm -- weak as opposed to Germanic-strong? -- that grows
louder as the film swings between past and present, though also between impassioned
and abstract.
The story starts in
1958. Hanna seduces the boy, Michael (David Kross), making him an eager slave
who must read classic literature to her in exchange for their illicit sex.
(He's under-age by several years.) Later, as a law student, Michael discovers
that Hanna, as a young woman, was a concentration-camp guard. From that moment
on, the young man (who's played in middle age by Ralph Fiennes) must struggle
with the meaning of what he has learned -- he loved her, after all -- in
something of the same way that modern Germany still struggles with the meaning
of the Nazi era.
Stephen Daldry
directed, skillfully, from David Hare's adaptation of a widely read novel by
Bernhard Schlink. The elegant cinematography is the work of two of today's
finest shooters, Chris Menges and Roger Deakins. (Mr. Deakins also shot
"Doubt.") And the cast is superb: especially Kate Winslet, who
transcends, by far, the limits of her character's narrow soul. Yet "The
Reader" remains schematic, and ultimately reductive. It really is about
literacy, which proves to be a dismayingly small answer to the enormous
questions posed by Hanna's dark past.
Bernhard Schlink's
"The Reader" was a terse, morally complex, erotically charged novel
that examined the impact of German guilt on the generation born after the
Holocaust. Director Stephen Daldry ("The Hours") and playwright David
Hare have taken up the challenge of turning this double-edged, cerebral book
into a film, and it's not surprising—movies being better at the visible than
the internal—that the eroticism trumps the moral complexity.
Fifteen-year-old
Michael Berg (David Kross) is a well-educated schoolboy who, in 1958, falls
into a passionate relationship with a secretive, tough, working-class wo-man 20
years older. Hanna (Kate Winslet) is a woman of few words, sudden rages and a
hungry sexual appetite that's matched by her equal ardor for literature; she
demands, as foreplay, that Michael read Homer, Twain and Chekhov to her.
Then one day, after
seeing each other in secret all summer, Hanna vanishes. The next time Michael
spots her, eight years later, he's a law student witnessing a war-crimes
trial—and Hanna is in the dock. She's willing to confess her role as a guard at
Auschwitz, but she has one secret—a far less damning one—that she clings to
with even deeper shame.
"The Reader"
is not about the horrors of the "final solution." It's about how
Michael deals with the fact that the great first love of his life was
implicated in these atrocities. Ralph Fiennes plays Michael in middle age— a
parched, solitary man of the law whose unusual relationship with the older
Hanna raises questions about his own moral compass. "The Reader" can
feel stilted and abstract: the film's only flesh-and-blood characters spend
half the movie separated. But its emotional impact sneaks up on you. "The
Reader" asks tough questions, and, to its credit, provides no easy
answers.
Slant
Magazine review
Nick Schager
Once again drawn to a tale that alternates
between (and often parallels) intrinsically connected pasts and presents, The Hours director Stephen Daldry and
screenwriter David Hare exhibit, with The Reader, a continued inability
to thrillingly translate literary forms to the screen. Even greater than it was
in their previous Virginia Wolf-centric collaboration, the problem is that the
two mediums aren't necessarily natural bedmates, as piercingly evidenced by the
filmmakers' method of adaptation, in which faithful straightforwardness gets
the particulars correct but makes their source material's plot tropes, symbols
and mirroring structure both simplistic and obvious. Transposing German author
Bernhard Schlink's novel about a young boy's maiden sexual relationship with an
older woman and, years later, the devastating revelations that come to light
about his lover's true identity, Daldry and Hare's film has the stately polish
and thoughtfulness that's come to define award-courting season, a sort of
faux-highbrow atmosphere whose measured deliberateness, when matched by intense
star turns, implies prestige. Yet even a minor peek underneath this elegant
surface reveals clunky conventions and superficial shorthand dramatizations,
both of which are delivered with self-important sophistication intended to mask
the fact that the affair is no more graceful or profound than your average
Which is a shame, as The Reader occasionally bumps up against the
pressing, universal tension that derives from furiously wanting to alter the
past, and yet recognizing that not only is said desire impossible, but that
one's anguish over this powerlessness can never be fully assuaged. This discord
blooms in the heart of 15-year-old Michael (David Kross), who, stricken with
scarlet fever in 1958, is aided on his way home one day by thirtysomething
stranger Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). When he returns months later to thank
Hanna for her kindness, she catches him peeking at her putting on stockings and
responds by bathing him, pleasuring him, and then having him read to her. Their
affair, depicted through the prism of adult, divorced Michael's (Ralph Fiennes)
remembrances, is given flickering vitality by a few early offhand images (such
as Michael's feet racing to another rendezvous). However, a dinner sequence in
which flatware clink-clanging ignites Michael's memories of devouring Hanna is
a thing of eye-rolling silliness, and moreover, their initial courtship—he
tentative and excited by his first lessons in carnality, she concealing concern
over their May-December amour with sternness—feels basic, familiar. And as
Michael begins regularly visiting Hanna, Daldry's grip on the material quickly
goes slack, beginning with the director's insertion of a needless, upfront
articulation-of-theme from a teacher who opines that secrets define character.
This blunt thesis statement is followed by Michael telling Hanna that "I
didn't think I was good at anything" and, intriguingly, a cutaway to the
sight of him confidently, joyously dominating a game of gym-class handball.
It's a tantalizing suggestion of dueling deceptions to come, but alas, The
Reader never makes good on that promise, as once Hanna suddenly disappears,
and her young beau grows into a joyless, emotionally detached law student
studying, in 1966, under the tutelage of Bruno Ganz's professor, Michael is
reduced to a man conflicted but not particularly complicated. Attending the war
crimes trial of female SS guards who stood by as 300 Jews burned to death in a
church during the Death March from
Michael's love/hate turmoil propels The Reader into a flip-flopping
second half concerned with his attendance at the trial—in which he realizes
that Hanna is secretly illiterate, hence her requests to be read to—and his
adult efforts to grapple with the past, which mainly involve making audio
recordings of books for the incarcerated Hanna. All the while, narrative echoes
begin piling up, each of them so tidily schematic that the story's literary
roots become distractingly glaring, a situation compounded by two protagonists
who are embodied with earnest gravity by Winslet and Kross/Fiennes, yet, like
the many plot device-only peripheral figures, remain fuzzy, shallow creations.
Even more than the book-on-film atmosphere and the pitiful, disengaging old-age
makeup Winslet eventually dons, it's the filmmakers' inability to immerse
themselves in, and wrestle with, their characters' distress that ultimately
proves most troublesome. Though nominally about individuals' inner—and, by
extension, post-Holocaust Germany's national—struggles with history, The
Reader remains a stiff, external affair, too refined to muck about in its
protagonists' consuming confusion, and too leaden and contrived to allow
anything to organically materialize, epitomized by a final conversation between
Michael and the sole church-fire survivor (Lena Olin) that takes great pains to
spell out those very thematic points which, in the name of subtle storytelling,
should best be left unspoken.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Reader (2008) David
Jays from Sight and Sound, February
2009
PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [3/5]
Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review
The Onion A.V. Club (Tasha Robinson) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Screen International review Mike Goodridge
Reel.com review [2.5/4] Sean O’Connell, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [3/5]
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment
Weekly review [B-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Peter Bradshaw's original review
from The Guardian, January 2,
2009
The lame, the weak and the godawful
Writer David Hare responds to a scathingly negative review from The Guardian, January 19, 2009
Sir David's attack on my Reader review is
as glib as the film itself
Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
January 19, 2009
Time Out New York (Ben Kenigsberg) review [1/6]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
The
New York Times review Manohla Dargis
EXTREMELY
LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE C 74
The post 9/11 movies worth considering are Spike Lee’s 25th HOUR (2002), Paul Greengrass’s UNITED 93 (2006), Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011), also the video of Paul Simon singing Sounds of Silence at the 10-year Memorial Event Paul Simon's Heartbreaking 'Sound of Silence' at Ground Zero ..., - - and that’s it. You can forget the rest, which don’t so much examine the consequences as manipulate the viewer with plenty of tearful guilt that is really insignificant filmmaking, basically telling the viewer what they already know about losing someone, reminding us in many different ways just how bad it feels. According to an interview with actress Sandra Bullock (The Cast Of 'Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close' Talk Navigating ...), “I think a lot of people haven’t been able to grieve.” Just who are these people, and are they the same undecided voters who can’t make up their minds until they walk into a polling booth? There have been endless discussions, news reports, magazine articles, radio chat sessions, online essays and personal recollections, fragmented memories, tributes, memorials, photos and video reminders, not to mention endless merchandising of the event, so certainly there has been time to process the event. What we haven’t had before, which this film provides, is a child’s perspective, where despite the gravity of the event, this is almost exclusively viewed through the eyes of a child—not just any child, mind you, but a borderline autistic child whose brilliance is only overridden by his meticulously obsessive nature, where he views the world through a catalog file system that is nearly perfectly mathematically arranged. In this way, the writers are allowed to paint with a broader brush, as this isn’t really a child so much as an overly mature young adult, but also one for which there is always a logical expression, where his brain continues to compute until everything makes sense, where the events of 9/11, of course, send the faculties of his brain into utter turmoil, where the computer does not compute and literally goes haywire.
Despite an utterly maudlin story that tearfully shows a brilliant and highly sensitive 11-year old boy Oskar (Thomas Horn), with few social skills, on a journey through the streets of New York to find the connection between the father he lost on 9/11 and a mysterious key he found in his father’s belongings in an envelope identified only by the name “Black.” In his mad rush to make sense of it all, he organizes everything with meticulous detail, like inventing a Dewey Decimal system for tracking down all the families named Black in the entire city, cataloging their addresses, where if he contacts each of them on foot only on weekends, taking no weekends off, he figures it will take him three years to complete his project. Initially allotting 6 minutes per visit, he soon discovers that people offer him sympathy and hugs, have their own stories to tell, which takes considerably more time. And while he enjoys the collective efforts to connect with him and offer some degree of comfort and friendship, snapping photos of those he meets along the way which he places in a scrapbook, all he really wants is to find out what the hell the key opens. While the diverse population he encounters does resemble a portrait of those that lost their lives on that day, only two really stand out. The first is Viola Davis as Abby Black, perhaps the first one visited, where Oskar bursts into her apartment with the subtlety of a blitzkrieg, forced to endure his non-stop, incessant chatter while already moved to tears by the impending separation with her husband who’s about to walk out the door, where she simply hasn’t the strength to send him on his way, so she endures both events happening simultaneously. The other is an old and feeble man who can’t speak (Max von Sydow representing the unspoken voice of the dead), who may be his grandfather, though he claims to be a renter in his grandmother’s apartment, where he’s forced to write hand written notes for Oskar to understand. Oskar asks him to tag along on his visits, which turn into carefully choreographed mime routines.
Oskar runs everywhere he goes, never tiring, blurting out
words like tiny explosions, where occasionally he tries to use his words to
outrun his thoughts, where in his excitement the adrenaline takes over,
creating a frenzied rush of near panic as he continually relives the events of
that fateful day, telling perfect strangers what happened to him on 9/11. Well how do you expect people to react? As the film is a recording of his journey, we
hear Oskar recall what happened to him over a dozen times, each one adding a
significant detail left out of the last version, where the sum accumulation loses
any hint of subtlety and starts pounding into your skull like a sledgehammer,
where this literally becomes overkill. Forcing
the audience to re-live 9/11 over and over again in a movie theater through the
repeated exploits of an overeager but delicate child is not exactly great
theater, as we re-live the photos and the news reports and Oskar’s own personal
recollections, all of which has some cathartic quality, one assumes, except
that for many it doesn’t. One’s reaction
to a nationwide catastrophe is much too intimately personal, where none of us
match the weird and eccentric personality traits of this overly precocious kid,
nice as he may otherwise be, but he’s not us and he can’t be made to stand for
us. He’s who he is and he makes it
understandable by making a child’s pop-up scrapbook of photos and memories,
which he calls by the movie title, taking something that’s messy and condensing
it all into something nice and neat and clean.
Unfortunately, there are many who survive the horrors of war, incest,
rape, torture, the Holocaust, or Japanese-American internment camps, and can
never utter a word about their experiences to their respective families. For those many individuals who don’t believe
Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]]
It is, simply, the “worst day”—that’s how 9/11 is referred to in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 child’s-eye novel, ambitious if a touch forced. In being true to the intentionally naive material, filmmaker Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) has now created an earnest puddle of slop: Fragile nine-year-old Oskar (Horn), bereaved after his dad’s death at the World Trade Center, is too quiveringly stunned to be any kind of long-form surrogate for a viewer. You watch him roam through a shaken city nonetheless getting on with itself, and wish this brainy kid—or at least his director—could enjoy a nonglazed moment or two.
That’s not to say the best scenes don’t work, particularly those
that transcend the specifics of that terrible Tuesday. Some geeky, relaxed work
by Tom Hanks as the doting father helps you feel the toll taken on a sensitive
relationship filled with microscopic inquiries, Barney Greengrass brunches and
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo | The ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
I've heard people say they weren't sure, even a decade after
Sept. 11, if they could handle this film about a boy whose beloved father has
recently died in one of the twin towers. I know what they mean. Almost half a
century after
It's surely not the fault of Thomas Horn, the remarkable young man who plays him. In widely seen clips from his winning appearance on "Teen Jeopardy," Thomas was thoughtful, articulate and poised beyond his years. That must have made him seem like a natural for the role of Oskar Schell, who may or may not have Asperger's syndrome, and who outdoes any of J.D. Salinger's gifted kids in richness of vocabulary and complexity of ideas.
But Oskar in print is one thing. As you read the book (which I also disliked), you are tracking, at your own pace, the workings of the boy's mind—and the pain in his heart—as he searches New York City for a lock that matches a key his father has left behind. It's quite another thing to watch Oskar on the screen, with no respite from his shrill voice or his mannered behavior. A less remarkable actor—or Thomas himself, directed for simplicity—might have taken the curse off the movie's case of the terminal cutes. Mr. Daldry, however, chose to push his young star in the opposite direction, toward a totality of artifice that dilutes the impact of Sept. 11 and underscores the blissed-out illogic of Oskar's quest.
Sandra Bullock is Oskar's griefstruck mother, Linda, and Tom Hanks is his father, Thomas. In flashbacks, father and son express their special relationship with such relentlessly abstruse conversations that you long for one or the other to say something like "Let's have scrambled eggs." Max von Sydow gives a lively performance as The Renter, a mysterious mute. In another film his silence might be golden. In this one it goes platinum.
Scott Tobias The Onion A.V. Club
In the aftermath of 9/11, the question arose of when it would be appropriate for popular art to address the events head-on. For a national tragedy of that magnitude, when would it not be “too soon”? Yet Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, an appalling adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, suggests that maybe that’s the wrong question. The 2006 docudrama United 93, once the trial balloon for “too soon,” dodged exploitation by focusing rigorously on the minutiae of a single flight. But it will always be “too soon” for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, which processes the immense grief of a city and a family through a conceit so nauseatingly precious that it’s somehow both too literary and too sentimental, cloying yet aestheticized within an inch of its life. It’s 9/11 through the eyes of a caffeinated 9-year-old Harper’s contributor.
Thomas Horn plays that 9-year-old as a boy who’s somewhere between
precocious and autistic, given to channeling his energies through whimsical
projects that give his intellect the exercise it needs. After his father (Tom
Hanks) dies in the
Through the boy’s journey, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close tries to link the personal with the universal, connecting one story of grief within the larger context of a wounded-but-resilient city. (Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour accomplished this in one breathtaking montage, but still.) Yet the film is like a monument that calls attention to its own magnificent architecture—at one point, a “Black” actually cradles one of Horn’s letters to her breast like a newborn babe. Rather than dilute the sap, director Stephen Daldry slathers on Alexandre Desplat’s prodding score—he did the same with Philip Glass in The Hours—and makes a motif out of a body falling from one of the Twin Towers. It’s all very tasteful, he presumes.
"If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?
Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is relentless in the worst way. Every moment, every line of dialogue presses its themes and metaphors with a mulish determination. Each shot is an emotional appeal. Not for a second does the movie breathe; never does a character say or do something not perfectly on all fours with the film’s designs. When he feels too much slack on the rope, Daldry cranks up the musical score, or launches an overwhelmingly emotional montage, or just has his precocious protagonist start yelling. The movie is furiously obsessive, hell-bent. It will wear you down or die trying.
I can construct a theory of why it should be this way. Extremely Loud is, after all, a story of a young boy toward the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum (Thomas Horn), trying desperately to make sense of his father’s death in the September 11th attacks in the only way he knows how: by throwing his entire being into an elaborate, compulsively-formulated plan to search for something he believes his dad (Tom Hanks) meant for him to find. It makes a certain kind of sense that the film would be as meticulous and purposeful as its main character.
But even if this works as a conceit, what we have in execution is unspeakably pushy and obnoxious. It is not enough that young Oskar Schell must canvas a traumatized city with a business card reading “Amateur Entomologist and Pacifist” looking for the lock that fits a mysterious key found in his late father’s closet. He must also tow along with him an old geezer who is (a) mute; (b) wise; and (c) clearly a long-lost relative of some sort. And he must tell his long-suffering mother (Sandra Bullock) that he wishes it was her in that tower. And if all of that is not enough, there are at least three maudlin plot twists, each calibrated for maximum sob extraction. It’s frankly shameless.
The film deserves credit for featuring an autistic character as a bona fide protagonist, rather than a subject of curiosity and pity as in, e.g., The Black Balloon. But I note that Daldry and his screenwriter, Eric Roth, rather cynically turn this to their advantage. Oskar speaks (and narrates the film) in elaborate, verbose declamations, a fact that the screenplay implicitly ascribes to his Asperger’s, but that in practice allows Roth to repeatedly verbalize the film’s themes: how sometimes bad things happen and they don’t make sense no matter how hard you try to figure them out, or how Thomas’s quest is his attempt to cling to his father’s memory. A weird sort of exploitation.
To be clear, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is earnest, and mostly good-hearted, and I found it hard to hate. It moves pretty well, and is too slick to be boring. I certainly did not have the same virulent reaction as Scott Tobias, despite harboring many of the same complaints. But if you want a movie that genuinely grapples with the effect of 9/11 on New Yorkers who lived through it, look elsewhere (perhaps to Spike Lee’s 25th Hour). This is, if you can believe it, maybe the first mainstream example of 9/11 kitsch.
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “We ... - The New Yorker David Denby
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Review | Cover Up Your - Pajiba Brian Prisco
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
'Extremely Loud' Review - Entertainment - Time Magazine Mary Pols
Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]
Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
David Edelstein on 'War Horse,' - New York Magazine David Edelstein
Next Projection [Christine J.]
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close mines 9/11 and - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Screen Daily Brent Simon
Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron
Film Review Online [James Dawson}
Review: 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ... - Film School Rejects Jack Giroux
Boxoffice Magazine [Pete Hammond]
Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
TheYoungFolks.com [GabrielleAdelle]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EricDSnider.com [Eric D. Snider]
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
Criticize This! [Andrew Parker]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]
tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]
Motion Picture Academy Ho-Hum Over 'War Horse,' 'Extremely Loud' Screenings Steve Pond from The Wrap
Stephen Daldry Talks Asperger's, Depicting 9/11 In 'Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close,' And The Oscars Todd Gilchrist interviews the director from
The indieWIRE Playlist,
Stephen Daldry Discusses New Movie Robert Sigel interviews the director from NPR, December 20, 2011
The
Cast Of 'Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close' Talk Navigating ... Gabe Toro speaks with several of the
principals from The indieWIRE Playlist,
Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Extremely loud & incredibly sentimental - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen
Extremely
Loud & Incredibly Close - Boston.com
Wesley Morris from The
'Hugo,' Plummer, Von Sydow and Close make this a ... - Boston Herald James Verniere
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Reviews - Boston Phoenix Bret Michel
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Matt Finley]
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' review Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
Extremely
Loud & Incredibly Close - Movies - New York Times
Just
Close Enough for an Oscar Nod? - NYTimes ... - New York Times
Daly,
Rebecca
THE
OTHER SIDE OF SLEEP
The
Other Side of Sleep: Cannes Review
David Rooney at Cannes Hollywood
Reporter, May 13, 2011
Murder-mystery from first-time director Rebecca Daly deliberately avoids suspense.
The film opens mid-dream, as Arlene (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) wakes up in the woods of her small rural hometown in the Irish midlands next to the murdered body of a young woman. Reality and subconscious immediately begin to blur as news circulates that local girl Gina has been killed while returning home after a night out partying. Like a ghost observing her own life from the outside, Arlene registers the gossipy speculation of her fellow factory workers and the shell-shocked grief of Gina’s family at a community prayer service.
Obsessively collecting newspaper coverage of the murder while returning repeatedly to a photograph of the mother she was too young to remember, Arlene insinuates herself into the lives of the dead girl’s family. She befriends Gina’s sister (Vicky Joyce), and cautiously gets closer to the victim’s boyfriend (Sam Keeley), a suspect in the murder.
While the police investigation happens outside the confines of the narrative, Daly and co-screenwriter Glenn Montgomery cast suspicion over a number of shadowy figures, including Arlene’s factory boss and Gina’s troubled father. It’s suggested that Arlene might have committed the murder herself while sleepwalking, but more strongly, that she is courting her own death by wandering the town at night, willfully exposing herself to danger.
All this is moderately absorbing, but the filmmaker’s deliberate avoidance of suspense keeps the drama remote and unaffecting. Even in high-meltdown mode when Arlene is trashing her kitchen and smashing plates, we’re never encouraged to feel much for her, despite Campbell-Hughes’ intense vulnerability.
Characterized by extended silences, minimal dialogue, static shots and penetrating close-ups, the film’s melancholy stillness feels a little studied and its slow pacing makes it a slog. The contrasting notes of balefulness and raw sorrow are disquieting at times, but overall, its spell tends to dissipate without getting under the skin.
In texture, it’s not unlike AMC’s The Killing and the Danish TV series from which that highly addictive procedural drama was adapted. That show conjures death and grief into palpable, insidious forces that condition wave upon wave of unpredictable, often irrational behavior. Daly’s film, however, remains soft and impressionistic, too caught up in its own ambiguities.
The
Other Side Of Sleep Fionnuala
Halligan at Cannes
With Irish accents so strong they require subtitles, Rebecca Daly’s
Offaly villagers are palpably real; her dreamy story ebbs and flows around them
as a psychologically frail young girl draws herself into the aftermath of a
disturbing murder.
A Cannes Residence project, The Other Side Of Sleep is undeniably Irish but speaks the film language of the European art-house, where it should make an immediate impression, notching strong sales for Paris-based Memento Films (its closest relation is Urzula Antoniak’s Nothing Personal).
Daly’s haunting debut flirts with dreams and reality; it is under-stated yet powerfully etched. Although it can’t quite maintain the force of its opening sequences and an elliptical narrative sometimes takes a turn into muddy waters, The Other Side of Sleep is a notable debut with a lead performance that marks out young Antonia Campbell-Hughes as a talent to watch. Daly’s work with photographer Suzie Lavelle and her sound team of Michel Schopping and Marc Lister is notable throughout.
Arlene (Campbell-Hughes) is a sleepwalker since childhood, a lonely and vulnerable orphan living by herself in a downbeat Offaly village (this is not an Irish Tourist Board destination) with occasional visits from her grandmother.
None of this is apparent in the memorable opening sequence, however, when she rises from her bed and wakes up beside a dead body wrapped in a duvet in the woods. A factory worker, she leaves the scene, comes home and showers, and goes straight to work.
Arlene lives in a silent, internalised world; a friend jokes that
people think she’s a little mad. The murder of her mother in
In the meantime, her sleepwalking - and terror of it - is intensifying, provoked by the trauma of waking up beside a corpse (although it does seem odd that in such a small town her neighbours would not be more aware of Arlene’s nocturnal ramblings). Arlene, at times, looks dangerously like she’s about to join a long line of cinema’s silent, blank-faced young girls, but Daly and her co-writer Montgomery have worked hard with young Campbell-Hughes to give her more than meets the eye.
Cannes
critics praise director Rebecca Daly for The Other Side of Sleep Vanessa Thorpe at Cannes from The Guardian, May 14, 2011
Damian,
Anca
CROSSING DATES (Intalniri incrucisate) F 9
This incoherent catastrophe is among the most stupefyingly awful films I
have ever seen, which could possibly be due to the worst subtitling on record,
but this first time feature film director was present during the screening claiming
she wrote what we just saw, so I’m inclined to believe either her English is
atrocious or she simply wrote the most insipid, god-awful dialogue I may have
ever seen, as so much of it made absolutely no sense of any kind. It was as if people were speaking pure
gibberish for two of the three segments.
The film is in three parts, supposedly linked together by a common
element, but don’t hold your breath for any real connection to speak of. The director indicated this began as a film
short that she expanded to feature length, so perhaps the final segment (at
least in understandable language) was closer to the origin of her idea, while
the other segments are pretty close to worthless. They are laughably bad, but listening to the
seriousness of the director afterwards, one realizes right away that she hasn’t
even an ounce of a sense of humor, that she’s instead pretentiously full of
self-justifying explanations. I can only
think she must know somebody important at a high level in Romania as this film
is not suitable for screening. I’m open
to the possibility that in Romanian language this may be an altogether
different film experience.
As seen in a theater, an obnoxious radio personality is summoned for a
prison interview to meet an inmate who is supposedly his exact double. But when they meet, the interview goes
nowhere. It’s as uncomfortable an
opening segment as one could possibly be subjected to, because if it’s 30 minutes
in length, the first 25 have no interest whatsoever. There is a scene of mild interest (a guy
making a jerk of himself) in the parking lot afterwards. In the second segment, the prison warden who
is female meets up with a Finnish colleague at the airport for a business
conference in Bucharest, where they apparently have a romantic history
together, but you’d never know it by the inane dialogue that is entirely in
English. My only clue was the exposed
cleavage in a red dress. But they are
interrupted in mid form by an unexpected visitor. We’re not talking aliens here, which might
have helped. The two ignore the visitor
still in their room and do the nasty on the floor. A crisis sends the warden scurrying back to
the prison. In the final sequence, the
visitor in the previous sequence actually has a life, happily meeting up with
her brother after he’s released from prison, but he soon realizes she’s being
handled by a goon who is offering her services for nude magazines, which sends
the brother voluntarily scurrying back to the prison, like he’s somehow happier
there.
After watching this incomprehensible movie, the director takes the
microphone and claims it’s all about the absence of love which is responsible
for why people end up heading in the wrong directions. Wow.
This is one stinker of a film to be avoided at all costs.
Damiano, Gerard
DEEP THROAT
USA (61 mi) 1972
This notorious porn movie was originally released in 1972. Its sole intention is to arouse with close-ups of fellatio. One of three principal women, Lovelace, discovers that her clitoris is in the wrong place - in her throat. Cue close-ups of one dick-swallowing trick after another. Stilted performances, dud production values and a thrashy, hilariously cheesy '70s soundtrack.
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
A dirty-funky joke, the one about the small woman on Swallow Street, the salacious party trick that spread out of sticky Times Square screens and into 1970s American culture like a tremor. The tone is offhand carnal vaudeville, Linda Lovelace -- frizzy, freckled, slender, affectingly half-lost -- wanders into her bungalow and nonchalantly greets her cigarette-dangling roommate (Dolly Sharp), who’s spread on the kitchen counter with a lout’s head between her thighs. Orgasms have long eluded the heroine, sex makes her "sort of tingly all over, and then... nothing." An orgy leaves a roomful of exhausted studs strewn about the living room but none of those bursting dams and exploding bombs she yearns for. Finally, in a medical examination adorably patterned after A Day at the Races, the Ovidian revelation: Her clitoris is hidden deep in her larynx, the bell at the bottom of the well. The doctor (Harry Reems) volunteers to help her overcome her gag complex ("a matter of discipline"), the oral spectacle that follows startles, tickles, and earns its shuddering orgasmic montage of fireworks and rockets. Parodying a certain Mickey & Sylvia hit, the soundtrack tries to make sense of it all ("Looooove is strange, a lot of people like it in the mouth..."). As befits a tale of displaced anatomy and pleasure, Gerard Damiano’s crossover triple-X smash is a male fantasy of female desire, a Doris Day-Rock Hudson romp with the polished veneer scraped off and the coy innuendo replaced with slapdash, raunchy surrealism (Lovelace in nursing lingerie readying herself for an old kinkster’s soda pop and straw, a spent Reems clutching his bandaged schlong under the sheets, "wounded in the line of duty"). Nixon led the prudes after it only to have its title haunt his dethroning scandal, Cronenberg took the yonic drollery and ran with it. As for Lovelace, there she is gasping in her final close-up, flushed and smeary and smiling, ready to be launched as pop emblem and pop casualty. With Carol Connors, Bill Harrison, Bob Phillips, Jack Birch, and William Love.
There's no doubt that the Gerard Damiano's 1972 porn masterpiece
"Deep Throat" is not only one of the most successful films of all
time, but it's also one that holds a great deal of historical significance as
well. It was the first and only porn film that managed to get a great deal of
mainstream attention and recognition at the time and even helped coin the
phrase "Porno chic". Because of "Deep Throat" it was
thought that pornographic films would start to move outside of the underground
and into the mainstream theaters all over the United States. Although that
never happened it certainly is one of the reasons why people have more lax
attitudes on the subject up until this day. Without the release of "Deep
Throat" who knows if that would have ever been possible.
Another thing that "Deep Throat" should be credited for is introducing the world to the most famous porno actress of all time, Linda Lovelace. At the time the actress became a phenomenon outside of the pornographic film industry and somewhat of an icon of porn. After all she didn't play a character in the film as she played herself. Understandably she was deserving of the attention however because not only was she actually funny in the movie but she also had a charisma about her that better looking porn actresses of today could never achieve. Not only that but she was the first woman to perform a "deep throat" in a porn flick before and it pretty much had jaw's dropping in every theater that it was shown.
Linda Lovelace however wouldn't be the only porn actor in the film though to become a phenomenon. The most memorable role to me in the film however goes to veteran porn actor Harry Reems who played the hilariously over the top Doctor Young. Not only did Reems show his acting chops in the film as well as his talents in comedy, but managed to really work well with Lovelace in the film. It was later said that Lovelace was sweet on Reems and would work very well with him when they managed to get rid of her pimp/boyfriend Chuck Traynor (who is actually credited as a production manager on the film) for the shoot. Reems himself was brought up on charges in Memphis at one time for "conspiracy to transport interstate obscene material" for a movie that he simply acted in. He's even mentioned that he felt that he was a recognizable part of the film and was getting the punishment for it. Director Gerard Damiano and star Linda Lovelace were actually brought in to be witnesses against him. He also mentioned that the only reason the case was overturned is because the Republicans had lost control of the White House when Jimmy Carter was elected, as Nixon was dead set on going after the porn industry as the Watergate controversy spiraled out of control.
The thing about "Deep Throat" though that made it special was the fact that the movie had better production values than most other pornographic films from that time period. Although by today's standards it's not much to look at, it's still one of the first pornographic films to achieve such high technical standards at the time as were many of the Mafioso funded films of Gerard Damiano. At the end of the day it looks like your typical B-movie, but if you are at all familiar with pornography made before it as well as porno loops you'll see just how much better the production is here as a whole.
Another notable about the movie is that some Hollywood stardom has actually come out of it in the strangest of ways. See actress Carol Conners and actor Jack Birch worked on the film together and collectively they are the parents of actress Thora Birch who starred in the Academy Award winning film "American Beauty".
The main thing about "Deep Throat" was the fact that it's still to this day the biggest money maker as far as film at the box office goes. Sure Titanic made more at the box office but it certainly cost more to make. "Deep Throat" was shot on a modest $24,000 budget while bringing in an estimated 600 million dollars making it the most profitable film ever made. Considering that most of the money coming in was doing so in cash, it's believed that the movie actually made more over the billion dollar mark but there is no evidence to prove it. Most of the money was going into illegal activities and it's been noted that the mob couldn't figure out how to cover up all of the money that was coming in.
Overall, "Deep Throat" is a historically significant film that deserves the attention that it has received. It's one of the most important films ever made and I would dare to say that it's easily the most important adult film that has ever been produced.
VideoVista [Andrew Darlington]
eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine
Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]
Adult DVD Talk [Selena Silver]
Adult DVD Talk [classic connoisseur]
All Movie Guide [Matthew Doberman]
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Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Deep Throat (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Deep-throating - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat 1972 YouTube (59 seconds)
Daney, Serge – film critic
Chronicle
Of A Passion Steve Erickson has many
Daney offerings, some translated by Erickson himself
Although widely considered the best living French film critic at the time of his death in 1992, Serge Daney remains pretty much unknown in the English-speaking world. An editor of CAHIERS DU CINEMA from 1974 to 1981, critic for the daily LIBERATION from 1981 until his death, and founder of TRAFIC, Daney published four books during his lifetime. An additional three (a collection of journal entries, L'EXERCISE A ETE PROFITABLE, MONSIEUR; a book-length interview, PERSEVERANCE; an anthology of sportswriting, L'AMATEUR DE TENNIS) have come out posthumously. Yet no publisher has found it worth their while to put out an English-language Daney collection .
Thanks to the graciousness of editor Paul Willemen, I've finally managed to get a copy of the manuscript for Daney's CINEMA IN TRANSIT, an unpublished English-language anthology acquired by the British Film Institute in 1994. I've written to them to inquire about the possibility of posting it on this site but have yet to receive a response and doubt I ever will. If anyone out there would like a copy, please contact me.
In other Daney news, the French publisher POL has just released a collection of his work from 1964 through 1981, the period when he wrote for CAHIERS DU CINEMA. The best source for ordering Daney's French books in North America appears to be Gallimard, Montreal's French-language bookstore. They carry TRAFIC, as well.
For your one-stop Daney
needs, you can take a look at the Serge
Daney in English blog.
Jonathan Rosenbaum on Serge Daney introduced by Adrian Martin from Senses of Cinema
Montage Obligatory The War, the Gulf and the Small Screen, by Serge Daney from Rouge
Serge Daney: L’Homme cinéma - Harvard Film Archive a retrospective of films advocated by Daney
The Tracking Shot in Kapo Serge Daney from Senses of Cinema, originally published in Trafic, Fall 1992
The Missing Image The Missing Image – From Cinephilia to the World – The Trajectory of Serge Daney, Jonathan Rosenbaum from New Left Review, 2005
Dzenis on Postcards from the cinema Serge Daney, Postcards from the cinema, review by Anna Dzenis from Screening the Past, July 19, 2007
Obituary written by Adrian Martin
Dang Di, Phan
BI, DON’T BE AFRAID! (Bi, Dung So!)
Bi,
Don't Be Afraid! (Bi, Dung So!) Lisa
Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily
Grounded in the authentic bustle of Hanoi and the uncomfortable interplay
of familial relationships Bi, don’t be afraid! is a thoughtful cinematic
exploration of inchoate longing, the messy consequences of physical decline and
encroaching death, and confirmation that sex and youthful exuberance spring
eternal. Frankly and overtly sensual with scant dialogue, this contemporary
portrait of relatives living in close quarters while harbouring secrets is
conveyed with impressive visual assurance.
Writer-director Phan Dang Di’s leisurely debut feature, which was part of the Cinefondation’s Atelier line-up in 2008, is a heat-soaked panorama of human desires that is probably more festival fare than art house material in most territories, but bodes very well for the directing future of Phan Dang Di who wrote the screenplay for Bui Thac Chuyen’s 2009 Venice Horizons and Toronto competition title Adrift (Choi Voi).
Ice is a recurring motif. It’s so hot that six-year-old lad Bi’s favourite place to play is among the various work stations at a neighbourhood ice factory. Bi’s attractive but strait-laced Aunt is later seen masturbating with a hunk of ice.
Bi’s seriously ill paternal grandfather has recently returned from years abroad and uses ice to dull the painful cramps in his belly.
Bi’s father’s coping mechanism consists of getting sloppy drunk with cronies every night in a large outdoor café. Bi, his father and grandfather, while each distinct characters, seem to suggest three major phases in every man’s life. Bi forms a bond with his ailing granddad.
Bi’s mother is frustrated by her husband’s filial cowardice and unwillingness to have sex… at least with her. The family’s cook is a not-always-silent witness to the proceedings.
Bi’s spinster aunt looks after him more attentively than the rest of the household. When do-gooders fix her up with a man they think might be a suitable mate, she struggles to take his advances in stride. But it’s a much younger man she encounters by chance who will rock her to the core.
Various couplings boast convincing raw energy. While there’s not a lot of humour, a scene in which two characters inhale helium from balloons and carry on a high-pitched conversation is as funny as it is incongruous.
Daniel, Bill
WHO IS BOZO TEXINO?
10/05 IN THE RAILROAD EARTH : Bill Daniel's
'Who Is Bozo Texino ... Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
Who Is Bozo Texino? is a great American movie, and its greatness is tied up very closely with
its American-ness. With this brilliant experimental documentary, self-styled
hobo film-maker Daniel places himself firmly in the bootprints of Jack London,
Jack Kerouac,
Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie - a fine, long tradition of American artists who
look for their inspiration to the marginal, the underclass, the vagabond and
the outcast. Nominally a chronicle/survey/history of boxcar graffiti (a
tradition as old as the railroad itself) and the men who create it, Who Is
Bozo Texino? soon transcends its narrow subject-matter to become a
gloriously rough-edged elegy for an
Unlike the overwhelming majority of documentaries - even
entertaining recent examples like Murderball, Dogtown and Z-Boys and Stoked - Daniel's film
manages a near-perfect union of radical form and radical content, And it does
so in consistently accessible style: at first you're intrigued by the stunning
monochrome images captured by his self-effacing,
sensitively-handled camera(s); by the startling kineticism of his
fluent editing style; by the sheer range of voices, music and
sound-effects we hear as he tracks down a series of grizzled
hobos and wisdom-dispensing graffiti-'markers.'
Then you realise that, just as these men have always instinctively rejected
authority and convention, Daniel (who has made a fantastic old-school poster
for the movie) has likewise embraced the unorthodox in his style of film-making
- even down to his choice of title and running-time. Indeed, in less than an
hour Daniel manages to say more about life, art,
There's a secret stigma, reaping wheel
Diminish, a carnival of sorts
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel
Stranger, stranger to these parts
Gentlemen don't get caught, cages under cage.
Gentlemen don't get caught,
Box cars (are pulling) out of town,
There's a secret stigma, reaping wheel
Stranger, stranger to these parts
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel
Diminish, stranger
Box cars are pulling
a carnival of sorts
Out of town
Daniels, Lee
PRECIOUS B 83
USA (109 mi) 2009
While there is a compelling story here and moments of brilliance in certain
scenes, the amateurish direction and lack of subtlety, despite the attention to
detail, seriously overdramatizes at the wrong times, creating an uneven tone
throughout, especially an over-reliance on Precious’s high gloss fantasy world,
where the editing is at times atrocious, adding artificial sequences so
jarringly obnoxious that their garish style undermines the otherwise
established realist tone, which has the effect of muddling the story, as these
fantasy sequences, many shown early on in short succession, detract more than
they add, each time juxtaposed immediately following a humiliating violent
confrontation, where the dramatic power of the moment gets lost in a glitter collage
of teen wish fulfillment where Precious sees herself as a slender white
girl. This story is so compelling it
needs no glorification, as the life of Claireece “Precious” Jones, played by newcomer
Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe, is about as abusive and horrifying as it gets, a
morbidly obese teenage black girl in Harlem whose mother (Mo’Nique) berates her
constantly, ordering her around like her personal slave while also physically
abusing her, subjecting her to mental defeatism by continually telling her she
is worthless. Despite going to high
school and enjoying the world away from her mother, she sits in the back and
does not participate, never learning to read or write. When she becomes pregnant at 16 with her
second child, her first born with Downs syndrome at 12, repeatedly raped by her
own father, her mother’s boyfriend, the school principal suggests an alternative
school that would help her learn to read.
The mother has a conniption because she thinks it will affect her
welfare check, and Mo’Nique has a welfare queen scam going on to collect as
much welfare as possible by doing absolutely nothing, where her life consists
of drinking and smoking cigarettes in front of the TV while making her
daughter’s life as miserable as possible, actually blaming her for stealing her
boyfriend. Precious, however, is a
gentle giant who silently endures it all, but it’s clear she’s never had a
moment of happiness in her life.
The opening sequences are so harrowingly miserable that they are only made
worse by what feel like one-note, stereotypical depictions of meanness and
abuse that thrive on crude language and over-melodramatizations. But once Precious finds her new school, a new
world opens up to her, coming under the tutelage of the near saintly Ms. Rain,
an excellent Paula Patton, who is a stand-in for Sapphire, a former Harlem literacy
instructer and the lesbian author of the book Push upon which the film is based, named one of the top ten books
in 1996. Ms. Rain feels right at home
with the most difficult, hardest to reach students, all girls as it turns out,
but she treats each with the kind of respect they never get at home, so her
classroom becomes a safe haven and offers some of the best moments in the
film. The girls themselves are a treat,
all stylish attitude with hair trigger tempers and foul mouths that fume in
sexual innuendo. The teaching method,
unfortunately, feels very similar to Hillary Swank’s portrayal with at-risk
high school kids in FREEDOM WRITERS (2007), where she similarly has her
students spend time every day writing about their personal experiences in their
diaries, which opens up their eyes by forcing them to verbalize their
thoughts. This teaching method requires
Precious to learn how to read and write in miraculous fashion, all supposedly
during her pregnancy, though her actual speech is literred with foul, sexually
graphic terminology. (See an excerpt
from the book at the Random
House publishing website) One of the
problems with black lesbian writers is not only their hostility towards black men
in general, where Precious’s father is depicted as a savage ghost, mostly an
offscreen presence, yet responsible for the ruination of a young girl’s life, a
common thread seen throughout the works of Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Tina
Mabry, or now Sapphire, but they also can’t resist depicting an idealized,
rainbow-colored camaraderie between the women where sisterhood suddenly
materializes at the hospital, all rallying their united support around Precious
when she delivers her baby, an odd twist because these women were at each
other’s throats with a healthy dose of scorn and skepticism in the previous
scenes.
Sidibe narrates her story throughout the film, much of it taken from her
diary entries, spoken in a calm monotone of semi-literate, stream-of-conscious
language as she describes the gritty, unforgiving world around her, oftentimes
feeling so alienated and alone that she may as well be from another
planet. Like Celie, a similarly abused
child in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,
both survive by developing a trust in language, Precious in her diary entries,
Celie in her series of letters, which connects them both to the outside
world. There’s a manipulative pan shot
as figures in black history encircle Precious as she is suddenly capable of
connecting a sense of self and identity to her own history. Precious eventually reveals the truth about
her father to the welfare office, where the sympathetic worker is played by a
near unrecognizable Mariah Carey without makeup, where their bond along with her
school and teacher allows Precious to confront her mother with a renewed belief
in herself. What happens gets ugly, and
is a bit hard to believe, but baby in hand, Precious hits the streets in the
snow with nowhere to go, which in her case is grounds for optimism. There are several outstanding moments, Sidibe
has hers after discovering her father passed the HIV virus to her, where she is
literally laid bare in class, exposed perhaps for the first time in her life,
while Mo’Nique has a similar confession, probably the scene of the film, when
the social worker at the welfare office demands to know what she was doing
while her boyfriend was having sex with her daughter. It’s a gut-wrenching moment that is beyond
words, but it releases a world of indescribable pain off the shoulders of a
16-year old girl whose life has finally been handed back to her. It’s these haunting moments of raw emotion
that save the film, as the performances are simply outstanding. Overall the tone of the film is uneven and
manipulative throughout, and doesn’t really match that dramatic firepower
offered in a few brilliant scenes, but it’s nonetheless searingly intense,
uniquely relevant, and hard to look away from this seamy underside of
life.
Time Out Online (Geoff Andrew) review [3/6]
Harlem, the late ’80s:
Clareece ‘Precious’ Jones is 16, terribly overweight, illiterate, frequently
bullied and already pregnant for a second time – by her own father. Only when
she’s sent (against her mother’s wishes) to an alternative school and begins to
express her anger and pain does life begin to seem a little less hellish. It’s
hard to be unaffected by this familiar story of horrendous abuse, though a
certain slickness and literalism in scripting, camerawork and cutting threaten
to turn the film into a kind of Sundance variation on the ‘sickness movie of
the week’ genre. But the performances somehow make it work: not just Sidibe as
Precious, but Mo’Nique as her mother, who in one scene towards the end single
handedly takes the movie into far more rewardingly complex territory.
Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [2/6]
Given the months-long
hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall
shrug-worthiness. You’d think the litany of horrors that befall Harlem teenager
Clareece “Precious” Jones (Sidibe)—illiteracy, rape, domestic abuse, Mariah
Carey—would register with some piercing and perceptive effect. Instead,
they pass by with the glazed-over, lookie-lookie luridness of a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
episode.
And yet, at the film’s
center is a fully lived-in performance by newcomer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe, who
will hopefully go on to better things and not be cast aside, Slumdog-style, in the post-awards season. The
actor holds her own with such scene-stealers as Mo’Nique—dangling her
cigarettes with Oscar-baiting malevolence as Precious’s mom, Mary—and navigates
the neorealism-lite trappings with brazen, always arresting confidence.
The film’s best scenes
take place in a literacy class headed by a tough-love educator (Patton). It’s
here that Precious finds the means to express herself in ways reminiscent of
Celie, the uneducated heroine of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. Indeed, director Lee
Daniels seems to be aping Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Purple (specifically the sequence where Celie
discovers a long-hidden pile of letters from her sister) in the moment when the
camera circles Precious while video images of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, et
al. are projected around her. The meaning is the same—history floods the
consciousness of both Celie and Precious and powerfully widens their
worldview—but Daniels’s methods are decidedly cruder. It’s hardly surprising
that, in another instance, he emphasizes the revulsion of incest by cutting to
a pan of sizzling eggs. Even the worst behaviors, he appears to be saying, have
to go over easy.
Moving Pictures magazine [Eric Kohn] at Cannes
Lee Daniels' Precious could go wrong in many ways, and yet
nimbly avoids the obvious trappings of the material. Based on the novel Push
(and screened at Sundance under that name) by noted poet Sapphire, the
story focuses on an overweight, pregnant, Harlem teenager (Gabourey Sidibe, in
her first movie role) at odds with her crazed single mother (Mo'Nique) and the
larger possibilities of the world around her. With a lively soundtrack and
heavily stylized manifestations of the girl's emotional distress, Precious
frequently approaches the dangers of getting too ambitious - and somehow
emerges unscathed.
This results from more than just Daniels' directorial guidance. Primarily
recognized for producing Monster's Ball rather than for his sole
previous directing credit, Shadowboxer, Daniels tends to pile on many
ideas at once, which runs the risk of alienating his viewers. But the constant
experimental formalism in Precious jibes with the nature of the
characters, and thus succeeds because the performances never falter. Sidibe
turns in a frighteningly low-key onscreen personality to reflect Precious'
abused, withdrawn nature (her father raped her, adding two children to her
life). This creates a powerful contrast with the vibrant world inside her head,
where she dreams of a happier life. In her fantasies, Precious wears lavish
clothing, dances with the man of her dreams, smiles for the cameras and pleases
the crowds. The movie tracks her progress from wishing for this impossibly
palatial world to understanding how to correct the problems of the one in which
she resides.
By staying close to his main character's downtrodden perspective for most of
the film, Daniels keeps things refreshingly simplistic despite the dark themes.
Because of her poor schooling and virtually nonexistent parental guidance,
Precious views the world with childlike simplicity - and yet she develops a
sense of confidence that fosters her own personalized intellectual
capabilities. A witty moment where Precious imagines herself in an old,
histrionic Italian movie as it airs on television, echoing Oliver Stone's
ironic use of canned laugh tracks in Natural Born Killers, shows us the
remarkable complexity of the girl's escapist tendencies. But just as she grows
more distant from her unhappy existence, it starts to improve.
Guided by the passionate welfare case worker Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey,
surprisingly less showy than one might imagine) and the supportive efforts of a
teacher (Paula Patton) in the alternative school where she goes after proving
herself academically superior to low-rent public school education, Precious
gradually steps out of her mental box. This transition would simply not seem
credible without Sidibe's extraordinarily subtle performance. Watching her try
to comprehend her constantly expanding universe is at once scary and
sociologically fascinating. In early scenes, since she lacks the verbal skills
and optimism to find success, her daydreams contain a cold, disconnected
feeling that constantly reminds us of their unreality - strengthening the
discomfort permeating the real world.
Mo'Nique's awards-ready performance completes the puzzle. A grotesque
manifestation of American poverty, it gives us one of the more memorable and
important movie monsters in years. She's composed of fragments, much like the
structure of the film; an abusive husband, lack of work ethic and no evident
talent give rise to her own rage, which she takes out on her despondent child.
But as Precious grows out of the psychological cage where her mother
desperately tries to trap her, Mo'Nique gets the opportunity to allow her
character to blossom into a fully believable human being. Her final monologue,
a self-defense of her bad mothering delivered to Mrs. Weiss, explains not only
her own flaws but how they prevented Precious from reaching her potential. The
scene is unabashedly manipulative but not vindictive, making it an apt
summation of the movie itself.
New
York Times review Michiko Kakutani,
June 14, 1996
What do you get if you borrow the notion of an idiosyncratic teen-age narrator from J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and mix it up with the feminist sentimentality and anger of Alice Walker's "Color Purple"? The answer is "Push," a much-talked-about first novel by a poet named Sapphire, a novel that manages to be disturbing, affecting and manipulative all at the same time.
Like Celie in "The Color Purple," the heroine of "Push" is the survivor of a brutal childhood and youth; at the age of 16, Claireece or "Precious" as she calls herself, has already had two children by the man she knows as her father. Her mother has not only allowed these rapes to occur, but also beats Precious for stealing her man. She, too, sexually abuses Precious, and treats her as a maidservant around the house.
It's hard to imagine how things could get much worse, but in the course of "Push," Sapphire throws a lot more misfortune Precious's way. Little Mongo, Precious's first child, to whom she gave birth at the age of 12, turns out to have Down's syndrome and is quickly taken away from her. A week after her second child, Abdul, is born, Precious finds herself out on the streets of Harlem, without a place to live. Not much later, she learns that her father has infected her with H.I.V.
Given these circumstances, it's no surprise that Precious often feels as if her mind has become a television set, playing and replaying videos that offer her a brief respite from the bleak realities of her daily life. In these daydreams, she is thin, not fat; white, not black; loved, not mocked.
"Push," however, is not the story of a helpless or self-loathing victim. It's meant to be a story of female empowerment and triumph. Through the help of a gifted teacher named Rain, Precious learns to read and write. She learns how to write down her own experiences and turn them into poetry. She also gets hooked up with an incest survivors' support group, and a H.I.V.-positive support group. She gains friends, self-respect and the hope of one day going to college. "Push," the paramedic says to her when she's giving birth. "Push," says her teacher, when she despairs of making anything of her life.
What prevents all this from sounding as cloying as the characters' names is Precious's street-smart, angry voice, a voice that may shock readers with its liberal use of four-letter words and graphic descriptions of sex, but a voice that also conjures up Precious's gritty, unforgiving world. Sapphire somehow finds lyricism in Precious's life, and in endowing Precious with her own generous gifts for language, she allows us entree into her heroine's state of mind.
Precious talks of the neighborhood addicts with "kraters like what u see wen you look at spots on the moon" on their arms, and girls in her incest support group who sit in a circle with "faces like clocks, no bombs." She speaks of time seeming "like clothes in the washing machine at laundry mat -- round 'n round, up 'n down," and the television in her own head, "always static on, flipping picture."
"I'm walking across the lobby room real real slow," Precious recalls. "Full of chicken, bread; usually that make me not want to cry remember, but I feel like crying now. My head is like the swimming pool at the Y on one-three-five. Summer full of bodies splashing, most in shallow end; one, two in deep end. Thas how all the time years is swimming in my head. First grade boy say, Pick up your lips Claireece 'fore you trip over them."
Although the reader comes to feel enormous sympathy for Precious, one is constantly aware of the author standing behind the scenes, orchestrating her heroine's terrifying plummet into the abyss and her equally dramatic rescue. The first time we see Precious with a book at school, she is having difficulty sounding out the words in a picture book and learning the alphabet. Only pages later, her teacher is trying to get her to read "The Color Purple" in class.
For that matter, Alice Walker's ghost hovers more and more insistently over "Push" as the novel progresses, lending Precious's story a blunt ideological subtext. We learn that white social workers are foolish, patronizing liberals, and that men are pigs who only think about sex. Though it's easy to understand how Precious might hold all of these views, it soon becomes clear that Precious's creator, Sapphire, is also stacking the deck. In a lengthy postscript in which Precious's classmates tell the story of their lives, we are treated to a recitation of crimes committed against women by men. Rita's father kills her mother in front of her eyes, and Rita begins working as a hooker at the age of 12. Rhonda is raped by her brother, then thrown out of the house by her mother; when she gets a job taking care of an old white man, he asks her for sexual favors. Jermaine is molested by a boy at the age of 7, then raped by a friend's father a few years later; at 19, she is assaulted by six men.
No doubt this rapid-fire sequence of horrifying stories is supposed to mean that Precious has finally found a community of friends with shared experiences. Instead, they leave the reader with the feeling that one has abruptly exited the world of the novel and entered the world of a support group. In trying to open out her heroine's story and turn it into a more general comment on society, Sapphire has made the tale of Precious decidedly less moving than it might have been.
New York Magazine
(David Edelstein) review
There are worst-case scenarios, and then there is Precious, who’s
in a hellish league of her own. The heroine and narrator of the novel Push by
Sapphire (born Ramona Lofton), now a much-hyped film called Precious: Based
on the Novel Push by Sapphire, is the embodiment of everything—I
mean, everything—American society values least and victimizes most. She’s a
poor, illiterate, morbidly obese, dark-skinned African-American girl. She was
raped by her father from the age of 3, pregnant with his child at 12 (the baby,
which she names Mongo, has severe Down syndrome), and then pregnant by him
again at 16, when the novel begins. She’s also sexually molested by her
jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital
fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse. The book
gives you quite a bludgeoning. I started to pull back from it in a flashback
when the 12-year-old girl is in labor on the kitchen floor and her mother is
kicking her in the face.
Sapphire goes on to chart Precious’s journey from darkness to light: her
transfer to an alternative school and acceptance into a warm, matriarchal
community, where she’s encouraged to give voice to her experiences in poetry
and prose. A former teacher, Sapphire wants to show young women that if the
damaged, emotionally locked-up Precious can develop a sense of self-worth and
autonomy, anyone can. But Push, written in Precious’s distinctive
patois (“I still don’t say nuffin’. This hoe is keeping me from maff class. I
like maff class”), is so schematic, so single-minded in its depiction of
predatory evil and empowering good that you may think its title is not an
exhortation to drive through pain but a description of the author’s technique.
I dwell on the novel because the movie leads with it (that subtitle!) and because it faithfully, even reverently, sticks to Sapphire’s outline. But the director, Lee Daniels, working from a screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher, has a good sense of when to push and when to lie back. His rhythms are punchy—abrasive without being assaultive. And he has such a striking actress in Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Precious, that he doesn’t need to force her alienation—or ours. I’m not judging girls who look like Sidibe in life, but her image onscreen is jarring to the point of being transgressive, its only equivalent to be seen in John Waters’s pointedly outrageous carnivals. Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. Her expression is either surly or unreadable. Even with her voice-over narration, you’re meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing. The movie is saying that she’s not an object, but the way that Sidibe is directed she becomes one. It’s only in a couple of heavy-handed fantasy sequences (she emerges from a theater in a bright-red gown to popping flashbulbs) that her eyes are windows to the soul.
Daniels does everything to hold the melodrama at bay, but there’s only so much he can do. The comedian Mo’Nique gives a vivid and surprisingly varied performance as Precious’s mother, Mary (ironic-name alert): I have no doubt she found psychological justifications for Mary’s sadism, for the displacement onto Precious of her fury at a man who she thinks preferred her daughter to her. But the woman who drops a TV onto Precious as she hurries down the stairs with her infant is a sociopath, too singularly garish to be universal. As Precious’s teacher, Ms. Rain, Paula Patton is at the other extreme. A light-skinned beauty with fine features, she has a network-TV wholesomeness: Even her lesbianism has the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval—a poster on her wall of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. The most offbeat touch is a social worker played by Mariah Carey. She’s a tad too goody-goody, but her toasty, caressing voice is a gift beside Sidibe’s mush-mouthed monosyllables.
Daniels does well with the girls in Precious’s class, who have a mordant, barbed rapport. They’re almost as defended as she is, so when they bond with her it’s not sticky: You can feel their relief in being able to get out of their own heads and be kind. That’s when the film is genuinely moving without being manipulative. But it somehow skips over the part where Precious actually learns. When she tells us, in voice-over, that she won a literacy prize, you may think you missed something. Precious jumps from signpost to signpost. Set in 1987, it features obligatory images on TV of Reagan and Ollie North—but also, for hope’s sake, photos of Oprah Winfrey (thinner than she was at the time), who signed onto the film as co-executive-producer after it was made. The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.
Edelstein's
Response to Commenters a response to his angered critics,
specifically Latoya Peterson at Jezebel:
Some readers (and a posse led by Latoya Peterson at Jezebel) are angered by my review of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. They believe my language reflects deep and both conscious and unconscious prejudices toward African-Americans, obesity, and the so-called “underclass.” Defending myself against those charges (as well as outright abuse) is bound to be a losing battle, but I respect the feelings of Peterson and many of her commenters (the least abusive, anyway) and am sick at the thought that my attempts to evoke this movie have been viewed so harshly — and, I believe, unfairly.
When a filmmaker in or out of Hollywood makes a movie about a victimized African-American girl, you can expect him or her to cast an actress who is thin and light-skinned with big round eyes to make everyone — black and white — want to identify with her. Lee Daniels, in filming Precious, has gone to the opposite extreme. He presents a heroine, Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), who is, in the context of mainstream American culture, on the bottom rung status-wise. That is not my prejudice; it is reflected in every aspect of our society, from job opportunities to magazine covers. (Outside of Oprah, who has spent millions to lose and keep her weight off, it’s hard to think of another overweight African-American cover girl — until now, anyway.) It is unjust, it is mean, it is destructive, it is inhuman, but it is true. It’s also the whole point of the movie (even more so than the novel). Here is an obese, black-skinned (as opposed to latte-colored), pregnant, illiterate, poor girl: She has everything against her. And Daniels, like Sapphire, continues to pile on the abuses. She is sexually assaulted by both parents. She is beaten into unconsciousness with a cast-iron pan. She is kicked in the face giving birth. She is expelled from school for being pregnant — not even her fault but the result of her father’s rape. She has AIDS.
Contrary to commenters' assertions (“What does it transgress, exactly? Because she is, you know, human, and she looks like a human … The usage is just racist. And sizeist”), “transgressive” isn’t a misuse of my thesaurus and it doesn’t reflect my racism or prejudice against fat people. In the context of movies, her image is a shock; it throws you violently outside your normal frame of reference, forcing you to rethink your assumptions. My assumptions are not, as many have inferred, judgmental. I’ve had weight issues all my life. My mother, an M.D., once treated obesity (or tried like hell) and in filling in for her receptionist in my late teens I saw what women in the African-American community with a certain body type and metabolism were up against — especially since they were surrounded by crap food (which, as the great documentary Food, Inc. makes clear, is both addictive and cheaper — thanks to corn subsidies — than, say, a head of broccoli). As for her affect, Sidibe is reportedly a bubbly, outgoing girl in life, but she is directed to be inexpressive. Again, that’s the point. Horribly abused and slighted or ignored by those around her, Precious has learned to reveal nothing. The first time you can see into her eyes is in her glamorous fantasy sequences, when Precious can let go.
I could have used euphemisms in describing the way she is presented to us, but I don’t think that would have evoked the movie. Daniels is very calculating in how he uses Sidibie’s image. He also has a scene in which she stares into a mirror and sees a beautiful thin white woman staring back, as if to say, “This is how she sees herself on the inside.” If he can so starkly portray how she wants to be versus how she is, if he can say, “Look how many strikes are against this girl,” then at the end when she emerges with real self-esteem, he can claim to have made a truly affirmative film — and I don't mean Hollywood-style affirmation.
So I was taken aback by comments like this:
Can I nominate Edelstein for worstie? That's how a real human being actually looks like in real life. I realize that her appearance may be shocking to you but you seriously need to filter your mouth. I agree with your sentiment and I hope this does spur some type of discussion, but his "reaction" was incredibly rude and shouldn't have been published (at least that bluntly). It didn't even take into consideration that some people do look like that and probably have very fragile self-esteem. As for her "shortcomings," obviously Ms. Sidibe is overweight but, from what I gather, that doesn't really have much to do with the true message of this movie.
It doesn’t have to do with the “true message” of the movie, but her weight is front-and-center.
OK, Edelstein, granted, maybe if Hollywood had allowed for a broader (ahem!) portrayal of black womanhood through the decades, showed the points between and beyond Dorothy Dandridge/Thandie Newton/Halle Berry and Mammy/maids/Medea/Eddie Murphy in a dress instead of spending a century studying how to properly light toothpicks onscreen, you'd find Sidibe less "jarring."
Actually, many of my colleagues and I have complained about fewer opportunities for beautiful women who are darker and more, ahem, broad (read: rounder, less model-skinny), like Angela Bassett. It is in the context of the Halle Berrys that Sidibe is, like it or not, jarring.
Also, her eyes are naturally narrow, not "squashed." I have a longstanding hatred of Edelstein, but this takes the cake.
As Jason Alexander said in Shallow Hal (the ultimate absurdist riff on prejudice against weight), “It takes the whole bakery.” My use of the word “squashed” was meant to suggest that Precious’s most expressive features are, thanks to how she's directed and photographed and lighted, hidden by her flesh; it was not a comment on Sidibe’s eyes, which are lovely in out-of-character photos.
The New York Magazine article confirmed my opinion of magazine and well, uh, all print media. Namely, the shockingly broad de-humanization of black people that exist outside of what it is to be a "good black," namely light skin, "good hair," thin, well off, and devoid of any linguistic trace of "black accents." (See: uh, the vast majority of black female actresses and singers). It's fucked up. It's sad. But seriously. It's about time he just played it as it lays and said "these are monsters." Which is to say, he missed the entire point of the book, the movie, and fucking life, that is, humanity exists in us all. In fact, this review is fucking evidence of some of the fucked up pathology that drives the self-hatred of the main character in Precious.
No one at New York would describe the characters (or people they're based on) in Precious as monsters. That's an unfair prejudice against this magazine. But I think the film does cater to a Reaganite preconception about “welfare mothers” by making Mary — in between the beatings of Precious — obsessed with her “check” and baldly lying about looking for work.
One line of mine I admit was insensitive: “She’s also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse.” The last thing I would ever do is make light of sexual abuse. In a clumsy way I was trying to suggest that I have read accounts of incest in which victims have said that at least when being touched they weren’t being beaten bloody, that it was perceived by the victim at the time as the lesser of two evils. But that is too complicated and too debatable a point to pack into a single offhand phrase. I apologize.
I think he means it offends his delicate sensibilities to be shown a fat woman on the screen. There should have been a black rectangle over her body so people wouldn't be offended.
No, my “delicate sensibilities” weren’t offended. I was offended based on other criteria. I still believe — and we can debate this I hope without throwing around charges of racism — that the piling-on of abuse and the relentless demonization of the family is a kind of demagoguery. I’m not naïve enough to think that monsters like Precious’s mother don’t exist. But I think the job of an artist is to get inside and understand people like that and not exploit their inhumanity in melodramatic ways to make us furious. It’s the crudeness of Precious I resent, not its message of hope.
UPDATE: Latoya Peterson also points to my description of Precious's mother, Mary, as "too singular to be universal," asserting that I refuse to accept (perhaps because of my different background) "ferocious violence" in this community. I accept its existence, but reject the portrayal onscreen — not out of squeamishness but in the belief that an artist owes us something more than a relentless display of cruelty edited for shock value.
UPDATE 2: I hope this is my last word on the subject, but as we get closer to the opening of Precious, it's important to note how casually the movie's adherents (many of whom haven't seen it) throw around the charge of racism. I've read that by pointing out that Precious is dark-skinned in a world that prizes lighter skin, I've revealed my own bigoted preferences. What garbage. In Sapphire's Push, Precious says she wishes she were light skinned and looks with envy on women who are. Early in the movie, the woman she sees in the mirror who represents — she thinks — who she is on the inside is thin and white. Those weren't my racist projections!
Meanwhile, a woman who calls herself piranha in an entry called "how not to defend yourself," quotes me selectively:
so now he defends himself, because he, david edelstein, isn't racist or sizeist, noooo:
"I’ve had weight issues all my life. My mother, an M.D., once treated obesity (or tried like hell) and in filling in for her receptionist in my late teens I saw what women in the African-American community with a certain body type and metabolism were up against — especially since they were surrounded by crap food"
*sigh*. that really needs no further commentary, does it.
*Sigh*. Maybe it does. Notice how she omits the final, parenthetical clause: "... which, as the great documentary Food, Inc. makes clear, is both addictive and cheaper — thanks to corn subsidies — than, say, a head of broccoli." I guess she doesn't feel that some people are genetically predisposed to obesity — and therefore have a much tougher time losing weight. And if she'd seen Food, Inc., she'd know that among the consequences of America's corn subsidies is a hugely disproportionate rise of obesity in poor communities. The filmmaker shows why a family goes to a fast-food drive-in window instead of eating at home: a) the parents both work several jobs and don't have time to cook; and b) double cheeseburgers are cheaper than a head of broccoli. The book and movie Precious drive this home by showing Precious's breakfast: a tub of fried chicken.
The dishonesty is breathtaking.
Precious
Reactions Interesting, Infuriating
Latoya Peterson at Jezebel
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire | Reverse Shot Andrew Chan
Slate (Dana Stevens) review
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
Slant
Magazine review [1.5/4] Ed Gonzalez
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
Christian
Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review
[B+]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Film Freak
Central Review [Alex Jackson]
The Onion
A.V. Club review [B] Noel Murray
Nick's Flick
Picks (Nick Davis) review [B]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[5/5] Scott
Knopf
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Precious: Based on the
Novel 'Push' by Sapphire Michael
Sicinski from The Academic Hack
Cinematical (Eric D. Snider) review also seen here: The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]
FilmJerk.com
(Brian Orndorf) review [B+]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [1/5]
Precious Mike Goodridge from Screendaily
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review
[3.5/5]
Eye for
Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3/5]
Moving Pictures magazine [Andre Chautard] at Toronto
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Bina007
Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]
Cannes
'09 Day 3: Up with people Wesley
Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe
blog, May 15, 2009
A
“Precious” moment; no really, no sarcasm
Charles Ealy at Cannes from 360 Austin Movie Blog, May 15, 2009
Kim
Voynar at Sundance under the
film title Push, from Movie City News
Noel Murray
at Sundance under the film title Push,
from The Onion A.V. Club, January 18,
2009
Nathan Rabin at
Sundance under the film title Push,
from The Onion A.V. Club, January 18,
2009
Scott Foundas
Pushed to the Brink, at
Sundance under the film title Push, from
The LA Weekly, January 20, 2009
Paul Moore
at Sundance under the film title Push,
from indieWIRE, January 26, 2009, also seen here: PUSH:
BASED ON THE NOVEL BY SAPPHIRE Review, Sundance 2009 | SpoutBlog
Patrick Z McGavin
at Sundance under the film title Push,
from Stop Smiling magazine,
January 24, 2009
Precious David Hudson at Sundance under the film title Push, from The IFC Blog, January 18, 2009
Eric Kohn at Sundance from indieWIRE, January 17, 2009
Lee
Daniels Reveals His Gritty Vision Stephen Farber interview from The Daily Beast, November 2, 2009, also
there is more: More Daily
Beast coverage of Precious
IndieWIRE Interview with director Lee Daniels, January 8, 2009
Gabby Sidibe’s Astonishing Debut Living
the Life, Tim Murphy from New York
magazine, September 25, 2009
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Glieberman
Variety (John Anderson) review at Sundance
Ty Burr at Sundance from The Boston Globe, January 18, 2009
'Precious' divides among black viewers Erin Aubry Kaplan from The Chicago Tribune, November 29, 2009
A precious American girl, a Japanese love doll, Iranian rockers, and a Korean vampire Barbara Scharres at Cannes from The Chicago Sun Times, May 15, 2009
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review November 6, 2009
The Audacity of ‘Precious’ Lynn Hirschberg from The New York Times, October 21, 2009
Black author Sapphire, her novel Push becomes Precious on big ... Nordette Adams from The Indianapolis Examiner, May 20, 2009
Sapphire's Push: Merciless Honesty | BlogHer Nordette Adams from Blogher, November 9, 2009
Precious (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Risky Material in the Classroom: Using Sapphire's Novel “Push”
What to Watch: Precious, Based on the Novel Push « Knopf Doubleday ... Study guide from the Random House publishing website
excerpt excerpt from the book at the Random House publishing website
here Random House profile of author Sapphire
Owen
Keehnen: Interviews Owen Keehnen
interviews Sapphire from Queer Cultural Center, August 1996
For Colored Girls: The Sapphire Interview Ernest Hardy interviews Sapphire from LA Weekly, November 11, 2009
Zabeth's Corner: Book Review: "Push" by Sapphire
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THE PAPERBOY B 88
USA (107 mi) 2012 ‘Scope
The recipient of some of the worst reviews in print, a train wreck alleged to be one of the worst and most forgettable films of the year, this is instead a highly entertaining and juicy film noir, a candidate for a spot on John Waters Top Ten films of the year, with enough repressed sexual dysfunction and lurid southern atmosphere to rival any Tennessee Williams play. Reportedly offered to Pedro Almodóvar as his first English-speaking feature film, after toying with the screenplay he eventually declined, but certainly the raunchy tone of the material is there, based on a novel by Pete Dexter who along with the director helped adapt the screenplay, which is unashamedly trashy, B-movie material. Some may find the boundaries of bad taste pushed to the fullest here, yet that is the point of the film, that people require their “news” to be sanitized and cleaned up beyond description so that it is no longer recognizable from its origins, where truth is a virtue that exists only in concept, as there are so many powers in play desperate to spin and alter the news to suit their readers. While there is no attempt to add sanctimonious morality or a message to this film, but this is ascertained strictly from the title of the film, and as it concerns a family where the patriarchal father (Scott Glenn) runs a newspaper. Set in a small town in Florida (though filmed in Louisiana) during the late 60’s when New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm can be seen delivering a speech on television, where by the early 70’s she was one of the founding members of the Black Congressional Caucus and even initiated a bid for the Presidency in 1972, surviving several assassination attempts, running as the ideological opposite of race segregationalist candidate from Alabama, Governor George Wallace, whose picture may be seen on the walls of law enforcement officials. This sets the scene for the existing racism that routinely exists in the region, where Macy Gray steals the thunder from some of the bigger names, playing Anita, the family maid, who takes the place of the missing mother to Jack (Zac Efron), an impressionable teenage kid just out of high school who also happens to be a paperboy.
Like a modern day MILDRED PIERCE (1945), Anita opens the
film awkwardly recounting her personal recollections of a local murder to a
journalist, where the film is a flashback of colorful events that she continues
to narrate throughout, often with a bewildered amusement. Jack’s older brother is Ward, Matthew
McConaughey, working for a Miami newspaper, returning to his home town
accompanied by a fellow black reporter, Yardley (David Oyelowo), supposedly
from
While some of the best scenes exude personal familiarity between Anita and Jack, it’s also clear the murky atmosphere under the surface is seething with a suffocating claustrophobia, often retreating into the swamps for more local color, as every character in the film has been seriously damaged in some deeply affecting way, where Jack follows his brother’s footsteps until Ward gets into a heap of trouble where he barely makes it out alive, the victim of some starkly graphic, criminally inspired, brutally sadistic gay bondage, literally forcing little brother to assert himself more due to his medical circumstances. Jack is the victim of the prevailing racial attitudes where he stupidly embarrasses himself in front of Anita, but also carries the baggage of abandonment issues due to the loss of his mother, while Ward is on a self-destructive bent driven by his inability to accept the fact he’s gay. Charlotte has such a low degree of self-esteem that she hangs on literally every word of some of the lowest and most depraved men on earth, driven to the point of delusion by her need to be desired by men. When Jack offers his love, she sees it as little more than child’s play. Yardley, like a modern day Mr. Tibbs, is forced to take advantage of job opportunities that have routinely been denied blacks, even if it means stepping on the backs of others to get there, losing his moral compass in the process. Hillary Van Wetter, on the other hand, is a swamp creature that lives with the alligators, snakes, and incessant swarm of bugs, a primeval force of nature that we’ve come to accept in Robert Mitchum’s roles in The Night of the Hunter (1955) or CAPE FEAR (1962). Brought together by uncommon circumstances, they all seem to bring out the worst in one another, where the insidious nature of man is portrayed as little more than that of lowly animals, where it’s questionable who we are and what we’ve evolved into. The film is more interested in capturing the right tone and atmosphere, like CHINATOWN (1974) set in the swamps, filled with Mario Grigorov’s original score and a collection of standard R & B hits from the 60’s, where the interplay between characters is interesting and often hilarious, leading to an unvarnished and uncompromisingly thrilling finale, where the unexpected raises its ugly head and proclaims victory, where many of us may be wondering what happened, and how did all this rarely seen material suddenly appear before our eyes? Daring and devious throughout, where Kidman especially is another force of nature onscreen, credit is due for having the fortitude to approach this material head on without studio imposed concessions.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Patrick Friel
The plot of Lee Daniels' THE PAPERBOY—the director's brave follow-up to his critically and popularly acclaimed PRECIOUS—reads like Tennessee Williams melodrama hopped up on Erskine Caldwell pulp. It's a Southern Gothic, sure enough, but don't let the critics who dismiss (or praise) it as a simple, trashy romp fool you. This is a heady and intoxicating brew that, honestly, shouldn't work—but does. The narrative threads are many (excessive even)—but they're worthy vehicles for an ensemble of exaggerated characters, a messy set of themes, and a carefully pastiched visual style. Jack Jansen (Zac Efron—yes, really) is the hub of the film (a stand-in for the source novel's author, Pete Dexter), a young man whose 1960s small-town life starts to spin out of control. Jack's older brother (Matthew McConaughey) is a newspaper journalist who returns from the city, with his black colleague Yardly (David Oyelowo), to investigate the case of a convicted killer on death row. The convict (John Cusack) is a swamp-dwelling, alligator-hunting maybe-psycho mixed up in a torrid jailhouse romance with a trampy death-row groupie (Nicole Kidman). Rounding out the primary cast, singer Macy Gray plays the Jansen family's domestic Anita (and the movie's narrator). As in the great genre films of Hollywood's heyday, Daniels uses a sensationalistic story, a debased genre, to explore a host of potent themes. Through shifting interactions and allegiances among his characters, Daniels riffs on race and class, guilt and innocence, sexual repression, friendship, trust, and more. There are shades of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, DELIVERANCE, WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and GOD'S LITTLE ACRE. Kidman evokes a sexed-up Elizabeth Taylor; McConaughey has the charming aloofness of Paul Newman's Cool Hand Luke; Cusack combines the frightening iciness of Robert Blake's Perry Smith and psychotic intensity of Richard Widmark in KISS OF DEATH. The list of cinematic reference points could go on, but it's not the specificity of these (or others) that matters. Daniel's achievement is recapturing the hot, sultry mood of these movies in his own haunting and beautiful way. It's trashy, exasperating, convoluted, over-the-top, violent, and deliberately provocative. But these charged-up qualities give the film its unique power, and Daniels piles them on as if daring his audience to come to grips with, and move beyond, the excess.
The Paperboy | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin
It’s hard to describe Lee Daniels’ sweaty new melodrama The Paperboy without making it seem far more vivid and entertaining than it actually is. Everything about The Paperboy promises a deranged instant camp classic, from Nicole Kidman’s strangely stylized turn as a prisoner-obsessed nymphomaniac who looks and behaves like a malfunctioning Marilyn Monroe sex robot to the surreal miscasting of genial Midwesterner John Cusack as a borderline-feral Southern death-row inmate to a much-buzzed about scene involving Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron. So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It’s as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.
Efron stars as a directionless young man in a perspiration-soaked 1960s Florida, where he frequently spends time clad only in a pair of tighty-whities. His dashing reporter brother (Matthew McConaughey, whose impressive recent winning streak reaches an end here) comes to town with his enigmatic African-American partner (David Oyelowo) to investigate the case of a prisoner (Cusack) on death row for killing a corpulent, corrupt sheriff. Efron falls in love—or at least a profound state of lust—with Cusack’s fiancé, a hot-to-trot sexpot played by Kidman, whose sun-baked sensuality spills out in all directions and is the film’s main attraction and source of morbid fascination.
An intense, almost disconcerting level of investment and commitment characterized Lee Daniels’ previous two directorial efforts, Precious and Shadowboxer, yet The Paperboy feels strangely remote throughout, in part because it centers on a murder case nobody in the film seems to care much about, not even the folks directly involved. The framing device finds maid Macy Gray recounting the sordid events in flashback, which further distances the film from the lust, rage, violence, and longing at its blurry core. In his previous films, Daniels established himself as a sensualist with a gift for feverishly over-the-top melodrama, but his primary directorial stamp here, beyond finding infinite reasons to separate Efron from his clothing, involves giving the film a retro-fever-dream look that suggests an Instagram filter called “Bayou Swamp.” The Paperboy offers a perversely bloodless take on rough sex, murder, intrigue, and race. If Daniels actually set out to transform the wildest possible source material into the most inert possible film, he’s succeeded spectacularly.
The Paperboy is an enjoyably lurid southern noir set in
the mid-Sixties from Pete Dexter (who collaborated on the screenplay) with
additional touches added by the director of Precious, who has a taste
for the highly colored ant the shocking. If you want to see Nicole Kidman pee
on a half-naked Zac Efron this is your movie. But Kidman is excellent as the
tacky bleach-blonde Barbie Doll death row groupie and Efron (Jack Jansen) is
vulnerable and sweet as the younger brother of Miami newsman Matthew
McConaughey (Ward Jansen), who comes with Yardley, a black colleague apparently
from London (David Oyelowo) to investigate a murder case. The sleazy, odious
inmate is played by John Cusack (Hillary Van Wetter). Of course in this Florida
town in this year a black colleague is provocative enough; and it's Daniels'
touch, not in the Dexter novel, that he should be black. The peeing scene has a
therapeutic purpose: it's to counteract toxins from a jellyfish Jack (Zac) has
met up with while swimming. Daniels' finest touch is his use of the excellent
Macy Gray as Anita Chester, the Jansen family maid, who also does the
voice-over narration, and the best scenes are ones of familial intimacy between
Anita and Jack. Everybody is good, McConaughey doing his Good Old Boy drawl,
Oyelowo infuriatingly cocky as the British-accented colored man, Cusack a scary
piece of swamp muck Hilary's family comes from the swamp and lives by gutting
alligators to sell for shoes and handbags). Daniels at times tries to evoke
Seventies B-pictures. I don't think you can take all this seriously, despite
the strong hints at many turns of Sixties South racism, but there's something
unique about it, and it entertains.
Charlotte gets the "paperboys" to come following a romantic
correspondence with Hillary, and when they come into town comes wearing a tight
dress and bearing big boxes of research into the case. But the newsmen seem
distracted, and not very interested in finding out the truth. Jack, a former
swimming star kicked out of college who's not doing much but delivering papers,
is enlisted to be the reporters' driver, and he falls madly in love with
Charlotte and moons for her or sexes for her till finally he gets her
"Okay, but just once." Meanwhile there is Anita's humorous voiceover
narration, and the present-time Anita's many cozy little scenes with Jack,
while unexpected or not so unexpected truths emerge concerning Ward, Hillary,
and Yardley.
The movie is great in individual scenes, but doesn't move so well from on to
the net. For a noir, The Paperboy lacks urgency or narrative drive. This
won't convince anybody it has contemporary relevance as did Lee Daniels'
previous film, the 2009 Precious, but again there may be some Oscar
mentions. Along with condemnations: the critics are not joining up to praise The
Paperboy. Rex Reed has launced one of his diatribes against it: '"This raunchy dreck, cut from
the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest
"Killer Joe," is a leap downhill from "Precious,"' he
intones. Indeed McConaughey is also featured with Zac Efron in Killer Joe,
but that's Tracy Lett, and that's a different kettle of rancid catfish.
User reviews from imdb Author: karenaziz229 from San Francisco
It's hard for me to understand the scorn that has been heaped upon this
film. You'd think Lee Daniels had created a film praising Hitler, the
Antichrist, and communism. Also, it's hard to understand why some critics have
focused on certain aspects of the film. Zac Efron in his "tidy whities"
or Nicole Kidman urinating on Mr. Efron. The level of titillation that is being
shown would be credible in a 7-year old, but not for adult critics. To focus on
these rather minor points shows a deep misunderstanding of what this film is
about.
So, what is this film about? While I think it's hard to reduce a work of art to
the level of a short essay, I am so fed up with what has been written about
this film that I shall attempt to do so.
For starters, I believe this film reflects the world as it is, and not as we
want it to be. I think this film is saying that our deepest need is for love,
connection, and moral truth but these needs become warped when filtered through
the lies,despair, and degradation that American society has offered up as the
truth. Mainstream films never go here, and while some indie films touch on this
theme, they don't usually go for as deep a dive. The only other director that I
can think of even approaching this level of an unblinking stare into the abyss
is Todd Soldendz.
The characters in the film consist of Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey), a
journalist who has come back to his home town to investigate whether or not
Hilary Van Wetter (John Cusack), a man on death row, received a fair trial.
Ward's attention has been drawn to this case by Charlotte Bless (Nicole
Kidman), a woman who has maintained a jail house correspondence with Mr. Van
Wetter, and who believes she is in love with him. Ward brings with him a
colleague, Yardley Acheman (David Oyewolo), a black journalist from London. They
are assisted by Ward's younger brother, Jack Jansen (Zac Efron), who still
lives at home. The Jansen family maid, Anita Chester (Macy Gray) is Jack's
confidant and a stand in for the mother that left the family several years ago.
Each character's story is that of connection or love that has been twisted or
thwarted for various reasons. Jack's playful relationship with the family maid
can never be a relation between equals because of his racism. Jack can see that
she is his natural ally and friend, but his racism denies them both a deeper
connection. As brothers, Ward and Jack share a powerful bond of affection, but
no amount of affection between the brothers can halt Ward's impulse to
self-destruction brought on by his inability to accept being homosexual.
Charlotte Bless is looking for love and thinks she can find it by writing to
men in prison. She receives a response from Van Wetter, and because of its
seeming indifference to what other men want from her, she decides this man
loves her. The delusion is so powerful that even when real love is offered by
Jack, she doesn't understand it. The film doesn't make it clear why she is so
self-destructive. We can only assume it is the logical end to the toxic sexism
that forces women to see themselves as worthy only if they are desired by a
man; any man. Jack's impulse toward love and connection with this woman is
driven by the damage done by the abandonment Jack experienced at the hands of
his mother.Yardley is a black man trying to have a decent career as a journalist
at a time (1969) when racism almost guaranteed that black men remain in lowly
positions and did not allow them to rise to their full potential. It is this
very racism that makes him betray his colleague and his principals and forces
him to assume an identity other than his own. Van Wetter is, I think, a kind of
stand in for a force of nature. It is when you face up to these kind of forces
that your innermost strengths and weaknesses are revealed.
Through these characters, Lee Daniels is showing the damage done to human
relations, forcing people to act in ways that are not pretty to watch, and so
the world he shows us is not pretty. It's hard and brutal. But so are the
forces that drive these characters. To the critics who hated this film, if you
want pretty, watch Lucy and Desi. Mr. Daniels world is the real world; flawed,
messy, and hard to look at, but with humanity and the impulse to transcendence
at its core.
Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]
Review: 'The Paperboy' Gets the Hard Things Right – | Film.com Stephanie Zacharek
Paperboy, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
The Paperboy - Entertainment - Time Mary Corliss, also seen here: Time [Mary Corliss]
The Atlantic Wire [Richard Lawson]
Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]
FILM REVIEW: The Paperboy - The Buzz - CBC Eli Glasner
The Paperboy Review: A Haggard Old Dog of a Movie, A - Pajiba Caspar Salmon
Swampwater: The Paperboy Is a Long Way Off ... - New York Observer Rex Reed
James Rocchi at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 24, 2012
REVIEW: Lurid Sleaze Saga 'The Paperboy' Starring ... - Movieline Alison Willmore
Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 24, 2012
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Jesse Skeen]
DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno]
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Neil Lumbard]
The
Paperboy Mike Goodridge at Cannes
from Screendaily
FilmSchoolRejects [Daniel Walber]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Sound On Sight Neal Dhand
Lost in Reviews [Richard Pepper]
Hollywood and Fine [Marshall Fine]
Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]
Film School Rejects [Simon Gallagher]
Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Alone in the Dark [Paul Greenwood]
Kyle Buchanan When Nicole Kidman Gave Zac Efron a Golden Shower at Cannes, at The Vulture from New York magazine, May 24, 2012
DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Lee Daniels’s THE PAPERBOY David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 24, 2012
Cannes 2012: Nicole Kidman reveals why she loved playing a 'hot, over-sexed Barbie' in The Paperboy Anita Singh interviews Kidman from The London Telegraph, May 24, 2012
'The Paperboy': Nicole Kidman is used to audience discomfort - Los ... Mark Olsen interviews actress Nicole Kidman from The LA Times, December 20, 2012
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy] at Cannes, May 24, 2012, also seen here: Todd McCarthy
The Paperboy Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Cannes 2012: The Paperboy – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 24, 2012
Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 24, 2012
Cannes 2012: The Paperboy, review Robbie Collin at Cannes from The London Telegraph, May 24, 2012, also seen here: Robbie Collin
The Star-Ledger [Stephen Whitty]
Philadelphia Inquirer [Steven Rea]
Philadelphia Daily News [Gary Thompson]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'The Paperboy' delivers a dark, angrily steaming tale: Review - Los ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
Nicole Kidman refused to say N-word for Lee Daniels in... Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The Paperboy - Movies - The New York Times A.O. Scott
LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER B- 80
USA (132 mi) 2013 Official site
Darkness
cannot drive out darkness — only light can. —Martin
Luther King, Jr.
This is a truly strange movie, at times deliciously
entertaining, while at other times one is simply aghast at the ineptitude,
where mixed signals are sent throughout, partly tragic, partly comic, where for
several moments one had to wonder if this could possibly be a subversive
attempt to actually send a message to America, but instead it comes across as a
toned-down Disney movie of the week, where the narrative style unfortunately
resembles Uncle Remus storytelling at the White House, told in the supposedly
inoffensive manner of Disney’s SONG OF THE SOUTH (1946), which is really one
long American narrative as Uncle Remus takes us through the Civil Rights era of
history, as seen through the eyes of a long-serving White House butler, Cecil
Gaines (Forest Whitaker). Rather than
deal with anything remotely resembling the present, it appears that today’s
movies prefer to remain stuck in the past, continually conjuring up stories
that deal with an era of loyal black servitude and obedience, like The Help
(2011), Django
Unchained (2012), 12
Years a Slave (2013), and now yet another, as if the drumbeat of showing
past transgressions will somehow alter the course of today’s history. If that is the desired effect, it’s not
working. One has to wonder who decides
which black stories are told, or how they’re told? And why do we continue to project the same
negative stereotypes that only reinforce images of black subservience? Black talents like Viola Davis and Forest
Whitaker have received critical acclaim for playing maids and butlers, while
British black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor is the odds on favorite for an Academy Award for
playing a kidnapped free slave sold into the brutality of slavery. Why is
Adapted from an article written by Wil Haygood that appeared
in The Washington Post just a few
weeks after President-elect Obama won the election on
The casting of Whitaker as the butler is a good one, as
after all, he already won an Oscar for portraying Idi Amin in THE LAST KING OF
What is particularly powerful about the picture is the portrayal of black
father and son relationships, established in the opening shots of the film in
1926 Georgia at an existing cotton plantation where Cecil (as a child) and his
own father worked, which was run exactly as it did during the slavery era, no
difference whatsoever except they didn’t shackle slaves. Blacks were still routinely killed by whites,
calling them “niggers,” even by judges in court, and whites just as routinely
got away with it, using the violent threat of lynchings and the KKK if anyone
had any other ideas. In another casting
misadventure, Mariah Carey plays Cecil’s mother in the fields, where after her
own sexual assault, they both witness the shooting of her husband, after which
Cecil is led from the fields into the house under the tutelage of none other
than Vanessa Redgrave to become the subservient “house nigger.” He learns so well he eventually becomes the
White House butler serving 8 different Presidents from Truman to Reagan, where
the rules are identical, as he is never to display any emotion, react to
anything seen, or engage anyone other than his boss. The irony here is that his oldest son runs
off to college and becomes a campus militant, the polar opposite of his father,
where viewing American black history from the 20’s through the 80’s through the
shared father and son experiences is simply too much, as it’s too great a
cultural divide. For instance, we learn
about what happened to Emmett Till over the dinner table as a drunken Gloria is
serving food to her family, where that’s the extent of the experience,
mentioned in much the same way as idle gossip.
Both parents are convinced that having left the South, they have obtained
security for their family. But Louis
will not rest until blacks have the same rights as other American citizens,
joining the freedom riders where he is routinely assaulted, beaten, spit upon,
and arrested. Because of these offenses,
Cecil disowns his son and refuses to speak to him, which is his way of deluding
himself about his son and history.
In much the same way, it’s interesting how the Presidents engage in private conversations with their black butlers about the ‘black” problems, where Eisenhower doesn’t get how his experience growing up on a farm isn’t the same as Cecil’s, or LBJ’s profusive use of the word “nigger” to his own cabinet and staff somehow evolves to the word “Negro” on national television, JFK coolly describes to Cecil (who had no idea) that his son has been arrested 15 times, before television photos of the firehoses turned on peacefully demonstrating blacks in Birmingham cause he and his brother to have a change of heart on the race issue, while Reagan (played by the Harry Potter wizard specializing in the Dark Arts) second guesses his own shortsightedness on the post Civil Rights race relations, something one sincerely doubts, since the Reagan Republicans have consistently attempted to all but legalize racial discrimination, playing the race card in political ads ever since that cynically appeal to white votes. But in this film, the theme of the film comes from the prophetic words of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoken to Louis just moments before he would be shot, “Domestics play a very big role in our history. In many ways they are subversive without ever knowing it,” suggesting they break down negative racial stereotypes by demonstrating steady employment, also by performing their jobs with grace and dignity, showing that they can be trusted, all of which defies the inherently distrustful views of racial bigotry.
But the arc of the story leads to a reunification of father and son, to President Obama, and the mistaken belief that things are finally so much better for blacks in America, where the film’s tagline, “One quiet voice can ignite a revolution,” is simply ridiculous. Who are they kidding? Then why are so many black men (over a million) languishing in prisons at the moment? And why is it legal to arrest a black and a white man for the exact same drug offense, yet the sentence for the black is so much more severe than the white, who with a lawyer may never serve any prison time at all? Whites use drugs 5 times more than blacks, yet blacks are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites. Blacks constitute more than 80% of those incarcerated under federal crack cocaine laws and serve substantially more time in prison than do their white counterparts, despite that fact that more than 2/3 of crack cocaine users in the U.S. are white or Hispanic, so it’s now perfectly legal for the police to exclusively target black neighborhoods for drug raids and for the court system to exhibit racial discrimination in court sentencing, and no one says a word. But while blacks no longer have to sit at the back of the bus, progress has been slow going, with all too many reminders of the vicious cycle of racial hatred that continues without end from generation to generation.
While the picture has some well known blacks promoting and participating in the making of the movie, the question must be asked, is this a black movie? Borrowing from the website Racism Is White Supremacy: Is “Lee Daniels' The Butler” (Really) A “Black Movie?” | Racism Is ...
1. Who wrote the screenplay for the movie, The
Danny Strong, Screenwriter for ‘The Butler,’ who was hired
to write “The Butler” in 2009, a year before Daniels even signed on as
director.
2. Who Owns the (Distribution) Rights to the movie,
“Lee Daniels’ The
Harvey Weinstein (Co-Chairman – the Weinstein Company)
David Glasser, Weinstein Co. COO
3. Who are the Producers, Executive Producers and
Co-Producers of “The
Laura Ziskin – Executive Producer (deceased)
Hilary Shor – Executive Producer
Adam Merims – Executive Producer
Buddy Patrick – Producer
Shelia Johnson – Producer
Lee Daniels – Producer
Cassian Elwes – Producer
How, then, is this considered a “black” movie? This is Hollywood’s portrayal of a black movie, which is an altogether different thing, as the creative minds and financial power behind the film are almost entirely white. So one must keep in mind that this is still how white people view blacks even in contemporary society, where it’s a continuation of a white Hollywood racist fantasia that’s been the corporate business model for well over 100 years, where leading black roles of continued submission and obedient servitude to whites are the ones more likely to be accepted by white audiences and nominated for Academy Awards.
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Lee Daniels' The Butler follows the title character, Forest Whitaker's Cecil Gaines, as he serves under eight American Presidents over a period of several decades, with the setup employed primarily as a springboard for an exploration of the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s and '70s. Filmmaker Lee Daniels has infused Lee Daniels' The Butler with an unabashedly old-fashioned sensibility that's reflected in most of its attributes, which does ensure that, for a little while, the inherently compelling subject matter is exploited to maximum effect - with Whitaker's solid turn matched by an eclectic group of periphery performers (including Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr, and Terrence Howard). (And this is to say nothing of the various folks playing the Commander in Chief, with Robin Williams' Dwight D. Eisenhower and Alan Rickman's Ronald Reagan standing out as highlights.) The film's compulsively watchable vibe proves to be short lived, however, as scripter Danny Strong begins to emphasize the comparatively less-than-engrossing exploits of Cecil's rebellious son, Louis (David Oyelowo). Whitaker's character is increasingly relegated to the sidelines, as Daniels and Strong devote much of the film's midsection to the battle for equality among African Americans - with the narrative's one-track-mindedness growing more and more tedious as time progresses. (It doesn't help, either, that Strong pads out the proceedings with a number of palpably useless subplots, including the possible infidelity of Cecil's wife and other similarly pointless asides.) The ensuing lack of momentum paves the way for a second half that wavers between mildly engaging to flat-out interminable, with the heartfelt final stretch, as a result, unable to pack the emotional punch that Daniels is obviously striving for - which ultimately cements Lee Daniels' The Butler's place as a terminally underwhelming curiosity.
As presented, Lee Daniels' star-studded, multi-generational epic
of truncated American Civil Rights history, The Butler, is an easily
interpreted political argument. It's an emotionally driven documentation of the
fight against subjugation, utilizing a framing device and broad character
conflicts to make it a twee narrative rather than a ramshackle, overly sweeping
documentary.
As written by Danny Strong (the scribe behind the similarly observed Recount),
this effective, but woefully contrived drama takes the Forrest Gump
approach to storytelling, utilizing the titular cipher — here, a slave turned
butler named Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) — to observe a complex tapestry of
historical events unfolding around him.
Although based loosely on the life of Eugene Allen, many liberties stretch this
story from the cotton fields of Macon, Georgia in the '20s up to the
presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. Cecil (a slave that witnesses the
murder of his father and the raping of his mother by white men) eventually
learns the ways of domestic service. Sent out on his own as a coming-of-age
journey, the theft of pastries pushes him into the good graces of a prestigious
local butler that teaches him the craft and who eventually recommends him for
roles that subsequently land him in the White House during the Eisenhower
(Robin Williams) years.
Amidst the endless array of montages quickly guiding us through his trainings
and acclamation to fellow staffers (Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz,
primarily), we also get a sense of Cecil's physical, and non-physical, absence
at home, with wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and oldest son Louis (David Oyelowo).
Significant Civil Rights events fuel the exposition spewing out of the mouths
of various presidents — Kennedy (James Marsden), Johnson (Liev Schreiber),
Nixon (John Cusack) and Reagan (Alan Rickman) — reiterated on the news
highlights that Gloria watches, reacting as emotionally and dramatically as
possible in close-up (demonstrating Daniels' sycophantic tendencies).
As a work of pacing, utilizing formulas and the interspersing of informational,
structurally necessary montages with quiet moments of intensity, focusing on
acting and the pointed pronunciation of profound dialogue, The Butler is
exceptional. As manipulative and ridiculous — every president shares a telling,
character-defining moment with Cecil and Cecil alone — as it is, there is a
whirlwind of inspiration and feeling projected from this story, doing as
intended by reminding us just how profoundly disturbing our collective history of
ignorance and discrimination really is.
As a work of art, The Butler is quite embarrassing, featuring characters
that can be summarized in brief anecdotal form and conflicts that exist only to
reiterate the thesis statement and some rather redundant political assertions.
While the eventual deterioration of the relationship between Cecil and his son
does hold some intensity on its own — the dinner scene where he brings home a
classless, belching girlfriend (Yaya Alafia) is priceless — the overtly argued
ideological difference is presented with ultimate condescension.
Louis (a young freedom fighter and eventual Black Panther, who engages in
rallies to remove segregation in public locales and spends more time in jail
than out) doesn't respect his father's decision to serve the white man.
Contrarily, some African-American academics suggest that, while not exactly
ideal, the role of the butler helped debunk most of the negative stereotypes
whites asserted about blacks, being a reliable, hard-working, professional
role, with a constant air of dignity.
It's an interesting argument that helps give this century-long bout of
name-dropping ("Oh, look, it's Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan!")
some sense of purpose beyond heavy-handed histrionics. But it's also painfully
obvious and reiterated too overtly and pointedly to leave this desperate awards
hopeful with a great deal of integrity by the time the make-up artists are
struggling to make everyone look decades older than they are.
Of course, since we're looking at a story seeking to reach as wide an audience
as possible, preaching the word of tolerance to the masses, this lack of
subtlety and the absurdist convenience of it all are understandable. While most
films of this nature are completely devoid of humour, Cuba Gooding Jr.'s
character makes regular jokes about fornicating with a woman that defecates
during orgasm. This was almost as surprising as having to admit that Oprah
actually does a good job with her character.
Lee Daniels' The Butler reviewed by Armond White for CityArts ... Armond White
How Daniels asserts/inserts himself into his films is crucial to the failings of…oh, let’s just call it The Butler. While Daniels purports to make a biography of Cecil Gaines, a Black Southerner who went from picking cotton in Georgia to serving as butler in the White House for seven Presidential administrations, the film primarily displays Daniels’ opportunism. Taking advantage of our strange, polarized political moment, The Butler only makes noise about race–simplifying the history that Gaines lived through from Jim Crow to 2008–implying that Gaines’s story prepared the way for the election of Barack Obama. So soon after Kushner-Spielberg’s Lincoln, another foreshortening of American history.
The Butler’s major malfunction is its inexact parallel to Obama’s own biography; Gaines’s suffering through the post-slavery experience is completely different from Obama’s story. Daniels feeds the marketable concept that Gaines’s very particular sojourn represents the entirety of Black America’s struggle for equality. He distorts Gaines’s private life into a national epic, making him an emblem rather than a character.
Everyone here, from limousine liberal parade of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave to the various Presidential caricatures (Robin Williams, James Marsden, John Cusack, Liev Schreiber, Alan Rickman), look like waxworks. From the beginning, Forest Whittaker plays the title role as a gaunt, wizened symbol of oppression and endurance–a Morgan Freeman figure of quiet dignity and rectitude. His wife (Oprah Winfrey) and two sons (David Oyewelo and Isaac White) seem like appendages rather than family. Gaines’s estrangement from his world suggests a reverse Benjamin Button aging through decades, keeping quiet during eras of social turmoil. He—and this film–most resembles Forrest Gump, that symbolic idiot savant witness to social progress he played no part in.
The Butler is unconvincingly noble–without even that streak of psychotic behavior in the ridiculous shit pie scenes of The Help. Gaines is always crotchety and proper, leaving dirty-minded resilience to Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr in scene-stealing supporting roles–they’re surrogates for Daniels the salacious auteur who’s uninterested in what propriety and self-control mean.
Instead of a freaky-deaky view of the Civil Rights Movements’ behind-the-scenes hook-ups (even Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waves quotes Martin Luther King defending masturbation as a great release), we get an Obama-ized tale of Gaines as a dogged, enigmatic paragon. Rectitude as political caution was better dramatized in Brian Helgeland’s far superior Jackie Robinson story, 42. But this film is so solemn and disingenuous it neglects its opening thesis: Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong never confess what it feels like to make a room “feel empty” (although Whitaker’s zombie performance inadvertently gives an inkling). They trade the existential torment of self-abnegation (refuted by decades of Hollywood’s servile-yet-impudent stereotypes) for the cliche of long-suffering martyrdom. (Daniels lacks the honesty and talent to show what being close to power feels like.)
A more credible film would consistently portray the advice of Gaines’s father “Don’t lose your temper with the Man. Dis his worl’; we jus’ livin’ in it.” The Butler will feel inauthentic to most Americans who painfully, cagily work menial jobs; it is designed to appease condescending elites—what politicians call “the Middle Class”–who like to sentimentalize about workers who are beneath their regard (symbolized by the ever-changing line of Presidents, lightly satirizing the indifference of patronizing whites). The Butler may feature a largely Black cast under a Black director’s baton, but it’s really a movie for whites who seek self-congratulatory lessons rather than entertainment.
Daniels’ key trope is the presumptuous montage: Lunch counter sit-ins at Woolworth’s contrasting formal White House dinner parties–pseudo-political juxtapositions that would make Eisenstein wince. Daniels uses montage for sensationalism–not feeling or politics. The entire film exploits subtle and overt American racial violence. The first striking image poses a lynching next to the American flag. Such cheap, Spike Lee rhetoric trivializes history. The 1929 flashback to Gaines’s mother being raped and father being killed isn’t just horrible, it’s an infuriating simplification: The son’s modern attitude shows ignorance of Southern custom; pressuring his father (“Pop, what you gonna do?”) is what gets his Dad killed. When titles say “Inspired by a true story” it merely means an anachronistic fantasy of Black American history adapted from Wil Haygood’s propagandistic Washington Post article (“A Butler Well Served By This Election”) celebrating Obama’s inauguration.
This fantasy includes casting Mariah Carey as the mother defiled and made crazy by the puzzlingly pretty white plantation-owner (Alex Pettyfer) and Oprah Winfrey as Gaines’s horny, boozing then devoted wife. Only Oprah–in a role better suited to Mo’Nique–could act self-righteous about committing adultery (dismissing her “yellow ass” lover). Oprah’s not a character but a Black Womanist Figurehead which places this film far outside the artful realm of Jonathan Demme’s magnificent Beloved. The subplot of Gaines’s conflict with his politically-wayward son merely extenuates the story without delving into the father’s painful, necessary political reticence. Worse, it misrepresents what Lorraine Hansberry explicated about the Black generation gap in A Raisin in the Sun.
Daniels panders to the hip-hop attitude that Black youth know more about survival than their hard-working ancestors. The scene of Gaines driving through urban chaos in response to MLK’s assassination is as phony as the riot scenes in Dreamgirls. Pandering to history and violence lacks the political detail of Melvin and Mario Van Peebles’ Panther; this more resembles Tarantino’s unrealistic s&m circus Django Unchained. These discomforting prevarications are angled toward Obama’s “Tonight is your answer” election speech—turning historical pain into shallow, maudlin victory. Daniels’ tendency to falsify Black American experience and then exploit it is as offensive as Spielberg-Kushner’s factitious Lincoln. A more personally honest, openly licentious fantasy would be more interesting. Now that he’s played his Obama card, I’m sure Lee Daniels’ Satyricon will come next.
Richard A. Epstein Defining Ideas, a Hoover Institution Journal, August 20, 2013
World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]
“Lee Daniels' The Butler”: An Oscar-worthy historical fable - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
David Denby: “The Butler,” “Lovelace” Reviews : The New Yorker David Denby
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
Subversive Subservience: Exploring the History of Black Servitude ... Sophia Dorval from Highbrow magazine, October 31, 2013
A Butler Well Served by This Election - Washington Post Wil Haygood, source article, November 27, 2008
Is “Lee Daniels' The Butler” (Really) A “Black Movie?” | Racism Is ... Racism Is White Supremacy, August 17, 2013
Racism Still Exists, Representations of Black People in Film Racism Still Exists
Today's Hollywood And The Reinforcement of Black Subservience Anthony Samad from Between the Lines, October 3. 2013
Lee Daniels' The Butler / The Dissolve Nathan Rabin
Movie Review: The Butler -- Vulture David Edelstein
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
The Butler, reviewed: Lee Daniels and Forest Whitaker lead a ... - Slate Dana Stevens
The Butler Review: Lee Daniels' Big Ol' Feel-Good Mess - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke
1NFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
James Kendrick - QNetwork Entertainment Portal
'The Butler' Doesn't Do It - The Wire Richard Lawson
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
Review: 'Lee Daniels' The Butler' Starring Forest Whitaker, Oprah ... Kimber Myers from The Playlist
Movie Mezzanine [Odie Henderson]
Film-Forward.com [Christopher Bourne]
CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]
'The Butler' Review: Lee Daniels Goes Historical, the 'Forrest Gump ... Kate Erbland from Film School Rejects
Butler, The (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]
Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]
Trespass Magazine [Sarah Ward]
Lee Daniels' The Butler Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Why 'Lee Daniels' The Butler' Has 41 Producers Pamela McClintock, August 14, 2013
Lee Daniels on 'The Butler': 'I Don't Feel So Good About the Title ... Hilary Lewis from The Hollywood Reporter, August 9, 2013
John Singleton: Can a White Director Make a Great Black Movie ... John Singleton from The Hollywood Reporter, September 19, 2013
The Guardian [Orville Lloyd Douglas]
The Star Online [Sharmilla Ganesan]
examiner.com [Christopher Granger]
Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Charleston City Paper [T. Meek]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pam Zoslov]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Dallas Film Now [Peter Martin]
Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie review by Kenneth Turan -- latimes.com
Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Steven Boone
Dannelly, Brian
SAVED! B 87
USA
“God only knows what I’d be without you...” rings out over the opening
shot. I found this satire on
fundamentalist Christian adolescents attending an all-Christian high school
hilariously subversive for the first half, but when the story starts to
coincide with the previously released MEAN GIRLS, well it looses some steam and
never really recovers, becoming all too predictable by the end while remaining
thoroughly enjoyable. Mandy Moore
Macaulay Culkin sets just the right tone in the film as the non-believing,
wheel-chair-bound brother to Mandy Moore Jena
Dante, Joe
Born and raised in
The Unofficial Joe Dante Web
Site
TCMDB biography
from Turner Classic Movies
Film
Reference profile by Ross Care
Joe Dante - Issue 51, 2009 - Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber from Senses of Cinema, March, 2003
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Joe Dante: serious mischief Tom
Charity from Sight and Sound, October
2010
Dante, Joe They Shoot
Pictures, Don’t They
Joe
Dante: 'Gremlins' Director Reflects on His Biggest Hits Glenn Kenny interview from The New York Times, August 5, 2016
SMALL SOLDIERS
1998 from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Best Films of 1998
article from the Reader
4. Small Soldiers.
Satire, according to George S. Kaufman, is what closes on Saturday night. But
judging from the critical response to Joe Dante's high-spirited satire of
watching wars and war movies, it's also what gets pilloried in the Friday
papers. I've seen this pleasurable and highly visceral extravaganza twice in
This isn't the first time Dante has been misunderstood, nor, I suspect, will it be the last. (His previous picture, the 1993 Matinee, was about war fever, and critics who connected its treatment of the Cuban missile crisis with our periodic eviscerations of Baghdad were few and far between.) Though all his movies are about the ethics and ramifications of spectatorship, Dante prefers to keep a low profile within the studio system and works without a personal publicist, so you won't catch many critics treating him like an auteur. For me the satire of Small Soldiers was so powerful and persuasive that when I saw Saving Private Ryan a week later, the Spielberg film seemed like derivative, warmongering claptrap. Now that Private Ryan has been hailed as the movie to end all wars, I can only wonder whether we've chosen Spielberg as our filmmaker laureate because we implicitly understand that he's every bit as innocent about his motives as we are--meaning that we can all remain children as long as he's the grown-up in charge. "I think World War II was my favorite war," the late Phil Hartman says wistfully in Small Soldiers while showing his wife his fancy new home-viewing setup--or media arsenal. Judging from the success of Private Ryan, Spielberg has lots of company, but now that the critical obfuscation has abated, I hope that home viewers able to laugh at their own worst impulses will discover the year's best studio picture.
Chicago Reader Movie Review Jonathan Rosenbaum, also seen here: Small Soldiers and Saving Private Ryan
HOMECOMING
Masters of Horror TV show
Masters of Horror: "Homecoming" Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
For a more in-depth consideration of Dante's shrewd, on-time
political satire than I can really offer, I refer you to Mark Peranson's
insightful analysis and Dante interview in the latest Cinema Scope. While I was
impressed with "Homecoming," I suppose some of its broader strokes
left me a little ambivalent. Dante and screenwriter Sam Hamm have produced a
classic Juvenalian satire, with impossible-to-miss stand-ins for Ann Coulter,
Jerry Falwell, Larry King, and other contemporary unsavories. Despite a few
poetic touches (none quite so moving as when an earnest polling-place worker
affixes an "I Voted" sticker to the body of a fallen soldier), there
is a sense of inevitability to much of "Homecoming." As a viewer I
found myself nodding in assent but also acutely aware of the fact that its
trajectory and its political takedowns were intellectually preordained. It's as
though this film was in the zeitgeist for the taking, and it is absolutely to
Dante's credit that he brought it into being. (After Ralph Nader's comment that
the presidency of George W. Bush was "beyond satire," it's nice to
see someone prove that thesis wrong.) But Dante abandons even the thin
metaphorical register recently employed by Romero, scoring direct hits but
sacrificing the subtlety that usually characterizes great art. So although I
began and ended my viewing of "Homecoming" secure in the knowledge
that Dante's point of view is the correct one, the director has perhaps
accomplished something else here, implicitly posing a secondary set of
questions, reverberating in the shadow of the primary ones. What is art's
function in a desperate political present? When are the stakes too high to risk
speaking in the ambiguous languages of aesthetic response? What's gained, and
lost, when the gloves come off? ["Homecoming" can currently be seen
in the
By Mark Peranson Dante’s Inferno: The Necessary Satire of Homecoming, from Cinema Scope
Darabont, Frank
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
USA (142 mi) 1994
In 1946 a young New England banker,
Andy Dufresne (Robbins), is convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and
sentenced to life at the Shawshank State Prison - twice over. Quiet and
introspective, he gradually strikes up a friendship with the prison 'fixer',
Red (Freeman), and over the next two decades wins the trust of the governor and
guards, but in his heart, he still yearns for freedom. Darabont's adaptation of
a Stephen King novella is a throwback to the kind of serious, literate drama
Hollywood used to make (Birdman of Alcatraz, say) though the big
spiritual resolution takes some swallowing - ditto the colour-blind
relationships within the prison and the violent disavowal of any homosexual
implications. Against this weighs the pleasure of discovering a first-time
director with evident respect for the intelligence of his audience, brave
enough to let character details accumulate without recourse to the fast-forward
button. Darabont plays the long game and wins: this is an engrossing, superbly
acted yarn, while the Shawshank itself is a truly formidable mausoleum.
Eye for
Film (David Haviland) review [5/5]
The story of The Shawshank Redemption is well known. Based on a Stephen King novella, the film was released in 1994 to a warm critical reception, but failed to turn a profit at the box office. Finding an audience through TV and video, it gradually grew to become a phenomenon, a canonised classic, and something close to a religious experience for many. The story may be well known, but the mystery remains: What is it about The Shawshank Redemption that has such a profound effect on people?
The film tells the story of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), an educated banker sentenced to life for the murder of his wife and her lover. In prison, Andy inspires his fellow inmates with his courage and humanity and has a profound effect on Red (Morgan Freeman), an older prisoner, who has given up hope.
Unlike many films of the Nineties, Shawshank has no "high concept" plot premise and is somewhat episodic compared with the tight, linear narratives of closer structured pictures. This sense of freedom in the storytelling allows the film to consistently throw up genuine surprises, as the viewer isn't constantly on guard for clues and plot points. In hindsight, we tend to forget how successfully writer/director Frank Darabont leads us to expect a very different resolution.
Now it is regarded as a feelgood classic, which only achieves such popularity by first visiting the darkest places imaginable. It's easy to forget how violent and depressing the story is and it's only by evoking a powerful sense of horror that Darabont's masterful screenplay earns its climactic feeling of release.
The film's inspirational power is heightened by the use of religious references and symbolism throughout. Some argue, compellingly, that it can be read as a religious parable, with Andy as a Christ figure, who sacrifices himself in order to inspire those around him, and is figuratively killed and reborn.
Part of the film's popularity is the way it warrants rewatching, as the quality of the writing means each new viewing throws up fresh details and delights. The tension, when the warden checks Andy's cell, for example, is only fully appreciated second time round. Similarly, the wonderful dialogue is best enjoyed with the leisure of already knowing the story; Andy's reply in court, for example, to the accusation that the disappearance of his gun is convenient: "Since I am innocent of this crime, sir, I find it decidedly inconvenient that the gun was never found."
The story obviously inspired the makers as much as it does the audience, as it marks a career high for most of the considerable talents involved. The cinematography by long-time Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins is awe-inspiring. Freeman and Robbins were never more touching and restrained and Darabont's direction displays the mastery of a man making his twentieth film, rather than, as this was, his debut.
The Shawshank Redemption is perhaps the only undisputed classic of the Nineties, although it's more popular with the public than with critics, who tend to be slightly sniffy about it's feelgood magic. In this respect, it has much in common with the other classics, with which it is often compared, such as Casablanca and It's A Wonderful Life, which suggests that it will remain a favourite of the people for decades to come.
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Though adapted from a Stephen King novella, "The Shawshank Redemption" has more to do with a man's internal demons than the kind that routinely rise up from overgrown graveyards. Like "Stand by Me," it's not a typical story from the horror King. Instead, it's a devoutly old-fashioned, spiritually uplifting prison drama about two lifers who must break their emotional shackles before they can finally become free men.
Set in a spooky old penitentiary with turrets and towers, the movie manages to be true to its Big House origins while incorporating such horrific mainstays as the clanking of chains and the creaking of the walls. There's even a raven that roosts in the prison library, where he is cared for by a darling old trusty (James Whitmore). For the most part, however, the movie expands upon cliches that date back to James Cagney's prison portraits—the twisted warden (Bob Gunton) and the sadistic guard (Clancy Brown).
Director Frank Darabont, who apprenticed on B-scripts ("The Fly II") and TV movies ("Buried Alive"), manages to fashion an improbable new pattern from the same old material in his remarkable debut. While he deals with the grimmest aspects of prison life (sadistic guards, gang rapes and befouled food), Darabont is chiefly interested in the 20-year friendship that sustains Andy (Tim Robbins) and Red (Morgan Freeman) .
The movie opens in 1947 as Andy, a prominent New England banker, is on trial for murdering his wife and her lover. Not only did he have a motive, but he had the opportunity—his footprints were found at the scene of the crime—and he had a weapon of the caliber used in the shootings. He insists that he is innocent, but the jury finds him guilty. Sentenced to life twice over, Andy is shipped to the maximum-security state prison at Shawshank, Maine. An introverted loner with an interest in reading, chess and rock carving, Andy doesn't make himself many friends until Red, a 30-year-veteran of the system, decides to take him under his wing.
Things begin to change for the better when Andy finds a way to use his skills and education to benefit his fellow felons. When he overhears the guard captain complaining about losing most of an inheritance to taxes, he offers to trade his advice for three beers for each of the men who are working with him that day tarring the roof.
His reputation as a financial adviser spreads, and soon he is doing the taxes for all the guards and running the warden's outside scams. This leads to a position in the tiny prison library, which Andy gradually expands into the best educational facility of its kind in the area. It takes him six years to do it, but Andy never gives up hope.
It is hope that allows the self-proclaimed innocent man to survive what may or may not be an unjust imprisonment. And hope is his gift to his friend Red, who no longer even tries to impress the parole board at his hearings. He's become "institutionalized," he explains to Andy, and would be a "nobody" on the outside.
Red's gift to Andy is absolution when he finally confesses his true sins. Whether or not he pulled the trigger, Andy blames himself for causing his wife's death; his redemption comes as he learns to give of himself over the course of this marvelously acted and directed film.
Robbins gives a performance that evolves with beautiful clarity from starchy banker to warm and loving friend. Freeman is sure to gain his third Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Red. He also reads the film's lovely narration, much of it drawn verbatim from King's 1982 novella.
A detailed portrait of the routine of cellblock life, "The Shawshank Redemption" might change a few minds about the usefulness of incarceration in terms of rehabilitation. Mostly, though, it reminds us of that we all hold the keys to our own prisons.
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
eFilmCritic.com (Andrew Howe) review [5/5]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
John's Movie Blog moviejohn
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Movie-Vault.com (Arturo García Lasca) review
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [3/5] Michael Dequina
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay S. Steinberg, 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Times James Gray, 2-disc Special Edition
The Lumière Reader (DVD) John Spry, 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [5/5] [Special Edition]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 2-disc Special Edition
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVDActive (Paul Cooke) dvd review [9/10] [10th Anniversary Special Edition]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [10th Anniversary Special Edition] Colin Jacobson
CHUD.com (Matt Hindmarch) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review [Special Edition]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [4.5/5] [10th Anniversary Edition] Brad Cook
MovieFreak.com (Dennis Landmann) dvd review [10/10] [Special Edition]
Exclaim! dvd review Monica S. Kuebler, 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Talk (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version] also here: DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss, Blu-Ray Version
Crimespree Cinema: Blu-ray release [Jeremy Lynch]
filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [4/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Oscar Movie's Review #19 [Warren Lukinuk]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Leonard Klady) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4] September 23, 1994
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] October 17, 1999
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze
THE MIST B 87
A good old-fashioned and highly entertaining horror movie, where one can read volumes into our society’s preparedness for such a large scale accident or disaster, namely, that despite the formation of a new Homeland Security cabinet position after 9/11, and billions of money spent in each state to update various security systems, the plain truth is that people aren’t even close to ready in the event of a real disaster. Katrina remains the best metaphor for our state of preparedness, which is a pretty pathetic picture. What this film does is break it down to a typical small town anywhere in the USA, in this case it’s Maine, writer Stephen King’s home state, where out of nowhere an event that no one can explain turns into a disaster of epic proportions. But it evolves out of an ordinary day, the night after a storm where the wind blew all the phone reception and power lines down so people flocked to the local supermarket to stock up on supplies, including a father and son, Thomas Jane (a LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE Greg Kinnear type) and Nathan Gamble, along with their next door neighbor, Andre Braugher, whose car was smashed by a falling tree. After a few courtesy hello’s, a man comes running into the store bleeding on his face screaming “There’s something out there in the mist.” Sure enough, the entire town has been engulfed by a strange and unexplained mist. People have a hard time believing the severity of their situation, even after one of the stock clerks has been ripped away from them by a giant creature, largely because most didn’t see it with their own eyes, so they’re inclined to be skeptical. When a group, led by Braugher, decides to brave the mist alone, they are set upon by giant creatures instantly, where one man’s half-eaten body is left lying in front of the store. So much for skepticism.
After a few instant fortifications of the front windows, in no time people are divided into factions, one by the level-headed dad, the only one brave enough to try to save the store clerk, and another led by the fire and brimstone spouting Marcia Gay Harden who is terrific in her role as the semi-crazed town fool who rises to the occasion fortified by her belief that the Apocalypse of Revelations is upon them, whose dire predictions of evil rooted in sin begins to resonate with a few, largely due to the rising degree of their fear. When prehistoric winged flying creatures break through the window and start flying through the store, well, to put it mildly, all hell breaks loose, and rather than stick together as a unit, one group risks their lives fending them off, while the other group cowers in fear, but claim Harden as a prophet afterwards, bolstering her position as the voice of hysteria. Although much of the action takes place stuck inside a supermarket, their dire circumstances are well demonstrated, because it’s as if someone opened Pandora’s Box and the world has been set upon by giant demons. How would anyone react under those circumstances? When it becomes clear that the fear factor is spreading as fast as the Mist itself, dad’s small group tries to come up with an escape plan, but their initial venture outside only exposes them to still greater danger than they ever imagined, and only a few get back alive, whereupon they are turned upon by the fear mongers, who have no answer except to resort to Old Testament ideas of offering human sacrifices to an angry God, as Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, as if that would quell the storm. But all it seems to do is turn this angry mob into what resembles a hateful feeding frenzy. Despite the ugliness of the winged creatures, and a few giant spiders thrown in as well, they are no less repulsive than humans turning against one another with such a bloodthirsty lynch mob mentality.
It’s interesting that one of the charms of small town life is how everyone knows everyone else, how there are few secrets, how you can keep your door unlocked at night, or even leave the keys in your car while it’s running, how there’s a palpable sense of unbroken community trust. This view that in hard times, the community will pull together and help each other out is simply shattered to bits in this film which shows instead a clawing and scratch-your-eyes- out mentality where self-preservation comes first. The idea that when faced with such hard times, extremist views prevail should open up a few eyes as to the desperate straits that exist in the rest of the world where religious extremism has already grown out of control, yet few who see this film will sympathize with others, instead they’ll take the individualist approach, like the days of the wild west when no moral order prevailed, where it was every man and woman for themselves. It appears we have come full circle by returning to that western mentality of 150 years ago – some progress we’ve made. Oh yes, but we have Ipods and cellphones to be thankful for.
With about a hundred film credits to his name, the works of Stephen King continue to fill movie theaters. But only a handful of the projects can really be considered “great,” and two of those were co-written and directed by the same person: Frank Darabont. His work on The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile garnered each film an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The Mist may not rise to such lofty heights, but Darabont proves once again that he’s got King’s number.
The film features a group of shoppers trapped inside a small town grocery store, with something from a strange mist killing anyone who ventures outside. Thomas Jane plays the typical King hero as movie poster artist David Drayton. Marcia Gay Harden plays the villain in the guise of the town’s local religious-extremist-wacko Mrs. Carmody, who uses the fear of the unknown to build what David calls her “congregation.”
Darabont employs a bevy of terrific effects to bring flying pterodactyl-like creatures, giant, lethal insects and very creepy acid-web shooting spiders to life. But he also relies on man’s humanity, or lack thereof, which always makes King’s stories shine above the typical horror fare. When it comes time for David and some others to make a run for it, they do so more out of fear of their fellow man rather than the creatures outside.
Harden does a fine job of keeping her potentially hysterical character reined in. The journey of her “becoming” as the store’s savior is a wonder to watch. And Toby Jones (Truman in the “other” Capote movie Infamous) is excellent as the surprisingly courageous grocery clerk. But it’s the story of the store’s inhabitants as a whole versus the mist’s unearthly realm that creates a tense and visually exciting standoff, eventually leading to an ending that King never wrote. Darabont’s skills go beyond interpretation, as he creates a work not just fit for a King, but fit for the screen.
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson)
Frank Darabont’s adaptations of Stephen King’s writings are not just some of the best mountings of the writer’s work but some of the best films, period, of recent years: The Shawshank Redemption, anyone? The Green Mile? So I don’t think it’s too outrageous -- or too surprising -- to say that The Mist, which Darabont wrote and directed from a King novella, is not only one of the best movies of 2007, it’s one of the best horror movies ever made. Period.
Look: B movies went A a long time ago, even before
the real world turned into its own kind of science fiction nightmare of drowned
cities and kamikaze terrorists, and so isn’t civil disaster the perfect
springboard for exploring the most sinister aspects of humanity? Because, oh yes,
there are creatures here with teeth of both the metaphoric and literal kind,
but they’re just animals doing what animals do. The monsters of The Mist
are the people, and how we give in to fear and give up on hope at the very
moments when we don’t need the one and desperately need the other. This is
horror of a philosophical, humanistic bent, examining the nightmares of
politics and religion on the small scale upon which they act upon individuals,
as well as our propensity to dispense with reason at the drop of a hat... or a
tentacle. For all its fantastical elements, this is as grounded and as
immediate and as real as movies get. This is “horror” the way that Rod Serling
told it -- think the creepy societal breakdown of “The Monsters Are Due on
The civil disaster is an ordinary one: a gusty storm knocks down trees and brings down power lines in one of those outwardly charming, secretly insidious Stephen King small towns. But did it also knock out the power at the local army base, wherein, it is rumored, is housed the remains of a crashed flying saucer and dead alien bodies? This is the stuff of the polite, time-passing chatter strained neighbors David Drayton (Thomas Jane: The Punisher, Stander) and Brent Norton (Andre Braugher: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Poseidon) engage in as they drive, with David’s young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), into town to pick up supplies to board up windows, and groceries before the shelves are picked clean. They’re all in the supermarket when a thick mist descends, obscuring the view out the plate-glass windows beyond a few feet. And then a bloodied man runs into the store, screaming about monsters in the strange fog...
It’s quiet inside the store for a while, the couple of dozen people trapped by their uncertainty over what’s happening but not yet giving in to panic. That begins to happen soon enough, however, when no rescue comes and, well, other, more deadly things begin to occur. It’s all smartly, brilliantly, paced, not just the more traditional aspects of what you’d expect from a horror movie -- those things with the tentacles in the mist are vicious buggers -- but the collapse of the civilization as represented by the little supermarket society. Tribes start to form along sharply drawn lines, drifting toward either David and his calm logic or Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden: Into the Wild, The Dead Girl), a vocal proponent of hellfire-and-brimstone Biblical literalism, and her preaching about how this is the promised Armageddon, and boy, is God pissed with us or what? (She’s the most terrifying thing about the movie, no question.)
There’s an almost orgasmic rise and fall to The Mist in how it scares the hell out of you via the monsters of both the human and the creature varieties, lets you relax with a tension-relieving laugh or two -- though the film never indulges in a snarky joke that would break the satisfyingly grim mood -- and then starts on you all over again. And if the movie worked purely as that kind of intellectual roller coaster ride and nothing else, that would have been more than enough. But it also offers finely drawn portraits of the kind of positive strength movies of this ilk -- or any ilk -- rarely see, of a real-masculinity not about bombast or machismo but built up of courage in the face of one’s own fear and a refusal to descend into easy animality... and not just in the obvious hero character of David but also in, say, the apparently meek supermarket manager played by the ever-essential Toby Jones (The Painted Veil, Infamous). Hell, even the woman customer played by Laurie Holden (Fantastic Four, The Majestic), who teams up with David, is strong and capable and genuine -- so let’s call it not just real-masculinity but real-humanity.
It’s impossible to guess quite what’s going on or quite how Darabont -- who took some liberties with King’s material -- can possibly resolve his story in a way that will completely gratify. But he does. How it ends... well, I couldn’t move from my seat, I was that blown away by the power of it. It’s absolutely right, exactly the kind of uncompromising kicker it needs to be to ensure that The Mist haunts you for a good long while with its shocking reminder of how we can be our own worst enemies in all ways imaginable.
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
"There's...something...in...the...fog....er,
mist!"
Book or story to screen adaptations of Stephen King’s work cluster around the mediocre ("1408", "Pet Cemetery," "Firestarter") or the truly wretched ("Night Flyer," "Night Shift", "Maximum Overdrive"). Of the few adaptations that stand on their own, most were made from King’s early novels ("Carrie," "Salem’s Lot," "The Shining") or novellas ("The Shawshank Redemption," "Stand by Me") with the occasional exception ("Dolores Clairborne," "Misery") drawn from his realistic novels. Writer/director Frank Darabont has adapted two of King’s work, "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," and after a long hiatus, is back with a third, an adaptation of King’s 1980 apocalyptic survival/horror novella, "The Mist."
Darabont sticks closely to
King’s novella, centering The Mist on David Drayton (Thomas Jane), an artist
who lives and works from a lakeside home in
But then the mist rolls in. One man, Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn), appears out
of the mist, bloodied, and bruised and with a story to tell: something
non-human came out of the mist and took his friend. The other townspeople
disbelieve him at first, but decide to stay put. The screams of a man dying in
the mist suggest that
The struggle between rationality and fear and between religious zealotry and
fire forms the backbone both of King’s novella and Darabont’s adaptation. Human
conflict, the breakdown of the social order, personalities crushed under
extreme duress are also elements found in most stories involving apocalyptic
horror, of which there’s no better example than George A. Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead. Despite a larger cast of characters in The Mist, the conflicts are
practically the same, the dilemmas almost identical: what to do when
information is severely limited and the risks are high, usually filtered down
to a simple, if extremely hazardous choice between staying or going.
In all that, The Mist is a fine example of the sub-genre. The increasing
desperation of the characters, the turn to religious comfort, and eventually,
the turn to violence as the answer are emphasized in a way few directors
working in the horror genre would, since they’d risk heavy criticism for such a
choice. Backed by Dimension Films (a.k.a. the Weinstein Brothers), Darabont was
given wide latitude in adapting King’s novella. To his credit, Darabont
includes all the major characters and, just as importantly, all of the major
plot points, including the attacks by the monsters, each one more intense than
the last. Up until the last ten or fifteen minutes, The Mist is truer to King’s
work than any other adaptation of his work.
Darabont, however, strays from The Mist original ending or, to be accurate,
continues the story past where King left his readers. King opted for an
ambiguous ending, one that gave the survivors, at best, a temporary victory.
Frustrating or refusing narrative closure, The Mist allowed readers to make up
their own ending, hopeful or bleak. Darabont’s ending provides far more closure
and offers, at least on one level, a more optimistic ending, but another, more
personal (meaning the characters we’ve followed for two hours), it’s anything
but. It’s bleakly ironic and probably the most daring ending to a mainstream
film this year.
If "The Mist"
doesn’t falter by tacking on a “false” or illogical ending (it doesn’t), it’s
far from perfect. At almost two hours, "The Mist" is too long and
repetitive, especially where the bible thumping, Revelation-quoting Mrs.
Carmody is concerned. The visual effects are also a bit dodgy, due no doubt to
budget constraints. To be fair, most of the visual effects, especially those
obscured by the mist are more than serviceable. It’s in the cold light of day
or in a well-lit interior that the visual effects look unfinished or
unpolished. Luckily, that only happens twice, once during the loading dock
scene and later on during an attack on the supermarket. Still, those are minor,
easily forgivable problems in comparison to Darabont’s achievement: an
adaptation of a Stephen King work that’s faithful to the source material while
managing to stand on its own.
Fangoria.com Don Kaye
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune Colin Covert
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
here David Harley from Bloody Disgusting
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Screen International John Hazelton
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
Erik Childress (eFilmCritic.com)
The Village Voice [Chuck Wilson]
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
FilmJerk.com [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: OhmyNews [Brian Orndorf]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)
The Video Graveyard Chris Hartley
House of Horror (James Vanfleet)
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis)
Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc
from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm
For
over 20 years in Seraing , Belgium Cannes
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia Kathleen Kuiper
In 2005, with their film L’Enfant, the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for the second time in six years won the Cannes Festival’s Palme d’Or for best film. Only filmmakers Emir Kusturica and Imamura Shohei had previously won twice. Two other pairs of brothers—Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, in 1977, and Ethan and Joel Coen, in 1991—had earned a Palme d’Or.
Like Rosetta (1999), the Dardennes’ first Palme d’Or winner, L’Enfant
explored life in an impoverished, gritty, industrial region in French-speaking
southern
Jean-Pierre Dardenne was born on
from Emilie
Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):
Three years separate the
brothers. Jean-Pierre born in 1951 and Luc in 1954, they grew up in the
industrial town of
In 1975 the Dardennes set up
Dérives, a production company that became the outlet for the sixty or so
documentaries they have made together.
These works cover diverse historical events including anti-Nazi
resistance groups, Polish immigration, underground newspapers, and the 1960
general labor strike in
In each of their pictures they
start from the same, simple question:
what does it really mean to be human today? They succeed in answering this through
precision, discipline, and the very way they use the camera and
carefully construct their scenes. They
take single characters or a family relationship and concentrate entirely on
these. Their films have little dialog,
no music (“It blinds you to the image”), and the most spare of narratives (they
refuse to draw any “dramatic line that would stifle [the] life” of their
protagonists). Simplicity is an
essential component. The Dardennes
concentrate our emotions, which in turn allows us time to reflect on a single
predicament or event. Also, we are given
the space to sense the very rhythm of the film, we feel and follow the
movements of the bodies, are conscious of surrounding traffic noises, and
notice the little habits and accessories that define the characters.
The Dardennes tend to reuse their
actors (Gourmet, Renier) and nearly always cast nonprofessionals. In these four films they gave Gourmet and
Renier their first major parts, and Dequenne, Marinne, and Déborah François
(Sonia in L’ENFANT) their first acting roles.
Their technical team, as well as their settings, has remained mostly the
same for each picture, too – Marie-Hélène Dozo (editor), Denis Freyd (producer
and screenwriter), and Alan Marcoen (director of photography). The small group and budget, along with the
single location and selection of actors, is a very conscious choice, a
filmmaking ethic, almost, as it is the product of the brothers’ relationship
with cinema and what they aspire to achieve.
In light of their subject matter
and this approach, it isn’t surprising that the brothers are often described as
political and socially conscious filmmakers.
They focus on the marginalized or déclassé in society – black market
employers, immigrants, the unemployed, young offenders, and teenage parents,
all shot in the postindustrial landscape of eastern Belgium. There are recurring concerns, in particular,
the transmission of skills and lessons, especially focusing on the journey to
adulthood, the role of parents for future generations, and the continued
importance of employment for status and a sense of self in contemporary
society. ROSETTA had such an impact that
it even spurred a new law, passed in
However, it is not so much their
subject matter that makes the Dardenne brothers’ work political, but more the
way their films explore certain emotions or situations and the humanist vision
that subsequently emerges. What the
Dardennes represent is the way cinema can be political today, their real
originality coming from their refusal to be cynical and struggle against what
they call the loss of confidence in man.
This can’t be achieved by making characters mouthpieces for particular
ideas or representative of predicaments and struggles. This appeal to class consciousness is an old
strategy and it is the lack of such an appeal in the Dardenne’s work that makes
them so interesting today.
If the brothers have concentrated on a similar selection of characters so
far it’s because theirs are the experiences they know about. The same setting of Seraing in Belgium is
also chosen because of its familiarity and, as Gatti taught them, it is best to
start with this when dealing with fiction, if you’re to go on and say anything
true. Of course, some aspects of the
film industry and the media, as we have seen, do rile the brothers. That the déclassé are such a blind spot,
cinematically and socially, is particularly disturbing for them. Either they are ignored or given charity, yet
both, they argue, annihilates them as active subjects capable of shaping their
own futures. Echoing the criticisms of
the late French critic Serge Daney, the Dardennes are scathing about what they
see as the estheticization of poverty of famine on screen – the manipulative
pictures of starving children put to pop songs for example, does little more
than nourish a vision of a powerless victim.
“Filming the body of someone starving is, for the media, the same as
filming a mute body,” so “filming a human being...who refuses to be reduced to
the symbol of suffering, who refuses that pity be felt towards him, filming
this human being has become an act of cinematographic resistance against the
contempt of a man who holds onto the morbid pity contained in these images,
derived from a victim-centred aesthetic.”
What is so remarkable and quite unprecedented about the brothers’ work
so far is they have achieved this cinematographic resistance, depicting
characters without transforming them from subjects into victims. Dignified is perhaps the most fitting word to
describe their cinema, as we are able to grasp the reasons for the character’s
actions.
dardenne-brothers.com
- An unofficial website about Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
All-Movie
Guide: Jean-Pierre bio from Lucio
Bozzola
All-Movie
Guide: Luc bio from Lucio Bozzola
Belgium
Federal Portal Biography
TCMDB:
Jean-Pierre biography from Turner
Classic Movies
TCMDB:
Luc biography from Turner Classic
Movies
Soldiers' Stories - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice Leslie Camhi from The Village Voice, November 2, 1999
Filmjourney.org: Dardenne documentaries Doug Cummings reviews a Dardenne Brothers documentary retrospective, April 2, 2006
Girish also reviews Dardenne documentaries, April 3, 2006
Filmjourney.org: Dardenne documentaries and early features April 7, 2006
Dans l’Obscurite Doug Cummings from Filmjourney, July 22, 2007
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] Films of the Dardennes Brothers, August 5, 2008
Real and Reel Life: The Aesthetics of the Dardennes Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, May 21, 2009
Dardenne, Jean-Pierre & Luc They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
kamera Interview by Tom Dawson
indieWIRE Interview by Anthony Kaufman
Filmjourney.org: Interview with the Dardennes by Doug Cummings March 23, 2006
Dardenne brothers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE PROMISE (La Promesse) B+ 90
Belgium France Luxembourg
Interesting racial mix, culturally diverse, gritty, authentic drama told mostly in real time, exposing an illegal immigrant cheap labor and apartment scam, where the artifice is stripped completely bare in this heavy dose of realism.
from Emilie
Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):
LA PROMESSE tells the story of the relationship between a
teenage boy (Igor, played by 14-year old Jérémie Renier) with his father, Roger
(Olivier Gourmet), who houses illegal immigrants and employs them in building
work. Roger covers up an accident on
site that leaves one worker dead. In the
process Igor makes a secret promise to the dying man to take care of his widow,
Assita, and their newborn child.
Fulfilling this promise forces Igor into adulthood, as he must choose to
act against his father.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
An impressively tough, raw realist
drama, set in and around the drabber areas of Liège, in which a 15-year-old
comes into conflict with his single parent father after a tragedy forces the
boy to confront the moral implications of the pair's exploitative business in
smuggling and housing illegal immigrants. Having made a promise to a dying
African that he'll look after his wife and kid, young Igor is torn between
filial duty and growing affection for his impoverished 'charges', between fear
of his dad's bouts of drunken violence and his desire to keep his word. The
performances are superb, the interplay between father and son extraordinarily
well observed, and the whole thing at once wholly unsentimental and deeply
moving.
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The subject is the birth of a conscience, the film was written and directed
by two brothers from
Instead of reporting the death, Roger enlists his son's help in burying him on the site - covering him with cement. He then lies to the wife, Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), saying that her husband fled because of gambling debts, and then uses an elaborate ruse to get her to go with him to Germany, where he plans to sell her as a prostitute. Igor, faithful to his promise, decides to help her, at great personal cost to himself.
La Promesse is quite vigorous and immediate in its editing and direction. The Dardennes have achieved a small miracle with their mostly non-professional cast. The young Renier has a special honesty and naturalness. We can see the painful growth of a moral sense in the boy. The drama of the immigrants, the social observation, the sense of corruption as an everyday reality, is seen from the inside, not preached at from the outside. The modesty and directness of the technique make the story all the more compelling. Although the film is sad, there is hopefulness - there is even a kind of faith in this film, the faith that promises do mean something and that the simple actions of this young man can make a difference.
La Promesse Mike D’Angelo (excerpt)
In short, I can't think of a recent English-language film as immediately and powerfully concerned with filial confusion and anguish as is La Promesse, by Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. There's no mystery in their heartbreaking tale, no "did he or didn't he?" -- young Igor (Jérémie Renier) watches, dumbfounded, from inches away, as his father (Olivier Gourmet) removes the impromptu tourniquet that Igor had fashioned from his belt. Later that night, at dad's insistence, he helps to bury the poor fellow. Has it ever before occurred to him to question his father's decisions, behavior, or authority? The film's early scenes, which deftly and succinctly establish the pair's ruthless, amoral trade, suggest that it hasn't; but judging by the expression on his towheaded face as he watches pop shovel cement upon the corpse of the man he'd hoped to save, those aren't exactly visions of sugar plums dancing in his head. What prevents him from acting immediately is not uncertainty or self-delusion, but love and inertia. (Irrelevant aside: if I ever form a speed-metal band, which is about as likely as Thomas Pynchon writing CD liner notes [what's that you say?], it will be called Inertia.)
But act he does. Like last year's otherwise utterly dissimilar Jerry Maguire, La Promesse depicts the aftermath of a noble, selfless gesture made by someone unaccustomed to bestowing such largesse; in this case, however, the stakes are a great deal higher, and there's nothing remotely funny or charming or romantic about the subsequent ordeal. In a development so downbeat and feel-bad that the mere suggestion of it would have development flacks cowering in abject terror beneath their mahogany desks, the beneficiary of Igor's compassion, Burkina Faso expat Assita (Assita Ouédraogo), is so bewildered and terrified by her circumstances that she turns on her protector, accusing him of trying to kill her baby. The stark narrative culminates in one of the most harrowing familial confrontations imaginable -- all the more remarkable because for once there isn't a handgun in sight. The Dardennes create tension the old-fashioned way: not with rote equations like train + helicopter + plastic explosives = BOOM!, but with volatile human emotions and contrary wills.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first film made by the brothers
Dardenne to be shown in the
Since I began writing this review, I've seen La Promesse a second
time. As a general rule, I try to see my favorite movies at least twice, but I
usually wait until they hit the bargain houses (or until I can sidle in from an
adjacent auditorium) before returning. In this case, however, I shelled out the
full $8 -- in part because I was eager to relive the experience, but also
because it had been more than seven months since I'd seen it the first time,
and I thought that I might well have forgotten significant details that I could
incorporate into, say, this very paragraph. (My memory for plot minutiae is
notoriously bad, and I've even been known to blank on entire films. For
example, I had completely forgotten, until I stumbled onto the title about an
hour and a half ago in my master film list, that I'd seen Nicholas Ray's Flying
Leathernecks, and had to look it up in Maltin before I could even vaguely
recall what the hell it was about (flying leathernecks, as it happens).
Understandable, though, since I saw it a small lifetime ago:
As it turned out, however, the refresher course was unnecessary: on the second go-round, I experienced La Promesse less as "that movie I saw last autumn" than as "that thing that happened to some folks I knew last year." This sensation was so disorienting, on the few occasions that I became conscious of it, that I fought against it, by attempting to envision the world beyond the frame as a set -- imagining, for instance, the boom operator standing a few feet to Igor or Roger's left, holding the microphone just above their heads, wondering how much longer it would be before somebody called lunch, trying hard not to cough. It didn't work. The illusion was too strong, the verisimilitude too great. I'm not entirely sure what that betokens, as I don't necessarily believe that filmmakers should strive for realism -- many, if not most, of my favorite films feature ostentatious artifice -- but there's no question that it grabbed me as I've seldom been grabbed by a movie this plain. If nothing else, it's the cheapest special effect I've ever encountered, and somebody ought to run and tell James Cameron, pronto.
Simple Life Darrell
Hartman from Artforum, August 4, 2008
“ONE THING IS CERTAIN: small budget and simplicity everywhere.” When Luc Dardenne articulated these twin principles—curiously, as though they were one—in his diary in 1992, did he have any idea they would guide him and his brother, Jean-Pierre, so surely into the upper realms of cinematic achievement? Several Cannes victories later, the Belgian duo—the subject of a mini-retrospective that begins at New York’s Anthology Film Archives on Thursday—are responsible for some of the screen’s most disarmingly resonant portraits of modern Europe. And they haven’t availed themselves of much more than a handheld camera, a pocketful of virtually unknown actors, and a single Belgian town.
The skies over
In La Promesse (1996), a teenager struggles to help an African immigrant whose husband has died in an accident; in Rosetta (1999), a girl tries to hold a steady job and keep her mother from sinking into complete dissolution. A carpenter mentors the boy who killed his son in The Son (2002), and The Child (2005) tracks the wanderings of a young hoodlum who sells his baby.
The critic J. Hoberman has described the cinema of the Dardennes as “spiritually infused social realism.” The brothers, who started out making documentaries, have a detective’s eye for authenticity. Look closely, and you’ll notice that Olivier Gourmet’s woodshop instructor in The Son has a blood blister on his left thumb. Their movies look raw and modern, but there’s a classical rigor at work in them: The Dardennes film scenes at different paces before deciding which feels right, and if they don’t detect the “life force” in a scene, Jean-Pierre has said, they reshoot it—often in another location.
The ghost of Rossellini lives in their frames—also, Bresson. The actors in these films don’t seem like they’re acting, and the dialogue is minimal. The Dardennes are known for honing body language more than delivery. And while they like to foreground the human face—especially in tight, over-the-shoulder close-ups—they have pretty much staked their career on the assumption that the camera can’t get into someone’s head. In Luc’s words: “We film what we can see. This starts you thinking.”
Thinking about economic injustice, among other things. The
Dardennes deliver memorable images of life on the brink—as when Rosetta,
wrestling with her alcoholic mother near their trailer, falls into a muddy
sinkhole. She flounders, cries out, then drags herself out of the slime alone,
gasping desperately. You can almost hear the filmmakers crying out: How can a
civilized country tolerate anything so abject?
Tragic conditions like these, the films posit, breed almost unfathomable apathy. When his girlfriend confronts him about selling their child, Bruno says: “We’ll make another one.” But even if he isn’t aware of it, his panting and scheming are leading him toward a redemption of sorts. On the one hand, the abrupt, ambiguous conclusions of the Dardennes’ films are a snub to the Frank Capra ending. Marginal types in particular, these endings say, move their lives ahead on their own—certainly the watchful eye of a couple of high-minded filmmakers doesn’t budge them. Maybe some divine force does? Beautifully, the lingering threat of violence that pervades The Son is most vividly expressed on a plank of plywood, by a red stain that almost seems to have appeared there by accident.
Ultimately, the Dardenne brothers’ films are not about their austerity—a default aesthetic, after all, for many a penniless filmmaker—but their richness. Simplicity can be a complicated proposition. Even, potentially, a heroic one.
Chicago
Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review
Nitrate
Online (Eddie Cockrell) review
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
Long Pauses Darren Hughes
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Lucid Screening Andrew
DVD Talk
(Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/5] Ken Fox
The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
ROSETTA A 97
Belgium France
from Emilie Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):
ROSETTA (played by Émilie Dequenne), even more simply, is a
young woman’s fight to “stay standing.”
She is determined to find employment and not “fall in the hole,” not
disappear from society and be engulfed by her own humiliated situation: living in a caravan park with her alcoholic
mother. “Rosetta moves, moves, moves,”
she is “in a state of war,” and the camera follows her every step...The moment
she starts to move we follow and try to make sense of her actions but at the
end we’re thrown back in our seats, forced to deal with the journey we have
just witnessed.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
From the opening seconds, this feature from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre
and Luc Dardenne, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival,
was surely the most visceral filmgoing experience of that year, including all
of
You feel ROSETTA in your nervous system before you get a chance to
reflect on its meaning, almost as if the Dardenne brothers were intent on
converting an immediate experience of the contemporary world into a breathless
theme-park ride. It makes just about
every other form of movie “realism” look like trivial escapism. The film is certainly not devoid of
psychological nuance either, and it had such an impact in
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
A deserving Palme d'Or winner at Cannes '99, Rosetta
is in the same, grim realist mould as the Dardennes' earlier La Promesse;
it, too, offers a glimmer of hope through the prospect of friendship. Teenage
Rosetta (Dequenne) has it tough: living in a trailer park with her promiscuous,
alcoholic mother, she tries to hang on to whatever mundane jobs she can get,
but for all her determination and hard work, bad luck and her surly, volatile
disposition repeatedly tell against her. Is life really worth living? Using
very little dialogue and long, hand-held tracking shots (the relentlessly
restless visuals perfectly reflect Rosetta's unsettled life, the secret to
which is provided only halfway through the movie - and even then, subtly), the
Dardennes never sentimentalise their heroine but respect the mysteries of her
soul; the result is a film almost Bressonian in its rigour and power to touch
the heart.
Tucson Weekly (Mari Wadsworth) review
Brothers Jean-Pierre and
Luc Dardenne co-write and co-direct this bleak and unredeeming tale of an
embittered trailer-park teen and her cutthroat climb to the top of the Belgian
waffle-cart ladder. It's every bit as fascinating as it sounds -- and in
French, oui! -- which means some people will insist it's a cosmopolitan
and artistic exploration of wage-earning, homelessness, alcoholism and desperation.
A dearth of dialogue means non-French speaking audiences won't be encumbered by
lengthy subtitles, affording plenty of time to focus on the off-road antics of
the Dardennes' hand-held camera, and increasingly pointless point-of-view
horseplay as Rosetta attacks absolutely every human being who crosses her path.
If it wasn't so literally hard to watch, it might be funnyÉfrom a sort of
insensitive, bourgeois perspective. Rosetta will not deepen your compassion for
humanity, but it reveals the violent and melancholy underworld of the
sidewalk-waffle industry in a way that only a French film can.
The camera is at eye level for Rosetta. In the tumultuous opening, it hurtles down a staircase behind the teen-age title character (Emilie Dequenne) as she tries to elude the factory boss who has just fired her. It swerves left then right as she pulls on locked doors in a vain attempt to evade the plant's security. It's sickeningly in the thick of things as she claws at her pursuers and shrieks that it's unfair, she's a good worker, she doesn't deserve to be let go. Throughout this terse, entertaining parable (it won the grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival), the Belgian-born writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (La Promesse, 1996) immerse you in the sensations of Rosetta's life: her daily, roundabout slog through the woods to reach the trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother (she's too ashamed to go through the front entrance); her frustrating treks to find employment, however menial; and, most of all, her countless rages at a society that refuses to grant her a "normal" (her word) existence.
By confining the movie's perspective to Rosetta and her rituals, the Dardennes suggest the ways in which people lose the big picture and so have no insight into their own corruption. All they know is what they need--and what will happen if someone else beats them out. In Dequenne, the filmmakers have found a somewhat lumpen girl with just a trace of prettiness, especially when she opens her eyes and lets the world see in. She mostly doesn't, though, which is the point. She tromps around dull-eyed in a gray skirt and thick, mustard-colored stockings--a sullen bottom-feeder. When a generous friend, Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione)--the only one she has ever had, the film implies--falls into quicksand and screams for help, you can see Rosetta's thought processes: If he dies, his job will open up, she'll get it, and she'll be "normal."
As in the La Promesse, the point is to show how capitalism is fundamentally at odds with human decency. People are good, but they're driven to victimize others by the fear that what they have will be taken away. At best, they turn into machines; at worst (most of the bosses), they become casual exploiters. You can't land a job without being raked by the angry gaze of the person you've unfairly replaced, and once you have it there are no guarantees that tomorrow you won't be raking someone else with your own angry gaze. Change the way things work and you will change mankind, is the implicit message--although it's crucial to add that there are no explicit messages, no Brechtian/Marxist exhortations. Both Rosetta and La Promesse end at the point when their protagonist's consciousness begins. The next step is anyone's guess.
I fear I've made Rosetta
sound programmatic. Well, it is, but the thing you come away with isn't the
program but the rhythm and texture of a young, working-class woman's life. The
Dardennes are peerless at staging and shooting rituals, such as Rosetta's day
selling waffles and beer from a truck: taking an order, plucking a waffle from
the iron, grabbing a beer from the shelf, counting money, making change, saying
thank you, taking another order … It's easy to dismiss films that make
grandiose statements about how people ought to live but never convincingly
portray how they do. The utterly believable capitalist ecosystems of the
Dardennes are harder to shake off.
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » True Grit [ROSETTA] January 14, 2000, also seen here: Rosetta | Theater Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader (capsule)
Senses of Cinema (Rhys Graham) review Why Bodies Collide, March 2001
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Rosetta (1999) Lizzie Francke,
March 2000
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Gary Mairs
Bright
Lights Film Journal review Five
Rampaging Women, October 2001
Reverse
Shot review
Knock On Any d'Or: Looking Back at Ten Years
of Cannes Winners, by Adam Nayman at indieWIRE
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
Film Journal International (Peter Henn) review
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[3/5]
The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Liam Lacey
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE SON (Le Fils) A- 93
Belgium France
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
Olivier (Gourmet) is a good teacher of
carpentry, but a touch gruff; even so, when he refuses to accept young Francis
into his workshop, that doesn't explain why he takes to following the boy, as
if he were spying on him. Might it have something to do with his own dead son,
as his estranged wife insists? One strength of the Dardennes' follow-up to Rosetta,
winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or, is that, once again, they ask us to discover
certain crucial facts for ourselves: by the time we're faced with questions of
ethical and spiritual import, we've done enough groundwork to assess the
evidence properly. Wisely, the camera stays close to Gourmet, with the result
that, notwithstanding his subtle understatement and a relatively taciturn
script, we're privy to his every fleeting thought and nagging emotion. Never
manipulative or sensationalist, the film is none the less deeply moving.
The Son Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
It is interesting how many critics have praised this film by
saying, in essence, that there is nothing to say, that it is almost too perfect
for words. The dumbstruck wonder so many
seem to be experiencing before The Son could be likened to the
non-linguistic reactions that viewers often have to experimental films. Like a structural film, The Son
deploys a closed-off style which determines what can and cannot happen within
the film’s universe. At a certain point,
its narrative trajectory becomes clear, and the tension becomes not how the
narrative will be resolved, but how its necessary resolution will be
depicted. Although The Son is
significantly different than Time Out and Spider, these films
share a sense of absolute completion and self-sufficiency, which for me
provoked more intellectual admiration than emotional engagement. Still, the film is a major work of art. Olivier Gourmet and Morgan Mariane deliver
exquisite, naturalistic performances.
And, as was the case with Pasolini, the Dardenne brothers’ Marxism
allows them to create a clear-eyed Christian film, one with both feet planted
in the everyday world. [A second viewing
cleared up many of my reservations. The
moral confusion, the near instinctual propulsive drive of Olivier was more
palpable, as were the jarring flare-ups of anger. Olivier does not forgive and then act upon
this forgiveness. Rather, his impulse to
teach and reshape the boy is a physical one, like righting a badly mitered
joint. Depth comes later, and surprises
Olivier, Francis, and us.]
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
The latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardenne is not without allegorical implications. Cannes Best Actor winner and
Dardenne mascot Olivier Gourmet stars as a bereft carpenter who develops a
sudden fascination for his young apprentice. As mirror reflection of Gourmet's
inner turmoil, the Dardennes' camerawork isn't as assaultive as it was in Rosetta,
but it's equally demanding. Their camera contributes to the film's near cosmic
state of grace. The nature of the film's relationships are revealed without
fanfare, and as such part of the film's mystique is learning that Magali
(Isabella Soupart) is not some pregnant stranger but Olivier's estranged wife.
Forty minutes in, the Dardennes offer a context for Olivier's strange
attraction to the young Francis (Morgan Marinne): Some five years earlier, the
teenager strangled Olivier's son while attempting to steal a radio from the
carpenter's car. The Son or, more accurately, How Joseph Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love Judas Iscariot, has been seemingly pieced together
from similar confessions. As allegory, The Son is a testament to
Christian forgiveness. While far from heavy-handed, the film's metaphors are
still unavoidable: Magdali-as-Magdalene, her Wednesday declaration (Lent
anyone?), and the many panels of wood Oliver is forced to carry (like Jesus, on
his way to
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
More than any other contemporary
filmmakers, Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne understand the ways
in which work gives tenor and meaning to people's lives, and how the mundane
routines of everyday life set the limits of their world. In their last film,
2000's Palme D'Or-winning Rosetta, these routines form the distinct
shape of a cage, with the title heroine clawing ferociously to survive in a
city with dire unemployment rates. Former documentarians, the Dardennes
followed her around with a handheld camera pinned to her back, getting about as
close to her visceral experiences as possible without burrowing into her skull.
If anything, this intense first-person technique is employed even more
rigorously for The Son, a searing Christian allegory about sin,
redemption, forgiveness, and, not least of all, carpentry. After the silent, white-on-black
credits, the Dardennes rudely plop the audience into the organized chaos of
Olivier Gourmet's workshop, as his juvenile apprentices work up a racket with
hammers, buzzsaws, and welding torches. A lesson in how to bury exposition, the
film proceeds for a full 30 minutes before the dramatic core of the story
spills out in casual conversation; until then, it simply lays out Gourmet's
daily life and offers something close to a crash course in his trade. Gourmet's
insistence on precision and order gives him a quiet command over his young
charges, who come to him as part of a reform program designed to usher them
from delinquency to responsible adulthood. But his stable life is upended when
a sullen new applicant (Morgan Marinne) turns out to be the boy who murdered
his only son five years earlier, a tragedy that ended Gourmet's marriage.
Though the Dardennes' style sometimes limits his expression to his ears, neck,
and shoulder blades, Gourmet's tormented, internalized performance sets the
film on edge: Not only does the audience not know what he's going to do, but he
doesn't seem to know, either. From the moment he recognizes Marinne, Gourmet's
interaction with the boy takes on an agonizing intensity, yet he's bound up by
conflicting impulses, with anger and bloodlust mingling alongside curiosity,
compassion, and an unexpectedly tender fatherly connection. The Dardennes
sustain that tension through a masterful closing drive that resembles the final
third of In The Bedroom, only without the same dreadful inevitability.
In the process, they also offer a few helpful lessons on back support, proper
beam storage, and distinguishing one type of wood grain from another.
Los Angeles Times review Manohla Dargis
There are few filmmakers today for whom moviemaking is as deeply
moral an enterprise as it is for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In the brothers'
powerful new film, "The Son," a man trembles at the threshold of vengeance,
confronted by a boy who has done him immeasurable wrong. Forgiveness is the
sort of thing that can sound the death knell for a movie, but in "The
Son" absolution isn't grist for a sermon or anything so blandly reassuring
-- it is instead the stuff of ordinary life.
The story opens in the barren Belgian city of
Francis doesn't know what Olivier knows, and the great, almost
unbearable tension in the film comes from the gap in their respective awareness
of each other. Recently released from a juvenile prison, Francis lives alone in
an apartment outfitted with not much more than a radio, a bed and his
prescription medicine. (He has chronic insomnia.) Sullen and watchful, with
blunt features arranged like a wall against the world, the teenager has learned
little from jail save for defensiveness. As far as Francis is concerned, as he
explains to Olivier in one of the film's more wrenching exchanges, he's paid
his debt to society and has a right to a normal life. He wants to learn
carpentry from his standoffish teacher, but, as it becomes painfully clear,
Francis is also searching for love.
It doesn't take Olivier long to realize what Francis wants from him; it takes
almost the entirety of the story for us to understand what the man will give.
At the center where he teaches, the carpenter pushes the boy away even as
Francis tries to sneak under his wing. Olivier forces the boy to carry beams
that are too heavy for him, yet he also patiently shows Francis how to build a
toolbox. He's at once gruffly paternal with the teenager and scarily hostile,
caught between curiosity and contempt. (Gourmet won best actor at
Best known for their modest art-house successes "La Promesse" and
"Rosetta," the Dardennes began making nonfiction films in the 1970s
as a form of political action. From documentaries about strikes and factories,
they moved into fiction and, after making two features that slipped into the
ether, found international acclaim with stories about people desperately
clinging to a place in the world. (The fiction films retain a gritty
documentary texture.) Like the immigrant African workers of "La
Promesse" trying to find a foothold in
The Dardennes have said that "The Son" could have been called
"The Father," an observation that reinforces the film's religious
undertones. It's possible to see the film as a Christian allegory, but there's
something too limiting about that take and not only because the filmmakers are
Jewish. The themes of vengeance and forgiveness aren't the provenance of any
one faith, after all, and there's as much leftist politics in their worldview
as there is the documentarian's pursuit of realism and a first-rate
Slate (David Edelstein) review
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Son (2002) Richard
Kelly, 2003
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
PopMatters (Elbert Ventura) review
indieWIRE review David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]
not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
filmcritic.com (Nicholas Schager) review [3/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4/5]
Reverse Shot review #4 Film of the Year, by Erik Syngle and Jeff Reichert
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
Kamera.co.uk review Antonio Pasolini
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [4/5]
PopMatters (Mark Labowskie) review
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]
Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films
Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]
Looking
Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review
[A+] from a
religious perspective
Movie Martyr
(Jeremy Heilman) review [1/4] from an
infuriorated cinephile
New York Observer
(Andrew Sarris) review increasingly
esoteric, if not pretentious
The UK Critic
(Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
DVD Verdict
(Joel Pearce) dvd review
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Plume
Noire review
Moland Fengkovm
Twitch Jason Morehead
Film Journal International (Erica Abeel) review
CineScene.com
(Josh Timmermann) review
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Guardian/Observer review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/4] Ken Fox
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE CHILD (L’enfant) B 87
Belgium France
Only fuckers work
Using the Bressonian model, the film is a series of precisely measured, almost mathematically determined small pieces of a puzzle, fragmentary moments in the lives of two young people (Jérémie Renier and Déborah François) that in the end add up to a whole, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The problem here is that we’ve seen it all before from the Dardennes, the exact same formula, and in much more interesting human life dramas. In this story, a despicable guy sells his girl friend’s newborn baby for quick cash, then when he sees her devastated reaction, realizes he better get the baby back, which leads to even more profoundly distasteful results. The use of cell phones in this film are so prevalent and repulsive, symptomatic of the exacting world of criminal activity, that the pronounced effect of continual mechanical ringing actually has a greater impact on the viewer than anything the people say or do. Interesting that he is forced to give up his cell phone midway through the film, focusing the center of the repugnant activity squarely on the shoulders of young Renier, a model of unrepentant behavior up until his baptism in the putrid river water, where his attempts to conceal himself from a crime nearly gets his young accomplice friend killed.
The lead character of street punk Renier is so disaffected, and his
connection to the world and the people around him so nonchalantly predictable
and routine that by the end, there is little sympathy. Part of the problem is the Dardennes style of
making films. By now we know what to
expect. In the past they have been
fueled by brilliant performances, unlike the non-actor Bressonian model, but
with a similar perfectly etched drawing of a world-within-a-world that
meticulously defines the parameters of one human life. By showing what they do, describing their
everyday routine with such amazing detail, we come to understand who they are,
usually by that single moment when they break free of their self-imposed
blinders and have a transcendent moment.
Again, because we’ve seen it all before, and in situations where our
emotional connection is much more involving, this film disappoints because it
never really connects with the audience, almost intentionally so. Despite the fact it is broken down to the
barest minimum, it defies you to care, going through a step by step process of
defining a world with people where it is impossible to care about anything at
all. All that’s left is making it
through each and every day, which is exactly the same as the last one, and in
time, growing more endlessly dreary than the next. To suggest that there is a breakthrough
moment here is to see a different film.
There is no transcendent moment, all that’s left is the dreary
ennui. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the
2005 Cannes
Luc Dardenne:
We understand why critics have seen similarities (with Bresson’s
PICKPOCKET), especially because of the endings, since in both films the boy is
in jail and the girlfriend comes to visit him.
The famous sentence that the boy says at the end of PICKPOCKET is,
“Jeanne, what a strange path I had to take to meet you.” It’s true that Bruno has also gone on a long
and strange path to be able to encounter, to be able to meet and accept, the
woman and accept his son, accept fatherhood.
So there is a similarity, but I think that the terms are very
different. The narrative construction is
very different. We’re talking about very
different things, and our manner of editing isn’t at all Bressonian.
At the same time, there’s a
similarity with Bresson in the link to Dostoevsky, to Crime and
Punishment. I think that perhaps out
choice of the name Sonia for the girl is unconscious, because it’s Sonia who at
the end of Crime and Punishment goes to Raskolnikov in jail, who allows
him to cry and to remember and understand what he’s done.
from Emilie
Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):
Finally, last year’s release, L’ENFANT, focuses on Bruno’s
(Jérémie Renier) process of renouncing his life of petty crime and fulfilling
instead, consciously, his role as a father.
This is done through the exploration of decision, and subsequent
repentance, to sell his newborn son.
In L’ENFANT, for example, rather
than dwell on his mistake, the Dardennes are interested in how Bruno comes to
understand his act as such. They explore
the sources of his final repentance.
Where does this sense of morality come from? Given his environment it would have been
comprehensible that he never felt any remorse but continued his amoral life of
petty crime. Yet Bruno turns himself in
to the police, seeks forgiveness from Sonia, and finally takes an interest in
his son. He does this because of those
moments of friendship and love he has experienced, and so feels their
absence acutely. His sense of morality,
then, derives from his interaction with the young Steve (especially after
hiding in the freezing water together, saving him from drowning, and trying to
warm his legs afterwards) where he realizes his ability to look after another
person, and the disgust Sonia shows towards him. The conclusion to L’ENFANT, as with their
other films, roots morality in society through engagement with others, rather
than any innate human (and thus Christian-based) goodness. It is this understanding of human beings that
must be derived from the Dardenne’s body of work.
For some the simplicity that
characterizes the Dardenne’s films might seem too easy. Rather than agonize over what Sonia should
say to Bruno, she faints. There is a
similar act in a difficult scene from LE FILS.
And even when Sonia’s confrontation with Bruno does come, her words are
few – “Get out!...outside!” But there is
nothing easy about this. The ability to
keep silent, to hold your tongue, is a restraint that differentiates the
Dardennes from other directors who appear to fear silence, anxiously filling
their frames with unnecessary sound and color.
When Sonia and Bruno meet again, the scene is nearly without dialog and
there is no music, only their movements.
But everything is so heavily charged that you watch with increasing
concern (you have time to feel this), wondering what will she do. She makes soup in the tiny kitchen, there is
barely space for Bruno and even less for the camera. We feel the claustrophobia and every detail
and action has a magnified impact – the pans slammed down on the cooker, the
gas flame hissing – we really are in that room. And finally Sonia snaps, screams those two
words, and her expression is savage, total disgust and anger. It lasts a second but imprints itself on our
memory. The humanism is here, in the
refusal to bow to our own expectation for melodrama. Will Sonia take him back, you ask yourself,
willing her not to. And then you watch
this scene and realize of course not, of course she won’t because we are
dealing with human beings and the gravity of Bruno’s action is fully
realized.
With their breakout hit La Promesse,
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne cultivated a singularly exquisite ethical and
emphatic view of the world adopted and extended by each and every one of their
successive masterpieces: Rossetta, The Son, and now L'Enfant.
The verite aesthetic of these films is instantly recognizable and rooted in the
brothers' shared background in documentary filmmaking; the wobbly camera,
back-of-the-head shots, oblique framing, and lack of mood music is its own
artifice, but the cumulative emotional and spiritual affect of these films
never feels premeditated. So innate is this style that the films appear to
materialize out of thin air, and with each new project, the filmmakers appear
to be daring us to find a single false note in their startling simulations of
real life.
In
typical Dardenne fashion, L'Enfant wastes scant time chokeholding its
audience. In a grim eastern Belgian steel town, Bruno (Jérémie Renier)
panhandles and cons locals with the help of 14-year-old Steve (Jérémie Segard).
Bruno's girlfriend, Sonia (Déborah François), waits to collect an unemployment
check, oblivious that Bruno is about to sell their newborn child, who's tossed
around like an article of trade throughout the film's running time. This moment
is horrifying, not least of which because Bruno betrays the moral and emotional
responsibility implicit in that mythic image the Dardennes allow us to glimpse
early in the film of father, mother, and son huddled in ostensible rapture near
the cold, dirty embankment they sometimes call home.
L'Enfant's
swirling sense of moral chaos, sustained horror, and courage has not been seen
since The Son, which was also open
to the possibility of good coming out of a world that can be relentless in its
callousness. Like the Dardennes' camera, Bruno seems propelled by an innate
mechanism beyond his control; he is keen only on self-preservation, oblivious
to his role as a father. The Dardennes help us to understand Bruno's
helplessness, but they never abuse or toy with our sympathies. They may see Bruno's
actions as the residual damage of a heartless social existence (a dog-eat-dog
global market), but this bitter truth isn't revealed to the audience with a
guttersnipe's sense of class, but with uncanny ease, and with the compassionate
belief that the world, in spite of its merciless cruelty, is still possible of
affecting good.
The
Dardennes are religious men, but their detached style is so munificent their
films defy easy categorization; these works can just as easily be read as
Christian allegories or visions of socialist-humanist daring. Indeed, every
remarkable composition and movement in L'Enfant exudes compassion and
remorse, evoking a profound sense of transcendental, existential, spiritual, or
emotional unease (take your pick, or take them all, because the brothers'
vision is nothing if not absolute), and its incredible, gut-punching
finale—which follows what may be the most exciting and revelatory chase
sequence the movies have ever seen—can be looked at as a male pieta or, more
simply (but just as powerfully), an eruptive demonstration of a child finally
becoming an adult. Either way, the film is nothing short of a miracle.
The Child (L'Enfant) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily
A few square miles of
unprepossessing urban landscape continue to yield a rich fictional universe in
the Dardenne brothers’ latest chronicle of life among modern European
have-nots.
Filmed as usual in the Belgian
industrial town of Seraing
Closer in tone to that film than
to the challengingly austere The Son (2002), The Child is a
complex, at times emotionally painful story of an artless young couple
struggling to survive at the bottom of the ladder. The film features an
undemonstrative but utterly compelling performance by Jeremie Renier, who made
his name with The Promise, and although very much of a piece with the
Dardennes’ other films, it consolidates their reputation as sparing, insightful
storytellers.
Strong narrative and a powerful
emotional charge, added to the brothers’ growing auteur reputation, should make
The Child a considerable hit with art-house audiences.
The child of the title is Jimmy,
just born to 18-year-old Sonia (Francois), seen at the start of the film
searching for the kid’s father Bruno (Renier). Bruno, a young petty thief
sleeping rough – having sublet Sonia’s flat – is pleased to see her, but
markedly less interested in the baby. Initially the young couple are in buoyant,
if blinkered, good spirits.
But before long, Bruno decides
that he and Sonia need cash more than another mouth to feed, and unilaterally
decides to sell the child for adoption. At one nerve-racking moment, he visits
an abandoned flat to hand Jimmy over; in an even more tense follow-up scene, he
waits in a garage in the hope of getting the child back.
Grim as this scenario may seem, The
Child is anything but sensationalistic; the Dardennes are not interested in
manipulating our emotions. Rather, they want to show us, without rhetorical
commentary, how life is for people like Bruno and Sonia, and to depict the
daily pressures that could lead a young man – cocksure but inarticulate and
unable to think beyond the moment – to such a reckless act.
By all reasonable criteria, Bruno
should seem a monstrous figure, foolish, selfish and callous. Yet the Dardennes
bring us close enough to let us understand his behaviour, and to watch him as
he begins – however dimly – to question it himself.
The film’s subtlety partly stems
from Renier’s performance. Although he often doesn’t give much away, he conveys
a nuanced sense of gradual change in Bruno: in the scene of the empty flat,
little registers on his face, but small hesitant tremors tell us that he’s
beginning to feel unpleasant emotions that he’s unused to. Deborah Francois has
her own key moments at the start of the film, as a waifish and not too smart
girl still in thrall to her boyfriend’s shallow confidence.
As for the ill-used Jimmy, it is
a mark of the film’s intelligence that we never get a sense of him as more than
a faceless bundle in a romper suit (he is played, in fact, by some 20 different
babies): this at once precludes any spurious sentimentality or personalised
horror at the child’s treatment, and also allows us to understand that the
child of the title is perhaps less Jimmy than his young father.
Much more narratively driven than
The Father – whose lead Olivier Gourmet makes a brief appearance here as
a policeman – The Child comes to a head as Bruno descends into an abyss
of his own making. The film climaxes with Bruno and a teenage accomplice
(Segard) fleeing after a theft, in a chain of events that finally allows Bruno
to accept responsibility for his actions.
The coda, cathartic without
offering any easy payoff, bears out the frequent comparisons made between the
Dardennes and Robert Bresson: like the hero of his Pickpocket, Bruno
might have some redemption in store, or at the very least, begin to grow up.
The film’s energy is driven by
the now familiar camera style of the Dardennes and cinematographer Alain
Marcoen – held-held and often very close to the actors, sometimes in confined
spaces, and always in harshly drab settings.
The result is a quasi-documentary
viewpoint that, while detached, never seems impersonal but rather allows us an
unimpeded view of the characters’ actions, while their emotions and thoughts
remain harder to gauge. In a remarkable film, the Dardennes once again prove
that there’s still life to be found in hard unvarnished realism, especially
when executed with such adult seriousness and compassion.
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh
Bright Lights Film Journal [Ian Johnston]
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]
At the Movies Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, April 6, 2006
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
DVD Times Noel Megahey
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Weight Of Water Jonathan
Romney from Sight and Sound, April
2006
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]
Reverse Shot [James Crawford] with responses by Nick Pinkerton and
Jeannette Catsoulis from indieWIRE
Luc and Jeane-Piere Dardennes interview and essay by Gerald Peary
here Walter Chaw, while a shorter condensed version may be seen here: Film Freak Central dvd review
DVD Outsider Slarek
Kamera.co.uk review Antonio Pasolini
Film Monthly (Andrew Dowd) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [3/5]
DVD Talk
(Svet Atanasov) dvd review [5/5]
Cinephile Magazine [Richard X]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
PopMatters
(Cynthia Fuchs) review
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review
[4.5/5]
New York Observer
(Andrew Sarris) review
stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review
DVD Verdict
(Joe Armenio) dvd review
The New York Sun
(Ben Kenigsberg) review
eFilmCritic.com (Doug Bentin) review [4/5]
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [2.5/5]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Lucid Screening Ben
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
www.european-films.net
(Boyd van Hoeij) review
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3.5/5]
Christian
Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review
[B+]
not coming to a
theater near you (Beth Gilligan) review
Talking
Pictures (UK) review Alan Pavelin and Howard Schumann
New York
Magazine (David Edelstein) review
eFilmCritic.com (Paul Bryant) review [3/5]
Film Journal International (Wendy R .Weinstein)
review
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review
CineScene.com
(Chris Knipp) review
The
Cinematheque (Kevyn Knox) review
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Premiere
Magazine [Glenn Kenny]
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Interview Jonathan
Romney interviews the Dardennes from Sight
and Sound, April 2006
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/4] Ken Fox
Time
Out London (Geoff Andrew) review
Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Wesley Morris
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The
New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
LORNA’S SILENCE (Le Silence de Lorna) B 88
Belgium Italy France
Germany (105 mi) 2008
The Dardenne’s take a dip into familiar territory in another minimalist,
unadorned and unsentimentalized examination of life in a loveless and paid-for
marriage, where immediately we’re aware of being caged-in, where the wife Lorna
(Arta Dobroshi) has few options, as she was given a raw deal when her worthless
husband Claudy (Jérémie Renier) turns out to be more of a slimeball than she
realized, a pitiful junkie who’s always whining and pleading with her while
promising to straighten himself out.
Claudy is easily one of the least appealing and more pathetic characters
seen onscreen in awhile, as it’s hard to know why she doesn’t simply kick him
out, as he’s otherwise a useless bastard that is an all-consuming force in her
life. We soon realize what kind of black
market hoodlums she’s dealing with, as they’re arranging to have “the junkie”
killed in order to arrange another marriage for her, this time with “the Russians,”
who apparently pay top dollar. In
typical Dardenne fashion, all of this evolves through an endless series of
walks, drives in cars, conversations on cell phones, more walks, which feels
like a pathetic way to waste one’s time, always arranging times and places for
an unending series of meetings where Lorna is treated like a piece of
merchandise that can be inspected and evaluated prior to purchase. Since the method has been utilized so often
before, none of this draws the audience into this circular web of money and
deceit, as cinematically it resembles ROSETTA (1999), one of the first to
employ such restless visuals through what seems like an endless stream of
hand-held tracking shots, more or less projecting the image of a caged-in
animal, which becomes especially relevant here as the film veers more towards a
slave market ring, as she’s a bought and paid for illegal Albanian immigrant,
so if she disobeys their rules, they’ll take her passport and send her back to
Albania. Her idea of getting a quick
divorce instead of following the murder plan threatens the Russian’s timetable,
so it’s out of the question, yet she pursues it anyway. This idea of free will soon has its
consequences, as she’s just as much a slave as the women living behind locked
doors depicted in international sex rings, such as Lucas Moodysson’s LILYA 4-EVER (2003), yet she still persists,
perhaps out of innocence, naiveté, perhaps a misreading of the situation and
the kind of thugs she’s dealing with, or more likely because she aspires to
freedom of choice.
The most powerful moments in this film are wordless, requiring
believable performances, especially by Dobroshi, who grows more inwardly
intense as the film progresses and had to learn an Albanian French accent, while
Renier is so skin and bones he’s a ghost of his former self. The inflexible underworld figures are not men
anyone would want to meet and would feel right at home in Cronenberg’s EASTERN
PROMISES (2007). Unfortunately, the
darker edges of the world today are infiltrated by men just such as this, men
who exploit the weaknesses of others (usually young women) for profit, where
killing is seen as a business decision.
It’s from these dark, restless waters that Lorna must learn to
survive. She goes through a charade of
fake battery attempts in order to quicken the divorce proceedings, all of which
leaves Claudy in disgust, as he’s checked himself into a rehab hospital in an
attempt to get clean and refuses to have anything to do with hitting her. So instead she has to settle for a series of
self-inflicted wounds and a convincing police report, all in a last ditched
effort (which he knows nothing about) to spare his life. The best piece of filmmaking is saved for last,
as there’s a bit of a plot twist where things really spin out of control, but
rather than find herself above the fray, as she hoped, she finds herself more
immersed in the muck than ever before, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth, as
the men in her life become ever more despicable, which of course, is how the
rest of the world views her. As a
foreigner living in Belgium, she is seen as a shadowy outsider who’s so
completely under the radar she’s barely even acknowledged as human. She’s used to being shunned by nearly
everyone, so what’s interesting in this movie is a storyline that’s never told,
that’s only hinted at, where in this rancid depiction of black market
corruption there’s only a brief glimpse of hope, but nonetheless, this
screenplay won the Cannes festival award for best screenwriting. From my perspective, the first half is overly
mechanical, but by the end it discovers its own inspiration. Perhaps trying too hard to be overtly
Bressonian, it reminded me of AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966), where everything that
could go wrong with the girl (taking the ownership and property place of the
donkey) goes wrong, as she’s led around on a leash by despicable characters,
yet in the end lands on a perfect grace note, where a Schubert piano sonata is
replaced by Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven’s sublime 32nd piano sonata.
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
In “Lorna’s Silence,”
a somber beauty of a French-language drama by the Belgian filmmakers
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the heroine is looking for purity of purpose too,
though she doesn’t know it, or can’t articulate it to herself. Lorna, an
Albanian émigré in the process of gaining Belgian citizenship (she’s played
exquisitely by Arta Dobroshi), dreams of opening a snack bar with her
boyfriend. But doing so depends on her keeping silent about a criminal scheme
that may cost the life of another man, Claudy, whom she has come,
inconveniently, to love. (He’s played by a Dardenne veteran, the always
impressive Jérémie Renier.)
Every time
predictability threatens, the plot takes an unexpected turn that traps Lorna
more tightly between her love and the thugs who run her life. Like earlier
Dardenne films, “Lorna’s Silence” is naturalistic, yet this one, beautifully
shot in 35 mm film by Alain Marcoen, achieves a poetry of bereftness. “They
want to kill us,” Lorna says near the end. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”
Simpler words were never spoken in more startling circumstances.
Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [5/6]
A soul-crushing weight
rests upon Lorna (Dobroshi), the Albanian-immigrant heroine of the Dardenne
brothers’ stunning proletarian character study. You can see it in her tightly
wound expression—lips subtly pursed, eyelids heavy—and in how she walks from
place to place with a sleepwalker’s gait. To describe the plot she’s entangled
in would ruin much of the film’s surprise, and also be a capitulation to those
who have accused the Dardennes of moving away from the less storied structures
of masterpieces like La promesse and The Son.
Suffice to say that
Lorna’s under the thumb of a mobster (Rongione) and is falsely married to her
drug-addict lodger (Renier). From there, the tale twists and turns until it
spirals out of control, though the Dardennes maintain their usual rigorous
aesthetic and thematic grip. They make it look easy, to the point that the
effortlessness and elegance of certain revelations barely register until after
the credits roll.
In the moment, it’s
easy to wonder if Lorna’s Silence will be much of anything beyond a
subdued, seemingly realism-bound pulp fiction. The Dardennes’ most praised
films tend to hinge on a climactic epiphany that is noticeably absent here.
Additionally, Lorna is left behind at her most vulnerable moment, a point that
a good number of stories would either begin at or at least continue on from.
Yet what becomes clear in these final moments is that the whole film has been
an epiphany; each story beat has brought us closer to Lorna while slowly
severing the narrative umbilical cord. It’s an entirely new world that we’re
left in—a place where the rules of the movie we’ve just experienced no longer
apply.
The Lumière Reader Barry Levinson (spoiler)
FOR ALL their nominal prestige, there’s a welcome lack of pomp surrounding
the event of a new Dardennes’ film. Maybe it’s because, unlike the Coens –
whose in-house pecking order sees to the divvying up of writing, but not
directing duties – the Belgian duo enact their craft under the same industrious
anonymity that informs their characters. Whatever the case, Lorna’s Silence,
their latest collaboration, opens on familiar terms – with a nod to Bresson:
Mimicking L’Argent, we witness a cluster of Euros changing hands,
unspooling a bleak scenario that finds the title character hitched to a junkie
named Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to gain citizenship. Strictly a formal
arrangement, the pair cohabit a flat in Liège, where – hair cropped boyishly
close – Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) flaunts an obvious lack of empathy over her
spouse’s struggle to give up heroin. (More salient, as it turns out, than her
steppingstone existence as an alien-bride, is the one she pictures alongside
her thuggish boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), with whom she dreams of opening a
snack bar.) But Lorna, like Claudy, is just another pawn in a plot overseen by
Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) – a shadowy cab driver who, after removing Claudy via
a forced overdose, seeks to marry her off to a mafioso known as “the Russian.”
Like their 2005 film The Child, Lorna’s Silence uses the sale of bodies
as shorthand for a desperate sub-order – one whose collapsed territories fall
under the lonely grip of the Euro. As viewers, our sole entry point into that
world remains Lorna: Shunning omniscience, the brothers purposely muddy
character relations, in a bid to lock us into the mindset of their flailing
heroine. But where as, in the past, that tactic has been used to devastating
ends, the web of crime surrounding Lorna – and her standing within it – prove
to be intuitively simple: that is, she treats Claudy with contempt for no other
reason than his co-dependence – suddenly awoken to his humanity by his
impending death.
As such, a chism is aroused, draining the impact from a crucial turning point
in in which Lorna strips down and fucks Claudy during the throes of withdrawal.
Before any tendrils of affection can emerge, however, Claudy is killed, and
what ensues is the typical spur towards redemption, only with an added twist:
When the resultant guilt proves to be too much, Lorna is sent reeling into a
kind of punch-drunk martyrdom in which she becomes convinced – against all
medical reasoning – that she’s carrying his unborn child. As played by newcomer
Dobroshi, Lorna is a pleasure to behold – magnetically shuffling between open
vulnerability and devout resilience. But the Dardennes’ ascent into a
delusional spiritualism feels off: Their films are at their best when they
reframe Christian tropes of sin and forgiveness as a fraught exchange between
two individuals; here, absolved of the source of her anxiety, Lorna simply
feels like a tool in some God’s-eye prank.
gradnick wrote in Lumiere Reader comments:
The Dardene’s have referenced Bresson in one way or another in
virtually all of their work, and while a nod to his final masterwork L’ARGENT
(1983) in LORNA’S SILENCE is quite likely, the film might also reflect an
understated awareness of Bresson’s UNE FEMME DOUCE (1969) and MOUCHETTE (1964).
The latter was referenced more stridently in the Dardenne’s second feature,
ROSETTA (1999), whereas here in their new film the similarities are more
implicit. Another striking touchstone for this excellent film might be Jean-Luc
Godard’s 1962 masterpiece, VIVRE SA VIE, through which LORNA’S SILENCE
resonates all the way back to Dreyer’s LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC (1928).
Dardenne heroines have all experienced their own unique Passion. La Passion de
Lorna follows a similar trajectory to that of Godard’s Nina: the circumstances
are different, but the options for Lorna are disturbingly similar to Nina’s
some 45 years earlier. However, the Dardenne’s take a different route. Just
when you think Lorna and Nina are about to merge in a repetition of VIVRE SA
VIE, Mouchette returns to pull us towards Bresson again. Where David Levinson
saw Lorna as the victim of a cruel prankster-God in what he took to be an
unsatisfying foray into delusional spirituality, I saw a very grounded late
Bressonian moral struggle. There is nothing in LORNA’S SILENCE to signal a
theological, spiritual, or specifically Christian reading of the film. Lorna’s
crisis and birth pangs that manifest inside her are moral and philosophic
rather than theological or spiritual. In this respect the Dardenne’s have an
affinity with Bruno Dumont, another Bresson-influenced French filmmaker who
locates his philosophical studies solidly in the earth (as signaled at the end
of LA VIE DE JESUS, the beginning of HUMANITE, and repeatedly throughout
TWENTYNINE PALMS and FLANDRES).
Starting with MOUCHETTE, Bresson’s films dealt with moral and philosophical
despair – the impact of the absence of God in the affairs of humankind. For
Lorna (like all of Bresson’s sensitive protagonists) pain and guilt are
nevertheless very real, and she cannot ignore them. Godard’s Nina was an
innocent, used by the world and spat out. Like Jeanne d’Arc before her, she was
martyred at the hands of men. Mouchette was another innocent, used by the world
then left to rot. She took action and martyred herself. Elle in UNE FEMME DOUCE
was another innocent broken by the indifference and self-interest of the world.
She took action and martyred herself. Lorna is not an innocent, but she longs
for the innocence of being at peace with her conscience and to be free of the
corruption of the world. She also takes action. If God is anywhere in the
equation, it might be (as Dumont suggests) in the silence of conscience –
maybe.
Posted: 05.08.08 @ 22:53:44
Whether or not you “like” their work, if you’ve spent any significant time this decade at film festivals (or reading the blogs that cover them), you’d be hard pressed to deny the impact that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have had on recent art cinema. With traces spottable in films as diverse as Berlinale winner About Elly, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Jacques Audiard’s over-praised A Prophet, the Dardenne style (handheld camera kept close, hyper-naturalistic performances, real locations, a general hard-on for brutality wrapped in the mundane) has become the dominant style of serious movies about ordinary people. This is what happens when you win two Palme D’ors in less than ten years, I guess — other filmmakers presume that you’ve cracked the code. The dirty secret, of course, is that the audience for an actual Dardenne brothers film consists almost entirely of other filmmakers and critics, and neither group has done a sufficient job of persuading that this shouldn’t be the case. This decade’s key art film phenomenon is — ironically, considering the Dardennes’ preferred subject matter — virtually completely inaccessible to any sort of audience outside of the elite circle that made it a phenomenon in the first place. If you are reading this, you are probably part of that elite. If you are not reading this, you probably hear the phrase “Belgian film about poor people” and run as fast as you can in the other direction, and frankly, I don’t blame you.
That said, the Dardennes’ follow up to the Cannes-winning L’enfant is of interest for two reasons: with a pulp kick giving way to psychological intrigue before the globo-political thesis kicks in, it’s more entertaining on a base level than “a Belgian film about poor people” has any right to be, and it reveals why the Brothers are not only worthy of emulation, but also why they do what they do so much better than their pretenders.
Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian immigrant who dreams of opening a cafe with her largely absent boyfriend, has married Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier, nearly unrecognizable at about 30 pounds lighter than in his last stateside release, Summer Hours) to secure citizenship, which will allow her to get a bank loan. As part of a deal set up with taxi driver/low-level crook Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), Lorna has agreed to make her newly-acquired Belgian citizenship useful by passing it on to a Russian stranger via another marriage. Claudy thinks he’s going to be paid 5,000 Euros to divorce Lorna so the second half of the deal can go through, but Lorna knows that Fabio really plans to kill Claudy and make it look like an overdose. When Claudy asks for her help in getting off heroin, Lorna tries to convince Fabio to spare Claudy’s life, faking domestic violence so that they can get a quickie divorce. At the point where Lorna is self-inflicting head injuries, it looks like Lorna’s Silence is on the road to a happy ending. It’s not.
Formally, Lorna’s Silence is above repproach. There’s a pure beauty to the imagery here that seems antithetical to the concerns of most films made by Dardenne pretenders, an ease with color and a subtlety of light that seems distinctly related to classic Belgian painting. The Brothers also understand that sometimes a fixed camera doesn’t impede immediacy, but actually enhances it. Their visual minimalism is all about quiet control.
Lorna’s emotional complexity is such that when I saw it first 14 months ago at Cannes, I interpreted Lorna and Claudy’s relationship — the heart of the film, the area where her silence most crucially comes into play — as a different beast than it seemed to be when I screened the film again last week. It’s clear that lonely, self-loathing Claudy would love for Lorna to be a real romantic and domestic partner, but Lorna’s motivations are much more ambiguous. Why does she suddenly become emotionally invested enough in Claudy to try to save his life, to the point where she literally throws herself mind and body to the cause, when everyone she trusts insists that a junkie’s life is expendable? Fabio suggests at one point that her show of basic human empathy is out of character with “the Lorna I know.” Something has happened over the course of the marriage to change her; on first viewing, I assumed that she had fallen in love, but the second time around I was sure it wasn’t as one-note as that. Indeed, the Dardennes’ project here seems to be emotional whiplash: when you suspect you have a character pegged you’re proven wrong, the moments of lowest spirit bump up against the highest, and there’s a dark humor to its deepest horrors.
Also seemingly more complex on second viewing, and ultimately more difficult for me to reconcile, is Lorna’s ending. It’s because of the Dardennes’ commitment to speaks-for-itself naturalism that they’re able to make the point, without ever stating it in anything like literal terms, that the 21st century globalist dream of a middle class life in a Western country inevitably resolves in either death or madness. And then in the final scene, any pretense towards realism is thrown out the window, as a desperate Lorna finds and, thanks to a conveniently placed crow bar, gains access to a safe haven, all in about 30 seconds. At this point, Lorna has without question been driven by guilt and grief to some kind of madness, so it’s possible a psychotic break has occurred — in a film that often makes use of narrative ellipese to throw the viewer off the track of the narrative, it’s possible that we’ve switched from an objective view of her circumstances, to her fantasy. I’d like to believe that’s the case; I’d like to believe the Dardennes are too good to suddenly change the rules of their game at the last minute.
Lorna's
Silence - Film Comment Against the Grain, Thom Andersen from Film
Comment, July/August 2009
After only four films distributed internationally, it seems that the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne can be seen everywhere, even in American films, such as Ballast. Those continuously moving sequence shots, following the protagonist in tight close-up, now belong to everyone. So the appearance of a new film by the Dardennes themselves might seem almost irrelevant, and the critical response to Lorna’s Silence at the 2008 Cannes film festival was lukewarm at best. But it’s too soon to write them off.
What counts with Dardenne films are the continuities and the slight variations. In Lorna’s Silence, they have created yet another protagonist for whom the most mundane action is a matter of life and death. Returning to the theme of immigration, the topic of their prophetic breakthrough film La Promesse (96) and the great subject of 21st-century cinema, they show once again how to tell an outsider’s story without sentimentality or excessive melodrama.
For the new film they have moved from their hometown Seraing (pop. 60,000) to neighboring Liège (pop. 190,000), although the difference is undetectable to someone like me who has never been to either municipality. One critic complained that the filmmakers have lost their bearings, but the change in location is like moving from Long Beach to Los Angeles or from Long Island City to Brooklyn. They now keep their camera farther away from their protagonist, so the details of her environment register more strongly. During Lorna’s final escape from her masters, a hint of magical realism is even introduced when she comes upon an abandoned cabin in the deepest forest, as well as a bit of music at the end.
Lorna’s Silence is no less bressonian than The Son (02) or L’Enfant (05), but it looks back to the Bresson of The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne or Les Anges du péché, that is, film noir Bresson. In its plot and milieu, however, it is even closer to some classic Hollywood noir films. I was reminded of Nobody Lives Forever, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, and The Prowler.
Lorna’s Silence and Jean Negulesco’s 1946 Nobody Lives Forever both feature minor-league hoodlums who will do anything to advance their schemes. In Nobody Lives Forever, a trio of over-the-hill con men pursue their pathetic plot with single-minded ruthlessness, finally threatening to kill their intended victim. In Lorna’s Silence, small-time gangsters have paid the heroin addict Claudy (Jérémie Renier) to marry Albanian immigrant Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) so that she can become a Belgian citizen. They have promised him a second payment to divorce her so that a Russian mobster can then marry her and become Belgian too. But they plan to speed things up and save 5,000 euros by killing Claudy with an overdose.
The con in Nobody Lives Forever goes awry when front man Nick (John Garfield) starts to fall for the mark, wealthy widow Gladys (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Something like that happens to Lorna. At first, she regards Claudy with polite contempt. Although she lives in his apartment, she treats him as an annoying tenant, setting down clear rules of separation and enforcing them rigidly. But she begins to feel more sympathy for Claudy as he tries to kick his addiction, even though he becomes more of a burden to her. To save him, she does everything she can to accelerate the divorce proceedings, banging her arms and later her head against a wall in order to make a case for domestic violence.
Both Lorna and Nick are careful to avoid an open break with their more cold-blooded confederates, offering reassurances that they are still on the same team and trying to find a solution that will satisfy their interests, but they are both betrayed by their gangs and forced to fight back. Nick and two loyal pals save Gladys from an improvised, amateurish kidnapping. Lorna cannot save Claudy, but she can save herself when her associates decide she has become more of a liability than an asset.
Jules Dassin’s 1950 Night and the City presents a remarkably vivid ensemble portrait of the hustlers, touts, and promoters who people the London underworld and of the complex webs of trust and betrayal they create. Information is capital, capitalism is crime, and crime is capitalism. The petty hoodlums in Lorna’s Silence are portrayed just as vividly, but they are not as colorful and idiosyncratic. It may be said they represent a more advanced stage of capitalist development. They’re all business: no small talk, no charm, no colorful lines, no philosophical speculations. There’s work to be done, and they’re doing it as efficiently as possible, with a grim attention to detail. Even Lorna’s Albanian boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), a long-distance truck driver, is always preoccupied with some obscure criminal endeavor during their rushed encounters. Hard men, indeed.
Night and the City is a fast film (its protagonist Harry Fabian, played by Richard Widmark, literally runs from one encounter to another), and so is Lorna’s Silence. The Dardennes’ method of shooting creates a pace that takes on the rhythms of the characters. Since Lorna is always in a hurry and never off screen for more than a minute, the film moves as briskly as Dassin’s film. There’s an amazing sense of exhilaration whenever she stops to rest. One such moment comes at the very end of the film, and the other when it seems Claudy has kicked his drug habit and she pauses for just a moment to celebrate. They think they are finding their freedom, and their joy leaps off the screen. These sudden breaks from routine are among the great moments of cinema.
Like Lorna’s Silence, Nicholas Ray’s 1952 On Dangerous Ground and Joseph Losey’s 1951 The Prowler follow their protagonists from their familiar urban world to the countryside. On Dangerous Ground’s Wilson (Robert Ryan), an angry, brutal cop, finds a kind of redemption in the snow-covered mountains of Colorado. The resentful, embittered cop Garwood (Van Heflin) of The Prowler cannot overcome his narcissistic self-pity and finds only death in the California desert. Garwood shares with Lorna a very modest dream. She enters a criminal underworld so that she can accumulate enough capital to open a snack shop with her boyfriend. He kills a total stranger so he can buy a motel in Las Vegas. For both of them, freedom just means being your own boss. They lose their dreams, but Lorna discovers another kind of freedom in the woods outside Liège.
Of course, Lorna’s Silence is more obviously a piece of neo-neorealism than of neo-noir, but I am proposing another historical context to suggest what I regard as the real originality of the Dardennes’ work and what sets it apart from that of their followers, which is precisely its break from neorealism.
Film noir and neorealism were, of course, contemporaneous responses to the profound psychic shock of World War II. Although we may look back on film noir with greater fondness, neorealism was more adequate to the artistic needs of the Forties. Contemporary critiques of Forties film noir—notably Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites’s 1950 Movies: A Psychological Study and Running Away From Myself by Barbara Deming, completed in 1950 but not published until 1969—may remind us how much these films retain of classic Hollywood fantasy and wish fulfillment, an aspect of the films that is generally overlooked today. Classic film noir provides us with an invaluable record of its time, but that is because we have learned to read the films against the grain. Neorealism is still necessary today, and the films of the Dardennes evidently recognize this need and respond to it. But neorealism has its limitations. Even more than film noir, it is a cinema of despair.
The neorealist protagonist—at least in Gilles Deleuze’s account of neorealism, which I regard as the most useful as well as the most provocative—becomes a spectator, a witness. According to Deleuze, before neorealism, in the cinema of the “action-image” (to which film noir belongs), “perception is organized in obstacles and distances to be crossed, while action invents the means to cross and surmount them.” But in the modern cinema that neorealism inaugurates, “perceptions and actions cease to be linked together.” A sensory-motor link has been broken, and the character can no longer act effectively. This impasse brings into being a new kind of cinematic image. There is a transformation of cinematic forms that is both a formal advance (the cinema has finally discovered its essence) and a reaction to how we see ourselves and the world: we have lost our belief that our actions (both individual and collective) can respond to the demands of our situation and change it.
In the broadest terms, this loss of faith was brought about by the political impasse of the Cold War. Then, with the collapse of authoritarian socialism, a new world order was installed beyond the reach of democratic institutions and movements. “Neoliberalism” is a nice euphemism for primitive rapacious capitalism.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne respond-ed to the triumph of neoliberalism not with neorealist despair but with a scrupulous examination of its workings on a human level, and they discovered that film noir was a useful idiom for their explorations. Like their other protagonists, Lorna is not a neorealist character. Her perceptions lead immediately to actions; there is no dissociation between them. Against the tide of neorealism, the Dardennes continue to insist that action is character. They demonstrate the possibility of human agency in a time when we have lost faith in that possibility. The victories they record are always tentative, provisional. It may be no more than a suspension of futile actions or wrong movements; it may be something very simple, like Lorna gathering wood and lighting a fire in a stove. As Brecht wrote just before his death: “The simplest things must be enough . . . / You’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself / Surely you see that.”
The House Next Door [Andrew Schenker]
Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review
Village Voice (Nick Pinkerton) review
Little White Lies magazine Matt Bochenski
IFC.com Matt Zoller Seitz
DVD Outsider L.K. Weston
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]
Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce
Moving Pictures Magazine [Ron Holloway]
Cannes 2008: Days 4, 5, and 6 Matt Noller from The House Next Door
Cannes, Competition: "Le Silence de Lorna," "Serbis" Glenn Kenny at Cannes from Some Came Running, May 19, 2008
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Le Silence de Lorna" (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2008) Glenn Kenny from The Auteur’s Notebook, May 19, 2009
Lorna's Silence (Le Silence De Lorna) Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily
Andrew O'Hehir at Cannes from Salon
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3/4]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Cannes Dispatch: Part Three: Patrick McGavin at Cannes from Stop Smiling magazine
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Auteur Fatigue, "Gomorra" Pops and Wayward Youths Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [3/5]
Avuncular American [Gerald Loftus]
Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks]
The Hollywood Reporter review Peter Brunette at Cannes
Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]
The Independent (Robert Hanks) review [3/5]
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [5/6]
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [3/6]
The Japan Times Kaori Shoji, also including and interview January 23, 2009 with actress: Arta Dobroshi: A role model
The Boston Phoenix (Brett Michel) review
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE KID WITH A BIKE (Le gamin
au vélo) B- 81
Easily the most contrived and manipulative of the Dardennes Brothers’ films, one which borders on melodrama and is likely to divide audiences, as they will either despise or feel sorry for the protagonist, in this case an 11-year-old boy Cyril (Thomas Doret), who from the outset is seen as a determined but problematic kid, one who is not likely to listen to or believe anyone else, but instead do whatever he wants with no apparent punitive repercussions. Known for writing their own screenplays, a documentary style, the use of hand-held cameras, and complete lack of artifice in a social realist setting, this film is an extension of their previous works, where this young boy is in nearly every frame of the film, initially seen as a detestable brat who insists the world is lying to him about the whereabouts of his absent father, involuntarily placed in a boys home where his only desire is escape. Obsessively driven by inevitable circumstances, the reunification with his father, the bare-bones plot seems paper thin, as more and more it becomes clear his father has abandoned him. Nonetheless, Cyril continues to seek him out with relentless desperation, including multiple escape attempts. Simply by accident, in the building where his father previously lived, he grabs and clings to a woman, Samantha (Cécile de France), to avoid being captured by the authorities, where she offers further assistance by finding the bike he reported missing, which is his only link to his father. His bike is also his means of flight and freedom, as it can seemingly take him wherever he needs to go.
When Samantha agrees to house Cyril over the weekends, offering no reason whatsoever for this extension of kindness, her character is immediately seen in glowing and rather angelic terms, as a guardian angel watching over an angry and dissolute child. It’s never made clear why Samantha takes such an interest in this utter stranger whose life is a perpetual series of misfortunes, but the first thing he does is disobey her with the same consistency as he does other adults. While she actually reaches out to him and helps find the father (Jérémie Renier), the object of his continuous obsession, who is working in a neighborhood nearby, the father simply shows no interest in seeing him again. While it’s clear there are damaging psychological issues, no one seems to offer any assistance on that front, as it is never mentioned. Cyril instead is left to resolve his personal issues on his own, where he gets involved with a gang of street kids who easily steal his bike (the kid never learns to use a lock), headed by an older kid Wes (Egon DiMateo), something of a dark angel who takes a particular interest in him, taking him under his wing, using Cyril’s blind persistence to hold onto his bike as a useful tool in accomplishing a secret task that he has in store for him, using Cyril to take care of some unfinished business, which, of course, he readily agrees to, as he thinks this guy is his new friend. To a kid who has no one, a new friend has a strange and intoxicating allure, so much so that he continually lies and deceives Samantha, who mystifyingly continues looking out for his best interests, even at the expense of her own relationships, where boyfriends find Cyril nothing but endless trouble, an ungrateful and impudent malcontent who refuses to listen or learn.
Clearly, Cyril tests the audience’s patience as well, as the
typically non-sentimental Dardenne approach leaves one thinking this is an
unusually obnoxious and abrasive kid, one who is continually asking for
trouble. This escalating wrongward path
can only have a few possible outcomes, where the narrow focus of a child’s fate
becomes overly predictable, especially considering all the contrivances thrust
upon the audience along the way, where this becomes a black and white
existential struggle for good and evil, meaning and salvation, where Cyril is
caught between the vested interests of a dark force and a guardian angel, where
both are trying to tap into and redirect this kid’s inner rage and seething
discontent. The overlying reliance on
maternal affection and sense of societal justice appear quite French, where
both somehow miss the point, but are overly accentuated with an exaggerated
power of influence. Cyril is a
psychologically damaged and extremely self destructive kid, one who would not
likely succeed without intensive personal therapy, but this film bypasses the
necessary hard work involved and instead would have you believe that a healthy
dose of motherly affection is all he needs to steer him on the right path,
which for a realist film is a bit preposterous.
Adding to the solemnity and sense of interior transcendence is a brief
recurring passage from Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto, Glenn Gould
- Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto 3/4 YouTube (
The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
Modern cinema's poets laureate of working-class marginalization and spiritual crises, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are also bona fide motion-picture makers whose works brim with the kind of propulsive thrust that would have left pure action pioneers like Raoul Walsh or Allan Dwan green with envy. Think of the Belgian brothers' new film, and the first thing that springs to mind is a red shirt zipping kinetically up and down and across the screen, rushing in and out of corridors when not climbing fences and trees. Of course, ardent humanists that they are, the Dardennes are interested first and foremost in the character wearing the shirt, a runty, half-feral 11-year-old boy (Thomas Dorset) whose single-minded pursuit of a feckless father who doesn't want to see him (Jérémie Renier) adds to the filmmakers' indelible intergenerational galleries of children plunging into adult worlds and adults learning to move beyond childish confines. As talismanic as De Sica's, the bike of the title becomes the main element through which the film scrutinizes the boy's anger and confusion, his relationship with a sympathetic hairdresser (Cécile de France) and a neighborhood hood (Egon Di Mateo), and the abrupt and furtive acts of revenge and compassion that lift rough-hewn realism into the realm of cinematic grace. Astoundingly unsentimental yet consistently heart-squeezing.
New York Magazine [David Edelstein]
The Dardenne brothers of Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have moved away from the somewhat formless quality of their early work into the realm of melodrama, which would be worrisome if their new films weren’t as good or better—heightened and purified by stronger narratives. The Kid With a Bike centers on 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), whose father has deposited him in a state-run school and decamped, leaving no address. In the face of all evidence, Cyril won’t accept this rejection. He runs away to their now-empty flat and pounds on the door. When school counselors come, he clings to the legs of a random young woman and screams for his papa and his bike.
The woman is a hairdresser named Samantha (Cécile de France) who
tracks down the bike (it was sold), locates the father (“Seeing him stresses me
out. I’m starting over”), and arranges to take the boy in. Why?
The Dardennes have an exquisite sense of when to let their shots run on: A scene in which Cyril pedals furiously away from a crime evokes his state of mind and gives you time to brood on where he has been and might be going. Despite the simplicity of the brothers’ technique, The Kid With a Bike has deep religious underpinnings, a relentless drive toward the mythos of death and resurrection. The film is not just in the tradition of Pinocchio and A.I.: It is a worthy successor.
Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]
The Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid with a Bike is a character study of boundless empathy. It is impossibly wise about childhood, human frailty, and moral responsibility. I will return to it again and again for comfort and perspective. It is chicken soup for my black, cynical husk of a soul.
Kids are inclined to think in absolutes. And so Cyril (Thomas Doret), the Dardennes’ 11-year old protagonist, absolutely refuses to believe that his father has moved away, sold his precious bike, and left him in a state orphanage indefinitely. After all, he said it would only be for a month. Ergo all of the other adults insisting that he is gone are wrong or lying. Biting and darting like a feral cat, Cyril runs to his dad’s old apartment, and inspects every empty room. Even then he doesn’t believe it. He must have been forced to go away, and take the bike with him.
A kind hairdresser (Cecile de France) recognizes Cyril’s bike and buys it back from its new owner. It’s a kind gesture, and the usually mistrustful boy asks if she would foster him on weekends. She agrees. But Cyril hasn’t given up on his father. Samantha, the hairdresser, tracks him down and they go to see him. There’s no dramatic confrontation. “When are you coming for me?” Cyril asks. The dad, played by the great Jeremie Renier, takes down Cyril’s mobile number and promises to call, but it’s clear he wants nothing to do with the kid. “I’m starting over,” he tells Samantha out of earshot. “I can’t if he’s around.”
As Cyril, Thomas Doret is an amazing discovery — he has a compact intensity of a born star, commanding attention without ever asking for sympathy — but the real triumph is the way his character is written. The Dardennes’ screenplay is extraordinary in its ability to pack drama and heartbreak into simple, naturalistic, entirely unsentimental scenes. Cyril’s dialogue is artfully terse and often beautiful (or at least the translation is), but at the same time perfectly plausible for a bright 11-year old boy: “I’ve come to see you. Do I jump or will you open the door?” he yells to his dad over a fence. He can be nasty and an awful brat (he certainly isn’t cute) but the movie makes sense of it: his family has left him with wounds that won’t heal just because a nice lady lets him stay with her on weekends.
Cyril’s pride and desperate need for a father figure he can respect gets him into some third-act trouble I’m loath to describe. The last 30 minutes of The Kid with a Bike are the year’s most riveting stretch of film, and the ending is just perfect. After what must have been years spent flailing in anger, Cyril faces his toughest test, and does the right thing.
Film
Reviews, Hong Kong Cinema Listings & Interviews – Time Out ... Geoff Andrew at
There are some very
consistently distinctive things about the Dardenne brothers’ films. They are
about recognisably ‘ordinary’ working-class people; they are usually about
inter-generational relationships; they deal with ethical (and psychological)
issues in such a way that people often describe them, rightly or wrongly, as
somehow concerned with ‘redemption’; they fall, for all their apparent
documentary-like naturalism, into three fairly clear ‘acts’; and – perhaps most
distinctive of all – they often feel, for one reason or another, a little… well,
unremarkable for the first 20 minutes or so. Then something happens which makes
you realise you’re watching something very special indeed.
All of which is true of their fifth film in the main
Partly, that’s down to performance. Besides such Dardenne regulars as Jérémie
Renier and (admittedly in a small role) Olivier Gourmet, the film boasts
wonderful work by Cécile de France (recently seen in Eastwood’s ‘Hereafter’) as
the protagonist’s unexpected but altogether plausible protectress, and by
Thomas Doret as young Cyril. Still, it would be wrong to attribute the
excellence of the Belgian brothers’ film simply to a form of well-acted
Loachian ‘realism’.
The marvellously nimble, fleet pace perfectly suits the adolescent, often
desperate energy of Cyril’s search for stability, while once more the narrative
embraces both naturalism and something more mythic, even Biblical; this, after
all, is a tale of crime and punishment, longing and disappointment, love,
hatred and forgiveness. But in the end it’s probably best to forget such
contextual stuff, as the film is primarily about people. See the sheer fear on
Renier’s face as his character confesses that he just can’t cope any longer
with looking after his own son. At this point, about half an hour into the story,
the power, subtlety, enduring relevance and absolute truthfulness of the
Dardennes’ latest immediately become brilliantly clear.
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
The Kid With A Bike has the classic Dardenne Brothers plot. Like those other famous brothers, the Grimms, the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne put their hearts and souls into the telling of tales about children in bad situations. The horrors of childhood are taken very seriously and there is nothing cliché or sentimental in their special neorealist approach to illuminate the human condition.
Their latest, and fifth film at the New York Film Festival and winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, is about 11-year-old Cyril (played with fantastic agility, vulnerability and strength by 13-year-old Thomas Doret), whose father abandons him. The mother is never mentioned, she only exists as absence, like in many a fairy tale, where one bad parent is more than enough to deal with.
Cyril
wants to get in touch with his father, desperately dialing his old phone number
over and over again, as if pure willpower and stamina could change the NOT IN
SERVICE message to his father's voice. Cyril also wants his bike back - he
cannot believe that his father could have sold it. The various people at the
orphanage where he is staying, have a hard time keeping up with this whirlwind
of a boy, who runs, breathes, bangs on doors, checks his old apartment
building, runs some more, always dressed in red, because he will not give up
the fantasy that his father still loves him, has not abandoned him, and that
everything is a big misunderstanding, just like Hansel uses pebbles to get back
to his father's house, only to be forced out again.
In
this tale, Cyril does not encounter a witch, but a hairdresser he holds on to,
played with wonderful grace and toughness by Cécile de France. Samantha is like
"the good fairy," Jean-Pierre Dardenne told me in response to my
comment that their stories set in a tough Belgian working class milieu capture
the core of what makes fairy tales relevant. "This film is the closest to
a fairy tale," he agrees, "because it is the simplest. It is about a
child who is losing a very big, terrible illusion."
Characters in a Dardenne film don't analyse situations or talk about why things occur. They act and in their movements, hits, smiles, they reveal the whole world. The little boy defends his father who never wants to see him again and he tries to latch on to a dangerous drug-dealing wolf in the woods who calls Cyril "pit bull". The boy doesn't know how to accept the affection from Samantha, a woman who is not family and still deeply cares for him.
Watch for a Dardenne brothers' favorite, Olivier Gourmet, who makes an appearance playing the cafe owner who serves the beers. Another Dardenne regular, Jérémie Renier, plays Cyril's father, in many respects an aged shadow of his role in The Child (a film that blew me away at the NYFF in 2005) which starts with him selling his baby, just like Rapunzel.
At the press conference Luc, the younger Dardenne, mentioned the locations in the film are in the form of a triangle: town, forest, gas station, everything happens between these three points.
Cécile de France's Samantha "brings a light to the story," when she reclaims the child's soul as they drive and bicycle to and fro.
In a world where everyone seems so lost, The Kid With A Bike will help you find your humanity again.
Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
The Kid With A Bike | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias, also seen here: The Kid With A Bike
Cinephile [Matthew Thrift]
Cannes:
A heart-rending take on a movie classic
Andrew O’Hehir at Cannes May 15, 2011
A Lost Boy and a Sliver of Hope in the Dardenne ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth
Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Four – The Kid with a Bike, Pina, and Good Bye Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from the House Next Door, May 14, 2011, also seen here: The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]
Capital New York [Sheila O'Malley]
The House Next Door [Jonathan Pacheco]
JamesBowman.net | The Kid With a Bike
Chicago Reader [Ben Sachs]
The
Kid With A Bike Jonathan Romney at
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Little White Lies Magazine [Jason Wood]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Keyframe: the Fandor Blog [Jaime N. Christley]
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Cannes
Review: “The Kid With a Bike” at Once New and Too Familiar Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes May 14, 2011
Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 14, 2011
CANNES
REVIEW: The Dardenne Brothers Break From Formula with Le Gamin au Vélo Stephanie Zacharek at
theartsdesk.com [Demetrios Matheou]
The Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]
Battleship Pretension [David Bax]
Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Cannes
'11, day four: The Dardennes shoot for the Palme D'Or trifecta, and Freaks
& Geeks' Linda Cardellini gets a rare showcase Mike D’Angelo at
Pirates
of the Riviera Barbara Scharres at
Cannes 2011. Rushes:
"Ninja Kids", "Goodbye", "Le gamin au vélo" Daniel Kasman at Cannes May 17, 2011
Drew McWeeney at
Kid With a Bike,
The Emanuel Levy at
Plume-Noire.com [Moland Fengkov]
Film Review: The Kid With A Bike (2011) Steven S. from Film Scope
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]
remembering-leon-cakoff-the-kid-with-a-bike-a-trip ... - Slant Magazine Aaron Cutler
Sound On Sight [Simon Howell] ar Telluride
Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Anthony Lane - The New Yorker (capsule review), also seen here: Not Child’s Play
The Kid with a Bike Richard Brody from The New Yorker (capsule review)
Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Andrew L. Urban]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Cannes 2011. Jean-Pierre and
Luc Dardenne's "The Kid with the Bike" David Hudson at Cannes May 15, 2011
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club Chris Kompanek interview, March 15, 2012
Dardenne
brothers: 'We don't argue in front of the actors' Anne Billson interview from The Guardian,
Movie Review: The Kid With A Bike - Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The
Kid With a Bike: Cannes Review David
Rooney at Cannes Hollywood
Reporter, May 14, 2011
Peter
Debruge at
The Kid With a
Bike (2012), directed by Jean-Pierre ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun from Time Out
The
Kid with a Bike – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
Cannes 2011 review: Le Gamin au Vélo/Polisse | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 15, 2011
The
Kid With a Bike – review Philip
French from The Observer,
Cannes
'11 Day 4: Unfair Wesley Morris at
Philadelphia Inquirer [Steven Rea]
'The Kid With a Bike' review: Dardennes' quiet truth Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
'Kid With a Bike': Tale of troubled child told with deft directorial touch ✭✭✭ 1/2 Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune, also seen here: 'Kid With a Bike': Tale of troubled child told with deft directorial touch ...
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
At
Cannes, Synergy but Not Consensus - New York Times Manohla Dargis at
The
Kid With a Bike - Movies - New York Times
Manohla Dargis from The New York
Times,
TWO
DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Deux jours, une nuit) B 88
Belgium France Italy (95 mi)
2014
An excoriating critique of capitalism, brilliantly revealing how it
isolates and divides workers, pitting one against the other, where over the
course of the film the Dardennes turn this into a modern era horror story. What’s most striking, however, is how it’s
framed in such ordinary circumstances, where the fear of losing one’s job is
the overriding concern, capable of driving one to do the unthinkable. While the opportunity to work with an actress
of the stature of Marion Cotillard may have proven too alluring to resist, the
film would probably have played much better with a lesser known, unknown
actress, much like their earlier efforts, especially ROSETTA (1999), where the
actress’s daily struggle might mirror the role of the character in the
film. Part of Cotillard’s role as
Sandra, a young Belgian mother working at a small solar panel factory, is her
invisibility, where she is forced to come out of the anonymity of her character
to make herself seen as she confronts each and every one of her fellow
workers. When trying to return from a
medical leave, she discovers the company has instead decided to lay her off in
order to pay the annual 1000 euro bonus to the rest of the workers. When cornered in a parking lot, the owner
agrees to hold a vote by secret ballot to alleviate allegations of pressure and
intimidation by the foreman, and if a majority of workers agree to vote for her
return instead of their bonuses, then he will honor their decision. He is of the opinion, however, based on an
initial vote tallied by the foreman, that most everyone prefers the bonus. This leaves her little time, as indicated by
the title, to change people’s minds.
While a worker on leave could be confronted by any number of illnesses,
such as losing a child, recovery from an injury or an accident, to having a
more serious medical diagnosis such a cancer, but in Sandra’s case she suffers
from depression (another invisible disease), seen taking large doses of Xanax,
well beyond the recommended limit, in an attempt to maintain her sanity
throughout this ordeal. The idea for the
film is based upon real incidents occurring in French factories, but also
Belgium, Italy, and the United States, where a worker was laid off so the rest
of the workers could get their bonuses, all of which raise questions of
solidarity in the workforce.
Shot in Seraing,
an industrial town in Liège, in Wallonia, the French-speaking section of
Belgium where the Dardennes were born and raised, and where all their previous
films were shot as well, Cotillard had to change her French accent to Belgian
for the film—no minor undertaking, as she’s the first non-Belgian actor to ever
work with the directors. By all
accounts, many believe she was robbed at Cannes by not winning Best Actress,
but this is an understated, minimalist, low-key film without any major dramatic
moments. Experts in social realist
films, this is most reminiscent of a Bresson film (Introduction
to Bresson), a meticulous film constructionist who downplayed the
performances of his actors, where this film is based upon a repeating, cyclical
theme where Sandra literally goes door to door tracking down her coworkers,
asking them to vote to save her position by sacrificing their bonuses. While this is incredibly humiliating, to say
the least, it leaves her emotionally exhausted and demoralized afterwards when
she realizes what an uphill struggle this is turning out to be. Shot in chronological order, most of the
scenes are long takes culminating with stressful discussions at someone’s front
door, usually interrupting them from their weekend activities with their
children, where the situation couldn’t be more awkward, as in an economic
downturn, everyone needs the money, with some in desperate straits. While it’s hard to believe someone is placed
in this position, literally begging for their job back, the Dardennes don’t
over-dramatize or turn this into a melodrama, but confine their focus to
exposing what each of these people must be going through, literally providing a
window into their souls, as for each, this is a gut-wrenching decision. People are surprisingly honest with one another,
as is Sandra, who is never pushy or argumentative, but simply presents the
reality of the situation, then must gracefully accept the fact that not
everyone is going to support her, even some who sympathize with her. In some cases, the husbands aggressively bark
out their opinions while their wives (who work with her) meekly stand in
silence, unable to alter the balance of power in their homes.
Beautifully portraying the accumulative stress and mental anguish,
Cotillard anchors the film with her warmth and sense of decency, where the
urgency of her situation mirrors how other people live and the pressures they
face, where in troubled times it’s extremely hard to support her efforts. Nonetheless it’s a heroic act to summon the
courage to embark on such a personally revealing journey, where you literally
strip yourself naked standing completely vulnerable before your coworkers,
always struggling to overcome feelings of hopelessness and despair. Perhaps the weakest character in the film is
Sandra’s own husband Manu, Fabrizio Rangione in his fifth film with this
directing team, whose pathetic struggle to continually push his wife feels
overly abusive, though perhaps necessary when she’s incessantly on the verge of
giving up. We don’t see an emotional connection
between the two, or any hint of happiness, but their interaction together
represents a tired couple that is used to struggling to get through every
day. Perhaps the most beautiful scenes
involve music, including Petula Clark singing the French version of the 1963
Jackie DeShannon song “Needles and Pins” Petula Clark - La Nuit N'en
Finit Plus - YouTube, while the scene of the film is the euphoric emotional
release expressed to the song of Van Morrison and Them singing a teen anthem
from the 60’s, “Gloria” THEM
(Featuring VAN MORRISON) - LIVE 1965 - "Gloria" YouTube (2:47). While Sandra is literally terrified at what
will happen behind the knock at each door, it’s a petrifying journey set by her
boss against her colleagues, where no one protests against the inherent cruelty
of the employer’s actions, instead it’s a barbaric act commonly accepted in the
modern workplace. Sandra has a husband
and child, perceived as a woman’s dutiful role in the 50’s, but in today’s
world she needs a place in society where she can be of use. Work has come to represent a sense of purpose
in people’s lives, even in the routine work of factory jobs, without which many
people feel lost and useless, expressed in the film as confronting one’s worst
fear, “living on the dole.” Despite the
anger and outright hostility that arises, where the foreman (Dardennes regular
Olivier Gourmet) blames her for “stirring up this shit,” this is an
unconventional exposé of the meaning of work in people’s lives, where to some
their fellow coworkers are an indispensable part of their lives, like one of
the family, where they spend eight to ten hours a day alongside each other,
while others routinely ignore the social dimension of working with others for a
period of years. In this film, the
Dardennes allow the characters to determine the outcome by challenging their humanity,
which has greater significance than some predetermined moral lesson that would
quickly be forgotten.
Which
movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival JR Jones from The Reader
An assembly-line worker at a solar panel factory (Marion
Cotillard), recently returned to work after an emotional breakdown, discovers
that her coworkers, coerced by management, have voted to terminate her
employment rather than forfeit their annual bonus; over a long and desperate
weekend, she visits them at their homes and begs them to change their votes.
The premise for this Belgian drama couldn't be simpler or more compelling, yet
writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The Kid With a Bike)
tease out any number of moral complexities as the heroine learns of her
coworkers' various circumstances (many of them have children, and almost all of
them are living hand to mouth). In film after film the Dardennes have proven
themselves the cinema's most acute humanist critics of predatory capitalism;
this masterful drama finds them at the top of their game, laying bare the
endless uphill battle of getting workers to look out for each other. In French
with subtitles.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Elspeth J. Carroll
The most masterful film of 2014 was also the quietest. The
Dardenne Brother's latest is a characteristically nuanced portrait of a young
mother recovering from a bout of severe depression. Steadily regaining her
strength and ready to return to work, Sandra (Marion Cotillard) is told that to
keep her job she must convince her coworkers to vote to save her and lose their
bonus. It seems an act of supreme cruelty that a woman who can barely bring
herself to get out of bed should be forced to persuade others to sacrifice so
that she can return to life, and her greatest battle is not to convince her
coworkers but to summon the strength to try. Her campaign provides a window
into the lives of the men and women she works with. We see their homes, their
families, their weekend lives. They're a diverse group, but they occupy the
same economic position—not dire, but precarious. Their reactions are
telling—guilt, anger, reluctant yeses and apologetic nos. There may be a right
choice—solidarity over self interest, but the Dardennes resist easy moralizing,
and their main indictment seems to be of the system which forces such a choice.
It's hard to imagine any other director with a soft enough touch to keep the
material from edging into melodrama, but its that restraint and precision which
makes the film so effective. Their control is matched by that of Cotillard
whose performance as Sandra is powerful without overpowering. "But they're
right. I don't exist. I'm nothing. Nothing at all" Sandra says to her
husband before collapsing on the floor. It's hard to read without cringing, but
in Cotillard's hands it feels honest, real (unnervingly so.) So much rests upon
Cotillard's performance. She is so fragile, so often on the verge of tears,
that her moments of triumph, however small or short lived, are truly moving.
TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT is a film that does so many things so well and so quietly.
It's at once a study of depression, of family dynamics, of community and of an
inhumane and exploitative economic system. But perhaps most excitingly, it's a
convincing work of realism that's much more hopeful than it is grim.
Cannes
Film Festival 2014: Part Two - Reverse Shot
Jordan Cronk
A similar sentiment is expressed in far more visceral terms in Two Days, One Night, a typically efficient work from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In fact, efficiency itself is a central subject of their new film. In two stealth, single-shot opening scenes, the Dardennes lay out their basic narrative conceit: Sandra (Marion Cotillard), informed by her boss of her impending termination, must convince her coworkers to side with her in a vote to retain her job at the expense of their yearly bonuses. She’ll have the weekend to complete the task and she’ll have to rely on nothing more than goodwill and persuasiveness to accomplish it. The Dardennes’ brand of socially minded, realist filmmaking has for well over a decade been one of the most recognizable in contemporary cinema. Each film’s distinguishing nuances lie in its uniquely implemented narrative devices—not as variations but as a subtle protraction of a specific working-class plight.
Two Days, One Night utilizes its temporal strictures to build tension via elemental means: handheld camerawork, infrequent but purposeful editing, and situational drama, all delivered through dialogue or dramaturgy. Sandra spends the majority of the film essentially restaging the same scene for an audience of one: a colleague with the ability to leave this woman and her husband (who can’t support the couple on his own) without immediate financial recourse. What’s fascinating about the film is how perspectives continuously shift; as a viewer we’re ostensibly asked to sympathize with Sandra—who we learn has recently suffered some sort of breakdown and is now taking prescription Xanax, which she pops incessantly throughout—and yet each successive encounter presents to the viewer an entirely new dilemma, with implications that could affect more than just this one couple. Many of these men and women are worse off and in greater need of a bonus than Sandra—who, if nothing else, is young and experienced—no matter the immediate repercussions on her life. The way the Dardennes foster this empathy, without allowing Sandra to wallow in self-pity—if anything, she refuses to beg, never resorting to negotiation—granting her the strength to exhibit grace during a final moral crisis of her own, further confirms their unyielding faith in human resilience and righteousness.
An unfeasibly gripping social realist parable that provides a gravitational showcase for one of Marion Cotillard's finest performances (and yes, we know that's saying something), the Dardenne brothers' "Two Days, One Night" sees the two-time Palme d'Or winners put in a serious bid for a third (though probably, Cannes rules being what they are, a Best Actress trophy for Cotillard is more likely). It’s a deeply lovable film, satisfying, nourishing and accessible, and bar the odd stumble toward melodrama (more on that later) we were completely immersed in its plain-spoken yet impossibly resonant rhythms practically from the first frame.
A great deal of that is Cotillard—her character is in nearly every single shot, and hers is inarguably the point of view of the film throughout, making it a riveting performance in a film that is riveted to her. But perhaps the greatest achievement is in how brilliantly the film balances the trademark Dardennes social conscience with a conceit that plays out almost like a ticking-clock thriller, as well as being a deeply felt character study, at the same time as it operates on at least two metaphorical levels in parallel at any one point. Casting the biggest name star they’ve ever worked with, who herself happens to be one of the finest actresses of her generation enjoying an extraordinarily impressive run of performances, and writing perhaps the most focused and sculpted screenplay of their illustrious careers, Jean-Pierre and Luc turn in a film that may well be their richest. At 63 and 60, respectively, it feels like they crested the peak of their powers a while ago, only to discover a higher summit to conquer, on top of which “Two Days, One Night” has now planted their flag.
As the film begins, Sandra (Cotillard), a wife and mother of two living in straitened circumstances in an economically depressed town, has slipped back into the depression from which she had ostensibly recovered, following the news that she has lost her job. Unemployment and potentially a return to social housing beckons for her family. In fact, the day before, she had been voted out of the company by her co-workers who were offered the choice of retaining her, or retaining their €1000 bonuses. An ally convinces her that the foreman had pressured some of her colleagues into voting her out, and when they confront the boss he agrees that they can hold a new secret ballot on Monday morning. Sandra therefore has the weekend to convince a majority to sacrifice their bonuses in order to save her job.
What then unfolds is an almost epic journey from house to house to meet each of them face to face, providing snapshots of the lives and attitudes of her co-workers, many of whom are in just as perilous a situation as she. It’s a portrait of a moral dilemma considered from every conceivable angle and not just on the part of those she’s visiting—Sandra, still fragile herself, can only negotiate with difficulty the oceanic swallowing of pride necessary to, essentially, beg for her livelihood. With difficulty, and Xanax.
The responses to her entreaties vary wildly from positive and sympathetic to outright violent, but a few insightful similarities remain. Almost everyone’s first question is “how is everyone else voting?” just as almost everyone’s response to Sandra's pointing out how it's not her fault that the boss put her job up against their bonuses is “Mine neither.” And there’s a hopelessness to the way they all simply accept the fact the injustice, really the barbarity of pitting workers’ self interest against their fellow-feeling in an effort to rationalize the company's bottom line. No one once suggests protesting the unfairness of it; it seems like they might as well shout at the moon to change its phase. And so, seamlessly and always within the context of this tense, ever evolving story, the film examines truly meaty moral themes of herd mentality, manipulation, pity, guilt, remorse, empathy, peer pressure and so on, at the same time as becoming an allegory for socialism, worker’s rights and corporate corruption and a heartfelt plea to recognize the humanity of others.
It’s true that the whole having-to-go-and-present-a-moral-dilemma-to-a-disparate-group-of-people premise does feel less organic than a typical Dardennes set up and more manufactured for those allegorical purposes, but that's not so much a criticism as an observation. In fact it’s a film with which we could find exactly two, and only two, things wrong. Without wishing to spoil, there is a section later on in the story when the story’s resolute believability falters and the actions and reactions of Sandra and one other character feel overtly manipulated for [over] dramatic effect. It is a shame, because the film is easily compelling enough without these extra turns of the screw.
Those hiccups in the flow of this deceptively taut, honed narrative would have ruined our enjoyment more, however, if they hadn’t been superseded by an ending that is simply perfection. Accomplishing a similar feat to last years Cotillard-starring Cannes contender “The Immigrant” the Dardennes here pull off an astonishingly satisfying somersault as their dismount, a simple moment in which we suddenly realize that the film we’ve been enjoying as a multi-layered ethical parable to that point was in fact also something much simpler and more human all along: the story of a broken woman’s journey back to herself. It’s nothing as simplistic as a happy ending, but it couldn’t be more uplifting and affecting, and we left the theater with our hearts nearly bursting. [A]
Two
Days, One Night review | Sight & Sound | BFI August 22, 2014
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for Film [Anne-Katrin Titze]
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Morning Herald [Paul Byrnes]
THE UNKNOWN GIRL (La Fille Inconnue) B+ 91
Belgium France (113 mi) 2016
In film after film, the Dardenne brothers provide the gold
standard on social realism, using a near documentary format to make spare and
cinematically austere films with a social message and moral implications, set
exclusively in Liège working
class environments, exposing social dilemmas that viewers universally can
identify with, revealing the difficult kinds of choices people are forced to
make, often risking their economic security to preserve their own humanity, where
their insight is usually right on the nose.
While the quality of their films is always high, two time winners of the
prestigious Palme d’Or (1st place) award at Cannes, for ROSETTA
(1999) and L’ENFANT (THE CHILD) (2005), while also winning The Grand Prix (2nd
place) award for The
Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011) and best screenplay for
LORNA’S SILENCE (2008), their most recent work included heralded actress Marion
Cotillard in Two
Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit) (2014), yet one detects a kind of
indistinguishable similarity in their films, as they are all made exactly the
same way. Speaking personally, what’s
been missing are the transcendent moments that elevated both ROSETTA (1999) and
LE FILS (THE SON) (2002) to near religious experiences, films that are
comparable to the Bressonian template, where the mechanics of rigorous technical
precision lead to a spiritual release, like finding a way out of the labyrinth,
suddenly freed from all human limitations, discovering salvation in the most
improbable places. This film attempts to
do the same, revealing how hard it is to make moral choices in today’s world,
as no one else is interested in lending a helping hand. Like an accident victim stranded on the side
of the road, most would prefer to conveniently drive by and not get involved,
something that might have been unthinkable 50 years ago, but times and
perceptions have changed, literally altering human behavior.
Born and raised in the industrial Belgian town of Seraing, the French-speaking Walloon
municipality in the province of Liège, the setting of literally every single
one of their feature films, the Dardenne brothers originally planned to make
this film with actress Marion Cotillard, but due to scheduling difficulties
made the earlier Two
Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit) (2014) with her instead, choosing
another extraordinary French actress for the role, Adèle Haenel, who was
involved in an open relationship with French director Céline Sciamma, meeting
on the set of her first feature film WATER LILIES (2006), continuing until the
Belgian release of this film in October 2016.
Surprisingly the Dardenne brothers re-edited the film after the initial
Cannes release, trimming 7-minutes off the film with 32 new edits, in effect
streamlining the film, adding greater fluidity, where the visceral pace is one
of the distinguishing features of the film, becoming something of a daunting police
procedural carried out by a private citizen, ratcheting up the suspense,
evoking an edge-of-your-seat style of thriller.
Haenel plays a young, successful physician, Jenny Davin, taking the
place of a retiring doctor in a small, neighborhood family clinic as she
prepares for a more prestigious position in a larger medical facility with
state of the art equipment and the recipient of huge research grants. As she examines an elderly patient struggling
for breath, she is also providing hands-on instructional training to a young
intern, Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), where her uncompromising attention to detail
leaves him a bit overwhelmed, feeling she is being overly critical, which makes
her even more resolute to be precise. In
response, Julien grows more introverted and aloof, which alarms the
doctor. When he freezes at the sight of
a young patient having a seizure in the waiting room, she reprimands him, “A
good doctor has to control his emotions.”
Working well past closing time, unable to see any more patients, she
instructs him to ignore the ring of the outer door buzzer, reminding him, “Don’t
let patients tire you or you won’t make a proper diagnosis.” The following morning, however, the police
arrive at her door requesting to see her security video, as a crime took place
across the street, where a young woman’s body was found lying dead on the rocks
by the river. Jenny’s conscience kicks into high gear, remembering the late night
buzzer, bringing this to the attention of the authorities, as she’s haunted by
the thought that the woman might still be alive had she opened her doors, where
the remainder of the film feels driven by the depths of her guilt.
While the video did
not capture the incident, police contend she was a young African prostitute,
suggesting the woman’s body showed signs of a struggle, where her head was
crushed by a blunt object and then left for dead after the perpetrator fled the
scene. Curious about what happened, Jenny
examines the crime scene, having to pass through a construction zone to get
there, as it was one of the workers who initially discovered the body. Rattled to the core, she is apologetic to
Julien, overly critical of herself for not checking the door, but unable to
ascertain the identity of the woman, she has a photograph made from the
security video, placing it in her phone, then showing it to Julien and various
patients asking if they know her.
Without explanation, Julien bolts from the office, claiming he’s not
coming back, apparently rethinking his career path, where Jenny tries to be as
supportive as possible, encouraging him not to make a rash decision, yet he’s
obviously been affected by the incident.
Similarly, after consulting with the retiring physician she is
replacing, she decides to take up his smaller neighborhood practice instead of
the more lucrative offer, even though it caters to a decidedly poorer
clientele. While the rhythm of the film
is built on a succession of patient examinations, she routinely makes house
calls as well, establishing an alternative storyline that requires travel, so
she’s constantly on the move, an action that only accelerates when she adds a
series of investigative inquiries to her list of things to do, questioning if
people have seen the girl, what do they know and what can they tell her? Based on the impoverished circles she’s
exploring, she heads straight into warning signs, where there are dangerous
asides, as she’s investigating people who do not like anyone asking
questions. Getting herself deeper and
deeper involved, she assumes more responsibility, where even the police warn
her to stay out of their business and eventually give her the cold
shoulder. While some will argue the
script is overly contrived, as detective work is never this easy, as everyone
she meets seems to have some involvement in the matter, but the quickening pace
of the film is extremely affecting, as viewers get caught up in her moral quest,
finding a name that belongs to a violated body that was simply tossed aside, like
it meant nothing, something the police and society at large are routinely indifferent
about, particularly when it comes to immigrants and people of color, yet it is
precisely this issue that elevates the tension and creates a compelling
drama. Always psychologically complex,
delving into the plight of forgotten or impoverished individuals, the
Dardennes succinctly humanize this moral issue in ways others can’t or won’t,
making this essential viewing.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Scott Pfeiffer, also seen at from The Moving
World here: 20th
Chicago European Union Film Festival (March 3-31, 2017), Report No. 2 (SLACK
BAY and THE UNKNOWN GIRL)
The Dardenne Brothers return with this expressive, visceral realist mystery. Adèle Haenel gives a naturalistic central performance as a promising young doctor at a working-class clinic on the outskirts of the Belgian riverside city of Liège. She's admired, even beloved. One fateful evening after a long day, she refuses to let her intern buzz someone in after hours. When the night caller turns up dead, she feels responsible. If she'd given the desperate African woman shelter, she'd be alive—a powerful, relevant metaphor. Mounting an investigation to discover the unknown woman's name, she discovers secrets involving the young son of her own patients, as well as various more or less threatening characters. (The boy's father is played by Dardennes regular Jérémie Renier). The Dardennes' mise en scène, carefully composed yet open, is rendered in the fluid handheld style of their longtime cinematographer, the great Alain Marcoen. Actors, directors, cameraman: all seem to be in a process of mutual discovery, catching real life as it unfolds. There's something in the doctor's steadfast, non-judgmental acceptance of people as they are, the way she even shares in their guilt, that makes one unforgettable scene in particular play out very differently than it might have. This movie has no score to telegraph how we're meant to feel. There's just one person caring, helping... because that's what she does.
Cinema Scope: Richard Porton September 05, 2016
Each new film by the Dardenne brothers is soothingly familiar, in
the sense that the directors masterfully recycle tried-and true-motifs. For
their detractors, the Dardennes are in danger of making formulaic art films,
while their equally fervent supporters maintain that, by continuing to plough
familiar terrain, they are enriching an already distinguished body of work.
The Unknown Girl, while certainly competent and
intermittently moving, is unlikely to convince skeptics who wonder if the
brothers’ flair for socially conscious melodrama might have peaked with
acknowledged landmarks such as La promesse (1996), Rosetta (1999),
and Le fils (2002). Like much of their previous work, The Unknown
Girl deals with questions of moral responsibility and the plight of
forgotten, impoverished individuals. Dr. Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel), an
ultra-conscientious Liège-based doctor, is as hard on herself as she is on her
harried intern. When she learns that her obliviousness to a late-arriving
visitor might have inadvertently caused the death of a young African immigrant,
her guilt compels her to become one of the most assiduous investigators since
Hercule Poirot. Although Haenel’s portrayal is never less than brilliantly
self-assured, the fact that the unknown victim referenced in the title remains
a tabula rasa ensures that the film is rarely more than a somewhat rote
exercise in liberal self-flagellation. Dr. Davin’s dedication to both her
medical practice and the lives of her forlorn patients make her something of a
secular saint, but the film’s cathartic twists are less well-earned than the
culminating moments in the brothers’ best work.
The Unknown Girl |
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
Like “The Promise” and “Two Days, One Night”, “The Unknown
Girl” examines the moral dilemmas facing people living in Belgian society where
the possibilities of acting honorably are constrained by the capitalist system.
In “The Promise”, a teenaged boy is forced by his racist father to keep secret
the death of an undocumented worker from Africa. When he comes in contact with
the man’s widow, he violates his father’s trust but discovers his own innate
humanity. In “Two Days, One Night”, a woman pleads with co-workers from her
factory to forsake a desperately needed year-end bonus so that she won’t be
laid off.
The unknown girl referred to in the title is a seventeen-year old
prostitute from Africa who buzzes to be let into the medical offices of Dr.
Jenny Davin an hour after office hours have closed. Since her office is in a
poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Lieges with more than enough patients to
make regular hours exhausting in themselves, the refusal to open the door does
not seem particularly portentous.
The next morning cops show up at her door to inform her that the
girl was found dead on the banks of the Meuse River, the result of a fractured
skull probably due to a violent assault. Davin, a single woman in her thirties
who seems to have no life outside of her patients, is stricken with guilt over
finding this out. She might not have landed the blow but her keeping the doors
closed was almost being an accessory after the fact since the girl was not a
patient but someone fleeing an assailant. Will this tangled human relationship
evoke Europe’s refusal to accept the refugees fleeing war and economic misery?
One cannot be sure that this was the Dardenne brothers’ intention but on a
subconscious level, it is entirely possible.
The girl’s body lacked any kind of identification papers so Dr.
Davin begins to grow even more remorseful. Not only was she inadvertently
responsible for her death; she has denied her family the knowledge of her
passing since she is unknown. Buried in a potter’s field, she can only
be identified by the newly dug up dirt above her coffin.
Like the factory worker who goes knocking on doors in “Two Days,
One Night”, “The Unknown Girl” is also a film whose plot is driven by a similar
voyage as the doctor contacts people one by one who might have run into the
prostitute on the night she was killed. Can they tell her who she was? While
there is an element of a detective story at work here, including facing the
violence of men who do not want her snooping around, the film is much more an
existential mystery as the doctor tries to persuade various men to unburden
themselves of a secret. And like “Two Days, One Night”, the conversations
become increasingly intense to the point of leaving you emotionally drained.
The film is made in the Dardenne brothers characteristically
austere naturalistic style with no interest in melodrama, only in showing the
daily grind of a doctor who in her spare moments plays amateur detective.
Unlike no other film I have ever seen, this is one that really conveys the life
of a doctor. Since the Belgian medical system pays for house visits, many of
her calls bring her into touch with poor people who are socially isolated. Her
presence seems to lighten up their day, including a young cancer patient. In
some ways, she is as much a priest as a doctor, especially when she is trying
to get someone to confess.
As is the case with their previous films, there is no film score.
But that does not mean that the sound of the film was of no interest to the
co-directors. You constantly hear passing cars on the highway below the office,
just as I hear now on Third Avenue beneath my high-rise. The low growl of the
motors and the hiss of the tires against the pavement are as effective as the
strings in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”.
I regard the Dardenne brothers as among a handful of directors
who are continuing in the grand tradition of the masters of the 1950s and early
60s such as Kurosawa, Ray, Fellini and Truffaut. When you get an opportunity to
grab one of their films, do not miss it. A word to the wise should be
sufficient.
The
Dardenne's The Unknown Girl (2016) – first-look review | Sight ... Jonathan Romney from BFI Sight and Sound, November 4, 2016
Here’s Adèle Haenel, keeping it simple and open as a medic
turned gumshoe in the Dardenne brothers’ latest investigation of social ties
and moral binds.
This has arguably been the great year of the minimalist
performance in Cannes. Throughout the competition, we’ve been watching actors
creating characters that are complex and suggestive because the performances
are pitched so low, allowing free play to the viewer’s imagination. There was Kristen Stewart
as an anxious haunted medium in Olivier Assayas’s
Personal Shopper; Adam
Driver as a contemplative bus-driving poet (or a poetry-writing bus driver?
We’re invited to see it both ways) in Jim Jarmusch’s
Paterson; and Ruth Negga
and Joel Edgerton as
real-life characters declining to stand on the centre stage of modern American
history in Jeff
Nichols’s daringly underplayed Loving.
Now we have the star of the new Dardennes film
The Unknown Girl (La Fille Inconnue) – Adèle Haenel,
the extraordinary, ever-rising French performer who made her mark in Céline
Sciamma’s Water
Lilies before going on to work with Bertrand Bonello,
André Téchiné and Guy Maddin, and
who proved abrasively funny as a soldiering-obsessed young woman in 2014
comedy Les
Combattants (aka Love at First Fight).
Haenel is mesmerising in The Unknown Girl, but where Driver, say,
is a captivating presence in Paterson because he’s essentially absent, Haenel
is absolutely present in every shot of the film, her intense but utterly calm
concentration holding our attention, although she’s almost never called on to
emote on screen in the conventional sense.
The locale, as ever, is the Belgian industrial town of Seraing,
and Haenel plays Dr Jenny Davin, a committed medic who works in a small
surgery. In the opening scene, she attends a young boy who’s having a fit, then
quietly but firmly upbraids her intern Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) for letting his
emotions get the better of his efficiency as a doctor. She also tells him to
ignore a late ring at the surgery door – let patients rule you, she says, and
you can’t make good diagnoses.
Making good diagnoses – of your own judgement and of the world’s
demands – will become one of the key themes of the film. The call that she
refuses to answer turns out to have been from a young African woman, later
found dead nearby. Jenny realises that if she had answered the woman’s call,
she might not have died – and so comes to feel directly responsible for her
death. The young woman remains unidentified, and seems fated to have a pauper’s
burial without a name to be remembered by. Jenny determines to unearth her
name, but in the process discovers more about the facts of her death, as well
as secrets in the lives of certain of her patients.
The film thus becomes a detective story of sorts – the Dardennes’
first, although like their last title, 2014’s Two Days, One Night,
it’s also a female-led quest narrative with a sense of ticking-time urgency
(albeit without that movie’s strict deadline).
There are also echoes of Hitchcock’s I Confess in
terms of the question of secrecy and the transference of guilt. Jenny is bound
by professional protocol, so anything that a patient might tell her must remain
secret; but we also become aware that she’s breaching the codes of professional
conduct by pushing her patients for information quite as insistently as she
does. The film is very much an inquiry into the conflict between personal
responsibility for others (a recurring Dardennes theme) and the matter of
social codes and protocol. But, Jenny says at one point, she’s not interested
in anyone else’s guilt: the guilt is entirely hers for letting the girl die.
As usual with Dardennes films, what makes the film work so
beautifully is what’s taken out rather than kept in: there’s a startling moment
when Jenny confronts a person who knows a great deal about the case, but we
aren’t told exactly what led her to him in the first place. It’s also a film
about restriction: like the filmmakers’ other characters, Jenny inhabits a very
small world. She seems to have little social contact, and the detachment that
goes toward making her a good doctor leaves her somewhat isolated: the point is
never stressed, but viewers might detect a quiet poignancy to the sight of her
preparing tomatoes in her flat above the surgery, where she sleeps among filing
boxes and other work materials.
Only at one point does Jenny raise her voice – when coming into
conflict with a patient who’s furious that she won’t provide a sick note. And
there are only a few moments at which she breaks into an out-and-out smile:
notably, when an appreciative patient throws her a panettone.
But one of the great things that Haenel achieves in this film is
to convey a sense of Jenny’s seriousness, moral and professional, reminding us
that the way to reveal a character’s complexity is not to concoct an overtly
complex performance. This is some of the best acting we’ve seen in Cannes this
year, and Haenel fits into the overall tone of the Dardennes’ distinctive
enclosed world every bit as well as Cécile de France
did in The Kid
With the Bike and immeasurably better than Marion Cotillard
did in Two Days… Her performance very much determines the register of the film,
which is pitch-perfect until, alas, another actor – and hitherto, a very
dependable Dardennes repertory regular – somewhat throws the pitch out of whack
by over-emoting in a conclusion that itself is borderline melodramatic.
Reverse
Shot: Julien Allen Without Prejudice, October 15, 2016,
also seen here: NYFF: The Unknown
Girl - Reviews - Reverse Shot
Sight
& Sound [Hannah McGill] (full)
December 1, 2016
Filmmaker: Howard Feinstein October 12, 2016
Little White Lies: David Jenkins
The
Unknown Girl :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste
Tim Grierson
The Unknown Girl
(2016) Review - Filmoria
Chris Haydon
The
Unknown Girl – Review – Jaime Rebanal's Film Thoughts
The Quietus
| Film | Film Reviews | Guilt And Responsibility: The ... James Ubaghs
MUBI's Notebook: Daniel Kasman May 20, 2016
The
Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
ScreenAnarchy.com
(Teresa Nieman)
The
House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]
theartsdesk.com
[Saskia Baron]
Brooklyn
Magazine: Elise Nakhnikian October
10, 2016
France
in London | Review - The Unknown Girl by the Dardenne ... Matthew Anderson from France in London
The Unknown Girl |
Socialist Review Esme
Choonara
The
Dardenne Brothers' The Unknown Girl | Movie reviews, interviews ... Jason Solomons
La Fille
inconnue / The Unknown Girl / Jean-Pierre Dardenne / 2016 ... James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
NYFF
Film Review: 'The Unknown Girl' Is Another Compelling ... Joey Magidson from Awards Circuit
NYFF
Review: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's 'The Unknown Girl ... Aaron Boalick from Vague Visages
The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo May 18, 2016
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri May 20, 2016
n+1: A. S. Hamrah December
12, 2016
JLT/JLT: Josh Timmermann October 07, 2016
What's
Worth Seeing [Jason Korsner]
Cineuropa.org
[Fabien Lemercier]
The
Upcoming [Imogen Robinson]
Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016
Film
review: The Unknown Girl — 'Torpid' - Financial Times Nigel Andrews
Sight & Sound: Geoff Andrew Top 15 Films at Cannes, May 24, 2016
Jean-Pierre
and Luc Dardenne's THE UNKNOWN GIRL - Fandor David Hudson
The
Dardenne Brothers' 'The Unknown Girl': Cannes Review ... David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter, also seen here: Hollywood
Reporter [David Rooney]
'The
Unknown Girl': Haenel Enriches the Dardenne Brothers' Latest ... Guy Lodge from Variety, also seen here: Variety
[Guy Lodge]
The Unknown Girl
(2016), directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc ... Dave Calhoun from Time Out
The
Unknown Girl review – crime drama with jarring problems | Film ... Wendy Ide from The Guardian
The
Unknown Girl review – a rare misfire from the Dardenne brothers ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
The
Unknown Girl review: Casualty-style melodrama comes to Belgium Tim Robey from The Telegraph, also seen here:
The
Telegraph [Tim Robey]
Evening
Standard [David Sexton]
The
Unknown Girl: review: a worthwhile addition to the Dardennes ... Donald Clarke from The Irish Times
Movie
review: Truth and despair in La fille inconnue (The Unknown ... T’Cha Dunlevy from The Montreal Gazette
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Dargis, Manohla – film critic
Filmmaker Magazine: Blog (excerpt)
I don't know about you, but I'm enjoying
tremendously Manohla Dargis's film writing in the New York Times,
particularly the more freewheeling attitude that runs through her pieces. Her
Godard interview of a few weeks back was brilliantly edited. Leaving in his
intellectual japes and her bemused ripostes -- bits that might have been edited
out in the hands of another Times critic -- both made the piece
entertaining and indicative of Godard's entire enterprise. In today's Times,
Dargis steps in front of her byline to frankly answer questions from readers.
(Registration required.) In response the various queries she raves about Li
Yang's underseen Blind Shaft, canonizes Bad Santa as a new
holiday classic, and responds to a reader who asks, "Hasn't the bar been
set too high for a medium that is meant to entertain? Must a film always
improve upon the art?"
Her response winds through a great story about a bored Paul Schrader falling
asleep during Warren Beatty's Reds, to a discussion of James Agee,
before winding up with the following:
I thoroughly understand the desire for entertainment
(really!), but movies were never "meant" to be any one thing. The
medium was seized on by opportunistic business types early on, but it was
always also a medium for artists, intellectuals and those for whom a life in
the movies means something more than just a succession of pneumatic blonds and
a swank Beverly Hills
Manohla Dargis
interview Steve Erickson from
Senses of Cinema
Critic Biography:
Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
The Awful Truth From Vertigo to Austin Powers, Scenes We Love, by Manohla Dargis from The Nation, March 16, 2000
The New
York Times > Movies > The Way We Live Now: The 21st ... The 21st-Century
Cinephile,
by Manohla Dargis from The New York
Times, November 14,
2004
Being the owner of
DVDBeaver forces me to respond to Manohla
... (pdf)
The New York Times
> Movies > Godard's
Metaphysics of the Movies Manohla
Dargis interviews Godard from The New
York Times, November
21, 2004
The
New York Times > Readers' Opinions > Questions for ... Questions for…Manohla Dargis from The
The
New York Times > Readers' Opinions > Questions for ... Questions for… Manohla
Dargis, February
1, 2005
Manohla
Dargis - New York Times Questions
for… Manohla Dargis, February
6, 2006
scanners The
critic: Manohla Dargis on film criticism, by Jim Emerson June 13,
2006
Manohla Dargis: Film Critic Starting
to Think Every Slightly ... the only photo I’ve found of the elusive
Dargis, from Gawker, June 16, 2006
"Movie
Review: Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties (2006) As Told to MANOHLA DARGIS by LORD DARGIS, from The New York Times, June 16, 2006
Best of 2006 - Movies - Manohla
Dargis - New York Times December 24, 2006
a long
Manohla Dargis essay Unblinking Eye, Visual Diary: Warhol’s
Films, New York Times, October
21, 2007
Women in Hollywood 2009 - At the Box Office but Not Directing ... Women In the Seats, But Not Behind the Camera, Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, December 10, 2009
Amazon.com: L.A. Confidential (BFI Modern Classics): Manohla ... Amazon’s listing of BFI Modern Classics: L.A. Confidential, by Manohla Dargis
kamera.co.uk - book review - BFI Modern Classics: L.A. ... BFI Modern Classics: L.A. Confidential, by Manohla Dargis, book review from Ben Walters (2003)
"Fuck Them": Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck Irin interviews Dargis from Jezebel, December 14, 2009
Articles by Manohla Dargis - Los Angeles Times
Reviews by Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
Manohla Dargis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - What is Manohla Dargis of the New York Times ... (3:36) on YouTube
Darling, Todd
A SNOWMOBILE FOR GEORGE C+ 77
USA (94 mi)
2008 Official site
What begins as a lighthearted query about snowmobiles and the two-stroke engine that was banned initially by the Clinton administration but quickly reinstated by the Bush administration, which led our documentarian to wonder why? He quickly learns that his snowmobile tends to smoke heavily, where the exhaust fumes are twenty seven times more toxic than an automobile. So how’d they get reinstated? People who make snowmobiles had no answers, as they had already redesigned the engine when they were informed there was no need. So he visited the Klamath Falls area in Oregon where there had been a hundred year dispute regarding water restrictions caused by water withheld by a dam to irrigate local farms, which impacted upon the salmon runs up the Klamath river, one of the strongest in the nation, causing ever smaller numbers of fish. George W. Bush’s chief political strategist Karl Rove decided this was an opportunity to rally their Republican base and intervened in the dispute, immediately taking sides with the farmers, giving them all the water they needed despite dire warnings about what this would do to the fish. During the next salmon run, all the fish died, the worst in the nation’s history, and could be seen washed up to shore belly up, as there was insufficient water to make it to their breeding grounds. Despite this disaster, the Bush administration refused to acknowledge their decision had anything to do with it, instead blaming recent drought conditions.
He visited Yellowstone National Park where snowmobiles were frightening away the natural wildlife, causing another battle between preservationists and snowmobilers, with the Bush administration siding with the snowmobilers, again, pandering to their political base, where these noisy, heavy pollutants continue to be allowed into the park in the winter, but where toll guards at the gates can wear protective gas masks. He visited a man in Wyoming who discovered that Wyoming grandfathered into their state constitution that land purchased a hundred years ago by a family was still obligated by state law which indicated they bought only what was above land, as the federal government owned what mineral rights were below the land. So oil and natural gas companies can enter people’s properties at will, with no notice or approval, and dig for oil and gas by any means necessary, even install permanent machinery to continue the operations indefinitely. The farmer visited indicated the noise of the machines was driving all the wildlife away, and the huge quantities of water brought out from beneath the earth to release the methane gas was killing the natural prairie grass that his cows had been eating for decades. Even worse, despite drilling at distances of nearly 5 miles away, private water wells were drying up, leaving many residents with no water supply at all. However, the government again took no responsibility, and blamed the families for improper maintenance of their land. The overriding theme here is that companies were given a blank check to do whatever they wanted, while families were simply marginalized in the process, and were of no concern whatsoever to the companies or the government.
When he visited survivors of 9/11 in
BURNING
FUSE FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi
Media
A Snowmobile for George is a rambunctious road trip that collects the stories of fishermen, cowboys and firemen who have had to face the consequences of environmental deregulation by the Bush Administration. Started by a question about the filmmaker's own used two-stroke snowmobile engine, this trip steadily reveals the political strategy and rationale behind a massive sell-off of public resources. A Snowmobile for George begins modestly as a one-man, one-machine road film that simply asks why rules to clean up a smoky off-road machine got shelved. With no presumption of guilt or blame, filmmaker Todd Darling tows his family snowmobile across the United States and persists in asking that question. The film's humble point of departure gives little hint as to its ultimate destination. What starts off as a personal quest gradually morphs as this journey takes the viewer to the sites of more serious environmental change. The common thread among these stories is deregulation - the notion that common citizens benefit when "the government gets off their back." But the film uncovers how the Bush Administration worked efficiently to match up the goals of select industries with the political demands of the White House at the expense of the average American citizen.
The Burning Fuse Film
Festival
Darnell, Eric and Tom McGrath
MADAGASCAR
USA
Just smile and wave.
That’s what we do boys, just smile and wave.
Chris Rock and Ben Stiller lend their voices to this colorful animated
story of New York City Zoo animals, a zebra and an audience-pleasing lion
respectively, also a hypochondriac giraffe and a no nonsense hippo, played by
David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett Smith.
Aided by a few irrepressible penguins who are nothing less than
ingenious, among the most hilarious animated creatures ever, a group that seem
to be missing from a Nick Park film, featuring co-director Tom McGrath’s voice
as the Skipper, the lead penguin who is always barking out orders, who
accidentally dig their escape tunnel into the zebra’s grounds, giving him for
the first time an idea of being free, living in the wild. Be careful what you wish for as it may soon
come true, as they quickly find out when they are sent away from the zoo as
disgruntled, irate animals, tranquilized, crated and sent to the island of Madagascar
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Eric Darnell ("Antz") and Tom McGrath plug
old-fashioned Looney Tunes style into the computer-animated film and come up
with the zippiest CGI comedy DreamWorks has produced to date.
Showbiz lion Alex (voice of Ben Stiller), the
merchandised-to-the-mane king of the Central Park Zoo, loves living in the Big
Apple: the feel of cement, the sounds of cars and sirens, the black night sky
where helicopter spotlights are the closest you get to starlight. His best
friend, Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), longs for the legendary open plains.
When Marty escapes to sample the wild (of Connecticut, via
Grand Central Station, of course), the ensuing city adventure of Alex and his
buddies, Melman the hypochondriac giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the
hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), is misinterpreted as a cry for escape, the furthest
thing from their minds. Shipped off to an animal preserve in
Alex is no predator, he's a ham who lives for the
spotlight, but he succumbs to his primal instincts in the wild (the marvelously
animated sequences suggest a giant housecat in the feral fever of play) and his
best friends start to look an awful lot like dinner on the hoof. It's the
film's basic conflict -- instinct versus individual choice -- and it comes
through with what I like to call the "Iron Giant" moral: "You
are who you choose to be."
Slim on plot but fat with furiously paced gags, "
For the adults, there is a non-stop bar rage of cultural
references, from "American Beauty" and "Silence of the
Lambs" to "The Twilight Zone" and "National
Geographic" TV specials.
For the kids, there are a smattering of poo jokes (some
inspired -- it's the lingua franca of the monkey kingdom, after all) and
slapstick gags, all directed with zany energy. It could be more involving, but
it's funny enough that you won't care.
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones)
If anybody bothered to ask movie critics, we’d tell you that the
fastest way to solve the population problem is to expose those of childbearing
years to a cartoon sneak preview, with its packed house of squirming, screaming
little, er, angels. I mention this only to set my mood (cantankerous):
That is to say, I was in no way prepared to like this film. The perfunctory
opening scenes didn’t help: There’s Marty the Zebra (voiced by Rock), who is
weary of pampering at the Central Park Zoo and lusting for a life in the wild.
There’s his grab-bag of wisecracking best friends: the self-centered showman,
Alex the Lion (Stiller); sassy hippo Gloria (Pinkett Smith); and glum hypochondriac
Melman the Giraffe (Schwimmer). Gently amusing stuff, sure, but nothing
terribly inspiring – that is, until a bookish primate makes a crack about
throwing monkey poo at Tom Wolfe, and Madagascar dangles the possibility
of being something slightly nutter. Consider that possibility mostly realized:
After its leaden beginning,
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
DVD Times Eamonn McCusker
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
YouTube - The Madagascar Penguins scenes (10 minutes)
The Madagascar Penguins in a Chrismas Caper - Free Video ... samo ... (10 minutes)
Dash, Julie
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST
USA Great Britain
Set in 1902, on a
barrier island off Georgia, this first feature is an impressionistic portrait
of the ritual last supper of the Peazant family before migrating to the
mainland. The younger generations are leaving the matriarch Nana (Day) and the
insulated traditional life she symbolises. Tensions are raised by the return of
family members Viola, a Baptist missionary, and Yellow Mary (Barbara-O), a
proud whore, and by Eli's apprehension that his wife Eula (Rogers) is carrying
the child of a rapist. Nana fears these rifts will destroy her family when they
leave the home of their African ancestors and calls on the spirit of Eula's
unborn child to heal them. Steeped in symbolism, superstition and myth, this
disconcertingly original film is structured in tableaux which jump through
time. The characters speak in the islanders' Gullah dialect and little is
explained; however, Dash's universal message about holding on to tradition in
face of change rings clear.
Daughters of the Dust: The Film File: The New Yorker Michael Sragow
There’s
teaching potential in Julie Dash’s acclaimed celebration of the Georgia and
Carolina Sea Islands culture, especially for classes in African-American
studies. But it’s hard to imagine how Dash expects general-interest audiences,
black or white, to find their way into her dreamy evocation of Gullah
traditions in transition. In theory Dash aims to present a folkloric story from
inside a folk culture, but her script, set on the eve of a family’s departure
to the mainland, makes the material seem distant and aesthetic. Fortunately,
Dash and her cinematographer, Arthur Jafa, endow their outdoor imagery with a
supernal prettiness, hitting otherworldly shades of purplish blue and
yellow-orange, as if they’d managed to drape an Oriental scarf over the sun. If
this movie has gained a following beyond those fascinated by the Sea Islands,
it’s possibly because it peddles the same exotic mixture as “The Piano”
does—men and women with contemporary emotional drives and nineteenth-century
costumes, parading on a primitive shore.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Kathleen Sachs
The narrator of Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST is more than
just a character in the film, but a symbolic representation of the film's
message. The unborn child who tells the story of the Peazant family in their
last days before migrating north is as much a reflection of the past as she is
of the future; all that has come before her is as inherent to the family as the
very blood within their veins, and it's that history which will propel them
along the trying and changing times. The Peazant family are inhabitants of the
southern Sea Islands and members of its Gullah culture, having preserved the
identity of their African heritage in the face of slavery and post-war
oppression. Before the move, the matriarch of the Peazant family contemplates
her native beliefs while the family's younger members overcome their personal
struggles. Rape and prostitution have afflicted several female members of the
family, and the scorn from both society and their own clan present the unique
obstacle of African American women within an already disparaged race. Dash uses
magical realism not only in the story, but also as a filmmaking device that is
reflective of the characters' culture. It was the first feature-length film by
an African-American woman to receive theatrical release, and its historical
context and female-oriented storyline set it apart from both other films of the
time and other films put out by fellow members of the L.A. Rebellion.
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Set at the
turn of the 20th century on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South
Carolina, writer-director Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters Of The Dust
explores a culture at a crossroads. The Gullah people, the islands'
inhabitants, have carved out a uniquely African-American culture that's in
touch with both sides of the hyphenate. Former slaves and their descendants,
the Gullah have preserved many African traditions while incorporating those of
the New World and its European heritage. Religion, more a syncretic collection
of traditions than a single faith, could involve charms against evil spirits as
easily as Baptist hymns, and the Gullah culture as a whole reflects this. It's
a way of looking at the world that both hearkens back to an ancient
malleability and anticipates post-modernism. The greatest strength of the
film—which covers one significant day in island history, and in the history of
one large family as it makes plans to join life on the mainland—is its ability
to portray this culture in almost documentary-like fashion. A rich, fully
realized vision, beautifully shot by Arthur Jafa (Crooklyn), Dash's film
is one-of-a-kind, and at times that works against it as much as for it. Her
exhaustive research has allowed her to re-create Gullah life in remarkable
detail, but many of the details, however intriguing, are left unexplained, a
fact that makes this new DVD version, and Dash's audio commentary, all the more
useful. What may be more difficult for many viewers is the film's non-linear
narrative and obtuse characterizations: Dash argues that she tried to structure
her film in a way more in touch with African narratives than Western
storytelling, but she still could have allowed her characters greater depth and
permitted them to serve as something more than icons. Still, it's hard to argue
that Daughters Of The Dust's faults outweigh its virtues, and the
supplemental features of this packed DVD (deleted scenes, a documentary,
interviews) only enhance the experience of a project that works better as an
experience than a film.
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
“Daughters
of the Dust” is an African American family heirloom, a gorgeously
impressionistic history of the Gullah people set on the South Carolina Sea
Islands at the turn of the century. In the hands of director Julie Dash and
photographer Arthur Jafa, this nonlinear film becomes visual poetry, a wedding
of imagery and rhythm that connects oral tradition with the music video. It is
an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's
spirit.
The
story focuses primarily on the women of the extended Peazant family of
luxuriant Ibo Landing, a black community descended from the slaves who worked
the indigo, rice and cotton plantations before emancipation. Isolated from the
mainland, the Peazants have preserved many of the traditions, beliefs and
language of their West African ancestors. All that stands to be lost, however,
as the Gullah clan prepares to migrate from this paradise to the industrialized
North. Only the matriarch Nana (Cora Lee Day), an 88-year-old mystic, insists
on remaining behind with the old souls and her "scraps of memories."
On a
summer day in 1902, a farewell picnic is underway on the beach, where the
Peazants in their Sunday best are gathered for a feast of shrimp gumbo, fresh
clams, yellow corn and johnnycake. The young women, romantic in long white
dresses, move as languidly as clouds while a photographer (Tommy Hicks) records
them for posterity. Nana's daughter, Yellow Mary (Barbara-O), looks like a
bride in her lacy veil, but she is in her family's eyes a "ruint"
woman. A wet nurse and a prostitute, she has just returned from Cuba with her
beautiful lover. She naturally finds herself in conflict with her cousin Viola
(Cherly Lynn Bruce), a fundamentalist Christian who rejects Yellow Mary's
morals along with Nana's spiritualism.
There
is also conflict between Nana and her dour sister-in-law (Kaycee Moore), an
outsider who considers the "Geechee" ways backward and dreams of
assimilation. Meanwhile, Nana seeks solace from the ancestral spirits who have
gathered for the birth of her great-granddaughter (Kai-Lynn Warren), whose
mother, Eula (Alva Rogers), was raped by a landowner. It is the precocious
unborn girl's job to convince her father (Adisa Anderson) that he, not the
rapist, is truly her father. The spirit girl, who sometimes mysteriously shows
up in the photographer's compositions, is also the movie's narrator, a guide
who unites the Gullah past with the future that might be.
A
multidimensional family drama spoken in the patois known as Gullah,
"Daughters of the Dust" is not always easy to follow, nor does it
reward viewers with neat resolutions. As Dash intended, her film enfolds us in
its dark arms and ancient sensibilities.
"Daughters
of the Dust," in the Gullah dialect with some subtitles, is not rated but
is suitable for general audiences.
User comments from imdb Author: Michael P. Lewis (mplewis) from Edina, MN
Daughters of The Dust was produced by Geechee Girls and American
Playhouse Company. The movie main focus is on the Peazant women. Nana Peazant
is played by Cora Lee Day, and Eula, her granddaughter, is played by Alva
Rogers who is pregnant and has been raped by a landowner. Nana's granddaughter,
Yellow Mary, is played by Barbara-O who is returning, with her friend Trula,
from the mainland and her life as a prostitute and wet nurse. Haggar, who has
married into the family, is played by Kaycee Moore and wants nothing to do with
the old traditions. Similarly, the Christian Viola, played by Cheryl Lynn
Bruce, is returning from her life on the mainland.
Daughters of the Dust is a film written and directed by Julie Dash. It tells
the story of a family of African-Americans who have lived for many years on a
Southern offshore island, and of how they come together one day in 1902 to
celebrate their ancestors before some of them leave for the North. The film is
narrated by an unborn child, and ancestors already dead also seem to be as
present as the living.
Julie Dash underwent many hardships in bringing the story to the silver screen.
She had severe budget constraints, filmed in mosquito and insect infested
areas, was delayed by Hurricane Hugo, sidetracked by sudden and violent
sandstorms, and was forced to decide to either have a child or make the movie.
In the end, she choose to give birth and nurture the story Daugthers of the
Dust and the result is an unconventional masterpiece.
Initially, the response by white male critics was not favorable and they
accused Dash of not adequately explaining the Gullah people, their culture, and
their religious traditions. While attacking Dash, these critics failed to
acknowledge many positive aspects of the film. The reasons behind this,
according to Bell Hooks, is that "we've never been taught, most of us, in
any history class that black people had different languages, had different
religious practices, etc. So, to some extent, the film represents that
challenge to a critic of any race" to review something they are not
familiar with.
Because of these reviews and the fact that movie tells the story of African
American women in an unconventional manner, it would seem to have slim
commercial prospects. However, through word of mouth and some positive reviews
it was able to generate a cult following. To date, the film has grossed 1.6
million from a budget of only 800,000.
The Newark Black Film Festival has chosen Daughters as the Film of The Century
while the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound Magazine chose the
soundtrack as one of the best in the past 25 years. It also received the Best
Cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.
I believe the film hits the viewer on various levels. By placing the story in
the early 1900's, Dash is able to show us a turbulent time for African-Americans
and address many issues such as migration, lynching, and the changing
African-American culture. Dash also shows and teaches us about Ibo culture and
its importance in the lives of those inhabiting the
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991, 113 min notes, essay and Julie Dash bio info by Michael Dembrow
Untitled Document A History of Exile, an essay on the film by Deanna McGowen Prufert
CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon)
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
Daughters of the Dust (2016 restoration in 2K from Cohen Film Collection) Antti Alanen
Read the complete review for Daughters Of The Dust TV Guide magazine
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Daughters of the Dust Eat-Online
Writing > Essays > Women Studies > "Daughters of the Dust," my ... my impression of the movie by Yanet Manzano
Diary of an Anxious Black Woman: Revolutionary Cinema: Julie ...
Manish Malhotra says it’s poorly made
Daniel Barrett calls it a dud
Daughters of the Dust (1991 comprehensive film website with analysis, essays and links
Religious Traditions of the African Diaspora The Gullah People and Their Link to West Africa
ISSUE ESSAY Maintaining Cultural Identity in the Face of Adversity
The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection Joseph A. Opala
Bench of Memory at Slavery’s Gateway Bench of Memory at Slavery’s Gateway, by Felicia R. Lee from The New York Times, July 28, 2008, at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, S.C, Toni Morrison led the procession dedicating her “bench by the road,” honoring the memory of slaves who arrived there
Daughters of the Dust capsule book review by Casey King from The New York Times, December 14, 1997
Daughters of the Dust book review of Daughters of the Dust, a novel by Julie Dash which expands the story, from Akilah Monifa
Read the transcript of an on-line featuring Julie Dash discussing "Daughters of the Dust" Interview with Julie Dash, December 19, 1997
MoMA.org | The Collection | Julie Dash. Daughters of the Dust. 1991 a photograph from the film
WELCOME TO DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST: Secrets and Whispers film website
Julie Dash Homepage on the AALBC.com's web site Julie Dash website
MAGAZINE | FEATURES | JULIE DASH-ROSA PARKS | VOLUME 26-6: MARCH 2002 Julie Dash and the Rosa Parks Story, by Robert A. Jones from DGA, March 2002
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Stephen Holden)
'Daughters of the Dust,' a Seeming Inspiration for 'Lemonade,' Is Restored Mekado Murphy from The New York Times, April 29, 2016
Julie Dash Made a Movie. Then Hollywood Shut Her Out. Cara Buckley from The New York Times, November 18, 2016
Daughters of The Dust DVD - Kino on Video
Gullah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daughters of the Dust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - Daughters of the Dust Scene an opening scene (1:41)
Invisible Woman.....Black Cinema At LARGE: Daughters Of The Dust a YouTube condensation of the film (9:05)
YouTube - Robert Farris Thompson Speaks: Daughters of the Dust an Interview with a Yale Art professor about the film, also seen here: Robert Farris Thompson on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust ... (14:55)
Dassin, Jules
Film Reference Rob Edelman
Between the mid-1940s and the
late 1950s, Jules Dassin directed some of the better realistic, hard-bitten,
fast-paced crime dramas produced in America Europe . However, while
he has made some very impressive films, his career as a whole is lacking in
artistic cohesion.
Dassin's films are occasionally
innovative: The Naked City is one of the first police dramas shot on
location, on the streets of New York; Rififi is a forerunner of detailed
jewelry heist dramas, highlighted by a thirty-five-minute sequence chronicling
the break-in, shot without a word of dialogue or note of music; Never on
Sunday, starring his wife Melina Mercouri as a happy hooker, made the
actress an international star, won her an Academy Award nomination, and popularized
in America the Greek bouzouki music. The Naked City and Rififi
are particularly exciting, as well as trend-setting, while Brute Force
remains a striking, naturalistic prison drama, with Burt Lancaster in one of
his most memorable early performances and Hume Cronyn wonderfully despicable as
a Hitlerish guard captain. Thieves' Highway, also shot on location, is a
vivid drama of truck driver Richard Conte taking on racketeer Lee J. Cobb.
Topkapi is a Rififi remake, with a delightful touch
of comedy. Many of Dassin's later films, such as Brute Force and Thieves'
Highway, attempt to observe human nature: they focus on the individual
fighting his own demons while trying to survive within a chaotic society. For
example, in A Dream of Passion, an updating of Sophocles' Medea,
an American woman is jailed in Greece
The villain in his career is the
blacklist, which tragically clipped his wings just as he was starting to fly.
Indeed, he could not find work in Europe for
five years, as producers felt American distributors would automatically ban any
film with his signature. When Rififi opened, critics wrote about Dassin
as if he were European. The New York Herald Tribune reported in 1961,
"At one ceremony, when the award to Rififi was announced, (Dassin)
was called to the dais, and a French flag was raised above him. 'It should have
been a moment of triumph but I feel awful. They were honoring my work and I'm
an American. It should have been the American flag raised in honor."' The
blacklist thus denied Jules Dassin his roots. In 1958, it was announced that he
was planning to adapt James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan, a project that
was eventually shelved. It is one more tragedy of the blacklist that Dassin was
not allowed to follow up Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves'
Highway with Studs Lonigan.
Encore:
A Touch of Noir - Film Comment
Robert Horton, May/June 2013
After the frenzied flamenco clapping of ghostly hands against a black void under the opening credits (this is going to be arty) the movie really begins with a series of nighttime shots in a Spanish town. And they’re good, evocative, tingly even: cobblestone plaza seen at a low angle, stark splash of light, a jealous man with a gun, two adulterous lovers shot dead.
We recall here that Jules Dassin, blacklisted American turned Euro-art-house director, once flourished in film noir. The opening to 10:30 P.M. Summer doesn’t quote Dassin’s Night and the City (50) or Thieves’ Highway (49) or anything, but these shots have a crackle that remind us that the man best known at the time (1966) for Never on Sunday (60) and Topkapi (64) knew his way around the haunted shadows of America’s darkest genre.
10:30 P.M. Summer doesn’t roll off the tongue as a title, and it probably doesn’t ring a bell, either. This flop has been overlooked by film history, and the reasons are not difficult to discern: it’s definitely a guest at Pauline Kael’s Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party—pretentious, self-serious, and fatally susceptible to trendy stylistic gestures churned up in the wake of Antonioni, Fellini, and Resnais.
And yet, and yet. That opening is punchy and strong. And much of what follows is intriguing in ways that sit side by side with what’s exasperating about the movie. We are in this Spanish town because Paul (Peter Finch) and his alcoholic wife, Maria (Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s wife and muse), are driving to Madrid with their young daughter and their friend Claire (Romy Schneider on the youthful side of her prime), who has been invited on the ride for somewhat mysterious reasons. Trapped in a crowded hotel as police search for the killer, the travelers spend a fraught night waiting out the manhunt, a rainstorm, and their own wayward passions. The following day brings a long, complicated hangover.
In a sequence carried off with Hitchcockian aplomb, Maria looks out from a hotel window during the stormy night. On a balcony her husband engages in a mid-deluge liplock with Claire; on the roof of the building across the way the escaping killer (Julián Mateos) flaps around in a sodden black cape, like a wounded monster. We know at this moment, thanks in part to Mercouri’s Greek-goddess-facing-the-Furies grandeur, that Maria will aid the fugitive’s escape. Which she does, in a series of mostly dialogue-free scenes of passable suspense (whether intentionally experimental or not, the drawn-out business of Maria’s car finding its way through the streets points more toward Kiarostami than Hitchcock).
The movie was adapted by Marguerite Duras from her own novella (Dassin’s also credited on the script). Dassin was originally to produce the movie for his fellow blacklistee Joseph Losey to direct, but the two fell out. (It would’ve been a characteristic picture for this period in Losey’s career, that’s for sure.) The frequency of stilted posing, the enigmatic glances portending that which cannot be said, the business of wondering whether certain moments are reality or dream—all these fix the movie in its era.
But there are moments when Dassin’s sense of craft (he did excel at heist scenes—see Rififi and Topkapi) and the locations and the actors’ specific presences combine to create something genuinely eerie. In her husband’s previous films, Melina Mercouri is all too iconic, a starkly outlined Force of Nature chiseled out of Greek marble; but she’s very human here, warm and wounded, and convincingly ready to slip the bounds of propriety and commit a crime of passion. (Color helps: she’s softer without the black-and-white outlines of Never on Sunday and 1962’s Phaedra.) As Maria pantomimes an attempt at connection with the killer in the car, or as she and Paul run along the plateau outside the town that opens onto a dry vastness for miles beyond them, the movie does fleetingly attain a kind of yawning existential largeness. It isn’t quite the edge-of-oblivion journey in The Sheltering Sky, but it is close.
And the ending? Not cool. Peter Finch running around shouting faintly anticipates William Shatner’s final cries in his memorable cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But the movie’s just evocative enough to make you wonder where Mercouri’s great injured bird has gone, after all, and to regret—well, at least register—her absence.
cineCollage :: Jules Dassin biography
Jules Dassin -
biography and films - Le Film Guide
James Travers biography
All-Movie
Guide bio from Hal Erickson
Jules Dassin Films | Jules
Dassin Filmography | Jules Dassin ... Rod
Edelman biography and filmography from The Film Director site
Jules Dassin | American
film director | Britannica.com Michael
Baron biography
Overview
for Jules Dassin - TCM.com profile page and brief biography
Jules Dassin
| Biography and Filmography | 1911 - Hollywood.com
Film Noir Directors:
Jules Dassin filmography
Jules Dassin - NNDB.com filmography
Jules Dassin -
Explore - The Criterion Collection
Harvard
Film Archive film retrospective
summary
JewishPost.com
- The Homecoming of Jules Dassin
essay by Gad Nahshon (Undated)
Jules Dassin: The early years -
Salon.com Michael Sragow from Salon,
How
Jules Dassin Set The Standard For Film Noir - tribunedigital ... Loren King from The Chicago Tribune, November 27, 2000
Jules
Dassin for the Honorary Oscar? - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares, 2007
Jules Dassin,
Filmmaker on Blacklist, Dies at 96 - The New York Times Richard Severo, April 1, 2008
Obituary:
Jules Dassin | Film | The Guardian Tim Pulleine from The Guardian, April 1, 2008
Jules
Dassin, 96; Blacklisted Filmmaker - Washington Post Adam Bernstein, April 1, 2008
BBC NEWS |
Entertainment | Film director Jules Dassin dies April 1, 2008
Jules Dassin
Obituary | Jules Dassin Funeral | Legacy.com Associated Press, April 1, 2008
Self-Styled
Siren: Jules Dassin, 1911-2008 April 1, 2008
Jules
Dassin - Telegraph Obituary, April 2, 2008
Jules
Dassin: In Exile, American Became an Auteur : NPR A Remembrance by NPR, April 2, 2008
Jules Dassin,
victim of the anti-communist witch-hunt, dies at 96 ... David Walsh from The World
Socialist Web Site, April 3, 2008
Tribute
to Jules Dassin – Forward.com Masha
Leon from Forward, April 11, 2008
Jules Dassin BRUTE FORCE 1947 -
Center for Studies in American ...
September 23, 20 (pdf)
Film - Film Forum
Salutes Jules Dassin, an Expatriate at Home Among ... New York Times, March 20, 2009
Edward
Copeland's Tangents: Centennial Tributes: Jules Dassin Part III December 21, 2011
Jules
Dassin's 1955 'Rififi' Remains the Best of All Heist Movies ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village
Voice, September 1, 2015
The
Essentials: The 8 Greatest Jules Dassin Films | IndieWire September 1, 2015
Dassin, Jules They
Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Jules
Dassin - Directors Guild of America
including lengthy video interviews by Bruce Goldstein, Undated (56 mi
and 39 mi)
Jules
Dassin: You'll never work in this town again | Profiles | News ...
Roger Clarke interview from The
Independent, August 8, 2002
An interview:
Filmmaker Jules Dassin, witch-hunting and Hollywood's ... David Walsh interviews Reynold Humphries, author of Fritz Lang : Genre and Representation in His
American Films, 1988, The American Horror Film: An Introduction, 2002, and a
recent release Hollywood’s
Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History, from The World
Socialist Web Site, April 7, 2008
Wise
Guys roundtable discussion with
André de Toth, Budd Boetticher and Jules Dassin by Patrick Francis from LA Weekly
Jules
Dassin (1911 - 2008) - Find A Grave Memorial
Jules Dassin - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
BRUTE
FORCE B+ 92
Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you’ve served your
time, or when you’re dead!
—Gallagher (Charles Bickford)
The Macbeth of prison break films, as there’s no happy ending to soothe the audience’s built-up anxieties, instead there is only a film noir world of death and destruction. Ostensibly a leftist, postwar reaction to fascism, Dassin’s film elevated the American prison picture to the role of a WW II POW film, where the sadistic chief prison guard is equated to the Nazi SS officers running the concentration camps. The timing of the film is interesting, as it was released in the summer just prior to the first Hollywood blacklist instituted on November 25, 1947, the day after ten writers and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dassin rose to Hollywood prominence in the late 1940’s with a series of taut and moody pulp films, including BRUTE FORCE (1947), THE NAKED CITY (1948), and THIEVES HIGHWAY (1949), each distinguished by an inventive camera style and shadowy imagery capturing a bleak, sometimes sadistic vision of human nature. Shortly after completing NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950), his career in America was finished when fellow movie director Edward Dmytryk testified before a congressional committee in 1951 that Mr. Dassin was a communist sympathizer, forcing him into self-imposed exile in Europe. One of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, his family moved to New York City when Dassin was a small child, eventually settling in Harlem. According to Dassin, “We were so poor it was ridiculous. At that time Harlem wasn’t entirely black. There were about three or four minority groups living in the ghetto, at each other’s throats all the time: Jewish, Negro, Irish, and some Italian, divided among themselves and taking out their wrath and their poverty upon each other. I was conscious of this, and of the daily problem of eating. And it was cold...it was always so cold.” Left-wing artistic circles abounded in New York during the Depression, where he worked in New York’s legendary Yiddish Theatre, which was founded on Brecht along with the principles of agitprop theater based on the Soviet model, working with Elia Kazan, among others, on a 1937 WPA Federal Theater Production of Revolt of the Beavers, playing the lead in a Marxist musical for children that was terminated after only three weeks by the New York police commissioner. For five summers during this period Dassin worked as an entertainment director of a Jewish camp in the Catskills, where, among other things, he engaged the young campers in productions of Shakespeare. At this time he was briefly a member of the Communist party, heavily influenced by the revolutionary realism of Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre (1931- 1940), the first acting company to introduce Stanislavski acting principles, but left the party in 1939 when Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact with Hitler. From Alastair Phillips, Rififi, 2009, pages 5-11:
The cultural milieu in
which Dassin thrived during this period provided a formative influence on his
later political and cultural sensibilities.
It was during this time that he was exposed to New York’s vital
left-wing theatre then flourishing in the progressive climate of the New
Deal. Dassin would later claim, for example,
that he joined the Communist Party after seeing the Group Theatre production of
Clifford Odets’s episodic drama, Waiting for Lefty, set among a
community of taxi drivers on the verge of a strike during the Great Depression
of the 1920’s. Like Orson Welles, Dassin
also worked in radio and it was his audio adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat
that led to him being noticed by the Broadway producer, Martin Gabel, who
subsequently invited him to direct The Medicine Show by Oscar Saul and
H. R. Hays at the New Yorker Theater.
This, in turn, led to an invitation to work in Hollywood.
Two of the actors from the Group Theater joined Dassin in
this film, Roman Bohnen, the befuddled warden, and Art Smith, the alcoholic
prison doctor who is really closer to the narrative center of the film, and
both would later be blacklisted (two other actors as well, Jeff Corey and Sam
Levene), with Bohnen suffering a fatal heart attack afterwards, while Smith was
named by Elia Kazan from his work in the Group Theater. Later in his life Dassin forgave plenty of
people associated with McCarthyism, but one he never forgave was Elia
Kazan. Dassin was included among a group
of younger, socially aware, left-wing directors that resorted to the use of
film noir to help them explore psychological motives under the surface,
including Robert Rossen, who directed Body
and Soul (1947), Abraham Polonsky, who directed Force of
Evil (1948), and Joseph Losey, who remade M
(1951), directors whose work carried some weight and substance, as
they had known hardship and struggle in their lives, having lived through
extraordinary historical events whose experiences helped define their artistic
vision, something Red
Hollywood (1996) director Thom
Andersen suggests is “characterized
by ‘greater psychological and social realism,’ by a skepticism about the
American dream, and by pointed reference to the ‘psychological injuries of
class.’” After becoming dissatisfied by
the conservatism shown by MGM, Dassin signed with Universal Studios after his
contract expired, specifically to work for a newly formed production unit under
the helm of liberal crime journalist Mark Hellinger, who advocated a greater
degree of social realism within the Hollywood crime film, having just produced
Robert Siodmak’s Oscar nominated film noir THE KILLERS (1947), a film that
introduced Burt Lancaster, an actor with outspoken liberal sympathies. Prison movies were most popular in the 1930’s
when dozens of films were made about men serving hard time, coinciding with the
hard times experienced by the general public during the Great Depression,
including George W. Hill’s THE BIG
HOUSE (1930), Mervyn LeRoy’s I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932), Roland
Brown’s HELL’S HIGHWAY (1932), Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING
(1932), and a host of others, all about men trying to survive under oppressive
circumstances. Other subjects explored
by this liberal group of filmmakers were outspoken films that attacked
racism, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, vigilantism, and the misuse of the criminal
justice system.
Enter Jules Dassin, with a script written by Richard Brooks, from a story by Robert Patterson, opening with grim, black and white shots of a solitary, cathedral-like Westgate prison compound surrounded by water, like Riker’s Island, where the austerity of the cold stone walls with an armed security tower rising overhead are subject to a constant deluge of rain, the film aches with an unrelenting sense of despair. Instead of dangerous prisoners in their midst, where it’s every man for themselves in a Darwinian world, the real enemy is the tyrannical rule of a notoriously brutal prison system run by a particularly disreputable, yet power hungry chief guard, Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). What’s immediately apparent is the camaraderie of the inmates, seen welcoming a fellow prisoner back from an extended stint in solitary confinement, where Joe Collins, in a dynamic performance by Lancaster, played with a battle hardened, inner-rage, always seething with intensity in a role that made him a star, immediately sets his sights on escape, driven by a single-minded purpose to get “out,” “Nothing’s OK. It never was and it never will be. Not ‘til we’re out, get it? Out!,” as there’s nothing left for them on the inside, no hope, no future, and no life. Seen as a tight-knit group, where the main characters are introduced, Collins gathers them around as soon as he’s returned back to the cell, including Howard Duff as “Soldier” Becker, John Hoyt as Spencer, a gambler, Jack Overman as Kid Coy, a professional boxer, Whit Bissell as Tom Lister, an embezzler, and Jeff Corey as “Freshman,” where they’re all-in with Joe’s plans. But first there’s another matter to take care of, what to do about the squealer that got Collins sent away in the first place. While Collins visits the prison doctor for an alibi, his cellmates menacingly surround the snitch (James O’Rear) in the metal shop, taunting him with blowtorches, forcing him backwards until he falls into a huge metal-stamping machine that instantly crushes him. So much for prison justice. But that’s just for openers. We see that the beleaguered and ineffectual Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen) is getting threatened to improve discipline by some political hack (Richard Gaines) whose only interest is protecting the governor from scandal, preferring to avoid problems through the use of strong-armed tactics by Captain Munsey to supposedly keep the inmates in line, whose motto is “Kindness is a weakness.” But the doctor, the only voice of conscious throughout the film, who witnesses first-hand the demoralizing effect this has on inmates, speaks up, “I know in medicine that you don’t cure a sick man by making him sicker. In here, you’re returning a man into the world a worse criminal than he came in.”
Realizing that he’s one bad press release away from assuming control of the prison, Munsey deceptively drives Lister to suicide, hounding him that his wife was erroneously filing for divorce, causing him to hang himself in his cell. It’s sadistically cruel moves like this that drive the men to band together and revolt, suddenly scrounging for things they can use as weapons as they plan an all-out escape. However, there’s a brief flashback sequence that connects several of the men to the women they knew on the outside, creating a series of romantic threads, which may or may not be real, as the men have plenty of time mulling over their fates, but they’re intriguing by the brevity, humor, and great camerawork of these sequences, where Spencer is fleeced at gunpoint by his stylish date, Flossie (Anita Colby), taking him for his money and his swanky new car, while Lister embezzles money from his company to give his wife (Ella Raines) a fur coat. Collins needs money for a lifesaving cancer operation, as otherwise his girl (Ann Blyth), who refuses treatment unless Joe is with her, may spend the rest of her dwindling life in a wheelchair, while “Soldier” fondly recalls the Italian woman he met during the war (Yvonne DeCarlo), smuggling food to her resistance faction, willingly taking the rap after she shoots her own father, as he was about to expose the American to nearby Italian soldiers. While essentially the inner thoughts of the men, they offer a completely different vantage point, as we see each of them prior to their arrests. Another unique twist is the use of one inmate named Calypso (Sir Lancelot), who sings all his lines, like a Greek chorus sung to Caribbean Calypso verse — bizarre. Easily the most surreal moment of the film takes place in Munsey’s office to the music of Wagner, Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture - Thielemann / Münchner ... - YouTube (14:42), a clear connection to Nazi concentration camps, as he brutally tortures a Jewish prisoner (Sam Levene) for information by beating him nearly to death using a rubber hose. Featuring outstanding camerawork by William Daniels, once associated exclusively with Greta Garbo, but his work dates back to Erich von Stroheim, the musical score is by Miklós Rósza, one of the great film noir composers. Adding to the visual landscape is the hellish place of work assigned to this group of prisoners, as underneath the prison compound is a giant sewer system, where like Sisyphus, they endlessly excavate for a mud-drenched drainpipe that supposedly goes from one end of the island to the other, but no one is really sure. As this is their only opening to the outside world, this is their avenue of escape. With Munsey agitating prisoners behind the scenes, using stool pigeons as informers, Collins was supposed to align his forces with those of fellow prisoner Gallagher (Charles Bickford), a man of discretion who only signed on after his upcoming parole was revoked “indefinitely.” It becomes a fatalistic exercise in futility once they learn Munsey has taken over as Warden and is aware of their planned escape route, waiting for them with machine guns pointed straight at them, literally daring them to go. Not to be deterred, Collins refuses to be stopped, as this is their only chance. With blistering results, using another stoolie as a human shield, the ensuing battle scene chaos is remarkable, meant to resemble the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz where a prison riot ran out of control for two days following an unsuccessful escape attempt. Fueled by a hatred for fascism, the Spartacus-like revolt was meant to educate and liberate the masses, where the spectacular gory violence of the finale predates Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) by twenty years, with Peck using slo-mo for even greater emphasis, where William Holden’s Pike Bishop declares, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Brute Force, directed by
Jules Dassin | Film review - Time Out
Tom Milne
Despite a loss of
temperature through the flashbacks which let in some female interest, this is
one of Dassin's best films. Less coherent than Siegel's Riot in Cell Block
11 in its challenge to prison conditions, it draws on WWII experience to
draw a powerful analogy between the prison (where Cronyn's sadistic chief guard
beats up prisoners to the strains of Wagner) and a fascist state. With
brutality breeding brutality in this world which the dialogue (script by
Richard Brooks) defines as an existentialist hell from which there is no
escape, Brute Force was a notably violent film in its day. The scene in
which an informer is herded by blow-torches to execution in a steam press still
chills.
Shirtless but Not Burt-less: Hunky Lancaster in Jules Dassin’s Crackling Prison Drama Brute Force – 35mm Kyle A. Westphal from Chicago Northwest Film Society
Is America a nation of laws or a fragile society held together by little more than brute force? The elemental prison backdrop of Brute Force serves as a springboard for an incendiary examination of the postwar American psyche in this grisly thriller. The work of newspaperman-turned-producer Mark Hellinger and a raft of Communists and leftist fellow travelers (director Jules Dassin, screenwriter Richard Brooks, one-man Calypsonian chorus Sir Lancelot, supporting players Art Smith and Roman Bohnen), Brute Force drills down to sociological basics: exploited prisoners, a quasi-fascist jailer, ineffectual civilian control, a none-too-subtle drainpipe to nowhere. Sweaty, frequently shirtless prole Burt Lancaster and the other inmates of Cell R17 plot an improbable escape, their efforts legitimized by the participation of model prisoner Charles Bickford and punched up by patriotic memories of wartime exploits. Standing in their way is Hume Cronyn, a politically ambitious enforcer who cleans his gun with a t-shirt and stages Wagner-scored torture sessions like a Nazi wannabe. Scarcely softened by the domestic flashbacks transparently inserted to make the movie more palatable to women, Brute Force still packs a wallop.
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Prison-break movies
are off-limits in real houses of correction, but the decommissioned Eastern
State is fair game for Secret Cinema's screening of Jules Dassin's high-drama
yarn. Drawn from Richard Brooks' script, Brute Force stars Burt
Lancaster as a rock-jawed inmate with a yen for the outside air and an effetely
effective Hume Cronyn as a sadistic head guard. Dassin liked to marry pulp
forms to socially conscious themes, which sometimes produces a kind of leftist
camp. (I suspect the reference in Barton Fink to a wrestling movie in
which the main character "wrestles with his soul" is a dig at
Dassin's Night and the City.)
Fond of Wellesian high
angles and showy deep focus, Dassin is a relentlessly self-conscious stylist,
amping up the climactic prison riot to gladiatorial proportions, an instinct
that jars with Brooks' desire to make each of his inmates an average Joe,
complete with heart-tugging flashbacks in which their crimes are laid down to
economic need. Dassin would do better with the just-the-facts approach of Rififi,
but William Daniels' cinematography is often stunning, and Cronyn's slyly
menacing performance will come as a shock to those who only remember his kindly
roles.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs
Time is of the essence in Jules Dassin’s BRUTE FORCE. Joe Collins
(Burt Lancaster in an early role) and his maudlin band of misfits
frequently refer to it; as prisoners, they have both too much and too
little, yet their focus isn’t on this trite contradiction but rather exact
measures of said essence. “What time is it?” Collins asks twice during the
film, just minutes before violent conflict. Dassin’s prison noir doesn’t
dwell on long sentences or seemingly longer days; instead, it relies on
the vitality of the moment to anchor its “metaphoric frisson,” as critic
Michael Atkinson calls it in his essay for the film’s Criterion release.
The atmosphere is certainly reflective of its time, when freshly cemented
postwar ideology was fomenting a new kind of political unease. There are
many references to fascism, both historical and fictional; a
brutally ambitious guard is clearly meant to represent, or at least
imitate, Nazism, and the drainpipe where prisoners are sent to work is
Kafkaesque in its contextual ambiguity. Dassin would experience similar
absolutism—he was blacklisted several years later—though whatever
radicalism he was participating in while making BRUTE FORCE apparently
didn’t endear him to it. He later referred to the film as a “really dumb
picture” and remembers saying, “but all these prisoners are such nice
sweet guys—they’re all so lovely—what are they doing in jail!” (Sarcasm
aside, he has a point. This black-and-white, baddies-and-goodies approach
somewhat undermines its convictions.) Still, the emotional depth eclipses
both these amateurish failings and the noirish futility, and it certainly
delivers a message, however unintentional it may be.
Brute
Force (1947) - Articles - TCM.com Mark Frankel
"Those gates only open three times. When you come in,
when you've served your time, or when you're dead!"
- from Brute Force
Producer Mark Hellinger had wanted to make a prison movie for almost a decade,
and when he read an article by a former convict, the basic story of Brute Force (1947) began to take
shape. Hellinger hired San Francisco Examiner reporter Robert Patterson
to come up with the scenario and then brought in Richard Brooks to write the
screenplay. A young screenwriter, Brooks had already worked on two of
Hellinger's productions: The Killers (1946, uncredited) and Swell Guy
(1946). Hellinger also reunited Burt Lancaster with two of his costars from The
Killers: Sam Levene and Charles McGraw. Brooks and Lancaster clearly got
along. At one point, Brooks told
Part film noir and part
Hume Cronyn's portrayal of the sadistic Captain Munsey is one of the highlights
of his film career. Of course, the idea of a final physical confrontation
between the athletic Lancaster and the wispy Cronyn was a bit hard to imagine
as a real contest. As Cronyn recounts in his autobiography: "Burt, who had
at one time been a circus acrobat, was in magnificent physical condition and
weighed about two hundred pounds. He could in reality have picked me up with
one hand and wrung me out like a washrag. As a concession to the casting and
the totally unbelievable match, it was agreed that before the struggle began,
Burt's character should be shot and wounded. Even so, Julie [Dassin] staged one
of the most murderously filthy fights ever photographed, so filled with kicks
to the groin, eye gouging and karate chops that when the scene was cut
together, it was considered altogether too violent for the public and portions
of it were eliminated."
Though ostensibly an indictment of a corrupt prison system, what emerges most
clearly from the film is the sense of utter hopelessness. According to one of
The only respite from the film's unrelenting brutality comes in the four
romanticized flashbacks. At night, after the inmates use their blowtorches to
push James O'Rear into the machine press, the four cellmates reminisce about
the women who, unwittingly or not, put them in prison. Whit Bissell recalls his
wife, Ella Raines (Hail the Conquering Hero, 1944), for whom he juggled
the company's books in an effort to get her a mink coat. John Hoyt bitterly
remembers con woman Anita Colby and the way she played him for a fool. (Colby,
a former fashion model and advertising executive, was the inspiration for Grace
Kelly's character in Rear Window, 1954.) Howard Duff thinks back to his
Italian beauty, Yvonne De Carlo. She had killed her own father in an attempt to
protect Duff, but when the authorities arrived, it was Duff who nobly took the
fall. Finally,
Though today she is chiefly remembered for her roles in The Ten Commandments
(1956) and the TV series The Munsters, at the time De Carlo was one of
Universal's most captivating starlets. And according to her autobiography, her
charms were not lost on the film's star. "I had no doubts that Burt knew
exactly what he wanted, and at the moment it was me." Though
According to Dassin, the flashback sequences were not his idea and though he
vigorously objected to their inclusion in the film, he lost that battle
(presumably to Hellinger).
Dassin and
Though the Production Code Office demanded several cuts to soften what it
called the film's "excessive" brutality, the film's depiction of
violence remained potent, and many critics felt that Hellinger had stepped over
the line. Responding to these critics, Lancaster commented: "If Daumier
knocks off a sketch of a rat eating out a woman's eye, by God, you say it's
art, but if Joe Blow writes it for Hellinger, you say it's obscene. I don't get
it."
Brute Force: Screws and Proles Criterion essay by Michael Atkinson, April 16, 2007
13
of Criterion’s Most Villainous Villains photo gallery, October 31, 2011
Brute Force (1947) - The Criterion Collection
Jules Dassin BRUTE FORCE 1947 -
Center for Studies in American ...
September 23, 20 (pdf)
Deep Focus Review - The Definitives - Brute Force (1947) Brian Eggert
Brute Force (1947) Jules Dassin « Twenty Four Frames John Greco
Criterion
Reflections [David Blakeslee]
includes trailer
Film
Noir of the Week Steve-O
Brute Force (1947) |
PopMatters Tim O’Neil
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Canadian
Cinephile [Jordan Richardson]
Classic Flix Review: Brute Force (1947) - FlixChatter Jack Deth
Shameless Self Expression [Ryan McDonald]
Brute Force (1947) - Jules Dassin - film review - Le Film Guide James Travers
DVD
Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson] also seen here: Brute
Force (1947) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
DVD
Talk - Criterion edition [Jamie S. Rich] condensed version here: Criterion
Confessions
Film
@ The Digital Fix - Brute Force: Criterion Collection Gary Couzens
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
The
QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion collection
The
Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] Criterion collection
MyReviewer
- DVD Review [David Beckett]
Blu-ray.com
[Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Rock
n Reel Rupert, Blu-Ray
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
Curiosity
of a Social Misfit [Patrick Scattergood]
Movie Review: BRUTE FORCE (1947). -
Mystery*File On-Line Steve Lewis
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
BRUTE
FORCE (Jules Dassin, 1947) | Dennis Grunes
Prisonmovies.net [Eric Penumbra]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell, also reviewing BLUE GARDENIA
and THE NAKED CITY
movieshrink.com
[Derek Dorris]
Through
the Shattered Lens [Gary Loggins]
10
great prison break films | BFI
Matthew Thrift from BFI Sight
& Sound, September 11, 2014
Brute
Force review – Philip French on a classic jailbreak drama | Film ... Philip French from The Guardian
The
New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
also seen here: Movie
Review - - THE SCREEN; ' Brute Force,' Prison Thriller, With ...
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Brute Force
(1947 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
10
great prison break films | BFI Matthew Thrift from BFI Sight and Sound, September 11, 2014
10
great London crime films | BFI Michael Pattison from BFI Sight
and Sound, July 22, 2015
THE NAKED CITY
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Despite its reputation, a rather
overrated police-procedure thriller which has gained its seminal status simply
by its accent on ordinariness and by its adherence to the ideal of shooting on
location. In organising the hunt for a brutal murderer, Fitzgerald's detective
is too winsome and hammy, Taylor's assistant merely wooden; thanks be then to Ted de
Corsia as the killer, adding a touch of real nastiness and urgency to the
admittedly well-constructed final chase.
Movie-Vault.com review Ramsey
In retrospect, The Naked City is an odd piece of film
noir. It contains few recognizable stars, was shot completely on location, and
includes real people in supporting roles. As the film attempts to capture a
certain street-level grittiness, there isn't much swank -- no burning Los
Angeles elegance as in The Big Sleep or shadowy, old world decay as in The
Third Man.
The film begins with some unvarnished and rather startling violence, when a
women is coldheartedly murdered in the middle of the night on the Upper East
Side. The case falls into the lap of Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald), a
diminutive Irish homicide lieutenant with a sort of muddled amiability and
clever wit that predates Columbo by nearly thirty years. Muldoon and his team
of flatfoots doggedly pursue their investigation, following lead upon lead,
reaching dead-ends, and getting lucky a time or two. It's all solid police
procedural, and the nature of the plot will feel familiar if you've ever seen
an episode of Law and Order. And like that program, the movie's not
afraid to get up close and offer quiet, desperate moments as when a mother is
faced with the prospect of identifying her daughter's corpse at the city
morgue.
The standout is, of course, the cinematography, for which the film won an
Academy Award. There's plane shots over the city that are simply breathtaking,
especially a view of the
To its credit, The Naked City gave rise to a television show of the same
name, and it's had an obvious influence on a score of police dramas, from Starsky
and Hutch to Hill Street Blues and the aforementioned Law and
Order (which owes some, if not all, of its existence to this film).
Granted, there's an intrusive, annoying voice-over narration done by none other
than the film's producer, in an attempt to glue together some sloppy
storytelling and editing during the opening. But The
The real star of the picture is
Turner Classic Movies review Paul Tatara
"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This
has been one of them."
With that memorably stark declaration, producer Mark Hellinger closes one of
the greatest film noirs of all time, Jules Dassin's The Naked City
(1948). The picture itself is just as hard-edged as its narration, a
groundbreaking detective story shot in raw documentary style amid the bridges
and concrete canyons of
The Naked City opens in tawdry noir style, with the murder of a young
model in her
No doubt about it - this is one great-looking movie. Dassin and Daniels
delivered perhaps the most starkly realized movie of the 1940s. Hellinger
intended the images to resemble tabloid newspaper photographs. But it was
Dassin and Daniels who had the brilliant idea to shoot scenes with a camera
that was hidden inside a van, behind a tinted window. That way, the cast could
cover the sidewalks without passersby even knowing they were taking part in a
movie! The results are a virtual time capsule of life in post-war
Dassin directed other memorable films in the same mold as The Naked City,
including Brute Force (1947), Night and the City (1950), and Thieves'
Highway (1949). But his career in
Nevertheless, even with Dassin at the helm, Hellinger is the most fascinating
person connected to The Naked City. A quick scan of his biography reads
like an elaborate, Damon Runyon-inspired put-on: His first job was as a
reporter for a theatrical publication called, mysteriously enough, Zit's
Weekly. During prohibition, he drank copious amount of brandy and wrote the
first-ever Broadway column, a wildly popular slice-of-life called "About
Town." He soon began dressing in his lifelong uniform of dark blue shirts
and white ties. He was so generous with his money, people would line up on pay
day and wait for him to slide bills into their hands. In 1926, he married a
beautiful showgirl whose actual name was Gladys Glad. In 1931, he wrote
sketches for the Ziegfeld show, Hot Cha. He successfully toured the
vaudeville circuit as an actor for a year. He broadcast football games for
Eventually, Hellinger wrote a couple of books that got sold to the studios out
in
Hellinger dropped dead from a heart attack in 1947, having lived just long
enough to enjoy a successful preview of The Naked City. At long last, he
finally got some sleep.
not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) review
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] condensed version here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [4/5]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5]
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay Carr
DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
DVD In My Pants - Criterion Collection DVD Review Jerry Donaghe
Reel.com DVD review [Jim Hemphill]
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THIEVES HIGHWAY
Great Britain
Jules Dassin's
trendy reputation (and an awful lot of money) was made with Rififi,
Never on Sunday and Topkapi - triumphant European success for a
blacklisted Hollywood talent. But cultists groaned, for the 'real' Dassin was
surely to be found in the baroque and electrifying Brute Force, the
grotesquely Dickensian Night and the City, and - a personal favourite - Thieves'
Highway. AI
Bezzerides' script (from his own novel Thieves' Market) and
the performances of Conte, Cobb, and Cortese (in her American debut) help
restrain Dassin's feverish artistic ambitions in this tale of racketeering in
the California fruit markets. The result slots sleazy eroticism and rigorous
action seamlessly together into a high-grade trucking melo. Nothing more, but
nothing less, which in the '40s was the most triumphant kind of American
success.
While Thieves' Highway's superficially upbeat
ending (reshot, against the filmmakers' wishes, by Fox chief Darryl Zanuck)
might prevent it from being categorized as a genuine noir, Jules Dassin's 1949
melodrama about long-haul truckers—the director's final (and finest) film made
in America before the House Un-American Committee exiled him to Europe—is
nonetheless a bleak portrait of post-WWII despair, corrupt capitalism, and
idealistic disillusionment. Nick (a sturdy Richard Conte) returns home from a
stint overseas as a military mechanic with exotic Asian gifts for his mother,
father, and fiancé, yet from the get-go, Dassin (working from They Drive By Night and Kiss
Me Deadly scribe A.I. Bezzerides' script, based on his novel Thieves
Market) layers this happy reunion with portentous signs of the nasty
reality lurking beneath this cheery suburban facade.
In
his family's sunny kitchen, Nick finds his bride-to-be Polly (Barbara Lawrence)
disappointed with his china doll gift (until she spies the even-more expensive
ring hanging from its arm) and his father legless due to an accident caused by
underhanded San Francisco produce market kingpin Mike Figlia (a devious Lee J.
Cobb, exuding small-time shadiness). Bent on exacting revenge, Nick teams up
with Ed (Millard Mitchell), a trucker currently tending to his dad's rig, and
the duo hatch a two-killings-for-the-price-of-one plan to travel to Frisco,
where they can simultaneously deliver a truckload of sweet, highly coveted
apples and dish out some bitter payback to the rotten Figlia.
With
the exception of the opening scene and Ed's fatal hairpin turn on a winding
highway, Dassin swathes Thieves' Highway's long-haul boys in
claustrophobic compositions and menacing darkness, amplifying the sense of
danger that hangs over Nick's head (whether it be the truck that collapses on
his neck during an impromptu roadside pit stop or the axe hanging from the belt
of Figlia's goon) and the air of doom that follows these desperate nomads as
they hurtle through the night in their rickety rigs. Breakneck close-ups of
speedometers and spinning tires create a propulsive sense of inevitability,
while Italian prostitute (and Figlia crony) Rica's (Valentina Cortese) comment
that Nick's bloody neck wound looks "beautiful" speaks to hers (and,
later, Nick's) reconciliation with life's pain and disappointment. When Nick
tells Rica—whose conniving smile initially says she wants to screw Nick in more
than one way, but ultimately radiates authentic affection—that she looks like
"chipped glass," she responds without a hint of surprise, "Do I?
It took me a long time to get that way."
For
Nick, however, it only takes the film's brutal 94 minutes to devolve from an
enthusiastically optimistic ex-soldier—the misery of war already a fading
memory—to a battle-scarred itinerant hardened by life's callous depravity.
Although Dassin's film is less an anti-capitalist screed than a cynical
portrait of revenge, betrayal, and dubious dealings, money is nonetheless an
insidious force throughout Nick's ordeal, from Figlia's backhanded market
manipulations to Polly's money-grubbing. Like pride and honor, love is also a
commodity with a steep price in Thieves' Highway, and when Nick drives
off into the sunset with Rica, his supposed triumph is colored by the fact that
he's been forever corrupted by his vengeance, his newfound lust for wheeling
and dealing, and the realization that the world—rather than full of pretty
gifts and prettier girls—is a cheerless, degrading labyrinth of treacherous
highways.
Reel.com
DVD review [Pam Grady]
Turner
Classic Movies dvd review Jerry Stafford
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Nate Meyers) dvd review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3/5]
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd
review [4/5] [Criterion Collection]
Movie
Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review
[4/4]
Being
There Magazine [Nathan Williams]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
NIGHT AND THE CITY A 97
Time Out review Tom Milne
Bizarre film noir with Widmark
as a small time nightclub tout trying to hustle his way into the wrestling
rackets, but finding himself the object of a murderous manhunt when his cons
catch up with him. Set in a London through which Widmark spends much of his
time dodging in dark alleyways, it attempts to present the city in
neo-expressionist terms as a grotesque, terrifyingly anonymous trap. Fascinating,
even though the stylised characterisations (like Francis
L Sullivan's obesely outsized nightclub king) remain theoretically
interesting rather than convincing. Inclined to go over the top, it all too
clearly contains the seeds of Dassin's later - and disastrous - pretensions
Night And The
City Movie Review (1950) from Channel 4 Film
Quality
In
1950 American director Jules Dassin fled to
Opening with a shot
of American crook Harry Fabian (Widmark) sprinting down the street, the story
follows his doomed attempt to gain control of
Widmark actually spends a great deal of the film running away from things, both
literally and metaphorically, and his nervous energy infects every scene.
Dassin uses low camera angles to sweep through the gloomy streets and the
wrestling sequence (featuring Lom and Mazurki) has a brutal power and beauty. A
taut plot moves towards a conclusion that's both tense and tragic and though
Dassin would go on to produce rather more ponderous fare, here he's bang on the
mark throughout.
From its definitive title, which succinctly
encapsulates the genre's fundamental gloominess and urbanity, to the inevitably
cataclysmic end for its enterprising protagonist, Night and the City is
no less than the archetypal film noir. Jules Dassin's 1950 masterpiece was his
first movie after being exiled from America for alleged communist politics, and
the unpleasant ordeal seems to have infused his work with a newfound resentment
and pessimism, as the film—about foolhardy scam-artist Harry Fabian (Richard
Widmark) and his ill-advised attempts to become a big shot—brims with anger,
anxiousness, and a shocking dose of unadulterated hatred. Few films are as
wholeheartedly bleak as Night and the City (sharply adapted from Gerald
Kersh's novel by Jo Eisinger), which ignores typical noir elements (an
intricate heist, a femme fatale of some dangerously sexy note) in favor of
watching the wicked, weasel-like Fabian scamper about like a decapitated
chicken that doesn't realize it's already dead. That such nihilistic nastiness
is remotely entertaining is a tribute to Dassin's frantic, expressionistic
portrait of
Richard
Widmark's sweaty, chaotic face—his eyes on the brink of popping out of their
sockets, and his mouth a tight, humorless line that emits a cackle like the
Riddler on speed—is a reservoir of self-loathing and agitated ambition, and the
director shoots his star's maniacal mug in slashing shadows that suggest
Fabian's delusional lack of self-awareness. A two-bit crook who dreams of a
life of "ease and plenty," Fabian finds what he believes to be his
ticket to the top when he persuades legendary Greco-Roman grappler Gregorius
the Great (Stanislaus Zbyszko) to form a wrestling business aimed at toppling
the phony pro-wrestling operation of crime boss (and Gregorius's son) Kristo
(Herbert Lom). However, as the film's opening and closing scenes (set to Franz
Waxman's throbbing, hot-blooded score) convey, Fabian is on the run not just
from those he's screwed (a considerable segment of London's population), but
also from the cold, hard truth that he's a minor-leaguer unfit for the
lawbreaking big time. Fabian's loyal, upstanding girlfriend Mary (Gene Tierney)
is told by her friend Adam (Hugh Marlowe), a wealthy artist and cook whose
domesticity is a counterpoint to Fabian's juvenile, amateurish career of vice,
that her boyfriend is "an artist without an art." Desperate to prove
Adam wrong and validate his calling as a wheeler and dealer, yet completely
incapable of honest self-analysis, Fabian commits noir's cardinal sin by
striving to better his lot in life. The results, predictably, aren't pretty.
Only
a year removed from the more traditional Thieves' Highway, Dassin's
first production abroad is dripping with symbolism, from the constrictive
staircases Widmark rapidly descends (indicative of the direction Fabian's
schemes are headed) to the lethal wrestling match between Gregorius and The
Strangler (a metaphor for the uselessness of Fabian's attempts at social
climbing). Just like his anti-hero, the director is obsessed with
"angles," as his frame doggedly circumscribes Fabian with astringent
architecture and harrowing darkness while amplifying the mood of impending
existential tragedy by refusing to present the character's face in full light.
Meanwhile, Dassin's London is a malevolent urban nightmare, a tangled web of
disorienting murkiness and dastardly double-crosses, and the metropolis's
menacing enormity—just like ruthless Silver Fox club proprietor Phil's (Francis
L. Sullivan) massive girth—forms a discordant visual and thematic contrast with
Fabian's wiry, hyper-kinetic frame. "Harry, you coulda been
anything," a despondent Mary sighs after her lover's foolproof plans have
been torn asunder, but in truth, Fabian—a man who robs and abuses Mary and
callously screws over Phil's untrustworthy entrepreneurial wife Helen (Googie Withers)—is
fulfilling the only destiny he's got. A more apt summation of this vitriolic
hustler comes courtesy of the acidic Kristo, who perceptively recognizes that
Fabian was "born a hustler, and you'll die a hustler." Fabian is
confined by—and doomed to perish in—the endless night and the wicked city, and
thus when Mary, working in a swanky nightclub, sings, "Here's to tomorrow
morning," the unromantic irony is enough to make one choke.
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Film Noir of the Week Geoff
Mayer and Brian McDonnell, from Encyclopedia of Film Noir
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [5/5]
Turner
Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson
Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]
Electric Sheep Magazine Pat Long
DVD
Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
The Spinning Image (Mark Dellar) review
Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[4/5]
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
DVD
Talk (David Walker) dvd review
[4/5]
New York Sun [Gary Giddins] also reviewing 3 other Criterion crime films
The Village Voice [Jim Ridley] A
Tribute for Richard Widmark,
Austin Chronicle [Jerry Renshaw]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
RIFIFI (Du
rififi chez les homes) A 98
France
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Archetypal heist thriller, with a
group of thieves banding together for a daring jewel robbery and falling out
afterwards. Highly acclaimed for the 35-minute robbery sequence, conducted
without a word being spoken, and for the generally downbeat atmosphere, it's
actually rather overrated, lacking the tension, profundity, and vivid
characterisation of similar films by, say, Becker and Melville. Like even the
best of Dassin's work, in fact, it never penetrates beneath its fashionable,
self-conscious surface.
Guardian/Observer review Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian
Jules Dassin's classic jewel-thief caper of 1955 looks as smart as paint,
with its unendurably tense, entirely wordless robbery section, and its
beautifully constructed payoff in the final act, built on failures to
communicate superseded by the cellphone age. In fact, the whole robbery is from
a low-tech, even pre-tech era, larceny on a human scale, hinging simply on
spraying fire-extinguisher fluid into an alarm-grille, which somehow makes it
more real and more exciting.
As ex-con Tony, Jean Servais has
a tremendously cold and haggard look (Ray Milland is the nearest
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Jules Dassin's brilliant depiction of betrayal, revenge,
redemption without joy, and irony. Jules, having been run out of the land of
the free on political grounds, knew something of each. Auguste Le Breton
pitched in on the script based upon his novel, but it's probably fair to say
that the latter work was coloured as a Dassin statement. And it is. It's
difficult to imagine a more comprehensive two-hour indictment of capitalism; it
even corrupts the criminals! As a secondary concern it then turns out that the
film is an utter technical masterpiece. The realism that already characterized
Dassin's better work is brought to critical mass in the famous 28 minute
robbery, a scene delivered without any dialogue or music. The next thing is
that when the music returns, when cinematic devices return, Dassin/Breton
sustain the horriffic level of suspense through to the darkest comedy of a
conclusion; so dark that it's not even funny. It is not, of course, supposed to
be. There may be something humorous about a talented artist giving American
fascists the finger, and then being welcomed with an enormous budget and all of
the cinematic talent in France (and England, and Italy, and Switzerland, and
Greece)...but, it's really not funny. Jules got the performances that he both
deserved and demanded from Jean Servais, Carl Mohner, Robert Manuel, Janine
Darcey, Pierre Grasset, and Marie Sabouret. Dassin himself (billed as Perlo
Vita) portrays a safecracker who folds under pressure and names names, and is
then sadly, but summarily, executed by Servais. The reality behind the film is
the legacy of Dassin executing that of Edward Dmytryk. Dassin lays the
foundation for Dylan's law of gangsterism ("to live outside the law/you
must be honest"), by demonstrating that to live outside the law you must
live outside the law, and all that entails. It's a world that Dassin knows
something about. It's a dark world inhabited by innumerable spirits of
attractively evil undercurrents. And he says that money is the only one.
Big House
Film (Roger Westcombe) review
As a French production made by an American movie veteran, Rififi
forges a world where the Hays Code of censorship never existed and
Classic
What director Jean-Pierre Melville synthesised from the French side (witness his bar in Le Doulos based on American models never seen in a French setting), Dassin conjures up from the perspective of the left-hand side of the Atlantic with his Hollywood nightclub architecture, echoing to the strains of doleful Parisian blues in Rififi. Here a chanteuse sings the film’s eponymous song, and gives us some clues as to its elusive meaning: "slugging it out" is one which, in context, may mean rough love play, but ultimately its point is its very unknowability to all but the initiates – the ‘gang’.
We know we’re moving into a different cinematic world in the key
confrontation scene that comes early between wronged gangster ‘the Stephanois’
(Belgian actor Jean Servais) and his ex-squeeze, Mado (Marie Sabouret), who
betrayed him to police. He demands compensation through taking her jewellery and,
as she sheds the baubles, his next demand - for her coat - turns power to
eroticism, brought home as she continues to shed… Nothing is seen, all is
suggested, but it’s a vengeful, domineering (and hence political) assault that
wouldn’t even have reached American censors, let alone been passed by
them. Coming after the familiarity and comfort of the
Sex rears its head again as the gang members bid farewell to their loved
ones before the heist through erogenous touching in scenes that have a truth in
them that can’t be denied, yet would never have been contemplated in 1950s
Music plays a big part, especially for a film famed for its ‘silence’, in Americanising Rififi. We are unknowingly prepared for the unvoiced drama to come when seeing the heist’s foundations being carefully laid - in a montage of mime! This extraordinary sequence of preparation is driven by breathless music – even the safecracker (played by Dassin himself) is seen as a cash-paying jewellery customer – completely sans dialogue. How very French this must have seemed from an American point of view. It’s a short but lovely sequence – no wonder we are barracking for the crooks!
The ‘silence’ of the fabled heist sequence glides in imperceptibly; it’s almost an elision. This setpiece is choreographed to perfection – it’s a ballet of teamwork, camaraderie and cunning, building inexorably without a wasted moment. And because it’s character-driven, it grows organically out of the narrative of gangland connectivity, rather than being dropped in with bookends as in later copies of this sequence like The Hot Rock (1972) and Dassin’s own, regrettable reprise, Topkapi (1964). Rififi ‘s famed sequence remains legendary not because it was first but because of its humanity, all eye contact, frailties and egos in full flight.
As the gang members’ nerves stretch tauter, the shadows steadily deepen, the camera angles skewing more rakishly off level. But it’s the ever-present sound that drives our tension – grinding saws, stepping feet, breathing bodies – we’re there! (Talk about mime!)
Stunning cinematography by Philipe Agostini (who also shot 1939’s Le Jour Se Lève) has echoes of The Third Man in its rococo noir: European wedding-cake architecture dramatised in destabilising fields of light and acute, ink-black voids. Attention to detail comes in their leader smoking at the crime scene but holding on to the match – forensics won’t get any breaks from these guys!
The ultimate putdown of police is their near-total absence (as it’s gangsters who initiate and make the running on ‘investigations’) which, like Fritz Lang’s M (1931), implies a lawlessness closer to jungle rule than constitutional – an unsurprising view for someone like Dassin hounded from their country by the kangaroo court of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Who can blame Dassin for running a dialectic between
The final death ride, in a ‘49 Oldsmobile ragtop (almost certainly the director’s personal ride), with the rescued boy in his cowboy suit enjoying his toy pistol waving shenanigans, oblivious to the dying gangster at the wheel, mocks the American tough guy aesthetic. Its stunning visual design has a subtlety and economy that leaves the Hays Code ‘crime must not be seen to pay’ admonitions standing exposed for their artlessness. But at the climax there is also a moment of paternal tenderness, recalling the fadeout of the American noir classic Double Indemnity (1944) in which Edward G.Robinson cradles the dying Fred MacMurray. It ties together two works of a mutually reinforcing canon, of which Rififi may be one of its ultimate distillations.
CINEASTE Paul Arthur
Alternative Film Guide [Doug Johnson]
Bands of Outsiders - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 - Village Voice J. Hoberman
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Tom Block
The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Todd Doogan
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]
VideoVista review Debbie Moon
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4.5/5]
Reel.com DVD review [Juliet Clark]
DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review
hybridmagazine.com review Jonpaul Guinn
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
NEVER ON SUNDAY (Pote tin Kyriaki)
Greece
Never on Sunday
Movie Review (1960) from Channel 4 Film
Utterly delightful comedy that is like a winning blend of Pygmalion and
Pretty Woman. Dassin is the American scholar who comes to Greece, meets Mercouri's
uncouth prostitute and offers to spend the next fortnight educating her in the
finer aspects of her country's culture - but will she rise to the challenge?
Just as memorable for its Oscar-winning soundtrack as it is for Mercouri's
hooker with a heart - a truly unique creation.
Ilya is the happy hooker of
Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller
The Greek film industry took center stage in 1960 with the
release of the off-beat romantic comedy, Never on Sunday. The film led to
increases in tourism and location shooting there. But not only was it the
product of an American writer-director's imagination, but it was even resented
by many in its country of origin.
Never on Sunday was the brainchild of American expatriate Jules Dassin. After a
promising start in Hollywood as director of such acclaimed film noirs as Brute
Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), Dassin had been subpoenaed
by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because of his liberal
politics. Because he was busy directing a play, he received a postponement,
only to discover that he had been blacklisted without ever having testified.
Unable to work in the U.S., he fled to Europe, where he scored an international
hit in 1955 with the caper film Rififi.
Eventually, he settled in Greece, where he fell in love with actress Melina
Mercouri after casting her in his religious allegory He Who Must Die
(1957). Wanting to boost both his own career and hers, he set out to create a
vehicle for her that would capture the international market. The result was Never
on Sunday, the comic romance of an American tourist (Dassin) who sets out to
reform a small-town prostitute (Mercouri) only to make her miserable. In an
effort to assure the film's U.S. success, he even wrote most of the scenes in
English, using the tourist's ignorance of the Greek language as an excuse.
With no major producers interested in the project initially, Dassin kept his
budget low, a mere $125,000, which adjusted for inflation still comes out to
less than a million in current dollars. One clever move on his part was
assigning the music score to Manos Hadjidakis, a Greek composer noted for his
work in developing new forms for the traditional instrument, the bazouki.
The result was a huge hit. With Hadjidakis' score and hit title song selling
records, the film went on to gross almost $4 million in the U.S. alone, despite
-- or maybe because of -- the fact that it was condemned by the Catholic
Church's Legion of Decency. When Atlanta's local censor tried to ban the film,
the distributor, United Artists, had the decision reversed in the courts,
marking one of the first successful challenges of the city's censorship law.
Moreover, the film scored well with critics. Mercouri won Best Actress honors
at the Cannes Film Festival, and the picture picked up five Oscar® nominations:
Best Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Costumes and Best Song. That
was when the real controversy started. Many Hollywood old-timers were appalled
that any foreign film, much less one showing a positive view of prostitution,
should knock more wholesome American fare out of the running. In a year marked
by some embarrassingly blatant campaigns for the Oscar®, Mercouri made headlines
when she refused to heed United Artists executives who urged her to fight for
the award. She complained to newspaper columnist Art Buchwald, "I'm not a
Kennedy. I'm an actress, not a politician. What do they want me to do -- ring
doorbells in Beverly Hills??" With Elizabeth Taylor a shoo-in for Butterfield
8 (1960) after her near death from pneumonia, Mercouri and Dassin decided
to wait out the awards in Paris.
There also were complaints about Hadjidakis's nomination for the title song.
Some pointed out that the song had achieved its greatest popularity with an
English lyric by Billy Towne, who was not eligible for the award since his
version was not the one heard in the film. Others complained that Hadjidakis
had stolen his melody from a Greek folk song. Nonetheless, on Oscar® night, he
came out the film's only winner. Even then there were problems. Through a
communications snafu, Hadjidakis was not there, nor had French producer Raoul
J. Levy been notified that he had been asked to accept any of the film's
Academy Awards®. When Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows announced the Best Song
winner, nobody came to the podium. After a few quips from Allen ("I guess
he won't be here until Sunday."), host Bob Hope came on and tried to claim
the award, joking "This is the moment I've been waiting for." But
Meadows simply took it herself and made sure it got to the composer.
Ironically, in all the furor about the film's foreign production and permissive
subject matter, nobody had noticed Dassin's sly criticism of the U.S. that
underlay the plot. He had intended the film as a political allegory about
America's penchant for forcing its values on other countries with no regard for
their native cultures, but people were too busy laughing to notice. Audiences
continue to enjoy Never on Sunday, through television showings (when the film
aired on network television, they had to cut one scene in which Mercouri's
character helps a young sailor lose his virginity) and a Broadway musical
adaptation called Ilya, Darling. Mercouri re-created her film role, with
music once again by Hadjidakis and script and direction by Dassin. Shortly
after her Broadway triumph, however, the film began drawing fire from a new
generation of Greek artists who complained that as a result of its success, the
only movies people wanted to see about Greece were those perpetuating the
stereotype of the happy, earthy Greek peasant.
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Film Freak Central review [Walter Chaw]
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Davaa, Byambasuren and Luigi Falorni
THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL (Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel)
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Pitched somewhere between a Disney "true life
adventure" and a Jean-Jacques Annaud natural world drama, "The Story
of the Weeping Camel" is (in the words of filmmakers Byambasuren Dava and
Luigi Falorni) a "narrative documentary." That is to say, their
portrait of a family of nomadic shepherds in the
The real life drama that gives the film its title, however,
is (as they say in the reality TV business) unscripted. In the early spring
birthing season, as the camels, goats and sheep of the family herd go into
labor, a pregnant camel endures a particularly difficult delivery. (At one
point in midbirth, she walks away with the calf's legs dangling out of her.)
The offspring, a rare white camel with an empty flop of
skin where the humps will eventually take shape, teeters and shakes on its
spindly legs and moves in to nurse. The mother rejects her calf, refusing to
let it suckle, so shepherds Ikchee (Ikhbayar Amgaabazar) and Odgoo (Odgerel
Ayusch) send their sons to bring a musician to perform an ancient ritual that,
tradition maintains, will bond the two.
It plays out like a naturalistic fable in an austere,
timeless land in which ancient traditions co-exist with modern technology. The
route to the local community center is marked by power lines running through
the desert, and the boys take a break on their journey to watch a neighbor's
satellite TV.
The gentle glimpses of simple family life serve largely as
a backdrop to the natural drama and at times feel idealized through the Western
eye of the camera lens. Yet there is a warmth and simplicity in the
presentation that feels honest and respectful and a captivating beauty to their
desert world.
The live camel birth (shown in all of its excruciating
beauty) is enthralling, and the cultural details, however staged, provide a
vivid window into a world that is fast disappearing.
The Village Voice [Leslie Camhi]
"So now, my children, I'll tell you the legend of the camel," a Mongolian grandfather intones as The Story of the Weeping Camel opens. This magical film, a "narrative documentary" (or so its makers call it) with the aura of a fairy tale, unfolds amid the scrubby brushland of the Gobi Desert, where nomads live in yurts, ride camels, and tend to herds of sheep and goats as they have for centuries. The granddaughter of nomads, Byambasuren Davaa (who co-wrote and -directed the film with Luigi Falorni) was inspired by a movie she remembered from her Mongolian childhood about a mother camel who rejects her newborn calf, before the two are reconciled by means of an ancient musical ceremony.
Influenced by classic documentaries such as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Davaa and Falorni cast a nomadic family of four generations living in three yurts, who play themselves in sometimes carefully planned scenarios. Shooting this family in the southern Gobi during the brief camel-birthing season, the filmmakers stumbled across the story they were seeking. As Camel begins, the lovely Odgoo (Odgerel Ayusch) and her husband, Ikchee (Ikhbayar Amgaabazar), along with their parents, grandparents, and two young sons, are assisting the animals in their labors. All goes well until the difficult birth of a beautiful white calf (called Botok) stretches over two days, straining the mother camel (played by a dromedary named Ingen Temme) to her limits.
Beyond its rare visions of remote vistas, Camel's great charm lies in its seeming simplicity. The camera records the events of the day—from a little girl's tears to an afternoon sandstorm—with a childlike clarity and curiosity. When Odgoo's sons set out on camelback to the nearest settlement (some 50 kilometers away), to find the violinist needed to heal the rift between mother and baby, the camera notes the outside world's encroachments on a traditional lifestyle—satellite dishes, video games, the ubiquitous motorcycles that serve as alternatives to animal transportation. But these are offered without heavy-handed judgments; the filmmakers merely note the coexistence of modernity and ritual.
Sometimes the nearly too perfect images border on kitsch. But with its stately pacing (and consistent with its broader theme about the need for belonging), Camel conveys a sense of an indigenous culture whose relationship to the earth and to nature is shaped not by conquest but by collaboration. Perhaps that's why the film's camel stars are also credited as performers. Living alongside these otherworldly creatures, whose stubborn independence shines through their wild, bovine eyes, must inspire a profound respect. Infinitely serviceable tanks of the desert, built to withstand the harshest climatic conditions, they may be coaxed, but never forced. And when they weep, their tears seem real.
Filmjourney Doug Cummings
The Story Of The Weeping Camel Gerald Peary
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)
Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]
Erasing Clouds Anna Battista
filmcritic.com Norm Schrager
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit)
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
Daves, Delmar
Delmer
Daves - Film Comment Bertrand Tavernier from Film
Comment, January/February 2003
Delmer Daves is the most forgotten of the American directors championed by French film critics in the Fifties—why? The reasons have little to do with his true stature as a filmmaker. He was unlucky enough to end his career with a string of Warners sudsers that seemed sorely lacking in ambition (although a good deal of them are visually quite remarkable). Some of his masterpieces are westerns, a genre that has now fallen back into disrepute. He rarely ventured into noir territory, and when he did, he stood the genre on its head. To make matters worse, he had given few interviews by the time he died in 1977. As a result, his best films are seldom shown, and hardly any of them are available on video or DVD.
To be sure, one shouldn't gloss over his more tentative efforts (Broken Arrow, for instance, is less inspired than his subsequent westerns, and probably would have benefited from the camera eye of Winton C. Hoch, who shot Bird of Paradise), the reluctantly accepted assignments (Demetrius and the Gladiators, A Kiss in the Dark), and hopeless failures (Never Let Me Go or The Battle of the Villa Fiorita). Not to mention the weaknesses resulting from period constraints and studio-imposed actors (Dennis Morgan in To the Victor; Alan Ladd in Drum Beat; and Troy Donahue, whose ubiquity in the late films goes a long way towards accounting for Daves's unfairly low critical status).
Such flaws, however, pale in comparison with the stunning originality of Daves's style, handling of dramatic structure, and approach to genre, which set him apart from his contemporaries.
What first impresses the viewer is Daves's attention to landscape, to nature, expressed in shots that intimately and sometimes inextricably mingle lyricism and realism. He actually insisted on personally supervising the kind of material many Hollywood filmmakers would leave to second-unit directors—extreme long shots, transitional moments filmed at dawn or twilight. For one setup in To the Victor (48), he spent a whole night on the Trocadero Esplanade in Paris, and, as he wrote to me, “it was worth the trouble.”
One recalls from his work an immense and spectacular variety of landscapes, sometimes within the same film—and not only in the westerns but in a lyrical melodrama like The Red House (47), an urban film noir like Dark Passage (47), or Parrish (61), a soap opera whose one redeeming feature is its use of exteriors. Jubal (56), for instance, derives part of its power and originality from its diversity of locations, ranging from the dramatic bareness of the opening shots to the elegiac forest of the Felicia Farr sequences, with each new locale appearing to modify the approach and construction of the narrative and shape feelings and emotions. Landscape is not just a setting for the action—it becomes part of it, its secret driving force. I have never forgotten the underbrush, the craggy slopes, the torrent of The Last Wagon (56), the parched, cracked soil in 3:10 to Yuma (57), the Modoc camp in Drum Beat (54), the beach graveyard in To the Victor, the gold-mining camp overlooked by Gary Cooper's small cabin in The Hanging Tree (59). All these locales are pregnant with meaning (more poetic than symbolic), filmed with a lyrical, emotional power but totally devoid of the picturesque. Daves's is not a tourist's eye—his ambition is to weave an organic link between a scene's inner feeling and its location. In Bird of Paradise (51), the black, gleaming sand of the beach where Louis Jourdan lands seems to foreshadow the dark, painful mood of his encounter with Everett Sloane, a magnificent Stevensonian character. Later in the same film, the basalt-colored rocky spur on which Jeff Chandler confronts the high priest imparts genuine solemnity to the scene. In Drum Beat, the windswept plateaus provide a visual counterpart to the thorny discussions surrounding the peace treaty. Doc Frail's cabin overhanging the small mining town in The Hanging Tree, connoting exclusion, reclusion, and domination, speaks volumes about the contradictions that tear him apart.
Nature in Daves's films is is not imparted with the grandeur, the epic theatricality so admired in Ford, who manages to convince us that one could farm and raise cattle in Monument Valley, a thoroughly unrealistic proposition. Daves does not mythologize Nature but befriends it, the way his characters do, at least those who must live or survive in it. His signature camera moves—crane shots, lateral tracking shots, which show his extraordinary mastery of space—are movements of integration: of character within community, landscape, and setting—and of emotional entrenchment (unlike Anthony Mann's, whose direction, one might say, is founded on movements of opposition, dramatizing the difficulty of an ascent or the imminence of danger). As Jacques Lourcelles has noted, Daves's crane shots “which often have no immediate, logical connection with the plot, magnify the emotions which in turn help the spectator commune with the landscape.”
To befriend Nature, however, is not to idealize it. While Daves's Nature may provide a field for apprenticeship (if one knows how to look at it), it isn't necessarily a realm of purification and redemption counterposed to a corrupt and corrupting civilization.
Such Bible-tinged ideological discourse, with frequent populist and conservative undertones, has inspired much of American cinema past and present and underlies key works, whether they manage to transcend it (like The Birth of a Nation, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now) or not. It is interesting to note that a number of Hollywood emigrés—Sjöstrom, Lang, Tourneur, de Toth, Preminger, Renoir, Boorman—have challenged, diluted, or subverted this creed.
Daves is closer to them (and to progressives or liberals like Ray, Brooks, and Polonsky) than he is to Griffith and Vidor. Nature as he sees it is at once beautiful and cruel, blind and magnificent, deadly and consoling. It may, with the help of Comanche Todd (Richard Widmark), contribute to opening the eyes and erasing the prejudices of the adolescents in The Last Wagon, but it can also drive a farmer (Van Heflin in 3:10 to Yuma) to the brink of ruin and force him to accept a lethal assignment. In Bird of Paradise, an elegiac scene is interrupted by blood suddenly streaming into the water, announcing Debra Paget's death. Living close to Nature does not confer any superiority. The ranchers and country folk in Broken Arrow suddenly turn into a racist lynch mob, undermining the peace effort; the small religious community in Jubal has its Judas; and bigots and hypocrites poison the atmosphere of the gold mining camp in The Hanging Tree, a film that eschews moral oversimplification throughout, opposing complex, conflicted characters played by Cooper and Karl Malden, or George C. Scott's terrifying Fundamentalist preacher. In this film, Nature plays an extremely complex role, either as savior or destroyer. Although a thunderstorm and the fall of a tree unearth gold, the consequences are extreme: only by giving up the gold can Maria Schell save Cooper from hanging. Nature should not dictate behavior, Daves suggests; rather, human beings, as they conquer it, should learn how to discover the values that underlie their lives. This, ultimately, is the subject of Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree . . .
As a logical consequence, the City and Civilization are not systematically depicted as noxious, corrupting entities, as in, say, Capra. Daves challenges this simplistic vision, upsetting many a cliché, and subverting fundamental aspects of certain genres in the process. Thus Dark Passage, a truly unique film, completely ignores the rules of the urban noir. As I and Jean-Pierre Coursodon noted in 50 years of American Cinema, “Curiously, despite the overabundance of bad breaks the protagonist is dealt by fate, the city (here San Francisco) doesn't have the threatening presence it usually does in film noir. It is on the street, at night, that Bogart's Vincent Parry meets the providential taxi driver, a kind of good fairy from the urban shadows, who will grant his wish of invisibility. And the endless staircase he climbs after his operation leads to Irene’s apartment, a refuge that protects him from danger.” The city may also represent shelter, and even redemption, as in Pride of the Marines (45).
Progress, represented by civilization, science, and knowledge, is a positive force for Daves, unlike Hawks. He shows immense respect for the psychologists in Pride of the Marines, a masterpiece of the kind of progressive, liberal cinema that was wrecked by the blacklist. He sides with them against the John Garfield character, an unusual stance in cinema of that period. Of course, writer Albert Maltz's contribution shouldn't be underestimated; Communist or liberal screenwriters and authors reacted against Hollywood's widespread anti-intellectualism (still prevalent today), the tendency to ridicule scholars, scientists, and practically anyone who might pass for high-brow. While the odd-looking, disquieting surgeon in Dark Passage seems to belong to that tradition at first, in the end he turns out to be quite efficient.
Respect for knowledge, education, and culture is felt in practically all of Daves's films. In his remake of Bird of Paradise he introduced the essential character, played by Jeff Chandler, of a Kanaka who explains to Frenchman Louis Jourdan all that makes the richness of his people. Many of his characters have attended a university (usually Stanford, Daves's own alma mater). Henry Fonda struggles to send his son to college in Spencer's Mountain (63), and the others, those who, in Al Schmitt's words in Pride of the Marines, are “less than ordinary men,” won't have a chance of making it until they accept that they must learn and open themselves to the world. Ignorance is belittling. The true Davesian hero is one who seeks, who educates himself through the study of various races and cultures, and who fights prejudice and the racist or puritanical blindness perfectly embodied by Jack Elam in Bird of Paradise or Constance Ford in A Summer Place (59). “To understand is to love,” Daves said to me, a creed that stands apart in a cinema that has often advocated isolationism, withdrawal, and nationalist self-sufficiency.
Daves loves America and knows how to make us share his feelings, but he also views the rest of the world with the same respect. In his cinema, foreigners are on equal moral and emotional footing with everyone else. He freely grants them an identity, a right to exist. He strongly reacted to DeMille's mockery of Wilder's and Wyler's foreign accents during a notorious Screen Directors Guild meeting in 1950, and berated him for his shameful xenophobic statements. Although a Republican, Daves worked with Communist screenwriter Maltz three times: Destination Tokyo (43), Pride of the Marines, and Broken Arrow.
Daves also stands apart from his contemporaries, and even more so from today's filmmakers, in his refusal to promote and extol individualism, placing rum closer to the European émigrés filmmakers, but also to Ford and his cult of public service. Both directors reject solitary heroes, favoring characters who are integrated into a community (as distinct from Hawks's small groups that are cut off from the rest of the world even as they crisscross it). They work with and for this community, and those who ignore it are challenged and questioned. “Nobody stands alone,” the nurse in Pride of the Marines tells John Garfield, who rejects all outside help. Maria Schell manages to convince Gary Cooper of the same thing in The Hanging Tree. No Daves character makes it on his own, whether negotiating a peace treaty, getting an outlaw onto the train in Yuma, or surviving a gunfight. It's only thanks to Charles Bronson, who throws him a weapon (a lightning-fast panning shot links the two men) that Glenn Ford wins the shootout in Jubal. He also needs help from several others—Felicia Farr, Valerie French, the small religious community—in order to escape his pursuers.
Howard Hawks, that most individualistic of directors, criticized 3:10 to Yuma, challenging everything that makes the film strong and original, and misreading the plot in the process: “The sheriff caught a prisoner, and the prisoner taunted him… saying, 'Wait till my friends catch up with you.' And I said, That's a lot of nonsense, the sheriff would say, 'You better hope your friends don't catch up with you, cause you'll be the first man to die.'” Van Heflin, however; is not a sheriff, a “professional” accustomed to killing (neither has he “caught” the prisoner), but a farmer forced by economic circumstances to accept the job of guarding the outlaw and putting him on the train to the penitentiary. Hence, everything that makes the character so moving, so original for its time, so close to us, his hesitations, his fears, his reluctance to use violence, as well as his determination to defend his community, all justify his final decision, imparting so much power to his confrontation with Glenn Ford.
This acknowledgment of other cultures and respect for collective consciousness account for other peculiarities of Daves's work, such as his devoting two entire films to something that westerns usually dispatch with a couple of scenes: the discussions and negotiations that go into a peace treaty. For Daves, causes, and particularly consequences, are as important as the events themselves—if not more so. Action scenes and moments of violence are usually swift, even lightning-fast: the ambush in which Debra Paget is killed is shown in just a few splendid shots to which Daves grants less emphasis than to those describing Glenn Ford's reaction to his discovery of Borgnine's dead body in Jubal. He certainly knows how to film violence—the dark, chilling scene in which Cooper kills Karl Malden, admirably shot in movement (The Hanging Tree) and Ford's cold-blooded murder of the stagecoach driver (3:10 to Yuma) would suffice to prove it. But he pays more attention to what brought the violence about, or to its results. For Daves, a battle is an opportunity to show lines of wounded soldiers and a retreating army (particularly in Drum Beat, whose magnificent shots are worthy of Ford). Pride of the Marines's extraordinary battle sequence, perhaps the most powerful in the genre alongside the one in Andre de Toth's Monkey on My Back, would be the climax of most other war films. Daves and Maltz follow it with what turns out to be the real subject of the film, the individual's discovery of everyday courage. This is civilian courage, very different from military heroics—a blind man's realization that he belongs to a whole social universe he had always taken for granted. It's one man's discovery of responsibility.
Several of Daves's films show characters struggling for survival, paying the price for a moment of violence or madness—Everett Sloane in Bird of Paradise, Widmark in The Last Wagon—or endeavoring to relearn how to live, like Glenn Ford in Jubal. At least three of his films deal with themes of blindness and healing: Pride of the Marines, Dark Passage, and The Hanging Tree.
It's easy to see how such a cinema might seem alien to fans of contemporary Hollywood, which seems to have forsaken the notion of consequences or responsibility (the lack of reaction shots in recent movies is a phenomenon worthy of study) in favor of pyrotechnics and virtual games in which digital effects, unlike the tracking shots of yore, are divorced from ethics.
If a single scene could summarize Daves's cinema, images of peace and quiet come to mind: Debra Paget emerging from the water, filmed in a devastating tracking shot, and lying down beside James Stewart (Broken Arrow); the wedding in the same film: “You will no longer fear the rain, for he will protect you, you will no longer fear the cold, for she will warm you,” a fine, faithful adaptation of the scene as described in Elliott Arnold's novel; the moving delicacy of the love scene between an outlaw and a former singer sick with TB (3:10 to Yuma), an admirable moment that broke one of the era's major censorship taboos. Glenn Ford and Felicia Farr are immediately attracted to each other, and a little while later we sense that they have just made love. The young woman shows no trace of guilt or regret, quite the opposite. She also accepts the fact that they won't see each other again (“I'll keep a beautiful memory”), and when Glenn Ford is arrested, she opens the stagecoach door for him—a heartrending shot—in defiance of the whole town. Beautifully staged and photographed, such scenes are unique in a genre that usually gave short shrift to female characters. Equally lyrical are the discreet, touching parting on a railroad station platform in Pride of the Marines and, a few minutes earlier, Garfield's declaration to Eleanor Parker: “I like the way you stand up to me. I like the way you curl up in a car sitting. I like the way you don't jabber all the time and you sit quiet. I like the way you laugh at my corny jokes. I like the way you listen. I like it when you say you're gonna do something, you do it, and you don't make up a 101 of silly excuses …. “
ndeed, women's faces are what I feel like singling out the most in Daves's films: Leora Dana in the pouring rain (3:10 to Yuma); Felicia Farr, sublime in three films; Genevieve Page, absolutely magnificent in Youngblood Hawke (64), whose character is handled with such respect and dignity that it thankfully upsets the conventions of an excessively traditional narrative; Maria Schell taking her first steps on the hill above the village (The Hanging Tree) . . . It is a rare Daves film indeed that does not boast some luminous portrait of a woman, or a great love scene; many of his actresses have found their best roles under his direction.
No American director is more alien to the cult of machismo, to cynical manipulation. More often than not, women are the driving force, or the filmmaker’s mouthpiece; they challenge the film's heroes, educate them in matters of the heart, without any hypocrisy or puritanism. The emotional power and lyricism with which Daves endows his female characters make him a worthy successor to Borzage. Indeed, if one must compare Daves with another director, it should be Borzage, or McCarey (for whom he wrote the splendid Love Affair), especially the McCarey of Make Way for Tomorrow, rather than with Mann. Daves share with Borzage “a certain naïveté, or rather a desire not to be influenced or censured by fear of ridicule” (Lourcelles). They both favor feeling over action, to the extent that the characteristics of certain genres become diluted, as film noir is in Dark Passage. Seldom has a film felt so dreamlike. Eschewing banal gestures toward verisimilitude, Daves's own adaptation of David Goodis's novel immerses us in an eerie atmosphere that makes the most unlikely encounters and coincidences seem quite ordinary—right up to a fairy-tale happy ending, invented by Daves (this wonderful conclusion was highly praised by the Surrealists, who saw it as a perfect illustration of the triumph of Breton's cherished concept of amour fou). Far from emphasizing gloom and despair in the pessimistic noir tradition, Daves makes up for his hero's every bad break with a fantastic stroke of luck (none of his encounters is indifferent; they're all either catastrophic or providential). The motherliness of the Bacall character and Bogart's enforced passivity make for an uncharacteristic type of relationship, quite different from their first two outings together. Instead of the erotic tension and seduction games of the Hawks films, gentle tenderness prevails—which probably accounts for Dark Passage's comparative obscurity. Again in contrast to Hawks, the depth of feeling between Daves's characters is such that their love seems impervious to hardships, to the rust of time—thus Van Heflin and Leora Dana in 3:10 to Yuma are a truly adult couple, bruised by the rigors of life but enduring (one is reminded of the relationships between men and women in Grémillon's films, especially The Sky Is Yours). Only death can destroy such love, as it does in Broken Arrow and Bird of Paradise. Daves, moreover, rejected the latter film's Hays Code—and studio-imposed ending. He found it revolting that interracial lovers always had to die. Daves's kinship to Borzage (and sometimes to Sirk and Mitchell Leisen too) is felt in all the late melodramas, especially, I think, in Youngblood Hawke. But traces of it can be found in all his films—it is the core of Broken Arrow, elegiac lyricism was quite foreign to the genre at the time, and worthy of Lucky Star or Man's Castle. One might argue that Dave's reinvention of film noir and the western was as revolutionary, although not as conspicuous, as those of Mann and Ray.
The Hanging Tree, a fine adaptation by Wendell Mayes and Halsted Welles of the equally fine Dorothy Johnson novel, is as groundbreaking in terms of genre as Dark Passage, from which it borrowed certain of the earlier film's relationships and situations and then reversed them: the womb-like house, a refuge located on top of a hill, a disabled character protected by another place (also found in The Red House). The narrative becomes a kind of dark fantasy, full of shadows, ghost, and houses set on fire, in the British Gothic fiction tradition.
One could not conclude an article on Daves without praising the constant and often sublime beauty of his photography, whose paradoxical style, at once realistic (even to the point of rejecting makeup) and theatrical, harmoniously combines a documentary approach with near-baroque experiments: The Hanging Tree, Bird of Paradise, The Last Wagon and the night scenes in Cowboy are exemplary instances of this felicitous mingling. Let’s not forget, of course, 3:10 to Yuma: the importance of shadows, the refusal to soften contrast with filters, the attention to the parched, cracked soil. Cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. told me that of all the directors he worked with, Daves was, along with Welles, and de Toth during certain sequences, the one with whom he most closely collaborated with on the visual style of his films, on their photographic texture. Drum Beat has a breathtaking visual splendor that paradoxically underscores the meditative, melancholy quality of the best scenes and compensates for the weakness of the initial premise and the performances. The Red House, as seen in the recent restoration by the Cinématheque Française, reveals an equally remarkable visual quality.
On a personal note, I could add that I knew Daves and that we corresponded quite often. I received his first letter in August 1960 (he was the first director who responded to me) and we met several times Paris and California. I remember his lust for life, his insatiable curiosity, his warmth, how highly cultured he was. One of his most surprising traits, one which astounded my children, was his talent as a forger: he could imitate any signature, any calligraphic style. He amused himself by painting the signs for the inns in his historical films, and I can still see him drawing and engraving a “Certificate of Existence” covered with unicorns and vine leaves for my son Nils. I had blocked out all these images, these recollections, banished them from my memory after his death. Now they resurface as if out of the mist, like the red cab at the end of Pride of the Marines. Of course, they are much less vivid than the images from his films that feed my reveries, such as those miraculous ones that close—or should one say open up?—Dark Passage: an unseen Peru, the ocean, a man and a woman dancing to “Too Marvelous for Words”—such an appropriate title indeed.
All-Movie
Guide bio from Hal Erickson
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Film
Reference profile by Patricia King
Hanson
Daves, Delmer They
Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
DARK PASSAGE
Time Out review Tom Milne
Classic thriller
based on the David Goodis novel about a man wrongly convicted of murder who
escapes, has his face changed by plastic surgery, and clears his name with the
aid of a girl whose father was similarly framed. Brilliantly atmospheric
Movie Round-Up Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
Dark Passage, based
on a novel by David Goodis and directed by the underrated Delmer Daves, teamed
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall for the third of their four movies together.
Because the noir plot hinges on a plastic surgery operation, the audience
doesn't actually see Bogart's face until the last third of the movie; most of
the first third is shot from a subjective camera perspective (well done). There
is terrific location footage of
Dark Passage
Movie Review (1947) from Channel 4 Film
Dark Passage was Bogart and Bacall's third feature as a couple following
on from the successes of To Have And Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946).
Billed as a compelling romance, Dark Passage is, in fact, a very different
movie. Firmly in the tradition of late 40s film noir, it is primarily the tale
of escaped prisoner Vincent Parry (Bogart) and his bid to clear his name and
find out who framed him for the murder of his wife. Bacall plays his
independent and wilful rescuer Irene, who hides him from his pursuers, nurses
him when he undergoes plastic surgery to change his identity, and falls for him
along the way.
It's a dark, surreal and slightly implausible tale. An unusual vehicle
for such a star as Bogart - he doesn't show his face until at least halfway
through the film. The first third makes inventive use of first-person camera
technique, never showing the actor's infamous face. For much of the second
third, he appears mute and in bandages after having undergone the quickest and
most effective facelift in history. Much more successful, technically, than the
much cited earlier attempt to introduce subjective camera into film, 1947's
Chandler adaptation Lady In The Lake, it's an intriguing
device which adds to the already tense atmosphere and sense of growing paranoia
as Parry is tracked down by police and other foes.
The film also benefits from its suitably gothic location of San Francisco and
some wonderfully oddball supporting characters such as Agnes Moorehead's
psychotically jealous Madge and Tom D'Andrea's lonely cabby. However, it never
quite hits the high notes and is rather slowly paced in parts and lacks the
fiery, smart dialogue from other Bogart/Bacall vehicles.
Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
While it might not rank as a favorite film among those who love
the screen team of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, you have to admit Dark
Passage (1947) has one of the great screen gimmicks of all time. For the first
forty minutes of the film, you see everything through the eyes of the main
character - an escaped prisoner from San Quentin who eludes the authorities
while making his way to a plastic surgeon who will give him a new face. When
the bandages finally come off, the audience gets their first look at this
wanted fugitive as he studies himself in a mirror. And guess what? He looks
just like Humphrey Bogart!
To be perfectly honest, the subjective camera technique wasn't a new idea and
had been utilized the previous year in Robert Montgomery's innovative detective
thriller, Lady in the Lake (1946). But the gimmick is still fun, and the
This was Bacall and Bogart's third movie together, and they were still in the
honeymoon stage of their marriage, enjoying their accommodations at the Mark
Hopkins Hotel with meals at the Top of the Mark during the filming of Dark
Passage. Bogie was also the highest paid actor in
There was one problem though. In her autobiography, By Myself, Lauren
Bacall wrote, "Toward the end of shooting I became aware of Bogie's
nerves; if the phone rang, he'd tense up, didn't want to answer it, didn't want
to speak to any except the closest. He'd noticed a bare spot on his cheek where
his beard was not growing. The one spot increased to several, then he'd wake up
in the morning and find clumps of hair on the pillow. That alarmed him. It's
one thing to be bald with a rim of hair, an actor could always wear a
hairpiece, but without the rim it would have to be a full wig. The more hair
fell out, the more nervous he got, and the more nervous he got, the more hair
fell out. In the last scene of Dark Passage he wore a complete wig. He panicked
- his livelihood hung in the balance. A visit to the doctor was in order. He
never went to doctors. The verdict was that he had a disease known as alopecia
areata - in layman's terms, hair falls out as a result of vitamin deficiencies.
He was plain worn out - the years of mistreating himself in bars and an
unsteady diet had added up to this. It would grow back, but he'd need B-12
shots twice a week...scalp treatments...more food...in general, more care. That
was a relief to us both. His next film was going to be The Treasure of
Sierra Madre (1948) with John Huston, and he'd have had to wear a wig for
that anyway."
Film Noir of the Week Don Malcolm
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson
Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
DVD Verdict Mark Van Hook
Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel
Murray] reviews a 4 DVD Bogart release, They Drive by
Night, High Sierra, To Have and Have Not, and Dark Passage
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams] 4 DVD Bogart release
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
BROKEN ARROW
USA
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
James Stewart turns in his usual fine
performance in this otherwise uninteresting 1950 western, which is mainly
remembered for launching a wave of revisionism in the genre: the Indians (as
played, of course, by whites) are the good guys. Debra Paget is the squaw
sacrificed for racial harmony; Jeff Chandler is a Boy's Life Cochise.
An excellent western
from little known director Daves, which pits Stewart as ex-army man Tom
Jeffords and Chandler as Apach leader Cochise, who strive to reach the common
goal of peace between the setlers and the indians despite the 10-year war which
continues to rage. A quieter, more thoughtful western than many of its peers,
this is so well directed and shot it's a wonder that Daves didn't have a more
high-profile career. Although
Time Out review Tom Milne
The Western that launched the
be-nice-to-the-Indian cycle of the '50s now looks a little on the
self-consciously liberal side, making something of a meal of its plea for
racial tolerance and peaceful coexistence, as Stewart's army scout and
User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
The movie is in the past conditional, because we know the real
end of the story and Delmer Daves who had been studying the Indians ways for a
long time did not try to fool the audience: "broken arrow" is not a
nice "peace and love" movie: there are plenty of death, violence and
hatred here, more than in the average western. As Cochise says, living in peace
is more difficult than waging war. But Jeffords and him become legendary
figures whom we can still meet today everywhere in the world, peace on earth
and good will to men. Thus his story becomes universal.
There's a wistful, not to say very sad side: Delmer Daves is like John Lennon
singing "imagine" or Neil Young singing "Pocahontas" (I
wish I was a trapper/I would give a thousand pelts/To sleep with Pocahontas/And
find out how she felt/In the morning in the fields of green/in the home land
we've never seen): he does know that all these promises are illusive, the two
protagonists trust each other, but who else can they trust? The dice are loaded
from the start.
That's why the love scenes are so important and among the most visually
astounding we can see in a western. Thanks partly to Debra Paget's breathtaking
beauty, the scenes between Jeffords and Sonseearhay climax the movie. They give
the audience a taste of a lost paradise "the homeland we've never
seen": Jefford's dream only really comes true in these sequences where the
lovers are under the "big sky" in communion with nature.
Some will complain because everybody speaks English, but Tom's voice-over warns
us from the very start. Kevin Costner, who makes his Oscar-winning "dance
with wolves" in the early nineties, owes a good deal to Delmer Daves.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Understandably, being a
But then such was the regularity of this problem throughout the decade that
it’s also an easy one to overlook - and besides
There’s also some of the overall tone of The FBI Story about
Furthermore, any preachiness is also off-set by a pleasing lack of simplicity.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
JUBAL
USA
Movie-Vault.com
(Vadim Rizov) review
Nowadays, most film buffs who don't tend to drift off to one
genre tend to ignore Westerns not made by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Sam
Peckinpah or Sergio Leone. That's a shame, because such a fertile genre has
spawned a great number of terrific films not belonging to well-known auteurs.
Case in point are the Westerns of Delmer Daves, who, besides making the
next-to-last Bogart & Bacall vehicle, Dark Passage, also helmed a number of
creditable Westerns in the 50s, including one of the first to sympathetically
view Indians, 1950's Broken Arrow (no relation to Woo or Travolta).
Jubal is a deftly put together tale ever-so-slightly modeled on Othello in
which Glenn Ford and Rod Steiger compete for acting honors, with the edge going
to Steiger. Ford, who had just come to major fame with his starring role in the
previous year's Blackboard Jungle, is Jubal Troop, a cowhand found lying
unconscious in the road. Picked up by rancher Ernest Borgnine, Ford gets a job
on Borgnine's ranch, rousing the dislike of malcontent Pinky, played by the
inimitable Rod Steiger with an odd voice that doesn't quite lisp but gets awful
close; it's a mesmerizing, perfectly attuned performance. Borgnine's wife,
Valerie French (overacting, who later appropriately ended up on soap operas)
makes many passes at Ford, who refuses to cooperate; Pinky, however, is
jealous, as French's ex-lover. When Ford becomes foreman of the ranch because
of Borgnine's need to attend to his new administrative duties as the head of a
cattleman's association, the stage is set for a tense showdown.
Concentrating more on the relationships between the men on the ranch than on
the various showdowns that ensue, Jubal is a well-paced character study.
Well-photographed in Cinemascope (letterboxing is a must), Jubal's screenplay
can be clumsy and has too much hollow-sounding dialogue for comfort; the
success of the film rises and falls on the delivery. Ford delivers his lines with
conviction, and Steiger is terrific; Borgnine, I fear, is far too over-the-top
in his caricature of a crude but good-hearted rancher. Charles Bronson has a
small part, in one of his first appearances where he wasn't billed as
"Charles Buchinsky." David Raksin's score is sometimes, but sometimes
very obtrusive, straining to create heated conflict where there is none.
Jubal is a bit unusual for the genre in concentrating first on the sex angle
(the storyline is motivated solely by it), and also for its sympathetic
portrayal of wandering religious fundamentalists searching for a promised land;
apparently, a stock evangelical preacher wouldn't do for this film. Although
the acting and writing is variable, the compelling themes at work here and the
superior directorial execution make Jubal a worthy psychological Western of the
50s (though it's still a long way from here to Anthony Mann and Budd
Boetticher).
Turner Classic Movies review Sean Axmaker
Delmer Daves's Jubal (1956) was one of the new wave of
adult westerns that flourished in the fifties. Starring Glenn Ford as a cowhand
drifter befriended by a big-hearted rancher (Ernest Borgnine) while his
beautiful, young, and deeply disenchanted wife (European starlet Valerie
French, in her American debut) does her best to seduce the simple, stoic
cowboy, it has been described as an Othello on the Range.
That characterization gets at the web of jealousy and desire manipulated by
envious ranch hand Pinky (Rod Steiger, playing Iago to Borgnine's Othello)
whose seniority is suddenly usurped by this outsider, but it confuses the
details and motivations. In this take, the young wife is no innocent but a
dark, exotic beauty (she's Canadian which is supposed to account for her French
accent) in a stifling marriage to the sincere but crude and boisterous
cattleman Borgnine; Steiger's cowhand is the spurned lover of the unfaithful
wife. It's not even about the Othello or the Iago figures, but the drifter
caught in the middle of the frustrated desires and desperate deceptions. This
is less Shakespeare than
Delmer Daves had established himself as a screenwriter with a series of light
comedies and romantic melodramas (including the original 1939 Love Affair)
before stepping behind the camera with the World War II adventure Destination
Tokyo (1943). Like most directors of his era, he moved easily between all
genres, but he proved his affinity for the western from his very first effort,
Glenn Ford had become a quietly intense leading man in the 1940s and seasoned
into a natural western star by the time he was cast as the title character,
Jubal Troop. It was his first of three westerns for Delmer Daves (they teamed
up again the next year with
Borgnine plays his part with a garrulous, boisterous amiability, the better to
contrast with Ford's closed-in performance, while Noah Beery, Jr. and John
Dierkes offer easy-going support as Ford's friendly bunkmates and fellow
cowhands. Steiger stands out in this company with his mesmerizing but mannered
method performance. His character, Pinky, is an even more devious version of
the brooding, jealous cowhand he played in the screen version of the musical
Daves gave the key supporting part of Reb Haislipp, a plain-speaking cowhand
whose loyalty to Jubal is unshakable even when Pinky turns the town against
him, to the up-and-coming supporting player Charles Bronson. It was one of the
first substantial supporting roles for the actor previously billed as Charles
Buchinsky in such films as House of Wax (1953). He had changed his name
just a year before in another Daves' western, Drum Beat (1954). For
their second go-round, Daves brings out Bronson's easy-going humor and
understated style, that was so rarely tapped by directors (the notable
exceptions being The Magnificent Seven [1960] and The Dirty Dozen
[1967]), and the film became a modest showcase for the actor's heretofore
untapped potential.
Jubal was generally well received ("The strong point… along with
ace performances and an overall plot line that grips tightly, is a constantly
mounting suspense," reads the Variety review) and New York Times
critic Bosley Crowther was inspired to write his mixed review in verse:
"It does have its wide-screen points / Lovely scenery; good performing;
/Smooth knee-action in the joints." Shot in the
Reverse
Shot review
Nick Pinkerton
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Talk
(Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [3/5]
Turner
Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
3:10 TO YUMA
A classic Western scenario, adapted from a
short story by Elmore Leonard. For $200, the sum he desperately needs to save
his land from drought, a small-time farmer (Heflin) agrees to escort a
notorious outlaw (Ford) to the state penitentiary in Yuma; holed up in a hotel
to await the train, with the outlaw's gang gathering in force outside, the
escort finds himself in effect the prisoner; nevertheless, although the
financial inducement evaporates (he's offered more to let matters slide by both
the outlaw and the town's alarmed mayor), he insists on fulfilling his
contract. It's of necessity a talkative film, with Ford working on Heflin's
nerves in a stream of Machiavellian banter, but one held in perfect balance by
Daves, who keeps the tension strung taut (especially in the gauntlet-running
final walk to the station) while at the same time elaborating a subtle
psychological conflict. The nerve centre is exposed in an early scene where
Heflin, the dour family man careworn by responsibilities, watches as his wife
and sons come under the spell of Ford's carefree charm: the conflict,
ultimately, stems from each man's envy of what the other has.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]
If you weren't too hot on the Western genre you might well mistake
This should not detract from the film itself, for
3:10 to Yuma Glenn Erickson from DVD Savant
The leader of a gang of thieves, Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) robs a
stage and shoots a guard outside the town of
The kings of the '50s Western were Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. Mann's productions got bigger until he graduated to the epic (El Cid); Boetticher stayed with small stories. Sneaking in among them was Delmer Daves, who had started as a Warners' contractee in the '40s, writing and directing wartime tearjerkers (The Very Thought of You) and action films (Destination Tokyo). In the early 50's Daves turned to color Westerns like the interesting Drum Beat and The Last Wagon. He eventually struck gold (or fizzled out) doing glossy Peyton Place imitations like A Summer Place, Parrish and the popular but horrendous Spencer's Mountain. Before the big fizzle he gave us this efficient piece followed by his best Western, The Hanging Tree. The critics never showed much interest in Daves; Andrew Sarris had little to say about him except that his frequent crane shots were 'debasing.'
We know we're in a '50s Western when we hear Frankie Laine, and
There's nothing grand in
Of special mention is Felicia Farr (Kiss Me Stupid, Charley Varrick), who has a quiet, excellently conveyed one-reel romance with Ford. Delmer Dave's films are known for a lot of windy dialogue but much of this winner is carried by looks and attitudes and moments of silence. The understated sparks between the two inform Ford's character, and help motivate his later actions in a satisfying way.
With its finely judged B&W photography,
Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon
At the Movies Michael Wood compares both film versions from The London Review of Books, October 18, 2007
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
Turner Classic Movies review The idea behind the film
Turner Classic Movies review Why the film is essential
Turner Classic Movies review A look behind the camera
Turner Classic Movies review Trivia and Quotes from the film
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
Davidson, Kief and Richard Ladkani
THE DEVIL’S MINER B+ 91
USA Germany
A humanistic glimpse at a scandalous tragedy that probably repeats itself
around the world every day, particularly in the poorest regions, namely the
necessity for children to work in the bleakest, most dangerous working
conditions in remote regions of the globe, as there is no one else that can
provide for their families. This film
explores the life of Basilio, a 14-year old who works in one of the most
dangerous mines in Cerro Rico above Potosi ,
Bolivia
Basilio also attends school, where his walk down the mountainside into town is enough to challenge anyone’s stamina, again it’s an uphill climb all the way for the entire return. Interesting that his biggest obstacle in school was not learning, or even the distance from his home, but girls, who he claimed were few in numbers, but were the meanest students in school, that he never played with them as they always got into fights scratching other people’s eyes, so were considered too dangerous. On days of carnival, the one day when everyone stays out of the mines, the boys can be seen lobbing water balloons at the girls, perhaps the most delightful moment in the film, which is otherwise overly serious, as this 14-year old must act and behave like an adult for the duration of his life. The life expectancy for a miner is 35 or 40 years of age before they succumb to silicosis, where the dust from the mines actually clogs the lungs, so Basilio dreams of finding a way out of the mines. Unfortunately, his condition is shared by another 800 or so other boys, few of whom ever leave the mines.
Told largely from Basilio’s point of view, which draws us into his world, constantly chomping on cocoa leaves to avoid hunger, yet maintain his level of energy, he describes in his own words his observations, fears, and his plans for the future while the camera crew follows the daily ritual of the boys entering and working in the mines. Eventually they have to split up, as Basilio has to move to a larger, more dangerous mine where he can earn $4.00 a day. The foremen who take these young boys under their wing obviously care for them, and feel a heavy sorrow in their heart, but they work them nonetheless, as they know their families need the money. When we see Basilio go deeper into the mine, where the temperatures rise to over 100 degrees where we witness the master drillers enveloped in smoke, the conditions are nearly unbearable to the viewer, as the kid has no mask, so he has to breathe it all in, enduring images that are simply terrifying. Imagine how much more terrifying they must be to a young boy in real life, forced to return there again day after day? This film feels like a relentless pursuit of realism.
Davies, Taran
AFGHAN STORIES C- 67
USA (60 mi) 2002
This filmmaker never ventures very far
"inside" Afghanistan, visiting only two northern border towns
under the control of the Northern Alliance at the time of the initial US
bombing campaign, so the film barely scratches the surface, instead,
this is largely a view of Afghanistan from people who are no
longer living there, and as "outsiders," they are bitter or
upset by their displacement - no surprise there
Davies,
Terence
I began making films [out of] a deep need . . . to come to terms with my family’s history and suffering, to make sense of the past and to explore my own personal terrors, both mental and spiritual, and to examine the destructive nature of Catholicism. Film as an expression of guilt, film as confession (psychotherapy would be much cheaper but a lot less fun). —Terence Davies
Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies - Harvard ... Harvard Film Archive
Arguably the greatest living British filmmaker, Terence Davies (b. 1945) is renown for the meticulous care that transforms each new release into a highly anticipated cultural event. A member of the distinctive generation of British Film Institute nurtured directors whose ranks notably included Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Peter Greenaway, Davies first established himself with three celebrated shorts, known collectively as The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984). Like his trilogy, the subsequent features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) are also set in postwar England, a dreary land of scarcity and sexual repression which inspires the elemental dichotomy at the heart of Davies’ work, a contrast between the somber outside world of gray, brick and rain and the intimate interior world, whose promise of warmth and camaraderie is tempered by poverty and the threat of violence or isolation. In Davies films escape – from both worlds – is provided by the radio, by the cinema and above all by music.
This is terrain that the Liverpool-born and Catholic-raised Davies knows well, and shapes with a strong autobiographical intimacy of his films. Davies’ work is distinguished by the wonderfully cinematographic qualities of his stories which are told most powerfully not through dialogue but rather through framing, camera movement, lighting and editing. Davies’ style has been called “memory realism”: everyday life is rendered in naturalistic detail colored by or overlaid with fantasy or reminiscence.
Davies’ postwar
Seen as a group, Davies’ films set in postwar
BFI Screenonline: Davies, Terence (1945-) Biography Ewa Mazierska, Directors in British and Irish Cinema
Terence Davies was born in
In the Trilogy and the two films that followed, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), Davies reconstructs his childhood and youth in a working-class district of Liverpool in the 1940s and 50s. His alter ego, called Robert Tucker in the later films, is shy and introverted; his teachers and peers treat this as testimony to his mental slowness and an excuse to bully him. His family life is traumatised by his violent and unpredictable father, who regularly harasses his sisters and his mother, the most important person in his life. Another cause of unhappiness is his homosexuality. The pain of being different is exacerbated by his Catholic upbringing, which makes him believe that homosexuality is the gravest sin possible. Yet Davies regards the past with nostalgia as well as resentment. All the films are imbued with tender memories of the communality of working-class life and the old forms of entertainment, such as listening to the wireless, visiting the cinema, and singing together.
The uniqueness of Davies' representation of the past lies in the way he uses cinematic means to convey the fragmented nature of memory and the partial knowledge of his young protagonist. Instead of using a smooth narrative, we receive a succession of loosely connected episodes, with no dominant story line. A moving image is sometimes replaced by a discoloured photograph to convey the impression of time frozen by memory and to emphasise the gap between the real and a recollected past. Thanks to the subjective camera, objects lose their hard, material existence, becoming only shadows on the wall or floor. Such a technique also suggests that children - his viewpoint characters in all his films except The House of Mirth - tend to over-interpret facts and mix truth with fiction. He also makes extensive use of songs, which play as important a role as dialogue in revealing his characters' feelings.
In 1984 Davies published a novel, Hallelujah Now, based on
his memories of life in
The House of Mirth (2000) marks Davies' furthest departure from his childhood obsessions. Based, like Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (US, 1993), on a novel by Edith Wharton set in America at the beginning of 20th century, the main theme explores the struggle of an individual with a culture. In The Neon Bible Davies seemed to have difficulty connecting with the feelings of his characters, but here he offers penetrating insights into an emerging American industrial society defined by greed, narcissism and hypocrisy. The fight ends in the defeat of the heroine (Gillian Anderson), confirming Davies' view that against the backdrop of history an individual human being is only a particle of dust.
Davies' carefully composed tableaux and highly stylised
narratives have led to him being grouped with Peter Greenaway and Derek
Jarman. But Davies is no post-modernist: his use of popular songs and
constant allusions to
Terence Davies.com also seen here: Official website
TCMDB biography
All-Movie Guide bio from Sandra Brennan
"Davies, Terence" bio from the encyclopedia of gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender and queer culture
Earth
mother Terence Davies on why he
wants to film Sunset Song, from The Guardian,
Terence Davies, neglected genius Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 26, 2006
The
tragedy of Terence Davies Shane
Danielsen from The Guardian,
Closely
Watched Films: Terence Davies - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Davies Film Retrospective,
Moving
Image Source Article (2008) The Persistence of Memory by Michael
Koresky,
Life
on the land Tessa Hadley on Sunset Song, from The Guardian,
Terence Davies (review) David Lancaster’s review of Wendy Everett’s essay Remarkable Balance, from Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, (2005), from Project MUSE
Terence Davies, neglected genius Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 26, 2006
The
tragedy of Terence Davies Shane
Danielsen from The Guardian, February
7, 2008
Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Davies Film Retrospective, February 20 – 27, 2008
Moving Image Source Article (2008) The Persistence of Memory by Michael Koresky, June 4, 2008
Life
on the land Tessa Hadley on Sunset Song, from The Guardian, August 8, 2008
Terence Davies's Sunset Song gets green light at last Catherine Shoard from The Guardian, February 17, 2012
The
Power of Restraint in the Films of Terence Davies - Village Voice Karina Longworth,
Terence
Davies’s Inner Light J. Hoberman
from The New York Review of Books,
March 23, 2012
An old-fashioned Gill Brian Pendreigh feature and interview from The Guardian, June 11, 1999
First steps in show business Simon Hattenstone interview from The Guardian, October 5, 2000, also seen here: Guardian Unlimited Interview
Terence Davies Pinewood Dialogues audio interview from Moving Image Source, December 15, 2000
Bigmouth
strikes again Simon Hattenstone
feature and interview the director from The
Guardian, October 19, 2006
"Miserable
to be gay: A Q&A with Terence Davies" Johnny Ray Huston intervew from The San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, February
20, 2008
Bright Lights Film Journal Article (2008) Paradise Betrayed, Karin Luisa Badt interview, August 2008
Interviews | My Liverpool: Terence Davies' Of Time and the City Jason Anderson intgerview from Cinema Scope, 2008
In
the director's chair: Terence Davies
Videoessay by Shehani Fernando, Rebecca Lovell, and Christian Bennett
from The Guardian, November 12, 2008
(8:28)
Terence
Davies: follow your hormones Stuart
Jeffries interview from The Guardian,
November 23, 2011
Ranked 10th on Film Comment's list of the 25 Best Directors of the Decade (2000-2009)
Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time
Terence Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE TERENCE DAVIES TRILOGY B 88
Great Britain (94 mi) 1983
People
either love what I do or they absolutely detest it. One woman said of the
Trilogy ‘I loathe every frame of it.’ One critic said ‘These films make Ingmar
Bergman look like Jerry Lewis.’ …other people come up to me and say ‘I’ve seen
my life on screen.’
—Terence Davies
Having seen the man speak in person at the premiere screening in Chicago for The Deep Blue Sea (2012), Terence Davies is impressive in every respect, passionate and extremely personal, revealing a sharp wit with healthy doses of acid humor, polite, well-schooled and continuously thoughtful, taking his time carefully choosing his words, where every uttered word feels as if it’s been reflected upon at great length. The overriding impression that comes across in person is his blunt honesty, where he doesn’t refrain from speaking his mind, where there’s an unadulterated force behind his raspy voice, often quoting from Shakespeare or other poets to emphasize particular points, which are perfectly superimposed into his own thoughts and reflections. He speaks with compassion about others, especially his beloved mother, and freely admits in his relationship with the church that it’s easier for him to remain celibate these days, like a high priest, something he mentioned several times. Upon reflection, however, this may as well be the theme of this early film, having condemned the Catholic Church for their dangerously hypocritical stand on gay issues, professing their love for anyone that’s gay so long as they don’t act upon their sexual inclinations, as all homosexual acts are considered a sin. While the Davies of today is comfortable speaking openly about gay issues, this wasn’t the case in his youth, where he had to remain closeted and extremely repressed, where he was taught all his sexual yearnings would send him straight to Hell, instilling a fear of God into his understanding of himself, literally hating himself as only Catholics can do, feeling he deserved punishment for his misplaced sexual feelings. Living a life of torment is the subject of this film, where three short films are integrated into a whole, from childhood, middle age, to imagining his own death, a painful and brutally honest account of his own life.
Born in
Driven by the church to fear his homosexual inclinations, he attends a strict all-boys Catholic school where he is regularly bullied and beaten by older boys, called “a fruit” by his classmates, only to then be bullied again by the teachers who demand strict adherence to discipline. The emotionally severe demeanor of the nuns is equally forbidding, always shot in dark shadows where we never see their faces, only an admonishing tone of disapproval in their voices, all driving this poor kid into a world of complete isolation. At home he has to listen to his father’s brutal attacks on his mother, seen burying his head in his pillow, actually wishing his father were dead. When his father unexpectedly dies a short time later, he is profoundly conflicted, afraid of his own thoughts, as if he was somehow to blame in the eyes of God, sending him into a rush of uncontrollable despair. Later seen in middle age, he has the look of defeat painted on his face, seen crying in the opening sequence of MADONNA, where gone is that childlike naiveté. Robert literally takes the Ferry Cross the Mersey (with no accompanying song by Gerry and the Pacemakers) to get to and from work each day, where this section concerns itself with being a dutiful son, still living at home with his mother, while secretly attempting to address his own sexual needs, heard by his mother creeping out the door at night as he makes the midnight rounds of gay clubs and public lavatories, where a wordless pick-up in a public urinal is the closest he can come to companionship. In one of the most scathing scenes of the film, a mix of the sacred and the profane, the camera pans the inside of an empty church while Robert’s voice can be heard pleading with a tattoo artist for sexual services, where it’s hard to tell if this is really happening or if it’s all playing out just in his imagination. We see more cuts to various S&M gay sex acts while he sits bored at his desk at work, or even sitting with his mother sipping tea. At church, when he goes to confession, he reports every manner of banal infraction, remaining silent on his real sins. It is this second section that delves most deeply into the film’s overall themes, where the anguishing guilt associated with homosexual fantasies leaves him even further isolated and repressed, trapped in an all encompassing depression, where he has a nightmare of his own death, seeing himself laid out in a coffin receiving a priest’s eulogy, awakening with a bloodcurdling scream of fear. Davies uses the image of Robert on a boat crossing the River Mersey as one in an infinite line of dead souls that Charon ferries into the mythical underworld.
The final sequence opens in the most
extraordinary fashion, showing the kind of poetic imagination we associate with
this director, where we hear the comforting sounds of Doris Day while Robert
attends his mother’s funeral, It All Depends On You - Doris Day [The Terence
Davies Trilogy] YouTube
(2:04), which end up being reflections of Robert as an old man who is a stroke
victim now lying near death in a hospital bed.
This chilling lead-up to his own death recalls Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1931)
when the ghost-like protagonist sees himself lying in a coffin as it’s driven
to the cemetery where he cognizantly witnesses his own funeral. As in the previous segment, these nightmarish
dreams of death intrude into his waking state as well, where his sad and dreary
existence seems like he’s stuck in a hellish purgatory forever paying penitence
for his sins. As the hospital nurses all
but ignore their patients, calling them honey or other terms of affection,
while never for a moment sitting down and actually taking the time to talk to
them, so all they have left is to look back upon their lives and become lost in
a flood of their own memories, shown in an impressionistic stream of flashback
vignettes. As the nurses decorate a
Christmas tree Robert recalls being an angel with a halo, dressed in white with
angel’s wings for a child nativity play.
As he remembers fearing the harsh rigidity of the nuns in Catholic school
as a boy, he is once more surrounded by nuns caring for him in the final stages
of his life, still wracked with guilt over his unmentionable sexual thoughts,
haunted by his fractured relationship with the church as his thoughts often
turn to God. Davies refuses to spare the
audience any comfort when it comes to death, as he literally rubs our noses in
it, showing himself breathing heavily in a death rattle, wheezing and gasping
for breath, haunting sounds and images that when combined couldn’t be more chilling,
as the reality of the inevitable seizes the viewer with a gripping
intensity. Davies narrates his final
thoughts to rarely depicted images, where death never felt so frighteningly
unappealing, exclaiming “When the light goes out, God dies,” seen as the night
nurse makes her midnight rounds in the dark with a flashlight, stopping and
sitting with him until the screen turns to white.
The Terence Davies Trilogy | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
The first three films of Terence Davies—Children (1974), Madonna and Child (1980), and Death and Transfiguration (1983)—make up an 85-minute semiautobiographical trilogy about a Catholic working-class Liverpudlian named Robert Tucker, who's seen as a victimized schoolboy, a closeted middle-aged homosexual, and an 80-year-old dying in a hospital. The emotional power of Davies's subsequent great symphonic works (Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes) is already present, as are the dry wit and visual mastery, though in terms of range and technical means these short films remain sketchy chamber pieces by comparison.
User reviews from imdb Author: scotsexile from United Kingdom
This has to be one of British cinemas unsung masterpieces. In three parts equating to childhood manhood and old age it painstakingly delineates the details of a very ordinary life. Filmed in B/W it has a documentary feel to it and its Liverpool setting is indeed bleak. The main character is based on the life of the writer of the film Terence Davies and as such is autobiography as catharsis and confession. He is gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England and the stifling effects of his strict catholic upbringing only serve to deepen his guilt. It is a bleak story with some stark and terrifying imagery. Wilfrid Bramble aka Steptoe plays Daveies as the old man brilliantly. The deathbed scene and the way it is shot stay in the mind for ages. So with no light relief why see this? I can only say that it has a humanity and insight that are rare in cinema. He is in the same league as Loach and Leigh.
The Terence Davies Trilogy - International Film Festival Rotterdam ...
In the first three autobiographically inspired short films by
Terence Davies, we see the development of his unique poetic talent. A rich
variegation of scenes from a human life, shaped by Catholicism and
homosexuality, which have not lost anything of their power and ability to move.
'Originally there were three medium-length films (Children, Madonna
and Child, Death and Transfiguration), all of which had the
same protagonist, Robert Tucker, and followed him from childhood to death,
illustrating a lifetime struggle between Robert's (homo-) sexuality and his
Catholicism and family background. Terence Davies (1945, Liverpool) has now
edited all three into a feature-length film in which the original three parts
have become three acts of a continuing drama. For those in need of a filmic
reference, the Davies Trilogy resembles the trilogy by Bill Douglas (My
Childhood, My Ain Folk, and My Way Home). Davies has
stripped his fragmented narrative to the barest essentials: the way the light
falls through a window to light a room and the character sitting in it, a
glance, an obliquely heard half-phrase, the tones in which a name is
pronounced, all provide more needed information than dialogue (of which there
is a minimum). The sudden understanding shock of sexual self-discovery when the
young Robert sees the water running over the body of an older boy in a school
shower room has never been captured so accurately (and economically) on screen
before. The film is not a happy one (films about repression never are) but it
is terrifyingly moving.' (David Overbey, 1984)
Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Michal Oleszczyk]
"The Terence Davies Trilogy" is a work of such profound sadness and despair that watching it has to result in either obliteration or catharsis (unless it provokes a walk-out). Six years in the making, the three black-and-white shorts took their time oozing from Davies' personal experience and one can see the growing assurance of their director's hand. "Children" (1976) try out things in a tentative way, "Madonna and Child" (1980) solidify them into a steady mode of expression and "Death and Transfiguration" (1983) present a mature, stunningly poetic cinematic voice. Now that the three movies are only shown spliced together (and became available on a Region 2 DVD released by British Film Institute), one can see the emergence of Davies' techniques and savor what remains his most direct and devastating work to date.
Brutally autobiographical, "The Trilogy..." channels Davies' own experiences of growing up Catholic and gay in post-war working class Liverpool: a child to a protective mother and a volatile sadist of a dad. The sad and abused kid turns into a ghoulish adult overcome with sexual and religious guilt, living a life that is best described as a one long, barely repressed sob. Even though the specifics (as well as the main character's name) differ from movie to movie and will further morph in Davies' subsequent features, the solid core of unprocessed guilt is on clear display at all times. These are movies about a man growing up to hate himself to the back-beat of pious incantations of God's everlasting love. What makes this portrayal of total self-hatred even more poignant, is that "The Trilogy..." covers its character's entire lifespan (including a grueling post-stroke death Davies admittedly abhorred and imagined for himself in the final installment). Davies tells a story of a man who never comes to terms with his homosexuality and, to paraphrase the final sentence of Henry James' "Washington Square," willfully locks himself into a closet - for life, as it were.
The way the films are made, the plot events not so much progress as come to the surface - albeit fleetingly. Past, present and future are jumbled together and presented in a free-associative way that seems natural and inevitable thanks to superb editing. Davies switches from his alter ego's youth to middle and old ages, presenting his life as a hall of mirrors with a running theme of guilt and desperation. The movies may have been produced in 1976 and later, but they take place in a reality that never registered Stonewall. Tucker (as Davies' stand-in is called in two of the films) is stuck as much in his dead-end job as he is in his closet. All of his sexual encounters take place in seedy clubs, S/M joints and public toilets. His face seems pummeled in, his eyes lack all spark and his mouth remains sculpted into a perpetual grimace of anguish. There's not even a hint at a possibility of a different life for him - not because Davies doesn't believe in it as a matter of principle, but because it doesn't dawn on this particular character at this particular time and place. (As Julian Barnes' wrote in his brilliant "The Sense of an Ending," commenting on the main character's forced chastity: "You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country").
Even though he will ultimately direct a superb adaptation of Edith Wharon's "The House of Mirth" many years after finishing "The Trilogy...," there's not a novelistic bone in Davies' body. His movies are never put together in terms of elegant story arcs or even straightforward narrative progression. As a director, Davies is all about juxtapositions - both in terms of editing and overlaying images with seemingly incongruent sound. The power of the "Trilogy..." lays in how boldly Davies employs those means in order to convey his character's state of mind - as well as nature of memory itself. Moments of son's affection towards his mother morph into clandestine sexual encounters with smirking, tattooed hunks; a man on his deathbed seems to be visited by his younger self running late to school; a childhood memory of a glowing Christmas tree clashes with images of a nighttime hospital ward: a place not so much haunted as downright inhabited by death.
In what counts as the "Trilogy"'s most shocking sequence, Davies employs all his strategies at once: slowly gliding camera scrutinizes the splendor of an empty Catholic church, Bruckner's majestic "Mass in E-minor" plays on the soundtrack, while Tucker is making a telephone call to a back-alley tattooist in vain hope of having his genitals adorned with one of his works. The obscene and vulgar language of the conversation alone makes for a startling contrast with the sacred interior - what's even more blasphemous is the fact that this sexually motivated bargaining is in fact a kind of Tucker's heartfelt prayer ("Please say you'll do it... Please...").
According to Catholic church's teachings, all homosexual acts are sinful - it's only the condition of being homosexual that's not. Hate the sin, love the sinner, et cetera. "The Terence Davies Trilogy," among other things that it does, shows just how this very logic pushes an individual to misplace sexual fulfillment and perceive it only in terms of punishment and transgression. The reason Tucker doesn't form a loving relationship with another man isn't that Davies denies him one in order to stay as miserabilist as he can. It's the logic of the religion Tucker adheres to that forbids him any expression of sexual longing. What Davies actually shows is Catholic teachings about homosexuality followed to their logical conclusion: a life of solitude and longing that will never go away and will forever seem a form of torment - not a promise - to the one who experiences it.
In fact, Tucker desires another man even on his deathbed, extending his arms towards a vision of a bare-chested, muscular angel. This may be the boldest of all Davies' suggestions: that for this repressed man, whose life has been destroyed by a cheerfully inculcated message of self-hatred, afterlife alone can provide another man's loving (and guilt-free) embrace.
Cinelogue [Jonathan Henderson]
The Terence Davies Trilogy | DVD Video Review | Film @ The ... Gary Couzens
Children (1976) Annette Kuhn from BFI Screen Online, also: Show full synopsis
Madonna and Child (1980) Annette Kuhn from BFI Screen Online, also: Show full synopsis
Death and Transfiguration (1983) Annette Kuhn from BFI Screen Online, also: Show full synopsis
The
Inner Light of Terence Davies - The New York Review of B J. Hoberman from The
Exploring the melancholy early work of Terence Davies / The Dis Sam Adams from The Dissolve, October 11, 2013
Average shot lengths in the films of Terence Davies | Research into ... Nick Redfern from Research Into Film
The Terence Davies Trilogy | Drew Hunt The Talking Pictures
BFI Filmstore British & Irish Film & TV
•
View topic - Terence Davies - CriterionForum.org film discussion forum,
The Terence Davies Trilogy - Film4
The Terence Davies Trilogy Geoff Andrew from Time Out London, also seen here: The Terence Davies Trilogy | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out
DVD review: The Terence Davies Trilogy/The Long Day Closes ... Phelim O’Neill from The Guardian
The
Terence Davies Collection - DVDBeaver.com
Terence Davis Trilogy BFI Children (1976), Madonna and Child ... Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver
Terence Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES A 98
Great Britain 2:54 )
The water is wide, I cannot
get o'er
And neither have I wings to fly.
O go and get me some little boat,
To carry o'er my true love and I.
A-down in the meadows the other day
A-gath'ring flow'rs both fine and gay
A-gath'ring flowers, both red and blue,
I little thought what love could do.
I put my hand into one soft bush,
Thinking the sweetest flow'r to find.
I prick'd my finger to the bone
And left the sweetest flow'r alone.
I lean'd my back up against some oak,
Thinking it was a trusty tree.
But first he bended then he broke,
So did my love prove false to me.
Where love is planted, O there it grows,
It buds and blossoms like some rose;
It has a sweet and pleasant smell,
No flow'r on earth can it excel.
Must I be bound, O and she go free!
Must I love one thing that does not love me!
Why should I act such a childish part,
And love a girl that will break my heart.
There is a ship sailing on the sea,
She's loaded deep as deep can be,
But not so deep as in love I am;
I care not if I sink or swim.
O love is handsome and love is fine,
And love is charming when it is true;
As it grows older it groweth colder
And fades away like the morning dew.
B.Britten
& P.Pears - O Waly, Waly - YouTube in a historic live performance (
Despite being listed in 2007 as the third greatest film in British history in Time Out’s 100 Best British Films, listed after #2, A THIRD MAN (1949) and #1, DON’T LOOK NOW (1973), or listed as the 9th greatest film worldwide in the past 25 years in Sight and Sound’s 2002 poll of selected British critics, BFI | Sight & Sound | Modern Times, the British newspaper The Guardian calls the film "Britain's forgotten cinematic masterpiece.” Set in the 1940’s post-war working class community in Liverpool, shot in washed out sepia tones, the film resembles the experience of glancing through an old family photograph album or scrapbook, offering a glimpse of faded memories. Using a Joycean stream-of-conscious style and novelistic detail, this is an experimental, non-narrative film that works as an interactive memory play, because as the audience views what’s onscreen, simultaneously they may be lost in rhapsodic thoughts of their own. While this is a distinct period piece that is actually two films, shot using the same actors two years apart, it begins with family portraits that come to life, moving freely between various time periods, as characters go back and forth between adulthood and childhood. One focal point is a small photograph of the director’s real life father (who died when he was six) which hangs on the wall, often centered between carefully composed tableaux of portrait-like shots of the family facing the camera, a presence that remains even after they walk away. Peter Postlethwaite plays the abusive wife-and-child-beating father, shown to have a dour mood, a fierce temper and quickly changeable moods, yet his impact is enormous even as he dies early in the opening segment. His family is haunted by his absence, somehow tarnished by his wretched and miserable existence, but still a force to be reckoned with that hangs over the rest of the film like a specter of gloom.
Opening with audio cues, Distant
Voices, Still Lives on Vimeo (4:39), voices are heard before the characters
appear, which typifies the unusual structure of the film, as shot dissolves
move from memory to memory, largely consisting of events being recalled by
different family members, creating a mysterious living theater where memories
come to life, often set to song, like Ella Fitzgerald singing “Taking a Chance
on Love” “Distant
Voices, Still Lives” « Distant Voices YouTube (2:18). Freda Dowie plays the long suffering mother,
Angela Walsh the more reflective older sister Eileen,
A darker and more difficult work than The Long Day Closes (1992), much of this recalls James Joyce short story The Dead, especially the meticulous, novelistic detail of specific events being recalled by someone much later in life, where a similar effect is the startling naturalness of the memories, which evolve over time, as people may mature and find a way to live with the ghosts of the past. Much of it taking place so close after the war, the entire nation was similarly traumatized by the same events, finding it difficult to rebuild their lives on anything resembling stable footing. Davies signature move is to juxtapose moments of happiness followed immediately by incidents of brutality, where this jarring effect has a way of drawing attention to the interior worlds of the people who magically come alive onscreen. Perhaps the most stunning is a scene of the father tenderly tip-toeing into the children’s room, sleeping three in a bed, on Christmas Eve, quietly hanging their stockings before becoming consumed with rage at the next day’s Christmas dinner. Told as a series of vignettes all strung together, where movies and radio are captivating the nation, beautifully expressed here with the escapist romanticism of umbrellas in the rain while hearing “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” “Distant Voices, Still Lives” « Distant Voices YouTube (1:55), which contrasts vividly with the stark reality of a nation in ruins, where the men in particular are brutish and revoltingly short-sighted, where their shortcomings reflect a dysfunctional spirit even as they sit together and sing communally in the local pub, all displaying basic survivor’s instincts at their best as they try to maintain their resolve while collectively keeping their wits about them. A poetic evocation of courage and transcendence with an utterly celestial finale, this film celebrates the humanity often thought lost when enduring horrible tragedy, something of an homage to a nation that refused to accept the humiliation of defeat, where the scars of the past become a redemptive and transformative agent of recovery.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Richard Dewes]
Terence Davies drew heavily on his own childhood in this highly
original, devastatingly emotional study of the lives of a working-class
Illustrating the intense conflict and unhappiness the young Davies felt at the time, the film often contrasts scenes of starkly incompatible emotional content - as when the father tiptoes with incredible tenderness into his childrens' bedroom to hang up their stockings, only to break down in impotent rage at the Christmas dinner table. Throughout the film, the sentimental love-songs of the soundtrack counterpoint the strained, often violent family ties; but far from being depressing, the film is a celebration of the trascendent power of love and is amongst the most moving and involving pictures ever made.
Distant
Voices, Still Lives | Film | The Guardian
Andrew Pulver,
Few British film-makers have dared to attempt such a thoroughly
poetic treatment of their native land, and Terence Davies is the only one to
have succeeded so spectacularly. This re-issue of his 1988 debut feature is not
only a disinterring of what is arguably the high point of postwar British art
cinema, but is also testament to what we have lost, cinematically speaking, in
the intervening period. There's simply no way a film like this could be made
now. Davies casts an unapologetically myth-making eye over his own adolescence
in wartime
Distant Voices, Still Lives | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule review)
It's hard to say what Terence Davies's powerful masterpiece is
about—growing up in a working-class family in Liverpool in the 40s and
50s—without making it sound familiar and lugubrious. In fact, this beautiful
memoir, conceivably one of the greatest of all English films, is so startling
and original that we may not have the vocabulary to do it justice. Organized
achronologically, so that events are perceived more in terms of emotional
continuity than of narrative progression, the film concentrates on family
events like weddings and funerals and on songs sung at parties and the local
pub. It's clear that Davies's childhood, which was lorded over by a brutal and
tyrannical father, was not an easy one, yet the delight shown and conveyed by
the well-known songs makes the experience of this film cathartic and hopeful as
well as sorrowful and tragic. (There are some wonderful laughs as well.) Much
of the film emphasizes the bonds between the women in the family and their
female friends, although there's nothing doctrinal or polemical about its
vision, and the purity and intensity of its emotional thrust are such that all
the characters are treated with passion and understanding. The sense of the
periods depicted—ranging from the blitz to a mid-50s screening of Love Is a
Many Splendored Thing at the Futurist Cinema—is both precise and luminous.
With Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Dean Williams, and Lorraine
Ashbourne; winner of the International Critics' Prize at the 1988
Time Out Dave Calhoun
Superlatives are in short supply to
describe the emotional power of Terence
Davies’ fractured chronicle of the life of a working-class family in 1940s
and ’50s Liverpool. Drawing on his own childhood, Davies turns his film on the
pivot of a brutal patriarch’s death and his daughter’s subsequent marriage, so
splitting his film into two episodes (which he filmed a year apart). The first,
‘Distant Voices’, is a set of difficult memories of childhood fear and wartime
suffering that drift in and out of the wedding day, while its companion, ‘Still
Lives’, portrays the life of a happier widow, her two daughters, a son and
their friends who gather in pubs, sing and are beginning to suffer their own
marriages. Pete Postlethwaite is Tommy Davies, the violent, damaged and
taciturn father; Freda Dowie
is Mrs Davies, his stoic wife and the suffering lynchpin of the family; and Angela Walsh
is Eileen, the daughter whose marriage blows a gust of fresh air into the stale
misery of her family but also threatens to follow the same tragic pattern as
her parents.
Davies’ storytelling is a unique joy. Images evoke
family photos and the struggle of recollection. Voices drift in and out,
suggestive of family ghosts and inner demons. Chronology is poetic, and
memories are filtered after the event like the film’s washed-out colour
palette. The writer-director offers a terrifying tension between the public
solidarity of pub sing-a-longs, marriage celebrations and mourning and the
private horror of domestic abuse, depression and personal dreams sought and
destroyed. The men are the most flawed, but the women, though the heroines of
the piece, are compromised too: ‘Why did you marry him, mam?’ asks a daughter.
‘He was nice. He was a good dancer…’ It’s a heartbreaking work. Its cast are
phenomenal; its songs flow through the film like blood; and Davies is
unflinching in his hunt for truth and full of nothing but love and
understanding for his characters. A masterpiece.
BFI Screen Online Annette Kuhn, also including: Show full synopsis
Terence Davies's debut feature is actually two films, made two years apart. With the same cast and setting, and an effective matching of image and mood, Distant Voices and Still Lives work together to make a highly resonant feature which continues to mine the rich biographical seam explored in Davies's earlier Trilogy.
The experiments in 'memory-realism' honed in the earlier works
are extended and brought to fruition in a highly distinctive marriage of style
and content. Distant Voices, Still Lives combines the social concerns of
much British cinema (in this case, life in a working-class
But far from being a gratuitous stylistic flourish, the film's
'poetry of the ordinary' is grounded in, and dictated by, its subject matter.
Composed largely of events and situations recalled by different family members,
Distant Voices, Still Lives is about memory itself, and through its
organisation of sounds and images enacts the very process of remembering.
Especially distinctive features of the film include the mixture of standpoints
from which events are recalled, the vignettish character of the memory-stories,
and references to popular songs, popular culture, religious iconography and
religious music. Film critic Derek Malcolm aptly described it as "a
musical version of
The film's authentic feel derives not from naturalism, nor even from realism in any ordinary sense. Rather, it contrives to convey the emotion, the 'structure of feeling', that attaches to memory. The narration, like memory itself, is cyclical, repetitive, ambiguous, suggesting, as Martin Hunt puts it, an "ambivalent, interrogative, contradictory and ultimately unresolved" relation to the past. The film's refusal of nostalgia is underscored by the brownish, bleached-out, hand-tinted look of its colour palette, and by startling juxtapositions of memories of happiness and brutality.
Distant Voices, Still Lives captures, from the inside, what it feels like to live (or rather to remember living) in a particular kind of family and in a certain class setting - a way of life some might say is now lost. Whether or not this is so, the film effectively conveys a very particular set of experiences in a way that is universally recognisable.
Distant Lives, Still Voices Fernando F. Croce from Slant magazine
Not the least among its achievements, Terence
Davies's wondrous Distant Voices, Still Lives offers a crystallization
of the appeal of the musical. An odd linkage, to be sure, since the genre's
trademark studio boisterousness would seem a world away from the kitchen-sink
dreariness of the director's mood piece about his years growing up with his
working-class family in post-WWII Liverpool, dominated by his abusive ogre of a
father. Yet Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into
the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct
expression, music as emotion felt. Cinema is the most unashamedly emotional of
arts, and the musical feeds in no small part on repressed, frustrated
sensations, the better to explode them with bursts of melodious bravura; what
are musical numbers, after all, if not lyrically stylized declarations of feelings
that could not be expressed any other way?
In
genre terms, Davies's opening "number" consists of a languid, almost
ghostly tracking shot through an empty, dark-greenish living room as "I
Get The Blues When It Rains" fills the air, dissolving then to a medium
shot of the main characters in funeral blacks: Mother (Freda Dowie) and her
grown children, Eileen (Angela Walsh), Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), and Tony
(Dean Williams). Posed frontally in a spare, doleful tableau, they suggest
figures in a faded family album, and, indeed, the role of memory is intensely
connected to the director's use of music. Songs from Davies's childhood flood
the soundtrack, and throughout the film there is the feeling that each snippet
heard is braided to an emotion biographically experienced and ripped, still
bleeding, out of the past. When "Taking A Chance On Love" is heard
while Mother sits on a windowsill polishing the glass from the outside, the
lovely specificity of the moment becomes incantatory, the earthbound plainness
turned as awesomely lyrical as the flashiest of Stanley Donen's showstoppers.
Incarcerated
in an all-too-real world, however, Davies's characters are unable to swim into
the Technicolor glories of their fantasies the way Vincente Minnelli's or Tsai Ming-liang's
can. Davies cuts from the kids watching Mother by the window to her being
brutally beaten by Father (Pete Postlethwaite) yet lets the same piece of music
play as he shifts from a fondly recalled moment to a traumatic one. The obvious
point of reference would be the sardonic bitterness of Dennis Potter's The
Singing Detective, though Potter's irony is completely alien to Davies. In
fact, the two artists' approaches could not be more different from each other;
whereas Potter sees the lies of pop culture in the chasm separating idealized
fantasy and cruel realities, Davies finds in it the possibility for salvation.
No
MGM glitz pierces through the film's barrage of cramped interiors, bombing
shelters and abuse, yet it is through music that the characters' souls reach
heavenward, even as their feet remain grounded in soot. To them, the very act
of enjoying or actively performing a song constitutes defiant ecstasy, a moment
of revolt against the crushing oppression all around them. Locked in the brig
for briefly going AWOL to confront his father, Tony pulls out a harmonica and
plays the theme from Limelight; feeling a continuation of her family's
patriarchal tyranny in her own marriage, Eileen rebelliously sings "I Want
To Be Around To Pick Up The Pieces" in response to her domineering
husband's orders. In both cases, Davies displays a profound understanding of
how art can liberate people from sorrow.
Davies's
film is an act of exorcism, but also one of redemption. "I make films to
come to terms with my family history," the director has said. "If
there had been no suffering, there would have been no films." Distant
Voices, Still Lives is a far darker work than The Long Day Closes,
Davies's luminous 1992 follow-up, where he could freely, lyrically recall the
burgeoning awareness of his homosexuality, his joy for cinema, or, simply, the
stupefying play of light on a carpet; as Armond White superbly put it, the
difference between the two films is the difference between "memories
Davies can't get rid of and memories he won't let go."
The
filmmaker actually shot the film as two deliberately contrasting halves, each
made with a different crew over a two-year phase; Distant Voices peeks
through pale-sepia tones while Still Lives abounds in ominous-ethereal fades
to white just as painterly stillness alternates with gliding camera movement.
The title may imply the stagnation of oppressed lives, yet the picture's
lasting impression is one of concentrated, purified motion, of images
poetically triggering images, and, above all, of waves of feeling flowing from
screen to audience and back. Never ignoring the characters' pain as the family
dissolves in the course of the film, Davies brings to their gatherings a
heartfelt sense of emotional community struggling with the inescapable passage
of time.
Although
Davies has stated that in filmmaking he has worked out his reasons for
rejecting his early Catholicism, Distant Voices, Still Lives remains one
of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades. Davies's utter faith
is in human emotion, rendered through popular art; late-'40s tunes, enriched
over the years with the expressive personal connections they have come to
carry, are no less sacred than the baptismal liturgy that welcomes Maisei's
infant into this world. "Buttons And Bows" performed at a wedding
reception, the crowd at the pub warbling "Bye Bye Blackbird" as the
night comes to a close: These are instances of feeling distilled to its
essence, as if Davies took the musicals he loved so much growing up and zeroed
in onto the tremulous heartbeats. Time, joy, and family are transitory, yet
Davies knows that the camera's ability to capture them borders on the divine. I
can think of few more moving expressions of this than the sublime ascending
crane from the huddled umbrellas outside a theater that dissolves into a gentle
pan over the rapt, weeping faces of the audience inside. From rain to tears,
and set to the strains of the Love Is A Many Splendored-Thing score,
Davies exults cinema's transformative powers past, present, and future.
DISTANT
VOICES, STILL LIVES - JonathanRosenbaum.com
Still Lives Distant Voices - Film (Movie) Plot and ... - Film Reference G.C. Macnab
The Art of Memory Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, September 2001
Cinelogue [Jonathan Henderson]
Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear: Distant Voices, Still Lives Nathanael Hood
Distant Voices, Still Lives Ric Burke from Film for the Soul
film is love.: Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1988)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson
What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
Terrence Davies hosts 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and 'The Long Day ... PR Web
Time Out’s 100 Best British Films Listed as #3
JonathanRosenbaum.com
» Blog Archive » Ten Best Lists, 1980s
Best Films of the 1980’s,
Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006 #1 Film in 1989
Bigmouth
strikes again Simon Hattenstone
feature and interview the director from The
Guardian,
Terence
Davies: interview Wally Hammond
interview from Time Out,
BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael
LFF
- Terence Davies presents 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' Sarah Cohen from Time Out London,
Bittersweet
symphony Beryl Bainbridge from The Guardian,
Distant
Voices, Still Lives: No 21 Steve
Rose from the Guardian,
Review/Film;
'Distant Voices, Still Lives,' a ... - New York Times Vincent Canby,
Distant
Voices, Still Lives - Movies - New York Times Vincent Canby,
Distant Voices, Still Lives: Information from Answers.com
Distant Voices, Still Lives - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Videos for "Distant Voices, Still Lives"
THE LONG DAY CLOSES A 96
No
star is o'er the lake,
Its pale watch keeping,
The moon is half awake,
Through gray mists creeping,
The last red leaves fall round
The porch of roses,
The clock hath ceased to sound,
The long day closes.
Sit by the silent hearth
In calm endeavour,
To count the sounds of mirth,
Now dumb for ever.
Heed not how hope believes
And fate disposes:
Shadow is round the eaves,
The long day closes.
The lighted windows dim
Are fading slowly.
The fire that was so trim
Now quivers lowly.
Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes.
—Henry Fothergill Chorley and Arthur Sullivan, 1868, The Long Day
Closes by Arthur Sullivan 2008 Prom ... The King Singers at Royal Albert
Hall (2008) on YouTube (4:21)
A heartbreakingly beautiful work, a memory play turned musical theater, where this impressionistic, Joycean stream-of-conscious Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man piece is unlike anything else you’ll see, though J. Hoberman from The Village Voice called it a “Proustian musical,” it is a follow up to the director’s earlier autobiographical work, DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988), the difference being that this is a few years after the death of his father, whose absence allows a wistful happiness. While it is a family portrait of a distinct period in time in the director’s childhood, namely the mid 1950’s in Liverpool, shown as still life painting over the opening credits, it has an experimental feel, as there’s no real narrative to speak of, while nearly every scene is accompanied by either a TV, movie, or musical reference. The camerawork by Michael Coulter, however, is near unforgettable, where the transitions between shots, visual and audio are spectacular. One could easily mistake this for a Michael Powell film, as the meticulous art design is so perfectly rendered, but the yearning, atmospheric mood is all Terence Davies. While something of a nostalgia piece, the film is more complex, mostly shot in the gloom of the everpresent rain, with 11-year old Bud (Leigh McCormack) staring listlessly out the window, the film reflects his inner thoughts and is a tribute to his recollections. What’s surprising about this film is how much of it is an audio experience, reflective of an era when so many listened to the radio, when this experience was literally a post-war national pastime. It’s no accident that even in pubs today one of Britain’s most unique traditions are its own citizens singing popular songs in unison, where seemingly everyone knows the words.
As the film moves along with elegant dissolves from shot to shot, song to song, sequence to sequence, the audience is following along the interconnected, interior thoughts of Bud, where the screen is aglow with a cinematic visualization of his imagination, literally using 35 different pieces of original music, some in their entirety, where the film received a 10-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes in 1992. Jam packed with movie references, seen here on IMDb: connections, Davies uses various songs like time capsules, or personal markers in his life, where we hear opera singers Isobel Buchanan Ae Fond Kiss from The Long Day Closes - YouTube (3:32) or Kathleen Ferrier Blow The Wind Southerly by Kathleen Ferrier 南の ... YouTube (2:23), but also Judy Garland from MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944) Judy Garland - Over the Bannister (Meet Me in St. Louis ... - Youtube (1:15) and Doris Day from LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (1955) Doris Day - At Sundown - YouTube (1:44) singing popular songs from movies. In one of the more beautiful sequences, his family poses for a WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) picture postcard, where people are constantly in motion, and even though they’re all sitting inside, snow continually falls behind them. The imaginings of things past have such a haunting immediacy that the film recalls the inner segment of the recent magisterial Terrence Malick work THE TREE OF LIFE (2011), where both blend visual poetry with personal intimacy.
What also stands out is what a perfectly behaved and obedient child Bud is, a Mama’s boy who idolized his mother (Marjorie Yates, a member of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company), often seen holding hands or sitting in her lap as she sings to him, a guy who follows all the rules and does everything he’s supposed to do, yet begins to have second thoughts early in life about the rigidity of Catholicism, where the church shows an extreme intolerance and inflexibility for homosexuality, at odds with his own budding sexual nature. Rather than receiving a reward for his efforts of devout obedience, the scriptures all but leave him in eternal damnation. Is it any wonder he would turn to the movies and popular songs for personal refuge? The evidence of conformity in British life is stunning, where in school or in church they are all expected to play by the rules, as if there’s something to be gained from that. But there’s no evidence of any reward, nor is there any sign of the insolence and rebellious disobedience seen in American films that suggest a cultural break with the past. Instead in Davies dreamy but orderly world, being smart, respectful, and polite creates a certain inner harmony, the perfection of which is not matched by the bleak world outside where it’s constantly raining, where young men are sent off to war, and where Catholic boys fall in love with Protestants on the road to both becoming atheists.
Davies remarkably demonstrates how each of the various social institutions from school, church, home, pub, and theater shaped and changed his life, actually framing his consciousness, where the ingenious way of introducing each sequence is like showcasing a new Broadway number with music, lighting, and elaborate camera movements, with brief pauses between sequences, shot in a sepia tone, where the colors are washed out. Using snippets of an instantly recognizable Orson Welles narration from THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), itself a modern exercise in nostalgia, “Back then they had time for everything,” Davies shows how the combining forces of art illustrate the power of the past as a living and breathing force in our lives. While the movie is not chronologically ordered, it makes sense if one can imagine how the mind can travel from thought to thought, often on emotional impulse, where perhaps the most remarkable scene of the movie is set to Debbie Reynold’s rendition of Tammy: The Long Day Closes with Debbie Reynolds' Tammy YouTube (3:51), an extended overhead tracking shot where the constantly inquisitive camera passes Bud alone at home before moving to a crowded movie theater, to a packed church, dissolving into a classroom with an amusing snippet from KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949), coming full circle before the camera finds its way back to where it started, as if its gone all the way around the world where poor Bud is once more isolated and alone, much like he spent a good deal of his childhood. Davies has a way of bookending his film, where the elegiac opening song lyric “the music of the years gone by” from Stardust - Nat King Cole - YouTube (3:16) seems to match the lamenting tone of the gloriously lyric final sequence, The Long Day Closes (1992) Closing Sequence (4:18), a part song bringing a high minded sense of seriousness to a setting from an earlier epoch.
The Long Day Closes - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Juliet Clark
“The music of the years gone by”: with Nat “King” Cole singing
“Stardust” while the camera slowly moves past tattered movie posters and down a
dim studio street, Davies ushers us gently, lovingly into another world. This
is a land of music and shadows and light, also known as 1956
Like Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies' final autobiographical film rings wholly true, due to the richness and the rightness of the allusions he makes through sets, costumes, dialogue, music, radio and cinema itself. Such is Davies' artistry that he shapes his material (an impressionistic series of brief, plotless scenes recalled from 1955-6, when he was about to leave junior school) into a poignant vision of a paradise lost. While economic constraints, school bullies, religious terror and barely-felt sexual longing are present, the accent is on the warmth 11-year-old 'Bud' receives from his family and neighbours. Indeed, it's primarily about the small, innocent but very real joys of being alive, recreated with great skill and never smothered by sentimentality. The stately camera movements; the tableaux-like compositions; the evocative use of music and movie dialogue; the dreamy dissolves and lighting - all make this a movie which takes place in its young protagonist's mind. Beautifully poetic, never contrived or precious, the film dazzles with its stylistic confidence, emotional honesty, terrific wit and all-round audacity.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Rob Christopher
In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson describes Davies' masterpiece as "a poem to ordinary bliss ... [it] is about a state of being, a kind of paradise, despite the rain, the harsh circumstances, and the cramped tenement house ... Nothing happens, yet lives and a time have been opened up and gently restored, as in a tender anatomy lesson." The lives are those of a lonely schoolboy, Bud, who takes solace in the local moviehouse, and his tight-knit family. The time is post-WWII—not a span of specific years, but an atmosphere that goes beyond time. There's no story, exactly, only the progression of a mood as it unfolds. The camera glides through this mood with infinite slowness, as if afraid to disturb anything, exactly the way your memory works when you're replaying a life-changing moment in your head. Yet, moment-to-moment, the film is bursting with a vibrancy that goes beyond mere memory. It's exhilaration so simple and pure that it's almost mysterious. (1992, 85 min, new 35mm print)
The Long Day Closes | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule)
The 1992 conclusion of Terence Davies's second autobiographical trilogy may not achieve the sublime heights of parts one and two (which comprised 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives), but it's still a powerful film, possibly even a great one—the sort of work that can renew one's faith in movies. Part three chronicles his life in working-class Liverpool between the ages of 7 and 11, a period he compresses into the years 1955 and 1956, but Davies focuses less on plot or memory as they're usually understood than on the memory of emotions and subjective consciousness. Music, lighting, elaborate camera movements, and the sound tracks of other films are among the tools he uses in relation to the basic settings of home, street, school, church, pub, and movie theater. Davies emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities between these places and the emotions they evoke, creating a consistent sense of religious illumination and transfiguration. What he does with the strains of “Tammy” in one climactic sequence and with the drift of moving clouds in another are alone worth the price of admission.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Richard Dewes]
This film, the sequel to Distant Voices, Still Lives, takes up the story of director Terence Davies' childhood in 1956, a few years after the death of his father. Compared to the earlier film, it is a much lighter, more optimistic work (one need only contrast the Hollywood-fantasy Christmas dinner with the analogous scene in Distant Voices), but still Bud, Davies' alter ego, is a lonely child, isolated in a fantasy world constructed out of popular songs, snatches of movie dialogue and faintly homoerotic Catholic iconography.
The style of the film is a fascinating blend between an unwavering naturalism in the performances, and a suggestively unreal stylisation in much of the mise-en-scene, as when church becomes cinema in a memorable overhead tracking shot. These allegorical leaps allow the film to escape the confines of strictly historical and autobiographical authenticity, and attain a near-mythological universality - this is the childhood not just of Terence Davies, but of anyone who has ever sat in a cinema, anyone who has ever dreamed.
The Long Day Closes Cinema Arts Centre
After creating his acclaimed autobiographical first feature film Distant
Voices, Still Lives (1988), Terence Davies returned to
his past for the even more brilliant The Long Day Closes.
Davies’ lyrical hymn to childhood focuses on his own memories of growing up in
a working-class Catholic family in
The Long Day Closes | Green Left Weekly Wayne Ruscoe
"Between my father dying when I was seven and leaving primary school, those years were just so happy I was almost sick with happiness", says writer/director Terence Davies of the period of his life that is documented in his latest film.
As in the earlier, award-winning Distant Voices, Still Lives,
Davies' own childhood reminiscences form the "plot" of this evocative
and visually lush homage to
The problem for this reviewer is that life in mid-'50s
Davies gives us a view that is not unlike the sickly sweetness of the musical Oliver; an unrealistic slice of a world best forgotten. Anglophiles will probably love this buried treasure from the time before TV, and, I suspect, the more precious critics will rave about its honesty and detail. But really, nothing happens of great consequence, nothing is learnt, nothing is received of value. It's rather like smelling camphor and being reminded of the odour of the closet your grannie used to look you in when you'd been a naughty child. A vivid memory for sure, but one that can be lived with out.
Still, it is a beautifully shot film, the work of a crew who have
laboured to reproduce exactly the child's view of his environment. The
soundtrack too, is rich with resonances of the post-war days of little
The full effect of sound and light together is spellbinding. This
is a masterful piece of film making. You will believe you are in
Davies has said that this will be last of his autobiographical pieces, and after five shots at the genre it is definitely time for him to move on. Clearly, he is a director of considerable talent and his skill in bringing out the best in his actors can well be seen in The Long Day Closes, but he is, in this film, very much marking time. So you had a gloomy chilhood, Terence. Get over it, man. Get another life.
Flicks - January 2005 Chris Dashiell from CineScene
Popular songs are often used in films as mood- establishing
interludes. The main action of the film, with characters and plot and dialogue,
is punctuated by wordless sequences in which a song highlights the events or
feelings occurring in the story. In Terence Davies' elegiac tone poem about a
lonely 11-year-old boy in 1950s
Gradually, without being told, we discern that the boy, Bud (Leigh McCormack), lives with his mother and older siblings in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods. He attends Catholic church, is bullied by both teachers and peers at school, and takes refuge in the sounds and images he absorbs at the cinema. As the youngest in the family, he looks on -- much of the time in silence -- as his family socializes with friends and relatives, his brothers go on dates with girls, his sisters put on makeup and talk about boys, and his mother sings to herself while doing chores. He looks out of windows -- the outside world both threatening and beckoning -- as he sits in the comforting safety of home.
This is all conveyed, not by a linear narrative, but by discrete scenes done in long, often static takes, like snapshots or lightning flashes that briefly illuminate Bud's life. Ordinary aspects of his existence -- the rain pouring down in buckets, the shifting patterns of sunlight on a bedroom rug, or Bud swinging on a makeshift metal bar in front of the apartment building where he lives -- are set to the recordings of 1950s film songs by the likes of Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, and Doris Day. In the most impressive use of this device, an overhead panorama of daily life is accompanied by (of all things) Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy." The effect is both moving and disquieting -- lush American ballads suffusing the drab working class environment with the golden light of memory. For this is a memory piece -- not related as if the events were happening now, but shown as filtered through a later awareness, fragmentary, with coherence supplied only by the aid of song.
The characters sing as well: old folk songs and show tunes sung
at get-togethers, "Auld Lang Syne" on New Year's Eve, a performance
of
It is in the nature of autobiographical films to risk self- indulgence. Davies avoids the trap by eschewing the conventions of drama altogether. Taking this radically non-narrative approach, The Long Day Closes vividly portrays the inner life of memory and desire, while at the same time allowing us to glimpse a particular place and period reflected in the mind of a boy. There is no rapid cutting -- the film moves slowly, like a gentle stream, with the graceful quality of time recaptured. The photography and muted color schemes are impeccable. This is a one-of-a-kind movie -- both formal experiment and nostalgic tribute. The ending, with the title song playing as Bud looks out at a sunset, sums up his passage from the reclusiveness of his childhood into a wider life in the world.
The Long Day Closes | REVERSEBLOG: the reverse shot blog Robbie Freeling
Is Terrence Davies the greatest living director that no one talks about? There, got your attention. This past weekend, demurely tucked away amidst the current pre-Alexanderplatz Fassbinder hoopla and the post-Imamura blow out of New York film culture, was one of the finest films of the past twenty (or whatever arbitrary number you care to add…thirty? forty?) years, Davies’s The Long Day Closes. A continuation of sorts of Davies’s acclaimed, and still non-DVD’d, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987), which recounted the director’s traumatic remembrances of his abusive father as a period songbook of sorts, The Long Day Closes focuses exclusively on the relationship between mother and son, not quite dramatized as a series of images and whispers.
Just when you thought you’d seen all this stuff before (dramas of working-class postwar Liverpool, concerning little boys who escape from reality to the cathedral-like confines of the cinema…), Davies transforms rote movie-honed pathos into something that nearly bursts with invention and integrity. Nostalgia, undeniably. Family, cinema, music, holidays, snowfalls, school bullies? For sure. Yet it isn’t some simple “trip into the past”—it may be closer in tone to Woody Allen’s Radio Days than something like Cinema Paradiso, yet it’s more liminal and less distanced than either. The Long Day Closes is immersive, a plunge into the lingering terrors of prepubescent sexuality and the mysterious ways in which memory is concerned more with indefinable rushes of feeling than events. Threadbare as the narrative seems, Davies packs more experience in this film’s short 90 minutes than most directors do with epics of belt-widening girth.
There are seemingly no traditional transitions in the film; from scene to scene, using elegant dissolves or gorgeously distilled graphic matches, it flows from one moment to the next with intuitive nonchalance. There are no scenes, just perceptions; traces and moods rather than defining happenstance. Psychological makeup isn’t established, it’s already a given: at the film’s outset the director’s young surrogate (Leigh McCormack) is seen curiously scoping out a bit of shirtless male musculature from his window with a mix of shame and wonder, the same two emotions he will feel when sneaking peeks at those other mysteries of childhood—cinema, the church. Davies brilliantly uses McCormack as his vessel: he’s not “pensive,” not a passive observer of his family and friends so much as a slowly forming moral being; the child’s pursed lips and eagle stare don’t convey “innocence” (as in other, thuddingly banal portraits of children escaping into dreams, such as, I have to say it, Pan’s Labyrinth) but rather an actual absorbent intellect. Imagine that: kids with the capability of judgment! Davies lets his actor’s face convey this, relegating his dialogue to simple asides and repetitions, like his occasionally asking his mum for movie money.
And such lovingly infrequent dialogue—the most memorable in the film being lines from other films draped across the soundtrack, as they echo in the boy’s mind, the most exquisitely rendered being a snatch of exchange between Judy Garland and Tom Drake from Meet Me in St. Louis, played while he spies his older brother romantically commingling with a girlfriend in glass silhouette behind the front door. (There’s also some Magnificent Ambersons thrown in there, with Orson Welles’s honey-acid narration incongruously telling us of George’s comeuppance—another example of a classical family narrative providing counterpoint.) Even more beguiling are the moments in which Davies abstracts the solitude of childhood to minute drifts across patterned rugs or wallpaper, watching and waiting for the light cast by a window to change with the passing of a cloud, or, in the memorably foreboding opening, an extended glide (heavenly but resolutely earthbound) across a rain-swept street and into an alleyway, bereft of people but pregnant with time and memory.
Anyone who’s seen Davies’s The House of Mirth knows that
his dreamlike and ethereal approach to memory is simply a mask for the stuff of
true flesh and blood. Ultimately, when Mirth’s Lily Bart succumbs to the
oppressive realities of the falsely genteel
The
Long Day Closes: In His Own Good Time
Criterion essay by January 28, 2014
The Long Day Closes | Reverse Shot earlier essay from Michael Koresky
Looking
at The Long Day Closes photo
gallery, January 27, 2014
The Long Day Closes (1992) - The Criterion Collection
BFI | Sight & Sound | Sound And The Fury: Terence Davies David Thomson from Sight and Sound, April 2007, also seen here: Sound And The Fury: Terence Davies
Jonathan Rosenbaum July 30, 1993
intellectual writings on film Samiracle
Remembering the Future: Terence Davies and the Paradoxes of Time Wendy Everett from Film Studies, Winter 2006 (pdf)
The Long Day Closes / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
The Long Day Closes | DVD Video Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens
Songs
for my mother « Things left undone
Matt
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Long Day Closes, The Review (1992) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
Terrence Davies hosts 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and 'The Long Day ... PR Web
"The Long Day Closes": A great gay film that didn't make the list ... S Nicks from After Elton
The Little Wooden Boy: The Long Day Closes by Terence Davies
Straight.com Ken Eisner from Georgia Straight
The Long Day Closes : The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule)
Movies for a desert island | Slide Show - Salon.com Matt Zoller Seitz
ReelViews [James Berardinelli] also seen here: James Berardinelli
terence davies - at the walter reade theater
The Long Day Closes Music Box Theatre
The Long Day Closes - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi
Last Seat on the Right: The Long Day Closes (1992, Davies) Michal Oleszczyk 3-part audio commentary
An
Interview with Britain's greatest living film Director: Terrence ... Martyn Contero interview from Scene 360,
Film4 also seen here: The Long Day Closes
Variety Reviews - The Long Day Closes - Film Reviews - - Review ...
Time Out’s 100 Best British Films Listed as #72
The Long Day Closes | Film review - Film - Time Out Chicago A.A. Doud
The Long
Day Closes Mark Kermode and Philip
French from The Observer
DVD review: The Terence Davies Trilogy/The Long Day Closes ... Phelim O’Neill from The Guardian
Terence
Davies This Weekend at the Aero - Page 1 - Film+TV - Los ... Doug Cummings from The LA Times,
Movie Review - The Long Day Closes - Review/Film; Turning a ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times
The Long Day Closes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Long Day Closes (song) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE NEON BIBLE
The Neon
Bible Geoff Andrew from Time Out
This adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's
novel returns to the concerns of Terence
Davies' acclaimed autobiographical work: the joys and agonies of family
life; the onset of adulthood; the oppressive hypocrisy of organised religion.
Here, however, instead of
The Neon Bible Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
After showing himself a master at juggling autobiographical material in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, both dealing with his childhood in Liverpool during the 50s, Terence Davies adapts a novel by John Kennedy Toole about growing up in the rural deep south in the late 30s and 40s—and it's remarkable how persuasively he handles this milieu while making it wholly his own. Two substantial assists are provided by Gena Rowlands (starring as the narrator-hero's disreputable aunt, a onetime torch singer) and the 'Scope format, both of which boost some of the mythological possibilities in the material. Davies's special gifts as a filmmaker have much more to do with expressing and sculpting passages of pure feeling than with telling a story. Diana Scarwid, as the hero's fragile mother, is almost as good as Rowlands (both actresses sing in this movie, and Davies turns their songs into incandescent experiences). Neither Toole's novel nor Davies's faithful version of it adds up to anything more than a period mood piece, but some of the passages in this movie are so beautiful and potent that you may carry the moods around with you for weeks. With Jacob Tierney, Denis Leary, and Leo Burmester.
The Neon Bible Mike D’Angelo
Terence Davies is something of an acquired taste. I thought his first feature, Distant Voices/Still Lives, one of the most tedious movies I'd ever seen; when I finally got around to seeing The Long Day Closes, his second feature, many years later, I was entranced, despite the fact that it really isn't any kind of significant departure from the one I'd loathed. I think that if I'd seen then in the opposite order, my opinion of them would similarly have reversed, because the key to my appreciation the second time around was the knowledge that nothing much is going to happen in a Davies film...at least, nothing in the way of narrative. The Neon Bible, by comparison, is positively fraught with incident -- there's even a murder, by god -- but it's shot in the usual Davies fashion, concerned less with 'what happens next' than with the juxtaposition of sound and image, and the dynamics of motion. A Davies film can almost be plotted, like a map; the camera, rather than any linear notion of time, propels the viewer forward, or backward, or to the left or right, up, down, and so forth. Davies' films are almost entirely about mood, and if you forget about plot and simply allow yourself to be transported, you're in for a hell of a ride (albeit a slow, leisurely ride -- when the film was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1995, Davies remarked that he'd have loved to have directed Speed, "but if I did Speed it'd just be one car moving very slowly, and then eventually it'd leave frame and you'd just be looking at a field or something"). In fact -- and here's something I complain about very infrequently -- this adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's precocious novel really has too much plot to be truly satisfying; there are moments of such narrative import that they effectively break the spell Davies has created. There are also moments in which Davies tries to push the spell too far, such as one in which Diana Scarwid sings "Tura-lura-lura" (I'm sure I just mangled the spelling -- somebody mail me the real one) for approximately sixteen years. On the other hand, Gena Rowlands is in it, so what're you waiting for?
The Tech (MIT) [Stephen Brophy]
It would be great to report that The Neon Bible is not only worth seeing but also a satisfying movie experience, but unfortunately, only the first statement is true. Terence Davies' latest film looks as ravishing as Distant Voices, Still Lives, or The Long Day Closes, and it uses musical cues to evoke the past as well as any of his previous works. But he is not telling his own story here, and the story he has leaves a lot to be desired.
The novel on which The Neon Bible is based is a juvenile
work of John Kennedy Toole, the eccentric
Toole wrote The Neon Bible when he was 16 years old; it would probably never have seen print without the bizarre and phenomenal success of his later work. It concerns David, a boy growing up in the rural South in the years surrounding World War II. The narrative is framed by the nighttime musing on a train of this boy about events in his past. It develops that he is running from that past and his participation in it.
Davies works as much of his magic as he can on the material he has been given and is generously assisted by his actors. Denis Leary and Diana Scarwid play David's parents, poverty-stricken and unable to support each other, even with the revival-tent religion they both cling desperately to. Into their lives like an exotic night bird flies Aunt Mae, played by Gena Rowlands, who becomes David's closest friend and the final straw in the battle that has become his parent's lives.
Aunt Mae used to be a nightclub singer, and she still wears flamboyant clothes and strikes one defiant pose after another. Her washed-out sister and denim-clad brother-in-law can't deal with her citified ways and fear mightily what the neighbors might think. Everybody is supposed to be the same in the Bible Belt - those who are different have got to get out.
Gena Rowlands delivers a complete Aunt Mae, one who flirts with her seven-year-old nephew, feeds his imagination, and is willing to abandon him to further her career. She can be cocky one second and humiliated the next and is believable every step of the way. Leary and Scarwid also develop well the inconsistencies of their characters. David is competently played by two actors, Drake Bell for the scenes when he is seven, and Jacob Tierney for his teenage scenes.
Davies creates some intensely beautiful set pieces, as one would
expect given his previous work. Watch for the town women singing
"Chatanooga Choo-Choo" while their men are off being soldiers and for
a schoolhouse recital of the Pledge of Allegiance while
AssociatedContent.com [Stephen O. Murray]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Film Scouts Reviews: Neon Bible, The Henri Béhar
The Seventh Art [Just Another Film Buff]
Movie Magazine International [Mary Weems]
FireBlade DVD Review [Jerry Stratton]
filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]
Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]
San Francisco Examiner [Barry Walters]
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH A- 93
Great Britain France Germany USA
The House of Mirth Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
“If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level.” Edith Wharton's encapsulation of the narrative form of her tragic (and sexy) 1905 novel, describing the progressive defeat of socialite Lily Bart by the ugly indifference of Wharton's own leisure class, is given an extra touch of Catholic doom in Terence Davies's passionate, scrupulous, and personal adaptation, which to a surprising degree preserves the moral complexity of most of the major characters. It's regrettable if understandable that the Jewishness of social climber Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia) is no longer an issue, and Lawrence Selden, Lily's confidant, is somewhat softened by a miscast Eric Stoltz, but the cast as a whole is astonishing—especially Gillian Anderson as Lily and Dan Aykroyd in his finest performance to date. Davies feels and understands the story thoroughly, giving it a raw emotional immediacy that would be unthinkable in the shopper-friendly adaptations of Merchant-Ivory and their imitators, and the film's feeling for decor and costumes, derived from both John Singer Sargent paintings and Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, is exquisite. With Terry Kinney, Laura Linney, Elizabeth McGovern, and Eleanor Bron. 140 min.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
"A girl must, a man if he chooses," laments
turn-of-the-century
The House of Mirth Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
In Terrence Davies' The House of Mirth, Lily
Bart (Gillian Anderson) is repeatedly tested with a series of marriage
proposals, but it's clear that her heart lies with the handsome Lawrence Selden
(Eric Stoltz), whose poverty more or less proves difficult for the avaricious
woman to ignore. When she loses a considerable amount of money at cards, she
turns to Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd) for help. Even though Lily refuses to have an
affair with him in order to erase her debt, Gus nonetheless lends her the money
but only on the condition that she will pay him back. Now penniless, she
returns to Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia), whose marriage proposal she once
rejected (or put off, as she begs to differ). In one devastating swoop, Lily's
dignity is completely ravaged and she becomes painfully aware of the
consequences of her indiscretions.
Besides
his remarkable ability to render a profound sense of past in all his films,
Davies can uncannily map out the emotions of his characters via his
mise-en-scène. Born to a working class family in
One
particularly ravishing pan in the film moves from a clock on a mantle and
across a room full of furniture recently covered in white sheets. From there
the camera glides across lush outdoor greenery and over a small brook. From the
bright circles emanating from the sun-drenched water, the gentle swell of the
camera gorgeously evokes Lily's psychical and emotional trajectory from her
BFI | Sight & Sound | The House of Mirth (2000) Kevin Jackson from Sight and Sound, November 2000
New York, 1905-7. Lily Bart, a
young lady of slender means, arrives in New York and meets her friend Lawrence
Selden, a bookish bachelor, who invites her to his flat. Leaving, Lily is
spotted by rich businessman Sim Rosedale. Staying at the country retreat of
friends Judy and Gus Trenor, Lily woos the wealthy but boring Percy Gryce, but
he rejects her advances on learning of her gambling debts. Later, she and
Lawrence kiss, although they skirt the issue of marriage. When staying at the
country house of her aunt, Mrs Peniston, who pays her a modest allowance, Lily
purchases letters which reveal that Lawrence had an affair with married
socialite Bertha. On hearing of her money difficulties, Gus Trenor offers to
invest Lily's savings, and introduces her to Rosedale, whose offer of marriage
she refuses. Later, after he reveals he used his own money to augment her
savings, Gus makes a move on Lily, which she angrily rejects. Gus then demands
she pay back the money he invested for her.
Facing mounting debts, Lily joins
Bertha and her husband George on vacation in Monte Carlo, not realising that
Bertha is using her as a shield for an affair. Bertha then accuses her of
seducing George. Outcast by her circle, left only a small sum when her aunt
dies, and unwilling to use the incriminating letters to tarnish Bertha, Lily
falls down the social scale, from secretary to drudgery in a milliner's to
unemployment and chloral addiction. Bertha visits Selden and throws his letters
into the fire. Using a loan from Rosedale to pay off her debt to Trenor, Lily
takes a lethal dose of chloral; Selden - having retrieved the letters from the
fire - discovers her body.
Review
"The world is vile," murmurs one of Lily Bart's few loyal allies, Carry Fisher, as she reflects sadly on the cruel stupidity with which their social circle has cast out and is gradually destroying her young friend. In Edith Wharton's novel, it is Lily herself who speaks the line, but writer-director Terence Davies is wise to have changed it: it resonates in his film as a grimly impartial summing-up, not as the personal grievance of a lady who has run out of luck. For the world of The House of Mirth is indeed largely vile, one in which the unprincipled and vigorously hypocritical, like Gus Trenor and Bertha Dorset, tend to triumph while the idealistic (Lily grows braver, less venal and more magnanimous as her worldly fortunes fail) are branded as immoral and ruined, unless cushioned, like Lily's lover Selden, by enough money and the appropriate chromosomes.
This beady-eyed view of the early 20th-century's nouveaux riches (a rather different tribe from the Old New Yorkers of The Age of Innocence, but no less savage at heart) was Wharton's own, and Davies has preserved its astringent spirit in bringing it to the screen. It's rare that a period film, however seriously intended, doesn't fall at least half in love with its fancy frocks and immaculate crockery, but The House of Mirth is quite different. Though handsomely designed (by Don Taylor) and lovingly shot (by Remi Adefarasin) - there's one dissolve, from pellets of rain lashing the surface of a cold pond to the softly glowing waters of the Mediterranean, that's almost excessively gorgeous - it never loses sight of the fact that the pretty graces of this world are also, as it were, the trophies of barbarism.
Wharton was keenly interested in the writings of her contemporary Thorstein Veblen, the first sociologist to make the insolent comparison between the leisure classes and ancient warrior hordes; Veblen, one suspects, would have appreciated the unbeglamoured eye of Davies' film. Indeed, far from diluting the remorseless quality of Wharton's social tragedy with the familiar backward-glancing nostalgia of most costume pieces, Davies has, if anything, accentuated its melancholy.
A modest budget no doubt played the decisive part in having Lily walk on to the screen alone at the beginning of the film, rather than weaving her way through the afternoon crush of Grand Central, but the effect is more than apt: the image of Lily emerging from a cloud of railway steam evokes Anna Karenina, and hints proleptically at her sticky end. And when we arrive at that sticky end, Davies certainly out-does Wharton in bleakness: where the novel's heroine drifts off into a more or less accidental drugged sleep and the soothing fantasy of nursing a child, the film terminates in unambiguous suicide.
As with Davies' trilogy of autobiographical short films, there are sequences
in The House of Mirth (the misleading title, taken from the Old
Testament, was applied by newspapers to an insurance scandal of 1905) so gloomy
they border on the excruciating; as in those shorts, the redemptive qualities
here are eloquence, precision and grace. If Gillian Anderson's first scenes
bear the inescapable trace of her role in The X Files, she rapidly sheds
it. Apart from her un-Lily-like inability to pronounce French words
appropriately, she is not merely plausible but exceptionally powerful, and she
makes Lily's final self-lacerating encounter with
Anderson more than vindicates Davies' idiosyncratic casting decision (as, in
a different register, does Dan Aykroyd, whose smug violence as Trenor is miles
away from anything he's shown on screen before), and lends both sympathy and
dignity to a character who could too easily provoke - as she sometimes appears
to provoke even in Edith Wharton - impatience and scorn. Fine as she is,
though, the film's finest quality is its typically quiet attentiveness to tone
of voice, posture, nuances of facial expression -
The Magnificent Anderson: The House of Mirth | Senses of Cinema Kent Jones, June 2001
Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert] Summer 2009
Best of the Decade #20: The House of Mirth | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
The House of Mirth - World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
AboutFilm.Com - The House of Mirth (2000) Carlo Cavagna
PopMatters F.L. Carr
The House of Mirth (Best of the 21st Century?) « Wonders in the Dark Sam Juliano
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Nor a thorn nor a threat... - Cinescene Chris Dashiell
A Sinking Lily Bart and Her Unforgiving Circle | The New York ... Andrew Sarris
The House of Mirth - Culture Vulture Arthur Lazere
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH - DVD - Film Freak Central Walter Chaw
The Crop Duster [Robert Horton]
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Flak Magazine Stephanie Kuenn
THE HOUSE OF
MIRTH - Hybrid Magazine Roxanne Bogucka
Xiibaro Reviews: The Mexican, The House of Mirth, The Last Resort ... David Perry
No chuckles in 'The House of Mirth' - CNN Paul Tatara
The House of Mirth | Film Blather Eugene Novikov
JamesBowman.net | House of Mirth, The
SPLICEDwire | "The House of Mirth" review (2000) Rob Blackwelder
The House of Mirth - Isthmus | The Daily Page Kent Williams
HOUSE OF MIRTH, THE - Film Journal International Wendy Weinstein
The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson
Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz
The House of Mirth (2000) - Cinescene Jeffrey S. Wettig
eFilmCritic Reviews iF magazine
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
The House of Mirth : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Gil Jawetz
Guide To Current DVD: House Of Mirth
About.com Home Video/DVD [Ivana Redwine]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
TalkTalk also seen here: The House Of Mirth review
UTK Daily Beacon [Ryan Freeman]
The Movie Report/Mr. Brown's Movie Site [Michael Dequina]
Epinions Review By Dan Ray, For The House Of Mirth
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Elizabeth McGovern Webpage - Review
Christopher Null also seen here: filmcritic.com cracks smile in House of Mirth
Jon Popick also seen here: Planet Sick-Boy
Film Comment's End of Year Critics' Poll 2001 | Filmlinc.com | Film ...
Andrew Sarris' Top Ten Lists 1958-2006 See year 2000
BBCi - Films Michael Thomson
Daylight snobbery Philip French from The Observer
Gilded rage - Boston Phoenix Scott Heller
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Death and the Maiden - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Rob Nelson
San Francisco Chronicle [Wesley Morris]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
the-house-of-mirth-2000-film - Answers.com
The House of Mirth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia book
Edith Wharton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edith Wharton's House of Mirth book review by Jonathan Wallace from The Ethical Spectacle, April 2001
OF TIME AND THE CITY A- 93
Great Britain
The
golden moments pass, and leave no trace.
—Anton Chekhov
Davies’ passionate documentary about his
hometown of Liverpool, England is given a scorchingly personal view, blending
superb archival footage with his own acerbic thoughts that he narrates, reading
literary passages, poems, and using an exceptional musical soundtrack to punctuate
his feelings. Sometimes movies have the
effect of speaking to you as if you’re the only person in the room. This film has that effect. Interesting that the writers are acknowledged
throughout the film, but not the many poets who are fully integrated into the
Davies narrative. Do not miss the
opening segment which is a marvel of invention, as the director lures us into
his world Of Time and the City: A
love song and a eulogy YouTube
(6:28), which at least initially resembles other British war documentaries of
the 40’s like Humphrey Jennings LISTEN TO BRITAIN (1942) which depict a country
uniting under a common cause despite obvious social deprivation. But then we are introduced to his distinctly
erudite voice, like a raspy call from beyond the grave where we hear him speak
of darkness and God, as if we spend our lives learning to differentiate between
the two. Davies was a devout Catholic
where the ideology of the church was not so much a religion as an imposed
indoctrination, an imprinted way of life from which he could not waver, where
he may as well have been born into piety.
But as he familiarizes himself with literary works and observes the
trappings of the world failing to live up to those high standards, doubting the
existence of God appears to be among the first places he started.
At times bitingly sarcastic, yet exquisitely to the point,
Davies appears to be having a rollicking good time (at our expense) with his
recollections from his own life, like the touch of a boy beside him, the sweaty
warmth coming from the enormous bodies of male wrestlers, the sins of the flesh
accompanied by a repressed society around him where homosexuality was illegal
in Britain during the 50’s, recounting in humor a judge’s definitive
description of horror when sentencing two male lovers, his immersion into
cinema that perhaps replaced his interest in the church, his developing love of
literature, and after hearing no divine call from the darkness, his descent
into atheism. Davies paints a portrait
of a once thriving working class city whose status is elevated by the religious
overtones of John Taverner’s “The Protecting Veil.” John Tavener - The Protecting
Veil - YouTube (
Perhaps his biggest ire is reserved for how it was all thrown away, how the beauty and splendor and grandiosity of art and architecture and the idea of a fraternal community of man was turned into images of factory workers going to work in the dirtiest, grimiest parts of town, where filth and factories were joined by housing projects and uniformly tasteless concrete monstrosities all of which rapidly decayed and in no time turned into rot and ruin, leaving behind no trace of the city he once loved. Of course, the Beatles and the Hollies were from Liverpool, where the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” Of Time and the City -- He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother YouTube (2:37) plays to images of uniformed soldiers lined up in columns marching off to yet another war, a taunt actually to the pervasive feeling after the collective international effort of fighting a war that would end all wars when all men were considered brothers and how the song was mangled into incomprehensible sentiment by the sudden popularity of rock “n” roll which he disliked immensely (eventually leaving Liverpool in 1973), where he was driven away by pop music directly into classical where he discovered Mahler’s “every overwrought note.” Gorgeously interweaving images of everlasting immortality among those of ruin and decay, Davies uses the sublime beauty of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony (“Resurrection”) Gustav Mahler - Urlicht - YouTube (5:08), an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, where we hear the last faint earthly echo, the song of a nightingale, a hushed quiet before the final spiritual transcendence is transformed into a chorale of radiant glory that overwhelms and enthralls. Davies does an excellent job dealing with his own wrath, the bitter pill of being human, finding cinematic expression that reaches a lofty plateau through its own intellect and self examination, a classic cinematic essay that exalts in its timeless status.
eye WEEKLY
capsule review [5/5] Jason Anderson
Much missed since 2000’s House of Mirth, British director Terence
Davies is at the top of his craft with this tribute to his dirty ol’ (home)
town of
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
In his first film since 2000's The
House of Mirth, Terence Davies blends found footage and ruminating
sonnets in Of Time and the City, an alternately tender and caustic
meditation on his native
Mary Corliss
Blood on the Beach, by Richard
and Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time
magazine, May 19, 2008
In Ashes of Time, Leslie Cheung says, the root of men's
problems is memory." Yet memory is the root of identity for many of us,
and for some of the best films at
Davies has been brilliantly memorializing his
Davies quotes Chekhov — "The golden moments pass, and leave no trace" — but the director's entire, exemplary career has been a mission to ensure that old moments, golden or grim, will have a prominent place in the museum of our collective memory.
Excavating
the Past to Set the Record Straight
Manohla Dargis at
CANNES, France — Memory twists and turns, peering into this and that dark corner in Wong Kar-wai’s “Ashes of Time Redux” and Terence Davies’s “Of Time and the City,” two beautiful entries at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The selections, both screened out of competition, find each director working through the past, with Mr. Wong revisiting one of his older features, the martial-arts fantasia “Ashes of Time” (originally released in 1994) and Mr. Davies returning to Liverpool, the city of his birth and the backdrop for his earlier autobiographical films, including the haunting and haunted “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988).
“Of Time and the City,” one of three movies commissioned to
celebrate
Mr. Davies narrates the fleet 72-minute film in a gravelly rumble that conveys as much through his delivery (arch, amused, enraged) as through his words (poetic, ruminative, elegiac). In that short, even too-short time, he ranges far and wide through both the city and its history, waxing personal and then political as he lingers at the movies (an early love), pauses in bleak homes and passes through one grim brick-lined Liverpudlian street after another, strewn with litter and busy with children. Mixing his words with quotations (from Friedrich Engels to Willem de Kooning), pop songs and classical music, he brings the past sensitively to life with black-and-white and color footage of a time long gone, both distant and still.
Exclaim!
[Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
No man on earth
is as pissed off as Terence Davies. Moments into this dirge-like docu-essay,
he’s railing against his
His hometown is no panacea, simply
the springboard for a blissful working-class youth ruptured by his dawning
sense of homosexuality, immense poverty and the scuppering of the elegant pop
culture he grew up with in the ’40s and ’50s.
The erosion of the economy and the
rise of desultory public housing somehow run neck and neck with the menace of
the Beatles, but this was never supposed to be methodical piece of social
anthropology. Davies, whose autobiography is always front and centre in his
work, has instead finally broken that fourth wall and addressed his lonely fury
straight to the back of the auditorium.
As a long-time fan of the director,
the film is at once dazzling and horrible: dazzling for its maker’s refusal to
acknowledge the bullies who ruled his life, horrible for how much the struggle
has cost him in self-esteem and isolation. Watching it is like listening to
your best friend doubled up with rage on an incoherent rant: you want to
comfort him but how?
Sorting out the social problems
with the personal grudges is not easy with this movie and there are times you
just want to get him drunk, find him a prostitute and hope things look better
in the morning.
But in terms of undiluted
expression of its creator’s sensibility, it’s pretty much without peer. And as
awesomely unpleasant as it is it’s still pretty awesome.
World
Socialist Web Site David Walsh at
Of Time and the City is an intensely personal, but also
socially perceptive film by veteran director Terence Davies (The Long Day
Closes, House of Mirth). Davies has made a documentary of a sort, a
tribute to his native city of
He has organized black-and-white photos, newsreel footage and contemporary video, beneath a soundtrack composed of classical and popular music, radio programs, oral history and his own intense narration, into a highly individual response to the culture, history and evolution of a major city.
There are many images that appear on the screen, but more than anything else, Of Time and the City evokes the Liverpool of Davies’ childhood and early adolescence. Raised a devout Catholic, the Church figures prominently in his memories. The narrator speaks of his dream of finding peace in his struggling soul, struggling with his sexuality in particular, a dream thwarted by the Church. About religion, he concludes, “It’s all a lie,” and notes that he became a “born-again atheist.”
Days at the beach (“The world was young and oh how we laughed”),
football crowds and football scores on radio, radio programs with bizarre
sexual double entendre (in the 1950s, when homosexuality was illegal in
And Davies cites Friedrich Engels somewhere here, a portion of this passage from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845): “Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can.”
At an early age, Davies discovers the cinema, which replaces the
ritual and splendor of the Church with its own. Gregory Peck arrives at the
Ritz Theatre in
Rightly so, the soundtrack includes “
The monarchy appears—the future Queen Elizabeth’s marriage in
1947 and her coronation in 1953. We fear the worst and even prepare ourselves
for a somewhat sentimental, national-popular approach on Davies’ part. But he surprises
and pleases us when he is quite unsparing on “Betty and Phil and a thousand
flunkies.” He notes the vast sums “wasted on the monarchy...privileged to the
last,” while the rest of the population, Davies drives home with deep feeling,
“survived in some of the worst slums in
Those slums are cleared in the 1960s and replaced with high-rise housing estates, which soon become new and perhaps more depressing dwellings. “We had hoped for paradise, we got the anus mundi [the anus of the world].” Two young girls push a stroller through a wasteland of rubble, broken glass. He refers in passing to “Municipal architecture—dispiriting at the best of times, but, when combined with the British genius for creating the dismal, makes for a cityscape that is anything but Elysian.”
Of Time and the City is unabashedly, unashamedly elegiac,
so much so that it’s almost impossible to be offended. “The golden moments pass
and leave no trace,” he declares, quoting Chekhov. Davies has no use for many
aspects of the modern city, where “cocktails are consumed in
The film is valuable not because of its carefully thought-through
approach to history and social life. No, not at all. This is a poetic version,
but genuinely felt and elegantly expressed. What Davies is largely paying
tribute to, although he probably doesn’t recognize it, is the socialist working
class culture that existed in cities like
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Of Time and the City (2008) Ryan Gilbey, November 2008
On Terence Davies' Of Time and the City - Bright Lights Film Journal Ian Johnston, February 2009
Of Time and the City | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky
Film Journey Doug Cummings
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
GreenCine Daily [Aaron Hillis]
DVD Outsider Slarek
Critic's Notebook [James Rocarols]
The Auteurs Glenn Kenny
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Of Time and the City Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
Of Time and the City Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge, also shorter version here: Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Edinburgh Film Festival 2008
Film-Forward.com Michael Lee
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Of Time and The City (2008): culturevulture.net - culturevulture film ... Beverly Berning
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]
Filmcritic.com Movie Reviews Paul Brenner
User comments from imdb Author: Anscombe from United Kingdom
User
comments from imdb Author: Martin Bradley
(MOscarbradley@aol.com) from
eFilmCritic Reviews Martin Schoo
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Val Kermode]
The New York Sun [Martin Tsai]
Of Time and City - sneersnipe film review David Perilli
Graeme Clark - The Spinning Image
Steady Diet of Film [Erin Donovan]
Of Time and The City : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Chris Neilson
Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Of Time and the
City - Talking Pictures Emma Farley from
Talking Pictures
The NYC Movie Guru [Avi Offer]
Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) capsule review
Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks]
IFC.com [Michael Atkinson] Page 2
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Phil on Film: Interview - Terence Davies Phil Concannon interview from Phil on Film,
Terence
Davies: interview Wally Hammond
interview from Time Out
'I
like my vanity and ego rubbed occasionally'
Jason Wood interview from The
Guardian,
Interview: Terence Davies on “Of Time and the City” – IFC
Aaron Hillis interview from IFC,
Cineaste Remembering
The Hollywood Reporter review Duane Byrge
Leslie Felperin Variety
Cannes
2008 diary: 'Of Time and the City'
Geoff Andrew at
Of Time and the City Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Of Time and the City Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Hank Sartin
The Times of London review Wendy Ide
It
was hailed as a great work of cinema - it made people cry Ian Jack from The Guardian,
How
a Prom took me on a journey to Terence Davies Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
Reel
Review: Of Time and the City Xan
Brooks video review from The Guardian,
Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]
Independent.co.uk
[Anthony Quinn]
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Critic Review for Of Time and the City on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
San
Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Remembrance
of Liverpool Past Dennis Lim from The New York Times, January 9, 2009
Terence Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Of Time and the City - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE
DEEP BLUE SEA B+ 91
One thing you can count on with a Terence Davies film is intelligence
and impeccable taste, also a nostalgia-tinged glimpse of the face of
The audience gets a heavy dose of what to expect in the wordless opening
sequence of the film, prefaced by a brief narration, a failed suicide attempt
by Hester (Rachel Weisz), who closes the windows, seals the door, and turns the
gas on in her rented apartment before being discovered by the landlady. Within the sequence itself, various
flashbacks occur that alter the sense of time, as Davies slowly blends together
the present with the past, adding bits and pieces of her stifling marriage with
an older judge, William (Simon Russell Beale), who still lives with his
insufferable mother (Barbara Jefford) on the grounds of their large
estate. The erudite and polite
conversation over tea laced with bitter and acrimonious undercurrents may
remind viewers what a beautiful thing well written dialog can be, as the scene
is seething with unexpressed emotion that all but consumes every last breath of
air. Within minutes, Hester is
confessing she’s been secretly concealing an affair, announcing her marriage is
all but over, running into the arms of an RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston).
While Freddie is tall and handsome, a bit of a smart aleck, boastful of
his days protecting the nation from ruin, he’s also not the sort to remember
important relationship details. So while
it may be easy to love the guy, he’s too in love with himself, playing golf,
drinking with his mates, and his devil may care nonchalance to even remember
what really matters, like all that Hester has given up to be with him. Hester’s love is more than infatuation, but
it’s a dramatic idealization, a kind of hopeful perfection that doesn’t exist,
where despite giving her all in a passionate approach to fulfilling each
other’s true desires, where sex, love, and intimacy are all intertwined, it
still sends her into the depths of despair, reeling from his personal
indifference, the discovery of how little she actually matters in his
life. Hester is a brilliant woman, the
intellectual equal to any man, including her husband and his overbearing
mother, where Freddie continually avoids having to listen to her, knowing he
can’t answer her reasoning. Scribbling a
suicide note read in the opening, true to her own dizzying passion, her suicide
attempt reflects her sense of futility both in herself and her failed
ideals. But she is rescued, and then has
to face those who drove her to such anguish.
Most of this entire film is shot indoors, in
darkened rooms, crowded bars, entrance hallways, down long corridors, or in
barely lit rooms of an old house, where the chintz wallpaper and old
photographs hanging on the wall define a now forgotten time. Shot on 35 mm by Florian Hoffmeister, the
dimly lit lamps in each room have a luminous beauty creating a dramatically
rich interior detail. What’s perhaps
most captivating about the film is the exquisite use of music, and how
reflective it is of her character, including Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto,
Andante movement, Barber,
Samuel violinc. mvt2 Andante on YouTube (
ColeSmithey.com
[Cole Smithey]
Musky with a dry wit that induces laugh-out-loud chuckles, Terence Davies’ spot-on adaptation of Terence Rattigan's brilliant 1952 theatrical stage drama, is a finely crafted gem of British post World War II malaise. The filmmakers perform no easy feat of putting the audience in the uncomfortably melancholy mind of the story's romantic leading lady. Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) is intensely intellectual, and defined by a passion that draws her away from a wealthy-but-emotionally-remote husband (Sir William Collyer—wonderfully played with tonal depth by Simon Russell Beale). Rachel Weisz keenly exposes her character’s emotional, psychological, and sexual conflicts during a time of rebuilding from war’s devastating effects. A master of creating character—in the Stanislavski sense—Weisz creates a very complex portrayal of human desire.
Hester falls passionately in love with Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), a
handsome RAF pilot returning from military duty. Tom Hiddleston’s dashing
Freddie finds his fiercely physical passion for Hester challenged by something
she does that introduces the film’s dark melodramatic context. Rattigan’s
refined dialogue bites and tears between characters we, the audience,
intuitively comprehend on elemental levels. The story’s love-triangle motivates
the characters’ actions of loyalty and betrayal, which necessarily arrive with
equal ferocity to the physical acts that cause them. From a production
standpoint the film is beautifully charged with organic elements of costume and
production design to reflect the subject's post-war era. “The
The
House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]
After an 11-year absence from fiction filmmaking in which he produced only the acrid love letter to his hometown of Liverpool, Of Time and the City, Terence Davies has returned to narrative storytelling in the fluid, memorial style of his first features. Faithfully adapting Terence Rattigan's overheated romance, the effect of this mixture of high theatricality in the performances and dialogue and pure cinema in the mise-en-scène turns out to be curiously similar to Davies's blunt, distilled presentation of his own past in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. The story, set "sometime around 1950," concerns a woman with a proclivity for suicide attempts (Rachel Weisz) who leaves her boring, wealthy husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a hotshot pilot (Tom Hiddleston), who's everything her husband isn't—a list that includes well-off, caring, or in love with her.
Davies collapses the entire first act of Rattigan's play into a wordless 10-minute sequence that sets into motion all of the personal dynamics without any expository slogging, and while the rest of the film isn't so radical, it nonetheless manages to achieve the rare feat of maintaining an unmistakably theatrical tone without ever playing as stagy in the least. Rattigan's dialogue veers between clever and tedious—a fight in a museum is hilariously stymied by Hiddleston's storming off with a shout of "I'm going to the impressionists!"; Rattigan follows this up in a reconciliation scene by having Hiddleston quip, "I only did it for the Monet"—and Weisz, Hiddleston, and Beale, all three accomplished stage actors, all bring off a balance between the small gestures of cinema and the bold ones of theater. The ghost of WWII haunts the film, materializing at two moments that prove to be its finest: a memory of community in the London Underground during an air raid that continues Davies's use of song as a key social unifier, and the final shot, a crane movement that connects Weisz, who in the circular structure has progressed from total resignation to something like hope, to a stark post-war image—an ambiguous, moving moment that could only have been achieved in cinema.
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Jennie Kermode]
The early Fifties. Chintz wallpaper. Repressed emotions. The wife of a High Court judge walks out on him for love of a younger man. But this is no conventional celebration of romance, as the suicide attempt with which the film opens should indicate. Sometimes things don't go happily ever after. Hester's husband still loves her and she cannot escape the awareness of his pain. But more devastatingly than that, her young man, Freddie, has never really seemed to care. A forgotten birthday is just the latest indication of the ease with which she slips his mind. Now she knows he is slipping away and, in the face of her helplessness, she tries to find a rational reason to stay alive.
Terrence Rattigan's powerful play has been adapted for the big screen before. The role of Hester could have been written for Vivien Leigh, yet Rachel Weisz makes it her own, delivering a powerful, raw performance that is undoubtedly Oscar material. She presents us with a woman who is sharply intelligent and acutely aware of her circumstances yet no more able to save herself because of that.
Much of the gay subtext of the play has been stripped away in this version (it's a shame to see so little of the doctor, though Karl Johnson plays him well) but in many ways this helps to bring out feminist themes that may seem more pertinent to 21st century viewers. Hester's emotional dependency on men is mirrored by her social and economic dependency, and though the subject is rarely touched upon, it's clear that she would be vulnerable on her own. She's caught at a point of social change where she is increasingly expected to take responsibility for herself yet is denied the tools to do it. The passion that she directs at Freddie seems like a surrogate for finding her own passionate connections with the world.
Unfortunately, what works wonderfully on the stage does not always translate well to the screen, and in other ways this film really suffers. The set decoration and the technical work are perfect (particular kudos should go to the sound crew) but the atmosphere is still too artificial, to a degree that feels inappropriate even in a story that sometimes takes artificiality as its subject. Too many scenes open in a contrived, awkward way that diminishes rather than enhances their impact. There are stretches of dialogue that feel leaden and some of the wittiest lines are let down by crude set-ups. Weisz works wonders with what she has and Tom Hiddleston makes a commendable effort as Freddie but struggles with the material; this ought to have been more effective than it is.
With its heroine caught between the Devil and the eponymous sea,
this film finds itself caught between the art and romance crowds; it's not
clear that it will fully satisfy either. There is no doubt that it has
interesting things to say but its curiously old fashioned, awkward approach
obfuscates them to little artistic effect. What remains is definitely worth
watching if you like intelligent cinema. Still, one can't help but feel that it
would have been better kept on the stage.
The
Deep Blue Sea – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French from The Observer,
If we count his first three short films made on shoestring budgets
between 1976 and 1983 as a trilogy, and his next, Distant Voices, Still
Lives, as a diptych (they were actually made separately), Terence Davies has
directed a mere seven films in 35 years. This puts him in the same exclusive
league for low output and high quality as his contemporary, Terrence Malick.
Davies's last film, Of Time and the City (2008), was a withering
documentary about the sad decline of his hometown,
His outstanding new movie, The Deep Blue Sea, is a version of a play by Terence Rattigan, who died in 1977 aged 66, Davies's present age. Despite the difference in age and background (Rattigan upper middle class, home counties, Church of England; Davies working class, northern, Catholic), they have much in common: being gay, having a deep attachment to England, a sympathetic understanding of women and a stoical sense of living with and making the uncomplaining best of the hand life has dealt you. This is perhaps best expressed in Rattigan's plays The Browning Version, Separate Tables and The Deep Blue Sea, all filmed in the 1950s, but none with such love, attention and understanding as Davies brings to his present task.
Rattigan's characteristically well-made play, first staged in
1952 with Peggy Ashcroft in the lead, is set on a single day in a dingy bedsit
in north
Davies has skilfully reworked the play, cutting it up into a
number of short scenes, beginning with a quarter of an hour almost without
dialogue. This sequence first creates a lifeless early morning in a 1950
Ladbroke Grove cul-de-sac that looks a lot like the murderer John Christie's
killing field at
Davies drops conventional chronology to give us moments from
Hester's life such as her meetings with the overbearing mother-in-law to whom
her husband is in thrall. If Sir William is the deep blue sea of the chilly but
kindly British establishment, Freddie, with his passion for sport, his
drinking, his devotion to fading military glory, is its devilish other face,
the physically fulfilling, misogynistic philistine. There is a gay subtext in
Rattigan's play, but it is subtly buried. Davies leaves it there as he directs
us to observe The Deep Blue Sea as a link between Brief Encounter,
which appeared just as the second world war ended, and John Osborne's Look
Back in Anger, which supposedly introduced a new, angry, less repressed
Davies elicits outstanding performances from his central triangle, all sympathetic in their various ways, lacking in self-awareness and victims of sorts. Tom Hiddleston, however, has a suggestion of a hidden sensitivity as well as a bitterness that was lacking in the character as created on stage (and later played in the film) by Kenneth More and which made More so much sadder a figure. Davies also brings to the film a particular stylistic trope of his own that he developed in Distant Voices, Still Lives, the drawing together of people into a community through popular music. In the new film a group sheltering in an underground station during the blitz sing "Molly Malone" (a folk song that echoes Hester's own tragedy); later the drinkers in a packed pub raucously perform the 1952 hit "You Belong to Me", which modulates into Jo Stafford's version as Hester and Freddie dance, slowly and romantically, in the empty art deco foyer of a hotel. This is a magical moment in a movie in which Davies, his cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, production designer James Merifield and costume designer Ruth Myers masochistically capture a key period in British life, a repressed and repressive time. They coat it with the brown varnish of postwar austerity.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film review: The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
Jonathan Romney, December 2011
The
Power of Restraint in the Films of Terence Davies - Village Voice Karina Longworth,
The
Deep Blue Sea | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias
2011 Toronto
International Film Festival Michael
Sicinski from The Academic Hack
Nigel Andrews The Financial Times
A
Deep Blue Sea Nourished With Lovers' Tears - The New York ... Rex Reed from The
Lovers
Try to Stay Above Water in The Deep Blue Sea - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton
Review:
'The Deep Blue Sea' A Beautiful ... - Blogs - indieWIRE Kevin Jagernauth
TIFF
2011: 'The Deep Blue Sea' - Toronto ... - Time Magazine Richard Corliss
REVIEW:
Rachel Weisz Shines Through the Contemplative Dankness of The Deep Blue Sea Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Phil
on Film: Review - The Deep Blue Sea
Philip Concannon
floatationsuite
[Sheila Seacroft]
Little
White Lies Magazine [Jason Wood]
LondonFilmFanatiq.com
[Jeff Galasso]
Film
Review Online [James Dawson}
Battleship Pretension
[David Bax]
Combustible
Celluloid Review - The Deep Blue Sea (2012 ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
ThisIsFakeDIY.co.uk
[Becky Reed]
Britflicks.com
[Siobhan Callas]
Cinetalk
[Katherine McLaughlin]
The
Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]
Front
Room Cinema [Scott Lawlor]
Reeling
Reviews [Laura Clifford]
David
Denby: The Deep Blue Sea - The New Yorker
(capsule review)
Screenjabber.com
[Jenny Priestley]
Screenjabber.com
[Justin Bateman]
The NYC
Movie Guru [Avi Offer]
FilmFracture:
What's Your Time Worth? [Anthony Geehan]
Bina007
Movies [R.H.H.] Professor 007
UK.
Terence Davies's "The Deep Blue Sea" David Hudson from Mubi
Interview:
Terence Davies Stuart Jeffries
interview with the director from The
Guardian,
Tom
Hiddleston interview Xan Brooks
interview with the actor from The
Guardian, November 25, 2011
Ready
for your close-up, Mr Hiddleston? with Time Out Film - Time ... Dave Calhoun interviews actor Tom Hiddleston
and actress Joanna Hogg from Time Out
London, February 2011
Phil
on Film: Interview - Terence Davies
Philip Concannon interview with the director,
The
Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
The
Deep Blue Sea Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
The
Deep Blue Sea – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw,
Catherine
Shoard's Toronto review The Guardian, September 12, 2011
The
Independent Geoffrey
Macnab,
The
Deep Blue Sea Wesley Morris from The
Review:
The Deep Blue Sea - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Michael Atkinson
'Deep'
characters wallow in shallow end
James Verniere from The Boston
Herald
'The
Deep Blue Sea' review: Rachel Weisz great
Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
The
Deep Blue Sea': Hushed, deft adaptation resonates 1/2 Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The
Deep Blue Sea - Movies - New York Times
A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
SUNSET SONG A- 94
Great Britain Luxembourg
(135 mi) 2015 ‘Scope
And
out she went, though it wasn’t near kye-time yet, and wandered away over the
fields; it was a cold and louring day, the sound of the sea came plain to her,
as though heard in a shell, Kinraddie wilted under the greyness. In the ley field
old Bod stood with his tail to the wind, his hair ruffled up by the wind, his
head bent away from the smore of it. He heard her pass and gave a bit neigh,
but he didn’t try to follow her, poor brute, he’s soon be over old for work.
The wet fields squelched below her feet, oozing up their smell of red clay from
under the sodden grasses, and up in the hills she saw the trail of the mist,
great sailing shapes of it, going south on the wind into Forfar, past
Laurencekirk they would sail, down the wide Howe with its sheltered glens and
its late, drenched harvests, past Brechin smoking against its hill, with its
ancient tower that the Pictish folk had reared, out of the Mearns, sailing and
passing, sailing and passing, she minded Greek words of forgotten lessons —
Nothing endures.
And
then a queer thought came to her there in the drooked fields, that nothing
endured at all, nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and
perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk since the oldest of
them had set the Standing Stones by the loch of Blawearie and climbed there on
their holy days and saw their terraced crops ride brave in the wind and sun.
Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learned, teaching and
saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills,
but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you
were close to it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurt you.
And she had thought to leave it all!
She
walked weeping then, stricken and frightened because of that knowledge that had
come on her, she could never leave it, this life of toiling days and the needs
of beasts and the smoke of wood fires and the air that stung your throat so
acrid, Autumn and Spring, she was bound and held as though they had prisoned
her here. And her fine bit plannings!—they'd been just the dreamings of a child
over toys it lacked, toys that would never content it when it heard the smore
of a storm or the cry of sheep on the moors or smelt the pringling smell of a
new ploughed park under the drive of a coulter. She could no more teach a
school than fly, night and day she’s want to be back, for all the fine clothes
and gear she might get and hold, the books and the light and learning.
The
kye were in sight then, they stood in the lithe of the freestone dyke that
ebbed and flowed over the shoulder of the long ley field, and they hugged to it
close from the drive of the wind, not heeding her as she came among them, the
smell of their bodies foul in her face-foul and known and enduring as the land
itself. Oh, she hated and loved in a breath! Even her love might hardly endure,
but beside it the hate was no more than the whimpering and fear of a child that
cowered from the wind in the lithe of its mother’s skirts.
—passage from Sunset
Song, first of a novel trilogy known as A
Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 1932, A
Scots Quair - Page 119 - Google Books Result
Based on the 1932 Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, part of a collective trilogy known as A Scots Quair consisting of three novels, Sunset Song published in 1932, Cloud Howe in 1933, and Grey Granite in 1934, completed shortly before his death the following year at the age of 33. For decades afterwards his books were all but impossible to buy, though they have steadily come back into print. The first, Sunset Song (mandatory reading in Scotland), is considered the best Scottish book of all time according to a 2005 poll from The List magazine conducted in association with the Scottish Book Trust (BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Mearns classic lifts book honour), though it caused a moral scandal when it was released. While not explicit by modern standards, the book dealt openly with sexual matters in a frank manner that caused many to reject it at first, but eventually the book was embraced by the same northeast Scotland Aberdeenshire community being depicted in the novel. Mitchell’s father was an impoverished farmer who was bitterly hostile to a child’s education interfering with his livelihood, so he read everything he could get his hands on, loathed farmwork, considered it slave labor, and instead ran away from home at the age of 16 to become a young reporter. A fierce advocate of socialism, he was blacklisted by the newspaper and eventually joined the army, becoming a clerk in the RAF for nearly a decade, traveling to the Middle East, before devoting his life to writing. Drawing heavily upon his childhood, Sunset Song is a revolutionary work, a mixture of stream-of-conscience and social realism, cleverly crafted in an innovative blend of English and Scots language (while his other works are written in plain English), noted for its use of humor, politics, and worldly characterization, showing amazing insight into a woman’s mind, a deep understanding of the complexity of human behavior, and a compassion for the human race, creating one of the strongest female characters in modern literature, following her as a young 14-year old girl in a tight-knit farming community through the passing seasons, weddings, funerals, and the eventual toll of World War I, becoming a testament to Scotland’s agricultural past that was wiped out and destroyed by the war, becoming a powerful statement about waste, loss of tradition, and social deterioration in the modern world. Writing a first draft for the film in 1997, Terence Davies noted the film has languished in a kind of funding purgatory for nearly two decades following repeated rejections from funding sources, claiming “That kind of thing erodes your soul, and I almost gave up. I’m not a mainstream filmmaker and the UK Film Council was set up to try and ape Hollywood. So the climate was terrible for the type of film I wanted to make.” (News News - The Sunday Times)
Without subtitles (which would definitely enhance the experience), much of the language is missed, while initially there is an odd and peculiar style that takes some getting used to, especially the blend of artifice and searing realism, but the wrenching power is unmistakable, creating a haunting and elegiac work of ultimate devastation. Davies is a master at getting to the heart of the matter, and by the end, much like his best works Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), his poetic literacy is just stunning. Opening with a rapturous look of the golden wheatfields, the novels are set in a fictional village in “The Mearns,” a sparsely-populated area characterized by farmlands, forestry and empty hills that rise heading inland from the coast towards the peaks of the Grampian Mountains, while the film is haunted by the foreshadowing of early words spoken by the protagonist’s mother, “You’ll need to face men for yourself.” Chris, played by Agyness Deyn, English fashion model, actress and singer, is a 14-year old farmer’s daughter with a thirst for education, harboring ambitions of becoming a teacher, which is viewed as among the noblest professions. We soon recognize the dichotomy of the family, a bullying and overly pious father (Peter Mullan) and an overburdened mother (Daniela Nardini), where the father continually picks on her older brother Will (Jack Greenlees), finding him weak and fragile, singling him out for harsh punishments that include beatings, while also brutalizing his own wife with uncontrolled lust, where the prevailing view of marriage at the time, supported by religious dogma, was for women to be bound by a man’s wishes and desires, treated as little more than personal property, leaving her utterly demoralized. This was the path of righteousness in her father’s eyes, yet what they witnessed in his ruthless behavior only made them cower with fear, and in Will’s case, generated outright hatred, where he wanted to get as far away from him as he could. The merciless patriarchal behavior on display is not only disconcerting but grotesque, yet in one extraordinary shot the anguished cries coming from the bedroom lead to the protracted wailing of child delivery, reminiscent of the agonizing screams in Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972), among the most extended uncomfortable moments in film. When it’s announced that twins are born, instead of elation, it only adds to a perception of deepening misery, further exacerbated by scenes of the entire family moving to a larger countryside home in a deluge of rain, eventually settling into the Blawearie place on the fictional lands of Kinraddie. In no time, the mother poisons herself and the newborn twins after discovering she is pregnant again. Davies leaves no mistaking the brutal harshness of the conditions, rendering a faithful portrait of Scottish life dominated by men, where women silently suffer in perpetuity. Chris assumes the role of her mother, but is torn between competing versions of herself, an English Chris that loves books and wants to go to University, and a Scottish Chris that loves the land of her birth, but also develops a growing resentment at the arduousness of farming life.
Contrasting the beauty of the landscape with the violence inflicted upon one another, the film is luxuriously shot by cinematographer Michael McDonough, where the outdoors resembles painterly masterpieces hanging on museum walls, using 65mm for the lush exteriors as well as a digital camera, where the literary aspect of Chris’s inner narration offers a kind of unapologetic pastoralism that provides the guiding light of the film, “But the land was forever. It moved and changed below you, but it was forever.” Using a stylistic technique known as “memory realism,” Davies portrays everyday life with a vivid naturalism, which allows him to delve into the inner psychology of Chris, whose maturity, represented by her changing mindset, continues to advance the story. The surrounding land of Kinraddie is seen as mythical, viewed in almost utopian terms, where it is a land and tradition worth defending, even if the inhabitants remain stuck in their own backward ways, where one of the strongest impressions counteracting her father’s viciousness comes from a neighboring farmer, Chae Strachan (Ian Pirie), a strapping physical specimen whose gentle kindness always feels welcomed and appreciated. His presence throughout the film becomes synonymous for the mindset of the other farmers, where he is always viewed as a virtuous man. When her father suffers a debilitating stroke, paralyzed and bedridden afterwards, barely able to speak, totally reliant upon his daughter, yet his abusive mindset never changes, where he attempts to impose his wrath upon his daughter, with suggestions of incestuous rape. With a blasphemous justification of his lust for Chris, and his brutality towards Will, we see the destructive possibilities of his harsh, single-minded religious belief. When she ignores him afterwards, shutting him out of her life as if traumatized, it’s hard not to be sympathetic for her position, even when he dies. As if a dark cloud has been removed from hovering overhead, her demeanor changes instantly, emboldened by her own freedom, as for the first time she takes charge of her life. Inheriting the farm, as her brother ran off to Argentina, she takes an interest in one of her brother’s friends, Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie), humorously realized in a street scene where both are overwhelmed by a flock of sheep that suddenly appear in the middle of a conversation as the sheep are herded down the middle of the street. In no time at all they are married, where the meticulous nature of the extended wedding sequence is sumptuously realized, an uplifting and joyous occasion with plenty of drink, dancing, and song, where Chris drops hearts with an a Capella rendition of “The Flowers of the Forest,” a sad lament with historical roots that may as well be the Scottish National Anthem. This punctuates their marital bliss with a particularly appropriate spiritual blessing, resulting in the birth of a child, named after Ewan, where their lives, never happier, feel beautifully intertwined and in perfect harmony with the surrounding fields, whose rhapsodic harvest resembles Dovzhenko’s mythic pastoral depiction in EARTH (1930), where this brief rural idyll seamlessly evolves into poetic literary description where only the land endures, becoming “the splendour of life like a song, like the wind.”
It came on Chris how
strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness of the land
and sky in dark autumn evenings, the crying of men and women of the land who
had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years, things wept for besides
sheep-buchts, remembered at night and at twilight. The gladness and kindness had passed, lived
and forgotten, it was Scotland of the mist and rain and the crying sea that
made the songs.
While Chris feels relieved when her father dies, it is from
him mainly that she inherits her peasant spirit, where she is drawn to the presence
of the Standing Stones (Pictish stones) that dominate the landscape, relics
of a pre-Christian era that connects them all to their pasts, that embody a
sense of timelessness, yet whose meaning remains elusive and lost. At the onset of World War I, which is the
first moment we really get a firm sense of time, there is a jingoistic spirit
in the air, where Chae Strachan enlists, believing it will bring about a new
socialist era, thoroughly misled by the
newspapers to volunteer for the army in 1914, where those that didn’t were
called cowards. Ewan has no interest in
fighting, as his life is running a farm, but he’s goaded into joining the
thousands of other young men sent to the European front for prolonged trench
warfare, where the idea of honor and nobility becomes confused with masculinity,
as his entire perspective undergoes a crude transformation, where the influence
of war turns him into a ruthless savage, returning shortly after training where
he is little more than a bullying beast, the spitting image of her father,
coarse, brutal, and vulgar, drunk nearly the entire time, treating her
horribly, where Chris needs to grab a knife to defend herself from his boorish
advances, leaving again shortly afterwards for France without so much as a word
from Chris. But the reality of the war
is a distant event and is barely noticed in Kinraddie, yet the magnitude of its
impact leaves an indelible impression, as so many men that left never returned,
including Ewan Tavendale, who we learn afterwards was shot as a
deserter, where there are fleeting moments that remind one of the absurdity of the
military trials in Kubrick’s PATH’S OF GLORY (1957). In the aftermath, the sweeping aerial shot of
the abandoned war zone is a stark reminder of those who lost their lives
trapped in a vile and meaningless existence of barbed wire and mud, a kind of
hell on earth that is both beautiful and appalling, yet also a chilling
reminder of how a nation so willingly sacrificed their own sons in an excessive
display of warmongering at the expense of human conscience and genuine
humanity. A thought provoking film, where
the overriding tenderness lies in the aftermath of war, punctuated by Scottish
folk songs, languorous images of a timeless landscape, time-altering 365 degree
pans, and dissolves between shots that make it appear people are melting into
the earth and sky, where it’s hard not to be swept away by the sheer painterly
beauty of the film. But the emotional
intensity of the last fifteen minutes is utterly transfixing, deeply tragic and
profoundly uplifting, that begins with an eloquent tracking shot following the
inhabitants of the entire town, one by one, walking through the wheatfields on
their way to a church memorial service, where the thunderous sounds of a
mournful chorus accompany them throughout, Glasgow Phoenix Choir - 'All
in the April Evening ... - YouTube (3:39), where the elegiac music becomes the unspoken sermon. But nothing is as memorable as the final
outdoor memorial service, where the names of the Kinraddie men killed at war
are inscribed in the Standing Stones, where a new reverend makes an impassioned
speech with clear communist leanings, denouncing the British government’s war policy, comparing it to
imperial Rome, “They have made a desert and they call it peace” (A
Scots Quair - Google Books Result), while a Highlander in kilts and bagpipes is silhouetted against the
sky, much like the bugler against the red sky in John Ford’s She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949),
playing “The Flowers of the Forest,” not really a folk song, but a national
song of reverence commemorating the Scottish dead at the Battle of Flodden against England in 1513,
now reserved almost exclusively for funerals or memorial services.
In the sunset of an age
and an epoch we may write that for epitaph of the men who were of it. They went
quiet and brave from the lands they loved, though seldom of that love might
they speak, it was not in them to tell in words of the earth that moved and
lived and abided, their life and enduring love. And who knows at the last what
memories of it were with them, the springs and the winters of this land and all
the sounds and scents of it that had once been theirs, deep, and a passion of
their blood and spirit, those four who died in France? With them we may say
there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants,
the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them
not, except as a memory in a song, they pass with the things that seemed good
to them, with loves and desires that grow dim and alien in the days to be. It
was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again
will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions,
rise but with alien effort to our lips. The last of the peasants, those four
that you knew, took that with them to the darkness and the quietness of the
places where they sleep. And the land changes, their parks and their steadings
are a desolation where the sheep are pastured, we are told that great machines
come soon to till the land, and the great herds come to feed on it, the crofter
is gone, the man with the house and the steading of his own and the land closer
to his heart than the flesh of his body. Nothing, it has been said, is true but
change, nothing abides, and here in Kinraddie where we watch the building of
those little prides and those little fortunes on the ruins of the little farms
we must give heed that these also do not abide, that a new spirit shall come to
the land with the greater herd and the great machines. For greed of place and
possession and great estate those four had little heed, the kindness of friends
and the warmth of toil and the peace of rest – they asked no more from God or
man, and no less would they endure. So, lest we shame them, let us believe that
the new oppressions and foolish greeds are no more than mists that pass. They
died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we
seem to inherit. Beyond it and us there shines a greater hope and a newer
world, undreamt when these four died. But need we doubt which side the battle
they would range themselves did they live today, need we doubt the answer they
cry to us even now, the four of them, from the places of the sunset?
And then, as folk stood
dumbfounded, this was just sheer politics, plain what he meant, the Highlandman
McIvor tuned up his pipes and began to step slow round the stone circle by
Blawearie Loch, slow and quiet, and folk watched him, the dark was near, it
lifted your hair and was eerie and uncanny, the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ as he
played it . . .
It rose and rose and
wept and cried, that crying for the men that fell in battle, and there was
Kirsty Strachan weeping quietly and others with her, and the young ploughmen
they stood with glum, white faces, they’d no understanding or caring, it was
something that vexed and tore at them, it belonged to times they had no knowing
of.
He fair could play, the
piper, he tore at your heart marching there with the tune leaping up the moor
and echoing across the loch. Folk said that Chris Tavendale alone shed never a
tear, she stood quiet, holding her boy by the hand, looking down on Blawearie’s
fields till the playing was over. And syne folk saw that the dark had come and
began to stream down the hill, leaving her there, some were uncertain and looked
them back. But they saw the minister was standing behind her, waiting for her,
they’d the last of the light with them up there, and maybe they didn’t need it
or heed it, you can do without the day if you’ve a lamp quiet-lighted and kind
in your heart.
Up Above and Down Below - Film Comment Gavin Smith, November/December 2015
And then there was Terence Davies’s even more anticipated Sunset Song, adapted from a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Set on a farm in northern Scotland on the cusp of World War I, it features an exceptionally strong central performance by Agyness Deyn as Chris, the bright daughter of a brutish farmer (Peter Mullan in top form) who sees her educational prospects and consequent hopes of a teaching career evaporate following the suicide of her mother and the departure of her brother. With great exactitude, Davies traces how Chris’s bleak future as her father’s housekeeper is averted and where life takes her, imbuing the action with an unostentatious tenderness and eliciting uniformly lovely performances from the rest of his cast. As a study in hardship, brutalizing family life, and romantic loss, Sunset Song is a deeply felt return to territory with which the director is intimately familiar. At first I wasn’t sure about the bold and unexpected shift in point of view in the film’s final stages, but the effect is absolutely devastating, and on reflection it’s a perfect move. Nothing short of sublime, Sunset Song ranks with The House of Mirth and The Long Day Closes among Davies’s finest achievements.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal and Kathleen Sachs
2016 is the year of Terence vs. Terrence. Or, perhaps less confusingly, Davies vs. Malick. Both are titans of modern cinema with conspicuously long gaps in their recent filmography, and both are releasing not one, but two films this year alone. The first pairing of these films, however, couldn't be more different—or decisive. Malick's KNIGHT OF CUPS is almost a parody of his mature style, while Davies' SUNSET SONG is the fulfillment of an ever-evolving aesthetic. But to simplify the distinction, one might also say that the former film is conspicuously sexist, while the latter is ardently feminist. Malick seems to view women as mere chapter titles in a book about virile existentialism (a.k.a. pure fantasy), whereas Davies positions his female protagonist as the author of her own story. Adapted from the classic Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibson, SUNSET SONG is about a young woman, Chris Guthrie—who's unexpectedly played to perfection by one-time It Girl Agyness Deyn—as she comes of age before, during, and after World War I. Davies has been nursing this project for years (he almost made it after THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, but met inexplicable resistance from the UK Film Council), and it necessarily invites a dialogue with his other work. The figure of the tyrannical patriarch links SUNSET SONG to Davies’s 1988 breakthrough, DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES, but he’s working in a different mode here: the narrative development is more conventional, the musical digressions are less frequent, and the trademark Davies patina has given way to a bucolic grandeur. (The exteriors were shot on 65mm, while the interiors were recorded digitally; the lack of 70mm prints of SUNSET SONG is one of the scandals of the age.) “There are lovely things in the world,” laments Deyn’s Guthrie, “lovely that do not endure … and the lovelier for that.” It’s a measure of restraint that Davies, hitherto a poet of memory and reverie, leans so heavily on the tangible here; he clings to solid objects as if they were on the verge of fading away.
TIFF
2015 | Sunset Song (Terence Davies, UK/Luxembourg ... Steve
Macfarlane from Cinema Scope
There is no such thing as a “minor” Terence Davies. If anything, the divisive response at Toronto to the Liverpool-born master’s new Sunset Song (based on a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon) verifies the preciousness with which critics have been holding Davies’ auteurism, and perhaps their own experiences of his work, in their minds. (Few would disagree this is his least abstract, most narratively conservative picture yet.) Sunset Song is anchored to Chris (Agyness Deyn), an (actual) bonnie lass growing up in rural Scotland just after the turn of the century. Her father (Peter Mullan) is a joyless, Bible-thumping sadist who rules by the lash, the type of character typically reserved for, well, Peter Mullan. The positioning of Mullan’s character as a bottomless dumping ground for the audience’s fear and hostility is probably more Gibbon than Davies, but the filmmaker is perhaps too good at turning these passages into a dreadful experience.
While the first hour of Sunset Song addresses Chris’ attempts to imagine a life for herself beyond this particular one-family cult of patriarchy, it’s consistent with earlier Davies that no small part of her repose is found in the very act of looking. Dour and musty interiors are juxtaposed with breathtaking, impossibly colour-corrected 70mm vistas of wheat and grass, with voiceover quotations from the novel buttressing the film’s unapologetic pastoralism (“And the smell of the Earth in her face almost made her cry, for the beauty of it”). Early into Sunset Song, I had the discomfiting notion that I was watching an over-refined classicalism bleed blindly into artlessness; what came to mind was less The Long Day Closes (1992) and more Michael Bay’s axiom at a Pearl Harbor press conference that “You should be able to hang every frame on the wall.”
Chris’ mother takes her own life, and after Pa is debilitated by a stroke, Chris (silently) takes her father’s. And soon she has met, and fallen in love with, a bloke from town named Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), giving way to Sunset Song’s bittersweet middle passage: a brief romance made all the more elysian for its welcome sense of relief (although the film has more than conditioned us to expect the worst). The couple have a low-stakes wedding in Chris’ family barn, on New Year’s Eve; in a moment of sublime power, Chris regales the crowd with a song, only for the image to haphazardly dissolve (grainlessly, painlessly) from a wide shot of her singing to a medium close-up. It’s jarring, but matters little—this is as tranquil a moment as exists in Sunset Song, and it’s an understatement to call its happiness hard-won.
Chris and Ewan have a child; the Great War begins; Ewan is drafted; he returns from basic training a person utterly alien to the man Chris married—somebody closer in temperament to her father. This expository lapse is masterful: it bespeaks time’s callous indifference, cementing that this story must begin and end on Chris, alone. Eventually, Sunset Song can’t help but reveal what—aside from the imponderable lengths of evil Christendom has allowed men to do—drew Davies to the material in the first place: the handshake memory makes between internal trauma and national myth. I was woefully unprepared for the film’s devastating final passages, wherein the camera returns to the same florid panoramas from before, now granted a (literally) breathtaking sorrow and majesty that risks turning the film’s soft-nationalist bent utterly inside out. There is no such thing as a minor Terence Davies.
Sunset Song | Film
reviews, news & interviews | The Arts Desk David
Kettle
There’s been a hugely protracted production history behind Sunset Song. Terence Davies first mooted a screen adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel of northern Scottish farming folk way back in 2000, soon after the success of his Edith Wharton pic The House of Mirth. But what’s emerged, at long last, is classic Davies through and through – luminous and lyrical, sorrowful and celebratory, and, most impressive of all, shot through with an intense compassion for its characters, good and bad alike.
In many ways it’s a pretty radical rethink of Gibbon’s novel, which charts the fortunes of hardy heroine Chris Guthrie, an independent-minded young woman in what’s now Aberdeenshire, from school through to love, marriage and beyond, taking in an abusive father, a mother’s suicide and, crucially, her unbreakable connection with the rural landscape she inhabits.
Gibbon is revered for challenging cosy, romanticised depictions of Scotland with his harsh, unforgiving (some might say miserabilist) portrayal of Scottish rural life. Yet Davies remoulds the story into something altogether more symbolic, almost mythic. There’s a sense of inevitability to Davies’s gently unfolding storytelling, as though what he’s showing us is one of the world’s great epic stories. But behind it all lies a taut structure and careful pacing. Sunset Song feels every minute of the 135 it lasts, but Davies plays a remarkable Tardis-like time trick: a deceptively slow-moving plot with a huge amount of narrative packed into it.
Model-turned-actress Agyness Deyn is strong, if occasionally a little unreadable, in the central role, combining determination and vulnerability to eminently watchable effect. But it’s Scottish actor Kevin Guthrie (pictured above), as Chris’s suitor Ewan Tavendale, who sparks the movie into dramatic life. He doesn’t appear until an hour or so in – introduced in a solid close-up that tells us everything we need to know about his imminent importance – but his sensitive, (literally) wide-eyed performance is heartbreakingly tender. The film’s second act, focusing on Chris and Ewan’s idyllic relationship, is its magical, glowing heart, and it comes after the horrifying, mundane violence doled out by Chris’s religious-obsessed father. Although whether we really need yet another mad-dad offering from Peter Mullan (pictured below) – strong though he is here – is probably debatable.
Where the film falls down, however, is in its third act, when the horrors of the First World War intrude on Chris and Ewan’s rural idyll. Ewan’s return from the trenches brutalised almost beyond recognition strikes a horribly jarring note. And despite the poetry of Davies’s slowly moving aerial shot of the war zone – at once beautiful and appalling – his final sequence feels unnecessarily manipulative – in fact, simply unnecessary, since by then we know the facts already.
That said, it’s hard not to be swept along by the sheer painterly beauty and emotional intensity of Davies’s achievement, conveyed in the visual grandeur of Michael McDonough’s remarkable cinematography. It’s all a bit too good to be true – as in endless scenes of sun-drenched rippling wheat fields, or a heart-swelling flirtation scene with Chris and Ewan magically surrounded by a scampering flock of sheep. But it's proud of its artifice, and achingly beautiful at the same time.
Sunset Song is quietly devastating in its emotional impact, but its passions are held firmly in check. And Davies’s masterful exploration of his underlying themes – the strength of the human spirit, the wonders of nature, even the brutality and fickleness of fate – sweeps everything before them.
Hearth
and Home: Sunset Song | Terence Davies - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, May/June 2016
Terence Davies’s Sunset Song was nearly one for the list of great apocryphal films. The British director originally attempted to make it after his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but it was turned down by the body then overseeing British cinema, the UK Film Council—who, Davies remembers, told him, “It hasn’t got legs.” There followed a long gap in his career, broken in 2008 by Of Time and the City, an archival documentary about his native Liverpool. An intense chamber-drama treatment of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea followed in 2011—and now, at last, Davies has been able to return to Sunset Song.
The film was a challenging project, not least because of the attendant expectations. Set in rural Scotland in the early 20th century, it is based on a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the first part of his trilogy A Scots Quair. The creation of a left-wing writer who emphasizes Scottish cultural and social autonomy, Sunset Song has an iconic status north of Hadrian’s Wall (unsurprisingly, it’s the favorite novel of Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon), but it’s a remarkable work by any measure, eminently modernist in its attention to the materiality of language and to the complex interweaving of personal and public history. Written using an English that incorporates the traditional Doric dialect, it’s crammed with words that will be unfamiliar to many readers—quean for “girl,” meikle for “big” or “much”—while its narrative register veers between the domestic and the cosmic, locating the inhabitants of the fictional Kinraddie, in northeast Scotland, within a broader sweep of history.
More specifically, the book recounts the coming-of-age of farmer’s daughter Chris Guthrie, torn between educational ambitions and her attachment to the land. The film’s Chris is Agyness Deyn, best known as a supermodel of singular, impish features, here in her second lead role. Davies, who claims to know nothing about popular culture, had never heard of Deyn, but knew when she auditioned that she was the perfect Chris. Deyn is remarkably affecting in the role, partly because she progresses so compellingly from innocence to experience, from composure through ecstasy to pain, and partly because her curiously old-fashioned face wouldn’t have looked out of place in the era of Peggy Ashcroft and Wendy Hiller.
Sunset Song was shot partly in Scotland, but substantially in New Zealand for the summer scenes, with interiors shot in Luxembourg. As you’d expect from Davies, the film is at once lyrical and austere. The beauty of the landscapes is offset by an ever-present awareness of violence and danger, embodied partly by Chris’s father (Peter Mullan), whose attitude toward his daughter is terrifyingly like that of a Biblical patriarch, even down to his incestuous urgings. As for Chris’s happy marriage to local boy Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), that too is tainted by brutality, notably when he returns from military service a changed man.
While the film literally concludes with a song at sunset, the title indicates a lament for a certain society and era, brought to an end by World War I. That this is very much a story about war is signaled, late in the film, by an extended track over the desolate mud of northern France, while the reality of military service suddenly comes to the fore in an audacious narrative left-turn that transforms the film entirely.
This is unmistakably a Terence Davies film, partly in its themes (Mullan’s character is a close relation of the volatile father in Distant Voices, Still Lives), partly in its execution. Like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Deep Blue Sea, with their pub sing-alongs, the film uses music—here traditional folk ballads—to evoke the identity of a community, sometimes in scenes (e.g., Chris’s wedding) of a marked formal theatricality. Visually, the enclosed spaces of Chris’s house eerily echo those of Distant Voices, Still Lives, their austerity suggesting a touch of Dreyer, while sweeping exteriors echo the romanticism of 1940s rural melodrama (Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going!, Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). The bleakness and the rapture are interwoven to altogether symphonic effect.
A similar sense of contrast prevails in Davies’s follow-up film, A Quiet Passion, about the cloistered life of poet Emily Dickinson. With Cynthia Nixon in the lead, and a superb supporting cast including Jennifer Ehle and Keith Carradine, it premiered to great acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival in February. As befits its reclusive heroine, it’s largely a claustrophobic chamber drama, and arguably Davies’s most uncompromisingly austere film since The Long Day Closes (92). But it’s also a film of often sensuous beauty, and in stretches, a surprisingly funny one too, as when the Dickinson sisters exchange brittle badinage with their witty friend Miss Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey)—sequences in which the Dickinson residence in Amherst really does become a House of Mirth.
I spoke to Terence Davies in London last December, while he was promoting Sunset Song.
You discovered Lewis
Grassic Gibbon’s book through the BBC TV adaptation in the early ’70s.
Yes, I saw it in 1971. There used to be a Sunday serial then on BBC, and I’d never heard of the book. Vivien Heilbron was playing Chris, and I watched every episode. Then I read the book, which is quite hard-going for the first couple of chapters, but once you get past that, it really is a great work.
The story is wonderful—like Jane Eyre. It’s an intimate epic. Although he never gives Chris’s exact age, when the book starts she must be 14 or 15, and when it ends she’s only about 20. In those five or six years, she’s going though an enormous change. That in itself is powerful. But there are other things that run beneath it, particularly toward the end—the aspect of forgiving suffering, not just the suffering that’s been inflicted on her, but all suffering. The last chapter is about forgiveness and not despairing.
Given that the book is
considered a Scottish national treasure, did anyone object to an English
director filming it, or to Chris not being played by a Scottish actress?
No. It was at the back of my mind that if people don’t do a convincing Scottish accent, then people in Scotland would know. Agyness was the only one we had a voice coach for, but we couldn’t afford a coach for everyone. So I made it a general accent. But my ear isn’t acute enough to tell which part of Scotland that would appear to come from. It went down well in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and Ian Pirie, who plays Chae Strachan, said: “They’re a very hard audience in Aberdeen. They booed Billy Connolly off the stage.” That I was dreading—but I’ve never in all my life entered a room where there was such warmth and generosity.
Chris is an individual but
at same time she’s an archetypal figure. She comes across in the book as an
embodiment of the land and of the experience of women in rural communities.
Given that, what were you looking for in casting the role?
Just someone who could look old and young at the same time. The only person I’ve ever seen pull it off is Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman: you believe that she’s a schoolgirl, and she was 30-odd years old when she did it. When I saw Agyness for the first time, it was a Monday morning, she was the first in, and she gave a wonderful audition, and I said: “We’ve found her.” She’s extraordinary, a real talent. The performance is truly innocent and pure, because she is. What she understands is that Chris actually is a poet—not an obvious poet, but her feeling toward that land and the world is essentially poetic.
How much did you want to
keep the political resonances of the book?
None at all. I’m not political. I’m a socialist by instinct, but I’m not in any way political. I’m interested in the way that life and politics affect ordinary people. What Chris feels isn’t political, it’s emotional—do I stay on the land, do I become a teacher?
How did you plan the look
of the film with DP Michael McDonough?
I said: “I don’t want any visual sentimentality, I don’t want pretty for the sake of prettiness. It’s got to be harsh, and in that harshness, there will be beauty.” And he got that. His eye is wonderful—he’s always looking.
The film’s tone is
characterized by contrasts between vast landscape exteriors and often cramped
interiors. We’re often looking out of windows onto the outside world.
I’m always drawn to people at windows, and empty rooms and staircases. I have absolutely no idea why. When we were doing it, [production designer] Andy Harris said: “Do you know a Danish painter called Vilhelm Hammershøi?” His paintings are basically empty rooms or windows, and if there is a subject, it’s usually a woman, usually with her back to the viewer. It’s like Vermeer, but with a smudged Northern light. I just thought they were breathtaking. I said the interiors have to look like that—that stillness you can get when nothing appears to be happening but a lot does, just through its stillness.
You’ve talked about
shooting at a particular time of day known as the gloaming. Is that the same as
“magic hour”?
No, the magic hour is earlier. Gloaming is the most wonderful word that you can’t translate. It’s not twilight and it’s not late evening, there’s a bit in-between. There’s a wonderful Richard Strauss song called “Im Abendrot,” which means “Red Evening,” and it’s always translated as “At Gloaming.” It’s a special time, and when you see it you think: “Yes, that’s gloaming.”
The film contains a number
of very telling camera moves, as in the scene when Ewan comes home and forces
Chris into the bedroom, and the camera just sinks down under the bed, hiding
them from view.
I was rather proud of that. I said to them: “We’ll do this in one take. I’m not going to put you through this again.” It was really very powerful what they did. It’s much more interesting not to see something—you only hear, and that’s terrifying. It doesn’t have to be marital rape, it can be anything—but then you leave it and say to the audience: “You’ve got to fill in the gaps now.”
When you use music in your
films, it’s very much as a part of characters’ lives. Here you use folk songs
mentioned by Gibbon, with very specific meanings—like “Flowers of the Forest,”
which is about death, and “Ladies of Spain” about sorrow and parting.
“Flowers of the Forest” was written by a Scottish noblewoman after [the battle of] Flodden—Henry VIII fought there and just slaughtered the Scots. It’s about slaughter. [Executive producer] Bob Last sent me three recordings, one by Ronnie Browne, which absolutely knocked me out, it was so moving. In the Doric dialect, you cannot understand a word of it, but you know what’s being said. “Ladies of Spain”—we found out it was a sea shanty, which was lovely. You don’t necessarily place them where they are in the book, but you make sure they’re in the right place, because a film isn’t a book.
There are scenes in the
book, which you’ve filmed, that speak very intensely of sexual danger in rural
life—for example, the man’s hands grabbing Chris’s ankles in the barn.
Where her emerging sexuality is concerned, it was terrifying for people in that era, when they weren’t told anything. What do you do if someone doesn’t want to tell you that you menstruate? I can’t imagine. She doesn’t know anything and it does disturb her—and she’s clearly disturbed enough to look at herself in the mirror and think: “What am I now?” She’s not sure what she is—she’s on the cusp of womanhood but she’s still a child.
I wanted to make it powerful, in the sense that it’s an unknown thing, that was what was important—not necessarily its violence but that fact that she doesn’t know what it is. When she does find out what it is, it’s actually tender.
There’s a moment in the
book when Chris slaps Ewan, early in their marriage—you don’t show that. In the
book, anger seems integral to the state of marriage.
It was shot, but it just didn’t work—you didn’t believe it. I thought it was more interesting to keep the tenderness within their relationship, so that when Ewan comes back [from the army], it’s really shocking. It releases this rage: he’s angry because he’s terrified. But his redemption comes at the end when he says: “I deserted because I wanted to go back to her—I did it for her and I did it for Blawearie [farm], because I still love her.”
You probably don’t like
budget cuts more than any other director, but there does seem to be something
about your cinema that thrives on economy. The period drama of The House
of Mirth works so well precisely because it’s pared down.
I look upon it as a moral duty—it’s not my money and it has to be husbanded, not wasted. The way I write the script, I write every track, every dissolve, everything, so when I go on set I know what the shots are, and that saves time. I couldn’t do that on the day, I’d just be too worried. I’d written the execution scene in a specific way and we couldn’t find [a location] anywhere. Andy Harris found this disused railway siding in Luxembourg—I thought [sarcastic tone] “Yeah. Fabulous.” I walked along the platform, and I thought: “We’ve found it. Give me 10 minutes and I’ll redo the shots.” It’s wonderful when you think: “We can’t do that—let’s do this.” That’s very exciting.
You went very quickly from
Sunset Song to making A Quiet Passion.
I’ve never had so much work in my life. A Quiet Passion went without a single hitch, a joy from beginning to end. With Sunset Song, every single thing that could go wrong went wrong, I don’t know how we pulled it off. A Quiet Passion was the complete opposite.
What was it about Cynthia
Nixon that made you want to cast her as Emily Dickinson?
I’d met her a number of years ago, when she was doing Sex and the City, for a film that never came off and I’ve never forgotten her. When I was writing the script, I could see her face because she’s very much like Emily Dickinson.
What are the aspects of
Dickinson that most fascinated you?
She was a great poet—it all becomes terribly solemn. She never went anywhere except when she was 17, she went to a ladies seminary, and she spent her life in this house. But that doesn’t make it restricted—it makes it much more powerful, because these things were very important to her. It’s the stoicism of writing wonderful poetry that does not get published. I find that almost unbearably moving. I think a genius like that—and she was a genius—not getting recognized in their own time is the most unbearable thing. Having a posthumous reputation isn’t going to help them at all. Because she’s a poet, she sees things in a very different way—she has one skin missing.
Lewis
Grassic Gibbon Socialist Review, December 2001
Gibbon,
Lewis Grassic. Sunset Song. :: Anglistika
BBC
Two - Writing Scotland - Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Sunset
Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon – A Son of the Rock ... Jack Deighton
ILovePhilosophy.com • All Art is Useless/Sunset Song
Sunset Song By
Michael Koresky | May 12, 2016 - Reviews - Reverse ... Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot
Profile:
Sunset Song finally comes to the big screen | Culture ...
Martin Hannan from The National
Film
Review: Terence Davies' Sunset Song - Press and ... Blair
Dingwall from The Press and Journal
The
House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]
National
Review [Armond White]
Sunset
Song :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Brogan Morris
TIFF Review: "Sunset Song" | Movie Mezzanine Kenji Fujishima
TIFF
Review: Terence Davies' 'Sunset Song' Starring Agyne ... Nicola Grozdanovic from The Playlist
Joshua
Reviews Terence Davies' Sunset Song [Theatrical Review]
Joshua Brunsting
Sight & Sound [Robert Hanks] December 4, 2015
Sight & Sound [Ashley Clark] September 15, 2015
Sunset Song (2015) Antti Alanen
Sunset Song - Little White Lies David Jenkins
Hardest harvest: the understated ache of Sunset Song Ryan Gilbey from The New Statesman
Sunset
Song May Be the Most Visually Stunning Movie of the Year ... Julia
Felthensal from Vogue magazine
'High-Rise'
And 'Sunset Song' Reviews: The Past As Another Country Keith Phipps from Uproxx
MOVIE
REVIEW: Sunset Song — Every Movie Has a Lesson Don Shanahan, also seen at Chicago
Independent Critics Circle here: Don
Shanahan reviews “BFFs” and “Sunset Song” on his “Every Movie ...
'Sunset
Song': Review | Reviews | Screen - Screen Daily David
D’Arcy
Sunset
Song - Newcity Film Ray Pride
Of
Time and the Movies: The Complete Terence Davies — and a New ...
Melissa Anderson fom The Village
Voice
Fuse
Film Review: “Sunset Song” — Misogyny in the Highlands » The ... Peg Aloi from The Arts Fuse
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Amber Wilkinson]
Hannah
McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie] also seen
here: Reel
Insights [Hannah McHaffie]
World
Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
Something,
but not very much - World Socialist Web Site
Sunset
Song — film review: 'Magical' - FT.com
Nigel Andrews from The Financial
Times
Film
Review: Sunset Song | Film Journal International David
Noh
Sunset
Song Review (2015) - The Spinning Image
Graeme Clark
The
Coops Review [Freda Cooper]
Sunset
Song | Chicago Reader JR Jones (capsule review)
Heart of the Country - The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule review)
High-Rise
makes for an unlikely highlight at Toronto ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club
Sunset Song | Find all
the latest movie reviews and documentary ... Jason Solomons
At
the Toronto International Film Festival: The Passion of... Adam Cook from Brooklyn magazine, also seen here:
Sunset Song - Brooklyn
Magazine
Toronto
International Film Festival: We Report Back - HOME Jason Wood
Daily
| Toronto 2015 | Terence Davies's SUNSET SONG ... David
Hudson at Fandor
Terence
Davies Interview (Sunset Song) | The Dailies Blog ...
Christopher Heron interview, December 4, 2015
Terence
Davies on religion, being gay and his life in film ...
Andrew Pulver interview from The
Guardian, November 15, 2015
Toronto:
Terence Davies on 'Sunset Song ... - Variety Guy Lodge interview, September
13, 2015
'Sunset
Song': TIFF Review - Hollywood Reporter
Deborah Young
'Sunset
Song' Review: Terence Davies Swoons for ... - Variety Peter
Debruge
Sunset
Song (2015), directed by Terence Davies ... - Time Out Tom Huddleston
BBC
- Culture - Film review: Terence Davies' Sunset Song is ... Owen
Gleiberman
Sunset
Song film review - The Herald Alison
Rowat from The Herald Scotland
Film
review: Sunset Song (15) - The Scotsman
Alistair Harkness
Sunset Song, film review: Different voices, still Terence Davies Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent
Sunset
Song review – Agyness Deyn roams a stunning Scottish ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
Sunset Song review: Agyness Deyn shines in Terence ... Henry Barnes from The Guardian
Sunset Song review – a lyrical triumph | Film | The Guardian Mark Kermode from The Observer
Sunset
Song review: 'a heartbreaking disappointment' - The ... Tim Robey from The Telegraph
Adaptation
of Sunset Song over-wrought and under told - The Globe ... Kate Taylor from The Globe and the Mail
MOVIE
REVIEW: 'Sunset Song' brings life to England on even of World ... Eric Althoff from The Washington Times
Sunset Song Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
'Sunset
Song' review: Terence Davies nimbly adapts beloved Scottish ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune
Review:
'Sunset Song' Shows a Woman's True Grit - The New York ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times
In
'Sunset Song,' a Hard Life Amid Cruel Beauty - The New ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times
Sunset
Song (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sunset Song -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Scottish Poetry Library The Flowers of the Forest lyrics
Ideology in Action:
Modernism and Marxism in A Scots Quair
Margery Palmer McCulloch, 2001
The
Concept of Change in “Sunset Song” - Maous Artiste ...
Peggy
Ann's Post: Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
James
Naughtie: the lost Scotland of Sunset Song | Books | The ... James
Naughtie book review from The Guardian
Rereading:
Life on the land | Books | The Guardian
book review by Tessa Hadley
Lewis
Grassic Gibbon's 'Sunset Song' – a neglected classic ... book
review by Marie Marshall
Lewis Grassic
Gibbon: Sunset Song - Jorum
A
Final Grain of Truth: My Autobiography - Google Books Result Jack Webster
Davis,
Andrew
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Schwarzenegger's recidivist
grunt-flick returns him to Amazonian Commando
territory, but with fewer firearms and a greater predilection for taking
himself seriously. As LA firefighter and contented family man Gordy Brewer,
he's an unassumingly heroic Joe, until Colombian terrorist El Lobo (Curtis)
parks a bomb beside his wife and child and leaves him a brooding widower.
Finding no redress from the US authorities, he plunges deep into the Colombian
jungle to administer some damage of his own. The film's less knee-jerk than it
could have been. Brewer may think he's stony set on revenge, but an encounter
with a wandering mother (Neri) and her son in the danger zone give pause for
thought. That said, it's often daft, whether unveiling the fireman's
instinctive bomb-improvising skills, or showing a liberation leader's penchant
for shoving snakes down flunkies' throats. Yet a populist American movie that
acknowledges a troubled world beyond US borders must be worth flagging, even
though the roles and responsibilities of Colombia's guerillas, paramilitaries,
army and US 'advisers', and the hierarchy of drugs and politics in its civil
war, are all firmly fudged.
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
I can't fathom why the release of Collateral Damage was delayed
in response to the
Once again, Schwarzenegger dons on the role of an everyday man waging a just
war. This time he's Gordon Brewer, a
The movie illustrates that there are really no good guys, except maybe our protagonist, and he too is portrayed ambiguously at times. Governments (both American and Colombian) have their own motivations, and the terrorists have theirs. The movie also illustrates the problem of shifting ties which occurs when dealing with other humans, particularly those involved in violent conflict. It seems everyone could learn from The X Files adage, "trust no one."
I suppose if you thought hard about it, the movie could be made to make sense, but it doesn't have to. Collateral Damage is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend checking it out on the big screen if you get a chance.
Reel.com review [3/4] Tor Thorsen
The current spate of nationalistic films such as Behind Enemy Lines, Hart's War, We Were Soldiers, and Black Hawk Down has got
many conspiracy theorists a-fuming. After all, weren't all these movies already
in post-production before 9/11? This glut of flag-waving propaganda must
point to some grand Israeli/CIA/ Freemason/Skull-and-Bones/Illuminati
conspiracy to keep the citizenry unquestioning, Wag the Dog-style, during
wartime.
Collateral Damage is the proof that this theory is bunk. Why? Because recent events have transformed the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle from bang-bang escapism to an unexpectedly complex action/drama in ways that no media manipulator could have foreseen. Even though the film was already more like Clear and Present Danger than Commando, with an emphasis on the perils of fighting terrorism with terrorist methods, last year's attacks have turned what were once supposed to be "ooh-aaah" moments of pyrotechnic splendor into chilling reminders of our own vulnerability.
The first of these comes early, when fireman Gordy Brewer (Schwarzenegger) watches helplessly as his wife and young son are incinerated by a bomb blast at the Colombian consulate in Los Angeles. The culprit is El Lobo (Cliff Curtis), a mysterious rebel leader who's equal parts Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, narco-baron Pablo Escobar (whom Curtis played in Blow), and famed terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
In an Osama bin Laden-esque videotaped communiqué, El Lobo justifies the attack as retaliation for America's repression of the coca-growing Colombian peasantry. The point man for this meddling is CIA agent Peter Brandt (Elias Koteas), a ruthless operative whose use of murderous death squads forces the Senate Intelligence Subcommittee to order his operation shut down. Undeterred, Brandt heads back down Medellín way to find and kill El Lobo, a plan shared by a certain hulking fireman hell-bent on revenge.
Through some artful editing, director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive, Under Siege) compresses the planning and execution of Brewer's trip through the South American jungle. However, as absurd as the fireman's infiltration into Colombia is — he's about as inconspicuous as a monster truck at a Vespa rally — once Brewer arrives, David and Peter Griffiths' screenplay takes a turn for the socially conscious. Like a less violent version of the similarly themed McBain, the film shows the campesinos' poverty and the death squads' brutality while also treating audiences to some viscerally pleasing action. There are also a few bits of comedy, courtesy of bit parts by John Turturro as a Canadian mechanic with a proclivity for public indecency, and John Leguizamo as an American transplant who dreams of ditching the coca trade for a rap-music career.
It's only when the action returns Stateside that Collateral Damage's energy begins to flag. Other than a few 11th-hour twists, the finale is a sad sputtering-out of threadbare action tropes. That's doubly sad, because what came before it was the most politically complex film of Schwarzenegger's career. Throughout all the battles, Arnold never shoots a gun and seems more intent on searching for answers than stacking up bodies. He even cries, for Conan's sake, much more convincingly than his unintentionally comic sobs in End of Days. And, at a time when the smallest note of dissent against the war on terrorism could get you tarred and feathered, his character questions whether military force alone can solve the terrorism problem. "Did you have to kill all these women and children?" he asks Brandt following a deadly raid on a rebel camp. There's no question that terrorism is never justified, but Collateral Damage at least makes an attempt to show that eliminating the desperate conditions that spawn murderous fanatics is equally important as blowing said fanatics into oblivion. Did Rambo ever do that?
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review
"Collateral Damage," the Arnold Schwarzenegger
movie famously postponed after 9-11, seemslike a telegram from a dead world. It
hails from the America that no longer exists, a world that ended in fire.
In this film you see things, continually, that could not
happen today. A man deposits a briefcase next to a potted plant in Union
Station and saunters away. He'd be nailed before he got 10 feet. A child's toy
is not examined but shunted around a checkpoint at the entrance to a highly
secure government office. No way. A mysterious police officer parks his
motorcycle in front of a foreign embassy and wanders off, just before a party
of dignitaries shows up. Never.
You also see things that could not happen any day. Chief
among these is that a firefighter – a Los Angeleno with a suspiciously thick
Austrian accent and the muscles of a bratwurst Clydesdale – sneaks into
Colombia and, languageless, planless and clueless, simply bluffs his way from
one end of the country to the other, ultimately penetrating a secret guerrilla
compound that not even the CIA has found. There he improvises a clever bomb. I
doubt this could even happen in Columbia, much less Colombia; Arnold's accent
would give him away there, too.
Then there's the very thorny issue of the title subject,
about which one must say at least the movie worries a little bit, one man's
collateral damage being another man's family tragedy. How can one make sense of
that paradox? The movie, gamely, tries; just as gamely, it fails, because it's
from a world where moral equivalence and promiscuous empathy were still the
colors of the day and it was possible to equate a terrorist bombing in Los
Angeles with a helicopter gunship attack on a terrorist base in Colombia and
hold the authors of each equally guilty.
That was glibly easy when there had been no foreign
terrorist bombings on American soil that claimed casualties in double figures;
it's almost impossible in an America when terrorist bombings have claimed
casualties in quadruple figures, when we are in the middle of an enormously
popular war and, sad but inevitable, our military pilots create collateral
damage on nearly every mission.
You may let these considerations spoil the movie for you or
not, depending on your sensitivities to such matters. But all that aside, does
the movie work if one makes a willful effort to banish context from the experience?
Well, a little better than you might expect, given the simplicity of the story,
which simply follows as Schwarzenegger's character gets even. His wife and
child slaughtered in that original L.A. terrorist attack, the (then)
wishy-washy State Department uninterested in pursuing mere justice in place of
geopolitical wisdom, he goes it alone, mano a guerrilla movement.
It's all too easy, and one of the movie's problems is the
eerie disconnect between what it is showing you as real and your deep instincts
that it couldn't have happened that easily. But you might not notice. That's
because the director is Andrew Davis, who might be called a good action
mechanic, as his "Above the Law" and "The Fugitive" attest;
so the film has a high level of who-what-where-when authenticity to it.
It's set in a natural, believable world, not a fantasy
place like so many of Schwarzenegger's other films, and the craftsman Davis has
a penchant for setting. He makes the fire in which we first discover Arnold's
Gordon Brewer, performing heroically, feel palpably real; likewise the bombing
in downtown L.A. and the seedy jungles and decrepit cities of Colombia, and
finally the inside of various D.C. institutional buildings, from rail stations
to State Department annexes.
And there's some cleverness, too. As Schwarzenegger's
character is a fireman, he does in fact know all the practical things a fireman
would know: electrical wiring, explosion potential, the incendiary qualities of
certain chemicals. Suppose he'd been a life insurance salesman: He could have
bored the guerrillas to death by explaining the difference between term and
whole life.
I liked, too, some late plot reversals, sorely needed after
the numbingly simple straight-ahead plunge of the first hour of the movie. Things
aren't quite what they seem and the twists are neatly done.
All that said, the movie still feels stale. Schwarzenegger
tries hard to act but in the end the foolishness of the thriller formula
becomes ridiculous; our old friend, the villain who seems to be dead but isn't
really, puts in several appearances and there's too much motorcycling through
too many tunnels that probably aren't there in the first place.
What is to become of Arnold Schwarzenegger? It's a question
this movie cannot help but raise.
"Collateral Damage" by Russell Meeuf - Jump Cut Russell Meeuf from Jump Cut, Winter 2006
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review also seen here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]
World Socialist Web Site review Joseph Kay
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]
Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [D]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
Film Monthly (Chris Wood) review
CultureCartel.com
(John Beachem) review [2.5/5]
Movie-Vault.com
(Angelo Aquino) review
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[2/5]
DVD
Talk (D.K. Holm) dvd review [2/5]
DVD
Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
Reel.com dvd review [1/4] Neal Block
DVD
Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review
New
York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
VideoVista
review John M.
Peters
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) review
[2/5]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Ruthless Reviews review Erich
hybridmagazine.com
review Clinton
Davis
filmcritic.com (Joshua Tyler) review [1.5/5]
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
HOLES B 85
USA
An off-beat story that takes place largely in a boys detention camp in the middle of a desert, a place where it never rains, and young boys are instructed to dig a hole each day as tall and wide as the shovel they are given, supposedly to build character. Much of it filmed in Red Rock Canyon State Park, where, like Death valley, the temperature was always over 100 degrees during the shoot, where the elements alone make it virtually impossible to escape, as the camp has the only water for a hundred miles in any direction, featuring a variety of young boys wearing bright orange jump suits. Based on the successful children’s book by Louis Sachar, Shia LaBeouf, later known as Caveman, just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, supposedly due to an ancient family curse, that “no good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather,” which seems to guide the symmetry of this story, sending him a one-way ticket for 18-months to the Camp Green Lake, a place where there is nothing green and there is certainly no lake, as it dried up years ago and all that’s left is baked dry earth and dust.
Much of it told in beautifully sequenced short flashbacks starring Eartha Kitt, also inspired performances by Patricia Arquette and Dulé Hill, both of whom are responsible for one family cursed to digging holes for 100 years and never finding anything of value. That family would be the prison warden, Sigourney Weaver, and her side kicks and overweight and overacting Jon Voight, and Tim Blake Nelson as the overly optimistic counselor who sees himself as a friend of the boys, always calling them by their birth names instead of their nicknames, which earns him no respect at all with the kids. Khleo Thomas as Zero is one of the most compelling kids I’ve seen in films for quite some time. He hasn’t spoken a word for months until Caveman shows up, and then he’s the only one he takes the slightest interest in, but his developing curiosity becomes the moral center of the story. The two become fast friends, helping each other in ways that would ultimately save the day, but it’s a long time developing, most of it lost in the daily routine of getting up in the morning, eating slop for breakfast, then digging holes under the hot sun each day. The film is beautifully edited, a nice balance of flashbacks mixed with the present day, allowing us to see how easily the past affects our lives, and it’s well-written, filled with witty dialogue and always great music, where there is always something interesting to find in the characters, who are themselves challenged in ways beyond their years. It’s a heart-warming story that is not saccharine-sweet, but is genuinely moving at times, where character ends up meaning something.
Davis, Bette – actress
RUTH
ELIZABETH DAVIS was born on
Bette's
career took a dramatic turn in 1934 when she was lent to RKO to play opposite
Leslie Howard
in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, and on account of her good reviews, she began to get
better parts. The following year, she made DANGEROUS (1935), for which she won
a Best Actress Oscar, the first of ten times she would be nominated. In 1936
Bette challenged the studio system and went to
Davis
became famous and often imitated for her clipped diction and distinct
mannerisms (especially her extravagant cigarette smoking), and her popularity
continued to grow with successes such as ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO (1940), THE
LETTER (1940) with Herbert
Marshall, THE
LITTLE FOXES (1941) with Teresa Wright,
and NOW, VOYAGER (1942) with Paul Henried.
Her career faltered in the late forties, but she came roaring back in 1950
playing the fading Broadway star Margo Channing in ALL ABOUT EVE,
the Best Picture of the year. Later in the '50s, her career began to falter
once more, but she came back once again in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?
(1962), also starring Joan
Crawford.
Bette
continued to adapt to new acting opportunities throughout her career, taking on
roles in horror films in later years as well as making various TV appearances.
Her personal life was not as successful however, having been married four times
and suffering estrangement from her daughter B.D. Her last significant film
appearance was THE WHALES OF AUGUST in 1987. Bette herself once said, "I
adore playing bitches … there's a little bit of bitch in every woman; and a
little bit of bitch in every man." In 1977, she was the first woman to
receive the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, and she died on
CMGWW: The Estate of Bette Davis the official website
Bright Lights Film Journal: Bette Davis Howard Mandelbaum
Article Smokescreen: Bette Davis and the Cigarette, by Angus E. Crane (1997)
100
Years of Bette Davis The Bold and the Bad and the Bumpy Nights,
by Terrence Rafferty from the New York
Times, March 30, 2008
The Fiery Bette Davis Bette Davis: In Those Eyes, Always a Glint of Fire, by Bob Mondello from NPR, April 7, 2008
Black and White Bette Bette Davis photos from the New York Times
Meeting Miss Davis an interview by Jim Emerson (1988)
Distinguished
Women, Past and Present: Bette Davis
Danuta Bois
The
Kennedy Center Honors: Bette Davis
Meredy's Bette
Davis Trivia Page
All About Bette, a Forum for Bette Davis Fans
TV Now's
monthly Bette Davis schedule when
her films will be on TV
Davis, Michael
SHOOT ‘EM UP C- 67
USA (87 mi) 2007 ‘Scope
Clive Owen stars as a hyper-aggressive, carrot-chewing gun and shooting specialist that is so good that he wipes out legions of men attempting to track him down, led by the overly obnoxious, sadistically murderous, yet obviously overmatched Paul Giamatti, in another rendition of what looks like and resembles SIN CITY, with Monical Bellucci in the femme fatale role. The film is an homage to Road Runner and Wiley Coyote or Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny with non-stop bullets, but it’s also very funny with ridiculous throwaway one-liners. The most ridiculous aspect of the film, which is its central premise, is that Owen must theatrically blow away dozens of would-be killers while helping an unnamed woman deliver a newborn baby, and then when the woman is shot, continue blowing away the bad guys while carring her baby in his arms, all cast in a bleached out, artificially contrived universe of comic book style storyline and characters. While this worked perfectly in the beginning, as Owen is drawn into this bloodbath without any connection to the woman and her baby, making his gallantry appear overly heroic, if not utterly improbable, yet as the film continues, it plays the same note ad nauseum, leaving nothing left to the imagination, becoming dull and senseless after awhile, largely do to the uninspiring direction which never changes course or attempts to keep the audience off balance, reeling us into the constant assault of guns and carnage where our hero walks away unscathed more than 90% of the time until the end, when he literally walks into a parallel universe of David Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. Interesting for about ten minutes, a film where the actors did nothing wrong, but were given entirely too narrow a range of emotion to work with in this storyline. Using an unorthodox cool and suave James Bond and his girl formula, the body count in this film is ridiculously high, never varying from that one-note theme.
The Village Voice [Chuck Wilson]
In this extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller, Clive Owen is Mr. Smith, a tough guy in a long leather coat who comes to the rescue of a screaming pregnant woman being chased by a creep with a gun. A warehouse shoot-out and birth ensue, and before long, Smith is tucking the infant under his arm and running for his life, a snarling Paul Giamatti and an army of hit men on his tail. Writer-director Michael Davis freely admits to lifting the idea for Shoot 'Em Up from the classic baby-in-peril hospital shoot-out in John Woo's 1992 thriller Hard-Boiled, a strategy he expands by gleefully referencing Raising Arizona, The Matrix, and James Bond movies. Riffing on 007 is such old hat as to be a sign of lazy screenwriting, but the jokes take on new resonance with the presence of Owen. There's no way to watch this Oscar-nominated Brit running, leaping, and firing a gun in a single, elegant bound and not wonder anew just how close he came to landing the big part.
Getting worked up over Shoot 'Em Up's excessive bloodshed is
playing right into its hands. So instead of slamming its loud-and-proud Looney
Tunes carnage as indicative of a cultural desire to view violence as detached,
consequence-free spectacle, perhaps it's better to simply ask: When action is
this thoroughly, willfully divorced from any sense of gravity (both the tonal
and scientific sort), how is anyone supposed to be excited by it? Aimed at
hormonal, Xbox-ing 13-year-old boys who like their mayhem phony and their
one-liners plentiful, Michael Davis's film is an extended demo reel for the
director's expertise at special effects-laden gunfights, charting with much
bombast, tongue-in-cheek humor, and mild sexism the efforts of mysterious
man-with-a-fake-name Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) and his lactating Madonna/whore
sidekick DQ (Monica Bellucci) as they attempt to protect a computer-generated
infant from murderous criminal Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti). Davis makes no
pretense at believability, casting his story as a superficially titillating
R-rated cartoon—replete with Owen comically chomping on a big (and deadly)
carrot and Giamatti fuming at his wascally adversary like a sadistic Elmer
Fudd—and there's an undeniable verve to his go-for-broke set pieces, which
mainly revolve around Smith heroically cutting down hordes of faceless enemies
amid wacko situations such as childbirth (he severs the umbilical cord with a
bullet), skydiving, and screwing DQ ("Talk about shooting your load,"
he quips). This anything-goes approach to combat, when coupled with outlandish
Western-noir affectations, intermittently amuses, even if
The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
Half a dozen fight
scenes into the action-movie parody/exemplar Shoot 'Em Up, a minion asks
Paul Giamatti's smirking thug character whether he wants to risk personally
pursuing ludicrously lethal quarry Clive Owen. Giamatti shrugs off the danger
with a derisive comment about people leading from the rear, then adds, avidly,
"Besides, violence is one of the most fun things to watch." He's
clearly talking directly to the viewers, taking them into his sleazy
confidence: The line (which has been widely attributed to Quentin Tarantino)
amounts to a pat on the head and a forgiving license to enjoy the film's
gleeful, enjoyably mindless excesses, which don't reach much further
thematically than "Whee! Violence!"
Shoot 'Em Up has a plot, but it's an illogical mess of
coincidence and conspiracy, and it takes a distinct back seat to hilariously
cartoony sequences like the opener, in which Owen is quietly munching a carrot
at a bus stop when a hysterical pregnant woman runs by, pursued by a
gun-wielding, abuse-screaming man. Owen comes to her aid with a world-weary,
"Here we go again" attitude that's only the first of many ways in
which Shoot 'Em Up recalls his role in Children Of Men. Soon,
he's delivering her child while handily dispatching waves of attacking thugs,
even taking one out with his carrot. Then he's on the lam with the baby,
killing so many of Giamatti's pursuing mercenaries in such increasingly
ridiculous ways that shock-exhaustion rapidly sets in. And while the film keeps
trying to get even more outrageous—for instance, by having Owen pass
baby-feeding duties to jaded lactation-fetish hooker Monica Bellucci—it rarely
tops the vigor and hilarity of that first scene.
It certainly tries,
though. Giamatti plays his villain role with a purring fervency that implies he
wishes he had a properly twirlable mustache. Owen plays his usual generic
modern desperado; in his case, the characterization mostly comes from the
choreography, which has him sexually satisfying Bellucci while killing eight
would-be assassins, or deliberately engineering a head-on collision with a van
to propel himself through both windshields and into the other vehicle, where he
proceeds to shoot everyone. The "Can't stop! Will die!" franticness
closely recalls Crank, but the glossy special effects and polished
aesthetic bring the action closer to Kung Fu Hustle or Tarantino's Kill
Bill. Certainly Shoot 'Em Up has those films' flailing humor and
desire to pander simultaneously to action-film fans and to people who mock
action-film excess. It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears
off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who
absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (A.O. Scott)
Davis, Peter
HEARTS AND MINDS A 95
USA (112 mi) 1974
The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of
the people who actually live out there.
—LBJ
An Academy Award-winning film examining the Vietnam War that
doesn’t fit the usual formula, that maintains its integrity and truthfulness
after the passage of time and is well served by providing both the American and
Vietnamese perspectives with such even-handedness. Much of the time, they could be talking about
the American occupation of
This film humanizes the face of the enemy with striking images of ordinary people, such as a farmer in a remote region away from any fighting who has to contend with the military strikes into his rice fields that wiped out his family, or a coffin maker who is overrun by the insurmountable grief from the steady stream of war dead, while similar images are seen on the airwaves today of innocent victims of U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the neverending rise in casualties, or a Buddhist monk describes how anyone who expressed thoughts of freedom or liberation from the American occupation was labeled a Communist and was either jailed or killed, while American strategists who worked for multiple administrations are seen defending their actions, never wavering a bit from achieving their desired goal.
On the American side, Daniel Ellsberg is especially eloquent about how he initially supported America’s involvement in Southeast Asia until he realized America was financing the French colonial effort during the Eisenhower years, and that a succession of government lies were used to justify military expansion, literally ticking off event after event, until eventually, nothing could justify our continued presence in a country that was fighting for its own liberation. Again, similar claims could be made for the current administration’s global misadventures as well. But rather than explore the political ramifications, this film concerns itself with the human cost, the agonizing toll on an entire generation growing up. One couldn’t help thinking that nothing has changed, it’s as if the same people in charge of the Vietnam military excursion are now in charge of the Iraq occupation, where the one thing that has changed is the public viewing of the war, which is taking place completely offscreen, out of sight, out of mind, with the dead and wounded returning home in record numbers and no cameras are allowed to film them.
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
It's hard to believe Peter Davis' anti-Vietnam documentary won
the Academy Award in 1974 -- not because it's undeserving, but because it's so
much more provocative and artful than the PBS-style dreck that usually nabs the
statue these days. Chalk it up to the mood of the times rather than declining
aesthetic standards; it's pretty clear Hearts & Minds won because it
underlined the message
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan
Rabin]
Nearly three
decades after its resolution, the Vietnam War continues to exert a strong hold
over the American psyche. The controversial winner of the 1975 Academy Award
for Best Feature Documentary, Hearts & Minds wades headfirst into
the war's swampy moral and emotional morass. Shot in the U.S. and Vietnam, the
film explores the psychological damage on both sides through newsreels, film
clips, and interviews with figures ranging from a Vietnam peasant surveying the
wreckage of his home to alpha-hawk Gen. William Westmoreland, who waxes racist
on the weaknesses of the "Oriental" character. Heavily influenced by
cinéma vérité, Minds eschews traditional narration, instead documenting
the myriad complexities of warring societies through the stories and commentary
of foot-soldiers, leaders, and victims. Minds reserves its most damning
criticism for the politicians and generals who directed the war from a
comfortable distance, but it expands its critique to include America's
near-pathological obsession with winning at all costs. Criticized at the time
for what some perceived as its anti-American slant, television veteran Peter
Davis' film veers close to propaganda, most notably by linking military
imperialism with the jingoistic aggression of high-school football. During his
clumsiest moments, Davis' fondness for provocation rises to the surface, which
is unfortunate, since it weakens the impact of his many salient points about
how American men are socialized to be warriors. At its best, Hearts &
Minds bears wrenching witness to the terrible cost of war, from permanently
traumatized soldiers to the communities and families it destroys. One of the
definitive anti-war documentaries, Davis' film puts a human face on an American
and Vietnamese tragedy. This new DVD version includes a booklet of informative
essays and an invaluable audio commentary, featuring Davis ironically railing
against the use of narration in documentaries while providing his own. He also
defends himself from the inevitable charges of anti-Americanism, although the
film makes it clear that his sympathies lie with humanity, not any specific
nation or ideology.
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review (Page 3)
These thoughts lead me, naturally, to Peter Davis's masterwork, Hearts and Minds.
It is one of the great feats of filmmaking: a coolly comprehensive assessment of America's war against Vietnam, completed while the shots were still being fired. Since the film's first showing in 1974, and its subsequent receipt in 1975 of the Oscar for best documentary, an entire generation has grown up without being able to watch this picture on the screen. Parker and Stone belong to this generation, which never saw the realities of American power revealed in a movie house but was steeped in counterfantasies, which soon came flooding into theaters as if to wash away Davis's achievement: First Blood, Top Gun, Missing in Action and their innumerable knockoffs.
Some subjects, America does suppress.
Fortunately, the Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has spent two years restoring Hearts and Minds, and Rialto Pictures is putting the new prints into national release, starting with a run at New York's Film Forum (through November 4). If you are of an older generation and lived through the years of the Vietnam War, you need to see this movie; only a picture this uncompromising can shake the dust off your memories and emotions. And if you are of a younger generation, you also need to see Hearts and Minds. It will shock you not only with the truths it brings to light but with the force of its truly balanced filmmaking.
Davis got all sides into the movie: American Presidents, generals and planners; Vietnamese leaders, prostitutes and peasants; French colonial officials; US veterans, from the heartbroken to the vehemently prowar; mourners; flag-wavers; coffin-makers; amputees; even a high school football team, whose coach helps set the tone for the movie by instructing his players to kill. By creating a counterpoint among these many voices, Davis composed a work that is simultaneously an exposé of the history of the war, an exploration of American martial culture and a deeply humane portrait of the victims.
In Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis managed to understand everything. Then, against convention, he forgave nothing.
village
voice > film > Silent Majority Report by Michael Atkinson
Not only the definitive American documentary about the war in
Interested primarily in the conflict between experience and the
propaganda lingering in stateside mouths, Hearts and Minds may not have
been the first feature film to expressly interrogate American policy (Emile de
Antonio's In the Year of the Pig saw light in 1968), but it crystallized
its era. Davis is hypnotized by the semiotics of middle-class militarism,
whether in and around a high school football game or a 1776 re-enactment,
itself counterset against Ho Chi Minh's hope that America would be empathetic
to the similarly righteous Vietnamese war against the French. (We were,
instead, funding nearly 80 percent of the opposition.) Radicals still maintain
that no one acknowledges the American invasion as such, but
Still, Davis's trump moments are strictly Eisensteinian: cutting
from a Vietnamese capitalist hopefully outlining his future plunder to a busy
factory rapping out prosthetic limbs or a heartbreaking funeral scene, complete
with loved ones assailing the coffin, followed by beefeater General
Westmoreland asserting that "Orientals" don't put "the same high
price on life as does the Westerner." Even if you think
There might be five documentaries no American should be able to
finish public school without seeing, and Hearts and Minds belongs on the
docket. It also forms a vital link in a subversive people's cinema, clearly
realigning history as a never ending series of crimes perpetrated by the
powerful upon the innocent. But for a few particulars,
Hearts
and Minds by Saul Landau
An American Film Trial, by
Saul Landau from Jump Cut, 1975
The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and
the claims of the war documentary
Tony Grajeda from Jump Cut,
Spring 2007
Movie-Vault.com
(Mel Valentin) review
DVD
Outsider Slarek
DVD Times Anthony Nield
DVD
Journal JJB
CultureCartel.com
(Rachel Gordon) review [5/5]
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5]
DVD
Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [4/5]
[Criterion Collection]
Reel.com
DVD review [Tor Thorsen]
DVD
Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]
filmcritic.com
(Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Dayan, Josée
CET AMOUR-LÀ B+ 92
France (98 mi) 2001
Where did this little gem of a film come from? This was a complete surprise, as there was absolutely no advance fanfare. Jeanne Moreau in a sweeping lead role, not a small part, mind you, as she is captured in nearly every frame of the film, why was this not the opening film at Cannes, particularly in the year of the French? As it turns out, the film played at Cannes only as a Jeanne Moreau Tribute Presentation.
A wonderful portrait of love and aging, using the real-life story of French writer Marguerite Duras, who, in the midst of a writer's block at age 66, decided, after a long correspondence from a twenty eight year old literary admirer, to call upon his love and companionship, who, despite being less than half her age, remained at her side for the last 16 years of her life as her lover, secretary, companion and nurse, where he helped revive her "joie de vivre" as well as her considerable writing skills. Both had initial doubts about their own self-worth, she a chronic alcoholic while he was suicidal, but through their appreciation for "the other," they learned to understand their own worth as well. What will stick in my mind are the small moments of patience and love, as this very shy man initially suffers demeaning treatment from this overbearing woman, but through his love for her prose, he withstood all personal attacks by always admiring her vision of humanity, so in time, they steadfastly endured. Their final moments together are nothing less than pure elegance. Jeanne Moreau, who knew the writer and is in her mid-seventies herself, provides a performance for the ages, supremely brave and individualistic, she never conceals Duras's profound human flaws, yet always remains luminous and intelligent. This is a graceful and truly elegant film.
The comparison to SUNSET BOULEVARD is actually a good one; age is seen as mere caricatures in Billy Wilder's hands, while Dayan's own screenplay presents age in a much more humanistic light. Forget that this film was about a real-life writer, that heightens the interest, of course, but the film would still work just based upon such a fresh and insightful view of aging. Sort of like sickness, people shun age in this country, as if it has overgrown its usefulness. The idea of a man so young falling in love with such an older woman would seem preposterous to most in this country, which is why this film took me by such surprise. It was a completely unexpected subject. Why weren't there busloads of senior citizens? Not since the Canadian film STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY have I been so enraptured by the wit and charm of the elderly. To see it realized with such calm assuredness, as well as the enormous presence of Ms. Moreau, was a delight.
Cet
Amour-Là David Denby from the New Yorker
At the age of sixty-six, during a fallow period of her working life, the
novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and director Marguerite Duras (Jeanne
Moreau) takes as a lover a twenty-eight-year-old philosophy student and
admirer, Yann Andréa (Aymeric Demarigny), who has been writing her fan letters
for five years. As they live together, she dictates to him and drinks, and
exercises the French art of making arbitrary declarations. "Bathtubs scare
me," she says. But she might just as well have said, "Rattan
furniture scares me." The only point of such remarks is that she exhibits
the will to make them. As writer-director Josée Dayan imagines her, Duras is a
dazzling intellectual star in the French diva-oracle tradition, and her
continuous self-assertion is a miracle. But in this movie Duras comes off as a
sibyl without vision. And poor Andréa comes off as a nothing. He is not an
intellectual companion, and Duras does not look at his naked body with desire.
If you're going to make a movie about sadomasochism, you had better make it
funny or dirty. But "Cet Amour-Là" is watery and sentimental and
(perhaps unconsciously) cruel. In French.
User Reviews From imdb: Ralph Michael Stein (lawprof@pipeline.com)
Only
Born in 1914 in a
Hardly surprisingly, Duras - always
committed to examining social issues - flirted with and joined the French
communist party after her country was liberated by the
The belle of a postwar literary
establishment that offered avant-garde writing to a country that in two world
wars had seen demographic decimation and international humiliation, Duras
tackled every theme and every subject while pursuing a somewhat hedonistic
lifestyle (including a very celebrated menage-a-trois). By the time she met
Yann, such exploits were interred in the mists of her memory.
Based on Yann Andrea's novel, the film
starts with his meeting Duras after long writing to her, poetically expressing
his admiration (and, undoubtedly, ambition to follow in her literary
footsteps). Played by Aymeric Demarigny, the young (in his twenties) Yann is invited
to Duras's apartment by the seaside.
A mutual attraction develops as Duras,
in a role only Jeanne Moreau could bring to life, accepts the young man as her
muse, amanuensis and lover. He moves in. As a couple, they argue, make up and
often engage in whimsical pursuits (her attempt to teach him to drive, for
example) in which the generational gap melts away. This was no short
relationship - the couple was together from 1980 to Duras's 1986 death.
In the film and perhaps in real life
(this is, after all, the surviving lover's tale of a relationship of near
mythical proportions in literary circles) Yann brings certain gifts that spur
the aging author's writing. Unfortunately he also brings bottles of red wine
which set the alcoholic Duras back into the drinking she apparently had escaped
from earlier.
An affair between a woman in her
eighth decade and a man in his third - an American film would highlight
exploitation, perhaps sex served up as bizarre. With actresses in their
thirties now appealing to directors to find roles for "older" women
it's doubtful many film makers here could portray a relationship such as Yann
and Duras's with unflinching honesty, subordinating the sexual aspects to the
more interesting core interdependence that Jeanne Moreau gives life to here.
Demarigny's excellent portrayal
notwithstanding, this is Moreau's film, a triumphant demonstration of the
depths of her acting AND a statement about her own innate vitality and
sexuality. She must care deeply about Duras.
A slow moving film that will reward
second viewings, it isn't for everyone. Duras isn't that widely read in the
Nicely filmed in a verdant
8/10.
Full Review Andrew Sarris from the New York Observer
Josée Dayan’s Cet Amour-Là is
not the kind of film I would recommend to anyone who found The Hours too
depressing. Cet Amour-Là, from Ms. Dayan’s own screenplay, with dialogue
in collaboration with Yann Andréa, Maren Sell and Gilles Taurand, based on the
novel by Mr. Andréa, recounts the passionate and scandalous love affair between
the 66-year-old, much-read and much-honored French author Marguerite Duras
(1914-1996) and a 28-year-old college philosophy student named Yann Lemmée (but
renamed Yann Andréa by Duras). After a long correspondence between literary
admirer and literary celebrity, Duras in 1980 summoned Yann to her side, where
he remained for the last 16 years of her life in the capacity of lover,
secretary, companion and nurse.
Their relationship was a stormy one.
On more than one occasion, Duras threw Yann out of her apartment, telling him
never to return. She frequently called him a nobody, a zero, right to his face,
and he never flinched. Yet despite her recurring writer’s block, her alcoholism
and her overall poor health, she managed to resume her writing, in the process
teaching her neurotic, suicidally inclined young lover not only how to write,
but also how to live and stay alive. Indeed, the unstated moral of this cryptic
film of modest dramatic dimensions is that dying is easy, but writing is
hard—or perhaps that just as a shark must keep moving or die, a writer must
keep writing or die.
In any event, unlike most of my
colleagues, I admire the film enormously, though I can understand why other
people do not share my enthusiasm. I notice that many critics, while generally
praising Jeanne Moreau’s accomplished delineation of Duras, have been very hard
on Aymeric Demarigny’s quietly flaky portrayal of the seemingly masochistic and
shamelessly submissive Yann. If I differ with my colleagues on the quality of
Mr. Demarigny’s performance, it is because his is one of the hardest roles for
even a minimally virile male actor to play. Besides, if one is to accept the
film on any level, one must understand—as Duras undoubtedly did in real
life—that being old and undesirable and near death, the only way she could
escape the demeaning status of a supplicant was to lash out periodically at her
young lover, who almost certainly would outlive her.
Yet there is nothing delusional in
the relation of Duras to her work, as there is with Gloria Swanson’s Norma
Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Fortunately for
Duras, an elderly writer doesn’t need a close-up from Cecil B. DeMille to
validate her art. Similarly, Mr. Demarigny’s nerdy Yann is a far cry from
William Holden’s male pin-up Joe Gillis, who sells his soul as well as his body
for the easy life in Norma Desmond’s mansion. By contrast, there is nothing
cynical or sleazy in Yann’s alliance with Duras. He loves and admires Duras as
Joe Gillis never loved or admired Desmond. Yann believes with religious fervor
in the prose that Duras dictates to him on his typewriter, whereas Gillis has
all he can do to avoid laughing at the massive manuscript that Norma Desmond
entrusts to him, to be turned into a filmable screenplay.
Don’t get me wrong. Sunset
Boulevard is a magnificent movie, despite all its cruel derision. Cet
Amour-Là is something else entirely: something smaller and less dramatically
exciting, but also something subtler and more spiritually transcendent. I think
we need both kinds of movies to balance our cinematic diet—which may just be
another way of saying that we need both French and American movies to better
appreciate the difference between one cultural constellation and another.
Yann, for example, as a
representative of the French male, would make Donald Rumsfeld chortle with glee
at this confirmation of the stereotype driving the current anti-French hysteria
over here, directed at a whole people reluctant to shed their blood in a
foreign land. The point is that I can’t imagine an American actor accepting a
role as unrelievedly humiliating as this. Am I then a closet masochist or a
hopelessly unredeemable Francophile? Not at all. It’s simply that Duras and
Yann happened to be two very real people who danced for a brief time on the
edge of eternity.
Ms. Moreau was both a friend and an
artistic collaborator of Duras, but she pays her the greatest tribute by not
slavishly mimicking her—which would have easily degenerated into parody—but
rather by endowing her with Ms. Moreau’s own acting charisma and luminous
charm. It can be argued (as many already have) that Duras was considerably
overrated as a writer. I am not prepared to say she wasn’t. It seems to me that
in most of her work, she was telling and retelling the same story of her own
sexual initiation at a very young age by an older man from a different culture,
race and ethnicity. Whether or not one respects her literary presence in such
stylish cinematic works as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
and her own India Song (1975), she has left an indelible mark on the
screen that makes her story of more than passing interest. Ms. Dayan is to be
commended for breathing even often-painful life into a relationship that was
largely sealed off from the world outside.
Dayton
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE B+ 91
She’s a super freak, super freak
A road movie with a demented dysfunctional family sense of humor, among which includes finding humor in a failed suicide attempt, jilted love, drug addiction, death, even how to dispose of a dead body, all wrapped around one family’s experiences where the dad opens up the film declaring: “There are two kinds of people in this world, winners and losers. And winners don’t give up.” Hard to live up to that philosophy without falling flat on your face. Dad (Greg Kinnear) is a rather despicable believer in a “Refuse to lose” positive mental attitude 9-Step Program, disregarding all other options, including the normal states of being in others. Mom (Toni Collette) has to put up with Dad, and is rather pissed off at his holier-than-thou approach where every obstacle is solved by the Sermon of the Dad. Frank (Steve Carell), is Mom’s gay brother, the nation’s leading Proust scholar who was recently jilted in an affair with one of his grad students who left him for Proust scholar #2 (yes, what could be more aggravating?), leading to his attempted suicide, so he has returned to his sister’s home for a supposedly “safe” environment during his recovery. Granddad (Alan Arkin) was kicked out of the senior citizen home for lewd and lascivious behavior as well as heroin addiction, and is a foul-mouthed libertine, but also has the most tender moments in the film. Dwayne (Paul Dano) is a Nietzsche-obsessed dour and sullen early teen son who hasn’t spoken to anyone in 9 months, while 7-year old Olive (Abigail Breslin from KEANE) loves Granddad, who is helping her practice her dance routine for the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest for kids, which she is “most” excited about, considering she only learns she’s a contestant two days before the pageant when the #1 contestant couldn’t fulfill her obligations.
On their way from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach in a broken down yellow VW van, where the sliding door keeps coming off and the clutch gives out, which means it always needs a running start, the family is one continual pain in the ass to one another, knowing how to get under each another’s skin, how to spark a nerve, which Olive tunes out by wearing her earphones. But along the way, each person comes face to face with their own delusions, almost like a mirror image of themselves, the one they never want to see. Each faces a horrible personal tragedy, but it’s also met with this terrific pick-me-up music that sends them on their merry way with a newfound purpose in life that wonderfully straddles the line between the grotesque, the tasteless, and the hilarious. When they arrive at the pageant and see what an artificial Barbi-doll each of the other contestants turns into, which is beyond tasteless and grotesque, they want to spare Olive, a genuine “real girl,” from the pain and disillusion each of them has recently had to face. But once onstage, she asks for a microphone and delivers her personal message, “I’d like to thank my Granddad who taught me all the dance moves,” and when the emcee asks for Granddad to take a bow, she tells them, “He can’t. He’s in the trunk of our car,” before launching into a relatively tame but bawdy version of Rick James’s “Super Freak,” which is enough to create pandemonium and send the audience out the room in droves. As it turns out, Michael Arndt’s script is something of an eye-opener, as most of the humor and personal tragedy is dead on, spurred on by outstanding acting performances, turning one-dimensional comical oddball misfits into compelling people, making this exaggerated farce something of a rollicking ride.
Little
Miss Sunshine Bryant Frazer from
Deep Focus
True, it's hard to imagine a more aggressively prefab "indie" than Little Miss Sunshine, which seems to have been conceived and written to pander to as broad a demographic swath outside the mainstream (well, right next to the mainstream) as possible. It's about a dysfunctional family road trip. Its cast of quirky characters includes a suicidal Proust scholar, a mute teenager taking cues from Nietzsche, a suffering but stoic wife, an ambitious but fundamentally bone-headed husband sending all the wrong messages, a cranky, dirty-minded grandfather who sends the right ones, and an adorable little girl.
Screenwriter Michael Arndt puts them through their paces with a rigor that evolves from the tautly clever storytelling of the opening sequence, which introduces each major player and establishes their foibles, to a more slipshod narrative built on metaphor, coincidence, and forced reconciliations.
Every critic's least-favorite scene in the film seems to be the hospital caper that leads directly into the film's tedious home stretch, and that's where I really lost interest, as well. However, the performances are very appealing (Abigail Breslin? Next time you see Dakota Fanning, tell her she can kiss your ass), and music-video veterans Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris direct with a forthright confidence and simplicity of expression that propels the unlikely yarn through some rough spots.
And then, in the final reel, something miraculous happens — the film climaxes as the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant finally welcomes little Olive, a guileless underachiever in a hotel full of tiny, highly sexualized painted ladies, onto the stage. Suddenly, the film squares up what feels like about a dozen contradictory impulses -- it's simultaneously dopey and wise, riotous and sublime, splendid and vulgar -- and, for a few moments at least, and if only from my seat in the room, all was forgiven. Clunky though much of the film had been, and cranky though I was just a few minutes earlier, I had a happy grin plastered on my face as the credits started to roll. That's worth something.
film > Little Miss Sunshine : A
"What's Wrong With ... Jim Ridley from the Village Voice
Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from
A grating black comedy about the paralyzing fear of not being strong, successful, or skinny enough, Little Miss Sunshine means to indict our national obsession with winners and the stigma of coming in second. The opening sequence introduces dad Richard (Greg Kinnear) delivering a motivational nine-step pep talk with mounting fervor. Big surprise: The very next shot reveals his audience as a few stragglers in a dingy classroom. At home, cantankerous Grandpa (Alan Arkin) settles in for his favorite leisure activity—snorting heroin— while mop-topped teenage Dwayne (Paul Dano) hits the weights in a sullen vow of silence under a giant Nietzsche poster.
In the next room, seven-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin) stares through glasses at a TV beauty pageant. The camera settles in a hospital ward, on the sodden misery of Uncle Frank (Steve Carell)—a gay Proust scholar who cut his wrists after losing his lover to an academic rival. Over his scowling face, the words appear: "Little Miss Sunshine." This is called irony. With Frank sequestered in Dwayne's room on suicide watch, the bickering household gathers for dinner—the movie pauses to chortle over a gauche Mayor McCheese cup on the table—just as a fluke announcement makes Olive a contender for the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest. Gung ho Richard convinces wife Sheryl (Toni Collette) to make the 700-mile drive in the family's decrepit van, and the others reluctantly sign on—for no better reason than that's what characters in shaky farces do.
Little Miss Sunshine is the latest in a long line of Sundance
clunkers, from Happy,
The pity is that there are strains of tenderness and generosity here: an affectionate scene between Grandpa and Olive comes as sweet relief, mainly because Arkin's character momentarily becomes a person instead of a wheezy comic device. (Can anyone remember the last time the Foulmouthed Grandpa bit was funny?) And occasionally the directors capture an unexpected bit of beauty or freedom—like Carell's cakewalk bolt toward the rolling van's doors, or a lyrical shot from underneath a whorled overpass.
The movie's platitudinous payoff—winning isn't everything, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc.—would go down a lot easier if Little Miss Sunshine didn't roam from scene to scene searching for new characters to patronize. A sequence with a brusque hospital "bereavement liaison" (Paula Newsome) comes off thuddingly sour, but the beauty pageant finale is the nadir. To engineer a happy ending—the heroes mustn't look like losers—the movie has to make everyone else look worse. Thus the contestants are made up into grotesque little kewpie whores, while the adults include a helmet-haired harridan organizer, a leering emcee, and an audience of snooty stage moms. Even as a metaphor for What's Wrong With America—"Life is just one fucking beauty contest after another," offers one character helpfully—it goes past comic exaggeration into cruelty.
And yet Little Miss Sunshine saves its one belly laugh for this scene, which not coincidentally is the movie's only left-field surprise: Olive's glaringly inappropriate (or is it inadvertently appropriate?) talent contest specialty, one of exactly two punches the movie doesn't telegraph. (The other involves Carell's reading material, and it's not Remembrance of Things Past.) As for the rest of this desperately contrived farce—wouldja settle for Little Miss Congeniality?
de
Andrade, Joaquim Pedro
MACUNAÍMA B- 81
Brazil
A mix of sensuality and the grotesque, a somewhat ridiculous, yet
politically potent period piece, an anti-intellectual satire on what it is to
be Brazilian, following the birth and life of a young naive Brazilian born in
the jungle of the Amazonas, making his
way into the civilized world before returning back into the jungle again, along
the way attempting to establish his own identity, a bit like Candide, using
an emotionally detached viewpoint of a main character who always seems to be in
the middle of something going wrong. An
epic hero goes into the wilderness and returns a conquering hero. A barbarian goes into civilization and
returns still a barbarian. The film is
an adaptation of a book by the same title written by Mario de Andrade, somewhat
influenced by a seminal literary work in Brazil, “The Lusiads,” written by Luis
Vaz de Camoes, known as the Portuguese Shakespeare, in 1928 when Brazil was
establishing its independence from Portugal.
A fairy tale, a carnival-like mock epic, a satirical rhapsody on a
theme, a highly illustrative look at Vasco de Gama’s voyages of discovery to
India, based on Indian myths and legends, written in verse in a manner similar
to Virgil’s The Aeneid, focusing on Portuguese people in the plural as a
collective people, transported in the film to the modernized 1960’s. This was the first work of Magical Realism in
Latin America , and was the first Brazilian
Cinema Novo film to enjoy public interest, capturing the attention of
newspapers as well as much financial success.
During the decade of the 60’s, Brazil’s population increased from 70
million to nearly 95 million, or by 1/3, endured a 1964 coup d’etat, followed
shortly afterwards by 3 more before the end of the decade, introducing the TFP,
Tradition Family Property, a right-wing organization formed to protect their
own assets, with a militarily controlled parliament and president who suspended
civil rights, sending many citizens into exile, implementing a brutal
totalitarian regime in the 1960’s, somewhat reminiscent of the fascist
dictatorship of the 1930’s after the country’s coffee economy was devastated,
leading at the time to a nationwide depression.
Cinema Novo was completely accessible due to its very strong roots in
Brazilian literature. This novel
introduced Brazilian modernism, something along the lines of Surrealism,
Expressionism, Dadaism, or Cubism, it was attempting to express something about
the modern age, an effort to break free from Europe, a cry for artistic
independence with a nationalistic spirit.
Prior to 1922, Brazil Portugal France
Using a main character who changes from an Indian to a Black man to a White
man, the film attempts to de-Europeanize the cosmos, making it an Indian
cosmos, overturning established racial categories by parodying race and
character, as despite the changing races, he continues to behave in exactly the
same way. He is a hero with no
character, who constantly yawns and murmurs “I’m feeling so lazy,” a
Shakespearian Caliban, a noble savage with an unbridled sexuality. A woman is seen pulling a joint from between
her legs, offering it to our black hero, who, after taking a puff, is
immediately transformed from a country hick into a handsome white prince. He is not strong and brave, the European
ideal, instead he faces danger by running away, by using cunning, and the
African religious practice of macumba or magic, which is viewed for the first
time in a completely non-judgmental manner.
A dancer is seen in a near hypnotic trance possessing his enemy, a
metaphor for foreign capitalists infiltrating Brazil
Macunaíma Revenge of the Jungle Freaks, by J. R.
Molotnik from Jump Cut
CONJUGAL WARFARE (Guerra Conjugal)
Brazil
Film Update Randal Johnson from
Jump Cut
In his fifth feature film, Joaquin Pedro interweaves three separate
narratives based on elements of some 15 short stories by the "vampire of
Using as a model the erotic comedy, or pornochanchada, which inundates the Brazilian market with its sexist and degrading exhibitionism, the director demystifies the corruption and hypocrisy of many moral values of Brazilian society. As in his previous film, OS INCONFIDENTES (1971), Joaquim Pedro apparently accepts the dominant ideology's roles and models only to subvert them on another level, thus maintaining a critical vision of Brazilian society. He also continues to develop the cannibalist metaphor of MACUNAIMA (1969). In one sequence, the young man attempts to make love with an attractive woman. Her bed is in the shape of a mouth, complete with lips and tongue. After the young man leaves, the woman rolls up in the blanket and the mouth closes over her. This reverts to the idea examined at length in MACUNAIMA that all social relationships in capitalist society reduce, in the final analysis, to cannibalism. Whoever has the power to do so devours his fellow wo/man. The use of the pornochanchada formula is in itself a critique and demystification of that genre.
de Antonio, Emile
POINT OF ORDER
Chicago
Reader [Pat Graham] (capsule review)
A memento of that wonderful cold-war era over which our
revisionist Coppolas (e.g., Peggy Sue Got Married) shed such wistful,
luminously nostalgic tears: Point of Order is Emile de Antonio's 1962
excerpting of Army-McCarthy hearings TV kinescopes, presented in the white heat
of outraged liberal propriety (though in retrospect defense counsel Joe Welch's
sentimental parries to crude McCarthy thrusts look slick and calculated,
disingenuously evasive; by comparison, the Tailgunner's bumptious dishonesty
seems almost tonic).
Time Out
Rejected by the 1963 New York Film Festival because it wasn't 'a real
film', de Antonio's debut feature is perhaps the purest expression of his
analytical approach to documentary and the 'media-event'. To the raw material
of hours of video footage of the 1954 US Army-McCarthy hearings, he brought a
radical collagist's technique: constructing an inquiry into the phenomenon of
McCarthyism without moving from his editing bench, taking up a camera, or
adding a word of commentary; re-democratising the historical documents once
dominated by the authority of McCarthy's 'performance'; and opening up an early
oppositional direction to cinéma-vérité.
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
Briefly glimpsed in Good Night, and Good Luck, Senator Joseph
McCarthy's self-destructive demagoguery first got the full-spectacle treatment
in Point of Order, radical filmmaker Emile de Antonio's engrossing
compilation of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Less documentary than
distillation, the film compresses nearly 200 hours of footage into 97 minutes,
giving a best-of view of the events that marked the beginning of the end for
the belligerent commie-hunter. The dreaded, innuendo-lubricated bullying of the
early 1950s' witch hunts hit a wall when the U.S. Army charged McCarthy and
lackey Roy Cohn of pressing officers to give Private David Schine, Cohn's
friend and lover, special treatment when he was drafted. The senator unwisely
countercharged that the Army was helping the expansion of the "red
world," so matters were brought to the fore (and, more importantly, to the
front of TV cameras) for an extended inquiry that, through de Emilio's editing
strategies, emerges as both claustrophobic and cleansing.
By pruning away at the raw footage of CBS kinescopes, de Emilio has given the
material the compact structure of drama, and it's easy to read the film as the
story of an ogre who ate himself to death, taking with him a decade's worth of
evil. In fact, de Emilio, later to craft such corrosive works as the Vietnam
War tract In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon essay Millhouse,
scarcely lets anybody off the hook within this enclosed political arena. The
most celebrated moment of the hearings, when Army counsel Joseph Welch
chastised McCarthy for his "cruelty" and "recklessness"
after he tried to smear a member of his staff with accusations of Communist
links, is routinely singled out as a moment of old-school decency battling it
out with (and silencing) reactionary fascism, yet Point of Order remains
awash in shades of gray. More than a mere showdown between good and bad
politics, the hearings come to stand for a system slowly realizing its own
potential darkness, with McCarthy, Cohn, and the other participants coming off
as more or less extreme outgrowths of a political organism interested mainly in
the control of lives and the elimination of any hints of
"subversion."
Contrary to the initial impression of "artlessness," de Emilio's use
of raw footage actually accentuates theatricality, from the opening
"cast" roll-call to the division of the film into "plot
point" segments ("The Army's Charts," "President Eisenhower
Intervenes," "A Letter from J. Edgar Hoover"). Far from
anonymous, the TV cameras are intensely felt throughout as not merely a
recording instrument but a draining device, the blasting light prodding each
participant for the truth. Clueless to the new medium, McCarthy self-circuits
in the long run—he fidgets, sweats, and snickers at his own flaccid puns and
slurs, and launches unfounded attack after unfounded attack while an
exasperated Cohn lifts his eyes to the heavens. More than anything, he exposes
himself. Welch, meanwhile, knows the TV lenses are there, and gives just enough
of his ornery heroism to hook the crowds, modulating the outrage and turning
the examination of a cropped photo into irresistible vaudeville by sheer
timing—a natural performer, as Otto Preminger richly understood when he cast
Welch as a judge in Anatomy of a Murder. McCarthy's bullying
exploitation of national fears could not be more timely, though Point of
Order is also a pioneering work in its portrayal of politics as mastery of
the media. It's not for nothing that de Emilio in the end locates McCarthy's
fall as the ultimate loss of audience, threats barked at the chamber as the
crowd disperses—the sequence itself a self-conscious manipulation of existing
texts, with only the unmanned TV equipment ultimately left in the empty frame.
New York Magazine [David Denby]
Baltimore City Paper [Luisa F. Ribeiro]
Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule
review)
Fulvue Drive-in [Nicholas Sheffo]
Turner Classic Movies [Paul Sherman] (capsule
review) also reviewing IN THE YEAR OF
THE PIG
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG
Critic's
Choice: New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, November 29, 2005
IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG
The Cinematic Threads Matthew Lotti
Chilling agit-prop made during
the Vietnam War fervor here in the States, questioning our very role in the
region (domino theory my ass) and making a point to cover some of the history
of the country itself. Having a little knowledge of the details certainly
helps, although spot-on interviews with various journalists (David Halberstam,
who I've always admired, is particularly lucid) and politicians fill in the
gaps. Peter Davis' Hearts and Minds is more intense and memorable - and,
despite its faults (and, like de Antonio, he has a clear bias), a haunting
experience - but this picture's methodical construction suggests extensive
research on behalf of its makers, and one of the more cutting critiques I've
seen of America's political "issues."
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The pig of the title is the
Turner Classic Movies [Paul Sherman] also reviewing POINT OF ORDER
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing POINT OF ORDER
On "The Year of the Pig" by Emil De Antonio and Bill Nichols Critical dialogue between filmmaker Emile de Antonio and Bill Nichols, from Jump Cut, December 1978
The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the claims of the war documentary Tony Grajeda from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
The New York Times (Howard Thompson)
UNDERGROUND
With a somewhat greater reputation as
a 'cause' than as a film (FBI subpoenas on de Antonio, Haskell
Wexler and Mary
Lampson to surrender all footage brought an outcry from left-liberal
Hollywood, before being withdrawn), this clandestinely-shot interview with five
leading members of the Weather Underground marks both de Antonio's weakness and
his strength as a radical film-maker. Soft-pedalling the analysis of the
Weather-people's position on revolutionary armed struggle in the States (the
questioning suggests reverence for 'the outlaw' rather than rigorous enquiry),
and accordingly obtaining a number of rather woolly theoretical self-justifications,
he none the less firmly situates the group in a recent US political history
constructed largely from his own previous films and those of his followers,
constantly relating his almost anonymous (obliquely shot) fugitive subjects to
the events and conditions that radicalised them and sent them underground.
Political
filmmaking U.S. political filmmaking: 2 stories, by
John Hess from Jump Cut
Underground Weatherpeople at Home, by Thomas Waugh
from Jump Cut
Emile
DeAntonio and the New Documentary of the 70s Beyond
verité, by Thomas Waugh from Jump Cut
Weather
Underground faction attacks Underground
Underground
and the WUO split, by Peter Biskind from Jump Cut
de
Bartillat, Laurent
THE
VANISHING POINT (Ce Que Mes Yeux Ont Vu) B+ 91
aka: Le Mystère de Watteau
This is the kind of
film that is rarely, if ever done well, perhaps the last being THE GIRL WITH
THE PEARL EARRING (2003), a gorgeously conceived, fictionalized version about
Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) and his growing obsession with one
of his subjects (Scarlett Johansson), the face in many of his most famous
paintings (seen here: Full
resolution). The elegant attention to detail in that film
was apparently an aberration as the director’s next project was another
wretched Hannibal Lector film, perhaps the worst of the series. What this film has going for it, first and
foremost, is Sylvie Testud, an actress of phenomenal range, who has performed
leading roles in multiple languages ranging from German, Italian, French,
English, and Japanese. Here she remains
wordless through most of the film, which is really one long extended art
appreciation lesson on the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau, an 18th
century French painter whose sketchbooks are largely lost, yet his extensive
take on similar subjects and his use of color and décor show early signs of
Impressionism some 150 years ahead of time.
Testud plays Lucie, an art researcher studying the women in Watteau’s
works, particularly one woman who is almost always shown from the back, who,
she suggests, may have been the painter’s lover, a theory scoffed at and
ridiculed by her highbrow professor and advisor, Jean-Pierre Marielle,
something of a Michel Piccoli look-alike and a leading expert on Watteau. The rudely imperious professor discourages
Lucie at every available opportunity, both publicly and privately, continually
suggesting there is nothing to her theory.
While working in a
photo print shop, she notices a mime standing still on a box just out of
traffic in the middle of a busy intersection, a man who catches her eyes for
several days before they finally get a chance to meet, where she is intrigued
by his eyes. Vincent (James Thiérrée) is
both deaf and mute, but can read lips and pantomimes his speech, which she
immediately takes delight in, as he obviously finds a different way of viewing
the world, which is especially interesting when they visit a Latin dance bar
playing Willie Colon’s “Idilio.” As she
spends hours on end staring at paintings, blowing up specific details,
searching for signs of recognizable patterns or themes, Vincent appears to have
an influence on just what she’s looking for, as he has an extraordinary ability
to eliminate all extraneous, unnecessary matter in the world around him and
find what’s truly significant. Perhaps
without realizing it, his lifestyle alone encourages her to continue her search
which borders on obsession, if only because he’s perhaps the only person she
knows who realizes what life without it would mean to her. The cinematography by Jean-Marc Selva is
stunning, in particular the detail in examining the Watteau paintings, while
David Moreau perfectly balances the mood with
quietly introspective music. Written by
this first feature director along with Alain Ross, its attractiveness is the
seductive world that is built from gazing intently in silence. While I haven’t a clue if any of this is
based on credible art history or if it’s all made up, and the film never really
makes clear how she draws her conclusions, but the time we spend immersed with
a single artist of such renown is in itself stunning, as it’s an exquisite and
thoroughly intelligent mix of medias.
The end credits list an endless number of Watteau paintings, easily over
50, a list that seems to go on and on, something unprecedented in movie
credits.
User comments from imdb Author: writers_reign
from
This is the offbeat kind of movie they not only still make
in
Festival
of New French Cinema Andrea
Gronvall from The Reader
The title refers to the focal point at which all lines
converge to create perspective, which becomes the leitmotif of this highly
imaginative 2007 mystery. Sylvie Testud (Fear and
Trembling) stars as a headstrong art student in Paris who’s determined
to prove the identity of the unknown model central to a masterwork by the
18th-century painter Antoine Watteau. Ignoring her imperious, disapproving
adviser (Jean-Pierre Marielle of The Da Vinci Code),
she follows a clue provided by her secret admirer, a deaf-mute street performer
nicely played by James Thierree. Director Laurent de Bartillat uses jump cuts,
rack focus, wipes, and extreme close-ups to suggest thematic connections in
this elaborate puzzle, which considers both the rewards and the costs of tunnel
vision. In French and Flemish with subtitles. 79 min.
12th Annual Festival of New
French Cinema
Facets Multi-Media
The
always interesting Sylvie Testud (La France)
stars as Lucie, a talented and dedicated art history graduate student obsessed
by the paintings of 18th century French artist Antoine Watteau. Intent on
uncovering the identity of a mysterious woman who appears in many of his
canvases but is always only seen from the back, she begins a relentless and
exhausting search for answers. Her quest takes her to an art auction in Belgium
where she bids for a work she can't afford, opens her up to the scorn and
ridicule of her thesis director, inspires her to research the work of a
contemporary of Watteau, and leads her to an unexpected friendship with a
mysterious mime who performs in the square across from the photocopy shop where
she works and may have clues for her to investigate. Lushly photographed and
exquisitely composed, this "art thriller" takes the viewer down the
path of one woman's obsession and explores emotions both violent and delicate
that are shared and unleashed the deeper she travels down her journey. Directed
by
User comments from imdb Author: Felix-28 from Melbourne,
Australia
This was shown on World Movies last night. I didn't quite
know what to expect, but I thought it might be something like Possession, the
excellent novel by A S Byatt which was made into a much less good film; i.e., a
story in which a present-day researcher solves a mystery about some aspect of
the life of a historical figure. Well, it is that: the historical figure is the
painter Watteau, and the present-day researcher is Lucie Audibert, who is
played charmingly by Sylvie Testud.
There's a side-story about a deaf-mute mime who does his act outside Lucie's
work, and with whom she strikes up a relationship. It adds little to the film,
although there seems to be some real chemistry between Lucie and the mime,
Vincent, played by James Thiérrée.
I found it quite compelling. The pictures on the screen are beautiful: the
cinematography is by Jean-Marc Selva, which is not a name I had ever heard
before, but it one I'll look out for in the future. The story moves along
steadily, never hurriedly, and an atmosphere of tension is gradually created
and built. Although Watteau is long dead, there's a sense of sadness and loss
at the part of his life that is revealed, which is complemented and
counterpointed by the sadness and almost desperation that surrounds Lucie's.
Sylvie Testud is superb. She's as thin as a sparrow and not particularly
pretty, but one of the things I like about French films in general and this one
in particular is that they are about (not always, of course, but quite often)
rather ordinary-looking people who are shown to be men and women of substance.
I've given it a score of 8 out of 10. I'd prefer to have given it 7.5, but
that's not possible, and it's better than a 7. It's not a great film, but it's
a very thoughtful one.
James Thierree offers a clue to the mystery that Sylvie Testud is probing.
Art history student Lucie (Sylvie Testud) is fascinated by the presence of a
mysterious woman, invariably seen from behind, in the works of the great French
18th century painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. She embarks on an investigation to
determine the figure's identity, a quest that leads to a series of discoveries
and a visit to
As she becomes increasingly absorbed in her mission, Lucie is given a vital
clue by Vincent (James Thierree), a deaf-mute she sees performing mime in the
street outside the photocopy shop where she works. Meanwhile her academic
supervisor Dussart (Jean-Pierre Marielle) appears bent on discouraging her from
developing her theory that the woman was an actress, Charlotte Desmares, with
whom Watteau was in love.
Perpetually broke, Lucie is in debt to her landlord, constantly borrows from
her actress mother (Christiane Millet) and has to sell off a family heirloom in
order to buy a painting that appears to hold the key to the mystery.
"Freely inspired" by the true story of Watteau's life, the movie
imagines the discovery of a previously unknown work by the painter and seeks to
establish a series of parallels, notably one between Lucie's mounting obsession
with Watteau and the loss, when she was a child, of her mountaineer father.
Dussart, we also learn, lost his wife as a result of his own obsession with
Watteau, while Vincent has an obsession with the river Bievre, a waterway that
continues to flow beneath the pavements of Paris's left bank despite being
paved over in the 19th century.
The movie has weaknesses as these connections often appear forced and there are
holes and obscurities in the storyline. Yet De Bartillat and co-writer Alain
Ross expertly convey their own painterly obsessions. (There are echoes here of
Peter Greenaway's early movies.) Every picture tells a story, not simply about
the subject but about the painter and even, digging deeper, about the person
who is examining it. The frequent dissolves between paintings and
Testud, one of the brightest of France's young acting talents, is faultless as
the dogged Lucie, while Marielle -- whom moviegoers will recognize as the slain
museum curator in "The Da Vinci Code" -- is enjoying an Indian summer
in an acting career going back half a century. Thierree is underused though,
his character fading from the picture in the second half, one of the least
satisfying aspects of a movie that rewards and frustrates in equal measure.
Variety review Jay Weissberg
Antoine Watteau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WebMuseum: Watteau, Jean-Antoine
Watteau paintings at the Web Gallery of Art
Idilio. Willie Colon Video Rockola on YouTube (5:11)
Idilio - Willie Colon (6:39)
de Broca, Philippe
Philippe
de Broca Rob Edelman from Film
Reference
Philippe de Broca has worked
consistently since the 1960s, directing films for theatrical release and
television. Yet when one thinks of de Broca, one thinks not of his recent
titles but of his earliest and most successful films: sincere, playfully
impudent comic spoofs made with dexterity and vigor, which stress illusion over
reality.
In these early films, which he
also co-scripted, de Broca's characters are nonconformists who celebrate life
and the joy of personal liberation. Structurally the films are highly visual,
more concerned with communicating by images than by any specifics in the scenario.
And these images often are picturesque. De Broca acknowledges his desire to
give pleasure to the esthetic sense and, as such, he is a popular artist. While
these early films are neither as evocative as those of François Truffaut (with
whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on The 400 Blows) nor as
cinematic as those of Claude Chabrol (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant
director on Le beau serge and Les cousins), they exude style and
wit. While they might be fanciful in content, their essence is emotionally
genuine.
De Broca's films are non-tragic,
and feature humorous treatments of characters and their situations. One of his
favorite themes is the relationship between the sexes, explored in his earliest
films—Les Jeux de l'amour, Le Farceur, and L'Amant de cinq jours—each
with Jean-Pierre Cassel playing a lighthearted lover. This character appears 20
years older in Le Cavaleur, featuring Jean Rochefort as a bored,
self-centered womanizer. De Broca's most popular early-career films, however,
star Jean-Paul Belmondo: Cartouche, a flavorful comedy-swashbuckler
chronicling the exploits of kind-hearted criminals in 18th-century Paris; and L'Homme
de Rio, a charming James Bond spoof about a soldier on leave who is led to
a stunningly photographed Brazil on a chase for treasure. His most renowned
effort is Le Roi de coeur, set during the final days of World War I in a
town that has been abandoned by all except the residents of an insane asylum.
Thematically speaking, Le Roi
de coeur is a perfect film for its time. Released just as the anti-Vietnam
war movement was gaining momentum, it is a pungent satire that lampoons the
very nature of war and conflict. Not surprisingly, Le Roi de coeur fast
became a cult favorite among college students. It ran for six-and-a-half years
alone at a Cambridge , Massachusetts
De Broca is more concerned with
good than evil. He began his career as a newsreel cameraman in Algeria
Nevertheless, the work in his
first half-decade as a feature filmmaker generally is more satisfying than his
efforts of the past three decades. Among de Broca's higher-profile post-1960s
films are Le Cavaleur and Tendre Poulet (Dear Inspector
and Dear Detective), a romantic comedy about a female cop who rekindles
a romance with an old lover while sniffing out a killer. The latter was so
popular that it spawned an American made-for-TV movie and an inferior de
Broca-directed sequel, On a vole la cuisse de Jupiter (Jupiter's
Thigh). By the 1990s, de Broca mostly was directing for French television.
A typical credit was Le Jardin des plantes (The Greenhouse), a
chronicle of the warm and protective relationship between a little girl and her
grandfather in the waning days of World War II. Le Jardin des plantes is
a thematic throwback to Le Roi de coeur in that it may be interpreted as
a statement about the folly of war. It also reflects on the less-thanhonorable
behavior of some Frenchmen and women under the German occupation. Yet despite
its somber setting, Le Jardin des plantes is consistent with de Broca's
cinematic view in that it primarily is a candy-coated entertainment that exudes
a sentimentality for a time and place that in reality was brutal and dangerous.
By far de Broca's highest-profile
late-career theatrical feature is Le Bossu (On Guard), which may
be linked to Cartouche as a swashbuckler/ripped-bodice period piece. Le
Bossu is set in the France of Louis XIV and charts the derring-do resulting
from a faithful swordsman's rescue of an infant princess from the grasp of her
sinister relations. While entertaining and acclaimed—it won nine César Award
nominations—Le Bossu is nothing more than a slick, by-thenumbers
commercial vehicle. In the end, de Broca's best films were those made in the 1960s.
THE LOVERS (Les Jeux de l'amour)
aka: The Love Game
aka: The Games of Love
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
WHAT happens to the heroine of "The Love Game" ("Les Jeux de l'Amour"), which came to the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse yesterday, shouldn't happen to any normal female, let alone to the heroine of a French film.
Here she is, nimble and nubile, rarin' to get married and have kids with a fellow with whom she lives and runs an antique shop on the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve. But he is a very fragile specimen. Rose paintings are his speed. He prefers to keep it chummy and casual. No marriage, no kids, just fun and games.
So she has to turn to their neighbor, who is tiresome but fairly masculine, for a down-to-earth matrimonial offer. When her partner hears of this, he pouts and goes off in a terrible tizzy. But the next morning he comes around and says, okay, he'll marry her and have kids if he has to—but gawd! And that's how we leave our heroine.
As you can see, this is not the sort of romance that is likely to be favored generally. It is certainly not the sort we ordinarily expect from the well-adjusted French. But then, this film is a production of Claude Chabrol, who is one of the foremost exponents of the so-called "new wave," so it may be a fair example of what the snappy young Frenchmen want these days.
If so, they are welcome to it. Genevieve Cluny is cute as the girl—a little skinny but full of sparkle and fun. However, Jean-Pierre Cassel is in strictly outer space as the lad. He flits and flounces and grimaces, and once he takes off through the woods, waving his arms and screeching. Not exactly our idea of charm, Jean-Louis Maury is rather plain looking, also rather dull, but he holds the franchise for the male sex. They're the only characters of any consequence in the film.
Let us add that the English subtitles, which translate the French dialogue, are very meager for the amount of conversation. And it looks as if some silly bedroom scenes have been cut.
THE JOKER (Le Farceur)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
NO matter how much you may be tempted to snort "balderdash!" and walk out during the early part of "The Joker" ("Le Farceur"), which came to the Fifty-fifth Street and Sixty-eighth Street Playhouses yesterday, take our advice and stay with it. Along about the third or fourth reel, the whimsey of the thing begins to bubble and from then on it's a lot of genial fun.
For this wacky little French picture about a charming Parisian libertine whose career seems to be a one-man business of providing amiable females with love is a casual amalgamation of several lively comedy styles, including a bit of that of Mack Sennett and a bit of the early René Clair. It gallops along at much the same pace as does the stage play of "Irma la Douce" and it concludes on a note of bland defiance of bourgeois conventionality.
But obviously Philippe de Broca, who directed and helped to write the script, had no particular message or even intention in mind, other than to stimulate the audience with a little impudent and bizarre activity. His idea is nutty and improbable, it is supported by the barest thread of plot and its details are pure conceits of fancy. That is its basic fun.
That is also why it is a bit difficult to get with it at the
start. The spirit and sport are so extraneous to the slam-bang conceits of
usual farce. It opens with the hero's popping out of a lady's apartment onto a
roof and skipping lightly across the rooftops of
He proceeds then to his own residence, which we ruefully discover to be a veritable mare's nest of grotesque decorations and eccentric relatives. His uncle, the evident genius loci, comes to breakfast wrapped in a rug and wearing a knitted skullcap that frames a cherubic face. His brother is a wacky sort of gasbag who uses the family group to make historical photographs for cheap magazines, and the brother's wife is a weird little creature who we learn bore the hero's first child. Upstairs, in a gallery chamber protected by chicken wire, are a couple of darling youngsters who are acknowledged as the hero's dividends.
Do you wonder it is a little baffling? But soon it begins to take form as the sweet satyr fixes his intentions upon a financier's beautiful wife. As he pursues this tempting beauty, first blowing hot, then blowing cold—and when he blows cold he soothes his anguish by playing solos on a bassoon—the whole thing acquires a light, elastic, rollicking, carefree charm. The conclusion is much too witty and fragile to be exposed.
Under M. de Broca's pert direction, the performances are superb, with Jean-Pierre Cassel especially blithesome and amiable in the leading role. He has the grace of a dancer and the nonchalance of a faun. He's so much better in this than he was in "The Love Game," which was M. de Broca's one previous film.
The lady pursued is played nicely by elegant Anouk Aimee, and the
old uncle is made a droll eccentric by the portly actor,
Georges Delerue has contributed a lively and deliciously amusing musical score. The whole is so much better than "The Love Game" that it isn't funny. Or, rather, it is.
This time the English subtitles are far from adequate.
FIVE DAY LOVER (L’Amant de
Cinq Jours)
aka: Infidelity
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
LOVE gets a gauzy going over in two fragile little films, one French and one Dutch, that opened at the Normandie yesterday.
The first is "The Five Day Lover," a flick of the directorial hand of youthful Philippe de Broca, who did "The Joker," and the flimsy, "The Love Game." In substance, it bears comparison to them. That is to say, it is quite thin and it toys with the notion of illusion as the essence of romance. But, unlike "The Joker," it misses the beneficence of good, madcap fun, and, unlike "The Love Game," it follows a pattern to the point of becoming a bore.
The idea is simply that a young wife and mother of two adorable tots meets up with a light-hearted fellow at a Paris fashion show and pops up to his apartment. She has no more shame about her husband being left at home to care for the kids than she has about taking this cuckoo away from her very best friend. All she cares is that he gives her the illusion of champagne romance, which she doesn't get from her husband, who is something of a clown and dunce.
But her best friend cares. She arranges a little party at which all four meet—the wife, the lover, the husband and, of course, herself. And out of this kooky confrontation there come understandings whereby the wife and the lover disentangle, the lover goes back to the best friend and the husband allows the wife to go on chasing illusions with other fellows, as long as she comes home week-ends.
As anyone can see, this is a gauzy and strictly whimsical design for a kind of domestic living that could only hold water in a play or film. And then its water-holding virtues would entirely depend upon the charm with which the nonsense is developed and dribbled into the thing.
In this case, M. de Broca does it a bit too airily, too patly and with too little humor or glittering assistance from his stars. Jean Seberg, looking quite different from what she has in previous films, is a bit too prosaic and posey—and immature, certainly—as the wife. Jean-Pierre Cassel, who has been prominent in both of M. de Broca's previous films, is too willowy as the lover and Francois Perier is too bumptious as the spouse. Only Micheline Presle as the good friend is credible in this fluttery romp.
KING OF HEARTS (Le Roi de
Coeur)
One of the sleepers of
all time in that, tried out in a small Boston cinema years after it flopped in
the UK and in America, it became a kind of Mousetrap in student cinemas
across the States. On a World War I mission, Bates discovers a town of lunatics
which is due to be blown up at midnight. The fairy-tale atmosphere and carnival
energy are nicely placed, but the whole excessively whimsical thing would have
worked so much better if de Broca had toughened up the overall (wartime)
context instead of letting everything slide towards farce.
All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]
A gentle, whimsical anti-war fable, King of Hearts was wildly embraced as a cult favorite in the 1970s. Even at the time, however, there were detractors who felt that the charms of the film were a bit too "soft" to compensate for its flaws. There's certainly validity to this argument, for Hearts definitely has its share of flaws. For one thing, nothing very much happens after the main predicament is established; one witnesses the former members of the asylum reconnecting with their past lives (real or imagined), without a great deal of variation. In addition, the "who is sane and who is mad" argument is a trifle precious, especially when the asylum residents are presented as exhibiting a very bowdlerized version of madness. However, most viewers are very willing to overlook these deficits, and it can easily be argued that these are not so much flaws as characteristics that add to the film's unique feel and sense of enchantment. Certainly, viewers who like Hearts like it a lot, which speaks volumes about its ability to impress, engage, and enthrall. Those who like the film will appreciate Philippe de Broca's delicate direction; those who are not taken with the film will find the direction slow. But almost all should agree that the cast is quite good, especially Alan Bates in what is essentially a straight-man role. Bates makes the character much more than an amused, bemused, or confused observer, bringing just the right amount of weight to the part without going overboard. Geneviève Bujold has never been more attractive or appealing, and the supporting cast as a whole plays their roles with just the right tone. If a viewer is able to enter into King of Hearts' particular world view, he will most likely feel as if he has made a new and very dear friend.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
An antidote to (or, perhaps, a necessary appetizer for) LaBute's neo-Cromwellian moralizing may be found this week at Film Forum, which has chosen to revive the most cloying of cult films, Philippe de Broca's 1967 King of Hearts.
As World War I ends, the retreating German army abandons a picture-postcard French town but not before booby-trapping the place to blow sky high when British troops arrive. The locals flee and, left to their own devices, a gaggle of cheerful lunatics escape their bin and take over the doomed town—thoroughly confusing the British soldier (Alan Bates) who has been dispatched to defuse the bomb. "Theater is everywhere," the wisest of the loonies informs him—and so are saccharine bromides. The LaBute Skinner box is here filled with bonbons.
As a movie, King of Hearts is more pageant than story. (To add to the enchantment, de Broca contrives to have circus animals wandering the streets; even the British soldiers are costumed in kilts.) As a cultural artifact, however, the movie is less a relic than a symptom. Set to a lilting score by Georges Delerue that shamelessly pastiches his music for Jules and Jim, King of Hearts managed to conflate a topical anti-militarism with the sentimental glorification of mental illness already percolating through mid-'60s popular culture in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, movies like Morgan! and A Fine Madness, and even the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Indeed, given its notion of schizophrenia as a form of defensive role-playing, King of Hearts is nearly a pop exegesis of R.D. Laing's anti-psychiatry. These adorable crazies are like children who never tire of play: Pierre Brasseur, the ripest piece of Camembert, impersonates a lunatic impersonating a general; Bates's love interest is provided by a very pert and pretty Geneviève Bujold, zany enough to imagine herself a virginal hooker. (The importance of her fantasy brothel suggests a diluted version of Jean Genet's The Balcony.)
This cutie-pie be-in opened in the U.S. during the full flowering of hippiedom in the very Summer of Love ("The arena of the spectacle might just as well be Central Park," Andrew Sarris wrote in the Voice) and achieved bona fide cult status in the early '70s, evidently running for five years at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, among other college towns. (In New York, King of Hearts succeeded the wildly successful Pink Flamingos as the Elgin's midnight attraction in January 1974, lasting a mediocre 14 weeks before being yanked for the redoubtable Freaks.) The movie's middlebrow destiny may be considered fulfilled by its own transformation into a Broadway musical that ran 48 performances in late 1978.
What's most striking about King of Hearts today is the cost-free detachment of its specious whimsy: There's a blithe Hitler joke, several farcical executions, and an exceedingly high body count. "Don't you think these actors are a bit over-the-top?" one wacko remarks upon watching the British and German armies slaughter each other at close quarters. Not really. The new 35mm print, as customary with Film Forum revivals, is impeccable.
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]
de Heer, Rolf
Vertigo Productions:
Rolf de Heer's Official Website
TCMDB
Hearing the Story: Sound Design in the Films of Rolf de Heer Cat Hope from Senses of Cinema, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald Article (2007) The Sage of Innocence, by Garry Maddox, March 3, 2007
Telegraph
Article (2007) Utterly Strange, Totally Enthralling, by Sheila Johnston, March 23,
2007
de Heer, Rolf They
Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
The Blurb
Interview (2002) by David Edwards
Australian
Film Commission Interview by Julia
Overton
ENCOUNTER AT RAVEN’S GATE
Encounter
at Raven's Gate from Time Out London
Arriving to investigate the smouldering
wreckage of an outback property, Special Branch agent Hemmings (Camilleri)
seems disconcerted to find local police sergeant Taylor (Cullen) already at the
scene. Taylor senses that he has stumbled on Something Big, and as the two men
piece together the events leading up to the disappearanceof the house's three
inhabitants, he begins tosuspect a government cover-up. In flasback, we observe
the fraught triangular relationship between paroled car-thief Eddie (Vidler),
his responsible older brother Richard (Singer), and Richard's frustrated artist
wife Rachel (
User comments from imdb Author: dispet from Melbourne, Australia
an early film from rolf de heer (bad
boy bubby, the tracker), it is also one of the most impressive pieces of visual
art to be created in australia, and far superior to the majority of horror
coming from the rest of the world. a tale of the human condition in the lonely
mental wastelands of the australian outback, de heer succeeds in making us feel
the insanity and discordance which lurks beneath the surface of country
australian life for anybody who can no longer keep themselves sane through
nature, sports or trips to the pub. far superior to picnic at hanging rock,
this is a film that will truly creep you out and leave you thinking about what
lurks outside. america has its backwoods, and australia has its outback.
User comments from imdb Author: charliecbc from Greensboro, North Carolina USA
I'm not sure
what to make of this film, or who to recommend it to. All I can say is I liked
it, it was amazingly well made, and it definitely held my interest throughout
the duration of its run time.
Visually, film has amazing composition. The cinematography and directing is
striking. The audio is quite striking as well, like during the dog attack the
sound of digiridoos (spelling?) blends with the dog's growling.
The film reminded me there are still many things in nature we do not completely
understand yet. Some things seem to defy scientific explanation. Having just
finished viewing this film for the first time, I could probably write a dozen
pages about this film and how I interpret it. Someone else could do the same
and our ideas might be quite different.
For one, this film is about is how every once in a while, whether you live in
the city or the country, sometimes everybody's biggest problems can come to the
surface all at once. In this film, the s--- hits the fan for several different
people in the same place, but in different ways. There are no flat,
one-dimensional characters here.
I don't want to muddle peoples' impressions of this film with comparisons to
other movies. There is definitely some "X-Files" type stuff going on,
and parts of it reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But in
general this film is quite unique, and is virtually unknown in the United
States.
There is no DVD available in NTSC Region 1, and the copy I watched was a dusty
old VHS tape issued by HBO, I recently found it in the Sci-Fi section of the
old, cluttered video store I work at. The cover looked interesting. Usually
when I find a film made in certain foreign countries, I assume a lot of people
there must have liked it if it a US distributor picked it up. Of course that is
not always true, and thousands of great foreign films never get released here,
while plenty of crap finds its way here thanks to the money hungry corporations
monopolizing the distribution networks. But I've always had good luck with
films from Australia, such as Chopper, Razorback, and The Last Wave.
I really hope this film gets a DVD release over here. I would love to view it
with better picture quality. I am also curious to know if this film was big hit
in Australia
Goatdog's Movie Reviews [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
DINGO
Austin Chronicle (Pamela Bruce) review [3/5]
Winner of Best Musical Score in the 1991 AFI Awards (and nominated for Best Film), Dingo is a jazz-infused tale set in what seems the most unlikely of places to inspire such music: the Australian outback. But, it is this unusual cultural combination which, for the most part, successfully serves as the driving force behind the life and dreams of the protagonist, John “Dingo” Anderson (Friels). A tracker by trade who hunts the Australian wild dogs of prey known as dingoes, “Dingo” Anderson is also a struggling, part-time musician who dreams of breaking away from the dusty outback dancehalls and the Johnny Cash-meets-Herb Alpert-and-the-Tijuana Brass repertoire of his small band, Dingo and the Dusters, for the sophisticated, urban aesthetics of modern jazz. All because of an unforgettable incident from his childhood in which a plane carrying legendary jazz trumpeter Billy Cross (Davis in his first and only film role) makes an unplanned landing in Dingo's remote hometown of Poona Flat, and Cross gives an impromptu performance for the astonished citizens. Rather than allow his unfulfilled aspirations to forever fade into the void of “what might have been,” Dingo -- much to the dismay of his wife, Jane (Buday), and childhood friend, Peter (Petruzzi) -- makes repeated attempts to re-establish contact with Cross in Paris through letters in order to realize his lifelong dream of performing with his idol. However, once Dingo's dream transforms itself into a face-to-face meeting with his idol after 20 years, the narrative's logic is disrupted due to the fiction-reality interface involving the larger-than-life persona of Miles Davis in such a thinly disguised role. Perhaps if a lesser-known actor or musician had been cast as Billy Cross, the last quarter of the film might have been more plausible and less alienating. Nevertheless, Dingo does have its share of worthwhile, memorable qualities, such as Denis Lenoir's (Monsieur Hire and Daddy Nostalgia) rich cinematography which provides a nice contrast between the slick, neon urbanity of Paris nightlife and the primordial beauty of the Australian outback, as well as the atmospheric jazz score which was co-written by Davis and Michel Legrand (and is one of Davis' last recordings before his death in 1991). The actors also give credible performances and blend easily with the naturalness of the outback population. If you are a jazz aficionado, an Australian film connoisseur, or both, Dingo might be the film for you.
Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd
review Andrew L. Urban
Boxoffice
Magazine review
Susan Lambert
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
BAD BOY BUBBY
Australia Italy
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Rolf de Heer's film is pretty much a weirdo.
It begins in the sordid flat which 35-year-old Bubby (Hope) shares with his
corpulent, incestuously demanding mum; since she insists the outside world is
poisoned by gas, the only creatures he knows are the cat he torments and the
cockroaches he eats. Then his long-lost dad turns up: jealous that he's been
usurped in his mother's affections, Bubby deals with the situation the only way
he knows how and, with a mixture of fear and curiosity, leaves the slum. The
following adventures are somewhat predictable; but at the same time the world
into which the innocent hero is cast has a singular loneliness and desolation.
The film's attitude to misfits is admirable, but it's hard not to feel slightly
uneasy about the use of real handicapped people in the later scenes. That said,
this proficient film is never less than intriguing. It may be muddled, but one
can't deny its ambitions, or the integrity of Hope's performance.
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Rolf de Heer's "Bad Boy Bubby" is a bold, often comic contemporary parable of good and evil, ignorance and enlightenment. It will recall the two film versions of the saga of Kaspar Hauser, as well as Truffaut's "The Wild Child," in which a human being is cut off from the world until adolescence or adulthood.
Beyond the ever-potent premise of turning a naif loose in today's society and seeing what happens, De Heer creates a spiritual odyssey, criticizing the divisiveness of organized religion and the way in which it can become an instrument of destruction rather than redemption. Painstakingly crafted in all aspects, 'Bad Boy Bubby," which is as funny as it is poignant and bizarre, is a tremendously ambitious film that succeeds triumphantly. It is a decided advance on De Heer's "Dingo," notable for its rare screen appearance of Miles Davis.
You might never guess that it would attain such scope or even
be the kind of film it becomes from its first half-hour, which is sure to be a
turnoff for some viewers. It takes place in a dank, drab, sparsely furnished
two-room apartment in
Bubby (Nicholas Hope) has never left it in his entire 35 years. His blowzy mother, Flo (Claire Bonito), is like one of those women who still occasionally turns up in the news: Someone with low intelligence who bears a baby out of wedlock and feels such shame that she keeps her child locked up until some chance discovery years later.
Bubby's entire knowledge of the world comes from Flo, who owns neither TV nor radio, thus making him even more deprived than "Being There's" Chauncey Gardiner. Every morning Flo bathes her son and herself, prepares breakfast for them, then has lusty sex with her son as matter-of-factly as the other routines, puts on a gas mask and leaves for the day, presumably to go to work. She's convinced Bubby over the years that the air outside is poisonous and that he must not venture forth on pain of death. In her dim, perverted way, Flo loves Bubby but, in addition to confining him, she often treats him brutally.
To say the least, the entire section of the film that takes place inside the apartment is bizarre in the utmost, steeped in dark, savage ignorance. After 35 years, Bubby's father, Harold (Ralph Cotterill), a low-life bogus priest, shows up, eager to make "an honest woman" of Flo at long last.
Bubby's world is swiftly turned upside down and dire events propel Bubby out into the streets. At this point Bubby's mental capacity is pretty much limited to an expert gift for mimicry. As you might expect, he is confronted with kindness, indifference and outright hostility in a wide variety of circumstances, but two encounters prove crucial. He falls in with an easy-going rock 'n' roll band, and at about the same time he paws a pretty, plump young woman aptly named Angel (Carmel Johnson, a radiant, selfless actress) who is naturally repelled and enraged. But his second encounters with the rockers and with Angel will transform his life.
On the one hand, he scores a hit as a rock singer, where a litany of all the abusive remarks hurled at him turn him into a popular rapper--ah, what a comment on a certain level of pop music--and on the other, Bubby's instant rapport with the severely disabled people in Angel's charge captures her imagination. She seems not to recognize him from their initial ugly encounter. Bubby is on his great adventure of self-discovery.
De Heer is admirably assured in his ability to take us on Bubby's amazing journey, and he has the gift of inspiring his actors to bare their souls (and often their bodies as well). "Bad Boy Bubby" must be taken figuratively, of course, rather than literally: For starters, it's unlikely that a 35-year-old man confined all his life would be as trim and agile as Hope.
The point is that De Heer and Hope succeed in persuading us to go along with the "reality" of the film, which is concerned with matters of the heart and mind rather than appearances. "Bad Boy Bubby" is that rare film that progresses from dark to light, emerging a celebration of the soul.
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Pablo Kjolseth
I first became aware of director Rolf de Heer (who was born in
the
Prospective viewers, especially if they are neurotic cat lovers (and I count
myself among them), would do well to recall the "it's only a movie"
mantra for several key scenes ? especially since one of the biggest censures to
threaten the film was over perceived feline abuse. De Heer assures viewers that
the cat in question was, in fact, saved from the pound and well rewarded with a
nice long life after filming. It's unclear if the same can be said for lead
actor Nicholas Hope, whose various humiliations are now forever immortalized ?
but all to his great credit, for he anchors this stunning and unique film with
flawless transitions that careen between a naïve and innocent man-child
demeanor and outbursts of autistic and manic intensity that can be either
violently destructive or magically productive.
The first half-hour of Bad Boy Bubby is so oppressive and grim that De
Heer realized his original idea of presenting these scenes in a cramped aspect
ratio would make it unbearably claustrophobic for the viewer, so he opened it
up to a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio to let the scenes breathe even as both
Bubby and his cat suffocate under the weight of Bubby's oppressive
"Mam." In turn, Bubby's mother only leaves the squalid apartment with
a gas mask so as to keep Bubby in fear of the outside world and to make sure he
won't escape. But escape he does, and so Bubby's journey begins. Aside for
being a stranger in what is, for him, a new planet, Bubby also has a talent for
mimicry that compulsively informs every scene that follows. Thematically, the
cinematic relatives that come to mind are The Wild Child (1970) by
Francois Truffat and Being There (1979) by Hal Ashby, but otherwise it's
hard to compare both of these traditional films to Bad Boy Bubby if only
because De Heer's film is so completely whacked out, crazy, unpredictable, and
also quite inspired and totally memorable in its own deranged way.
With most films, should the viewer leave for a quick bathroom break they could
easily come back and fill in the gaps as to what they had missed. Not so with Bad
Boy Bubby, for even the briefest trip to the lavatory might mean missing an
entire segment that you could never have predicted and yet, somehow, plays an
instrumental part to the whole. One of the reasons for this comes down to its
unique construction as a work that gestated over several years, with De Heer
writing down bizarre life moments and then putting them away for later. In some
cases he'd revisit scenes that he realized weren't quite as strange anymore, so
he'd ratchet them up a bit, thus creating a tapestry of changing encounters
that are all amped up in their strangeness and glory, and that range from Bubby
joining a rock band to eventually playing a key role in another group that
assists people with cerebral palsy. He also kills things with cling wrap, but
that's all part of his learning curve.
Adding to the dynamic element of the film is De Heer's decision to shoot each
segment with a different cinematographer/director of photography, so that the
end credits reveal 32 different names in this capacity. It's a daring venture
but the gambit pays off by making each separate scene vibrate with a unique
visual signature, and Hope's riveting performance as Bubby helps to anchor the
overall flow of the story. Another interesting stylistic feat, which the dvd
announces in a foreword, is the use of what De Heer refers to as a binaural
sound design that is captured by attaching small transistorized microphones
just behind each of Hope's ears. The microphones are hidden behind Bubby's
hair, which was relatively easy to do since Bubby always looks like he licked a
light socket first thing in the morning. The effect is interesting and just a
touch disorienting, which was De Heer's intent as he wanted the viewer to share
in Bubby's more immediate and askew way of taking in the world.
The dvd by Blue Underground for Bad Boy Bubby includes an interview with
director De Heer that is very informative and will certainly elevate ones
respect for the film. Other bonuses include an interview with Actor Nicholas
Hope, as well as an earlier short film in which he starred and that helped land
him the role in Bad Boy Bubby. A gallery of stills and the original
theatrical trailer round out the package.
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [5/5]
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski) review
DVD Verdict (Paul Corupe) dvd review
Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd review [Collector's Edition] Andrew L. Urban, offering additional thoughts here: NICHOLAS HOPE INTERVIEW
Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth
Monsters At Play (Gregory S. Burkart) dvd review
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [4/5] Eric Campos
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
THE QUIET ROOM A 95
Australia
This film is a disintegration of a family seen though the eyes of a 7-year old child, who provides a stream-of-conscious narration throughout, refusing to speak to her parents, who bicker and fight and eventually separate. The film is so dramatically effective and true to life that it felt like rather extraordinary therapy, the child and the audience are the only ones who know everyone’s true feelings, as the parents don’t have a clue. They simply don’t have the imagination to understand their own child, who provides a unique and unusual intensity, mostly from the startling honesty of her inner thoughts, finding her parents “cold and sad and dark, and really not there,” alone in her room, confused, afraid, unappreciated, unloved.
Note: As the young girl (at age 3 and age 7), the director cast two of his own daughters under the pretext that he could spend more time with them. Aware of their limited acting abilities, he decided to make the older girl mute.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The fascination with
perception and communication that characterised de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby
again dominates this look at a couple's deteriorating relationship as witnessed
(with confusion and misunderstanding) by their seven-year-old daughter, who
simply refuses to speak - though we hear her thoughts in voice-over. Without
ramming the point home, de Heer shows the well-meaning parents' insensitivity,
their desperation and their occasional readiness to use the child as a pawn in
their power games; and while it's basically a one-idea movie, and perhaps too
concerned with formal originality, as opposed to emotional content, it still
offers acute insights into a child's inner world.
Los Angeles Times (John Anderson) review
A different kind of suspense film, "The Quiet Room" takes place largely in the mind of a 7-year-old girl (Chloe Ferguson) who, for reasons only gradually explained, has stopped talking. And she's good at it. You can't trick me, we hear her think, as her mother (Celine O'Leary) or father (Paul Blackwell) pose questions that literally beg for answers. She resists their pleading, their anger, their wrath. She's driving them a little mad.
But "The Quiet Room," a deft bit of psychological business from Australia's Rolf de Heer, is about a world gone mad. It's the girl's world, granted, but since we're inside her head, it's all we have. And that's apt: As her parents go through the pains of eventual marital breakup, they're oblivious to the fact that what they're dismantling is their child's entire universe.
This isn't a moralizing film, per se, but it certainly puts a new slant on a subject taken for granted. The Girl (she has no name as such) flashes back to herself at age 3 (played by Ferguson's sister, Phoebe), wanting to be loved the way she was when she was little. Her rationale carries the self-absorbed logic of childhood: Her parents may have stopped loving each other, but by doing so they've unavoidably changed their love for their daughter.
"The Quiet Room" is one quiet movie--you adopt the Girl's silence, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat. If there's a fault here, it's that the Girl--given a very affecting reading by Chloe Ferguson--swings a bit broadly from innocence to irony (not that kids aren't capable of it, but this is a movie). And when she thinks a line like, "You're hurting my heart," it may indeed be true, but it doesn't sound like it.
"The Quiet Room" is an odd film, a taut tale of modern woe that will leave you moved. "Are you and Dad making progress?" she asks her mother, having at last broken her code of silence, adopting the euphemistic language of adults and slipping away from us even as we watch.
Anatomy of a Quiet Crash - Panix Mike D’Angelo, also seen here: The Quiet Room
Is The Quiet Room over
yet? Or am I still watching it? Rolf de Heer's psychodrama about a
seven-year-old girl who stops talking to get her squabbling parents' attention
might have made a first-rate 15-minute short; at 57 hours and 14 minutes,
however, it becomes just a tad repetitive and tiresome. I'm all for leisurely,
measured pacing and minute examination of characters' lives, but this film
doesn't exactly suffer from a surfeit of ideas -- there was really no need for
it to be longer than Die Zweite Heimat, Berlin Alexanderplatz,
and Lars von Trier's work-in-progress The Kingdom combined.
Okay, I confess, I didn't actually look at my watch -- maybe it wasn't quite that long. But even an hour and a half was enough to stupefy me; by the end, I no longer had the strength even to move my hand in the circular get-on-with-it gesture that had characterized my response to The Quiet Room for the previous hour. Moment to moment, the film is effective and affecting; unfortunately, every moment is the same moment. If Crash spins its wheels, The Quiet Room is up on blocks.
The film's primary asset is young Chloe Ferguson, who plays The Girl (all of the film's characters are unnamed; The Girl's parents are simply The Mother and The Father) in the present tense, at age seven. (The actress' younger sister, Phoebe Ferguson, appears in a few brief flashback scenes.) A remarkably expressive child actor with an arresting face, she, and she alone, makes The Quiet Room tolerable, and occasionally even moving; her rare smiles are infectious, and while the film's premise requires her character to spend most of its three-day running time in a deep funk, she manages to communicate a fairly wide range of emotions without the benefit of dialogue. Or, rather, she could have done so, had De Heer been willing to trust her. Instead, his script has The Girl jabber incessantly in voiceover, both when alone and in "conversation" with her parents (played unmemorably by Paul Blackwell and Celine O'Leary), who can't hear her precocious replies to their questions and comments. This handy road map to The Girl's feelings and desires effectively undercuts any emotional power the film might otherwise have had; imagine Holly Hunter speaking in voiceover throughout The Piano,and you'll have an idea of how miserably misguided this choice was.
Eliding the voiceover might help The Quiet Room somewhat, but the best and simplest way to improve it would be to leave three-quarters of the footage on the cutting room floor; there simply isn't enough material here to justify a feature-length film. It's quickly established that The Mother and The Father are ignoring The Girl in favor of endless petty bickering, and that The Girl, unhappy about this development, has adopted silence as a weapon. There's only so much you can do with this scenario, and De Heer does all of it about twenty times over, making Crash look like a model of narrative economy by comparison. The occasional flashbacks break up the monotony, and the use of language with regard to them is intriguing -- The Girl refers to herself at age three in the present tense, not the past, as if the happiness her family once shared is still a tangible entity, just out of reach. But even this inspired notion is eventually discarded, and we're left with yet another variation of the line "Still not talking, huh?"
I was surprised, upon investigating the film's credits in preparation for
this review, to discover that it is not an adaptation of a stage play. It
certainly looks like one: nonstop dialogue (most of it in voiceover, true, but
that might have been a cinematic alternative to a gimmick that would only work
onstage, in which The Girl would speak aloud and the other actors would simply
pretend not to hear her; theater audiences, for obvious reasons, find it easier
to suspend disbelief than do movie audiences), four characters (there's also a
teen babysitter, but that's it), one set. Rolf de Heer, who is best known in
his native
Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne) capsule
review
The
Movie Boy (Dustin Putman) review
[3/4]
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Andrew L. Urban, which includes: Read
Andrew L. Urban's interview on location in Tasmania with writer/director Rolf
de Heer
Boxoffice
Magazine review
Susan Green
Metro Pulse (Jesse Fox Mayshark) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
EPSILON
aka: Alien Visitor
Australia Italy (92 mi) 1997 ‘Scope
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: liberalgems from Baltimore, Maryland
This movie is quite original! It's
dream-like quality is simply delightful. I thought to myself while watching
this film, "imagine what could have been accomplished with a larger budget
and a harder edge!" This is a subversive story, one that political
conservatives will detest. With chests puffed-out they will sing the following
chorus: "What gives an "extraterrestrial outsider" the right to
condemn the human race's destruction of the environment, and ostracize our
precious way of life? A filmmaker with guts, that's who!
The love affair between two lonely strangers, is shown to be both confusing and
inspiring. While one being is obviously an alien with a unique ability to
control time & place, she is in some ways, all too human! How ironic!
While message movies are - for the most part - out of vogue. I dearly hope that
when they come back in fashion they tackle issues regarding the health of the
world's environment with a vengeance!
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Andrew L. Urban, which inclides an interview
with: ROLF DE
HEER
Grandma is telling the story: once upon a time… He, an
ordinary Aussie surveyor bloke, is camping alone in the outback. She lands on
Earth (by mistake) nearby and after a confused meeting, She begins to show him
how crazy his world is - there is so much beauty but it has been so badly
spoilt by the locals. Not like home, on Epsilon….
I first saw it at Cannes in 1995, at a 10pm ‘by invitation
only’ screening, when it had just been finished, and sold unseen to Miramax.
Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax heavy, was at the same screening, but left half
way through. He later offered Rolf de Heer "a very generous amount of
money" to re-think the film. Rolf did.(After making The Quiet Room.) I saw
it again in January 1997: he has added a new top and tail story around the
film’s basic premise, and shot some new footage to go with it. This has helped
give the film a stronger narrative structure.
Even so, Epsilon is a film impossible to categorise in
terms of genre or formula; it abandons traditional film making, using motion
control and time lapse photography to put its editorial viewpoint about our
waste of the earth’s glories.
In some ways, the eagerness to get the message home pushes
the film closer to preaching than drama, but the often breathtaking visual and
musical fusion comes to the rescue. Using time lapse photography, de Heer gives
us a new perspective on our world, through the eyes of an alien. It’s a valid
device, and considering his ambitions, highly successful. The film is still
essentially a two-hander, and is peppered with surprises.
Although it’s unlikely to find a mass audience, it is a
novel and highly enjoyable experience."
User comments from imdb Author: Draconian (pjsavoie@home.com)
EPSILON, a.k.a. ALIEN VISITOR, is not what I expected. This is a
no-budget Australian film with no special effects other than speeded-up film
and quick scene cuts. The female alien (who comes over immediately able to
speak perfectly accented Australian) can "blip" from place to place
or time to time and alter her perception of the flow of time to match the
"faster" humans.
An elderly grandmother tells her two granddaughters about a story a wandering
man told her 40 years before, when an unnamed "She" came to the
planet naked and completely disoriented, unable to recognize which star in the
sky she came from...She meets a man alone camping in the Australian Outback,
apparently bewildering him. She is here by "mistake", and gets angry
when she is told she is on Earth. The Earthlings are known as consummate
despoilers of the environment and a metaphor for the most insulting thing
imaginable to the rest of the universe: those who "breathe the foul
air" but do nothing about it, sticking their heads under the sand like an
ostrich. In another amusing metaphor, Earthlings are "frogs".
From there, it is entirely a film about dialogue, as the perplexed man tries to
understand She's peculiar psychology and viewpoints, even as She calls him
unintelligent and "quaint". The man begins to realize maybe it's
humans who are irrational and not thinking straight. Yet, while waiting to be
"beamed up" back home, She sees that this human is not entirely
faulty in his thinking and even falls in love with him.
The dialogue about perspectives is in spots interesting, but it is all layered
with a heavy-handed environmental message and a low-budget feel (there are only
two main actors, who blip around various deserted scenes, and the evil
despoiling humans on the planet are never seen at all). The environmental
message offers no solutions, but paints one or two dire metaphors about what
will happen to nature and man if something isn't done. The logic also doesn't
hang together: the rest of the universe has "given up" on Earth, yet
one space woman caught on Earth by mistake manages to effect some positive
change by the conclusion of the movie. What would a battalion of aliens deliberately
sent here manage to achieve against pollution and waste?
DANCE ME TO MY SONG
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Julia (Rose, persuasive) is bound
to a wheelchair and her carer Madeleine (Kennedy) is a man chasing bitch pushed
by frustration and jealousy towards violence against her vulnerable charge;
Eddie (Brumpton) is the faintly mysterious but ultimately angelic local guy
who, much to Mad's jealous annoyance, takes a shine to Julia. The third film in
de Heer's loose trilogy dealing with the fraught relationship of the
marginalised with the world is his bravest yet (it was scripted by Rose, who is
herself confined to a wheelchair); often, however, it resorts to fairytale
coincidence and contrivance, while the characterisation is cartoon thin and the
message heavy handed.
Film
Scouts (David Sterritt) capsule
review at Cannes
It certainly isn't hard to imagine a Best Actress award
going to Heather Rose, the star and coscreenwriter of "Dance Me to My
Song," directed by Rolf de Heer, whose "The Quiet Room" was so
memorable in 1996. Rose plays a severely disabled woman who strikes up a
friendship with an ordinary man, then finds herself in an unexpected love
triangle with this new companion and her emotionally disturbed caretaker, who
abused and mistreated her even before the romantic rivalry started to develop.
The movie would seem exploitative if Rose hadn't coauthored it herself, but her
harrowingly honest performance--physically, she is the character she portrays,
multiple handicaps and all--is precisely what lifts the otherwise too-familiar
drama into the realm of genuinely unique cinema. It's one of the highlights of
the festival so far.
User comments from imdb Author: Theatrefella from Los Angeles, Calif.
I saw this film at the Telluride film
festival in 98 or 99. This film has never left me. Making critical comments on
this film is simply foolish. The director and Heather filmed this film over a 5
year period due to the physical limitations of the writer/actress. This was a
labor of love and inspiration. This was a project that stunningly provides an
impeccable vision into a kind of life that is led by some of our fellow human
beings that the rest of us would prefer to deny. Some of the comments have
indicated that they were uncomfortable or that they did not get it or they
didn't not care for the gratuitous moments of the film. Well tough. This is reality,
the pain of body, mind and spirit and the conquering of these trials by a
monumental demonstration of power, creativity and fortitude that those of us
defined as "normal" can not hope to understand or match. This film is
a must see for any young person or adult who wants or needs an amazing reality
check. This film is a vehicle to tell a story of freedom and unquenched
intellect trapped but not surrendered.
User comments from imdb Author: Eugene Kim (gene_kim@earthlink.net) from Arlington, Virginia, USA
"Admirable" and "courageous" are two words
that come to mind while watching "Dance Me to My Song."
"Frank," "candid" and "uncompromising" can also
be used to describe this Australian film about Julia, a woman with a severe
form of cerebral palsy that prevents her from doing the most basic things, like
getting dressed or going to the bathroom. She's played by Heather Rose, who really
is afflicted with cerebral palsy, and who co-wrote the script. (I'll admit
feeling acutely uncomfortable at times watching Rose's Julia as she writhes and
contorts while making gurgling noises - I'm sure that says a lot more about me
than the film or Ms. Rose.)
I saw this movie at the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C. (where it
was shown as part of FilmFest DC '99). "Dance Me to My Song" deserves
a lot of credit for refusing to blink at Julia's condition. We see her
completely undressed; Julia's nakedness conveys her vulnerability without being
the least bit prurient or exploitive. Julia is very much at the mercy of
Madelaine, her latest assigned caregiver. And it quickly becomes apparent that
Madelaine is an extremely selfish person who has no business caring for Julia
or anyone else. How she uses - and abuses - Julia is at the core of this drama.
Also figuring prominently in the plot is a rather mysterious man named Eddie,
whom Julia manages to befriend after comically blocking his path with her
motorized wheelchair.
As straightforward and unpretentious as this film is, one thing it's not is...
terribly complicated. I'm hard-pressed to think of any scene where it isn't
abundantly clear how we're supposed to react; everything is so clear-cut. This
scene will make you smile, that one will make you shed a tear, this one will
make you laugh, and that one will make you want to shout in anger. The film
falls short of true greatness, IMHO, by making Madelaine a near-total witch.
There are a few attempts at making Madelaine a more three-dimensional character
(including a scene in which she sits by herself and cries), but in the end,
it's apparent that we're just supposed to hate her. Further stacking the deck
are visits from a woman named Rix, one of Julia's former caregivers who's meant
to be every bit as wonderful as Madelaine is horrible. (When Madelaine gets a
form of comeuppance from Rix, it's as if the audience is expected to cheer. The
AFI audience didn't.) Viewers might rightly wonder: If Madelaine is so awful,
why doesn't Julia get rid of her? We get something of an explanation fairly
late in the film - it's implied that caregivers are hard to come by, which
suggests a lot of borderlines slip through - but it doesn't really explain why
Julia tolerates as much ill treatment as she does. (The movie is too
preoccupied with making Julia out to be a total victim to consider the
possibility of an abuser-enabler relationship.)
Also - and I think this is a legitimate point - for all the time we spend with
her, I don't feel as though we get to know Julia all that well (unlike, say,
the way I think we become acquainted with Daniel Day-Lewis' Christy Brown in
"My Left Foot"). Part of this may have to do with the fact that Julia
(and, I assume, Heather Rose) lacks the power of speech (unlike Christy Brown),
and must rely on a "voice machine" to synthesize simple spoken
sentences. I mourn as a lost opportunity a scene in which Eddie reads a lengthy
message that Julia has left on the screen of her personal computer, a message
which must have required a Herculean effort on Julia's part to type out. The
camera sweeps past the monitor; we can only pick out a few phrases. (The gist
of the message is summarized by the film's title.) This was our best chance to
experience Julia's inner voice at length, and the movie skips over it.
Still, "Dance Me to My Song" is a strongly acted film, very much
worth seeing.
James
Berardinelli's ReelViews
Toto
Cinema Matters, Australia review Peter Long
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller, David Edwards, and Andrew L. Urban, including
Urban’s FEATURE and Paul Fischer’s interview with actress RENA
OWEN
THE OLD MAN WHO READ LOVE STORIES
Australia Netherlands France Spain (109 mi) 2001 ‘Scope
Mediasearch, Australia review Giula Sandler
The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is Rolf De Heer’s adaptation of the Luis Sepulveda book, and he succeeds in making you want to read the novel, but the film itself is not such a success.
The Old Man, Antonio Bolivar, is played endearingly by Richard Dreyfuss. He lives in the jungle of South America and is slowly romancing the local prostitute Josefina, played by Cathy Tyson, via their mutual love of romance novels. When a jaguar whose cubs have been killed goes on a rampage attacking the locals, Antonio must go on a hunt with the mayor, Timothy Spall, the dentist, Hugo Weaving, and several others to kill the beast before it kills them. On the way, the themes of progress, leadership and courage are explored, but not much new is said about any of them.
The film doesn’t seem to quite know what it is. It is too slow and sedate to be an adventure, too farcical to be a drama and too serious to be a comedy. This confusion is not helped by the vastly different performance styles, the hammy over the top mugging of Hugo Weaving and Timothy Spall and the restrained respectability of Dreyfuss, Tyson and Victor Bottenbley, who plays a local tribesman who befriends Dreyfuss in a series of awkward flashbacks. The accents employed by the cast are also quite a distraction.
The film was shot in French Guyana and the locations are beautiful. It is lovely to see Richard Dreyfuss in a role a world away from his usual fare and Timothy Spall, who seems to be everywhere at the moment (The Last Samurai, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is always fun even if it feels like he’s acting in a different film. There are some lovely moments of humour and a lyrical pace that could have been better utilised.
The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is a more accessible film from Rolf De Heer. It is certainly gentler than Bad Boy Bubby or Alexandra’s Project, and has an uplifting, happy ending. However, you never quite believe these characters are real. They have not made the transition from novel to living, breathing people, and it is this that makes it hard to care about what happens to them.
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Andrew L. Urban, including an interview
here: ROLF
DE HEER INTERVIEW
Antonio Bolivar (Richard Dreyfuss) lives in the village of El Idilio, a widower of many years, whose wife died shortly after their arrival in the Amazon, where the Government encouraged young families to colonise the jungle. Now 60-ish, the natives have accepted him, and his one friend is a bohemian, rustic dentist, Rubicondo (Hugo Weaving). When Bolivar expresses an interest in books, Rubicondo persuades him read the pulpy romantic novels read by his mistress Josefina (Cathy Tyson), rather than the Bible. Reclusive, but happy and familiar with the jungle, Bolivar is coerced by the venal village Mayor (Timothy Spall) into tracking down a jaguar which has killed a poacher, a task that makes him reflect on his life and its relationships.
Filled out by details and anecdotes from the rich imagination of
the writer, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is a character study that takes
us into the exotica of the Amazon and the proximity of a man who begins to
reflect on the truths and beauties of life almost absent mindedly. Despite, or
perhaps because of, the many logistical, physical and financial difficulties of
making the film, Rolf de Heer has wrought a remarkably engaging adaptation,
aided by beautiful, powerful images and an excellent crew – including sound
designer James Currie and composer Graham Tardif, whose combined efforts are a
significant element in the film’s success.
Richard Dreyfuss makes the self reflective, reclusive Bolivar interesting and
credible (including a well sustained accent), by the sheer refinement of his
technique. Bolivar is a man who recognises the value of the essentials of life,
such as the beauty and ideas that words might convey, as equally as the beauty
of the female jaguar pining for the cubs stolen from her – and seeking
revenge.
Timothy Spall’s rotund, moustachioed, black-haired Mayor is broadly drawn and
his accent is wobbly, but Hugo Weaving makes a nice fist of the dissolute,
ruffian dentist. I also like Victor Bottenbley – an unlikely name for a South
American Indian – who plays Nushino, the local Indian leader who befriends
Antonio. But the film’s greatest strength is its sinewy ability to keep us
involved in the character and avoiding the trap of turning the story into a
jaguar hunt. Indeed, that becomes an extension of the discovery of Bolivar’s
character, with insights of simple but noble humanity.
The film includes many of the supporting events and asides, snatches of life
and snippets of humour that inhabit novels, but never stumbles over them.
Memorable, with something to say about the human condition, The Old Man Who
Read Love Stories is gentle yet powerful – like nature itself – and reflects on
de Heer as a filmmaker who is comfortable with his craft and the self that is
reflected through it.
User comments from imdb Author: Philby-3
from Krakow, Poland
User comments from imdb Author: chauvesouris
from
Nofreelist.com Pearly
hoopla.nu
review Stuart
Wilson
THE TRACKER A- 94
Australia
De Heer is a
meticulous director who knows exactly what he wants to do, who’s skilled enough
as a craftsman to create very precise images that are known for being coherent
and unique. Here he’s created something
that’s hard to find – a brand new film experience. At the core, what’s so striking about this
film is that the presentation is as startlingly unique as it is blunt about
racism, not an easy subject to present.
Set in the Australian outback around 1922, three armed white mounted
police, with the aid of an aboriginal tracker played by David Gulpilil, pursue
an alleged black murder suspect who has retreated into the bush. The names of the three are a bit unusual,
which include Gary Sweet playing the lead named The Fanatic, a cold, cruel man
who is the most ruthlessly racist and violent of the bunch, a man whose best
friend is his gun, also The Follower, an innocent, young recruit, and The
Veteran, an older man who no longer itches for violence, as he’s seen it
all. The story is framed in narrative
songs written by the director and Graham Tardif, sung by aboriginal singer
Archie Roach, which are hauntingly slow, yet dead serious, which perfectly
match the somber mood and languid pace of this film, gorgeously photographed by
Ian Jones.
The lyrics are
protest songs, passionate outbursts of quiet outrage, expressing feelings that
are used to being ignored, such as “Far Away Home,” using feelings that express
the viewpoint of the tracker, who is witness to the outrageous murder and white
violence against his own native people.
There are brief incidents of violence, which are always shown
off-screen, cutting to still paintings by Peter Coad, which are in bright
colors, and in the style of aborigine art.
So aborigine presence is everywhere in this film, surrounding the action
of the pursuing whites, who, little by little, get picked off by unseen
enemies, creating a psychological condition of dread and horror, and a sense
that danger lurks behind every rock, beyond each turn in the road, behind every
tree. And the camera does not
disappoint, always aimed at the pursuing trackers, sometimes close up,
sometimes from afar, but the camera moves in such a way that the trackers
themselves are always being tracked by unseen forces. Part of the brilliance of this film is the
character of the tracker, who is himself enslaved for part of the journey, but
despite the chains, he is the freest spirit among them, filled with guile and
cunning wisdom, and a startlingly dark sense of humor, who defers to the need
of the whites to be called “Boss” without blinking an eye, but he misses
nothing, always keeping the pursuers a half-day’s ride from their intended
target, always keeping one step ahead of the pack. With songs and pictures that were created
just for the events in this film, it lends the impression that this is a
legendary story, a fable that will be talked about for years to come. If only that were true.
Senses
of Cinema (Jake Wilson) review January
2003
Early in the 20th century, four men
travel in the Australian outback, over high sandy ridges strewn with gums and
mounds of spinifex. They are in pursuit of a fugitive, an Aboriginal man
accused of the murder of a white woman. Three of the four are white and on
horseback: the Fanatic, the Veteran and the Follower. Their Aboriginal
offsider, who precedes them on foot, is the Tracker.
As their labels suggest, these
figures are immediately recognizable types, rather than individuals. Heading
the expedition, the Fanatic is a lean, grizzled martinet who believes in being
firm with the natives. The Veteran is an older man, who looks wise but says
little. The Follower is a cheerful youth, anxious to do his best. He plays the
ukulele, and sings a song, “The Copper’s Lament.”
The Tracker himself is a seemingly
docile “civilized” black who blithely echoes his companions in their scorn for
his race. Like a Shakespearean clown, he plays the fool, cringing and capering
in his baggy borrowed clothes. Yet right from the start, there are moments when
his mask of deference slips a notch – when his grin stretches a little too
wide, or his laughter vibrates for a moment longer than expected.
In some ways, The Tracker resembles
a stripped-down Western, with its rugged outdoor setting and its focus on
primal power struggles between men. Equally, the film is a politically charged
fable about colonization and resistance, pondering the very contemporary
question of how far two systems of law and belief can exist side by side. But
above all, this is a drama of vision, where what each character sees (or fails
to see) determines his destiny.
We might think of the game “Follow
the Leader.” As a subordinate, the Tracker is expected to mimic his masters.
Yet it’s not so obvious who’s following. In theory, the Tracker is a despised
servant. In practice, the others defer to him at every step, since only he can
read the traces in the landscape marking out the fugitive’s trail. By
acknowledging their guide’s superior skills, the white men confess their
essential weakness: their failure to grasp the reality of the country they
purport to rule.
Rolf de Heer is one of the few
auteurs who regularly succeeds in financing features in
The film’s formal system depends in
large part on alternating between multiple points of view, spatial and
psychological. De Heer makes classical use of widescreen composition to
dramatize the shifting group dynamics, but also regularly employs overt
stylistic flourishes, at dramatic high points and as plot punctuation. One
important recurring device is his bold use of zooms, as when the Tracker’s gaze
fixes on an object and penetrates the intervening space like a spear – or
conversely, when the image begins as an extreme long-shot, then zooms out until
the figures in the distance are lost to sight, folded into the detail of the
immense landscape.
Much as these zooms pull us towards
or away from the subject of the image, the film solicits a mixture of immediate
emotional response and more distanced contemplation. De Heer refuses to
represent acts of violence directly, replacing them with Aboriginal-influenced,
faux-naif paintings. The massacres seem partially detached from their narrative
context, like archetypal scenes repeated throughout
But the film’s greatest asset is David Gulpilil, in perhaps the best role of
his long career. If the Tracker is conceived by the script in abstract,
allegorical terms, Gulpilil’s concrete, humorous performance clearly draws on a
lifetime’s experience of navigating between cultures. It’s largely thanks to him
that the film pulls off a remarkable balancing act, neither veiling Aboriginal
traditions in romantic mystery nor seeking to define their essential truths.
The Tracker remains a protean hybrid, whose thoughts and motivations are
knowable only in part. Literally and figuratively, he has the last laugh as he
rides into the sunset – leaving us to wonder what else we might have failed to
see.
Slant
Magazine review
Jay Antani
Aboriginal Art and
Film The Politics of Representation, by Marcia Langton from Rouge (2005)
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review also seen here: In Film Australia review
Filmjourney Doug Cummings
filmcritic.com (Jules Brenner) review [3/5]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Emma Westwood
CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban, also including: ROLF DE HEER INTERVIEW and from Brad Green: SOUNDTRACK REVIEW
Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page
The Tracker: triple j film reviews also here: Triple J
ABC Sunday Morning Julie Rigg
European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights Mark Freeman
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Film Forward Kent Turner
The Tracker MaryAnn Johanson from the FlickFilosopher
ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [3/5]
Variety (David Stratton) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Antti Viklund
ALEXANDER’S PROJECT A 95
Australia
Read nothing about this film ahead of time! In my view, the less you know, the greater the
impact. A Film Festival is an ideal
place to see a film like this, as the word about what to expect hasn’t spread
yet. So I’ll simply say this is
flawlessly executed, with an amazing screenplay that is hands down the best of
the year in my view, written by the director himself, perfectly paced,
brilliantly acted, with Helen Buday pulling off one of the best performances of
the year in the role of a lifetime. A
film that’s not afraid to take risks, from start to finish, this is a cold,
austere, raw yet hilariously uncompromising glimpse into the dissolution of a
marriage, as staged in what resembles an impregnable “Panic Room.” Watch a woman turn a man into a mouse,
something right out of NO EXIT, the kind of film Neil LaBute wishes he had
written, but hasn’t…very, very creepy.
Not for everyone’s pleasure, but precise and powerful. It’s hard to imagine anyone else could have
made it any better. “Is Mistress
Alexandra home?” Unforgettable.
I'm not sure what the beef is here. One guy claimed the film showed only "her" side of the story, while another claimed Alexandra was "insane." I found her sexual analysis to be right on the money, including her demonstration of the gifts he had given her, gifts for his own pleasure and amusement, not hers. I found the hairy hand of the gardener next door to be simply classic, "Wait, it's not time for that yet." And the kid’s comments at the end, "Is Mistress Alexandra home?" to be hilarious, particularly when contrasted against this control freak kind of guy. Even the final bit with the neighbor next door worked, as it again demonstrated his wife's intelligence, and his complete inability to deal with her well-thought-out thoroughness. Even leaving in the film blurb with the kids at the end worked perfectly. "Cheers, dad!"
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
A revenge film somewhat in the style of Neil LaBute's best
work (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things) that isn't what it seems to
be and makes the audience complicit in the ugliness. Helen Buday gives a great
performance as the middle aged wife who leaves a tape for her highly successful
pretty boy husband, his birthday present. The film largely consists of the
husband sitting in an armchair watching the tape, but it's very well written
and understands how to keep the husband (and audience) glued to the screen. It
asks us how much we really know about the people around us, and how our
perception of our own actions differs from their perception of our actions. The
impact of the film is such that you find yourself looking at your significant
other in a whole different light. Though written and directed by a man (big
surprise), it's one of the rare films about sex that offers a believable female
perspective. Few will be listing this among their all-time favorites, but it's
the kind of film that you don't forget, that gets stuck in your gut.
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Scott Tobias
As Rolf de Heer's unsettling Alexandra's Project opens,
suburban dad and company man Gary Sweet wakes up on his birthday to a happy
domestic scene, as the sun beams into his cozy two-story townhouse and his
adoring children dogpile on him in bed. Things only get better at work, where
his chummy coworkers greet him with a cake in the boardroom, and his boss
grants him the promotion he so richly deserves. But when the other shoe drops,
it falls hard: Anticipating a surprise party after work, Sweet instead returns
to an empty home with the furniture upended, all the light bulbs unscrewed, and
a videotape waiting ominously on the television. On it, his scorned wife Helen
Buday dictates their marital problems and includes a few shocking, sadistic
touches for good measure.
A Medea for the chilly age of Atom Egoyan and Michael
Haneke, Alexandra's Project brings a powerful dose of "hell hath no
fury" revenge to a relatively ordinary domestic breakdown. For all the
provocations on the videotape, which throw Sweet's extramarital activities in
his face and permanently threaten his status as a parent (among other blows),
Buday's complaints are garden-variety, the sort of issues that might put
Divorce Court judges to sleep. While conceding Sweet's success as a father and
provider, Buday lashes out at him for his sexual appetite, and how she was made
to feel that she existed only to satisfy his desires, with little consideration
for her needs, or for anything apart from her body. Obviously, Buday's feelings
of neglect and objectification—if not outright enslavement—are grounds for a
nasty divorce, but the punishment doesn't remotely fit the crime.
To a degree, Buday's extreme response gives Alexandra's
Project a powerful kick, much like the nuclear families gone awry in Haneke's
superior The Seventh Continent or Funny Games, to which de Heer owes an obvious
debt. Had Sweet's abuses been more outrageous, it would be much easier for
viewers to get some distance from Buday's actions, or to sympathize with her.
But de Heer's high-concept feminist tract loses some of its integrity over
time, as it slowly devolves into a seedy, voyeuristic thriller that takes all
too much pleasure in turning the screws. After a while, the sadistic hows of
Sweet's comeuppance begin to supercede the more important whys.
filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp
It’s his birthday, and a husband returns home from work expecting
a not-so-surprising surprise party. But the house is deserted, and all that’s
left of his wife is a videotape where she and the kids wish him a happy one.
The children are sent off to a relative’s house and the wife engages in a vivid
striptease seduction. But she cuts her act short, beginning instead a one-way
monologue to her husband, sifting through the complex issues of their troubled
marriage. Clearly, Alexandra’s Project is entrenched in the realm of
dysfunctional relations and comes up with a novel way of handling it: a
psychological thriller told in monologue form, where a husband cannot interact
with his wife’s “battle of the sexes” speechifying.
Directed by Rolf de Heer, Alexandra’s Project is minimalistic and very
formal. The actors, after a brief introductory section, have almost no interaction
together, and it’s basically a one man show as husband Steve (Gary Sweet)
attempts to figure out exactly what his wife is going on about, and ultimately
where she is. The wife, Alexandra (Helen Buday, whom some may recognize from Mad
Max Beyond Thunderdome), starts out simply, discussing their basic
problems, but eventually it gets into issues of sexism, fidelity, and
ultimately compassion. She does, ultimately, take off her clothes for him, but
the effect is strangely unnerving after she’s brought up her mastectomy, and
the possibility that another person (and not her husband) may be behind the
camera watching her undress.
Alexandra’s Project is confidently shot and scripted in clipped,
emotionally direct dialogue that’s thankfully not resorting to Harold Pinter,
David Mamet, or Neil LaBute (collectively, the role models for this sort of
film). And though it’s compelling to see a husband-wife debate where the two
cannot interact, ultimately de Heer’s project doesn’t have much to say about
sexuality and emotional violence that hasn’t already been covered before. It
may say something that such things have become banal within the cinema, and
that we the audience are unaffected even as Steve goes through a meltdown.
But also, it’s refreshing that for all Alexandra’s transgressions, I don’t know
if her actions qualify as female empowerment. Alexandra’s Project says
that we’re dead inside, and yet because of its puzzle-like structure of Steve
figuring out what, where, why, and how this is happening to him, the movie is
never a deadening viewing experience. As the characters brutalize themselves
and each other, Alexandra’s Project appeals to the viewer’s mindfulness
rather than teasing them for shock value. But it also begs the question: What
does the filmmaker value? That’s not immediately clear; but it’s certainly
compelling.
The Lady Vanishes: Alexandra's Project and Rolf de Heer Jake Wilson from Senses of Cinema, May 2003
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [2.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews
[John Nesbit]
Film Monthly (Erin Paulson) review Oren Golan
eFilmCritic.com (Dr Nick) review [4/5]
Mediasearch, Australia review Sonia Da Silva
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review
Art Right Now 2 Natasha Gray
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban, also including: ROLF DE HEER INTERVIEW
Montreal Mirror Matthew Hays
Digital Retribution dvd review Julian Bodenmann
DVD Net (Jules Faber) dvd review [Region 4]
hoopla.nu review Stuart Wilson
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[4.5/5] Eric
Campos
DVD Net
(Terry Kemp) dvd review [Region 4]
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [4/5]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [1/4] easily the most negative review out there
Eye Weekly [Kim Linekin] until I read this one
DVD
Talk (Robert Spuhler) dvd review
[3/5]
ABC Tasmania Jonathan Dawson
Variety (David Stratton) review
Sunday Online, Australia (Peter Thompson) review which includes
an interview with the director
TEN CANOES B 88
Ten
canoes, three wives, 150 spears…trouble.
—movie tagline
Once upon a time, the move starts, in a land far far away...then the narrator breaks out in a hearty laugh, claiming that’s not the way this story goes. David Gulpilil narrates a sumptuously beautiful ‘Scope film that mixes the present with the ancestral past of the indigenous Yolngu peoples of Ramingining, Australia, moving from color to black and white, where the narration is English, while the scenes are acted out in Ganalbingu tribal language. Told in a humorous but very personalized style, referencing life spreading through the branches of a tree, the one thing we learn is that a good story may take days to tell. The title was inspired by a photograph of a group of ten Aboriginal men in their bark canoes on the Arafura swamp. The photo was taken by anthropologist Dr. Donald Thomson, who lived among the Yolngu tribes in Central and North-Eastern Arnhem Land during the mid-1930s and the visual style of the movie, beautifully shot by Ian Jones, owes much to those striking black and white photographs by Thomson. While the film takes great pains to meet the standard of “authentic,” it is ultimately overshadowed by how simplistic the story turns out to be, despite the twists and turns and embellishments that attempt to heighten our historical as well as sensual perspectives.
Opening with a shot flying above the trees, following a river for endless miles, David’s son, Jamie Gulpalil, plays an impatient, overeager youth, Dayindi, who has his eyes on the youngest wife of one of his tribal elders, Minygululu (Peter Minygululu). As he joins men from his tribe on a goose egg hunting expedition, Minygululu tells him a long, meandering ancestral story about a similar young man who had his eyes on the youngest of his brother’s three wives. After they cut bark from trees to make canoes, they head out into the Arafura swamps in search of the magpie geese. Throughout their expedition, we hear the story from the past about learning to follow the right way, which throughout the course of the film, provides insight into the life and cultures of tribes in Arnhem Land. This hypnotic film is certainly more mesmerizing than a similar mythic journey in a fictionalized LORD OF THE RINGS, with its untold killings, as this is the oral history of real people that lived a thousand years ago, expressed through their own mythical tale of ancient times which reveals the ramifications from the killing of one man, with fictionalized visuals provided by the film director, in collaboration with David Gulpilil and the Ramingining community, as this is basically their film.
Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal) is a tribal warrior with three wives, but he travels back and forth between his small village and a far away residence that exclusively houses the young men of his tribe. Yeeralparil, also played by Jamie Gulpalil, is attracted to his brother’s youngest wife, a dangerous practice that is immediately noticed by the older wives who try to shoo him away like an annoying fly, but he persists. One day they are visited by a stranger, who may be a sorcerer, and might have come to steal their souls. But they give him food and kindly wish him off. After that, Ridjimiraril’s second wife mysteriously disappears. They suspect the stranger, but it could be others who have kidnapped her as well. On the tip from an uncle, a search party travels to a neighboring tribe, returning much later knowing no more than when they left, as they never found any trace of her. Kids capturing honey high up in the trees in order to satisfy the sweet tooth of the one fat member of the tribe, Birrinbirrin (Richard Birrinbirrin), see a stranger off in the distance and the tribe is notified. Ridjimiraril, still enraged over the loss of his second wife, grabs a handful of spears and says he only wants to talk to the stranger, followed behind by Birrinbirrin. Ridjimiraril, however, hurls his spear on first sight, killing the stranger, who turns out to be the brother of the stranger who passed through their village.
According to tribal law, the affected tribe has the right to avenge their loss in a spear-off against the man responsible, who along with a chosen partner (Yeeralparil), must withstand a barrage of spears thrown at them by the stranger’s tribe. They do a good job dodging them at first, but eventually their legs lose their initial energy and Ridjimiraril is hit by a spear. As no vital organs were hit, he survives, but loses strength over time until eventually, after returning home to their village, he rises from his bed to dance a final dance of death, which is carried on by others after he passes on. Yeeralparil believes it’s time for him to make his move and claim the youngest wife for his own, but when he arrives in the village, it’s the oldest that claims him, which leads to a huge catfight among the women, with plenty of screaming and yelling, which gives Yeeralparil a pretty good glimpse of what the future holds for him.
Facets Multi Media - FACETS FRONT PAGE -> Film Festival Diaries Milos Stehlik at Cannes, May 16, 2006
And the new film by Rolf
de Heer - certainly
Yet there is always a certain cutting edge of an idea, and an artistic concept.
TEN CANOES is essentially an aboriginal tale. The great actor, David Gulpilil
(The Tracker) narrates the story if ten men who go out into the swamp to
collect eggs of the gumang, the magpie goose. Dayindi, a young warrior who
covets the wife of his older brother, is told a cautionary tale from the
mythical past. The story is, in itself, fantastic, but what is most fantastic
is how expansive it is, how it grows, as Gulpilil narrates in the film,
"like a tree." It is an entirely different way of storytelling
demanding, allegorical, lyrical, violent, moral. The film is beautiful to watch
and deeply humanistic, with the narration in English and the acted sequences in
the original tribal language.
Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4/5]
The Aboriginal peoples have always played a prominent part in Australian cinema – but this is the first film I’ve seen that puts them centre stage.
Several directors have focused on their plight since the coming of the white colonists, yet even in sympathetic portrayals such as Rabbit Proof Fence and The Chant Of Jimmy Blacksmith they are seen solely in relation to the European settlers.
Ten Canoes, on the other hand, takes us back a thousand years before the First Fleet. Using an entirely Native Australian cast (many of whom are not professional actors) and shooting completely on location, De Heer is clearly attempting a cinematic portrayal of the Aborigine neither as tragic victim or theme park ‘noble primitive’.
Of course, you can’t entirely ignore the box office, so the presence of David Gulpilil will undoubtedly be a big advantage in getting bums on seats. Probably the only Aboriginal actor most people could name, he’s turned in sterling performance in everything from Walkabout through Crocodile Dundee to The Tracker (his previous collaboration with De Heer). As a musician and performer he’s also been one of the standard bearers of Native Australian culture over the years and spends much of his time in his traditional homeland of the Arafura Swamp, in the far north of Northern Territory, where the film is set.
His love for this stunningly beautiful and remote land shines through from the first words of his voiceover. He never appears on screen but acts as a guide, chorus and, most importantly, storyteller as the film unfolds.
The story concerns a small group of men from the Yolngu tribe, engaged in the annual goose-egg gathering expedition. As they strip tree bark to make the titular canoes it becomes clear from their conversation that Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil, who’s inherited a fair slice of his dad’s screen presence) is in love with the youngest wife of his much older brother, the white-haired expedition leader Minygululu (many of the cast have their real name and character name in common). To take the heat out of the situation the older man tells his brother an instructive tribal legend.
In true Aboriginal tradition the tale is poetic, discursive and several days long. As the hunters make their way to the swamp to gather the eggs we see flashbacks to an older time, where another younger brother, Yeeralparil (Gulpilil Junior again) feels the sap rising for the young bride of Ridjimiraril, a noted warrior and hunter. The tension is palpable but Yeeralparil does nothing except find more and more ludicrous excuses to swing by from the single men’s camp and catch a glimpse of his beloved, and life goes on as normal.
Until the arrival of a stranger from another tribe (Djigirr, whose role as co-director was to advise on tribal customs and liaise between crew and cast). The men of the village are alarmed, especially when he tells them he has magical objects to trade - the effect is similar to a drug-dealer gatecrashing a parish council meeting - and suggestions range from killing him to employing their own sorcerer to give the camp a clean bill of health. Soon after, another of Ridjimaril’s wives disappears...
The events that follow include accidental murder, self-sacrifice and tragedy. But it would be a mistake to dismiss this as a worthy but gloomy grinder that you ‘ought’ to go to see. De Heer succeeds in proving that, despite their way of life appearing utterly alien to the audience, these characters are not so different to us. They are often greedy, deceitful and morally flawed. But they also radiate compassion and good humour, getting through a hard and often dangerous life with love for their families and their land, and an awareness that even when you make your own law, there’s still a difference between right and wrong.
Dayindi’s life lesson is in the end less important than the film’s almost documentary-level immersion in a way of life that is basic, but neither simple nor impoverished. Admittedly, there are some longeurs and Gulpilil Senior’s narration isn’t always as sparkling and endearing as he seems to think it is. But these are minor quibbles. This is storytelling in its truest sense and the cast rise to the occasion; you wouldn’t guess they aren’t professionals, probably because they live these roles rather than acting them.
And did I mention that it looks absolutely stunning? De Heer and his cinematographer Ian Jones conjure up the vistas of swamp and forest, quiet and yet still teeming with life, superbly. The black and white camerawork used in the ‘framing’ story is equally effective. Inspired by a 1930s anthropologist’s photographs of (you’ve guessed it) ten canoeists, it reminds the audience that whatever our initial conceptions of these people were, they already had a history and culture going back millennia. It’s a privilege to share in it.
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes is a
richly layered folk-myth drama set among Australian Aborigine tribes in the
Northern Territory: a tale of war and love and death among unclothed
hunter-gatherers. There is beautiful photography, and some terrifically
insouciant performances from first-time actors. But as captivating as Ten
Canoes often is, in all its robust humour and candour, I couldn't help feeling
ambivalent. The film is very much like the kind of stripped-down, universally
applicable legend from which Peter Brook might create a marvellous piece of
stage theatre, yet at times it also resembled a very worthy,
National-Geographically-correct version of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto - a version
in which an explicit, exciting and unidirectional story would be considered too
vulgar. What unfolds here on screen is so gently and obliquely laid out that I
have to admit my attention very occasionally wandered, and I even suspected
that bush spirits were silently attaching tiny weights to each of my eyelashes.
Regular moments of enchantment removed them.
The very notion of a storyline is perhaps inapplicable to a
worldview in which the distinction between past and present is blurred, in
which thousands of years can pass and the nature of people's lives remain
precisely the same. Indeed, the storytelling calls into question the notion of
time passing, and in reaching back to the lives and identities of one's
ancestors it transcendentally reveals these existences to be at one with the
lives that are being lived now. De Heer - who writes, and co-directs with Peter
Djigirr - begins with a simple, beautiful image: a winding river in lush
country, whose course is followed by an overhead shot with a wry, playful
voiceover from actor David Gulpilil, who explains that the story he has to
tell, so far from being simplistic, is a complex and sophisticated affair with as
many ramifications as branches on a tree. A young hunter with his tribesmen is
out stripping tree-bark with a view to making 10 canoes. He is discontented
with his unmarried status, and nurses a desire for one of his brother's wives.
In order to instill wisdom and patience into the young buck, his elder sets out
to tell him some overlapping, inter-relating stories of his ancestors which
then take place before us in colour, with the present tense material limited to
black and white - itself a way of making the distant past more vivid than the
here and now.
The same actors playing their ancestor-counterparts also
dramatise a tale that brings the past into parallel with the present, a tale of
thwarted romance, tribal fear, and sexual politics: a tale with something of
the Iliad in the way the belligerent males talk themselves into doing battle
with enemies over the assumed abduction of one of the womenfolk.
Part of what is charming and refreshing about Ten Canoes is
that it does not make the Aborigine peoples alien or exotic, or a subordinate
part of a story about white people's transgression. Movies such as The
Proposition or Jindabyne or Rabbit-Proof Fence, all valuable in their different
ways, have made them into a kind of drama-accessory about a disturbing or
hostile landscape. Incidentally, the first two of these movies were prefaced
with warnings that they contained images of dead people that were liable to be
offensive to Aborigine viewers. As it happens, Ten Canoes does not have such a
warning, despite the themes of violence and death: perhaps the cultural
stricture is not universally applicable, or perhaps the camera is not deemed to
have captured the precise moment of death. At any rate, the Aborigine people
are not brought on as part of a realist thriller or shocker. Ten Canoes makes a
more ambitious leap of sympathy, entering their own world, on its own terms.
What is also striking about Ten Canoes is that it is one of the very few films
of any sort to show the human body, without the incessant western idiom of
irony and sexualisation. The men and women actors here are unselfconsciously
naked, and yet De Heer does not imply that they are living in some kind of
Edenic state. Their real lives are fizzing with romance, with gossip, with
yearning, with dirty jokes and backtalk, and with privacy and secrecy too.
Their bodies, young and old, fat and thin, are not the neurotic centre of
attention.
Having said all of which, I couldn't help wishing that the
narrative did not meander and diversify and double back on itself quite as much
as it does. There is something a little bit pedagogic and even fastidious in
its insistence on a multiplicity of narratives which play themselves out in
ways that draw the sting from their own tails. Ten Canoes is not a shaggy-dog
story, exactly, but it's a story that declines to be bound by the traditional
guidelines of beginning, middle and end.
This refusal is part engaging and part exasperating - but
in the end mostly engaging, and the performances by, among others, Crusoe Kurddal,
Jamie Gulpilil and Richard Birrinbirrin have an unforced authority and ease.
The movie simply presents these vivid personalities in various permutations and
lets their natural charm do the rest.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Ten Canoes (2006) Adrian Martin from Sight and Sound, June 2007
Review: Ten Canoes (2006) : In Film Australia - all about ... Luke Buckmaster
Ten Canoes Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: Turner Classic Movies dvd review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban, also including: ROLF DE HEER INTERVIEW
DVD Verdict (Jennifer Malkowski) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review
Richard Phillips World Socialist Web Site, which includes an interview with the director, July 19, 2006
Twitch (Michael Guillen) review at Toronto September 9, 2006, which includes a Q & A with the director
Twitch (Michael Guillen) review Idaho Film Festival October 3, 2007, also seen here: The Evening Class
Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
Reel.com review [3.5/4] Jim Hemphill
The Onion A.V. Club review Noel Murray
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]
cinemattraction (Phillip Piggott) review
The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Emily S. Mendel
CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Daily Plastic [J. Robert Parks]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Boxoffice Magazine review Richard Mowe
DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [3/5]
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Sunday Online, Australia (Peter Thompson) review
Time Out London (Ben Walters) review [5/6]
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [4/6]
The Times of London review Wendy Ide
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Josh Rosenblatt) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle review Ruthe Stein
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Christopher Long
De Jong, Mijke
LAYLA M B 86
Netherlands
Belgium (110 mi) 2016 Topkapi
Films [Netherlands]
It’s hard to make topical films, especially
when the screen reality doesn’t match the authenticity of on-the-ground news
reports of terrorist attacks, police crackdowns, angry demonstrations, or
following the hordes of refugees swarming into Europe, not to mention those
citizens left behind in the war zones and refugee camps. It’s a searing reality that is difficult to
digest, no matter how meticulously accurate the newscasts may be. But as links to terror organizations have
been discovered within major European cities, it has led to an accompanying
rise of Islamophobia, including burkini bans on French and Corsican beaches,
leaving people wondering how local citizens are being recruited into jihadist
organizations, where this film attempts to answer some of those questions. Dutch director Mijke de Jong, with a script
written by her husband Jan Eilander, combine their efforts in a story studying
the roots of the problem. Set in
Amsterdam, Layla (Nora El Houssour) is an 18-year old student studying to
become a doctor who is a Dutch citizen with a Moroccan background, living at
home with her middle class Muslim family.
While her parents, including her father (Mohammed Azzay) and mother (Esma
Abouzahra), encourage her to follow a promising educational path that will lead
to a better life, she gets more distracted by the way Muslims are treated differently
than ordinary Dutch citizens, as they are profiled simply by their appearance,
labelled agitators by referees in local soccer matches, and routinely singled
out and arrested by police for practicing free speech, even getting into a
heated discussion with a fellow student when asked not to pray, to the point
where she feels ostracized by society.
As she explores her Muslim background, she devotes more of her time
studying the Quran, where she learns to identify radical phrases, scours the
Internet for YouTube coverage of attacks on Muslims throughout the country and
atrocities to Muslims around the globe, which she immediately shares with her
friends and family, and is disappointed by the timid reaction by her parents,
who lead a comfortable life and don’t make waves.
What’s clear, at least in this film, is that she comes from a loving
family, where she’s had plenty of opportunities to succeed, something her
parents don’t want her to jeopardize.
She’s a bit of a tomboy, as she loves to play soccer and mix it up with
the boys, and can more than hold her own when it comes to a fiery attitude,
including plenty of trash talking. But
in accordance with custom, she wears a headscarf and dresses modestly, but
she’s a modern woman that believes women can stand up for themselves, joining a
radical group of women called the Sisters who discuss ways they can help fight
repression, passing out flyers, posting YouTube videos depicting the horrors in Syria and Gaza, while also meeting a male
radicalized friend that she likes named Abdel (Ilias Addab) in clandestine
Skype sessions. Developing a growing
indifference towards her studies, she makes a bold move to drop out of school,
secretly marry Abdel, and run away to Belgium to join a jihadist training camp,
where the intimacy expressed while traveling together are among the best scenes
in the film, showing a joyful and loving relationship. But they barely avoid arrest when they leave,
heading for Amman, Jordan, where they plan a life of religious activism. While she is embraced by the women, where one
takes her out to the refugee camps, where the children are starved for
affection and anyone willing to spend time with them, she is totally ignored by
the men, including her husband, spending long hours alone with absolutely
nothing to do, where as an Islamic wife she is expected to clean the house and
serve food, and do little else, as they have no use for a woman’s ideas. The extent of the patriarchal society is not
only demeaning, but cruel, as they demand total subservience, something that’s
simply not in her DNA. While she loves
her husband, he positively stifles her spirit, where she’s not allowed to do
anything without the husband’s permission, as the man makes all the decisions,
while the subject of men’s discussions is off-limits to women.
What the film does is humanize the character
of Layla, as she is searching within herself and in a surrounding society for a
world without insults and recriminations, where people can lead their lives in
peace without continual disruptions by police and angry citizens. For most college-age kids, this is a fairly
common dream, a belief in social justice, a hope that everyone can be treated
fairly. Instead what they discover is a
daily reality of discrimination and profiling, which exists as much in black
communities in America as Islamic neighborhoods in Europe. The heavy-handed treatment, the overreactions
by police that result in the shooting deaths of innocent young black men, or
the continued harassment of Muslim men with beards, only leads to a seething
discontent, a breeding ground for anger and radicalization, where the result is
a lack of trust with existing authorities, which can lead to the extremist
radicalization the film examines. While
this film asks as many questions as it answers, it attempts to fill the holes
in a better understanding of what people are up against, where there are no
easy decisions when facing the cruel realities of life. One is reminded of Merzak Allouache’s
Algerian film The
Repentant (El Taaib) (2012) which is largely seen through
a jihadist’s eyes, where despite honest efforts, they may never fully integrate
back into society, as they’ve crossed too many lines. While this is a well-meaning film, it only
addresses the initial phase of radicalization, where she’s too intelligent and
there are too many obstacles placed in this one woman’s path for her to become
a true believer, becoming a public service corrective for someone who has
swayed from the path of the civilized and was tempted by the jihadists, but
ends up discovering their own extremism is too harsh. That’s not the case with everyone, especially
those coming from impoverished communities decimated by war, where there’s no
hope anywhere to be found. This is
fertile territory for extremist recruits, as they have no other options. So this is a somewhat watered down picture,
but it’s helpful nonetheless, revealing how mistreatment builds discontent,
that better police procedures that recognize the rights of minorities would be
in society’s larger interests, as discriminatory behavior will come back to
bite you. That’s something both Europe
and the United States seem to be ignoring, instead plunging ahead with more
sophisticated use of surveillance and profiling techniques, where targeting
racial groups will only lead to more ruthless police confrontations and create
even more animosity.
Layla
M. (Mijke de Jong) — Platform - Cinema Scope Angelo Murredda
The youth-in-extremis movie gets a relatively fresh new face in Mijke de Jong’s Layla M., which, together with Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, positions TIFF’s Platform programme as a quality clearing house for coming-of-age melodramas with a critical difference. Here the point of distinction is the budding radicalism of the heretofore university-bound Layla (Nora El Koussour), a Dutch-Moroccan teen whose growing devotion to Islam—and specifically to its radical fringe online—puts her at odds with both Amsterdam’s xenophobic whites and her more or less secular middle class family. Layla starts by tiptoeing into liberationist memes about burqas, whose construction de Jong charts in loving procedural detail, then graduates to marrying an equally devout jihadist she meets online and relocating to Amman, Jordan, where she’s sidelined to serving duties as the men host grim meetings about taking direct action, never stopping to consider that she’ll be implicated in their plots.
Layla M.’s progression from youthful enchantment to adult exhaustion (as well as from liberation to newfound oppression) feels too fast and more than a little tired; the closest analogue in recent years is probably Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air (2012), which similarly finds its plucky protagonist sidelined by the end to dirty-dish duty while twentysomething radical dudes plan their very important protests in the living room. De Jong is also guilty of relying on visual shortcuts to chart Layla’s radicalization, decontextualized moments where, for instance, we see her silently parked in front of her laptop, watching jihadist propaganda instead of doing her homework. But there’s a believable, shopworn naturalism to the performances, and a particular spontaneity and vibrancy to El Koussour, whose Layla just barely suppresses her innate insolence whenever a patriarch— whether her father or her husband—has the gall to put her in her place.
'Layla M': Toronto Review -
Screen Daily Allan
Hunter
Mijke de Jong’s exploration of the issues surrounding radicalisation and identity is one of a number of current films on the theme (Heaven Can Wait etc) but is distinguished by its intelligent approach to complex matters, the polished visuals of cinematographer Danny Elsen and a knockout central performance from newcomer Nora el Koussour. That combination and the timeliness of the topic should make Layla M a regular fixture of the festival circuit and guarantee some theatrical interest.
Nora el Koussour’s Layla Mourabit is a fantastically stroppy, compelling character. A Dutch/Moroccan teenager, she is a fiery, opinionated figure. Encountering casual racism on a daily basis, she is outraged by a father who never fights back and is ashamed by her defiance. He merely wants her to study hard, keep out of trouble and become a doctor.
There is a very striking sense of Layla as someone whose voice is not heard in her home, her school or her city of Amsterdam. There is also a sense of how eagerly she embraces her status as an outsider, becoming more devout in her prayers, studying the Quran, attending demonstrations and never giving an inch in the defence of her position. She is spirited and would probably start an argument with her own shadow. She also tends towards the insufferable in her righteousness which makes her all the more interesting.
The process of Layla becoming open to radicalisation is convincingly depicted as she abandons friends who mock her decision to wear the full hijab and finds it intolerable that so few people seem to care about what is happening in Syria. Even though you fear where this is heading, the viewer can fully appreciate what she is feeling.
Layla is drawn to the charismatic jihadist Abdel (Ilias Addab). Skype chats and supportive words fuel her starry-eyed romantic notions. When her life in Amsterdam becomes intolerable, she is more than willing to become Abdel’s bride and follow him to the Middle East and a new life in which her role as a docile wife leaves her with similar feelings of being denied a voice.
One of the admirable qualities of Layla M is the way it strives to find the good and bad in each character. There is a genuine affection in the relationship between Layla and Abdel, especially in the moments when they are alone together. There is a charming scene when they slowly dance in a hotel room and later they look out on a starry sky and the promise of their new life, both intimate moments beautifully captured by Danny Elsen. The fact that Abdel will come to see Layla as someone who disrespects him and fails to fulfil her duties does not diminish his earlier fondness.
There is a fatalistic arc to Layla M. There is a distinct break between life in Amsterdam and life as a fugitive. We know this is unlikely to end well but there are still unexpected details that emerge and Nora el Koussour’s performance to carry the narrative. Her big, yearning eyes, the hot flashes of her anger and the tears of disappointment all convey the emotional turmoil of an incredible journey.
my film journal:
Layla M. John
P
The story couldn’t be more timely and urgent as European and other Western countries find themselves in the grip of weekly reports of young people being recruited by ISIS to perform acts of terror on unsuspecting innocent lives.
Layla M. follows a spirited, headstrong Moroccan/Dutch 18 year old, Layla, living with her family in Amsterdam where she was born, as she becomes radicalized by a local Islamic fundamentalist group.
A poignant and powerful wake-up call, Layla M. deals with the current problem of homegrown radicalization of Europe’s young and disenfranchised. This controversial film shows the struggle within a Muslim family living in the Netherlands as they deal with interpretations of their own Religious doctrines and the critical liberal society they live in.
In the wake of increasing backlash against Muslim communities sparked by terror attacks, Layla's faith grows stronger. She is warned by her family and friends from continuing on the extremist path, but she grows increasingly frustrated by what she sees as oppression of her religious beliefs by a racist western society and begins to use her new found faith as a form of protest.
Dutch director Mijke de Jong’s gripping new film immerses us in Layla’s reality as the film is shown from her perspective. Nora El Koussour gives a mesmerizing passionate performance as Layla and draws us into a world where she is coached by online radicals who convince her to persuade her parents and brother to join in protesting the injustices perpetrated on the Muslim community.
Layla’s family and friends grow increasingly worried and encourage her to focus on her studies and career to no avail. With exams looming, she is drawn further into dangerous activities; protesting and making jihadist videos which are drawing the attention of the authorities who are now keeping a close eye on her and her family.
When she falls in love with Abdel, a quiet young man from the jihadi group, she secretly marries and follows him to the Middle East where they are free to practice a so called ‘truer’ form of Islam, only to discover that she is not prepared for the cruel realities of life in an extremist militant patriarchal society and its oppressive ideas about the role of women which goes against her ideals.
Like most teenagers, Layla is just looking for an authentic life she can believe in. We worry for her as she naively navigates her journey to find truth and battle injustice. We keep hoping that her parents or a teacher will guide her on the right path but the society in which she lives seems so aggressively hostile toward her decisions that her tragic fate seems inevitable.
Part of the 2016 TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, Layla M. is a thought-provoking must see for anyone looking for insight into the underlying causes of the current violence and terrorism spreading across European countries with large Muslim communities.
We
Got This Covered [David James]
Front
Row Reviews (Greg Wetherall)
TIFF 2016:
Layla M. Review | Dork Shelf
Michael McNeely
'Layla M': Inside
the Experience of a Female Radical ... - No Film School Emily Buder interviews the director,
September 21, 2016
'Layla M.'
Review | Hollywood Reporter Boyd
van Hoeij
Toronto
Film Review: 'Layla M.' - Variety
Scott Tobias
TIFF
2016: “Old Stone,” “Layla M.”, “Past Life” - Roger Ebert Matt Fagerholm
Nora El Koussour |
Favor Talents
de la Iglesia, Álex
COMMON WEALTH (La Comunidad)
Common Wealth Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
The straight man's Pedro Almodóvar, Álex de la
Iglesia has enjoyed tremendous success in his native
THE PERFECT CRIME (Crimen Ferpecto)
Crimen Ferpecto Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Spanish auteur Álex de la Iglesia continues to show
absolutely no signs of reconciling his dramatic and comedic impulses. Though
inextricably bound to one another, these dueling urges refuse to play nice, and
it's the fallout from their non-stop collisions that makes the director's
latest genre pastiche (think Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen meets
Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith) so much fun to watch. Though not as
consistent in tone as La Comunidad, Crimen
Ferpecto (the title, changed for the film's American release to The
Perfect Crime, is a reference to the Asterix and Obelix comic Asterix
and the Laurel Wreath) is more self-reflective in the sense that the battle
between its two leads mirrors the ongoing war between the serious and the
absurd that has become par for course in de la Iglesia's metafictive canon of
films.
Two
employees at YeYo's department store—Rafael (Guillermo Toledo, a happy slave to
capitalism, and Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), a homely saleswoman who wants to
desperately buckle the system—enter into an unofficial lifetime contract when
one helps the other dispose of a body after a sinister accident in a dressing
room, and what unravels is at once a critique of consumer culture and a bawdy
comedy of the sexes.
People
are crazy in de la Iglesia's films and the constrictive atmosphere the man
summons throughout Crimen Ferpecto suggests people wanting to break free
from the crippling allure of consumerism. "The secret's in the gift
wrapping," says Rafael to a customer he attacks like a hawk with the hope
of driving his commission so high he can secure a position as the store's floor
manager. It's a slogan de la Iglesia takes more than seriously: The melodrama
that takes place inside YeYo's feels suffocatingly boxed-in (the people inside
the store are like animals gasping for breath inside a container were a child
keeps a pet animal) and the film's splashy aesthetic seems to exist only to
gussy up the action with a sinister bow (the camera charts the mise-en-scène as
if mounted on a horizontal path that can turn on a 90-degree dime at any
moment).
De
la Iglesia uses style to sketch emotional context: The giddy cinematic
cross-references, feverish hallucinations, and gut-busting non sequiturs fill
in the gaps of his characters' backgrounds. There's no scene more profound than
Rafael losing all sense of what's real in the world at the precise moment he
enters the stage of a reality program, or no scene as funny as Lourdes's
macabre little sister screaming at a dinner table that she was raped by her gym
teacher, but as soon as the film builds to a startling scene atop a Ferris
wheel (with 2D backdrops straight out of Hitchcock!), de la Iglesia seems to lose
his grip on the film. Once Rafael's boss starts making appearances as a
Grinch-like ghost and a Columbo-like police officer's investigation of Rafael
and Lourdes's crime is hastily incorporated into the otherwise resourceful
delirium, you get a sense the film wants to be over and done with as soon as
possible. The ending is a messy, contradictory kaput, but we should all be so
lucky to experience the witty pop that precedes it.
Feature: Every Heaven Has a Hell: An Interview with Álex de la Iglesia
De Lencquesaing, Louis-do
IN
A RUSH (Au Galop)
France (93 mi) 2012
In
A Rush Jonathan Romney at Cannes
from Screendaily
If ever a film didn’t live up to its title, it’s In
A Rush (Au Galop), a family drama as stylishly laidback as
its director and male lead Louis-Do de Lencquesaing. The actor turned auteur
made a considerable splash as the suicidal producer in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Father
Of My Children, and his debut feature is rather in the mould of that film - an
elegantly executed drama with distinctive, sometimes eccentric dashes of
characterisation.
But de Lencquesaing’s offering, despite its strong cast and unflappable confidence, never quite distinguishes itself from the run of the thoughtful, literary mould of bourgeois drama that is an enduring staple of the Gallic screen. The path has been well trod of late by the likes of Christophe Honoré, Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas (whose Summer Hours this perhaps most closely resembles, with its theme of letting go of the past). Audiences and distributors already committed to this vein of French drama will probably remain faithful; others will shrug it off as more of the same, however classy.
The story is intermittently narrated in voice-over by novelist Paul (de Lencquesaing), who appears to be writing, possibly for his next book, about his encounter with Ada (Cervi); the story is ostensibly about Ada, but Paul increasingly becomes its focus, which perhaps says something about the somewhat narcissistic bent of de Lencquesaing’s venture. Ada’s settled life, we hear at the start - she has a partner and a young daughter - is about to be disturbed by her meeting with Paul, himself divorced and living with teenage daughter Camille (Alice de Lencquesaing). When Paul, whose publisher Ada works for, walks into her life, Ada is immediately intrigued by his rumpled suavity, and the two soon start an affair.
Meanwhile, Paul and restaurateur brother François (Beauvois) have to deal with their loftily capricious mother Mina (Keller), following the death of their father (a briefly glimpsed Verley). And Camille, more or less the sanest in the family, has her own romantic traumas with her footballer boyfriend.
If the film seems oddly familiar, it’s partly because the director and his real-life daughter Alice have already memorably portrayed a version of their own relationship in Hansen-Løve’s film. In fact, Alice’s performance is the freshest element of In a Rush, her pert wit and alertness bringing a tart spontaneity to proceeedings. Also winning is veteran Keller, drolly imposing as the patrician Mina, especially once the character begins to unravel with dignity.
The film’s most significant flaw, however, is that de Lencquesaing comes across as overly impressed with his own presence. While his brooding, often wry charisma appears to stem from his real personality, rather than being an actorly construct, he makes Paul too seductive to allay accusations of vanity - especially given the ease, and thoroughness, with which Ada falls for him.
Elegantly, if modestly crafted, and shot with an eye for crisp atmospherics by Jean-René Duveau, this is a consummately crafted package - but in tone, often a rather complacent one. While you could only dislike it deeply if you had an animus against haut bourgeois dramas per se, In A Rush comes a touch too close to lifestyle cinema for comfort.
In
a Rush (Au Galop): Cannes Review Jordan Mintzer at
With a seductive novelist, gorgeous mistress, a dying patriarch, a country house and an inheritance - this film is French to a tee.
40-something Paul (de Lencquesaing père) is an accomplished author with suicidal tendencies, as evidenced by an opening scene where he dangerously hangs off a bridge in Paris, staring into the abyss. But things quickly pick up when he stops by his publisher (Denis Podalydes, underused) and meets the irresistible Ada (Valentia Cervi), who’s already shacked up with the sweet-faced businessman, Christian (Laurent Capelluto), with whom she has a daughter, Zoe (Enola Romo-Renoir).
Paul being Paul (or just being French), such a fact does little to deter him from pursuing his conquest, although the sudden death of his father (Bernard Verley) and its effect on his spirited mother (Marthe Keller) throws a few curveballs his way. Soon enough, though, Paul and Ada begin their illicit relationship, which seems to consist mainly of the former admiring the latter’s physical attributes, and the latter admiring the former’s wit and intelligence. Such is the plight of the writer.
As the plot points crisscross and Ada is eventually driven to choose between the two men she claims to love, both Paul and the narrative start to turn in circles, and there’s hardly enough traction in the characters – mostly Parisian archetypes – to keep things engrossing through the final reel. Slightly more palatable, though never fully developed, is the story between Paul’s smart-alecky daughter, Camille (de Lencquesaing fille), and a troubled soccer player (Ralph Amoussou) who winds up interned at a local psychiatric hospital.
If the cast in generally convincing and the tech credits passable, In a Rush never takes things far enough either emotionally or thematically to place it above the fray of any number of French dramedies that deal with sex, death and love – usually in that order. Since de Lencquesaing has already proved himself a worthy presence in the works of filmmakers like Maiwenn, Emmanuel Mouret and Mia-Hansen Love, one gets the impression here that his talent is best expressed on the other side of the lens.
Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa
Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from Variety
de
Oliveira, Manoel
Still making films now into his 100’s, de Oliveira is almost as old as cinema itself and was a contemporary of Eisenstein and made his first short film in 1929, HARD WORK ON THE RIVER DOURO, a scathing portrayal of poverty, making his first feature in 1942, then directed only documentaries and short films for the next 30 years, rising to a feature film director only in the 1970’s.
Mary
Corliss
Blood on the Beach, by
Richard and Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time
magazine, May 19, 2008
Manoel de Oliveira was born in
1908,and made his first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial (Working on the
Douro River) in 1931, when he was 22. That documentary, a vital panorama of
dockside life in Oporto, Portugal, was shown today, with the director, who will
be 100 on December 11, in attendance. Oliveira has been a mainstay in the
Cannes competition for a quarter century, providing such sere delights as The
Cannibals (with its comic shock of a conclusion), Voyage to the
Beginning of the World (Marcello Mastroianni's last great film) and I'm
Going Home, with a wonderful role for French film luminary Michel Piccoli.
Piccoli was onstage to present an honorary Palme d'Or to the director who had
never won one in competition. "Finally," Oliveira impishly exclaimed
as he kissed the award, "I got one!"
Oliveira carries a cane, but he
uses it less for support than as a jaunty prop —twirling it, pointing it at the
cheering audience — till you expect him to break into a song-and-dance routine.
The cane might be a tribute to his first cinema idol, the dapper French comic
Max Linder, who influenced Charlie Chaplin, Oliveira's second idol. In the
audience, clearly buoyed by the old man's energy, were other distinguished
directors: Cannes Jury President Sean Penn, Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis
The Internet Movie Database tells
us that Oliveira has two films in production. If he keeps going, and his vigor
today suggests that's not a problem, he will eclipse Leni Riefenstahl (who
released her last movie on her 100th birthday in 2002) as the world's oldest
cineaste. And one of the most vital. "Vive le cinema!" he exclaimed
before striding offstage. Oliveira is living proof that cinema is a game old
men can play with agility and ageless grace.
All-Movie
Guide Sandra Brennan
Manoel de Oliveira ranks among
It was not until 1942 that Oliveira made his feature-film debut as a director
with Aniki-Bóbó. With its naturalistic approach, Aniki-Bóbó was the forerunner of the Italian
neorealist cinema. However, it was a commercial failure in
When some of
The Classical Modernist: Manoel de Oliveira - Film Comment Jonathan Rosenbaum, July/August 2008
Films, films,
The best resemble
Great books
That are difficult to penetrate
Because of their richness and depth.
The cinema isn’t easy
Because life is complicated
And art indefinable.
Making life indefinable
And art
complicated.
—Manoel de Oliveira, “Cinematographic Poem,” 1986 (translated from the Portuguese)
Since this century has taught us, and continues to teach us, that human beings can learn to live under the most brutalized and theoretically intolerable conditions, it is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our 19th-century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism.
—Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991
To insist that all great filmmakers contain multitudes is to risk a counter-response—that the same might equally be said of the not-so-great. Just as much labor can be expended on bad work as on good, and this applies to the labor of viewers and filmmakers alike. Life and art are both complicated, as Manoel de Oliveira points out, but that doesn’t necessarily make them interesting.
And so, from a practical standpoint, I’m afraid it won’t do to argue that lingering skeptics who still dispute Oliveira’s greatness simply need to see more of his films, especially because this advice usually leads to their seeing more of his bad stuff. Familiarity with Oliveira’s work as a whole does have its compensations, such as recognizing and enjoying his repertory company of actors, who seem every bit as loyal as Ford’s or Bergman’s, and include stalwarts Luís Miguel Cintra (17 films), Leonor Silveira (16 films), and Oliveira’s grandson Ricardo Trepa (13 films). But this doesn’t necessarily redeem his less scintillating features. And you don’t have to look far to find a bad Oliveira film—or at the very least boring (such as The Convent), pretentious (The Divine Comedy), or slight (Christopher Columbus, The Enigma), not to mention difficult (almost anything). This problem is compounded by the fact that some of Oliveira’s lesser efforts are the easiest to see, probably because they often feature stars.
These films are also usually the talkiest, as well as the ones in which Oliveira’s ideas—cinematic as well as thematic—seem too sketchy to sustain feature length, perhaps helping to explain why he sometimes alternates the gab with extended musical performances and/or prolonged establishing shots. The Letter (99) and Belle Toujours (06), for example, have their charms and fascinations, to be sure, but I’d hate having to use either one to support claims for Oliveira as a major figure.
The former transplants to the late 20th century Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Clèves, written in 1678 and commonly described as the first great short novel in French—a tale about the self-abnegating love of the highly principled, and married, heroine (Chiara Mastroianni) for the Duke of Nemours. (Reportedly, the idea for both reading and adapting this novel came about two decades earlier, from Oliveira’s principal French collaborator, translator, and exegete Jacques Parsi. Knowing the director’s fascination with the theme of frustrated love, he also suggested Paul Claudel’s The Satin Slipper.)
Part of the promising and initially amusing joke here appears to be the notion that aristocrats and their fussy distinctions hardly change at all from one century to the next—a conceit that works only if you don’t think about it too much. The other part is giving the role of the Duke to Portuguese pop star Pedro Abrunhosa, a dour, poker-faced dandy who hails from Porto, Oliveira’s hometown. Known for never removing his sunglasses, he plays himself à la Dean Martin in Kiss Me, Stupid.
Yet the campy humor of this double conceit extended over 105 minutes is so dry that it ultimately becomes arid. Oliveira neither runs nor plays with it; he dully plows ahead like a bulldozer, leading one to wonder eventually whether he has forgotten that the idea is supposed to be funny and ironic. And “Momento,” the surprisingly conventional and humorless music video that Oliveira made with Abrunhosa three years later, makes one wonder if he ever intended any sort of joke to begin with.
There’s a similar mulishness in Belle Toujours—an unlikely sequel/speculative footnote to Belle de jour that, unlike Buñuel’s work, has more to do with class than with sex, and whose only authentically Buñuelian touch involves the absurdist appearance of a chicken at a climactic moment. In the original film, Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), a frigid bourgeois housewife who loves her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel), gets an afternoon job at a high-price brothel in order to satisfy her masochistic desires—a secret discovered by Pierre’s friend Henri (Michel Piccoli), a rakish brothel customer. After Pierre is shot by one of Séverine’s jealous clients, leaving him permanently mute and paralyzed, Henri announces that he’ll tell Pierre everything, but we (and she) can’t be sure whether or not he actually does.
Oliveira, who couldn’t persuade Deneuve to play Séverine again, got Bulle Ogier, the female lead in his My Case (86), to assume the role. Beside the fact that she never comes across as the same character (a difference in conception that goes beyond casting), the story’s focus has shifted to Henri (Piccoli again). He chases after the reluctant Séverine for most of the movie to invite her to a swank dinner, which she finally agrees to attend because she wants to discover whether he did in fact tell Pierre the truth 40 years earlier. As Henri pontificates to a young barman (Ricardo Trepa), he portrays Séverine as a masochist who became a sadist in order to work through her love for her husband. Yet it’s his own unacknowledged sadism and glib narcissism that dominate the story—even though Oliveira, judging by interviews, appears to think that the film is mainly about Séverine. One might even argue that some “civilized” form of misogyny is the main aristocratic attribute on display here, just as “civilized” xenophobia and/or misanthropy may be the key form of disdain in A Talking Picture (03), another star-laden production.
In sum, you might say that there’s some sort of joke at play in The Letter and Belle Toujours, but an extremely private one in both cases, and without a clearly demarcated punchline. Oliveira’s apparent remoteness from these characters (apart from his seeming complicity with Henri) and the audience creates a yawning distance that at times seems to define his method. There are plenty of attractive distractions along the way, such as the musical interludes in both films, e.g., the performance of the second and third movements of Dvorák’s Eighth Symphony at the Paris concert that opens Belle Toujours, where Henri first sights Séverine. But the fact that they often register as distractions rather than as essential narrative or nonnarrative forays is part of the problem.
It also won’t do to try to clinch any briefs on Oliveira’s behalf by pointing out that he’ll be a century old this coming December. This is impressive in its own right, and makes his ongoing productivity all the more remarkable—though he’s pointed out himself that it’s largely been his filmmaking that has been keeping him alive. Even so, this doesn’t automatically validate the work being produced, at least beyond proposing that he may actually have more to tell us about the 19th century than James Ivory. Like Oliveira’s celebrated early stints as a champion pole-vaulter, diver, and race-car driver, you might say that his age adds more to his legend than to any better understanding of his filmography. (Some Oliveira fans seem to value Christopher Columbus, The Enigma chiefly because Oliveira, as lead actor, can be seen driving a car in it. I suppose one could also relate Oliveira’s principal assertion in this 75-minute film—that Christopher Columbus was a Portuguese Jew—to John Malkovich’s theory in The Convent that Shakespeare was a Spanish Jew, but I’m happy to leave the elaboration of this cross-reference to others.)
The son of a prominent industrialist—the first Portuguese manufacturer of electric lamps—Oliveira was an athlete, film actor (who appeared in the first Portuguese talkie), and college dropout who also helped run his father’s factories and took over a farm inherited by his wife when he wasn’t trying to make movies. But even though he finished his first film—the documentary short Labor on the Douro River (31)—when he was 23, over a decade would pass before his first feature, then a whopping 21 years more before his second.
If he deserves to be regarded as a master—and I believe he does—his mastery belongs partially in an eccentric category of his own invention, comparable to that of Thelonious Monk as an idiosyncratic jazz pianist. And it’s a mastery of sound and image that took shape fairly early—even though, as a director of actors, his foregrounding of artificial styles of performance doesn’t always enhance the technical gifts of his players. A few of Oliveira’s films are worth seeing principally for their actors: Voyage to the Beginning of the World (97) offers Marcello Mastroianni’s last screen performance (as an Oliveira surrogate); the all-star cast of A Talking Picture includes Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich (in a hilarious turn as a charming if self-absorbed American cruise ship captain), Irene Papas, Stefania Sandrelli, and Leonor Silveira; Trepa’s best turn probably comes in the decorous but static The Fifth Empire, in which he plays clueless, despotic King Sebastian I (1544–78); and Michel Piccoli is especially fine in representing the joys and sorrows of getting old in I’m Going Home (01), perhaps the most accessible of Oliveira’s fiction films. But none of these are exactly characteristic.
Making my strongest claims for Doomed Love and Benilde isn’t likely to stir up many disputes. But this is partly because outside of scattered retrospective screenings, these features are almost impossible to see. Neither has ever been released on VHS or DVD anywhere in the world, and even if you want to try to track down Inquietude (98), which is nearly as good, you’ll have to settle for French subtitles if, like me, you don’t understand Portuguese.
The language barrier represents only one of many obstacles that stand between Oliveira and his audiences. A major strength of Randal Johnson’s recent book on the filmmaker, the first in English, is that it guides us through the features up through Belle Toujours and most of the 20 or so shorts and documentaries with all the essential contextual information, making it possible in many cases to follow the basic thrust of even those films that aren’t available on DVD with English subtitles. In this respect, besides being up to date, Johnson’s book has proved more useful than the five French books on Oliveira that I’ve acquired, all published between 1988 and 2002; in comprehensiveness, it’s topped only by the mammoth catalog produced for a tribute at the Torino Film Festival in 2000.
But certain other cultural barriers persist. No less formidable are issues involving class (Oliveira’s aristocratic background), political orientation (never directly stated in any of his films), the history of Portugal in the 20th century (especially the aforementioned dictatorship), and history in general (specifically, how one situates Oliveira, a 19th-century modernist, in relation to any particular period, past or present).
Indeed, another off-putting aspect of his career is its highly asymmetrical shape. He started out like Dreyer with an overall average of one feature per decade for half a century, then continued with about one feature per year ever since. It’s true that his initially sparse output can largely be attributed to the constraints of Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship, which lasted from 1926 to 1974, and that the fairly steady flow of work afterward can largely be attributed to the resourcefulness of Paolo Branco, who produced all of Oliveira’s films from Francisca in 1981 through The Fifth Empire in 2004. Yet the facts that Oliveira’s mastery as well as his modernism were firmly established in Benilde (75) and Doomed Love (78), before Branco came along, and that his near-annual output has continued since they parted company, only confirm that any simple cause-and-effect explanations of his unusual oeuvre are likely to be untrustworthy.
Let’s consider briefly the first three of these issues. (The fourth will be addressed a little later.) Despite some shared (and mutually avowed) cinematic influences, such as Bresson and Straub-Huillet, Oliveira and Pedro Costa might be said to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of Portuguese culture in terms of the respective milieus of most of their films—rich versus lumpen-proletarian. The working-class milieus of Oliveira’s first two features, Aniki-Bóbó (42) and Rite of Spring (63), and his subsequent A Caixa (“The Box,” 94), can’t of course be factored out. But these three features, which have practically nothing else in common with one another (and even less in common with any of Costa’s films), are all atypical of Oliveira’s work, comprising, respectively, a neorealist children’s film, a documentary following a rural Passion play (à la Flaherty, with deliberate restagings and re-creations), and an adaptation of a play loosely resembling Elmer Rice’s Street Scene.
The elusiveness and ambiguity of Oliveira’s politics may partly derive from survival tactics during a half-century of living under the repressive regime of Salazar’s Estado Novo (New State). But one can’t necessarily conclude from this that Oliveira was simply or only a victim of the Estado Novo, even if, like many others, he was briefly jailed at one point (as he mentioned when he visited Chicago in 2005). Johnson reports that the occupation of the Oliveira dry-goods factory in Porto by leftists during the 1974 revolution led to its eventual bankruptcy and Oliveira losing “almost all of his personal assets, including the house where he had resided since 1940.” The fact that both a conservative devout Catholic like Paul Claudel and a leftist atheist scamp like Buñuel belong to his personal pantheon only begins to suggest that whatever his political positions might be, they aren’t likely to be simple.
The same goes for Oliveira’s mixed credentials as an avant-gardist. It’s been a quarter of a century since I’ve seen his hour-long Nice—À Propos de Jean Vigo (83), clearly meant as an homage to Vigo’s half-hour 1930 À Propos de Nice, but I remember thinking later how strangely sedate and polite it all seemed as a tribute to a fire-breathing anarchist. My favorite Oliveira features are his most transgressive, yet I also have to admit that part of what makes each of them qualify as avant-garde is the way these various transgressions rub shoulders with diverse forms of propriety and repression—the sort of traits that used to be called square. But then again, the ultimate avant-garde act may be to undermine what we mean by avant-garde.
I’ve seen 26 of Oliveira’s 29 features to date. One of those that I haven’t seen, Memories and Confessions (82), is, according to Oliveira’s own instructions, to be screened publicly only after his death. (I wonder if it constitutes, among other things, a political confession; it’s also said to be about a house he’s lived in for years.) His longest feature, the 400-minute The Satin Slipper (85), I’ve managed to see most of, but under uniquely frustrating circumstances: at an Oliveira event held at Brown University in 1998, repeated breakdowns in the projection of a 35mm print led to the entire audience being forced to leave well before the end in order to attend an already-scheduled panel discussion about the film—a perfect example of bureaucratic obtuseness at its most dysfunctional. The other missing item for me is Past and Present (71), Oliveira’s third feature—and this isn’t counting his 20-odd shorts and documentaries, only five of which I’ve seen.
As hazardous and provisional as such an undertaking might be, I’d like to rank all his other features in descending order of preference, in order to establish both where I’m coming from and, in terms of my own defense of his work, where I’m going. I’ve seen roughly half these films more than once, but my memories are more vague about many others, so the order assigned to the final 10 is somewhat more arbitrary:
1. Doomed Love (1978)
2. Benilde or the Virgin Mother (1975)
3. Inquietude (1998)
4. Porto of My Childhood (2001)
5. My Case (1986)
6. Francisca (1981)
7. I’m Going Home (2001)
8. Rite of Spring (1963)
9. No, or the Vain Glory of Command (1990)
10. Day of Despair (1992)
11. Aniki-bóbó (1942)
12. Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997)
13. Magic Mirror (2005)
14. The Letter (1999)
15. A Talking Picture (2003)
16. Belle Toujours (2006)
17. The Cannibals (1988)
18. The Uncertainty Principle (2002)
19. Valley of Abraham (1993)
20. A Caixa (The Box) (1994)
21. The Convent (1995)
22. Word and Utopia (2000)
23. The Fifth Empire (2004)
24. Party (1996)
25. Christopher Columbus, the Enigma (2007)
26. The Divine Comedy (1991)
A few general points about these assessments:
(1) As far as I’m concerned, there is no “golden age” in Oliveira’s career—even
though what I take to be his supreme adaptations of prose fiction and theater, Doomed
Love and Benilde, occur relatively early on, and the superb and
pivotal modernist musical scores of João Paes, which play substantial roles in
Oliveira’s films of the Seventies and Eighties, no longer figure in his work
afterward. Nevertheless, masterpieces and less interesting or accomplished
films turn up in all periods.(2) Similarly, I can’t entirely privilege the
films in Portuguese over the films in French, or the adaptations (which
comprise most of his features) over the original scripts (such as Porto of
My Childhood and No, or the Vain Glory of Command), or the
adaptations of stories or novels over the adaptations of plays. In fact, two of
Oliveira’s boldest and most original films, the Portuguese Inquietude
and the French My Case, are derived from combining adaptations of
theater with adaptations of fiction, while the no less adventurous Porto of
My Childhood—an autobiographical documentary that could serve as an
excellent introduction to Oliveira’s work if it were more readily
available—freely draws on the resources of both theater and fiction.
My Case chiefly consists of three successive onstage adaptations of a frenetic 1957 one-act Portuguese farce translated into French, José Régio’s O Meu Caso, but it also manages to work in portions of Samuel Beckett’s Pour finir encore et autres foirades (a collection of stories known in the U.S. as Fizzles) and the Book of Job. Inquietude begins as another frenetic one-act Portuguese play (Helder Prista Monteiro’s 1968 The Immortals); it’s revealed to be a performance of the play taking place in Porto in the Thirties and attended by four characters adapted from António Patrício’s story “Suzy” (circa 1910). Then, one of these four characters in turn recounts to another the film’s third story, derived from Agustina Bessa-Luís’s haunting and magical 1971 fairy tale, The Mother of a River.
(3) While some commentators have tended to privilege the eight Oliveira features derived from or co-written by his novelist friend Bessa-Luís, I regard most of these as secondary, with the notable exceptions of Francisca and the third episode of Inquietude. Arguably no less important, and for me more interesting, is another writer friend of Oliveira’s, José Régio (1901–69), principally known as a poet, who wrote the plays Oliveira adapted in both Benilde and My Case as well as in The Divine Comedy (which also draws material from the Bible, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, but perversely ignores Dante) and The Fifth Empire (derived from Régio’s play El-Rei Sebastião, written only two years after Benilde). Although I’ve read nothing by either Bessa-Luís or Régio, I’ve mainly concluded, based on Oliveira’s adaptations, that Régio’s troubled existentialism and skepticism are far more fruitful and intriguing (at least from a dramatic standpoint) than Bessa-Luís’s congealed and conservative Jamesian ironies. But I also must confess that when I saw The Divine Comedy 17 years ago, I found it insufferably pretentious, hectoring, and dull; at their worst, Bessa-Luís’s stories seem boring and snooty, but I wouldn’t fault any of them for pretension or aggression. (Aggression, in fact, is what they sometimes appear to need the most. For me the most gratifying moment in Valley of Abraham occurs in the third hour, during a character’s interminable monologue about the decline of Western civilization, when another character suddenly lifts a purring cat from the heroine’s lap and flings it straight at the camera, as if to wake us all up.)
As suggested by the somewhat bewildering mix of materials in Inquietude that are drawn from 1910, 1968, and 1971, in a film set in the Thirties, the settings of Oliveira’s period films are sometimes difficult to date in relation to specific periods, apart from the specific periods of their major source materials (e.g., the late 16th and/or early 17th century for The Satin Slipper; the 17th century for Word and Utopia; and the 19th century for Doomed Love, Francisca, and the unjustly overlooked and underrated Day of Despair—the trilogy about novelist Camilo Castelo Branco). Along with such contemporary tales as I’m Going Home and Belle Toujours, The Letter provides a much clearer take on the 20th century than the eight films with Bessa-Luís, which for me often appear to exist in a kind of time warp arising from both the insularity and preciosity associated with wealth and the freezing of history typically found in totalitarian regimes.
(4) For a good many commentators, the 166-minute Francisca has eclipsed or supplanted the 262-minute, 16mm made-for-TV Doomed Love as Oliveira’s ultimate masterpiece about obsessive, unrequited love, perhaps to some extent because its distribution has been much wider. My preference for the earlier and longer film (explored in my criticism collection Placing Movies) has a lot to do with the evident superiority of its source material (widely regarded as one of the greatest of all Portuguese novels) and its exceptional theoretical interest as a workshop of ideas regarding cinematic literary adaptation—rivaled to my mind only by Greed. It’s a tribute to the epic staying power of Doomed Love that it survived even a recent showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that denied it an intermission, omitting an important element in its dramatic structure.
(5) The strident, over-the-top acting featured in My Case and in the production of The Immortals in Inquietude is in striking contrast to the distanciated underplaying more characteristic of Oliveira’s other films, which sometimes come across more as “representations” than as performances (especially in Doomed Love, Francisca, and The Satin Slipper). And for me, the most impressively acted of the films lying between these extremes is Benilde, which also boasts the most astonishing opening shot to be found in any Oliveira film.
Like the original opening of Touch of Evil, this shot appears behind the credits—with Paes’s bombastic, apocalyptic score, punctuated by manic screams and moans, accompanying a rapid, endless tracking shot that snakes and pans around the labyrinthine backstage spaces of Lisbon’s Tobis Studios until it finally arrives at and enters the film’s set, a room in the mansion where the play takes place. Then, as in Michael Snow’s Wavelength, the camera continues its journey all the way up to a framed photograph on a wall, in this case depicting a field, at which point the following title is superimposed: “The action of this film is supposed to take place in the 1930s.”
The wickedly and subtly subversive “supposed to” introduces a note of existential doubt that’s in fact central to Benilde—a film that indelibly captures the dread of living under totalitarian rule by following the same general approach adopted for Vichy France in Clouzot’s 1943 Le Corbeau and for Franco’s Spain in Bardem’s 1956 Calle Major: reformulating political oppression in sexual terms. The 18-year-old title heroine, living sequestered with her widowed father and a maid, has become pregnant, and since she’s an avowed virgin, she claims it’s an Immaculate Conception. But she also sleepwalks, while some of the other characters think that a crazed village outcast is somehow to blame. The remainder of the three-act play steadfastly refuses to confirm or refute either explanation. The remote setting, the spiritual ambiguity, the competing interpretations, the lighting and the mise en scène—all recall Ordet without the closing miracle. Instead, at the end we get a shortened and slowed-down reversal of the opening shot, making Benilde as much a theoretical statement about filmed theater as Doomed Love is about filmed literature.
But this shouldn’t imply that either masterpiece is any sort of formalist exercise; both are also claustrophobic hothouses of fierce meditation about ideological and spiritual as well as physical confinement. Benilde is a suffocating chamber piece, while Doomed Love, which opens with an iron gate swinging shut, emphasizes the bars in convent and prison alike. (The latter, incidentally, was inspired in part by a viewing of Straub-Huillet’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach—as we learn from Conversations avec Manoel de Oliveira, by Antoine de Baecque and Jacques Parsi, the best of the French books devoted to his work.)
Superficially, Benilde might be said to bear some thematic relationship to Magic Mirror (05), made 30 years later, about a wealthy woman (Leonor Silveira) determined to witness an apparition of the Virgin Mary. But in fact I’m more apt to view it in terms of contrast, offering another illustration of the arguable superiority of Régio’s existential skepticism over Bessa-Luís’s more conservative wit and irony. (More mannerist than Doomed Love, Francisca for me periodically founders on its surfeit of hollow and posturing banter, its silly aphorisms such as “Death is only a moral accident” and “If fatality was a woman, I would marry her.”)
The grandest claims to have been made for Oliveira, and in some respects the most persuasive, are those suggested by Raymond Bellour, in 1997. Bellour associates Oliveira’s name with the word “civilization” (“a word far greater than cinema, its life or death”), and continues, “Oliveira’s preoccupation is, to put it banally, the fate of the world, how to live and die, survive in harmony with the logic of an ancient and prestigious country, which was fortunate to discover the world when it was worth discovering, and the strange destiny of having in part escaped the worst conflicts of this century thanks to a cruel and miserable dictatorship. He is, I believe, the only filmmaker who knew how to tell, in a single film, the history of his country, from its founding through a melancholy myth up to the end of its empire (No, or the Vain Glory of Command).”
This accounts for the difficulty of Oliveira’s cinema as well as its importance and necessity—especially during a period when the fate of the world has been widely perceived to be a less pressing matter than the accumulation of wealth by a few individuals whose lack of interest in art is as conspicuous as their obsession with empire. As we return to what Eric Hobsbawm in my opening quote has described as barbarism from a 19th-century perspective, the civilized serenity of a broader view is bound to seem somewhat remote.
The author thanks Scott Foundas and Richard Peña.
TCMDB bio from Turner Movie Classics
Film Reference Manuel Dos Santos Fonseca, updated by Rob Edelman
Strictly Film
School Acquarello
Against the Grain: On the Cinematic Vision of Manoel de Oliveira Randal Johnson from Senses of Cinema
On the Uncertain Nature of Cinema (By Way of the Work of Manoel de Oliveira) by filmmaker Víctor Erice from Rouge, 2004
The Enigma of What Endures in Manoel de Oliveira's Belle toujours ... Nathaniel Drake Carlson from Cineaste, Summer 2008
BFI | Sight & Sound | Game for a century Jonathan Romney from Sight and Sound, December 2008
Manoel
de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica - Cinema Scope ... Michael Sicinski, Spring 2010, also seen from
The Academic Hack here: The Strange Case of
Angelica
Daily
| Manoel de Oliveira, 1908 - 2015 - Fandor
David Hudson, April 2, 2015
de Oliveira, Manoel They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
DOURO , FAINA FLUVIAL
aka: Hard Work on the River
Portugal
User comments from imdb: Author: sibisi73
from United Kingdom
Oliveira's first film, shot around the harbour in
Classic
Films Michael Sicinski from
the Academic Hack (September)
Didn’t
really want to include this one, since I honestly wasn’t that impressed with
it. But considering it’s an off-year, and the 35mm screening at
ANIKI-BÓBÓ
Portugal
Aniki-Bobo
Movie Overview (1942) from Channel 4 Film
One of the earliest
features by
User comments from
imdb Author: ruiresende84
(ruiresende84@mail.pt) from Porto , Portugal
Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest world poets, which happened to be
Portuguese, as the director of Aniki Bobó once said something like "No
children's book should be written for children". I apply this to cinema.
There's no sense in making children's movies completely empty of any idea, as
The Boston
Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]
DOOMED LOVE (Amor de
Perdição)
Portugal (261 mi) 1978
Doomed Love Dave Kehr from the Reader
Manoel de Oliveira's 265-minute adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's 19th-century romance contains virtually every word of the source novel, played out in perfect fidelity to the text. The result is a striking, eccentric film that finds its meaning in the rupture between a 20th-century medium and an antique rhetoric, measuring the passage of time through the modulations of human thought. A wealthy young man falls in love with the daughter of a rival aristocratic family; kept apart by their parents, the two lovers communicate through long, impassioned letters. Oliveira constructs a temple of words against a deliberately stiff, theatrical mise-en-scene, yet for all its abstraction, the film is astonishingly immediate and moving, driven by a prickly obsessiveness and a swooning romanticism.
NO, OR THE VAIN GLORY OF COMMAND
(‘Non’, ou A Vã Glória de Mandar)
Portugal Spain France
User comments imdb Author jpmota from
I had to see this film, it was about all I like: Portuguese History. It may
be one of the richest, in battles, glory, drama, myth... a small country with
the most amazing historical background (celts, Romans, sueves, Goths, Arabs,
francs...), a nation that could and would rule over the entire world for about
200 years without any opposition (from 1384 to 1583), the so-called Portuguese
Centuries! But Oliveira centers his movie around the Portuguese downfall, the
way
Synopsis: A group of Portuguese soldiers are on their way to the front at the war in Angola, in 1974. On the way, they discuss patriotism, nationalism, and colonialism in the context of Portuguese history. Flashbacks are used to illustrate Portugal's history. Although parts of this film are interesting, much of it is dry and even tedious. Rather disappointing; not as good as Manoel de Oliveira's last film.
The plot is very simple. A group of Portuguese soldiers are in Angola, in 1974. They are in the back of a truck which is driving them to the front lines, where they will join the battle against the guerillas fighting for an independent Angola. On the way, they have long discussions about Portugal's ancient history, its colonial period, and how nationalism and patriotism relate to colonialism and their history.
Flashbacks are used frequently to illustrate the Portuguese history the soldiers are discussing. Some of the flashbacks include: tribal chieftain Viriato, in Roman times; King Afonso and the dream of a combined Iberian Empire with Spain (12th Century); battles with the Moors in Africa. Most of the discussion centers on wars and colonial conquests, and the utter futility of it all, the "vain glory of command," of the film's title.
The story continues as the soldiers arrive in a staging area, where they await orders for field operations. The discussion and flashbacks continue, as the soldiers prepare for battle....
Although the film does convey a message -- the futility of colonialism and foreign military adventures, it does so in a dry, rambling, and slightly incoherent way. This was surprising and disappointing to me, as my expectations were rather high for this film. The last film by the Director, Manoel de Oliveira, was much better (THE CANNIBALS, a black humor parody of opera, in which a bunch of stuffy, pretentious opera singers accidentally engage in cannibalism).
Although the film was disappointing, it does have some good moments. Although some of the historical flashbacks are quite dry, there is one (far too brief) battle scene that looks like it was done by the Three Stooges. Also, one of the flashbacks deals with a visit of Portuguese explorers to an island populated with beautiful, naked nymphs and little cupids. That flashback is quite silly and illustrates Manoel de Oliveira's delightful (and slightly warped) sense of humor. My complaint is that there isn't enough of his wonderful humor in the film! Also, part of the soldier's discussion is interesting, though I suspect many viewers will find little of interest in their discussion.
Manoel de Olivieira, who is 83 years young, is currently working on his next film. I look forward to his next film with interest (to be released next year?). As for the current film, I think it might appeal to those with an interest in Portuguese history and/or modern perceptions of colonialism. I don't recommend it to a general audience -- instead, see if you can find de Olivieira's film THE CANNIBALS on video instead.
Strictly Film School Acquarello
The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
ABRAHAM’S VALLEY (Vale Abraão)
France Switzerland Portugal
This Portuguese
adaptation of Madame Bovary - or rather a poetic meditation on the novel
by Augustina Bessa-Luis - is encased in a hypnotic atmosphere, both melancholic
and tranquil. Ema (Silveira), orphaned at six, house-bound till 14, grows up in
a bourgeois family in the unchanging vine-terraced Duoro valley. She's slightly
lame, but possesses a beauty which is 'exuberant and therefore dangerous'.
Despite a taste for luxury, she marries a doctor who depends on her 'like a
worm on soil'. She's twice unfaithful, but her only close bond is with a mute
servant. In a world where 'the pleasures of hypocrisy exceed those of love',
her spirit must die. Subtle, elegant, enigmatic, this movie by the veteran
Oliveira exercises a powerful grip. Oliveira's style is hard to categorise (the
director began making films in 1931): the timelessness of the modern-day
setting, where the Lotuses and Maseratis seem so incongruous, is reminiscent of
Resnais, but the languorous acting echoes the satiric irony of late Buñuel and
the secretive minimalism of Bresson.
User comments from imdb Author: valadas from Caldas da Rainha, Portugal
Well the
resemblance of the plot with the Flaubert's novel is very superficial after
all. This is much more than a story of bourgeois adultery. It's the story of an
intelligent and sensitive young woman brought up in the frame of the society of
mid-20th century northern Portugal in an atmosphere of bigotry and social
stagnation who marries a man she does not love and whose life has no way out.
The plot develops itself in old rural mansions under the eyes of a silent
witness, the deaf-and-dumb servant Ritinha who sees everything and understands
everything without speaking or intervening by any means but forming with Ema
the main character, a strong union of love and mutual understanding. The visual
images develop themselves in a slow poetic movement which is Oliveira's
favourite. The scenery however, is beautifully located in the Portuguese river
Douro one of the most beautiful rivers in the world.
User comments from imdb Author: Marc from Buenos Aires, Argentina
"Abraham's Valley" may be the
most extraordinary achievement for Portuguese cinema, and puts Manoel de
Oliveira on a level with the world's greatest directors who were equally able
to create an unmistakably personal style on their exploration of the human
condition. I agree with the first commentator that one cannot speak of an
adaptation of Flaubert's novel, but it should also be pointed out that de
Oliveira – maybe comparable to Robert Bresson's film versions of Dostoyevsky –
conveys the theme into his very own perception of the world, and leaves behind
the source in his search for the profound depths of it to create something
likewise outstanding, like only a true genius can. The rigid and formal
aestheticism which de Oliveira had been developing in more than 60 years as a filmmaker
transcends into a perfect composition, which owns a lot to the original marvel
of static shots in early silent cinema and the eclectic rigours of Dreyer and
Straub/Huillet, so that the few times the camera actually moves it creates an
amazing effect on the viewer. The antique decoration as well as spellbinding
landscapes of the Portuguese valley reshape the baroque feeling of
"Abraham's Valley", a film which is guided by an omniscient voice
over but nonetheless always centering around the stunning beauty of main
actress Leonor Silveira. Alongside Béla Tarr's "Sátántangó" and
Edward Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day" this might be the greatest
masterpiece of the 90s, but since the critical world still doesn't seem to be
willing to give credit to Portuguese films which doesn't star international
actors one might just be lucky to catch this film during a retrospective in
some hidden cinematheque.
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Ema (Leonor Silveira), the beautiful daughter of a rich Portuguese businessman, is married off to a doctor whom she doesn't love. Although she stays with him and has two daughters, she takes a succession of lovers to fill the void inside her, but still feels essentially alone.
The veteran Oliveria's three-hour epic, with its overt
references to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, is an odd duck of a movie. It takes
place in the 20th century, with automobiles and references to the upheavals in
Portugal in the 1970s, but its style, tone, and thematic concerns are decidedly
19th century. Most unusual is the use of voice-over - this is perhaps the most
extensive use of a narrator in a fiction film to date. The urbane, omniscient
voice is something of a character itself - what we are shown enacts what we
have been told, or sometimes subtly comments on it - and this technique takes
some getting used to. I can't say that it's a complete success - at times it
seems pretentious - but the union of image with the old-fashioned literary
style of the word began to grow on me during the film's second half.
Oliveira treats the film like a novel. The main story is
like a river with many tributaries (the picture in fact takes place around a
beautiful river in the titular valley) that explore different characters and
themes, and include intellectual discussions on topics political and spiritual,
as well as amusing glimpses into the sexual mores and hypocrisies of the
Portuguese upper class.
The director's serene style, with its careful attention to
the passage of time, does create the full-bodied impression of a big novel.
Silveira is stunning in the lead role, while the rest of the cast is of
variable quality, with one standout being Luís Lima Barreto as one of Ema's
rich admirers.
On the whole, Abraham's Valley cannot fail to impress as a
rich expression of the director's personal vision. Its central theme is the
tragedy of women having their self-worth defined as being admired by men. Ema
internalizes what she is taught, so that she becomes trapped by her own need to
be considered desirable, no matter what the cost.
It's a huge, beautiful, flawed motion picture, alternately
graceful and awkward, composed with very few moving shots, yet taking great
risks with its narrative technique. Vanguard's recent DVD release, however,
apparently doesn't get the image ratio quite right, so until someone takes the
trouble to do it correctly, you'll just have to put up with the annoyance, or
hope the film pops up at a festival near you.
DVD
Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review
[1/5]
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
The Boston
Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THE
CONVENT (O Convento)
Portugal France
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
In which eccentric veteran Oliveira
transcends wackiness and achieves utter tosh.
Portugal had one of the more obscure cinema industries on the European continent. This is somewhat easy to explain due to that country's cinema being always in the shadow of their big Iberian neighbour. This state of affairs, however, is not going to change if more of Portuguese films turn out to be like O CONVENTO, 1995 drama directed by Manoel de Oliveira.
The plot deals with Matthew Padovic (played by John Malkovich), American professor who wants to prove his hypothesis about William Shakespeare being Spanish of Jewish descent. Some of the evidence might be hidden in the isolated Portuguese monastery. Padovic decides to go there, accompanied by his wife Helene (played by Catherine Denevue). There he is greeted by sinister-looking guardian Baltar (played by Luis Miguel Cintra) who quickly begins hitting on Helene, while Padovic must deal with the presence of beautiful assistant Piedade (played by Leonor Silveira).
Intriguing premise and two great actors - Malkovich and Denevue - are only two good things about O CONVENTO. The movie had misfortune of being directed by Manoel de Oliveira, man who used to make movies for more than sixty years. Unlike other octogenarians who defied their age while making films, de Oliveira defied any idea of making this film comprehensible to anyone but himself. The result is complete mess - film that meanders between genres of drama and Satanic horror. Many of the scenes are poorly lit, while the soundtrack, consisting of Stravinsky and other examples 20th Century classical music, irritates the audience instead of creating any sort of atmosphere. O CONVENTO runs for merely 90 minutes, but for those who must sit through that experiences, those 90 minutes would look like eternity. Whenever someone wants the example of the "art film" at its worst, O CONVENTO would serve this purpose quite nicely.
SF,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5]
Richard Scheib
American professor Michael Padovik and his French wife Helene
arrive at a convent in Portugal. Padovik is seeking evidence in the convent’s
library for his thesis that Shakespeare was Spanish. He is attracted to the
beautiful and pure-hearted librarian Piedade. The curator Baltar, who also
claims to be The Devil, tries to seduce the irritated Helene. But she demands
that he prove his professed love by disposing of Piedade.
The Convent is a
variation on the Faust story. At
least it might be. It is really very hard to tell what it is meant to be about.
Certainly Goethe’s Faust figures
prominently and passages of it are read throughout. The swarthy Luis Miguel
Cintra hovers sinisterly in the background and at one point claims to be The
Devil, although there is no way of telling if this is meant literally or not.
There’s an innocent soul – the piercingly beautiful and virtuous Leonora
Silveira – who appears to come to a tragic end. But beyond that not much is
clear.
What appears to happen is that John Malkovich’s wife (Catherine Deneuve) makes
some sort of diabolic agreement with Cintra to be rid of Silveira whom
Malkovich is attracted to. We see a scene where Silveira tells Cintra she
desires him rather than Malkovich but then she runs away to a part of the
forest Cintra has earlier told Deneuve contains an abyss. He yells after her
and the scene then cuts to a later point where Silveira has vanished. Whether
the abyss was real or allegorical is left unclear. The film reaches an
ambiguously happy ending with Malkovich and Deneuve walking off down the beach
arm in arm, apparently reconciled, maybe due to Deneuve’s diabolical contract
with Cintra, then again maybe not. The end credits spell the vagueness and
ambiguity of it all out with the statement that their bodies were found burned
in the forest, although there were also reports that they were found living in
Paris, although just as equally the word of the observing fisherman cannot be
trusted.
The French cultural critic Jean Beaudrillard made the observation that the
ultimate postmodernist building would be one that has no entrances. By like
analogy the ultimate postmodernist film would surely be one that tells a story
that operates on a set of rules that are never conveyed to the audience. The Convent is very much that. The plot is all
loose ends and uncertain metaphors that never cohere into a clear direction or
any overall roadmap. This sort of thing can often be utterly pretentious but
here it proves somewhat fascinating. Director Manoel de Oliveira invests the
landscape and the grounds of the decaying convent with a brooding
mysteriousness. His camera focuses on empty landscape far longer than is
necessary for mere scenography, as though if we look at bleak stretches of
beach long enough we might find some meaning in them. There is an intensive
violin score, which adds much.
Movie Magazine International review Michael Fox
Steve Rhodes review [0.5/4] the pacing is atrocious, scenes drag by at a glacial speed
Film Scouts (Henri Béhar) capsule review
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [1/5] No place is safe from this movie
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [1.5/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
VOYAGE
TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD (Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo)
Portugal France
Manoel de Oliveira
was born in 1908 and made his first movie in 1929. It's no surprise then that
this 1997 production feels like an old man's film. Manoel, a Portuguese
director (Mastroianni), revisits childhood haunts on a pilgrimage with his
actors and collaborators, Afonso (Gautier), Judite (Silveira) and
Film
Scouts (David Sterritt) capsule
review
I've gotten into a tiff or two over de Oliveira's picture,
which I find much stronger in its second half than in its first. The opening
scenes chronicle an automobile trip into
Boxoffice Magazine review Ed Scheid
"Voyage to the Beginning of the World" ("Viagem Ao Principio Do Mundo") contains the 171st film appearance by Marcello Mastroianni, notable because it's the last of his many memorable performances before his death in December of last year. Mastroianni's character here is very similar to Manoel de Oliveira, the film's 88-year-old writer/director. Both have the same profession, the same first name and wear a similar floppy-brimmed hat.
Alfonso (Jean Yves Gautier) is a French actor with a role in a
Franco-Portuguese co-production. His dead father was originally from
Providing a depth the rest of the film lacks, Mastroianni's
performance shows the remarkable range of his talent. He is full of charm while
bantering in the car with a young actress (Leonor Silveira). Close-ups show
Mastroianni's face full of deep emotion and warmth as the director remembers
events from his past. He even makes a face full of childish delight at a
stuffed cat. But the main storyline, of the actor investigating his Portuguese
roots, is too slight to maintain much interest when Mastroianni is not
onscreen. Part of the reason is that the script doesn't develop the other
characters on the journey, and much of de Oliveira's directorial style consists
of a repetitious combination of conversations in the car and shots of the road
as if viewed from the back window.
Nostalgia
for the Real: Manoel de Oliveira and Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo zunguzungu,
The program for the Manoel de Oliveira series at the PFA speaks of that hundred year old director–still active, amazingly–as the “dean” of Portuguese cinema, yet hurries from that statement to another, more interesting one, asserting that “Portugal could never lay sole claim to him: like Louis Bunuel and Raul Ruiz, he is a major European film stylist. He belongs to cinema.” By the end of the paragraph, too, the writer has returned to this point, reasserting that “Again, he belongs to cinema.”
I’m fascinated whenever it feels like a writer or speaker is putting a somehow excessive emphasis on a seemingly banal point, when the lady protests too much. After all, who is the writer arguing against? Who is denying that he belongs to “cinema”? Why is that being the “dean of Portuguese cinema” has to be so quickly qualified and neutralized and why is it so necessary to establish that he’s still one of us? Why would being Portuguese be incompatible with belonging to cinema, and why does the writer compare him to people like Bunuel and Ruiz? Why don’t I stop with the rhetorical questions and just say what I think?
The answer, I think, is that Portugal’s position within Europe (and within modernity) is different than France’s, as the first film of the series–Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo / Voyage to the Beginning of the World–sets out to illustrate. Half of it is in French, mainly consisting of sparkling philosophical banter amongst a troupe of television people, and the other half is in Portuguese, as these television people try to communicate with a bunch of old farmers in a tiny Portuguese village. As we were walking out, I delighted myself with the thought that it’s a European version of Deliverance: nothing like Deliverance–because Deliverance is an extremely American film–but having in common a journey into a place defined as the “past,” and the problem of communicating with the strange savages who inhabit that past. That the American version features anal rape and manly men in boats while the European version highlights existential self-loathing in bad mustaches only firms up my confidence in the parallel, and my conviction that I have discovered the key to all cinematic mythologies.
So here’s what happens: three actors and their director are on
his way to a location shooting in
Deliverance, too, is about the death of an “old” way of life: the river they paddle down is due to be destroyed by a TVA dam, so that hydro-electrification can bring progress. And, like the hicks in Deliverance, this old woman has a particular but barely explained antipathy to the outside: not only does she hate TV, she speaks with a poignant distaste for the ways that, by fleeing to the cities, the “old” ways are being left behind. So, as the film ends, we are left with an unanswered question: will the TV actor return with his brother Yves? Or will he prove all of his aunt’s prejudices against the “new” right?
The film’s final shot is the actors standing in a dressing room, resplendent in their period costumes–apparently they’re putting on the Portuguese version of How Green Was My Valley–and you just know, looking at them, that there’s no way any of them are going back. The silly nostalgia for “authenticity” that they are performing for television is from the same script that made it so hard for them to understand what the old woman was trying to tell them back in the village. As she talked about his father, she kept telling him variations on the same story: how he came to leave the village. Afonso is unsatisfied, wanting to know about his father’s life here, but she only shakes her head, refusing to tell he: there is no “here,” here anymore. TV has destroyed it, and the departure of young people. I don’t think he quite gets this, but–just like when she bitterly complains that the EEC has ruined the local economy by taking away smuggling as a business opportunity–it’s a remarkable piece of social theory: under globalization, being “local” isn’t about adhering to a static and authentic past, but an identity constructed by being left behind.
So it’s funny that, as in the film, Manoel de Oliveira gets defined not as merely Portuguese, but as a purveyor of Portugueseness for a global audience, an origin redefined by the function its interpellated into. Like the old woman in the village, his identity as local gets constructed not in opposition to the global, but through it. Like hers, it’s an identity constructed out of nostalgia for a real that not only never existed then, but only exists now because of the ways that nostalgia creates it. How green was my valley, indeed.
Senses of Cinema (Wheeler Winston Dixon) review August 2005
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Apollo Movie Guide [Rachel Sanders]
The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
ANXIETY B+ 92
aka: Inquietude
Portugal
Working with cinematographer Renato Berta, shot on location in Portugal and Madrid, the film is a triptych, adapting 3 literary works into 3 episodes, and is a very slowly evolving work revealing the pace and subject of aging, beginning with Prista Monteiro’s one act play “The Immortals.” The father is a respected doctor, the son a respected writer, and using a methodology of theater of the absurd, the elderly, spiteful father urges his son to commit suicide as the only means to obtain immortality. He is obsessed with driving him there, eventually taking matters into his own hands, with some clever use of his walking stick after asking his son to straighten out some curtains next to an open window.
The second story is Antonio Patricio’s “Suzy,” which follows four characters attending a play in the 1930’s, where two rich playboys pick up a couple of beautiful women, one becomes obsessed with the beauty of a long-suffering prostitute “Suzy,” and spends endless moments talking in restaurants about women with his friend, which features the monotonous, recurring refrain, “poor Suzy.” This section was reminiscent of Fassbinder’s THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), particularly in its use of dramatic backdrops, which provides extraordinary expression in an otherwise minimalist, emotionally spare piece, the highlight of which is a dance sequence in the restaurant between the director and his wife.
The long conversation from the second episode evolves into the third, as one recounts a story to the other, a tale within a tale, Agustina Bessa-Luís’s “The Mother of the River,” which is beautifully filmed outdoors in an elegant, dream-like fantasy. Irene Pappas is an ancient river nymph, the river’s mother. When a young, dreamy country girl comes to ask her advice, discovering she has fingers made of gold, the nymph recites ancient Greek poetry to express the King Midas-like imagery of magic and illusion.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review (original link lost, the lengthier review is no longer available)
Now pushing 90, Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira
is our oldest living film master, which makes it all the more astonishing that
he's averaged one feature a year for the past decade. He's best known in the
Jonathan Rosenbaum's favorite of the year Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Best Films of 1998 from the Reader
1.
Inquietude.
I prefer the French and Portuguese title of this three-part
feature--which my dictionary defines as "disturbed state"--to its
English title, Anxiety. But whatever you call it, Manoel de Oliveira's
masterpiece offers so many lingering beauties and profundities that even after
three viewings I feel I've barely scratched the surface. (Also, because the New
York film festival passed on it, it's one of the few major foreign films of
1998 that received a U.S. screening only in Chicago.) It features no stars
(excepting Irene Papas in the third episode), and few mainstream critics are
liable to support it, so its odds of getting an American distributor are just
about nil. But one way or another, I'm sure, it will find its way back to Chicago
De Oliveira, who celebrated his 90th birthday last month, is the only director working today who started out in the silent era, and while his modernist and aristocratic sensibility is steeped in the 19th century, there's nothing old-fashioned about his work. For Inquietude he daringly combines a one-act play (Prista Monteiro's The Immortals) and two stories (Antonio Patricio's "Suzy" and Agustina Bessa-Luis's "The Mother of the River") into a single narrative: the characters in "Suzy" attend a performance of the play, and one of them recounts to another "The Mother of the River." The theme of existential identity links the three works, and de Oliveira's stately, reflective style fuses them into a seamless and luminous visual poem. Comparable in its achievement only to de Oliveira's Doomed Love (1978), this can't be written off simply as a "testament" that sums up an illustrious career; de Oliveira is currently working on an adaptation of La princesse de Cleves, and he may well have other major films up his sleeve. Indeed, though The Immortals ponders the issues of old age, de Oliveira refuses the conventional pose of the old master looking back on his life and career with equanimity; Inquietude, a masterpiece with irreverent wit, ironic bite, and anger over the vagaries of self-definition, has the decanted authority of Carl Dreyer's Gertrud and the imaginative splendor of The Arabian Nights.
THE
LETTER (La Lettre) A- 93
Spain Portugal France
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
This distinctly odd version of the
classic novel The Princess of Clèves, from Portuguese director Manoel
de Oliveira (b. 1908), falls between a rather studied literalism and a
woebegone updating. The chaste wife (Mastroianni) is here wooed by real-life
rock singer Pedro
Abrunhosa, who to non-Portuguese may well seem an utter prat. Some reckon
the film is intentionally funny, but this writer's in the larger camp that
considers it misconceived and out of touch. (See also La Fidélité).
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The great 91 year-old Portuguese director Manoel de
Oliveira returns to the festival with The Letter, an adaptation of a 300
year-old novel set in modern-day France. Chiara Mastroianni (Marcello's
daughter) stars as a lovely French woman who marries a doctor and then falls in
love with a Portuguese pop star (played by Portuguese pop star Pedro Abrunhosa)
but never cheats. As usual, Oliveira exerts a masterly control over his pacing
and compositions, juxtaposing wild emotions with still surfaces, and still
keeps the movie breezy by explaining away huge chunks of the novel during
intertitles. It's a brilliant work.
The Letter Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader
This doesn't approach the achievement of Manoel de
Oliveira's previous feature, Inquietude, the highlight of last year's festival
and my favorite film of 1998. But the 34th film of
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
Luminous and impassive, radiating a mysterious sadness from her wide brown eyes and chiseled Aubrey Beardsley lips, Chiara Mastroianni is more than an image of virtue in Manoel de Oliviera's film ''The Letter.'' In this Portuguese director's contemporary update of the 17th-century French novel ''La Princesse de Cleves'' by Madame de Lafayette, she is the apotheosis of the sort of fervent morality that is the private domain only of saints and fools.
Her character, Catherine de Cleves, is a beautiful, deeply
unhappy woman who torments herself with questions about loyalty, virtue, honor
and trust that may have been vital issues in Roman Catholic France three
centuries ago but that today hardly anybody anywhere bothers to ask. And in
relocating the story from 1678 (when the book, considered to be the first great
French novel, was published) to contemporary
Would a sophisticated Parisian doctor upon learning that his wife has been pining for another man with whom she has never slept (and never will sleep) allow himself literally to waste away from jealousy and a broken heart? Not in this day and age. But in Mr. de Oliviera's raw spiritual allegory of the war between the flesh and spirit and the destructive consequences of one woman's extreme goodness and honesty, that is exactly what happens.
Those familiar with the director's earlier films shouldn't be surprised by such flagrant anachronisms. In a way they are the point.
In contemplating the eternal versus the temporal, he cuts directly to the chase. His characters may wear modern dress, but they're still caught up in the moral and religious issues of an earlier time. ''The Letter,'' like his other recent films, repeatedly and pointedly juxtaposes the flimsy modern world with images (especially heroic sculptures) that betoken an older, more permanent idea of Western civilization and Christian aspiration.
Temptation appears to Catherine in the person of a Portuguese pop singer, Pedro Abrunhosa (playing himself), an enigmatic, Mephistophelean figure with a face full of stubble who affects black sunglasses and designer hip-hop fashions. When they first meet at a party, Catherine is contentedly married to a handsome doctor (Antoine Chappey), whom everyone believes to be her perfect match. But a spark is struck between the beautiful young matron and the free-spirited singer. For the rest of the film she struggles to resist a passion that she confesses first to a childhood friend (Leonor Silveira) in a convent and later (as a sign of her virtue) to her husband.
The doctor is blissfully unaware of his wife's love for another man until they are watching television, and she involuntarily cries out at the news that Pedro has been injured in an accident. Even after her husband dies and she is free to marry Pedro, she avoids him, eventually taking the most extreme, self-mortifying measures to assuage her guilt.
It isn't until the end of the film, when her confidante reads a long letter from Catherine, who has disappeared, that the movie makes its case for an absolute morality along with a fierce asceticism. ''The Letter'' tacitly endorses a view that the ultimate purpose of human life is neither happiness nor perpetuation of the species but engagement in an agonizing struggle toward an impossible moral perfection measured against eternity.
The Letter: Eurovision and the Aesthetic of Silence David Melville from Senses of Cinema
Mike D'Angelo capsule review
Variety (David Stratton) review
I’M GOING HOME (Je rentre à la maison) B+ 92
France Portugal
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Thanks to the dependably marvellous
Piccoli, this heartfelt but slim, slightly predictable and sometimes silly
study of an actor in his twilight years manages to hold the attention
throughout, despite longueurs as we see him on stage and in rehearsal (for, obviously,
The King Is Dead and The Tempest and, very implausibly, as Buck
Mulligan - to be sûr! - in a Malkovich movie of Ulysses). The
film has its moments - the sudden news that he's lost almost his entire family
in an accident, some gentle comedy with café tables, Piccoli's expression as
make-up is applied - but without the actor's charm, warmth, expertise and sheer
presence, the pickings would be slim.
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home might
have made a fitting swan song for the 93-year-old director if he weren't still
so spry; unlike his main character, the filmmaker obviously has more work to
do. After a performance in Ionesco's Exit the King, Gilbert Valence (the
great Michel Piccoli) discovers that his entire family (minus his grandson) has
been killed in a car crash. He is an aging actor, friendly to his admirers (he
is frequently seen signing autographs) and careful when making important choices.
Gilbert's decision-making (to buy or not to buy a pair of shoes, to take or
decline a role in an action-packed American film) suggests a willingness to
overcome his overwhelming sense of loss, except he doesn't know how. Though he
takes risks, he discovers that comfort lies in that which is familiar. Too
young for a role in the aforementioned action film and too old for the part of
Buck Mulligan in a screen adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses (directed
by John Malkovich's John Crawford), Gilbert not only becomes a victim of
typecasting but a slave to his mortality. Staring at a Jack Vettriano painting
depicting dancing lovers, Piccoli profoundly evokes Gilbert's sense of loss and
remorse. On the Exit the King stage, a character says of Gilbert's King
Berenger: "His majesty the king is raving." Like his Berenger,
Gilbert is seemingly convinced that his power is intact. Gilbert busies himself
after the death of his family (he buys the shoes, he takes the part in the
film) as if to return to normalcy. Tragically, Gilbert's shoes are stolen and
he soon finds himself struggling through his demanding English role in Ulysses.
Oliveira's compositions engage silent film idiom to glorious effect, and the
story itself unravels like a great silent work with a haunting open ending.
However sad, Oliveira suggests that there is no place like home and certainly
no better place to die.
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
"I'm Going Home" is a quiet, closely
observed study in the small ways people accommodate big things. It's about an
elderly man living in
Michel Piccoli plays Gilbert Valence, a famous French actor whom we meet onstage, performing a searing death scene in the Ionesco play "Exit the King." It's a tour de force of hammy bathos, a real star turn: He nails it, as do his co-stars (who include an actress played by Catherine Deneuve). De Oliveira films much of the scene from backstage, where we later see the actors waiting for their curtain calls with bored resignation: It's just another day in the theater. But then Gilbert receives a message that his wife, daughter and son-in-law have just died in a car accident.
If this were a
As he proves in the extraordinarily bold first
sequence, during which the scene from the Ionesco play is filmed virtually in
its entirety, de Oliveira is not afraid to take risks in "I'm Going
Home." He'll often film Gilbert from behind a pane of glass, the front of
a boutique or the facade of his neighborhood cafe, through which we see but
don't hear the actor speaking with people. An amazing amount of information is
communicated during these passages, as the nuances of expression and gesture
reveal the man behind the words. The visual style also conveys the rhythm of
Gilbert's day, as he strolls placidly down the
"I'm Going Home" is a flâneur of a movie, unhurried and alert as it limns the patterns of Gilbert's cheerful, yet unmistakably mournful, routine. You get the sense that he can't keep up appearances much longer, and he doesn't. But even as "I'm Going Home" reaches its crisis point, what's gone before doesn't seem like denial as much as the quiet heroics of the last civilized man.
I'm Going Home Gerald Peary
There's no cinema-producing
country in the world with less of a popular tradition than Portugal
I'm Going Home, shot in 2000 when
Oliviera was a robust 92 (he's maybe 94 now) is typical fare in some ways,
i.e., beginning, without any set-up or explanation, deep in a stage production
of Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King. A 13-minute sequence from an obscure
absurdist drama, and Catharine Deneuve appears here and never again! But then
the movie becomes normal (mostly), moving, and wise. It's one of the most
accessible, and endearing, movies in Oliviera's seventy-plus years of film
directing.
Actually, even that cutting from
Exit the King, though brazenly indulgent, has resonance for what happens
afterward. Ionesco's dottering ruler admits he knows nothing of life, then
announces impulsively that he wants everyone in his kingdom to have his image
before them. O vanity! Soon, the morally blind stage character and the actor
playing him, Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli), separate. As the
play-within-a-movie finally ends, Valence Valence
Valence Valence Eiffel
Tower
What also counts is making art,
the real kind, the right kind. Oliviera, who has never compromised his own
vision, wants the same for Valence
But he says "no" again
when his eager-beaver agent tries to talk him into a lucrative action TV
serial. Valence
That's where the title kicks in,
an epiphanic decision: "I'm going home."
It's a moment close to the heart
of Michel Piccoli, the amazing French actor so simple, so sublime, as Valence Cannes Valence
"I chose a child I saw for
the very first time as his grandson," Oliviera piped in. "I chose
Piccoli because he's an actor with a lifetime of experience. I'm more and more
excited about a long life of experience. Still, he's a youngster next to
me." At that, Oliviera, who honestly looks about 65, laughed uproariously.
Piccoli, born in 1925, agreed.
"I can't do the math, but I could perhaps be Mr. Oliviera's son."
What's so special for Piccoli
about acting for Oliviera? "There's a great deal of intimacy and
closeness. He is a man who has a kind of diabolic authority and a perverse
authority. At the same time he's an enormous joker. How is it that Deneuve and
Malkovich accept a part on two days notice? Because they have a loyalty to this
mysterious man."
A journalist had to ask the
obvious: the secret of these spry ancient gentlemen, actor and director, about
holding back aging.
Piccoli: "I don't want to
get old. One has to become more and more radical."
Oliviera: "You must ask the
Lord in heaven."
indieWIRE review Scott Foundas
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [4.5/5]
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
VideoVista review Paul Higson
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
CineScene.com (Josh Timmermann) review
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh
PopMatters Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [2/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Boxoffice Magazine review Ed Scheid
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [4/5]
Camera Journal (Cambridge) Paul Sutton
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman
I'm Going Home Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
BBC Films review Neil Smith
The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey
The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle (Carla Meyer) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
PORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD (Porto da Minha Infância) B- 80
aka: Oporto of My Childhood
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Manoel de Oliveira's 2001 masterpiece explores the
Portuguese city where he's lived for more than 90 years, though it concentrates
on the first 30 or so. It's remarkable for its effortless freedom and grace in
passing between past and present, fiction and nonfiction, staged performance
and archival footage (including clips from two of his earliest films, Hard
Work on the River Douro and Aniki-Bobo) while integrating and
sometimes even synthesizing these modes. He's mainly interested in key images,
music, and locations from the Eden
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Sundance Channel’s tribute to mercurial Portuguese auteur
Manoel de Oliveira is a VCR alert for anyone who missed the
Manoel de Oliveira Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE (O Princípio da Incerteza) B 88
Portugal France
Parlor games of the
morose, super-rich, who, in true de Oliveira style, sleepwalk through this
film, bored and listless with life and themselves, who have nothing better to
do than turn on one another in true melodramatic fashion. A similar
comedy of manners style of story was done to much better effect by Fassbinder
in CHINESE ROULETTE (1976), but here, it’s almost as if the characters were
lifted out of the dreamscape of the Sokurov film, as there was plenty of art
work on display here in this film as well, beautifully filmed by Renato Berta,
who spends much of his time in dark interiors, but particularly the repeated
scenes out the window of a moving train, always accompanied by this frenzied
violin that goes up and down the scales like the devil himself was playing,
always finding a triumphant final high note.
This served a purpose of making sure you stayed awake. This film continues the ANXIETY (1998) feel
of two men sitting at a table discussing things that no one in normal
conversation ever discusses, but this is the norm for de Oliveira, so it starts
out with an abnormally slow, languid pace, slower than watching paint dry, but
if I’m not mistaken, the uncertainty principle was a pointed reference to
whether the bride was actually a virgin or not.
In this emotional vacuum, a few hilarious moments appear out of nowhere,
so while people are stabbing one another in the back, they always act so civilized
about it. Ahhh, the sense and
sensibilities of the Europeans!
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A typically eccentric, playful post-post-modern account of dynastic and
domestic intrigue involving a seemingly pure heroine, her wealthy husband, his
childhood friend the maid's son (who has always loved the girl), and his
friend, a seductive and seemingly Machiavellian brothel madame. If that sounds
complex, it's as nothing compared to the ludicrously ornate opening exegesis
(complete with speculation on bizarre nicknames) offered by two men on the
fringes of what little action there is - mostly the film comprises static,
stylised tableaux of often impenetrable talk. Then there are the endless,
minimally varied shots of the
filmcritic.com (Rachel Gordon) review [2/5]
Social class, prideful
martyrdom, and a dollop of beautifully expansive landscape weave a tale of
operatic proportions, both by plot and physically exhaustive standards, in
veteran Manoel de Oliveira’s latest exploration of motivation. Marrying for money
instead of childhood love, Camila (Leonor Baldaque) naïvely assumes the
supposed epic and selfless attributes of Joan of Arc to deal with her husband’s
infidelity and the consistent treatment of being irrelevant to the very people
that encouraged the doomed match.
When The Uncertainty Principle isn’t relishing placing Camila within the
bleakly lush settings of her prison, it takes the time to humorously discuss
philosophical ideas with an energy that keeps character interaction enjoyable.
It can never be fully surmised if Camila’s passivity is an effort at provoking
guilt out of those in her environment or if she is internalizing some imagined
voice emanating from the cobwebbed statue she visits frequently, so her erratic
impulses are continually amusing. Also well executed is the slowly mounting,
subtly-played tension between her lifelong crush Jose (Ricardo Trêpa) and
apathetic husband Antonio (Ivo Canelas) for the possible fate of the woman they
share.
Unexpectedly, the source of Antonio’s adultery is a missed opportunity in the
amount of time she is given to communicate with others. Vanessa (Leonor
Silveira) seems to be grasping at the last of her possibilities at
respectability. She has a truly unique struggle of balancing the grudging
feelings she has for an ungrateful married man and wanting to protect the
immature princess that shares his home. Combine this with the fact that she has
money and connections because she runs a brothel… but will never surpass
Camila’s rank despite her extra life experience and Camila’s forced
provincialism. The few moments that pit the two women together are pricelessly
biting satire.
But while some of the emotional uproars are stunning, or even hilarious, it
takes so long to build to those climaxes that it’s easy to let your eyes close
for a few minutes and still not miss much of importance. Several conversations
repeat themselves, and the additional scenes of the Roper brothers as Camila’s
previous tutors serve no other purpose than to over-extend an already lengthy story.
Though excessively tiresome, The Uncertainty Principle, as verbally
pretentious as the title may be, has its handful of redeeming features, as long
as you discount its ability to bore.
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Variety (Deborah Young) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
A TALKING PICTURE (Um Filme Falado) B- 81
Portugal France Italy
Certainly a
filmmaker who makes some of the wordiest films on record, who, along with
Godard, tries to use film as an extension of history and memory, here he
creates a talking travelogue, something akin to Sokurov’s film, RUSSIAN ARK
(2002), only it takes place on the site of ancient ruins instead of inside a
museum. A young Portuguese history
professor takes her inquisitive 9-year old daughter on a European journey,
describing the history of each location as the camera shows images, like post
cards, capturing their travels passing through Marseille, France, where the
Greeks once spread their civilization in ancient times, with a brief history
discussion with a local fisherman, visiting the ancient ruins of Pompeii,
Italy, the Acropolis and Parthenon in Greece, with a brief history discussion
with a Greek Orthodox priest, then sailing on a cruise ship through the
Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, visiting Istanbul and the Persian Gulf,
heading for Bombay, India, where they plan to meet with her husband. The captain of the cruise ship is an
American, John Malkovich, who dines each night with 3 divas who curiously
discuss their own country’s history, language, and cultural perspectives. They include Catherine Deneuve, a French
business entrepreneur, Stefania Sandrelli, a retired Italian fashion model, and
Irene Pappas, a professional singer, who actually sings a song late in the film
about the passage of time where the wind blows the orange blossoms away. Along the way, French, Portuguese, Greek, Italian,
and English are all spoken, sometimes at the same table, yet they all find a
way to understand one another. The
dialogue feels forced, feeling very much like a series of lectures, especially
the inclusion of John Malkovich, who, representing
Nonagenarian Portuguese auteur Oliveira's
eccentric fable begins like a low key travelogue. A beautiful academic
(Silveira) is taking her young daughter on a Grand Tour through Europe and the
Near East, visiting the Acropolis, the Sphinx, Istanbul and various other
cultural hotspots. Only gradually does it become apparent that the film is
Oliveira's response to the events of 9/11. We listen as the academic sits at
table with the sleek and cultured cruise ship captain (another purring
performance from Malkovich) and discusses art, language, culture and history
with three ever present female guests (Deneuve, Papas and Sandrelli). Then, we
learn that there are terrorist bombs aboard and Oliveira's rambling, reflective
essay lurches uncomfortably into thriller mode. The extraordinary final shot,
at once tragic and absurd, shows that even in his 90s, Oliveira still knows how
to wrong foot an audience.
City Pages [Mark Peranson] (link lost)
A coy, verbose meditation on history, civilization, and,
indeed, the fate of humanity, this postmillennial headscratcher from the great
Portuguese nonagenarian Manoel de Oliveira (I'm Going Home) is divided
neatly in two, symbolizing past and present, young and old. The first part
finds a university professor (Leonor Silveira) and her young daughter on a
pleasure cruise from
Bright
Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]
The magnificently civilized A
Talking Picture more than keeps the promise of its title, proceeding via a
stream of cultivated discussion of history, largely through the person of an
elegant history professor from
Senses of Cinema (Yaniv Eyny and A. Zubatov)
review
September 2004
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
Village
Voice (Dennis Lim) review
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
www.european-films.net
(Boyd van Hoeij) review
Reverse
Shot review
Nicolas Rapold
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Noel Murray
The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review
PopMatters
(Lester Pimentel) review
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
MovieFreak.com (Howard Schumann) review [A-] also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
Boxoffice Magazine review Tim Cogshell
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [1/5]
Variety (Deborah Young) review
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
MAGIC MIRROR (Espelho Mágico)
Dec Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack (December 2005)
Certainly at this point in Manoel de Oliveira's career, most cinephiles have made up their minds: either you like him or you don't. Granted, his late-career burst of creative energy (a new feature every year) has included some odd lurches into near-accessibility (I'm Going Home) and a controversial travelogue-cum-Euro-comedy (A Talking Picture) whose apparent swipe at Islamo-fascism raised certain hackles in the critical community. But by and large there has been a consistency of quality and style in Oliveira's work since the 1980s, most of his films from this period engaging in variations on a single formal problem: the disparity between the filmic and the literary. Oliveira's exploration of this problem hasn't been quite as severe as that of Straub and Huillet, although there are points of convergence, most notably a rigid, often immobile visual field and a flat, declamatory performance style, both of which emphasize the impossibility of a smooth transition from text to moving image. Like Straub and Huillet, whose last film to seriously make the North American festival rounds was 1999's Sicilia!, over time Oliveira has evolved into a filmmaker so stark in execution, and so peculiarly European in his concerns that it's much easier at this point for programmers (forget distributors) to ignore him altogether. Actually, the same could be said of Raul Ruiz, whose late-90s splash of recognition has all but evaporated. Magic Mirror is not an entirely successful film, and in many respects it is a frustrating and almost anachronistic effort that recalls certain tendencies in both Ruiz and Straub / Huillet. Oliveira's film is an adaptation of a novel, The Soul of the Rich, by Augustina Bessa-Luis. The sprawling yet static narrative centers around Alfreda (Oliveira stalwart Leonor Silveira), a wealthy woman who believes that contrary to conventional church doctrine, the Virgin Mary was born to a rich family. She keeps renegade theologians on call and preoccupies herself by mentally preparing for a spiritual visitation by Mary herself, on the assumption that Our Lady would naturally want to speak to someone of equally noble birth. The film's other protagonist, Luciano (Ricardo Trepa), takes a position with Alfreda upon his release from prison. He tries to engineer a fake Virgin Mary sighting for his increasingly deluded boss, although this subterfuge never really comes to fruition. Around these major poles orbit endless cascades of talk, centering on the Church, the role of the wealthy in society, the archetypal nature of the sexes, and the frequent joylessness of existence. Magic Mirror resembles mid-period Ruiz films such as On Top of the Whale and Life is a Dream, with their determinedly banal mise-en-scène, beige-matte color scheme, and assertive foregrounding of intricate spoken text. Unlike even Oliveira's most uncompromising recent films, such as The Letter or The Uncertainty Principle (which shares with Magic Mirror a character called Blue Bull), Magic Mirror is unleavened by even the driest sense of humor. Be advised, there are no taciturn rock stars, discotheque fires or goofy Malkovich cameos here. In fact, there's nothing about Magic Mirror that is "entertaining," by any conventional meaning of the term. And yet as I hung with it, it eventually won me over with its commitment to pure philosophical abstraction. Even late Godard will offer up seductive cinematography or dazzling montage sequences, but Oliveira reduces the visual field to blank signifiers of decadent aristocratic accumulation, garish fountain statues and gaudy mausoleums. The social critique is clear -- the world no longer needs this ineffectual gentry, or its self-serving claim to have God in its back pocket -- but even more than this, Oliveira's stultifying narrative format serves to embed these people in the screen like frescoes, putting them into an indeterminate historical past until some random clue reveals the fact that no, Magic Mirror is a portrait of the present, a segment of society that can conveniently opt out of time's motility. Magic Mirror really is like watching paint dry, as the saying goes, but its ineluctable weirdness compels and rewards attention to the phenomenon. Over time, the cracks in the wall start materializing, and that seems to be the point.
The
Village Voice [Nathan Lee]
One way of looking at Magic
Mirror, a baffling opacity from Manoel de Oliveira, is easy enough. Every
film is a magic mirror. Watching them, we regard ourselves, and what we find
there depends on an infinite array of memories, capacities, tastes, and
desires. (That a work of art is completed by its audience is a cliché
insufficiently acknowledged when it comes to cinema, a medium highly involved
with audience identification and conventional notions of authorship.) Flung
through space, reflected into the eyes of the audience, a movie is released
from the mind of its creator to be absorbed, and transformed, by that of its
co-creator, the viewer. The nature of that absorption can be hazarded by the
filmmaker, theorized by the academic, commented on by the critic, but the
process is private, subjective, and ultimately beyond analysis.
Magic Mirror is not oblivious to these things. Indeed, the
impression given by de Oliveira's cinema is of an intelligence charged to an
almost intolerable degree with attention to fundamental principles of art,
spectatorship, civilization, you name it—his films are omnivorously
ontological. Born in 1908, de Oliveira is one of the last living artists to
bestride the entire 20th century. Prolific into the 21st, his recent movies
have contemplated this fact. He has made a Voyage to the Beginning of the
World (1997), reflected on Word and Utopia (2000), discoursed on The
Uncertainty Principle (2002), and announced that I'm Going Home
(2001). Directed by a man who remembers the silent era, A Talking Picture
(2003) contemplated the voyage of Western culture toward a rendezvous with
disaster. That de Oliveira conceived his apocalypse onboard a cruise ship
piloted by John Malkovich speaks to the puckish swing of his philosophizing.
Unlike Jean-Luc Godard (born in
1930), who has long equated his own mortality with the lifespan of cinema, de
Oliveira has a sense of humor about his role in the Long Goodbye of the Seventh
Art. Belle Toujours, an impish sequel to Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour
opening next month, is the work of a man whose confidence in his own powers is
rivaled only by his capacity for self-amusement. It's natural that the
Portuguese master should now engage with his Spanish colleague, having achieved
a late style equally (and ineffably) graced with supernal poise and high
metaphysical humor.
Summarizing the plot of Magic
Mirror is about as useful as diagramming the narrative of a Rilke poem, but
here goes: Released from prison, handsome Luciano (Ricardo Trêpa) goes to work
at the palatial country estate of Alfreda (Leonor Silveira), a chilly
aristocrat obsessed by a desire to meet the Virgin Mary. While her husband
noodles about in the music parlor, Alfreda discourses on religious topics with
an assortment of male callers, including a scholar played by Michel Piccoli.
Highlights: Was Mary rich or poor? Did Jesus wear socks with his sandals? Has
anyone ever thought about the souls of the wealthy?
Enter the piano tuner and
quasi-reformed forger Filipe (Luis Miguel Cintra) who, for reasons not entirely
obvious, conspires with Luciano to hire a Mary doppelganger and arrange a
visitation with Alfreda. Meanwhile, a mysterious Spanish nun (Marisa Paredes)
materializes in the garden in order to add several thousand recondite words to
the unabashedly literate, if semi-comprehensible script.
Academic theologians with a taste
for obdurate Brechtian aesthetics, say hello to your new favorite film!
Civilians, even those versed in Oliveira at his most extreme, may find their
patience pushed to the limit. Thick with mirrors and breaches of the fourth
wall, Magic Mirror is avidly aware of being watched, even as it rejects every
avenue of accessibility. Based on a novel by Augustina Bessa- Luís, a frequent
de Oliveira collaborator, the film is perversely textual, an endlessly talking
picture seemingly addressed to no one but itself.
Were it not for de Oliveira's
visual elegance, contemplating this Mirror could, Medusa-like, turn your
brain to stone. He has the inexplicable ability to make an endless, immobile
medium-shot bristle with dynamism, and can, when he chooses, marshal
spine-tingling montage. For the most part, however, word takes precedent over
image—the great exception being an astonishing detour, deep into the film's
second hour, to Venice and Jerusalem. Spied from a recumbent point of view,
summoned in the reflection of a gilt-edged mirror, these ecstatic shards of
memory—frescoes, canals, twists in a labyrinth—suggest the immense reserve of
pictorial prowess de Oliveira has kept under wraps. Their surpassing beauty
arrives like a shock of recognition.
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The New York Times (Matt Zoller Seitz) review
BELLE TOUJOURS C 76
Portugal France
Get
thee to a nunnery
A short and beautiful film up to a point, but that is the crucial point in the film. The 97-year old director dedicated the film to Luis Buñuel and his scriptwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, the creators of the 1967 film BELLE DE JOUR starring Catherine Deneuve as Séverine, a woman who explores her bizarre sexual fantasies by secretly becoming a high-class call girl by day in order to save her marriage, where at home she remains faithfully chaste. Michel Piccoli reprises his role as her husband’s friend who awkwardly becomes one of her customers, but Deneuve turned down the role, which was instead given to French actress Bulle Ogier, who starred in the 1972 Buñuel film, THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE. This switch turns out to be crucial, as Ogier is not Séverine.
Opening with an entire final movement from Dvorak’s 8th
Symphony, Piccoli is beside himself sitting in the audience after he spots
Séverine after the passage of nearly 40 years.
When he just misses her at a local bar in Paris
When the meal is over and the servers leave the room, turning off the
lights, allowing them a conversation in candlelight, the entire film loses
steam. All energy is just sucked out of
the film. Their conversation is void of
any hint of interest, completely lacking the brilliance and acerbic wit of the
original film. When their conversation
is over, and there is a lame attempt at surrealism, it is more pathetic than
interesting. People are fascinated that
a man of this age can continue cranking out the films, but calling this a
sequel to the original, dedicating this project to Buñuel, is
sure to draw unflattering comparisons.
2006 New York Film Festival Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion (excerpt)
The New York Film Festival once seemed highly
loyal to 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, but they’ve passed
on most of his recent work. Fortunately, they’re back on board for “Belle
Toujours,” one of his best films. It’s a highly unusual sequel to Luis Bunuel’s
1967 “Belle de Jour,” in which Catherine Devenue played Severine, a bored
housewife who explores her sexual fantasies by working in a brothel. Michel
Piccoli reprises his part from “Belle de Jour,” while Bulle Ogier replaces
Deneuve as Severine. On the surface, Bunuel and Oliveira, who has an affinity
for distanced, Brechtian literary adaptations, don’t have much in common, but
the latter’s homage is touching.
Here, Oliveira is less concerned with sexual
or narrative experimentation than Bunuel. Instead, “Belle Toujours” is a calm
but powerful reflection on aging, a theme Oliveira has frequently—and
understandably—touched on. The director’s avoidance of camera movement creates
a stately feel, enhanced by the lighting and cinematography. “Belle Toujours”
is a miniature whose minimalism—only three major characters and a few
settings—sometimes feels theatrical. The film’s emotional charge peaks in the
sublime next-to-last shot, in which Oliveira turns a scene of waiters clearing
a table into an image resonant far beyond its literal content. It’s as powerful
a metaphor for loss as I’ve ever seen.
Manoel de Oliveira is someone Luis Buñuel actively rebelled against: an aesthete. Belle Toujours, a sequel of sorts to Belle de Jour, plays out as a bad bar joke. Literally. What do you get when a man walks into a bar and deconstructs a Buñuel picture for half an hour? The answer is not a whole lot. The genius of Buñuel's 39-year-old masterpiece—like that of David Lynch's modern renovation, Mulholland Drive—is how the walls separating its conscious and unconscious dimensions are completely dissolved. De Oliveira strips the original film of its power by cementing its spongy mysteries with banal annotation. Michel Piccoli, one of the brightest stars in Buñuel's complex milky way of philosophical wonders, reprises the role of Henri Husson, who spots Séverine Serizy (Bulle Ogier) at a symphony (Lynch's Bondar might say, "Si hay banda!"), loses her in a crowd, and spends much of the film trying to catch her—perhaps to taunt her with broken glass and play with her as he once did under a table. By casting Ogier, one of the middle-class dopes from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in the role originated by Catherine Deneuve, and keeping her character out of Husson's hair for so long, de Olivera rekindles a familiar Buñuelian theme: woman as obscure object of desire. But Husson, after deconstructing Belle de Jour and Buñuel's directorial mantra for a barkeep, will eventually catch her, at which point Séverine reveals, during a suspenseful candlelit dinner, that the past is long gone and her sexuality is no longer "unbalanced." Buñuel, the most acerbic humanist the movies have ever seen, would have been disappointed to see Belle de Jour stripped of its stunning ambiguities and Séverine judging herself so: By assuming that the 1967 film's supposed perversities in fact took place in the real world, de Oliviera doesn't have to pose moral arguments in relation to what Raymond Durgnat described as the "inner world of desires and feelings" of its characters. Not that de Oliviera's film should behave like Buñuel's, but why does growing old have to mean becoming boring?
Belle toujours Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Masters on Autopilot (Sort of) #3: A trifle, but an
intellectually reaching one nevertheless, Belle toujours is my least
favorite Oliveira film since Party, but it does have the virtue of being
short. Oliveira's stylistic stiffness, especially with respect to actors and
line delivery, adds some interest value to Belle, Oliveira's tribute to
Buñuel and Carriere, partly because their approaches to cinema are so divergent
as to barely make sense in relation to one another. The passkey to
understanding Belle toujours is perversity, a concept Oliveira has
Michel Piccoli's character discuss ad infinitum, to awkward effect
but not without a certain conceptual
rigor. Piccoli's character Henri regales a chummy young bartender of tales of
the limitless masochism of Belle, a woman driven to thwart her relationship
with the man she genuinely loved. Henri makes no attempt to disguise his relish
at recounting Belle's Buñuelian exploits, displaying himself as a dirty old man
with his second-hand memories, indulging a fetish for narrativizing the
salacious past. Meanwhile, Oliveira himself is unable to convince Catherine
Deneuve to reprise her role and yet persists in completing the project anyway,
substituting Bulle Ogier as though the women are interchangeable. This points
to a different level of male perversity, the free exchange of women as
commodities (and the main reason, psychoanalytically speaking, that
prostitution carries such erotic force for its consumers). As with Buñuel's
original, Oliveira demonstrates that male sexual deviance so saturates our
social world, setting its rules without having to interrogate them as such. So
MdO has basically made a perverse work of art about the perversity of narrative
desire, in the erotic sphere, certainly, but in the realm of cinema as well.
(This makes Belle toujours of a piece with Oliveira's larger project of
working with language and performance in an almost sculptural manner. We treat
narrativity in the cinema as if it were the most natural thing in the world,
whereas for years Oliveira's primary aesthetic charge has been making it deeply
strange.) This is, like so many other Oliveira films, "a talking
picture," but if talking here is substitute sex, Piccoli and eventually
Ogier move in circles to no climactic aim. If the film has any notable flaw,
it's that it spells out its themes so precisely and overtly that there's little
left for the film (or the viewer) to do. Unless we "like to watch."
[ADDENDUM: I cannot for the life of me understand why I initially gave this
picture a 6, other than perhaps kneejerk auteur brownie-points (my own brand of
perversity, I suppose). My review, as well as my memories of the picture
itself, all point to a 5/10 rating. So at the risk of looking kind of flaky, I
must correct myself. Oh, and I'd added in all the tilda-N's. Good job, me.]
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay Carr
Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira, who will turn 100 in
December 2008, is amazing not only for his longevity, but for the undiminished
vitality of his art and craft. Far from slowing down, he has accelerated his
output. The spare, elegant, minimalist style he has arrived at late in life has
resulted in six films (two in pre-production) since Belle toujours
(1998). But that film illustrates as well as any the unique mix of felicities
he’s dispensing these days with such virtuosic ease. Having lived through, and
with, almost all of cinema, it’s not surprising that he should with such
offhand naturalness not only reference its past masters, but fall so smoothly
into step beside them. In this case, he not only extends the scandal-provoking Belle
de jour (1967) of Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, making his add-on
film seem an airy postscript whipped up by a pastry chef, but turns it as well
into an unforced meditation on age and the impossibility of reconciling past
and present before bringing all to a close with a wistful smile and a seraphic
shrug.
The punning title of Belle Toujours is a tipoff to de Oliverira’s
mindset here. Like the original, his film is mischievous and something of a
tease. It begins in a Parisian concert hall, when Michel Piccoli’s Henri
Husson, the sybarite of the original, is easing into the enjoyment of the coda
of Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony at a concert when he notices in the audience a few
rows ahead of him the Belle of all those years ago – Catherine Deneuve then,
Bulle Ogier now). His face, puffy with age, is nonetheless responsive and
sentient. Hers, stylish, framed by a blond perm, is a mask. At concert’s end,
he tries to approach her. She spots him, hurries out, steps into a waiting
limo, and flees, leaving him on the curb.
Life has evidently left him well-fixed, to judge by his well-tailored
conventional clothing, and the fact that we never see him at any kind of work.
He clearly is a man who knows his way around, as we see by the way he enters a
bar he saw Belle later leave, and pumps the barman (a knowing, yet obliging
Ricardo Trepa) for info. Clearly, he means to stalk her, but always in the most
well-mannered haute bourgeois way (yes, we’re thinking Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie here – one of many sly references to Bunuel and his themes). Not
that de Oliveira doesn’t establish a tone all his own. His views of
Almost comically, his efforts to track the elusive Severine Serizy, known as
Belle when she would leave her wheelchair-bound husband all those years ago for
sex as a part-time prostitute, become delicately bumptious after he tracks her
to the hotel where she lives. He’s eager to reopen their relationship (he was
the husband’s best friend, with whom she betrayed the husband she nevertheless
loved in her perverted way). Piccoli’s Husson spends a certain amount of time
trying to align the past and a possible present. He half-explains, half-confesses
to the patient barman, while ignoring the pointed remarks of two streetwalkers
who are regulars in the bar, his reawakened obsession. To his surprise, the
young barman is an insightful confessor.
Finally, he runs into Severine on a street, stops her, and undergoes what
clearly is a verbal and sometimes physical tug of war. Here, de Oliveira draws
back to show us their convergence in a medium long shot. We don’t hear what
they say. What we learn is that he has played his only card, and that it works.
He will tell her what he whispered into her husband’s ear before he died – she
has wondered and agonized over it for decades – if she will agree to an
intimate dinner with him. She can’t resist.
And so she appears for a candlelight dinner in a private room, attended by
three waiters, bearing a few surprises for him. Essentially, they are updates.
The Belle he knew then has no connection with the life she has led ever since,
she informs him. The fire no longer burns within her, she states. The sexuality
she refers to as unbalanced and twisted has died down, she adds. So eager is
she to distance herself from her former identity that she’s thinking of
entering a convent, she concludes. There is further talk of betrayal,
masochism, sadism, and a bit of the latter from Husson, whose silken manner
becomes blurred by what he freely admits is alcoholism. He’ll tell Severine
what he said to her late husband as promised, he insists. But not before toying
with her first.
That they are not of one mind is made clear when he kisses her hand, saying
“Belle toujours, ma cherie,” only to have her reply, “I was never your
darling.” Far from being any sort of sexual conqueror (an idea mocked by an
earlier shot of a gilded statue of Joan of Arc riding off to battle), Husson
was at the time of their liaison, he learns, merely an instrument of her
perversion -- a perversion, she insists, that was buried with her husband. The
power game in which he thought he had the upper hand doesn’t quite go the way
he had imagined. Now, as then, he admits, women remain sexual enigmas to him.
The new Belle, with her rueful clarity, is rendered more sympathetically by
Ogier than the younger Belle was by Deneuve. Ogier’s face communicates a
vulnerability and self-awareness not available to the more closed-off visage of
Deneuve’s younger Belle.
It’s not surprising that such retrospective weighing of various pieces of the
past and such bemused reflections on memory should figure in the then
98-year-old de Oliveira’s film. What’s not at all to be taken for granted are
the graceful touch he brings to the juggling of them and the twinkling humor
epitomized in his final Bunuel homage as he surrealistically has a rooster
(cock, if you will) strut in its jerky barnyard way down the corridor of the
slightly shabby edifice to which Husson invites Belle. Belle Toujours
isn’t about sexual combat. It’s meditation as meringue.
The Enigma of What Endures in Manoel de Oliveira's Belle toujours ... Nathaniel Drake Carlson from Cineaste, Summer 2008
Manoel de Oliveira’s 2006 film Belle toujours can be said to be many things, from a sequel to Luis Buñuel’s classic Belle de jour, to an homage from one artist to another, to a self contained consideration of Oliveira’s own signature ideas. But perhaps this film’s most salient point of distinction is its emphasis on the ultimate inadequacy of adherence to only one particular point of view or vision of truth no matter how thoroughly determined; this is what establishes Belle toujours as its own separate entity and gives weight to its overriding theme of an encompassing sense of loss. This sustained state of loss is contrasted with the prospect of an equally enduring and potentially eternal principle of ever renewing self-conceptualization represented by the character of Séverine (Bulle Ogier).
Belle toujours picks up the events of Belle de jour almost four decades later. The new work is all about those events as they continue to be obsessively processed by Husson (Michel Piccoli), one of the primary characters of Buñuel’s film, also played there by Piccoli. Husson is, in fact, the principal character of Oliveira’s film, and Séverine, who was the dominant figure in the original, is subordinated to his relentless scrutiny. Husson, who had knowledge of Séverine’s indiscretions in Buñuel’s film, catches sight of her at a concert recital. His interest in her is rekindled, and he stalks her, eventually inducing her to agree to meet with him. He taunts her with his secret knowledge, specifically with the possibility that he will at last disclose what he told her husband. She is intimidated by this form of manipulation; and, as a result, Husson enjoys a brief, ephemeral power over a woman he could never have had in the natural course of events.
What stands out most on a first pass is the film’s brevity, its succinct and purposeful character. As viewers familiar with Oliveira’s oeuvre know, though his films are technically precise, they are by no means uniform in length. The duration of his narratives vary widely and appropriately, determined by their individual internal logics. In Belle toujours, stylistically, Oliveira has made what is arguably his most approachable feature since I’m Going Home. Similarly, this film is haunted by an acute awareness of mortality and an insulated retrospective vision. Knowledge of the Buñuel forerunner clearly helps one grasp Oliveira’s project, but it isn’t essential. The precision of Belle toujours can’t be overstated; Oliveira goes in, gets the job done, and gets out. The work is very complete and cohesive, yet demanding of further engagement and closer scrutiny.
As an “homage” to Buñuel, Belle toujours functions in an interesting fashion. It certainly does not read as any kind of attempt at a sequel per se. Rather, it acts as an opportunity for one artist, with his own unique sensibility, to reflect on another who has been a formative influence. Still, and despite plenty of Buñuelian allusions, there is no effort made to adapt the style of the one to fit the other and no concern that the Oliveira’s film may feel like only an appendage to the earlier, self-contained great work. In this regard, the infamous rooster scene in Belle toujours comes across as almost perfunctory, a nod of recognition to the origins of an attitude. Oliveira’s own attitude (and his films are always about the imposition of attitude) is never absent even if it remains often, and typically, hard to pin down. However, the fact that his relationship to the earlier film is in a certain sense paralleled by the clearly incomplete perspective of the new film’s central character cannot help but act as an acknowledgment of ironic limitation. For Oliveira is conceding that his own reflection on the contents and thematics of the first film are but one possible reflection of many. If his view is seen as a settled statement it would be no less systematically prescribed and delimited than Husson’s; the significant difference is in the ability to recognize it as such. This recognition prevents it from any absolutist pretension.
The occasions for a kind of perversity to surface in Belle toujours are abundant in terms of both form and content. We observe Husson as he finds Séverine in a crowd and loses her. It’s evident that she is trying to avoid Husson’s numerous unsuccessful attempts at confrontation. There is a willful perversity to be sure in Oliveira’s staging of the first actual conversation between the two, composed in long shot, the dialog inaudible. Later, and in another explicit moment of deference to Buñuel, Husson presents Séverine with a replica of the buzzing box from the original film. She turns it away claiming to have no interest anymore in such cryptic provocations and we, of course, are not even afforded a glimpse of its contents.
Nevertheless, Oliveira’s most perverse and characteristic stylistic decision is his presentation of the climactic dinner sequence, which is designed in a very forthright way to accommodate the confrontation we’ve been waiting to see. It is depicted in minute detail; we watch Husson and Séverine go through drinks and several courses before saying more than a few words to one another. This particular staging has precedent in Oliveira’s familiar and rhythmic use of static framed imagery as transitional or bridging material, a device which is often mistakenly singled out for ridicule—as with, for instance, the shots of the ship’s prow cutting through the water in A Talking Picture. Many took these images to be evidence of a desiccated imagination instead of perceiving in their perpetual return a comment on the inexorable forward motion of an aggressively insidious and unreflective progress. In other words, Oliveira’s compositions imply a function or purpose beyond what is depicted and yet the depiction itself can be seen as a perverse act, an inexcusable secession to the supposedly mundane.
But the dinner sequence in all its detail is crucial to an understanding of what Oliveira is up to in Belle toujours. It establishes the confines of the room and the enactment of this very civilized dining ritual as the ultimate context for these characters’ attitudes. It has been referred to as almost equivalent to a religious rite and this is not far off. Certainly, the whole sequence depends for much of its effect on Oliveira’s understanding of the inherent theatrical dimension of lived space, the way it can and almost always does align itself with the specifics of an imposed consciousness or imaginative vision inherent in the human condition. The final, literal dismantling of this space is, of course, apt.
The dismantling of space has its esthetic parallels to the opening scenes of the film. Oliveira begins Belle toujours with a long take of a Dvorak symphony performance, another signifier of high culture. It is here that Husson catches his first glimpse of Séverine. Afterwards, we observe the patrons filing out and the methodical closing procedures in which the music hall, once vibrant with energy, is slowly shuttered and darkened. Husson is thrust into isolation, cut loose from socially specific orientation, and as he drifts down the city streets the electric lights above him also begin to dim and go out. In the later, final sequence, Husson and Séverine’s ritualistic dinner also eventually dissolves into darkness as the candles flicker and die, appropriately complementing the tone of their retrospective conversation. Husson and Séverine are finally reduced to almost indiscernible silhouettes against the light from the expansive background window. In close-up they are isolated in virtual darkness, a haunting separation from the room’s many emblems of high culture and refined taste, which had served to sustain and ground what communication they could have.
Structurally, Belle toujours is almost evenly divided between the “search” and the “resolution.” The first thirty-five minutes of its sixty-five minute running time details Husson’s attempts to track down and confront Séverine. His efforts are rhythmically broken up by a series of extended visits he makes to a bar from which he saw Séverine emerge. Static, though panoramic, vista shots of Paris are also intercut throughout and act almost as chapter breaks; these shots are scored by snippets of Dvorak, the only time other than the opening performance when we hear any music. The music enhances the artifice of the seemingly naturalistic dramatic sequences and emphasizes their presentational qualities. We recognize with clarity how actors are positioned and move within the frame to create highly precise images. Husson, for instance, is seen consistently in a mirror behind the bar, a compositional decision which highlights the enforced division of his conscious self during his confessions to the bartender.
Perversity is a continuous theme within the artificial context of the film. The very word is used by both Husson and Séverine but with radically different emphases. Once again, attitude is at the heart of Oliveira’s film. Husson uses the word to describe Séverine’s proclivities as he knew them; he uses it to describe a kind of licentiousness by which he is secretly enthralled. Its appeal is the forbidden. Ultimately he wants to justify that appeal to himself by using the term freely, rendering his desire normative. This is why the final confrontation with Séverine is surely so unsatisfying for him. She regrets her “ill-spent past” and even speaks of retiring to a convent. But when she speaks of her “perverse” desires she uses the term to denote a deviation from a recognized or established norm, even if she is not necessarily voicing a moral judgment. Séverine’s use of the term “wicked” seems to be more of an acknowledgment of social designation than evidence of any moral condemnation. Her denial of feeling guilty for her past actions (significantly she simply says they “no longer interest” her) is significant as it indicates a distinct misunderstanding between the two characters. Husson misses this point when he declares that they are similar as he is now an alcoholic, an addictive behavior that functions as his “convent.”
Husson’s crucial lack of insight is also highlighted during his several dialogs with the barman (Ricardo Trêpa), whose variations on the same point time and again seem not to register upon Husson at all. The barman mentions that, “[a] lot of customers feel the need to confess. And they only do it with a stranger. With somebody who seems disinterested in what he’s hearing.” Later he adds that “they feel a need to unburden themselves. But never to someone they know, and even less to a friend. They confess... to someone neutral like me who doesn’t know them or won’t see them again. That way, they’re sure their confessions will die there.” This anonymity parallels Severine’s brothel experience of long ago, which shielded her from the threat of authentic or emotive intimacy, which she now acknowledges. But Husson strenuously denies his position as a participant in perversity and insists on defining himself as an impartial third person observer, while all the time he is seeking, under this cover, to manipulate the known limits of his described universe. He fails to recognize that this kind of behavior is partially responsible for much of his present alienation. Beyond that, his aggressive and self-imposed ignorance, perhaps, also is meant to indicate why his “confessional” must take the form it does. It is precisely because Husson’s dismay is not a genuinely moral one that it cannot by rights be construed as religious guilt. His disillusionment is too obscured by denial and truncated vision to ever be subject to such codified moral instruction; it lacks the necessary self-awareness for that.
The symbolic female is a consistent presence throughout this film, appearing in forms as diverse as mannequin heads in a store window, prostitutes at the bar, an image in a tapestry or within a painting, and even the figure of a bronze Joan of Arc (a personality who also turns up to significant effect in Oliveira’s The Uncertainty Principle). These appearances illustrate Husson’s method of seeing and understanding women. Though there is a seemingly broad spectrum represented, what is important is that these representatives are all so rigorously positioned. They exist either behind glass or within the frame of the painting. The prostitutes, for their part, are pressed into unyielding, conceptually recognizable social roles, and even Joan of Arc is presented as though on display, set solidly within a space of admiration and earned respect. Husson states, “(t)o me, women were always Nature’s greatest enigma,” and yet, by responding to these specific variations in female presence, safely rendered and contained as they are, Husson can maintain a position of implicit authority, of unchallengeable interpretive accuracy.
The prostitutes are paired to highlight an age difference, which
reads superficially as a comment on the enduring nature of their profession, as
well as yet another link to the milieu of the previous film. At one point,
the younger prostitute (Leonor Baldaque) says to her companion (Júlia Buisel),
“They say you’re something special in bed. The problem is getting them there,”
to which the older woman responds, “But you’ve always helped me to get them
interested.” These remarks not only acknowledge the reality of an economic
relationship between the two women but also suggest a way in which this
reflects on the central narrative. The barman speaks of them as “poor souls”
but also “angels” who “don’t delude anybody” and “do business with their
bodies.” The implication is that feminine sexuality is a potentially wild and
chaotic thing that can risk escaping the enforcement of designation. The
prostitutes are, in a sense then, congratulated for their candid and forthright
lifestyle, but this is partially because the persistence of this lifestyle
maintains orientation within a balanced social order. As Agustina Bessa-Luis
says during her cameo in Oliveira’s Porto da Minha Infância, “The geisha
is a misdemeanor within democracy, but without misdemeanors there can be no
culture.” It’s no slight detail that Séverine later refers to her own youthful
attitude as “imbalanced.” Her comment does not resonate as a moral judgment,
but simply a recognition of what is; and, furthermore, an indicator that she
will not fit easily within the rigors of such a social order, especially one
motivated by the superficial transgressions provided by a shallow set of moral
assumptions.
The prostitutes also represent the flux of definable beauty that has long held
a fascination for Oliveira. The pragmatics they ground their friendship in is a
valuable part of a system in which the primary quality of beauty is its
function as an inducement. The beauty that diminishes then is that which is
only an inducement.
The final sequence itself functions as a metacommentary on this established theme. The space Husson has prepared is so ornate and richly luxurious as to be almost oppressive or claustrophobic, so full of paintings, tapestries, carpeting, cabinets, and screens that its ornamentation is virtually inescapable. The only release is the window between Husson and Séverine, heavy red curtains framing it on either side. The window allows the two characters to gaze out over Paris and to regard it as belle toujours, a cultural inheritance which will endure beyond the transience of their particular relationship to it. In this way, the city itself serves as Oliveira’s ultimate model exemplar; the embodiment or definition of an eternal principle.
Husson makes a practice of imposing his own story upon all the
narrative elements of Séverine’s. He relentlessly reads her history as an
adjunct to his own, as some perfectly realized embodiment of all his prejudices.
Even when he finally engages in a prolonged dialog with her, a gulf of
separation remains between them, perpetuated by Husson’s inability to imagine
an alternative vision that could be just as legitimate as his own. The title
itself is Oliveira’s ironic acknowledgement of this nuanced distinction; the
idea that the notion of beauty is infinitely malleable and applicable as
perspective warrants. The casting of Bulle Ogier in the role made famous by
Catherine Deneuve provides another example of how beauty affects us. That Ogier
is not the original Severine is emphasized by the glaringly artificial blonde
wig she wears. Surface signifiers, then, will fade or alter unavoidably
while the internal aspects of character and its refinements can endure and develop
or be neglected and remain unrecognized. Yet it is very much in the notion of a
fixed, static series of reference points that Husson finds his comfort and
reassurance.
Michel Piccoli is superb throughout and so much relies on his performance. He
projects a consistent imbalance of his own, a self-effacing quality marbled
with a very real desperation. He seeks a justification for his own perceptions,
a way to convince himself of the inevitability of where he has ended up in
life. He raises himself in his own estimation by intruding himself in
Severine’s story, telling the young bartender that he “represented the
conscience she didn’t have” and happily agrees with the bartender when he
suggests that Husson was “just an instrument to her.” The continuity of civilization
as embodied by Husson appears to rely upon well-deployed hypocrisies.
Hypocrisy is also evident as Husson details Séverine’s “wicked” past, referring in passing to the brothel of the first film. The bartender then remarks that “some customers tell me that in their youth there were a lot of these houses. They say things have changed a lot since then. They even complain about the mentality of people these days. That the values of their day have been overthrown.” This irony is casually stated, but the implication is immense; for Husson’s imagined power over Séverine comes from an assumed moral context, the assumed authority of a particular circumscribed moral order which he is only interested in insofar as it can bestow him with that power of authority. That she can transcend it, positioning her own renunciation in a broader context, is the key to her freedom. Husson’s inability to understand this is the definition of his damnation.
Critique. Belle toujours
by Manoel de Oliveira Hervé Aubron
from Cahiers du Cinéma
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [1/5]
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]
PopMatters (Barbara Herman) review
cinemattraction (Mia Ferm) review
The Village Voice [Michelle Orange]
House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
DVD Talk (Gerry Putzer) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review
The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Crossing Europe Film Festival (Linz) report
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [3/6]
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE-HAIRED
GIRL (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura)
Portugal Spain France (64 mi) 2009
Eccentricities of a
Blond Hair Girl Michael Sicinski
from The Academic Hack
At this point, I honestly have no idea whether it's special pleading to speak of Oliveira's work in the context of his advanced age. The recent Toronto International Film Festival catalog matter-of-factly referred to MdO as "cinema's most senior filmmaker," which of course he is -- 100 years old and counting. But one of the things that impressed itself upon me while enjoying Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl is the fact that Oliveira is making films for no one but himself. He's following his own rules, or so it seems. Sure, there may be external circumstances that have impacted his recent turn to under-70-minute featurettes. Making shorter films might ease Oliveira's ability to secure completion bonds, and the man himself may be considering, consciously or not, a desire not to leave projects in an incomplete state, should his health take a bad turn. But I prefer to think that Oliveira simply has no more use for the arbitrary rules of commercial cinema, choosing instead to follow the avant-gardist's dictum that the internal demands of the work should determine its ideal length. Many of Oliveira's recent films have been overt confrontations between the classical and the contemporary. His work has exhibited a tendency to examine pre-modern ideas by staging them within a vague, awkward present day (as in Belle toujours or Magic Mirror), or by arranging an outright clash of incompatible histories (the crypto-conservative A Talking Picture). Formally, these films have tended toward stasis -- immoble camera, very basic blocking of performers, and a dry, declamatory acting style designed to drain the films' long dialogues of any clear cadence or narrative arc. I've written elsewhere that Oliveira's great subject is the incongruity of cinema and theatre, the moving pictures' ability to pin performative presence to the wall like a slide-mount, denying the very sense of temporal coexistence that is cinema's most casually-achieved aesthetic effect. Oliveira's films are not just "about" history; they are history, and his methods emphasize their anteriority to us, the audience.
Eccentricities is Oliveira's most unique, and most pleasurable, film is many years, partly because it renews the confrontation of "living" and "dead" elements, this time giving presence and spontaneity their due. It's a lively film, frisky and bizarre. From the very first shot, Oliveira has taken us somewhere new. Instead of his typically stately establishment shot, or the frontal two-shot that has characterized most of his dialogue sequences for many years, Oliveira starts us out onboard a moving train. After the conductor moves through the aisle, we settle on our protagonist, Macário (Ricardo Trêpa), seated next to a stranger (MdO axiom Leonor Silveira). We view them from a high 45° angle, and at a 45° diagonal, upper-left / lower-right pitch. Naturally, they both face forward, and although they never really make eye contact, they do turn their heads in one another's direction. Macário will recount his sad tale of ruination to this stranger on a train, of course -- the framing conceit of the film. But the physical stasis of this narratorial duo is backdropped by the train window, the lush southern Portuguese landscape of Algarve racing by as they talk. The visual impact of this decision, especially in the context of Oliveira's usual procedures, cannot be overstated. Instead of the retrospective tale being cordoned off inside a sitting room or a dimly lit upper-crust bar, Eccentricities's story is jutting out into the larger contemporary world. The train appears to protect it, but time's arrow determines its course all the same -- the relativity of modern physics in action.
This framework is vital, because it characterizes Oliveira's
treatment of the source material, and his own film, throughout. Eccentricities
is based on a short story by Eça de Queiroz, and Oliveira allows the author's
work to look in two directions at once. Eccentricities emphasizes both
the awkward nineteenth-century morality and filial codes of the original work,
and Eça de Queiroz's basic modernity, his recognition of the impetuousness of
youth and a self-destructive streak that Romanticism all too often valorized
while taking inadequate account of the real world's material exigencies.
Through his second-floor office window, young Macário, an accountant at his
uncle's cloth shop, spies Luisa (Catarina Wallenstein), the fetching young girl
of the title, across the street. We discover that she and her mother are of
ambiguous, possibly dubious class provenance, although this is conveyed in
subtle hints that the boy fails to observe. The boy's uncle (Diogo Doria)
refuses to let his nephew marry the girl (or, it appears, anyone else -- not
clear why), so he flees to
Oliveira stages this anachronistic "moral fable" (I guess you'd call it) with an eye to maintaining its fundamental inscrutability. The uncle's behavior, or the strange, stilted gender dynamics that characterize the film's courtly codes of conduct, are never explained, even within the young man's narration to Silveira. However, Eccentricities is set in the present. We see a computer on the accountant's desk, but the anachronism runs deeper than this. When Macário gets an early positive sign from the girl that his attention may be returned, he goes back to his office and performs a giddy, arm-flailing dance, like Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil. He's breaking the placid Victorian-era frame of decorum that otherwise shrouds the story. What's more, Oliveira inserts the contemporary through semi-documentary material enfolded into the diegesis. Macário is taken by a friend into the salon of the Eça de Queiroz Society, the story's very author enshrined as a part of the historical past. And Eccentricities also makes space for the performance of Portuguese music and poetry, in a manner very clearly intended to honor and preserve their past. Therefore, Oliveira is implicitly asking his audience to lend a 21st century ear to works in a classical mode, to admire their beauty and present-day resonance, despite but perhaps in some ways even because of their temporal alterity to our world. And in a sense, the film itself is a component of the exact same project. Factually, the basic material that comprises the film's text is an historical artifact, a point made clear by the intrusion of literary history into the work itself. The determinism of Eça de Queiroz's tale might be best understood at a remove, behind the glass armor of canonical distance. But for Oliveira, this and every text is alive, pushing its way gawkily into the animate present so as to test its mettle, to learn whether or not it has any truths left to disclose. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl might seem to belong in a box, but Oliveira chooses instead to send it off on its way, to see if its final destination still exists.
THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (O
Estranho Caso de Angélica)
Cannes 2010: Sincere Love:
"The Strange Case of Angelica" (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal) Daniel Kasman at Cannes May 16, 2010
Often I get the sense that serious movies are the rarest kind of them all. I don’t mean the easily self-serious and pretentious films, films closed to mockery through riskless gravity. The most serious leave room—dangerous room—for failure. They need that room to necessitate a leap of faith—if the film isn’t willing to risk something, how can we truly take it seriously? As such, love stories can be the most serious of them all, and the hardest to beautifully pull off. We sing high praises for Hollywood’s sincere sentimentalist—and sentimental sincerest—Frank Borzage, and with The Strange Case of Angelica it is a delight to see Manoel de Oliveira apply a cerebral, shaded touch to a Borzagian, risk-taking, haunted love story.
As in all recent Oliveira, everything is deceptively simple: Isaac (Oliveira’s perennial youth, Ricardo Trêpa), a young photographer, falls in love with a dead girl he photographs. Through his viewfinder, and later his still images, he sees moving, smiling, radiant life. Suddenly his still, ascetic existence as an old world outcast—he’s a Sephardic Jew who delights in poetry, old radios, and appreciates the outdated, dying beauty of the countryside working class—is transformed by irrational love into a hopeless existence. Like Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn—which similarly took some inspiration from Cocteau—Oliveira conjures ghostly love through the sheer risky pleasure of hokey special effects so earnest with belief they are impossible to laugh at. Méliès is seen in the naïve splendor of Isaac’s dreams of flying with his love, and the intellectual heroes common to 19th century literature, angst ridden by wrestling with themselves and their place in the world, is suggested by the muffled humor of the old societies—the dead girl’s religious-aristocratic household and the compassionate inquisitiveness of his landlady and her opinionated friends—that fail to understand Isaac’s passion.
Angelica’s anxious old world / new world dream—where photography and moving images inspire the dreamer—is shot in concrete grays where the world’s small pleasures are in dawn’s light falling on Isaac’s face as he gazes at his mysterious moving picture, or the afternoon slanting in from the door to the rumpled bed linen telling the story of another night of wrestling with visions of a solemn world and an impossible love. Trucks rumble by under his window, and across the river from his humble home is the splotchy hillside where the vineyard workers are being replaced by machines. As in Borzage, escape from the world’s ails to the bliss of an otherworldly love is at once the most cowardly and most heroic of actions, and since our haunting ghost is played by the beaming Pilar López de Ayala, Isaac’s ultimate act is a leap of faith that’s not hard to understand at all.
The
Strange Case of Angelica (O Estranho Caso de Angélica) Jonathan Romney at
Now aged 101, Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira is one of the
surpassing prodigies of cinema. He continues not only to film but to flout
commercial logic with features that are intransigently eccentric and calculated
to please only himself and a ‘happy few’ of long-term admirers.
His latest film has all the maestro’s subtlety and precision, but lacks the more accessible touch that gave Belle Toujours and Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl some slim, but tangible, chances of crossover appeal. A contemplation of love and metaphysics, The Strange Case of Angelica finds Oliveira, nothing if not game, trying out some new visual tricks, but the rarefied tone and somewhat funereal mood will make Angelica one for only his most faithful art-house distributors.
One rain-swept night, a young Jewish photographer named Isaac (the director’s grandson and regular lead Trêpa) is called out to the moneyed Portas estate, where he is to take a photo of the family’s married daughter Angelica (López de Ayala), who has just died.
He starts snapping the deceased - only to see her open her eyes
and smile at him through his viewfinder.
Isaac finds her still smiling when his photos are developed (the story
apparently takes place some years before digital photography), and becomes
obsessed with her. Angelica haunts his dreams, notably in a digital fantasy
sequence - a first for Oliveira, and a rather beautiful one - as she takes
Isaac for a spin through the skies, in the manner of Chagall’s wedding
paintings.
The film’s first half is executed with a finesse that could only be Oliveira, and almost entirely in visual terms, as Isaac visits the estate and muses in his shabby room. About midway, however, the film moves into more rarefied, discursive mode, as an engineer (Cintra) and friends muse on the economic crisis, theory of matter and antimatter and, more enigmatically, the “seven mosquitoes of the Apocalypse”. It’s one of those Oliveira sequences which pile on the obscurity, only to end on a sublime comic note as - just on the edge of the frame - a cat eyes up the landlady’s caged bird.
Apart from the classic supernatural theme of a man falling for a seductive revenant, it’s hard to say what the film is really about - but there are plenty of tantalising hints in the quotes from metaphysical texts and the allusions to particle colliders and the Hubble telescope. Trêpa is an undemonstrative but winningly bemused lead, while López de Ayala, in a wordless role, lends perplexing allure to the ghostly siren.
As ever, this film is partly a hymn to
Review:
The Strange Case of Angelica - Film Comment
Haden Guest from Film
Comment, January/February, 2011
Hovering somewhere between ghost story and fairy tale, the 30th
feature by the indefatigable Manoel de Oliveira is a beguiling meditation on
the ontological and illusionist powers of cinema. The Strange Case of
Angelica tells the story of a young Jewish photographer summoned late
one stormy night to take a final, postmortem portrait of the eponymous
aristocratic maiden whose sudden death has left her lying in mysteriously
blissful repose in her ancestral mansion high on a hill outside of town, a
knowing Mona Lisa smile suspended enigmatically across her face. As he looks
through his camera’s rangefinder to capture a last memento mori, the Sleeping
Beauty suddenly opens her eyes, pulled back from death by the photographic
kisses of her Prince Charming. He recoils only to find that Angelica’s waking
gesture was revealed to him alone, a private vision seen solely through his
camera—although, of course, also seen by us, the viewers. What secret does
Angelica long to share and why has she chosen this young man? And, more
importantly, is she real or an illusion?
Gently refusing any clear answers to these questions, Oliveira instead offers
Angelica’s exquisite corpse as a beguiling emblem of the simultaneous embrace
of realism and magic that has animated and defined the cinema since its
earliest years. Like the Surrealists, Oliveira understands the cinema as, to
borrow the title from another of his late films, a “magic mirror” in which the
real and the fantastic are mutually dependent upon one another, as tightly
intertwined within the same image as they are in the printed photograph of
Angelica, whose eyes continue to flutter longingly at the photographer. Among
the most openly fantastical moments in all of Oliveira’s vast oeuvre are those
of the photographer’s recurrent dream that he is flying through the night sky
with Angelica in his arms. Rapturous black-and-white sequences without dialogue,
the dreams are silent films whose fervent artificiality and ecstatic magic
clearly evoke Méliès. Oliveira’s first use of 21st-century digital technology
paradoxically marks a return to the origins of cinema with the special effects
trembling with a handcrafted sincerity and shimmering sense of wonder—a
reminder of Oliveira’s status, at the miraculous age of 102, as the only
still-active director to have worked in the silent cinema and to have
experienced firsthand the age of Murnau and Borzage.
Yet these “flights” of pure fantasy are also firmly tethered to a strong
Lumière impulse and counterargument that runs insistently throughout Angelica,
expressed most powerfully in the photographer’s sudden urge to shoot a series
of portraits of workers breaking soil in the hilly vineyards outside his studio
window. As his dreams of flight with Angelica become increasingly vivid, the
real world grows dim, sad, and slow, and the photographer turns desperately to
labor, the quintessential realist subject and, of course, the first inspiration
for the Lumière Brothers—and for Oliveira’s 1931 debut Douro, Working
River. In a frightening sequence toward the end of the film, the young man
desperately follows a tractor smashing the rocks behind it, snapping furious
snapshots of the most purely physical material he knows, only to find that the
hard, stony soil remains as elusive as his phantom lover. The Strange
Case of Angelica recovers and unsettles the photographic roots of
cinematic art in the figure of the photographer, the man with the
still-but-somehow-moving camera, whose instrument, we learn, is wonderfully
imprecise and uncontrollable—since by “capturing” the real it also unleashes
the imagination.
Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica - Cinema Scope ... Michael Sicinski, Spring 2010, also seen from The Academic Hack here: The Strange Case of Angelica
There are, needless to say, certain old saws that we as critics rely upon far too often. They can help us get somewhere in a hurry, make a point or join a gap in an argument so that we can move on to where it is we really want to go—and this can be useful when we’re forced to fend off counterarguments or attacks that are equally as reflexive as the ones we’re invoking. For example: “So-and-so just makes the same film over and over again.” To which we might reply: “No, a great master devotes him or herself to a lifelong aesthetic program, continually refining it, exploring it from every possible facet. You could say it is all one big film.” The first statement needs to be knocked down, because it is not a real criticism. It’s a manoeuvre against thinking, what Roland Barthes once called “deaf and dumb criticism.” (“I’m a professional film critic, and ______ bores the crap out of me, so guess what? You punters really don’t even need to bother. Thou art vindicated!”) But the retort, while serviceable as rhetoric, isn’t particularly useful as criticism either. It doesn’t really help us see or hear.
I speak as someone who has relied too much on this One-Big-Film idea a bit in the past, and who, for the twelve or so years that I have been watching the films of Manoel de Oliveira, have too often allowed that idea to structure my deep appreciation of his work. In certain ways, this has prevented me from being fully attuned to how his films have changed in recent years, how bizarre, unruly aspects of them that struck me as “anomalies” (in an almost Thomas Kuhn way: “outlying” facts that I couldn’t square with “Oliveiraness”) were really collapsing my dominant interpretive paradigm. For a long time, I understood Oliveira’s work as representing, first and foremost, a kind of modernist joust with classical literature and theatre. The films that shaped my understanding of his cinema—No, or the Vain Glory of Command (1990), Valley of Abraham (1993), Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), Inquietude (1998) and Word and Utopia (2000)—tended to employ a text-laden, flatly declamatory style, oftentimes delivered almost directly to the camera. Positioned somewhere between the stripped-down neo-Baroque of Raúl Ruiz, the materialist readers’ theatre of Straub-Huillet, and a colour-saturated variation of late Rossellini, these films seemed intent on pulling apart everything they ostensibly aimed to harmonize. Thick literary language and theatre’s unadulterated physicality were, ultimately, inhospitable to cinema, resulting in an almost Greenbergian separation of the elements, a suspension and, indeed, a thoroughgoing inquietude.
But then Oliveira’s films included elements that were unavoidably “cinematic,” by any meaningful definition, and I wasn’t sure what to make of them. Were they just offhanded jokes, sidetracks that had nothing to do with the “great project”? It was easy enough to discount the lovely I’m Going Home (2001) as a unique semi-middlebrow one-off, Oliveira trying his hand at a more stringent version of the typical European art film. (It even begins with Michel Piccoli onstage in a very Oliveirian Ionesco production alongside Catherine Deneuve and Sylvie Testud, the theatrical “scene” from which personal tragedy extracts him.) But if I’m Going Home “doesn’t count,” what of Portuguese musician Pedro Abrunhosa’s vacant, behind-the-shades “performance” in The Letter (1999)? The discotheque fire in The Uncertainty Principle (2002)? And pretty much the entirety of Belle toujours (2006) or A Talking Picture (2003)?
I began to wonder what I’d been missing by glomming on so quickly to a master key for interpreting Oliveira’s oeuvre. (And what do we miss when we similarly reduce Straub, Iosseliani, or the most prevalent case these days, Hong Sang-soo?) This isn’t to say that I’d been entirely wrong about Oliveira’s methods before, or that he stopped making “talking pictures” in that original sense. (Magic Mirror, from 2005, is underrated, but does feel more like an early-‘90s effort.) But what I did discover, upon revisiting The Strange Case of Angelica, is that my prejudices regarding what Oliveira films are, or should be, threw me off the track. I failed to recognize this film for what it is: both an open text and a cautionary tale, a work that gestures toward many possible levels of social and aesthetic inquiry but also scans on its surface like a lost entry from the Brothers Grimm. First of all, Angelica is a ghost story. The Romantic tale of love beyond the grave is one of the most basic storytelling templates there is, of course, but one of the often unacknowledged effects of ghosts within a narrative space is the introduction of multiple timeframes within a single diegesis. Ghosts are, after all, “the past” slicing through to the present, and one of the key aspects of Angelica, long before any ghosts even appear, is Oliveira’s creation of a highly unstable timeframe.
In the middle of the night, a Catholic family requires the emergency services of a photographer. The local professional is unavailable, but they are referred to Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), an amateur enthusiast with darkroom capability. The neighbours call him a “Sephardic immigrant,” and the emphasis on Isaac’s Jewishness, along with the rather anachronistic specificity with which it is denoted, seem to place us in the late 19th or early 20th century. However, when the family sends a car around to pick Isaac up, it’s a contemporary SUV, complete with a glowing electronic dashboard. Oliveira gives us a very deliberate shot of the vehicle rounding a traffic circle in the night, with classical statuary and a fountain in the foreground. This otherwise banal gesture—a car moving through Old Europe’s public face—becomes an ambiguous time travel, out of known history and into the spirit world.
Isaac’s assignment is to shoot funereal images of the young, deceased Angelica in her final repose, prior to her burial. (Pilar López de Alaya, an actress perhaps best known for having been stalked in José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia [2007], portrays this exquisite corpse.) As he looks through the viewfinder, the dead girl appears to come to life again, opening her eyes and smiling at him. Naturally, Isaac is rattled. This happens once again in the makeshift photo studio he has arranged in his boarding house bedroom: while working on developing the photo, the dead Angelica’s image comes to life, with a smile so pure and benign as to allow for any possible projection upon it—angelic beatitude or doe-eyed virginal expectancy.
My initial experience with The Strange Case of Angelica was, in a word, off-putting, although I did find much to admire and even enjoy about this seemingly simplistic tale. Oliveira’s dip into “special effects,” in the form of the lo-tech superimpositions of the ghostly Angelica, was as much of a shock to me as the disco fire or the various odd deployments of John Malkovich in the earlier Oliveira films. (The use of cobalt blue spectres in the Méliès idiom, actually, reminded me very much of Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon [1950], another tale of love-struck madness.) But I found myself mentally slotting Angelica alongside I’m Going Home as another cul-de-sac off the “main track” of Oliveira’s primary artistic trajectory. It moves at a mid-tempo pace, drawn in part from the Chopin piano works that comprise its soundtrack. It also contains a relative dearth of extended dialogue sequences. (Even the boarding house breakfast, with its discussion of anti-matter and “the seven mosquitoes of the apocalypse,” is brisk compared to some of Oliveira’s showstopping colloquia.) Angelica seemed oddly accessible, but also somehow empty.
What I failed to observe, however, is that Angelica is every bit as concerned with the problems of cinema as Oliveira’s more theatrically inclined works, but explores them through more specifically visual means. In fact, this may be Oliveira’s most sustained meditation on the cinematic medium itself, apart from other aesthetic considerations. We began to see intimations of this direction in his previous feature, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (2009), which staged its talkiest, most static passages on a moving train, combining frank verbal delivery with the raw power of cinema’s originary magic. But with Angelica, we find the old questions regarding spirit photography and the camera’s alleged truck with the supernatural brought forward, onto the Mulvey/Lacan spectatorial axis. Isaac’s desiring gaze is an animating one, one that haunts his dreams and turns his waking life into a kind of haunted paralysis, simply awaiting the next visitation. (Isaac keeps his poor landlady awake with his nightly moaning and yelling, implying that this para-Freudian subject is in the throes of nocturnal emissions.)
But Isaac is the “enunciator” of the images that haunt him, is he not? Oliveira shows us the photographer becoming enslaved by his own images, and the repeated sight of Isaac removing them from the stop-bath and hanging them on the drying line, one “frame” after another, alludes to photography “becoming” cinema, the “dead” image coming to life and overtaking its maker, becoming more real than the world from which it was extracted. But these photographs are not a sequence. Some are of the dead Angelica, and others are of the team of vineyard workers who sing and plow and harvest across the road from the boarding house, men working in what Justina the landlady (Adelaide Teixeira ) dismisses as “the old-fashioned way.” “That’s why I like it,” Isaac replies. Before his heartsick lunacy takes over, we see Isaac cross over into the field like a good ethnographer, documenting this vanishing mode of labour. Each of the workers crosses in front of Isaac, stops, and poses for his “official” portrait, and these are the images that hang on the line alongside the shots of Angelica’s earthly remains.
What does this tell us? Isaac can be seen as being locked inside a classically modernist economy of images, using his camera to try to read past the surface of things and acquire a representation of authentic moments, “spirits” of the temporal world, before they fade. He fixates on Angelica’s image, much more so that her own family does. They wait for him to deliver the proofs while he hoards them, investing an inordinate amount of attention on the assignment. For the Catholic family, of course, the photos would be merely a reminder, a devotional object, to gesture toward the departed soul of their beloved wife and daughter. Isaac, whose Jewishness is very much made an issue at the start of the film and as he enters the family’s house, has instead fallen prey to the graven image, which sets him on the dangerous path of artistic modernism and of cinephilia in general.
In the end, The Strange Case of Angelica is a film that strikes me as double-coded. It does exist denotatively as a parable of amour fou in which the outsider allows himself to project his fantasy life upon the passive screen of the inert object. In this regard it falls in line with the classical literature of the Fantastic and the Uncanny, from “Sleeping Beauty” and Pygmalion to E.T.A. Hoffmann and right up to Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (2002). But it is also quite clearly Oliveira’s ironic consideration of the cinematic apparatus and the deeply irrational desire that it instills in us. Before the start of cinema proper, both Méliès and Étienne-Jules Marey were exploring motion study, but only the former felt the need to reconstitute motion, before a live audience, after breaking it apart. Marey, for his part, wondered why we should work to replicate what we can already see with the naked eye. Because Méliès knew well in advance what Isaac discovers to the point of insanity: only the cinema can allow us to live forever inside the temporality of another’s death.
113.
Centenarian Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira’s “O Estranho Caso de
Angelica” (The Strange Case of Angelica) (2010): Mixing illusion and reality
with the mystery of life and death Jugu Abraham from Movies That Make You Think
The
Strange Case of Angelica | Film Review | Slant Magazine Andrew Schenker
Cannes
Film Festival 2010: Day Two Matt
Noller from The House Next Door, May 14, 2010
Cannes 2010. Manoel de
Oliveira's "The Strange Case of Angelica" David Hudson at Cannes May 14, 2010
Cannes 2010 – Un Certain Regard Fabien Lemercier at
Vitor Pinto
at
Cannes:
What Does a Film by a 101-year-old Director Look Like? I Don't Know, I Fell
Asleep Julian Sancton at Cannes May 13, 2010
Guy Lodge In Contention at
Charles Ealy at
Matt Bochenski at
Peter Brunette at
Cannes 2010: Manoel de Oliveira premieres film at 101 The Strange Case of Manoel de Oliveira, still making films at 101, by Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 13, 2010
Cannes '10 Day 2: Old maids, old masters Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 14, 2010
Cannes
2010: Day 2 » Michael Phillips at
Stars
or Not, Cannes Finds Glamour Manohla
Dargis at Cannes May 13, 2010
De Oliveira's
Latest, 'Strange Case of Angelica' - Review - The New ... The
New York Times, December 28, 2010
The Strange
Case of Angelica - Wikipedia
de
Orbe, José María
AITA
B+ 91
aka: Father
No one lives in the house anymore – you tell me –; all have gone. The living room,
the bedroom, the patio, are deserted. No one remains any longer, since everyone
has departed.
And
I say to you: When someone leaves, someone remains. The point through which a
man passed, is no longer empty. The only place that is empty, with human
solitude, is that through which no man has passed. New houses are deader than
old ones, for their walls are of stone or steel, but not of men. A house comes
into the world, not when people finish building it, but when they begin to
inhabit it. A house lives only off men, like a tomb. That is why there is an
irresistible resemblance between a house and a tomb. Except that the house is
nourished by the life of man, while the tomb is nourished by the death of man.
That is why the first is standing, while the second is laid out.
Everyone
has departed from the house, in reality, but all have remained in truth. And it
is not their memory that remains, but they themselves. Nor is it that they
remain in the house, but that they continue about the house. Functions and acts
leave the house by train or by plane or on horseback, walking or crawling. What
continues in the house is the organ, the agent in gerund and in circle. The
steps have left, the kisses, the pardons, the crimes. What continues in the
house are the foot, the lips, the eyes, the heart. Negations and affirmations,
good and evil, have dispersed. What continues in the house, is the subject of
the act.
—No One Lives in the
House Anymore, by César Vallejo (1892 – 1938), translated by Clayton
Eshleman
A spare and stylistically unique film, one that insists it be viewed in
a pensive and quietly reflective manner, something along the lines of
minimalist conceptual art, as the camera lingers and hovers around every corner
of an old 13th century home in the Basque region of Spain. While it doesn’t rely upon long takes, as one
might expect, it instead finds novel angles and viewpoints, where rarely do we
feel like we are revisiting the same area twice. Filmed exclusively in natural light, composed
of static shots, it’s largely a meditation on death and dying, where the
glacial pace and constantly probing camera by Jimmy Gimferrer may suggest every
structure has a life and core identity of its own, something beyond superficial
character traits, but is a part of a living history of the geographical region,
a natural part of the world around it, where every structure may have its own
carefully defined personality. Part of
the title may suggest the paternal responsibility that comes with each
successive generational lineage as the home is passed from person to person and
family to family, each with the obligation to care and look after the home,
which is something of a national treasure, especially when small schoolchildren
visit to hear a lecture about vying families that lived and fought nearby
defending what they perceived as their own territory, using the home as a kind
of fortress when it was originally built.
Mostly we see two characters, Luis Pescador as the elderly caretaker who
continually tinkers around the building and Miken Goneaga is the amiable priest
of the nearby church who can be seen paying neighborly visits.
Based on the date alone, the home would have survived the Plague and the
Spanish Inquisition, but there is some question as to whether it will survive
the break-ins from various home invaders, largely small groups of kids that try
to ransack the place in the mistaken idea they may find something of value
inside. All they really do is break a
few windows and alter the existing sense of order inside, where Luis has to
painstakingly put everything back together again, a constant with an old house,
where leaks, decaying walls, and the constant sense of structure deterioration
play a part in the overall character of the home. What’s perhaps most peculiar are flickering
lights on the wall seen initially in a lightning storm, eventually turning into
projected images of heavily decomposed film, Basque found footage from the
region that continues the parallel theme of aging and decay, but also the idea
of human visitation, as these flickering images offer a ghostly presence,
adding a dreamlike state of reality, a kind of unknown netherworld that perhaps
exists only while we sleep. Offering a
peculiar sense of beauty, perhaps one that each inhabitant brings through
subjective perceptions, this personifies the changing nature of things over time,
where what was originally a face becomes a barely recognizable ghostly
apparition, as there may be few traces of that original face left, but perhaps
only a glimpse of what looks like an eye or perhaps a nose, altering the very
face of existence.
This is a somber and reflective work on the nature of time and history,
a non-narrative film given an experimental and even interactive adaptation, as
the filmmaker plays around not only with images on the wall but with various
forms of light, continually opening doors and windows, where in one of the more
remarkable transition shots one sees out of darkness what appears to be a full
moon in an otherwise black sky, but slowly over time there are small almost
imperceptible changes, as the slightest increases in light soon reveals a
beautifully designed window, where what one thought was a moon is the opening
to the world outside. While there are
occasional engaging conversations between Luis and the priest, mostly all we
hear are the sounds of Luis tending to various repairs, scraping away the vegetative
plant life that has overgrown several of the windowsills, measuring pieces of
wood as he attempts to repair a broken window, spraying the walls with a toxic
insecticide, all part of a seemingly endless process of keeping up with what’s
needed to care for such an old structure.
But mostly, it’s a quietly contemplative film, where Luis can be seen
leaning against the walls, where near inaudible traces of the sounds of the
church can be heard playing indescribably beautiful sacred music, where the sound
wafts though the house like a holy presence.
While the film is continually accessible on a number of levels, testing
the boundaries of documentary and fiction, its patient adherence to an
unusually curious and continually shifting perspective makes one focus and take
notice, where there is certainly no pressing urgency anywhere, but instead a
quietly transcendent state of mind is achieved, feeling almost like a brief
cinematic prayer.
AITA | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubin
Like his compañeros José Luis Guerín, Pere Portabella, and
Mercedes Álvarez, director de Orbe adventurously bridges the boundaries of
documentary, fiction, and avant-garde. The subject of AITA is a decaying but
beautiful Basque home that de Orbe inherited. The building is tended by an aged
caretaker and visited by a priest, schoolchildren, vandals, and various ghosts,
including the flickering images of decomposed nitrate films. Winner of the best
cinematography prize at the
Father Geoff Andrew from Time Out
Set wholly in or within the grounds of a
rambling, semi-derelict old mansion outside San Sebastian, this calm, measured,
visually very beautiful blend of documentary, fiction and archive footage bears
some resemblance to Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘Goodbye Dragon Inn' and Jose Luis
Guerín’s ‘Train of Shadows’, but is amply rewarding in its own right. It takes
a while to find out who the various people visiting and working in the house
are, and as long to learn about the building itself, but a series of brief,
often pawkily amusing conversations between two of the men comes slowly to
focus on themes related to death, faith and the possibility of ongoing life:
certainly the house, thanks to cinema, is alive with the ghosts of Basque history.
Experimental but very accessible and humane, and quietly affecting.
cine-file.info/forum
Candace Wirt
Several years ago, the Spanish artist and filmmaker Jose Maria de
Orbe inherited his family’s ancestral home in the Basque country, dating back
to the thirteenth century, from his father. Working with nonprofessional
actors and without a script, De Orbe focuses on the castle’s elderly caretaker,
Luis Pescador, and his upkeep in addition to the caretaker’s conversations on
dreaming and death with the local priest, Mikel Goneaga. However De
Orbe’s protagonist is the home itself, and he mixes fact and fiction to capture
its history in his family and a larger public sphere. Aspiring toward the
depiction in the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo’s “No One Lives in the House
Anymore,” De Orbe and cinematographer Jimmy Gimferrer bring the home alive again
through light. Using high definition video, they explore the nature of
light as it moves through this space, questioning its source and potential
meaning. Ultimately, AITA is the filmmaker’s “tribute to light” and
“legacy to [his] son.”
The
House Next Door [Veronika Ferdman]
Karlovy Vary Festival
In my three years attending the festival, I've never seen more walkouts than those inspired by José María de Orbe's Father. And that's too bad. Filmed exclusively in natural light and composed of static shots of varying distance, it boasts a minimalist narrative: an elderly caretaker looking after an old and crumbling 13th-century mansion. The film carries a Moonlight Sonata-like rhythm; a once-black frame slowly fills with strips of light as the caretaker goes down the corridor to open door after door, letting in the light. There's great attention to space, from claustrophobic hallways to empty, spacious room, and the textures and colors of walls (crumbling blue paint and wallpaper and cement). The film is concerned with the effort it takes to take care of something—from pulling vines off the façade of the house to steaming an ornate cornice. It's similar in tone and theme to fellow countryman José Luis Guerín's masterpiece Tren de Sombras. Both films are concerned with the simultaneous decay—of places, people, images, film stock—brought about by the passage of time and the miraculous ability of objects, like the mansions the films are centered around, to remain preserved through history.
Oct Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
A favorite among some of my most trusted filmic advisors (especially the Cinema Scope crew), I found myself surprisingly underwhelmed by Aita. The title, which translates as "Father," largely spells out Orbe's agenda, in much the same manner that Alain Cavalier does by calling his most recent effort Pater. It's about patrimony, cultural inheritance, the weight of tradition as passed down from (male) generation to generation, and the degree to which the "sons" will be adequate to the task of preserving this vital identity.Aita is specifically about an elderly caretaker (Luis Pescador) tasked with protecting a 13th century Basque castle, both from the ravages of time and from wandering groups of kids. Some of the kids just like to break the windows out of any available structure, whereas others break in out of curiosity, wandering through the halls, swiping the random artifact. The irony that the caretaker is swatting away the only folks with any interest in the castle, however misplaced, is not lost on Orbe; his disembodied camera slowly wanders the halls, oscillating between a restrained human point of view and one identified the camera and dolly itself, the detached apparatus. (Or "ghosts," I suppose, if you're inclined toward such a reading.) For contrast, the caretaker is visited on occasion by a priest (Miken Goneaga). They engage in unscripted dialogues on the nature of time and decay, the transitory character of material things. And, as a "ghostly" superimposition of those lost artifacts of the past, Orbe projects early cinema onto the interior castle walls, the image-history of Basque culture as a material emanation and a frame-within-the-frame. I think I was bothered by this semi-avant-garde procedure, since it clarified the problem I had with Aita throughout. Neither flesh nor fish, the film ends up dabbling in experimental gestures as a kind of garnish, for what is primarily a conceptual effort. In the end, I felt as though I could always see what Orbe was getting at, but experienced it at a second-order remove.
The
Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]
The central character in Aita (Father) is the dilapidated 13th Century Basque mansion inherited by Spanish director José Maria de Orbe. In a recent interview, he said that he made the film to create art where decadence and destruction once ruled. While neither a documentary nor a work of fiction, Aita is most assuredly a work of art, a mesmerising, poetic contemplation on light, texture, space, the past, the present, decay and rebirth. In the first shot we see overgrowth being cleared away, and in the second, two workmen discuss the outer shell of the house while another fossicks among bones in the basement. These shots prime us for a contemplative film that will require our active participation.
With the measured opening of doors and windows, de Orbe uses natural light to not only paint beautifully composed frames of textured surfaces and shifting perspectives, but to suggest a broader (perhaps political) metaphor for the need to reveal, examine, and restore. In this respect, the mansion could be read as more than just a building. While the film largely explores textures and spaces, it frequently pauses to focus on sound: the resonance of rooms, dripping water, wind, rain, birds, and the distant sounds of other life. We get the sense that everything we hear and see is as the house might perceive it. As a silent witness to centuries of war and injustice, this is indeed a haunted house, and Aita could be an attempt to exorcise some of the ghosts.
In a scene where school children visit the house, two girls whisper to each other in the attic. When one tells the other they should leave because she’s scared, I was reminded of Victor Erice’s masterful Spirit of the Beehive (1973), another subtle Spanish film about a nation haunted by its past. It’s also worth noting that Aita is another name for Hades: lord of death, ruler of the underworld, the invisible or unseen one. I wouldn’t know if this had anything to do with choosing the name of the film, but it is an interesting aside.
Throughout the film, a number of (mostly playful) conversations between the mansion’s elderly caretaker and a younger priest allude to various themes and ideas, such as whether the past should be unearthed and examined or simply left in peace. All the while, the film patiently waits on the house to reveal itself. Shown but never fully revealed, the house remains something of an enigma, but as night falls it does indeed start to speak, as images from the past flicker upon walls. Silhouettes (of former occupants perhaps) and numerous other ghosts silently re-enact their eternal rituals in a captivating display of light and texture, a purely cinematic sequence reminiscent of Bill Morrison’s equally extraordinary Decasia (2002). Of the many films I saw at this year’s festival, Aita was probably the most original. While the pacing may test some, those with an eye and an ear for such rarefied delicacies will be well rewarded.
LIFF
2011: AITA review Eight Rooks from
Twitch
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Amber Wilkinson]
London
Film Festival 2010: The S&S
blog Sight and Sound, October 2010
AITA (FATHER), LA
VIDA ÚTIL, & ATTENBERG Jonathan
Rosenbaum,
The
Light Within: An Interview with José María de Orbe on Notebook ... Daniel Kasman feature and interview with the
director from Mubi,
Variety Reviews -
Father - Film Reviews - San Sebastian - Review ... Jonathan Holland
The
Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition - Google Books Result
De Palma, Brian
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib (excerpt from his review of THE FURY )
De Palma can be an
extraordinarily stylish director. He regularly experiments with techniques like
split screen, 360o pans and slow-motion. His films come filled with amazing pieces of
stylistic showmanship - like the wordless erotic pursuit through the art
gallery in Dressed to Kill, the cinematic bravura of the
climactic scenes in Carrie, the taping on the bridge in Blow Out, and the first 20 minutes of Snake Eyes which were all directed in a
single shot.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info John Dickson
Has there ever been a modern filmmaker that can divide the aisles like Brian De Palma? He makes blockbusters, sparingly, mixing the high profile with the personally under-the-radar. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is in every way a blockbuster of the mammoth scale, yet it also manages to fit right alongside the entire body of De Palma's work. In its cinematic construction lay scenes in which what we witness to be normalcy/truth are followed by shots or scenes that expose everything as a lie; there are surveillance cameras of all shapes and sizes monitoring the very surface of what is seen, a hero bound to get to the bottom of a conspiracy while trying to redeem themselves over a past trauma, plus not to mention the dazzling formal mastery on display, giving its technique over to new meaning, as filmic wonderment becomes a tool in which to purge the very nature of what is seen and felt. However theoretical you want to draw Brian De Palma, everything serves a function for entertainment, never too far from the importance of keeping an audience on the edge of their seat. RAISING CANE delights in it’s Buñuelian-surrealism by showing characters revisiting similar settings throughout their reality and dreams, unsure where one ends and one begins, while shifting gears so fast that the need for clever twists become obsolete, and a purer cinema is had as a result. FEMME FATALE (closer to MULHOLLAND DRIVE and HOLY MOTORS than anything else) uses repetition as its very function of creation, returning constantly to places and situations with images and characters bleeding over from previous scenes, as if the very nature of the film can’t keep up with the main character’s lies and imagined realities. FEMME FATALE fuses the idea of dreams and film together as one, seen as a temporary escape from one’s own past mistakes and traumas, as characters create their own thrillers in their heads while desperately clinging to the reality that keeps shifting all around them. Of course with De Palma, not only do the individual films reveal their stories through the nature of repetition, so does the context of De Palma’s entire body of work. Objects, faces, clothes, and rooms always reappear: the body double, the disguise from the murderer in DRESSED TO KILL popping up in SCARFACE, RAISING CANE, BODY DOUBLE, and PASSION, as well as certain situations being nodded to from film to film. Take for example a scene in FEMME FATALE where Antonio Banderas’ character follows Rebecca Romijn around a city, after being instructed by a voice on the phone to do so. While tailing the mystery woman, Banderas sees things that to him, reveal her to be a woman in trouble, beaten by her diabolical husband, all the while unaware of the fiendish plot/truth simmering underneath, as he decides to play hero while simultaneously being fascinated by her as a sexual object. Also, following both Banderas and Romijn is a shadowy character played by Gregg Henry. Everything just mentioned is a virtual re-telling of a scene in BODY DOUBLE, even down to having the same actor, Henry, playing the shadowy character in both films. FEMME FATALE even features a glowing-red poolroom with a fight involving a pool cue, and a jukebox sound-tracking the action, à la CARLITO’S WAY. Spending time with the entirety of De Palma’s work allows the viewer to catch every visual reference and nod, as if all the films function as one, revealing a key to the filmmaker’s imagination and thought-process. Going as far back as his late 60’s work GREETINGS, one finds the seeds for political conspiracy taking root in its characters’ minds, dictating their every action that follows. The American Cinema has always kept De Palma neatly-categorized under the file “subject for further research,” as if the bubbling satire beneath his films’ surfaces were a gate blocking viewers and critics from taking him seriously as a filmmaker. His recent film about the Iraq War, REDACTED, is a modern re-telling of his Vietnam-war film CASUALTIES OF WAR. What possibly evaded viewers when it came to a film like REDACTED, was the level at which De Palma was playing with the flimsiness of the image itself, revealing the documentation of the war, not to mention the war itself, to be a badly disguised farce, revealing its true nature in the very last minutes of the film. DE PALMA is evidence of the importance of popular filmmakers of their era to pay homage to filmmakers of the past, giving collective rise to how vital a filmmaker like Brian De Palma is to our history. Like his films, replaying what has come before can tell us how to move forward. I seem to recall in the history books, a certain filmmaker of suspense films being labeled as a pure genre filmmaker by critics of his time, until a group of younger, contemporary critics/filmmakers proved the case for his genius in the late 50’s-60’s, by writing articles, books, and making films drawing from his influence. Certainly it’s not too late for De Palma as well?
All-Movie
Guide Hal Erickson
American director Brian De Palma has always insisted that he gained
his fascination with all things gory by watching his father, an orthopedic
surgeon, at work. It's more likely that the principal influence on De Palma's career was Alfred Hitchcock, a fascination he has claimed to
have outgrown professionally. Whatever the case, De Palma did his first film work in amateur short
subjects while a student at
De Palma's first film to gain theatrical release
was 1968's Murder à la Mod, and the first to accrue
critical approval was a trendy anti-war tome called Greetings (1968), again with the Brooklyn
boy who by this time was known as Robert De Niro. Hi, Mom! (1970) was a similarly irreverent
comedy, but De Palma was prescient enough to realize that the
vogue for anti-establishment films would soon pass. Thus he began emulating Alfred Hitchcock with Sisters (1973), utilizing the split-screen
technique popularized by such late-'60s pictures as Grand Prix and The Boston Strangler. De Palma not only admitted to borrowing from Hitchcock in Sisters, but also underlined the tribute by
having the film scored by Hitchcock's frequent musical director Bernard Herrmann. Obsession (1976), again scored by Herrmann, was one of several De Palma imitations of Hitchcock's Vertigo (see also Body Double), and also established the
director's fascination with 360-degree camera pans.
Carrie (1976), De Palma's most successful film to that date (and
still one of the most successful Stephen King adaptations), marked a return to the
split-screen technique and wrapped the story up with another of De Palma's trademarks, the "false shock"
ending which turns out to be a nightmare. There was a similar finale (again
staged as a dream) in Dressed to Kill (1980), which audaciously
included a shower scene à la Psycho (but the director deceived, staging
the murder in an elevator). By the time Body Double came around in 1984, De Palma was all but parodying himself with
gratuitous gore, slow motion, lyrical panning shots, Herrmann-esque musical scores, characters who
weren't who they seemed to be, and twist-around endings. With the acclaimed Scarface (1983), the director inaugurated
his "crime is not nice" period, ladling out grimly violent sequences
in such films as Wise Guys (1986) and The Untouchables (1987) to show that the bad
guys weren't the lovable lugs Damon Runyon had made them out to be. De Palma next explored a different kind of violence
in Casualties of War (1989), a Vietnam War film
that centered on the outrageous mistreatment of a Vietnamese woman by a platoon
of American soldiers.
Raising Cain (1992) was a full-blooded
return to terror, with one of De Palma's favorite actors, John Lithgow, given free reign to express his
wildest, darkest passions. Carlito's Way (1993) was another crime
flick, this time with Al Pacino (who'd worked with De Palma in Scarface), and proved to be one of De Palma's most widely praised films in years. With
the exception of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), which
was a full-out failure, De Palma has remained one of a handful of truly
bankable
De Palma was back just two years later with Femme Fatale, a typically stylish exercise
featuring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as the title character and Antonio Bandaras as the man unlucky enough to become
entranced by her. After a four-year layoff De Palma returned to theaters with an adaptation of
James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia. Based
loosely on the infamous unsolved murder case, the book was the first of a
four-book series that would also include L.A. Confidential.
De Palma a la Mod a fan site run by Geoff Beran
Le Paradis de Brian De Palma a French/English site run by Carl Rodrigue and Tony Suppa
Film Reference Robin Wood, updated by Joseph Milicia
Brian De Palma Keith Uhlich from Senses of Cinema
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Brian De
Palma profile from Alfred Hitchcock Collaborators &
Partners in Crime
Brian De Palma @ Filmbug bio info
Brian De Palma NNDB profile page including a filmography with links to short reviews
Brian De Palma by FilmMakers Magazine profile page including a biography and filmography
Feature: Auteur Fatale: The Films of Brian De Palma Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
Objects of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma Michael K. Crowley from 24LiesASecond, April 28, 2004, which features a mob-like photo of the American “whiz kid” directors
Casualties of Genre, Difference, and Vision: Casualties of War James Moran from 24LiesASecond, April 28, 2004
The Plausibles: The Problems of Make-Believe in the Age of Reason Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, April 29, 2004
Double Reflections: Beyond the Shadow of the Double Giuseppe Puccio from 24LiesASecond, July 18, 2004
Pleasures Worthy of Guilt: A Cinephile's Confession Dennis Cozallio from 24LiesASecond, March 21, 2005
Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, July 1, 2005
girish: Brian De Palma July 24, 2006
Brian De Palma: Critical Black Mass." Dennis Cozzalio from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, August 21, 2006
Brian De Palma’s land of paradox Peter Gelderblom from Lost in Negative Space, August 26, 2006
Sergio
Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: THE BLACK RHAPSODIES OF ... Dennis Cozzalio,
The Films of Brian De Palma, Part One Jeremy C. Fox from Pajiba, September 15, 2006
Say ‘Brian De
Palma.’ Let the Fighting Start. - New York Times A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
Los
Angeles Times Article (2006) The death-deifying De Palma, by Peter
Rainer,
Reverse Shot Feature (2006) Junk Art: Brian De Palma, by Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert, Fall 2006
Fall 2006, Brian De Palma | Reverse Shot A Reverse Shot online index of two dozen De Palma film essays, Fall 2006
TIFF
2007: Brian De Palma on the front lines - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners,
Brian
De Palma Explains Himself - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 ... Anthony Kaufman,
Brian De Palma: 'Apparently, I'm a left-wing wacko traitor who ... James Mottram from The Independent, February 24, 2008
Objects
of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma Michael K. Crowley from The House Next Door,
The House Next Door: The Shape of Substance: Brian De Palma and ... Peter Gelderblom, November 10, 2008, initially published here: The Shape of Substance: Brian De Palma and the Function of Form from 24LiesASecond, September 17, 2005
brian de palma - The Screengrab When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Paul Clark, November 18, 2008
De Palma, Brian They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Gerald Peary Interview January 1979 for Take One
interview De Palma a La Mod, interview by Geoff Beran
during a retrospective in
Brian De Palma on "Snake Eyes" interview by Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine
Steve
Rose talks to director Brian De Palma | Film | The Guardian Crazy,
huh?
The Black Dahlia The San Francisco Brian DePalma Theory Collective, a taped transcript of the post viewing discussion, September 15, 2006
NYFF: Brian DePalma's Blowup Katey Rich from Cinema Blend, which includes a transcript of the October 11, 2007 interview by J. Hoberman that ended up in a shouting match with a Magnolia Pictures representative (see YouTube footage below)
De
Palma Versus Cuban: Edelstein Enters the Ring David Edelstein from the
Brian
De Palma Gives Up in the Battle Over ‘Redacted’ Darrell Hartman from the
Conversations
podcast: Brian De Palma | Salon Arts & Entertainment Stephanie Zacharek interview from Salon,
Redacted The
Close-Up Film Interview - Brian De Palma Re: REDACTED
The Nerve Film Lounge: Q&A: Brian DePalma Re: REDACTED
De Palma Image of the Day #01 A series of De Palma images from films, by Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled
The religion of director Brian DePalma
Photos and discussion around the director Flickr
Brian De Palma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Five themes for Brian de Palma YouTube
(
BRIAN DE PALMA COOL TV INTERVIEW (
YouTube
- Brian De Palma interrupted at NY Film Festival ...
YouTube
- Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 1 (
Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 2 (9:55)
Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 3 (9:57)
Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 4 (9:53)
Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 5 (9:35)
MURDER À LA MOD
USA (80 mi) 1968
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Based on the title and the year
of its release (1968), you'd expect Murder a la Mod to be a brisk
exploitation romp: bare breasts, flashing lights, perhaps a brief appearance by
the Strawberry Alarm Clock. But that wasn't Brian De Palma's style, even in his
rarely seen first feature. The movie opens with a low-angle shot of women
jumping into the air in front of a photographer's backdrop, breaking up the
rhythm of their rise and fall with brisk, stuttering cuts. De Palma then jumps
to a shot of one model with her throat slit, making the analogy between one
kind of cut and another explicit.
Mixing Peeping Tom and Blow-Up
with a soupcon of Luc Moullet-style anarchy, Murder a la Mod kills time
with weird digressions, like a woman's prickly conversation with an officious
bank clerk, then leaps forward in undercranked spasms. A photographer's model
is introduced, forgotten, then fatally stabbed with an ice pick, although not
before being covered in ketchup. De Palma rewinds and replays the action from
multiple points of view, although further "explanations" only amplify
the absurdity, which eventually coalesces around a manic and possibly murderous
stagehand played by Phantom of the Paradise's William Finley.
Although it clearly prefigures
the false-bottom puzzle boxes of De Palmas to come, Murder a la Mod is
exhausting and unrefined, a gas in stretches but a bummer on the whole. Still,
there's one sequence you can't tear your eyes away from. Following the model's
date with a straight razor and before the plot gets cooking, De Palma
interpolates a series of screen tests for the central role, which generally
come down to an off-camera De Palma urging buxom cuties to take off their tops.
The girls, however, don't go quietly; one looks positively sick at the thought
of disrobing, while another gripes about the low pay, her resistance turning to
resignation as the director gets his way. It's not clear if the auditions are
real or staged, and particularly if De Palma's crass cajoling is a put-on or
the real McCoy. (One doubts these girls could act so convincingly if they were
in on the gag, but you never know.) But it's worth noting that the sequence
provides Murder with its only flash of the nudity that was all but
essential for "art" films of the time, and that it's viewed through a
viewfinder's crosshairs. Worth noting, too, that De Palma plays essentially the
same role in The Black Dahlia, and that he was more convincing as an
asshole director when he had less experience.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD review: Murder à la Mod (1963)
Tim Lucas from Sight and Sound, March 2007
Anyone
attempting to chart Brian De Palma's development as a film director has long
been thwarted by the unavailability of his earliest work. As luck would have
it, the most easily found pieces of this puzzle - Greetings(1968) and The
Wedding Party (1969) - look forward to the unsuccessful, comic side of De
Palma exemplified by Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), Wise Guys
(1986) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), while only the
anarchistic and involuted aspects of Hi, Mom! (1970) offer shades of the
sly, malicious prankster he would become. Last year, an important change in
these affairs was facilitated by the Carlotta label's French DVD release of Brian
De Palma Années 60, which collected the 1970 release Dionysus in '69
(documenting an orgiastic Greenwich Village stage production of Euripides' The
Bacchantes) as well as two shorts, Woton's Wake (1962) and The
Responsive Eye (1966), and a 30-minute documentary. Now, thanks to the wily
specialists in orphaned exploitation cinema at Something Weird Video, an even
more significant recovery has been made: Murder à la Mod, De Palma's
second feature and first ever theatrical release.
The only
feature ever distributed by the oddly named Aries Documentaries, Murder à la
Mod seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth after playing at a single
New York City theatre. Very likely only a single print was circulated, and it's
presented here looking fresh from the lab. Better yet, it's unmistakably a De
Palma film through and through - a very close relative of Sisters
(1973), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981) in particular,
with subject-matter both suspenseful and recursive, revealing close affinities
with the time-and-spatial play of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad,
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, and the self-confessional cinephilia of
the previous year's David Holzman's Diary.
An extended
pre-credits sequence finds various young women (including Sisters'
Jennifer Salt) caught in the cross hairs of a movie camera, being auditioned by
their boyfriend (the offscreen voice is De Palma's own) for a skin flick he's
got to make to pay for his divorce. Each woman seems to think she's the only
one in the photographer's life, and the final session segues from a pop
explosion of Lesteresque effervescence to on-camera murder. The ensuing story
finds the fashionable Tracy (Andra Akers), back from Europe, catching up with
her less worldly friend Karen (Margo Norton), who announces her engagement to
Chris Jordan (Jared Martin), a handsome photographer for whom she's posed nude
but who strangely hasn't touched her or applied pre-marital sexual pressure.
When next they meet, Chris tries to break his engagement to Karen, admitting
that his divorce is not yet final and that he's had to take a job shooting a
smut movie to get the $10,000 necessary to dissolve his marriage. (The film is
masterful at inserting details that must be easily recalled to mind later.) The
startling murder-by-icepick of a key character (very Sisters), filmed in
high contrast, puts into effect a cinematic mechanism - a big, loudly ticking
one like the car bomb in the director's 1974 film Phantom of the Paradise
- that continually turns the chronology of events backwards and forwards in an
effort to elucidate the murder and its motivations from multiple angles and
through multiple eyes, including those of an acid-giggly director played by
frequent De Palma collaborator William Finley (who also contributed the
psychedelic theme song). It would not be much of an exaggeration to call Murder
à la Mod the first fully realised De Palma film; a crude model certainly,
but with an intricacy of design to rival Snake Eyes (1998) or Femme
Fatale (2002). It's also precociously recursive: Phantom fans will be
intrigued to spot De Palma's own name on the clapboard in a
film-within-the-film.
The extras
in this 'special edition' are two bonus features. The first is Larry Moyer's The
Moving Finger, another heretofore lost independent curiosity filmed in New
York City, in which a Beat coffee house run by resident poet Lionel Stander
becomes a hideout for wounded bank robber Mike Dana. A young Barry Newman is
prominent among the countercultural coveters of Dana's stolen $90,000, and
there's an impressive brief appearance by the legendary New York street
musician-poet Moondog.
The tin can
tied to the end is An Eye for the Girls, a condensation of a feature
consisting of stock footage and original still photographs, credited almost
solely to one Harold Klein. At 50 minutes, it's quite long enough, thank you,
but its non-story has sufficient thematic ties to Murder à la Mod to
show that it wasn't included thoughtlessly.
Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert) also reviewing GREETINGS and THE WEDDING PARTY
Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: Turner Classic Movies
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
GREETINGS
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
A loosely linked series of sketches involving two young men
who coach their buddy on how to weird out the army psychiatrist and thereby
flunk his draft physical. There's also some strangeness about the Kennedy
assassination and a lot of sexual horseplay. It's all served up with good
humor, self-indulgence, a touch of wit, and once in a while a fine satirical
relish. It was Brian De Palma's first major film, and also the first major role
for Robert De Niro. Hindsight works wonders here: the film seems more
comprehensible than it did when first released, now that its style has been
taken up by television. With Gerrit Graham, Richard Hamilton, and Allen
Garfield (1968).
Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson] also reviewing HI, MOM!
"Yeah, you know,
tragedy is -- it's a funny thing."
-- John Rubin (Robert De Niro) in Hi,
Mom!
Looking back at Brian DePalma's career, it seems perfectly natural that he should move from quirky, underground black comedies like Greetings and Hi, Mom! to highly sophisticated, operatic horror films like Carrie, The Fury and Dressed to Kill. The difference between the early films and the later ones is only a matter of scale and genre emphasis. DePalma began making comedies which are horrifying, and has progressed to making horror films which are hysterically funny. Like all the best American directors, DePalma recognizes that horror and humor spring from the same source-our inability to confront what frightens us. We have two choices: we can draw back in horror, or we can retreat into laughter. DePalma knows that humor and horror are so inextricably intertwined in the American imagination (recall Ronald Reagan quipping to his wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck") that it is fruitless to try to sort out which is which, to go for "pure" horror or "pure" humor. There's really no such thing. DePalma's films are bursting with moments which are funny because they are so horrible-and all the more horrible because they are funny. Conundrums like this are the stuff of which his films are made. Tonight you'll see what I mean.
“I
met a man in filmland, a patron of the arts
He
bought my scheme to turn my dream into a peeping art.”
-- Hi,
Mom! title song
The first thing you notice about DePalma's movies is that he is absolutely obsessed, and in love, with the medium. Rarely has the cinema seen such a fluid visual imagination. Always acutely aware that films are made to be watched by audiences in theatres, he pulls us into his film-stories using hand-held camera, character point-of-view shots, and other audience identification techniques-then turns the film around on us, tossing us back into our seats and reminding us that we're watching a movie by slipping in Godardian inter-titles, jump cuts, split-screen, slow-motion, fast-motion, fancy wipes and dissolves, and anything else you can think of that can be done with a movie camera, an optical printer and a moviola. The artist is clearly in his element, and that's what makes DePalma's films such a joy to watch.
Greetings, DePalma's 1968 anti-military/anti-war movie
melange, was the first of his films to find an audience. In fact, it was so
successful that Hi, Mom! was conceived as a sequel (originally to be
called Son of Greetings). Greetings is an ebullient, brazenly
disturbing mixture of movie-movie acrobatics and American counter-culture
politics in the manner of pre-1968 Godard. Critics have emphasized over and
over DePalma's debt to filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and (especially
over-emphasized) Alfred Hitchcock. In Greetings, Michelangelo
Antonioni's Blow-Up, another hip youth-cult film of the time, also looms large.
But the filmmaker whose spectre really presides over this film is that of
Abraham Zapruder, the man who made the most famous 8-mm home movie of the
Kennedy assassination at Dealy Plaza.
The first thing we see in DePalma's movie is a television set carrying a speech by President Johnson. In front of the set sits a book: Six Seconds in Dallas. Greetings, made five years after the assassination, is a picture of a nation obsessed with six seconds of Kodak movie film. Right away, DePalma begins detailing the dissolution of the barrier between the personal and the political in American society; just as, in this and subsequent films, he will dissolve the barrier between the film and the audience, between horror and humor, between public and private.
“Peeping through my window / Seeing life on
little screens.”
-- Hi,
Mom! title song
All of these elements are operating splendidly in the first shot of Greetings. President Johnson, giving a televised speech, is speaking both to the audience there in the auditorium with him and the audience watching him on TV. In front of the television set on which we are watching him is a coffee pot, partially obscuring a portion of the screen. We're not just watching Johnson on TV, we're watching him on a particular TV set in a particular room in someone's home somewhere-which puts us at three steps remove from that hall where we see Johnson speaking. When Johnson turns to the camera to address a question directly to his audience, we experience a strange, chinese-box sensation. Johnson, speaking directly to the TV camera, is speaking directly to the audience watching television. We, watching this television set in this movie, suddenly find him addressing us, too. The documentary reality of Johnson's speech becomes a part of the fictional film, Greetings; all these layers are at once telescoped and compressed into a single frame-within-a-frame. Appropriately, DePalma both begins and ends his film with this shot.
Even more tension is added to the above moment when you consider how DePalma is playing with the dimension of time: Johnson delivered the speech at a particular moment in time; the videotape of that speech was broadcast at another time-say on the evening news; DePalma, after making a videotape of his own from the broadcast, filmed the speech off the television set at some other time in 1968; and we are watching that film now on April 14, 1981. Johnson, in the moment he looks through the camera lens at us, slices through all those levels of distanciation and the moment becomes an immediate one again, Time is trapped on film and renewed. If this is beginning to make you feel dizzy, it should. It's this kind of mind-boggling tension that DePalma's films thrive on. Each film is like a pair of mirrors facing each other with the audience trapped in the void between.
In Greetings,
Gerrit Graham plays Lloyd Clay, a conspiracy buff who finds evidence
everywhere-but especially in blow-ups made from the Zapruder film-which he
feels proves conclusively that the Warren Commission was a whitewash, that the
FBI lied, and that there was indeed a man with a gun behind the grassy knoll.
DePalma, too, is clearly fascinated by the "frozen" moment in time
which that piece of film represents.
Godard called cinema "the truth 24 times a second." But DePalma, echoing David Hemmings in Blow-Up, also realizes that the closer you examine a frame (one twenty-fourth second) of film, the less tangible the "truth" of the visual evidence becomes. One person may clearly see an assassin; another may see only a grainy blob. Part of DePalma's fascination with split-screen lies in its ability to bombard the audience with a great deal of visual information, allowing viewers to choose what they want to watch at any particular moment -- like Jon Rubin, picking out the most interesting windows in the apartment building in Hi, Mom!, or Allen Garfield watching three porno movies at once in the same film.
Film is a medium in flux; time will never stand completely still for scrutiny, even when "captured" with a movie camera. So DePalma plays with that flux. In Obsession, we move from 1975 to 1959 in one apparently seamless shot. In The Fury, the past and the present occupy the same frame simultaneously as Amy Irving has a telekinetic vision on a stairway. And in Greetings -- well, there's that opening/closing shot.
In what is probably Greetings' funniest and most unsettling scene, Lloyd Clay draws diagrams of bullet paths on the nude body of his sleeping girlfriend to prove that the doctors provided the Warren Commission with false information. Suddenly, in a rather jarring reminder of the film's first shot, he looks directly into the camera and, on the verge of hysteria, shouts his assassination theories at us. We thought we were witnessing what Clay's friend, Jon Rubin, will later call a "private moment." What could be more private than this intimate scene in these people's bedroom? But all at once DePalma and Gerrit Graham reach out of the film and nail us to our seats. A private moment, blown up on a movie screen, becomes a public one. The private and the public, the personal and the political, are fused. A decade later, this scene will find its echoes in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.
Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert] also reviewing MURDER À LA MOD and THE WEDDING PARTY
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
10,000 Bullets - DVD review Michael Den Boer
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine
All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]
Channel
4 Film capsule review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review
THE WEDDING PARTY
Peter Nellhaus Coffee Coffee and More Coffee
In part because of the entries written by Girish on his blog, and because I like to be a completist with some filmmakers, I finally saw Brian De Palma's debut feature. Filmed in 1964, with a copyright dated 1966, the film did not receive theatrical play until the release of Greetings, De Palma's first film to get significant distribution following its December 1968 opening. The evolution of Brian De Palma will probably be better evaluated by the scheduled DVD release of his first solo directorial credit, Murder a la Mod from 1968.
What importance The Wedding Party has is largely based on its being the first film for several participants in the cast. Cast primarily with actors and friends from Sarah Lawrence College, the film includes Jill Clayburgh, as well as three actors who would collaborate several more times with De Palma - Jennifer Salt, and William Finley, seen above to the left of Charles Pfluger and future De Palma star Robert De Niro. Had none of the actors or the co-writer/director gone to greater acclaim, The Wedding Party would probably be another forgotten student movie.
This is not to say that the film is bad or unwatchable. The Wedding Party is the kind of cute farce that students from the Sixties would make primarily for an audience of their peers. Having been an NYU film student at the end of the decade, I speak from experience. De Palma's taste for satire and sight gags would be developed in future films. The rich white people teased gently here would be treated more savagely in films like Greetings and Hi, Mom. Some of the visual humor is inspired, if not by silent films, then second-hand by Godard, Truffaut and quite probably, Richard Lester.
De Palma has become something of the Rodney Dangerfield among the so-called Film Generation directors. Instead of giving his films fair evaluations, De Palma has too frequently been written off for imitating Alfred Hitchcock. I have to wonder why Claude Chabrol is not held to the same standard, especially as his films have become increasingly formulaic. More than any other filmmaker from the Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol has made films that are similar to the French "Cinema of Quality" that Cahiers du Cinema had rebelled against fifty years ago. De Palma, at his best, including the maligned Femme Fatale, still manages to take his narrative into unexpected places, often with startling images. While Chabrol sometimes is too refined for his own good, De Palma is unafraid to shock, jolt and above all, entertain.
Slant
Magazine [Eric Henderson]
The Wedding Party was Brian De Palma's first feature, though the subsequent Greetings made its way onto a handful of
screens earlier when Wedding Party found itself without distribution. De
Palma had to fund the film's meager release with his co-producers: Wilford
Leach, a renowned stage professor who had become one of a young De Palma's
mentors, and Cynthia Monroe, a wealthy film student who basically funded the entire
project. (Don't bother looking for her as the bride, as she wasn't funding a
star vehicle for herself—in fact, she only appears briefly as a bridesmaid.)
Falling in line with De Palma's early, predominately goofy projects leading up
to the morose gravity of Obsession, the film begins with the groom being
picked up from the ferry to be driven to his bride-to-be's estate, sped up to
look like a Keystone Cops outtake. The chauffer isn't allowed to drive the
vehicle and ends up hanging from the running board, the prospective groom takes
the wheel from the back seat and relatives keep finding their way outside of
the car, one wandering to the sea because, so the overlapping voiceovers tell
us, he enjoys the melancholy effect the surf has on him.
Talk about exiting the gate with a running start. Wedding Party, once
finally released, was subject of a review in Variety that has proven a
handy epigram for De Palma's critical standing since ("techniques
themselves were deemed more fundamental than ideas of substance"). At the
risk of siding with the critical enemy, Wedding Party is admittedly far
more confident in form than it is in function. From a screenwriting
perspective, De Palma, Leach, and Munroe don't ever really convey the role that
the young couple's posh, island estate wedding has on the groom's psyche. (And
they seem to often forget that the bride has a psyche to attend to as well.)
The film gives the "a film by" credit to all three, but it's
abundantly clear Leach turned his attentions on his gifts as a stage director
to create a well-stocked ensemble of character actors doing actorly things,
which is probably one reason why the film frequently calls to mind Robert
Altman's A Wedding.
This left De Palma free to begin exploring his role as a film director with all
the enthusiasm one can expect from a director whose works never completely shed
their film-student trappings (and that's meant as a compliment). Much as the
groom's hectic arrival was played in triple time, the excruciating round of
introductions the groom is subjected to thereafter plays out in slow motion
with the isolated patter of whispering old bitches dominating the soundtrack.
("Look at that hair, I guess he thinks he's fashionable.") The
punchline extends to the opening credits, where all the bride's family fills a
single title card that blocks out the entire screen. The groom's relatives are
listed next: one single, lonely name. Later on, when the family keeps intruding
into the future newlyweds' privacy, De Palma films the two from outside their
window (in a seemingly purposefully fake matte shot) to resemble a jail cell. Wedding
Party is a spunky freshman effort, but De Palma undoubtedly felt more
comfortable—and continues to flourish)—in the realm of the wryly sophomoric.
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: Turner Classic Movies dvd review
Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert] also reviewing MURDER À LA MOD and GREETINGS
DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Reel.com dvd review [1.5/4] James Emanuel Shapiro
The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review
DIONYSUS
USA (85 mi) 1970 co-director: Richard Schechner
User comments from imdb Author: FaustPWilliamsWLeach from Canada
I'd been wanting to see this play/movie for a while, and when a
friend was kind enough to send me a copy of Brian DePalma, Le Annees 60 (Brian
De Palma- The 60's) I couldn't believe my luck!
Having been introduced to both Bill Finley and Bill Shephard through PHANTOM OF
THE PARADISE, I was intrigued and deeply impressed to see both men in VERY
different roles, and yet, if you've seen Phantom, there's almost a reversal of
roles. Whereas, with Phantom, Mr. Shephard's role is an active spectator in the
theatrical blood bath, with Dionysus, he plays a character who is duped in much
the same way Bill Finley's character would be, a few years down the road.
And speaking of Mr. Finley, you really have to wonder how idiotic the folks in
Hollywood's high hills must be, to pass up such a natural talent! After seeing
Phantom of the Paradise a number of times, I was amazed and impressed to see
him in roles that are as far removed from the ambitious but naive Winslow Leach
as it's possible to get!
In Dionysus in '69, Bill plays the title role; the man/god Bacchus/Dionysus,
who plots out revenge on the family and city responsible for the killing of his
mother. His villainy is so cleverly deceptive, however, that you couldn't help
but be reminded of a unscrupulous record producer, as he lures young king
Pentheus and his entire kingdom to its own ruin.
I'll admit that there were a couple scenes I couldn't sit through, for the
graphic nature, but that's just me. The story, over all, was intriguing and had
me reading Euripides' The Bacchae, to find out how the play really ended. I
like Bill Finley's version better.
User comments from imdb Author: Brad Mays (redmund) from Los Angeles, CA
Dionysus is not really a film as such,
but a "from the hip" documentary "capture" of the
Performance Group's legendary 1969 staging of Euripides' THE BACCHAE. Hugely
inspired by the ground-breaking theatrical rituals of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski,
DIONYSUS IN '69 (as the production was named) stirred up huge controversy
amongst New York theatre audiences and critics alike.
Although the production was directed by Richard Schechner, Dionysus In '69 was
created through a rehearsal process that was part democracy, part anarchy, part
primal scream therapy. The final result was more a ritualized confrontation
than conventional play, which culminated in a virtual orgy of audience
participation. Nudity, profanity and huge amounts of stage blood were used to
tremendous effect. Brian DePalma discovered the production and brought two NYU
film maker friends of his into a special performance where multiple 16mm
cameras were used to archive the iconoclastic proceedings in B&W. The final
cut is an exercise in the "split screen" techniques which would
eventually become DePalma's cinematic trademark.
The cast shows deep commitment to their material, and Bill Shepherd (later
known as Will Shepherd) is particularly brilliant in the role of Pentheus. I
will not go into the plot, which should be well-known to most college
graduates, but will say that the original Euripides play (written about 500
B.C.) deals with the myth of Dionysus and his revenge upon the city responsible
for his mortal mother's death.
I had the good fortune to direct Will Shepherd in my own film adaptation of THE
BACCHAE, produced in October of 2000, where he played Cadmus, grandfather to
the character he portrayed so brilliantly some thirty years before at the
Performance Garage in New York.
I highly recommend the film DIONYSUS, if not for its filmic brilliance, then at
least for its documentation of one of the true theatrical marvels of the late
1960's.
There are a number of 16mm prints of Dionysus floating around out there
somewhere, but I'm not sure what company distributes the film, which is not
available on video through
Slant
Magazine [Eric Henderson]
Dionysus is frequently still written off as a footnote in Brian De
Palma's filmography, even though its status as a difficult-to-see film has
created an enthusiasm amongst De Palma fanatics counter to this. And, in any
number of ways, the film probably deserves its status as a conversation starter
in the De Palma canon rather than the entire conversation: it's more
theater director Richard Schechner's and his Performance Group theater troupe's
vision, the cinematic experimentalism is scaled back to one single signature
form (again De Palma shares "a film by" credit, this time with his two
co-cinematographers Robert Fiore and Bruce Rubin), and any vague parallels to
the Kennedy assassination were prescribed nearly 2,500 years in advance.
Dionysus is a feature-length split-screen, a bifurcated recording of
what was one of the New York avant-garde theater world's more controversial
productions: a loose interpretation of Euripides's Bacchae performed in
and around its audience in a garage that frequently detoured into simulated sex
acts and modern political soapboxing. (It's original title, Dionysus in '69,
is a campaign slogan for William Finley as Dionysus, who shatters the
play's—and film's—illusions of Greek dramaturgy with an explicitly American
context by repositioning the performance as a bloody, sexy cautionary tale—one
that can only be remedied by replacing President Johnson with President Finley.
Works for me.)
De Palma frames the entire performance as just that—a performance—to the best
of his abilities. He opens with the actors on one side of the screen before
curtain, stretching, purring their vocal exercises, centering, and shaking it
out. On the other side, he shows the audience lined up around the block.
(Unless my eyes deceive me, the sequence features one of De Palma's only
moments of self-referentiality when his camera finds The Wedding Party's groom Charles Pfluger
waiting in line.) While the performance of Bacchae (specifically,
Finley's dependably galvanizing performance at its center) is undoubtedly the
primary element of Dionysus, De Palma's contributions are worth
considering, if only for context. The split-screen, so often an attempt to make
the screen a psycho-physiological extension of the characters within the film,
is here used as an attempt to unite one audience with another.
While it's obviously impossible to get down and dirty with the actors from the
other side of the movie screen, at least De Palma's multiple choice
frames-within-frames suggest the intimacy of the theatrical experience. The
merging of political radicalism, melodrama, sophomoric humor, and turbulent
sexual transgressions survived as a formula—with varying ratios—in basically
every De Palma film to follow. After all, it's worth mentioning that the film
features a male-on-male make out session that predates Femme Fatale's lesbian bathroom grope.
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review
HI, MOM!
aka: Blue Manhattan
A blast from the past which recalls De
Palma's beginnings as a really eclectic independent. Made for $95,000 after the
unexpected success of his anarchic Greetings, this is the sequel to end
all sequels. De Niro plays variations on a Vietnam vet returning to NY as,
variously, a 'peep art' porno movie-maker, an urban guerilla, and an insurance
salesman. At least that's the framing excuse for an increasingly lunatic series
of set piece gags. 'Be Black Baby' is a skit on off-Broadway 'encounter
theatre', in which a middle class white audience is terrorised by black actors
in whiteface. Shot by De Palma in visceral vérité, it actually is
terrifying. Structurally, the film never recovers - but then its main merit is
a refusal to 'hang together'. Anarchic and very appealing.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Before he strode confidently into
Hitchcock territory, filmmaker Brian De Palma began his career in the late
1960s and early 1970s with a series of anti-authority satires. Hi, Mom!
(1970) wasn't quite as controversial as its X-rated predecessor, Greetings
(1968), but it still has a bite, even today. Robert DeNiro stars as Jon Rubin,
a
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
An online film critic said upon the release of
2000's Mission to Mars—probably the film that demonstrates the single
largest gap in perception between mainstream American audiences and hardcore
French cinephiles—that there's no better test case for the auteurist model currently
working in film criticism than Brian De Palma. No matter how seemingly diverse
his films are (or, conversely, how seemingly tied they are to the work of a
certain suspense director), they are all immediately identifiable as "a
film by Brian De Palma." But too often De Palma's films are looked at as
simple, stylistically flossy, self-referential exercises using thriller genre
tropes. This is unfortunate, because it leaves no room for De Palma's reckless
early films, including the stunning, complex comedy Hi, Mom!
Conceived
as a sequel of sorts to the three-pronged satire of 1968's Greetings (in
fact, Hi, Mom! was originally set to be titled Son of Greetings),
Hi, Mom! is likewise a film with three major threads, only all are
devoted to the character of Jon Rubin (played by an appealing, floppy-topped
Robert De Niro in a performance many consider to be a direct harbinger of his
Travis Bickle role in Taxi Driver). (Readers should be advised of
possible spoilers, and those already familiar with the film should be aware
that I make no attempt to clearly streamline the film's wild, ungainly plot.)
Jon, a Vietnam vet, drifts through the film like a skuzzy butterfly, moving
from one underground social environment to the next: first the world of
pornographic filmmaking, next becoming an actor in a performance art-cum-social
crusaders' college theater troupe, finally landing on domestic terrorism. His
enlightenment-barbarism is held against a distorted paradigm of flowering
courtship rituals with Judy (Jennifer Salt), the girl with whom he initially
wants to make his Candid Camera pornographic film.
De
Palma biographer-enthusiast Laurent Bouzereau notes in The De Palma Cut
that the film received rave reviews from adventurous critics, but suffered a
financial failure that led De Palma to also consider it an artistic failure.
But one has to take into consideration that the director's greatest directorial
strategy—one that incidentally informs Hi, Mom! more than it does
practically any other De Palma film—is his attempt to make us aware of our role
as an audience, and also our connection with what he as a director is
attempting to accomplish through a heady mix of artifice, contradiction, and a
hectic emotional pitch.
De
Palma's films are nothing if not structural, representational works of art,
filled with winking moments that distance the audience from the diagetic
details of his scenarios through their flamboyant technique (the slow-mo zoom
on Nancy Allen's open-book face as she discovers Angie Dickenson in the
elevator in Dressed to Kill, the downright Brechtian finale to Body
Double), even as other equally showboating moments are galvanizing
narrative K.O. punches (John Travolta feverishly discovers his erased tapes in Blow
Out, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos comes to the water's surface in Femme Fatale).
If
indeed De Palma's own auto-critique of Hi, Mom! in relation to his own
personal canon was informed by what wags sarcastically refer to as the
"Hitchcock connection" (derisively calling to mind images of De Palma
fixed on the belly of the Master of Suspense like a lamprey or via an umbilical
cord) and that this early counter-cultural comedy somehow falls short on the
required tally of Hitch riffs, it would be a shame. Hi, Mom! might have
been only the third feature film by the director, but practically every trait
that would come to signify the art of De Palma is at play in the film, many of
them, natch, in direct conflict with another.
The
most Hitchcockian riff that De Palma ever examined is the capacity for the
human psyche to harbor intense, complicated divergence. But, whereas Hitchcock
often resolved this tension by placing it in the context of a relatively well
adjusted, normalized society (i.e. the long-winded psychological rationale that
closes Psycho), De Palma complicates the archetype through his
insistence on highlighting the equally labyrinthine tangle of contradictions
behind social normalcy, knots that seem to cause individual maladaptive
dysfunction. An early broadcast from NIT (that's National Intelligent
Television, the front used by the anarchist theater clan) sees the crew of
black students taking to the streets with the intention of exposing the
internal hypocrisies of the average WASP. Obviously baiting people to their
breaking points, the students reveal the sham of social grace, as their targets
are stripped of their reliable defense (their politeness and tacitly segregated
racial congregations). This sequence is obviously the comedic set-up for the
"Be Black, Baby" performance art nightmare that practically rapes the
definition of social façades and the lengths people will go to preserve them.
But it's also a reflection of Jon's demented internal logic (to the extent that
a cipherous figure can be said to have logic); in De Palma's world he is
portrayed as a man whose utter alienation from normalcy stems, appropriately
enough, from the total absence of it.
As
Chaka Khan purrs in "Tearin' It Up," "I'm going to make you wish
there were two of you." Many schisms in De Palma's movies are tethered to
sexual frustrations and confusions—basically anything having to do with sex
that doesn't involve supine boudoir humping. The Fury can be taken as a
sweeping, apocalyptic satire of educational sex education films, charting the
development of one boy and one girl as they go through a sort of psychic
puberty. The attempts of adults to contain their increasingly virile state
(psychic abstinence) leads to the ultimate sexual-murderous release. Hi,
Mom! doesn't so directly address the connection between sex and violence,
but it should be noted that the film's last act, in which Jon plants a bomb
that demolishes the building he and a pregnant Judy share in domestic
tranquility, is a sly joke. Being that Jon and Judy met under the pretense of
sexual intent (at least according to Jon), the fact that Judy is pregnant
indicates a newfound absence of sexual conquests, and every tryst between the
two now carries the promise of further consequences. Jon's destruction of
everything that represents familial domesticity, like Amy
Like
the shot in To Die For of Nicole Kidman as a kid looking back and forth
between a video camera and the monitor feed in an effort to see her own face on
television, Jon Rubin's relationship to pornography in the film's first segment
is complicated by his desire to straddle the gulf between watching and being
watched. (The Rube Goldberg device he invents to film himself making love to
Judy in the building across the way—which predictably fails—accentuates the
comically Sisyphesian difficulty of bridging the gap between the two.) In its
take on the relationship people have with their own image-making games, Hi,
Mom! occasionally comes off as the work of a film student who spent his
summer session on Marshall McLuhan blitzed out of his mind on acid. The
concepts are all there, but they've been kneaded into a bizarrely funny
burlesque of the "medium is the message" worst-case scenario.
With
the "Be Black, Baby" sequence, De Palma manages to do with racial
tension what he no doubt hoped to pull off with sexual ambiguity in filming Cruising
(a project he lost to William Friedkin before turning out the thematically
similar Dressed to Kill). Aided by a deliberate dissection of a very
real social stress point, it is one of the most thrilling left turns ever
filmed. The theme of voyeurism, which up to this point had been treated as a
blue joke, becomes a hellish shattering of the seemingly secure fourth wall,
both for the on-screen audience of upper-crust whites who attend the show,
submitting themselves to humiliation, beatings, and broomstick rapes, as well
as the actual film's audience, who are basically cast adrift into an 8mm
calamity without even the comfort of a recognizable character. For their
trouble, the audience is thrown a bone with the post-performance reactions of
the upper-class twits who exclaim, amazingly, their gratitude for being shown
how they're directly responsible for all of society's racial ills.
There
are, of course, basketsful of further stylistic and structural tactics that
construct Hi, Mom! If the descriptions of the film's collage of ideas
and subplots all sounds rather daunting and busy, it probably is that and more
so; this is, after all, De Palma's Godard period (I say that without wishing to
be flippant). In fact, if the film indeed has a failing, it would be in its
unbridled, undisciplined ambition. Early in Jon's would-be career as a
pornographer, he pitches his idea to his decidedly uninterested producer (Allen
Garfield, deliriously funny) to blur the lines between fiction and verité by
filming four real windows, four real storylines. This not only predicts De Palma's
fascination with split-screen effects (he actually had already experimented
with this device in Dionysus in '69), but also his fascination with the
difference between private emotions and public "performance" (take
note of the fact that the "reality" he's filming across the courtyard
is filled with sexual fantasy role-playing, or "fiction"). Hi,
Mom! is an overachieving film that deserves better than mere footnote
status in De Palma's already far too marginalized career.
Reverse Shot [Michael Joshua Rowin]
Cinepad (Jim Emerson) review also reviewing GREETINGS
Hi Mom Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
VideoVista
review Gary
Couzens
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
PopMatters Tim O’Neil
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT
USA (91 mi) 1972
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Warner Brothers turned off the money before Brian De Palma
was able to finish shooting this anarchic 1973 comedy. Consequently, the
plotline, about a business executive (Tom Smothers) who decides to chuck it all
and become a magician, is even more confusing than it would have been
otherwise. De Palma, though, gets off some interesting shots (there's a witty
parody of a Hitchcock track under the opening credits), and Orson Welles does
some magic tricks. A mess, but not intolerable. With John Astin, Allen
Garfield, and Katharine Ross. 91 min.
SF,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Unable to handle work pressure, marketing executive Donald
Beeman walks out of his job and becomes a tap dancing magician under the
tutelage of Mr Dallesandro. On his travels he encounters various strange
people. Later he and his workaholic ex-boss create Tap Dancing Magicians, a
course for pressured executives to drop out into, and it becomes one of the
most successful corporations in the world. But then this business begins to
exert pressure on Donald too.
This was Brian De Palma’s third film. With his next film,
Sisters (1973), De Palma ventured into the psycho-thriller genre and had an
international hit. He would go on over the next decade to make hits like Carrie
(1976), The
Fury (1978), Dressed
to Kill (1980) and Blow
Out (1981) and become synonymous with stylish psycho-thrillers and his
recurrent Hitchcock homages. But before that De Palma for all the world seemed
to be shaping up as a director of quirky independent films with the likes of
Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Hi, Mom (1970) and this. Sadly most
of his earlier indie films languish forgotten nowadays – they are rarely seen
today and difficult to find, if not completely unavailable, on video.
All of which is a shame as Get to Know Your Rabbit is a brilliantly funny
absurdist comedy. Were it more well known it would undoubtedly become the cult
film it should be. Americans never really understood the absurdist sense of
humour that emerged out of the British tradition (Monty Python, the Goon Show,
The Young Ones et al), which this falls very much into. This may well explain
why the film was not a success. Jordan Crittenden’s script is filled with
wonderfully nonchalant absurdities – the bomb-caller who tries to announce
there is six minutes before a bomb goes off and is put on hold; Katharine
Ross’s delightfully nonsensical story about her crush on the paper-boy and how
she had to sell herself to pay for the paper subscription in order to continue
to see him every day; or John Astin as Smothers’s workaholic former boss
begging – “I’ve been so long without an office. Just give me an office, I
wouldn’t ask you to trust me with a job” and then collapsing in relief when he
finally gets to paperclip two pieces of paper together. The final throwaway gag
is sublime. The cast are memorable, of which John Astin and a wonderfully
dignified Orson Welles, who gets to indulge his love of magic tricks, are
particularly standout. De Palma directs in sublimely droll straight-face and
the film is a joyous little gem. The only time that De Palma ever got to
indulge this sort of sense of humour again was in The
Phantom of the Paradise (1974) – comedy is a genre one wishes he would
visit again.
Slant
Magazine review
Zach Campbell
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
SISTERS
The Silencers to Smiles of a Summer Night Pauline Kael
Brian De Palma's low-budget horror movie about a psychotic
ex-Siamese twin has its share of flaked-out humor (as in the TV game-show
parody at the beginning) and De Palma does some virtuoso stunts though not in
the dream-slapstick style of his later thrillers, CARRIE (1976) and THE FURY
(1978). This is a much more primitive scare picture. He lurches his way
through; he can't seem to get two people talking to make a simple expository
point without its sounding like the drabbest Republic picture of 1938. The
facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his
apparent intention--to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old
corn. He manages the thrills, though (there are some demented knife-slashings),
and audiences seemed to be happily freaked by Bernard Herrmann's score, with
its old radio-play throb and zing. With Margot Kidder, who knows how to turn on
sexiness with a witch's precision, and Jennifer Salt, who gives a feeble
performance as a nitwit girl reporter. Also with Charles Durning, Lisle Wilson,
Mary Davenport, Bill Finley, and Barnard Hughes. Shakily written by De Palma
and Louisa Rose. A Pressman-Williams Production, released by A.I.P. For a more
extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Reeling.
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
Though Sisters
is an undeniably tight homage to Hitchcock from an obviously indebted De Palma,
I am still inclined to place it at least a tier below the likes of Dressed
to Kill and Body Double. It might just be that, when held up against
the spectacles of Angie Dickenson's showering body double soaping up the
velvety lining of her cootch or De Palma restaging the
death-by-power-drill-phallus box cover of Slumber Party Massacre, the
discreetness of Sisters' first hour (with its fairly obvious variations
on doubling and mirroring psyches) can't help but seem a tad academic and
recherché in comparison. If it weren't for the post-murder clean-up
split-screen (with a cunning frame within said split featuring Margot Kidder's
mentally fried Danielle looking at her bifurcated image in the bathroom mirror)
and Bernard Herrmann's knowing B-rate knock-off of his own musical clichés, one
is almost tempted to entertain De Palma detractors' arguments that his
exploitation of Hitchcock tropes is nothing but a dead end. Lucky for the film
that Jennifer Salt's one parsable character trait—a habitual need to place
"very important" telephone calls (I think she tallies at least 27 in
the space of a half-hour)—leads her into the lair of a Lysol-wielding C-rate
faux-Faye Dunaway, who stops Salt's Nancy Drew momentum dead in its tracks,
leisurely hissing "Better spray yourself, hon…I think you have a
cold." Her feline devotion to keeping germs off of the receiver makes
quiet mockery of Salt's huffy addiction to moving her reporter's notion of
"plot" forward, culminating in a primal scream that sends Salt,
Kidder, and even De Palma himself reeling into the film's free-form,
experimental, destructive final act. As the symbolic gatekeeper to the very
ennoblement of De Palma's reputation as "Master of Suspense, Jr.," you'd
think the nut would at least get a screen credit.
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Brian De Palma made several films
before Sisters, but that 1973 thriller, recently restored for video and
DVD release, truly set the stage for the rest of his career. A self-confessed
homage to Hitchcock bursting with references to Psycho, Rear Window,
and others, Sisters allowed De Palma to find his own voice by imitating
another's. But those who have written him off as a stylish imitator were wrong
from the start: Sisters could never have been made without his
inspiration, but Hitchcock never could have made it. Independently financed and
shot on an extremely modest budget, Sisters joins Hollywood-caliber
suspense sequences to the feel of a gritty exploitation film and themes in tune
with the time of its creation. That it opens with one of DePalma's trademark
fake-outs—in this case Peeping Toms, a game show that recalls Candid
Camera by way of Michael Powell—reveals both its importance in terms of the
director's later work and how much the initial enjoyment of it depends on an
ignorance of its many plot twists and ingenious dashing of expectations.
Suffice it to say that it features Margot Kidder as a sweet French-Canadian
model, Jennifer Salt as an intrepid female reporter, Charles Durning as a
by-the-book private eye, a madhouse, a doctor specializing in Siamese twins,
and a fatal set of prize cutlery. With Sisters, De Palma created an
expertly paced technically audacious thriller that's too knowing to be easily
dismissed as a mere exercise. Albeit a near-perfect fusion of craft and
material, particularly in some remarkable split-screen sequences, there's more
at stake than immediately apparent: Consider the way every male character uses
a combination of patronization and aggression to suppress female ambition, or
the way an uncredited (and scene-stealing) Olympia Dukakis uses different
techniques to the same end in a cameo as Salt's mother. For a director later
labeled a misogynist, Sisters has an awful lot in common with early-'70s
feminism. But, as a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De
Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable
regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best. Featuring
such wicked jokes as a sequence juxtaposing a woman going into seizures with a
man happily and unknowingly purchasing her a birthday cake, it finds his career
quickly taking shape.
Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
The first film of New York based filmmaker Brian De Palma
to receive a wide theatrical release and attract favorable notices from
mainstream critics, Sisters
(1973) is an audacious mixture of psychosexual thriller and Alfred Hitchcock
homage infused with a wicked sense of humor. Certainly, De Palma had already
established himself as a director to watch with such promising indie efforts as
Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970), two improvisational,
anti-establishment satires, both of which starred a young Robert de Niro. But Sisters is the film that set
the tone and style of De Palma's "thriller" oeuvre which blossomed
with Carrie (1976) and peaked with Dressed to Kill (1980). Bursting
with creative energy and visual experimentation, the film is a virtuoso sampler
of his strengths (and weaknesses) and a lot more fun than some of his later
work which often verged on self-parody.
In the tradition of other mystery thrillers about twins where one is good and
one is bad (The Dark Mirror [1946], Dead Ringer [1964]), Sisters tops that plot device
with a kinky twist: Danielle (Margot Kidder) is a former Siamese twin,
separated from her psychotic sister, Dominique. She becomes the object of a
police investigation when a neighbor, aspiring journalist Grace Collier
(Jennifer Salt), witnesses a murder in Danielle's apartment. When the police
fail to find any evidence that would convict Danielle, Grace conducts her own
private investigation, hiring a detective (Charles Durning) to monitor the
suspect's apartment while she tries to unravel the strange relationship between
Danielle and her creepy ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), who continues to
stalk her. It all ends in a madhouse, appropriately enough, with Grace strapped
to a gurney and completely at the mercy of Emil, who is revealed as the doctor
who performed the separation surgery on Danielle/Dominique.
While De Palma's detractors have always accused him of plagiarizing Hitchcock, Sisters is actually an
inspired homage to the British master of suspense, with De Palma enriching the
narrative with situations and elements from key Hitchcock films. The film's
voyeuristic nature and the nosy neighbor who cries murder is inspired by Rear
Window (1954); Emil's attempts to control and dominate Danielle mirror
James Stewart's behavior toward Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958), the
unexpected early murder of a sympathetic character audiences had assumed was
the protagonist harkens back to Janet Leigh's shocking demise in Psycho
(1960). The other Hitchcock connection, of course, is the film's music score,
composed by Bernard Herrmann, one of Hitchcock's most famous collaborators (The
Trouble with Harry [1955], The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956], North
by Northwest [1959], etc.). De Palma strikes just the right note of
freaked-out paranoia with the opening credit sequence featuring Herrmann's
frantic orchestration which is like an amphetamine-fueled version of his Psycho
overture. Yet, despite the pervasive Hitchcock influence, Sisters has a distinctive
style all its own with De Palma employing split-screen techniques, alternate
points-of-view, dream sequences, frenetic editing, ominous tracking shots and
dashes of graphic gore to give the film a feverish rollercoaster momentum.
Scratch the surface, however, and you might notice a feminist subtext which has
been noted by many film scholars, among them Robin Wood who wrote in his
chapter on Brian De Palma in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond:
"Sisters
analyzes the ways in which women are oppressed within patriarchal society on
two levels, the professional (Grace) and the psychosexual
(Danielle/Dominique)." Even if you don't buy that academic jibber-jabber, Sisters is a true reflection
of its troubled era, marked by the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War and the
emergence of the women's movement. It's also easy to see how some reviewers
believed that De Palma was creating a feminist horror film since both Danielle
and Grace are the real victims of Sisters, both of them thwarted in their attempts at independence
by men. Danielle is constantly manipulated by Emil and the prescription drugs
he administers while Grace is at first humored by the police, then dismissed
and eventually silenced as the film's potential heroine. At the film's
conclusion, she has returned home to her mother's care in a post-hypnotic
state, docile and subservient.
On the other hand, some critics consider Sisters misogynistic, an accusation which has followed De Palma
throughout his career. Remember the cruel fates awaiting Angie Dickinson in Dressed
to Kill and Fiona Lewis and Carrie Snodgress in The Fury (1978),
their deaths rendered with an almost sadistic glee? One could argue that Sisters has no sympathetic
female characters. Danielle could just as easily be viewed as a dangerous
psychopath, a castrating avenger who alternately seduces and destroys men. As
for Grace, De Palma occasionally exploits her character for humor in scenes
where she bungles her own investigation and comes off like a nitwit (such as
the scene where she drops the birthday cake on the cop's leg). The fact that Sisters can be viewed as both
a feminist film and a movie by a misogynist makes it one of De Palma's most
fascinating works and one that compliments the film's schizophrenic nature.
Without a doubt, Sisters
marks an important turning point in De Palma's career. It looks back toward his
early films with its loose, freewheeling, try-anything style of filmmaking and
the presence of William Finley and Jennifer Salt who appeared in some of De
Palma's first movies. It also anticipates his rise as a Hollywood auteur with
its more traditionally structured plot, visual stylization and prominent roles
for Margot Kidder and Charles Durning, both of whom would go on to greater
success; Kidder for box-office hits such as Superman [1978], The
Amityville Horror [1979], and Superman II [1980] and Durning for
Oscar®-nominated supporting roles in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
[1982] and To Be or Not to Be [1983]. For some however, Durning's
shining moment may be the final closing shot in Sisters, one of the great comic fadeouts of all time and the
perfect setup for a sequel.
SISTERS : Les cicatrices du gros plan (Soeurs de Sang) de Brian de ... Didier Truffot from Cinetudes (translated below)
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Sisters (1973) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 25, 2009
Sisters Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
Reverse Shot [Tom J. Carlisle]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Flipside Movie Emporium (Michael Scrutchin) review [B+]
Images Movie Journal Derek Hill
DVD Journal JJB
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [1.5/5]
Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jeff Ulmer) dvd review
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5]
The
Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion
Collection] Adam Jahnke
Goatdog's
Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review
[3.5/5]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
DVD Town
(John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Talk
(Thomas Spurlin) dvd review [1/5]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson
Movie Martyr
(Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Movielocity
Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch) dvd
review [7/10]
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night
Critic]
Horror View Head Cheeze
DVD Talk
(Brian R. Boisvert) dvd review [3/5]
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Elusive
Lucidity: De Palma Image of the Day *
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
This rock 'n' roll musical is
still many fans' favorite due to its success as a "
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Despite the dread MOR dirges given to
Harper's crooning ingenue, arguably De Palma's finest film. A highly inventive
updating of the Phantom of the Opera story to the rockbiz world -
complete with borrowings from Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray
- it tells of rock composer Finley's desire for revenge after he is cheated by
a nightclub and record label mogul (Williams). Nothing that remarkable about
the plot in itself, but De Palma employs his love of gadgetry to imaginative
effect (making terrific use of split screens and video technology), and casts a
satirically beady eye upon the money-hungry foibles of the music industry.
Best, in fact, is the cameo by Gerrit
Graham as the camp, 'Producers'-style glamrock star, although Memmoli's
world-weary manager and the piss-take of Alice Cooper are also memorable.
Phantom Lady to Planet of the Apes Pauline Kael
This satire of horror movies is
also a rock musical comedy. The writer-director, Brian De Palma, has an
original comic temperament; he's drawn to rabid visual exaggeration and to
sophisticated slapstick comedy. William Finley is the idealistic young composer
who is robbed of his music, busted for drugs, and sent to Sing Sing, all at the
instigation of Swan (creepy Paul Williams), the entrepreneur of Death Records,
who has made a pact with the Devil for eternal youth. The composer escapes from
prison, is maimed by a record-pressing machine, and becomes the Phantom, who
haunts Swan's new rock place, the Paradise, where the girl he loves (Jessica
Harper) becomes a star. This mixture of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and Faust
isn't enough for De Palma. He heaps on layers of acid-rock satire and parodies
of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, PSYCHO, and THE
PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY--AND the impacted plots actually function for him. The
film is a one-of-a-kind entertainment, with a kinetic, breakneck wit. The
cinematographer, Larry Pizer, keeps the images full to overflowing, and the set
designer, Jack Fisk, supplies striking takeoffs of the frenzied decor of German
silent films. The singer, Beef, is played by Gerrit Graham, who gives the
single funniest performance; Harold Oblong, Jeffrey Comanor, and Archie Hahn
turn up as three different groups--the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, and, with
black-and-white expressionist faces, the Undeads. 20th Century-Fox. For a more
extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Reeling.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Mark Radice) review
One of De Palma's earlier films, Phantom of the Paradise is a bizarre blend of rock, horror and comedy, as well as being a pastiche of a number of sources, including Faust, Hitchcock and a wry comment on the rock word's commercialiam and on showbiz as a whole.
Swan (Paul Williams), a megafamous rock producer; steals Winslow Leach's
(William Finley) rock cantata on Faust frames him and gets him sent to prison.
Leach escapes and breaks into Swan's studios but inadvertently gets crushed in
a record press, becoming horribly deformed, and starts to haunt the
De Palma as usual puts in a few cinematic references, a cheap joke Psycho shower scene, a programmed assassination faintly reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate, and of course echoes of earlier versions of The Phantom of the Opera. The film is adorned with the unattractive side of 70s style: tight half T-shirts, huge bell-bottoms, the ubiquitous lank hair with centre-parting, men with chunky black polo-necks, overgrown fringes and nasty 'taches, plus the encroaching drugs scene and primitive music technology. He also uses his split screen device, and makes good use of sound and video technology (then). The general feeling is (partly since the film has dated quite remarkably) quite bitter, but this is intentional, as De Palma deliberately sets out to satirise showbiz - the machine you have to conform to (as he had to and still has to) to get anywhere, the sad wannabees, and pathetic easily-pleased crowds.
The grand finale is a grotesque almost cartoon-like amalgam of rapid cutting, bizarre colours, wild music and crazy people, with a touch of Grand Guignol thrown in for good measure - it has to be seen to be believed. It suitably encapsulates De Palma's quirky film, an entertaining period piece from the 1970s, whose satire still holds much relevance in the cut-throat world of showbusiness today.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Kian Bergstrom
A hit only in Winnipeg (a city then and now of exquisite good
taste), PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE seems to have everything going against it.
Music by the anti-cool songsmith Paul Williams, who also plays one of the
leading roles, an alienating, mannered, downright strange performance by
William Finley in the title role, a visual scheme exuberant with kitsch, gaudy
colors, and off-putting compositions, and a tone of jokiness and self-mockery
resolutely at odds with the deadly seriousness of the subject matter: at first
glance, there's nothing about the movie that's not at odds with itself. It's
the same with the plot line, which is so absurdly constructed and disconcerting
as to fairly defy summary. Winslow Leach, bespectacled composer of a cantata
about Faust, has his music stolen by the Svengali-esque Swan, a producer and
nightclub owner. Framed as a heroin dealer, Winslow is sent to Sing Sing, where
all his teeth are extracted in an experimental medical procedure. He soon
escapes, however, when he hears his own songs on the radio being butchered and
breaks in to Swan's record-pressing plant, only to have his head trapped in the
machinery. Now with the grooves of the hated record inscribed on his face, and
his own voice destroyed, he determines to destroy Swan's nightclub, disguising
himself as a cybernetic owl, only to be waylaid in his quest for revenge when
he falls in love with the ingénue Phoenix, played by the great Jessica Harper.
And that's just the first two reels. There are a dozen musical numbers,
elaborately staged and hilariously parodic, and a series of terrible murders,
committed grotesquely by the otherwise sympathetic hero, Winslow, all of which
work to prevent any attempt on our part figure out what in the world we're
watching. PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE never lets us get comfortable, and this is
not merely on the level of plot. The film's strange, distracting style and
other-worldly sights and sounds are just artificial enough to suggest that the
work is wholly within a fantasy land, the fairy-tale world of the classic
Hollywood musical, and just nasty, explicit, and corporeal enough to indicate
that we're seeing a version of reality. After Winslow becomes the Phantom, he
plants a time bomb in the trunk of a prop car about to be rolled onto a stage
crowded with his enemies. It's is a dead ringer for the bomb we see in the
opening seconds of TOUCH OF EVIL, and what follows is nothing less than a
stunning one-upping of that film's luxurious and deadly first shot. Not content
with one mobile camera, De Palma shoots his car-bombing in split-screen and
during a song-and-dance routine. On one level, it's an exercise in audacity and
confusion and suspense, a great director showing off. But, as in all aspects of
PHANTOM, the segment serves to unnerve the viewer tonally, preventing us from
fully enjoying the technical mastery of the style or from enmeshing ourselves
within the story and feeling unmitigated suspense and horror, from either
condemning or identifying with the characters and their actions. Hilarious,
horrifying, mortifying, embarrassing, engrossing, and delirious all at once,
PHANTOM's masterful control over every aspect of cinema makes it impossible to
truly come to term with, but makes it one of the most profoundly pleasurable
experiences in American cinema.
SF,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
At the time of The Phantom
of the Paradise, director Brian De Palma had emerged with four
quirkily eccentric comedies – Greetings
(1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Hi, Mom (1970) and Get to Know Your Rabbit
(1971). However De Palma had not really garnered major attention until the
striking psycho-thriller Sisters
(1973). This psycho-thriller genre would for the next decade become De Palma’s
most fertile directorial ground. (See below for Brian De Palma’s other titles).
The Phantom of the Paradise is one of Brian de Palma's most enjoyable hour-and-a-halves. It was written back in 1969 when De Palma was still in experimental form. De Palma has designed the film as a parody of the oft-filmed The Phantom of the Opera (1925) - all conducted as a hilarious parody of seventies glitter rock. Although not just satisfied with The Phantom of the Opera, De Palma also throws in spoofs of Faust, The Picture of Dorian Grey and the Universal Frankenstein films. Not to mention a really funny parody of the Psycho (1960) shower sequence - the first and funniest of numerous Hitchcock quotes that would turn up in De Palma's films - with The Phantom wielding a toilet plunger in lieu of a knife. Just as much as the horror genre, De Palma conducts wild and hilarious swings at 70s glam rock - with De Palma and songwriter/star Paul Williams winding in send-ups of every imaginable musical style from The Beach Boys to Alice Cooper to retro-50s rockers like Sha Na Na.
De Palma is a director with a love of flashy directorial style. Here he characteristically shows off - some of his use of anamorphic lenses and split-screen trickery proves a distraction, but the scenes with his camera conducting 360o pans, or animated musical bars and notes winding around Finley as he composes are highly stylish.
Gnomic 5’2” Paul
Williams gives a campy performance that, among the rest of the film’s lunatic
exaggerations, seems only to be perfectly in place. He’s clearly having a lot
of fun. Williams had a sporadic career as a musician and actor in film and tv –
he appeared as an orangutang in Battle for the Planet of the
Apes (1973) and in Smokey and the
Bandit (1977), had his own very short-lived tv series The Paul Williams Show (1979), voiced The
Penguin in the various animated Batman
tv series of the 90s, and wrote the theme music for The
Love Boat (1977-86) and songs for several of the Muppet movies. But the film’s real scene
stealer is Gerrit Graham as Beef, a macho parody that seems to combine David
Bowie’s gender bender persona with Gary Glitter to quite hilarious regard.
Gerrit Graham had debuted in Brian De Palma’s Greetings,
made his first major performance in The Phantom
of the Paradise and went on to appear in a lot of B horror movies
throughout the 1980s, particularly those produced by Albert and Charles Band.
Graham however has never been better than he was here. His attempts to walk in
platform heels are guaranteed to have one in hysterics.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
(1975) the following year mined fairly much the same territory as The Phantom of the Paradise in its combination
of monster movie clichés and parodistic glitter rock. This joyfully mad film is
a perfect companion piece for the Rocky Horror
set and is indeed a side of himself that Mr De Palma should visit again some
time.
De Palma’s other genre films are:– Get to Know Your Rabbit
(1971), Sisters/Blood Sisters (1973),
Obsession (1976), Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill
(1980), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984),
Raising Cain
(1992), Mission to Mars
(2000) and Femme Fatale (2002).
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Slant
Magazine review
Fernando F. Croce
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jeff Ulmer) dvd review
Critic After Dark Noel Vera
Epinions.com - Review on Phantom of the
Paradise by Phineaskc
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5]
Horrorview Suicide Blonde
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5]
DVD
Review e-zine dvd recommendation Dennis Prince
Cinema Suicide Bryan White
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]
DVD
Verdict (Kevin Lee) dvd review
Mondo Digital also reviewing DRESSED TO KILL and THE FURY
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
OBSESSION
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
Schrader and De Palma's tribute to
Hitchcock's Vertigo may lack the misogyny and bloodbath sensationalism
of De Palma's later work, but it's still dressed up in a mortifyingly vacuous
imitation of the Master's stylistic touches. Virtuoso gliding camera movements
do not necessarily a good film make. The main problem with the film, in fact,
is the excruciatingly slow pace; although if you've seen Vertigo, the
story itself - of a businessman haunted by guilt about his wife's death, and
getting involved years later with her lookalike - will fail to yield the
narrative surprises and suspense required in a thriller.
BoxOffice.com [Wade Major] (link lost)
If "Obsession" isn't Brian De Palma's best film, it's definitely his best "Hitchcockian" film. A fascinatingly clever, vibrantly mystical reworking of the "Vertigo" concept, "Obsession" is wall-to-wall virtuoso filmmaking sustained by a fabulously well-structured script. The story basically concerns a businessman (Cliff Robertson) who loses his wife and daughter to a botched kidnapping plot, only to years later run into a woman who is the spitting image of his deceased wife.
There are the obligatory creepy twists and turns, nearly all of them dictated by "Vertigo," but just askew enough that audiences still won't know where the film is headed. It's a credit to the script by Paul Schrader, who wrote his text based on an idea that he and De Palma generated after an enthusiastic viewing of "Vertigo." That story and more are related in the brief documentary on the film's making, which is the most significant extra here.
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib (excerpt)
Brian De Palma seems to vary from one film to another as to
whether he is the plunderer of Hitchcock's tomb or the carrier of his torch.
This borderline genre entry is the first of De Palma's reworkings of
Hitchcock's Vertigo
(1958). [De Palma even admits on the DVD release that his decision to make Obsession came after he and screenwriter Paul
Schrader watched a print of Vertigo,
a film that was out of general circulation at the time]. The debt is emphasized
even to the extent of De Palma employing Vertigo
composer Bernard Herrmann. (Also borrowed, one might note, is the famous
scissors killing from Hitchcock's Dial M for
Murder [1954]). De Palma's other great debt is to Nicolas Roeg and Don't Look Now (1973),
from whom he borrows the obsessive, gloomily haunted vision of Italy (he merely
swapping Rome for Roeg's Venice locations ). It is certainly an attractive idea
to set the Vertigo obsession amid the
sinister Europe, playing on the anxiety of the continent's oppressive past and
culture that have preoccupied filmmakers ever since The
Third Man (1949). Like Roeg, De Palma certainly creates an
attractive image of figures funereally moving through an elegant
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
Geneviève Bujold was a little bit like the Björk of
late '60s, early '70s cinema. She worked between predominately pop-minded American
films and hermetic, aggressively Euro productions, coasted a long way on
adorably pliable looks, and kept you perpetually off-balance with her
off-kilter line-readings and interpretations. She was a sterile cuckoo with a
voice whose grit confirmed the darkness in her eyes. Paul Schrader may have
ended up having to capitulate Obsession's original (ridiculous) scripted
ending to the will of Brian De Palma, but the casting of Bujold in what is
essentially Kim Novak's role in Vertigo results in a literary emphasis
not seen in De Palma's work again until the strong-arm showboating of Oliver
Stone and David Mamet. Obsession is, as far as De Palma's tributes to
Hitchcock go, half-baked and far-fetched without even the benefit of being
audacious-unto-tasteless. It's the movie in which the only dearth of a
metaphoric "double" is the comedy mask that ought to complement the
dour visage of tragedy. (Is that the reason that it is Obsession,
and not any other De Palma film up until Femme Fatale, that is included
in the top 1,000 film list of that old sourpuss Jonathan Rosenbaum—the critic
who sneered at the director for expressing delight at audience reaction to Dressed to Kill?) While
Bernard Herrmann's rapturously funereal score (with at least four separate
dirge leitmotifs swirling around the opulent, central "Valse Lente")
ratchets up the film's metastasized, polluted doom-gloom, Bujold takes her role
(a screenwriter's "pitch" if there ever was one—e.g. "What if we
took the idea that Kim Novak was practically young enough to be James Stewart's
daughter and just ran with that?") in the opposite direction, at least
initially. Within minutes of meeting Cliff Robertson's sad sack, she bites
heartily into Schrader's symbolic dialogue about the ethical implications of
discovering an original draft of art and restoring the revision. It's clearly a
bout of self-deprecating guilt from a writer who felt a little dirty turning Vertigo
into a teary-eyed sick joke. But Bujold's enthusiasm as a performer redeems the
entire picture, especially when she's asked to perform flashback scenes that
shouldn't work but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma's fearlessly
experimental whims.
OBSESSION by Brian de Palma / 1975 Jérôme Reber (Hughes) from Cinetudes
DVD Times Mike Sutton
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Rich Rosell) dvd review
DVD
Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
CARRIE
C.C. and Company to Catouche Pauline Kael
The best scary-funny movie since
JAWS-a teasing, terrifying, lyrical shocker, directed by Brian De Palma, who
has the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies. Pale,
gravel-voiced Sissy Spacek gives a classic chameleon performance as a repressed
high-school senior whose energy is released only telekinetically, and Piper
Laurie plays her deep-voiced, sexy fundamentalist mother. With John Travolta, Nancy
Allen, Amy Irving, and William Katt. United Artists. For a more extended
discussion, see Pauline Kael's book When the Lights Go Down.
Unlike other Hollywood virtuosos, De
Palma's central inspiration remains unashamedly the horror film and its
thundering techniques of emotional manipulation. Carrie is almost an
amalgamation of The Exorcist and American Graffiti, with Spacek
as a religious maniac's daughter whose experience of puberty is so harrowing
that it develops paranormal aspects. De Palma's ability to combine the romantic
and the horrific has never been so pulverising. Here he contrives a wild
juxtaposition of Carrie's freakish inner turmoil with the dreamy cruisin'
mentality of her high-school colleagues. The style and imagery are strictly
primary in the Freudian sense: menstrual blood and spotless ball dresses,
Cinderella dressed up for the abattoir. But the fierce sympathy it extends to
its unfashionable central character puts the film a million miles above the
contemporary line in sick exploitation.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Harral) review
Carrie sees De Palma on top form in what is perhaps his preferred territory, namely that of the horror movie. Sissy Spacek could almost have been born just to play Carrie, the daughter of an ultra religious Christian, whose fanatical and dictatorial character dominates her life, causing her to be treated by her "cool" high school peers as a "weirdo", and general social outcast. However, with the onset of puberty Carrie discovers that she possesses fantastic psychic powers and sufficient means to strike back at her teenage antagonists.
In the hands of De Palma this seemingly straightforward horror story becomes a vehicle for a slick display of stylistic virtuosity. His intermingling of dreamy romanticism and schlock horror is a pleasure to behold, climaxing in a fantastic scene at the high school dance where all the stops are pulled out (slow motion shots, split screen sequences, floating soft focus cameras and numerous other devices) to make Carrie's final humiliation a truly stunning set piece. While De Palma's obvious linking of the supernatural and the emergent female sexuality is not an uncommon one for a horror movie to make (see The Exorcist, for example), his evident sympathy with the internal turmoil and pain of the eponymous "heroine" is relatively unusual for the genre. Carrie is all the more impressive and fascinating as a consequence.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Kian Bergstrom
The strange CARRIE finds De Palma in a mode of perpetual
discovery, movement, and defilement. In the film's now-legendary second scene,
Carrie White, High School senior, cleans her thighs in the shower after P.E.
class. She drops her bar of soap, and we, but not she, see it bounce off the
tiles at her feet only to be replaced by a stream of blood filling her hand.
After a moment, she gazes into her palm, and we see her fingers in close-up,
cupped and dripping with menses. For Carrie, it is a moment of unspeakable
horror—she wails like a beast for someone to help her—a horror of sudden
knowledge: her body isn't what she thought it was, is in fact terrifyingly
unruly where it ought most be domestic. Her blood has revealed her body to be a
thing she cannot recognize, a thing we and Carrie are soon to see has a power
that, like her first period, is uncontrollable, bloody in effect, and invisible
in source. This moment becomes the structuring conceit for both the film's
thematics and its style: nearly every shot finds space operating as on the
principle of the jack-in-the-box, showing us what we expect to see but in a
different place or way than it ought to be. While punishing her daughter for
daring to enter sexual maturity, Carrie's religious fruitcake mother works with
an antique sewing machine in a forced deep-focus composition made possible by
the split-field diopter. It is a deeply uncomfortable shot, with the mother
framed far to the right and a vast and preternaturally focused empty kitchen
behind her. Suddenly, Carrie emerges through an unseen door into that kitchen.
Two shots later, Carrie is weeping in a medium shot, but in a mirror: De Palma
has faded from the woman, still at work making clothes, to her daughter's face
in reflection such that Carrie's image has exactly replaced that of her
mother's head. These slightly off revelations repeatedly reveal hidden filths,
corruptions, or hatefulnesses we hadn't access to before: a hurtful graffito, a
murderous parent, a bucket of blood. CARRIE begins and ends not in blood but in
bleedings, horrifying transfers of what we keep desperately contained
within our bodies at all cost, and as such it is a film that itself
metaphorically bleeds, spreading though every crevice of its diegesis, mapping
out the creepily familiar and labyrinthine space of monstrosity.
Slant
Magazine review
Eric
Henderson
Carrie might be a film about high
school, but it was perhaps Brian De Palma's first completely mature film, at
least equaling the nearly-concurrent release Obsession in gothic pathos.
Based on Stephen King's first novel, famously written in near-poverty as the
future bestselling mogul tried to make ends meet by teaching English to high
school kids, Carrie turns a fairly contemptuous source text (in the
book, Carrie is nearly as unappealing as her tormentors) into, as Pauline Kael
said, a "teasing, lyrical thriller." It brought both De Palma and
King into mainstream visibility, kick-started the careers of nearly everyone
involved (or, in Piper Laurie's case, provided an unexpected return to form
playing horror cinema's ultimate mom from hell), won two acting Oscar
nominations and earned fantastic reviews and word-of-mouth. Surely this
represents De Palma's first great selling out, right?
Absolutely
not. Carrie, a profoundly sad horror comedy about a dumped-on,
telekinetic outcast whose late-blooming menstrual cycle and sexual maturation
react violently with her fundamentalist mother's psychological chastity belt,
is the film in which De Palma discovered that his destructive sense of humor
could be synthesized with his graceful visual sensibilities in a manner that
would accentuate both. The linearity of King's storyline (actually, the
linearity of screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen's version of King's novel, which
was told via a fussy collage of news articles, testimony, and Reader's
Digest memoirs) has the preordained momentum of Greek mythology; some of
the shots of a pig blood-soaked Carrie standing above her peers at the fateful
prom were lifted from the theatrical performance De Palma shot of Dionysus.
But
De Palma's technique reaches a new volatility here. Half Phantom of the
The
scene in which Carrie realizes she likes Tommy Ross, for instance. De Palma
begins by showing Carrie sitting in class with pencil eagerly poised to
transcribe Tommy's poem as their tweedy teacher reads it aloud to the class.
The camera swirls around to show the entire class slacking, yawning, exchanging
jocular smirks to indicate they know the poem's true author was Tommy's
girlfriend Sue. Tommy ends up in severe close up while a split diopter shot
puts Carrie in the background behind Tommy's impressive blond mane. "It's
beautiful," she murmers, her hair like bundled hay in front of her face.
Even the teacher piles on, sensing the emotional vulnerability as an
opportunity to attain camaraderie with his indifferent students. "You
suck," Tommy says, even more covertly than Carrie, before the teacher's
request for a repeat begets the response "I said 'aw shucks.'"
Tommy's chiseled features melt into a triumphant cackle. A perfectly realized
scene in the midst of a hundred (many of which have little to do with the
horror of mind-controlled fire and everything to do with the horror of teenage
responsibility), Tommy's social triumph under the wire stands in mockery of
Carrie's inability to do the same. And when Tommy silently demands "What's
that?!" in slow motion after the bucket tumbles down on Carrie, the
fulfillment of that disparity comes to pass and the resulting inferno must be
carried out.
Whether
intimate or flamboyant, Carrie's style is insistently sensual: Carrie
running her finger along the definition of "telekinesis" in super
close up, Miss Collins's gym class doing detention calisthenics to the
accompaniment of a blaxploitation-esque "Baby Elephant Walk," Carrie
and Tommy swirling in rapture courtesy De Palma's Tilt-O-Whirl cam, Pino
Donaggio's tempestuous chamber music leading up to the bucket drop, Carrie
seeing red in kaleidoscope as her sanity burns. It's as passionate, erotic and
clumsy as the descriptor "sensual" implies. Maybe because it's the
first De Palma film that it could be said belongs decisively to women. (Those
Oscar nominations don't lie, and it's a shame both Spacek and Laurie lost to
the virgin and whore in Network's boys club.) The would-be
revealingly-titled Sisters may seem a volley
between Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, and an insane woman with her can of
Lysol, but all three are tamed and controlled by Kidder's effete creep husband.
Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face
of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley
whales across Nancy Allen's face.
Myth
and Magic in De Palma's Carrie Dmetri Kakmi from Senses of Cinema (2000)
Carrie Ragtime:
the horror of growing up female, by Sarafina
Kent Bathrick from Jump Cuts
Carrie
and Marathon Man Carrie
Meets
Building
a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense
Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond,
CULT
MOVIE REVIEW: Carrie (1976) John
Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV,
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Reverse Shot [Jeannette Catsoulis]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Rich Rosell) dvd review [Special Edition]
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
DVD Verdict
(Mike Jackson) dvd review [Special Edition]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review Special Edition
Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson] yet another review
Film Freak Central dvd review [Special Edition]
Bill Chambers, also reviewing a host of other De Palma films
Classic
Horror review
Jenn Dlugos
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5] Special
Edition
Movie
Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
City
Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Leslie Dunlap
Crazy
for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
eFilmCritic Reviews Dr. Isaksson
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Special Edition
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson
filmcritic.com (Blake French) review [2.5/5]
Cinemaphile.org
(David Keyes) review
Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall]
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
DVD
Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long
DVD
Verdict (Christopher Kulik) dvd
review [Blu-Ray Version]
Digital
Retribution dvd review Michael McQueen
DVD Talk
(G. Noel Gross) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]
Bloody-Disgusting
review [5/5] Steven
Political
Film Society review Michael Haas
Last Drive-In on the Left: DVD review also reviewing THE FURY and DRESSED TO KILL
LA
TACO » Brian de Palma’s “CARRIE” ~ Hollywood Forever Cemetery ... October 23, 2008
TV Guide
review
Entertainment
Weekly capsule dvd review [B+]
[Special Edition] Michael
Sauter
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Richard Eder) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version] Gary W. Tooze
THE FURY B+ 90
USA
One of Pauline Kael’s favorites, a movie that meets her loving criteria of trashy films as art, where according to Michael K. Crowley from The House Next Door Objects of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma: “She called his films serious, compared them to works by Godard and Antonioni, and devoted pages and pages to cataloguing their virtues and, when necessary, their deficiencies. Certainly one of the most daring sentences she ever authored appeared in her 1978 review of The Fury, in which she asserted that De Palma had at last directed a movie that surpassed in intensity, vision and number of classic sequences anything directed by Hitchcock. In her defense of De Palma, Kael made adversaries and—in the eyes of the critical establishment—jeopardized her credibility. She was pilloried and even parodied by other critics. But she never backed down.” Kael went further in her admiration for this film: “This finale -- a parody of Antonioni's apocalyptic vision at the close of "Zabriskie Point" -- is the greatest finish for any villain ever. One can imagine Welles, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Spielberg still stunned, bowing to the ground, choking with laughter.”
Where does one begin? This kind of overpraise is more shocking than the film, which chugs along like a typical B-movie, carrying the weight of plausibility on its shoulders despite the presence of improbable stars like Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes, both extremely intense individuals in their own right, who despite their opening cordiality turn into arch enemies in the film. Following the success of CARRIE (1976), what did the world need during the post Vietnam era of the 70’s but another telekinetic horror movie, this one starring two similarly endowed college age kids, Andrew Stevens as Robin Sandza, Kirk Douglas’s son, and Amy Irving as Gillian, neither of whom ever meet except telepathically. The opening sequence is so cheesy that it could just as easily have been pilfered from the latest Elvis movie, where it’s hard not to laugh at the blatant Palestinian stereotypes and the less than spectacular special effects. Douglas and Cassavetes share a similar history of working for a secret Government organization, which adds to the allure of the film, as following the Vietnam and Watergate debacles, behind-the-scenes, secret CIA organizations were looked upon with outright suspicion, as if they had deceitfully derailed the moral purpose of government in the first place, to provide for the common good, and done so behind everyone’s backs. To put it another way, Childress (Cassavetes) steals Peter Sandza’s (Douglas) son right out from under him, making it look like his father died, where Peter is declared dead by the U.S. government and forced to live underground for the rest of the film in order to keep the government and Childress from finding him.
The movie shifts to the idyllic sunny beaches of Lake Michigan, where Gillian and her friends are typical teenagers, but Gillian has special powers that even she doesn’t understand, as she has visions that are powerfully real, yet so intense that anyone touching her at the time bleeds heavily, causing a kind of panic for all involved. Of course, Gillian’s mother doesn’t seem too alarmed and runs off to Europe, never to be seen again in the movie, much of which takes place in recognizable Chicago locations, including a mesmerizing set piece taking place at the now torn down Old Chicago Amusement Park in Bollingbrook, leaving her daughter to fend for herself at a mysterious medical institute known as Paragon, a clinic uniquely specializing in studying the powers of telepathy, where Gillian scores off the charts, as Robin did before her, which catches the eyes of Childress, who secretly harbors his own devious intentions. It’s Gillian who can see what Childress is doing with Robin Sandza, who’s been moved to a secret location where he’s a captive guinea pig, a test rat living under scientific observations where his every move is monitored closely. Gillian’s identification with Robin is like discovering a lost identical twin, where the power between them is like nothing she’s ever experienced. Peter, meanwhile, is attempting to track down his son through a nurse at the clinic, Hester (Carrie Snodgrass), where he’s romantically seducing her in order to get information on his son. Hester ends up Gillian’s only friend there, as everyone else seems to be plotting against her. Her daring escape plays out like an extended choreographed slow-motion ballet for which there are serious consequences.
Gillian has struggled to keep her telekinetic visions under control, but despite her best efforts, people continue to get hurt, and even worse, killed, which mirrors exactly what happens around Peter, only without the secret powers. Their very presence attracts danger to anyone who is near, always connected by the hovering presence of Childress, the dark force of evil that wants to corral and ultimately possess her powers, much like the scientists poking and prodding David Bowie as the alien from outer space in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Where all this leads is to another whirlwind finale, where the world literally spins out of control and all hell breaks loose, exactly what Gillian has been trying to prevent. Cassavetes, much as he was in Rosemary's Baby (1968), is simply a detestable character, an abomination to humankind, like a villain out of a James Bond movie who deserves a more heinous nickname, as he’s hell-bent on controlling the world. Searching for Robin, Douglas and Irving are an unlikely pair, as none of the characters in the movie really gel together, instead it’s all about creating the mood and atmosphere of a strangely dark and paranoid world that’s under a veiled attack unbeknownst to anyone except these few who have the fate of the world resting in their hands. It veers into the world of the macabre, but in doing so, distinguishes this director with another thrilling finale, one filled with operatic grandeur and obsessive hallucinatory moments.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Here De Palma poses
the burning question: is there still commercial mileage in demonic possession?
But this attempted follow-up to Carrie almost entirely lacks its
predecessor's narrative thrust and suspense. At centre it's another
common-or-garden story of children screwed up by their own telekinetic powers,
but there are several distracting subplots: one about secret
Four Friends to The Fury Pauline Kael
Brian De Palma's visionary,
science-fiction thriller is the reverse side of the coin of Spielberg's CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS. With Spielberg, what happens is so much better than you dared hope
that you have to laugh; with De Palma, it's so much worse than you feared that
you have to laugh. The script (John Farris's adaptation of his novel) is cheap
gothic espionage occultism involving two superior beings-spiritual twins
(Andrew Stevens and Amy Irving) who have met only telepathically. But the film
is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night
world; no Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many
"classic" sequences. With Kirk Douglas, Carrie Snodgress, John
Cassavetes, Daryl Hannah, Dennis Franz, and Charles Durning. 20th Century-Fox. For
a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book When the Lights Go Down.
The Fury | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
And so we come to The Fury. One of the
very highest-rated De Palma films by those who claim the man as a personal
favorite and clearly the lowest-rated "red period" De Palma film
elsewhere (check for yourself). The movie that draws the
deepest line in the sand between De Palma apologists and De Palma maniacs,
whose attempts to revive the movie are usually characterized as
self-aggrandizing test cases to see quite simply how far their role as arbiters
of counter-taste can stretch. The movie that Armond White said is impossible
not to completely, wholly love if you have any shred of understanding of the
film medium and how it works. The movie that gave Pauline Kael occasion to
paint a portrait of Orson Welles, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, and Steven
Spielberg choking to death with laughter (and, presumably, envy). The movie
that David Thomson watched while
sitting next to Kael during her (presumably only) viewing, and then oh so
gallantly recalled her misguided appreciation thereof to eulogize her upon her
death in 2001. To be generous, Thomson's fussy, detached approach to movie
appreciation is about as sensual as drying out homemade beef jerky, and we can
have every reason to expect a critic of his type to feel a little embarrassed
by the vocalizations of a critic who did all but receive head from her favorite
movies.
In retrospect, Kael's review of The Fury doesn't quite pack the same
sort of punch as some of her other famous raves (like Last Tango in Paris,
But, additionally, there's a literally prurient element to The Fury that
fascinates at a subconscious level, one which refutes claims that the
incoherence of the script keep the film at a lower level than De Palma's other
masterworks. Certainly the film doesn't overwhelm the endocrine system with the
attractive distractions as in Dressed to Kill or Body Double, but it's comparative chastity
is a red herring. There is no moment in The Fury that spins as wickedly
out of control as "Be Black Baby" or Winslow Leach's hallucinatory
"Faust" composition montage or Tommy and Carrie's vertiginous prom
waltz, but the tradeoff is a film with an insidious stamina. As Kael noted, The
Fury is one of those rare films where even the passages of exposition and
unnecessary dramatic clutter are filmed in the least boring manner possible.
The plot is as square as anything De Palma ever adapted for the screen, but his
cinematography has so many abstruse angles that it's frequently disorienting.
Which is exactly what adolescence feels like. Ultimately, The Fury is a
film about pre-pubescence by a director whose work had finally reached the
level of confidence reflecting a post-pubescent talent. The best of both
worlds, baby, and barely legal.
The Fury, a film whose sexual dynamic metaphorically explores the point
in adolescence where females hold a legitimate, mystic authority over males (even
gay ones...especially gay ones), is a teasing riff on the sort of 16mm
coming-of-age lyceums that kids were shown when the boys were sent to the
gymnasium and the girls were sent to the cafeteria. Amy Irving (who even begins
the film in a single-sex educational environment) and Andrew Stevens, the two
young paragons of psychokinetic power being exploited at Paragon, are shown in
parallel courses of development. Stevens's progress is charted by kitschy
displays of musculature such as slow-mo pole-vaulting while Fiona Lewis
narrates, "His body is getting stronger." (The
clinically-proportioned musculature of Stevens is beautifully cast in this
respect; he's a bronzed bulldog without a leash.) Meanwhile, the more mature
Irving (who was already the least credible of Carrie's cast as a teenager) is repeatedly
embarrassed by the inopportune appearance of blood. It may not be blood from
her celestial orifice, but she must claim responsibility for it and thus the
sick joke metaphor stands.
The Fury's Sturm und Drang sides with the paired-off
salt-and-pepper shakers of pent-up psychic-sexual bloom, but De Palma's
anarchic sense of humor and undercurrent of luxuriant, tragic mortality (unforced
as in Obsession) belongs to Kirk Douglas as
Stevens's father, John Cassavetes as Stevens's governmental kidnapper, and
Eleanor Merriam as Mother Nuckells, the dotty old woman whose apartment Douglas
crashes while escaping Cassavetes's goons. They're the flip side to the
pertness of the two walking psychic genital diagrams. In fact, the
one-scene-wonder that is Merriam's performance, as a woman who's delighted by
So even though Thomson's own requiem for both The Fury and Kael as an
apparent phase that cinema just had to go through but has now passed boils down
to a remarkably condescending "it exists, trust me," The Fury
is the most crucial movie of all De Palma's movies. When Paragon doctors come
to
Reverse Shot [James Crawford] Fall, 2006
not coming to a theater near you (Jason Woloski) review
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
Bright Lights Film Journal :: Terms of Psychic Warfare Steve Johnson, November 2010
Objects
of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma Michael K. Crowley from The House Next Door,
Jim
Emerson's Scanners blog Can a movie ruin a good review?
Cinema
At A Fury-ous Height Kenji Fujishima
from My Life, From 24 Frames per Second,
Black Hole Reviews [Mark Hodgson]
Pluck You, Too! Thomas Pluck
Commentary Track [Richard Winters]
@
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Brian Koller also seen here: filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]
The Terror Trap Dan Hunter and Jason Knowles
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Dan Heaton) dvd review
DVD Verdict
(Patrick Naugle) dvd review also seen here: DVD Verdict
The
Fury Mark Davis from DVD Times
...read the complete Fury, The review at A Guide to Current DVD (Mark McLeod)
The Fury G. Noel Gross from DVD Talk
She lost it at the movies David Thomson on sitting next to Pauline Kael
from Salon,
Popdose [Robert Cashill] scroll down near the middle
And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]
Cinescape [Andrew Hershberger]
The World's Greatest Critic [J.C. Maçek III]
Combustible Celluloid film review - The Fury (1978), Brian De Palma ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
CinemaDuMeep.com [Michael Ferrari]
GenX Movies Random
Sound
On Sight
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Elusive Lucidity: De Palma Image of the Day
girish: De Palma Image of the Day: The Fury
Mondo Digital also reviewing DRESSED TO KILL and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
Last Drive-In
on the Left also reviewing CARRIE and DRESSED TO KILL
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Say
'Brian De Palma.' Let the Fighting Start. - New York Times A.O. Scott,
HOME MOVIES
aka: The Maestro
I'm a pretty big De Palma fan, have seen all his films except for
this one, which I've finally found a few days ago at a video blowout sale. It's
pretty hard to find, so the question is: Is it worth looking for? Well, yes and
no.
Certainly any De Palma fan would love to have it in their collection. As it is
his most autobiographical, but I found the film too slapsticky.
It stars Keith Gordon as Denis Byrd (the nerd in "Christine", a teen
in "Jaws 2")as an 'extra in his own life'. His family's eccentricies
have overruled any chance of being an individual.
Enter Kirk
Denis's father (Vincent Gardenia), a doctor, is having affairs with his
patients, and his Mother (Mary Davenport)is a wreck after catching him. His
brother (De Palma regular Gerrit Graham) is a health nut and teacher of
Spartinectics (nod to
Denis' brother is set to marry Nancy Allen (Kristena), but she has to prove
herself 'worthy' by being tempted by the opposite sex, drugs, etc.
Denis grows a crush for Kristena, and the scenes between them are my favorite
in the film. Many De Palma trademarks are seen, like the split diopter shots
and themes of voyeurism. It was a filmed experiment with Sarah Lawrence College
students (One of the students was future music director Mark Romanek) but with
top notch talent involved like composter Pino Donaggio, and I seem to recall
Spielberg being somewhat involved.
So I'd recommend "Home Movies" to De Palma enthusiasts and
completists only. Althought, if you happen to be browsing through your local
video store and see a copy. Jump on the chance and rent it. You could bring
home much worse.
Slant
Magazine review
Fernando F. Croce
At once Brian De Palma's most slapdash and most
autobiographical picture, Home Movies takes playful stock of the
director's tenacious motifs while positing a lighter, even more hopeful
relationship between the characters at play and the eye of the camera surveying
them; call it a benign Peeping Tom, or, considering the foregrounded
personal intimations of the title, a rather less corrosive version of Hi, Mom! Indeed, it is as a throwback to De
Palma's skittering countercultural comedies of the late '60s and early '70s
that this brash oddity is most often situated in the filmmaker's oeuvre, an
allegedly failed attempt to recapture Godardian radicalism after "selling
out" to the
User comments from imdb Author: Bill Treadway (treads22@hotmail.com) from Queens, New York
Brian DePalma's "Home Movies"
is a genuinely strange film. It is hard to believe that DePalma made this. It
doesn't have the superb technical credits that you come to expect from him. It
doesn't have a logical story (for DePalma that is). And it doesn't have the big
budgets DePalma's films are accustomed to ("Sisters" has a budget of
500,000 bucks; this film was made on a few thousand)
What it does have is a goofy charm that most
The film stars Kirk Douglas ("The Fury")as The Maestro (the video
title), a teacher who films his life constantly. He attempts to have his prize
pupil Keith Gordon ("Dressed to Kill") do the same, but he has
problems of his own. The object of his affection is Nancy Allen ("Dressed
to Kill", "Carrie", "Blow Out"), a hooker who has too
many vices for her own good. The problem? She is attached to Gordon's brother
(wonderfully played by Gerrit Graham, who appeared in most of DePalma's early
films and just about stole "Soup for One"), who is a nut.
All this is established within the first 25 minutes or so and the film's
success depends on all of the surprises DePalma sets up, so I won't reveal any
more. Some people might be turned off of "Home Movies" possibly due
to the content, but more probably due to the visual style. Today's audiences
are accustomed to gloss and if they don't get it, they protest. If you are one
of those people, I just want to say three words: SHAME ON YOU!!!!!!!! How dare
you criticize a film just because it doesn't look glossy like
DePalma shoots on 16mm and makes the film look like someone's home movies,
which is appropriate since the Kirk Douglas character is constantly filming his
own life (and others). Also, give DePalma credit for helping his students get a
first credit (the film was made as a class project for
Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]
DRESSED TO KILL
USA (105 mi) 1980 ‘Scope
Beginning and ending
with a pair of shower frissons, this brazen reworking of Psycho is most
striking for its sheer audacity, and actually lifts that film's most shattering
device. But having achieved this coup, the film degenerates into near-farce,
punctuated by a number of hollow audience-grabbing moments which hang together
not at all. Ultimately, the film amounts to little more than a consummate study
of suspense technique, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Down
to the Sea in Ships to Dune Pauline
Kael
One of the most sheerly enjoyable films of recent years, this
sophisticated horror comedy, written and directed by Brian De Palma, is
permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts. Set in Manhattan, it's
about sex and fear; De Palma presents extreme fantasies and pulls the audience
into them with such apparent ease that the pleasure of the suspense becomes
aphrodisiacal. Angie Dickinson shows a much warmer expressive range than might
be expected as a beautiful, aging golden blonde, married yet frustrated, and
longing to be made love to; Michael Caine brings fine, precise shadings of
ambiguity to the role of her analyst; the breezy comedienne Nancy Allen is a
pretty, investment-minded hooker, who witnesses a murder; Keith Gordon is
Dickinson's teenage prodigy son, who builds computers; and Dennis Franz is a
brash police detective. The music is by Pino Donaggio, the cinematography is by
Ralf D. Bode, and the editing is by Jerry Greenberg. Filmways. For a more
extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib (excerpt)
Whatever one can dismiss De Palma for plundering Hitchcock, one cannot deny that he is one of the most extraordinarily stylish directors. His work has a dazzling playfulness, an elaborateness of artifice constructed for its own sake - in Snake Eyes (1998), for example, he shoots the first 20 minutes all in one single unbroken shot. The stylistic highlight of Dressed to Kill is a quite amazing ten minute sequence with Angie Dickinson set in an art gallery. It's a sequence conducted entirely without dialogue. De Palma strikes a mood of weirdness right from the start with the comically alienating blankness of the modern art works looking back down at Angie Dickinson, silent vignettes of the other patrons with their voices disembodiedly coming from the corners of the screen, and cuts away to little picture balloons of Angie's thoughts. An elaborate sequence is wound around her intimations towards the stranger, the dropped glove, his game leading her around the maze of halls, with rising urgency in the score and frenzied point-of-view camera-work as she becomes lost. The sequence outrageously culminates with him appearing and dragging her into a cab and making love to her. The whole sequence is left on a note of dis-ease in the last shot as a hand reaches down in the foreground to pick up the discarded glove. Directorially this is a sequence of extraordinary visual daring.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info John Dickson
DRESSED TO KILL opens like a diamond reflecting light in many directions, inside the Day-Glo ambience of a bedroom, bathed in the immortal sound-sphere of Pino Dinnaggio’s soft-core string arrangements; the mind is where this film begins and ends. The glare of light pierces through the skin of this film like a sharpened razor, tearing at the fabric of the illusion. No other filmmaker, other than Godard, has played so much with what we as viewers perceive as the surface, or surfaces of films, revealing their layers into a sinking hole, like mirrors reflecting into themselves. This is the start of what we have come to know as Brian De Palma. While his previous films pointed towards the direction this film would take audiences, this is the film from which the rest follows. The layers of reality are just as buried as the more “obvious” BODY DOUBLE years later, and this work cements the filmmaker as the premiere Master of Subversion. While its tempting for critics to dish out weak cases in the trial of “Is De Palma the new Hitchcock?” maybe we as viewers, in our own times, should better ask the question “Is De Palma the new Buñuel?” A great deal could be said on that point, avoiding the narrow view to which we compare De Palma to Hitchcock; but what will this serve other than a base entry-way into De Palma the filmmaker? Maybe this is the ultimate juncture where PSYCHO and BELLE DE JOUR meet? Maybe De Palma better illustrates the similarities between Buñuel and Hitchcock? Or maybe De Palma is just De Palma and we’d serve his work, and ourselves, better if we proceeded as such? Yes, this film is an almost reimagining of PSYCHO, more so, an examination of the Hitchcock film itself, in which all the elements from the 1960 classic are fleshed out in the most literal sense: there is the murder of an innocent woman trying to regain her moral compass, her discussion with the unknowing murderer about her position in life, a killer with multiple personalities, a relative of the victim investigating the murder, the psychologist’s explanation, nefarious showers, and cross-dressing. De Palma seems to be daring critics and viewers to make the obvious comparisons, as he would do so more graphically the rest of his career. There may be no greater filmmaker, sans Griffith, to truly develop/invent the cinema like Hitchcock (certainly directors like Scorsese and Polanski “rip off” or “pay homage” to Hitchcock as much) and De Palma understands Hitchcock’s position as bedrock in the proliferation of the cinematic language. He understands that to try to avoid imitating Hitchcock within the “thriller genre” is almost as foolish as someone simply trying to BE Hitchcock. Its of note to mention the emotional connection that runs throughout the film, that of a boy being separated from his mother. While the emotions are less obvious than they are in an emotionally fuelled work like CARLITO’S WAY, they are not simply absent. Over the course of the film, the boy’s obsession with solving his mother’s murder, transitions into the fascination of using the eye of a camera to better establish a long-sought truth, one that will become more refracted and oblique as the investigation proceeds. As in a film like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA, the original objective of the investigation is but a mere side-entrance into the connection between two lost souls as they solve the mystery together. This film is no more a horror film than the opening of BLOW-OUT is, and yet simply reducing the film to a mere commentary on genre, is completely missing the point. The ending of this film splits, like male and female, into two different planes of view, as we now get the voyeur perspective more explicitly, à la mental institution patients and customers at a posh Manhattan restaurant. To be more revealing about its conclusion is not so much an avoidance of things being spoiled, but more of things being discovered; this is not a film that sits neatly into the category of “well-defined,” but one that reveals itself over time, as it sweeps you up in the fantastical joys of how a film speaks to an audience and how an audience speaks to a film.
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews
Dan Heaton
Brian DePalma has the ability to create unbelievable tension
and excitement with camera movements that rival the best film directors of all
time. In Scarface, he heightens the effect of an extremely brutal
chainsaw killing by pulling away from the action right in the middle and moving
into the silent outdoor air. Mission Impossible features a tight,
nail-biting heist from an apparently impenetrable facility that showcases
remarkable precision and timing. The opening murder sequence in Snake Eyes
covers a single shot through a diverse array of locations and characters. Given
this talent, it's surprising to notice how often his stories fall flat;
sometimes his top-notch skills overcome the characters and lead to an overload
of style. Numerous critics have lambasted DePalma for years, and while I don't
share their strict views about his shortcomings, he does go overboard at times
and hinder the story.
In Dressed to Kill, DePalma utilizes ingenious filmmaking tactics to
heighten the suspense. Events are shot from distorted camera angles, reflected
through mirrors, and followed closely with very few quick-cuts. The camera
moves at will through the scenes and even lifts upward at one point to reveal
nightmarish details. Steadicam point-of-view shots are common, especially from
the eyes of the killer. There's seldom a dull moment in terms of style and
original visuals. Unfortunately, the story falls short in terms of interesting
characterizations. The subject matter is often taboo and filled with danger and
seediness, but the action generates more of a yawn than true tension. While
certain episodes work nicely, the overall product suffers from a lack of
charisma from most of the major players.
The story begins with Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson)óa sexually frustrated
housewife who meets a complete stranger at a museum and engages in a risky
affair. Several early moments, especially
Film critics often criticize Brian DePalma for blatantly ripping off plots and
devices from Alfred Hitchcock's movies; he calls these allegations ridiculous,
and instead says his methods are in homage to the legendary director. While I
usually agree with DePalma, there are several moments in this film that cross
the line between originality and copying. The prime example is an elevator
murder scene, which has a strong resemblance to the infamous shower scene in Psycho.
During this brutal attack, I couldn't get past the similarity, and it ruined
the effect of a key scene. Instead of generating suspense, it frustrates
because it's impossible to forget the original Hitchcock moment. The scene's
music, direction, and role in the plot mirror the 1961 chiller far too closely
to casually dismiss them as coincidental.
Dressed to Kill features several grisly images of extreme violence that
are difficult to forget for days after viewing them. This disc offers the
option of viewing the unrated version, which contains several additional
close-ups of the razor blade slicing through skin. While these moments are
memorable, they raise the question of DePalma's motives for choosing this form
of presenting the violence. He appears to relish providing a slow, methodical
look at a disheartening murder. While the effect is shocking, it would work
much better if the characters were more complex and interesting. Although the
blood is troubling, it would become mind-blowing if there was more at stake in
the story. The directing is impressive, but the script converts it to a gimmick
because it lessens the impact of his style.
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]
It isn't only because one of the first shots of (the
unrated director's cut of) Dressed to Kill is of Angie Dickenson's body
double lathering her cooch that the cunty spirit of Pauline Kael is resurrected
whenever anyone wants to score a few cheap points at the expense of Brian De
Palma's reputation. It's also because she was one of the only contemporary
critics who accurately described what wavelengths De Palma's movies were
working on. For instance, she was one of the few who actually used the term
"comedy" to describe the obviously riotous Dressed to Kill,
which anyone who really listens closely to that maid's scream after the film's centerpiece elevator scene could
tell you is a truism. Dressed to Kill is the quintessential
Because
fetishizing requires the dislocation and amplification of objects from their
surroundings, a quick rundown of the formal dildos and vibrating bullets on De
Palma's kink counter: creamy, coordinated couture, complete with sonically
active jewelry and heels; razor fixation (reminiscent of Argento, though
predating the astonishing moment when blaze meets bulb in Tenebre); manhole steam
illuminated by porn shops' traveling marquee lights; the sighs of a
masturbating woman merging with the prurient bloom of Pino Donaggio's best
score (even if De Palma probably wanted something closer to his former
collaborator Bernard Herrmann's score from Taxi Driver); the
choreography of the Phil Donohue split-screen, with exactingly timed parallel
turns; "What's the going rate on running red lights?"; a jerry-rigged
time-lapse camera hidden in a shoebox; the way the trannie psycho's name Bobbi
is spelled; the fact that it's the only one of De Palma's "red
period" films whose palate is overwhelmingly blue.
Dressed to Kill
certainly belongs in the rich company of Noo Yawk, Rotten Apple, post-disco,
post-feminist, post-Stonewall, post-Son of Sam, pre-AIDS urban nightmare movies
that seemed to emerge from faded balconies of the slightly more upscale
grindhouse venues on 42nd. But Dressed to Kill's funk of hedonism is
only as pungent as a perfume sample in a department store catalogue ad, unlike
the thick grime of its shrieking cinematic sisters Ms. 45, Maniac,
and Cruising. The latter film was a project De Palma himself wanted to
make initially and had written a screenplay for as early as 1974. He ultimately
passed the project over to William Friedkin (who crafted a provocative,
misunderstood masterpiece of his own to complement De Palma's much-protested
hit), which is just as well, since De Palma's original script reportedly spent
far more time creating an erotic fantasy life for a character (almost certainly
the gestation of Angie Dickenson's lonely housewife) who had little to do with Cruising's
central plot about the psychosexual role-playing kinship between undercover
cops and fisting homos.
No,
what we have here is the work of a director who saw the charred aftermath of
the sexual revolution's late-'70s bust and thought, "I should cast my wife
as a hooker again. A real
DVD Times [Mike Sutton]
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Dressed to Kill (1980) John Kenneth Muir from Reflections on Film/TV, July 24, 2009
Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]
Protesting Dressed To Kill leaflet by Women Against Violence and Pornography in Media, from Jump Cut, October 1980
The Seduction The
pornographic impulse in slasher films, by Patricia Erens from Jump Cut,
April 1987
Re-Vision: Essays in
Feminist Criticism Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism,
edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, reviewed by
Ellen Seiter from Jump Cut, February 1988
Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in
contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling
from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
DVD Verdict Gary Militzer
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]
Film Freak Central Bill Chambers
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick
George Chabot's Review of Dressed to Kill
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]
DVDTalk.com review [Holly E. Ordway] Special Edition
DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Special Edition
The Digital Bits Greg Suarez, Special Edition
Mondo Digital also reviewing PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE and
THE FURY
Last Drive-In on the Left: DVD review also reviewing CARRIE and THE FURY
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
BLOW OUT
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-]
Underrated by just about everyone
except Quentin Tarantino (who wears his influences on his sleeve and probably
overrates this one), Brian DePalma’s remake-cum-homage of Michelangelo
Antonioni’s classic Blow-Up
(and Francis Coppola's The Conversation, actually) isn’t as skillful as
the earlier film at questioning the nature of "reality," but
culminates nevertheless in a devastating sleight-of-cinema that reverberates in
the brain for days afterward. John Lithgow and Dennis Franz (lately of the TV
series NYPD Blue) both play supporting roles, but John Travolta, on his
way out of vogue, stars as the B-movie sound man scouring Philadelphia in
search of the perfect scream. By the end of the movie, he finds it.
Blazing
Saddles to Bombay Talkie Pauline
Kael
It's hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and
inevitability, but you'll never make the mistake of thinking it's only a dream.
John Travolta is Jack, a sound-effects man who happens to record the noise of a
car speeding across a bridge, a shot, a blowout, and the crash of the car to
the water below. The driver-the governor who is the most popular candidate for
the Presidency-is dead, but Jack is able to rescue the governor's passenger, a
cuddly blonde (Nancy Allen). On paper this movie, written and directed by Brian
De Palma, might seem to be just a political thriller, but it has a rapt
intensity that makes it unlike any other political thriller. Playing an adult
(his first), and an intelligent one, Travolta has a vibrating physical
sensitivity like that of the very young Brando, and Nancy Allen, who gives her
role a flirty iridescence, is equally vivid. It's as if De Palma had finally
understood what technique is for; this is the first film he has made about the
things that really matter to him. It's a great movie (and probably the best of
all American conspiracy movies). With John Lithgow, Dennis Franz, and Deborah
Everton as the unlucky hooker. Set in Philadelphia; cinematography by Vilmos
Zsigmond. A George Litto Production, for Filmways. For a more extended
discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
I often have a hard time defending my admiration for Brian De Palma. In this
country he's considered a rip-off artist who pillages from Hitchcock, Kubrick,
Antonioni and Michael Powell, as well as a misogynist and a violent creep. It
gets especially difficult when discussing such obvious turkeys as The
Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and last year's
But in
Of all De Palma's movies, Blow Out is the one I most like to see over and over. It's a clever updating of Antonioni's Blow Up and Coppola's The Conversation with John Travolta as a movie sound effects man who accidentally records an auto crash that may have been a murder attempt. Nancy Allen (playing a hooker again) survives the crash and now knows too much. A young Dennis Franz plays a sleazy photographer whose snapshots prove Travolta's theory. And John Lithgow plays a "strangler" who complicates things. Though Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction made Travolta a star, this may be his finest performance as an actor. Flushed with the box-office success of Dressed to Kill, De Palma was allowed to use the appropriate but downbeat ending he wanted for Blow Out, which subsequently guaranteed its failure. It remains one of his greatest efforts.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Jim Gabriel
The tides of auteurist reputation seem to be turning away from BLOW OUT and toward CARLITO’S WAY as De Palma’s finest achievement. Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that; CARLITO is an undersung triumph and is held in special esteem by the director himself. But BLOW OUT remains De Palma’s signature moment, the nexus of so many strains of his directorial temperament: the longstanding fascination with technology blooming into fullest mastery of the filmmaker’s toolkit, the use of lens and angle to force the viewer into a way of seeing; the political bent of his young career metastasizing into a vision of macro- versus micropolitics no less despairing for their couching in pop thriller verities. John Travolta’s Jack Terri, a sound man reduced to working on T&A bloodbath B’s who finds himself front and center in an assassination conspiracy, seems like Keith Gordon’s whiz kid from DRESSED TO KILL now grown up, ostensibly wised up, but marinating in cynicism. He’s too young to be this beaten up, but beaten he is, phoning it in at the job, taking weakish jabs at the political operative who wants him to disappear after fishing escort Nancy Allen out of a river-sunk Presidential candidate’s car. Travolta is marvelous, by turns giving and withdrawn, petty and playful—a wounded romantic if ever there was one. (Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is rightly renowned for it’s inky blacks, split diopters, and bravura 360-degree moves, but the cherry on the sundae is his lighting of his star’s eyes, which reaches Golden Age heights of expressiveness.) Travolta here embodies an underreported trait of De Palma’s—his deeply felt political sense, a foursquare sense of right and wrong that runs through his career from HI, MOM! to BLOW OUT, the furious CASUALTIES OF WAR, and REDACTED. Travolta processes every deception as a personal affront, and proceeds as such, bringing his technical prowess and sheer cussedness to bear, to the point of finally using Allen as bait to expose the conspiracy. The movie was originally to be called PERSONAL EFFECTS, and it never strays far from that title’s resonance. Travolta and Allen’s give and take, their flirts and terrors, their romance that dies aborning, is among the sweetest and saddest things you’ll ever see. (Allen is every bit the screen presence as Travolta, or at least as nearly beloved of the camera. Her comic timing is impeccable, and her character’s upshot heartbreaking.) BLOW OUT is, along with THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, the finest of modern American romantic tragedies, released at point in time when the moviegoing public had no inclination to buy tickets for such bitter pills, no matter how expert and tantalizing their coating. But what remains is that De Palma-ness: the whiz-bang and the mourning, the fetish and the hard truth, the sex and the lie. With Dennis Franz, John McMartin, and a scarifying John Lithgow.
Slant Magazine review Paul Schrodt
Blow Out is not known as one of Brian De
Palma's horror movies, but of all his films, it's the one that feels most like
a nightmare. Carrie and The Fury
ended with orgasms—frustrated teenagers revenging their oppressors in
phantasmagoric releases of pent-up sexual energy. This espionage thriller goes
out quietly, with a slow-motion dwindle into personal and political hell. By
the end, the viewer half expects to wake up sweating, as if from some terrible
dream. De Palma underlines this disillusionment by setting the story up for a
heroic conclusion in the traditional
Terry
remains steadfastly principled, another one of De Palma's naïve protectors of
all things innocent and good in this world (re-crafted for Michael J. Fox in Casualties
of War). An interrogator asks him, "Why do you care?" and Terry
shoots back, "Well, it's the truth, isn't it?" Terry is a soundman
for movies; he is in the business of recreating truth. Early in Blow Out,
a split screen juxtaposes Terry marking effects with the deceptive production
work of a network news show. Whereas Terry searches for unadulterated reality
in his recordings (a gunshot, a door slam), TV journalism is invariably
surrounded by white noise and political spin. Eventually, Terry will similarly
sift through images and sounds from the accident to uncover a bullet that shot
out the tire ("the bang before the blowout"). This virtuoso study in
perception comes from Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup—though, unlike
Antonioni, De Palma doesn't question reality itself but, instead, its
fragmented political representation. Blowup's photographer prints
his picture larger and larger, becoming lost in its iffy signs of murder. In Blow
Out, the truth is cut-and-dry but spins out of control—hence a Blowup becomes a Blow Out.
Despite
his determination, Terry always seems to keep complete dejection at bay
(helped, no doubt, by the fact that Travolta suffered from insomnia during
filming). In a flashback, we learn that he helped crack down on corrupt cops
until one of his wires got an undercover detective killed: "I'm not gonna
get fucked again." Nancy Allen as Sally, a prostitute Terry rescues from the
car accident, is like a new reason to live. She's the ditzy blonde completely
ignorant to the situation at hand, unable to differentiate good guys from bad
guys. Everyone uses her, from conspirators to her photographer-cum-pimp Manny
(Dennis Franz). Only Terry takes Sally seriously, for a very specific reason
that comes to reveal itself as time goes on. Some critics have complained that
the character is dumb, which is true, in a sense—if Sally was smart this would
be a very different movie—but entirely beside the point. Sally is a victim of
the political machine, someone Terry feels compelled to protect. De Palma
projects onto her the innocence and purity Terry wishes to impart on his
country.
Through
the right mixture of batting eyelashes and world-weary sighs, Allen makes this
damsel believable, even poignant. Most critics applaud Travolta, though in
reality Allen deserved the Oscar. She turns herself into the Lady Liberty for
modern times—a Barbie Doll hooker with a childlike giggle and a soul pure enough
to make her of another world. Terry's fight to save the truth is as much a
fight for Sally (both are very real, and yet both are somewhat vague symbols of
Terry's love for his country), which makes the turnout all the more
heartbreaking. When Terry finds himself inadequate to keep Sally or the truth
out of harm's way, it sends both him and the audience spinning into a moral
nosedive…literally. Two times the camera revolves around him, as he feels his
grasp on the mission slipping away. De Palma treats Terry sympathetically but
sees through to his blind idealism that can't possibly jibe with the way things
really work. Terry becomes another casualty of war, one of the hermits who stay
stuck in the past because the present is built on a lie. He still believes in
principles, but they've been irrevocably tarnished. Maybe that's what everybody
else already knew.
Blow Out Mike Sutton from DVD Times
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Blow Out (1981) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 21, 2009
Blow Out: Take One | Reverse Shot Andrew Tracy
Blow Out: Take Two | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky
Blow Out Fake Humanism, by Beth Horning from Jump Cut
Dialogue on Blow Out Jacquelin Bautista and Beth Horning from Jump Cut
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
DVD Verdict (Gary Militzer) dvd review
Blow Out Raphael Pour-Hashemi from DVD Times
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [3/4]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
What I Watched Last Night [Ross Williams]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
SCARFACE
USA (170 mi) 1983 ‘Scope
To get the full effect of this film’s international influence, take a look at young non-professional actor Marco Macor playing himself as a young hoodlum from the housing projects of Naples (photo seen here: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1190958336/tt0929425) in Matteo Garrone’s brutal and excruciatingly intense film GOMORRAH (2008), where he mimics Scarface’s Tony Soprano throughout, including a wonderful impersonation scene in an abandoned warehouse where he and his friend Ciro are just beginning to get the itch to shoot guns, eventually leading to a signature scene shooting guns on a riverbank in their underwear, where they discover (the bigger the better) the joys of shooting a rocket launcher. They exemplify, twenty-five years later, the cultural reach of this film.
The first motel shootout bodes well, a
set piece handled with panache and the right note of clammy terror, but the
rest of this lengthy modern morality tale (updating Hawks' film to 1980) is
downhill all the way. When Castro last threw out all his scum, most of them
fetched up in Florida, including Tony Montana (Pacino), a man with only 'balls
of steel and my word, and I don't break either for anyone'. He attaches to the
right sort of godfather, and rises and rises through a world of conspicuous
consumption which would make the Borgias blanch. Filmed in the bright
widescreen glare of a thousand white suits, the movie is still empty at its
heart; where Coppola gave you a whole dynasty in The Godfather, with a
world and all its moral confusions behind it, De Palma spends three hours
sketching out another tetchy little fiend with no more than the ability to
nose-dive into mountains of cocaine and come up to razor a few more rivals.
Pacino gives a monstrous performance as the Cuban heel, clearly aiming for role
of the year, but the abiding memory is of just another Method boy chewing the
scenery in his quiet way.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Jim Gabriel
The director’s second biggest theatrical hit, and the one with the longest life as gangsta staple and dorm room wallpaper (not to mention decades of legendarily risible censored AMC schedule filling.) De Palma needed a grabber after the financial disaster of BLOW OUT, and he delivered in spades: a headline-ripping, three-ring circus of excess, causing an epic battle with the MPAA over its ultraviolent set-pieces and spare-no-expense disreputability. It was, and still is, despised by all the right people, and a few of the other kind, too. It’s not seen by De Palma partisans as anywhere near the purest representation of his sensibility, and they have a point; whole sequences roll by in a logy, somewhat rote haze. One can spend stretches of the film daydreaming about what it could have been if directed by its writer, Oliver Stone, in full Warners-meets-SALVADOR punch-and-parry tabloid mode. But despite those passages, SCARFACE still has its fascinations, beginning with its star. Nothing quite prepared 1983 audiences for the 180-degree change in Al Pacino’s basic attack, his very mien, his transformation from supreme underplaying to jabbing, bobbing, ostentatious bombast. The accent is broad and ludicrous, but the kinesis is unfettered, utterly free; for better or worse, this is the film where he became a wholly different kind of actor, and it is nothing if not captivating. And many of those set-pieces really are something; De Palma’s native willingness to go there, to deliver the goods, to break out the chainsaws, grenade launchers, and defenestrations with a childlike glee, a delinquent’s love of pissing off the squares, is appreciated if you’re just plain in the mood to get off. Even the three-hour running time works if you feel it as a cokey hangover instead of the rush that you go to a Scorsese for. It is, in the final analysis, a deeply strange affair when looked at in the right light. With Michelle Pfeiffer in the first bloom of career luminescence, F. Murray Abraham as a guy you can’t wait to see die, a bonhomous Robert Loggia, and the great actor Harris Yulin, who delivers the finest expulsive “Fuck you!” in the whole of American cinema.
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Hawkboy
“This is why Pacino never won any
Oscars.”
Quite possibly, the most quoted movie ever made. And boy oh
boy, is it funny.
This movie's a comedy, right? The dialogue in this movie is
so completely laughable and the situations so warped that to take it as a crime
movie on the level of "Goodfellas" or "The Godfather" would
be insane. It's written by Oliver Stone, so I guess that being WAY over-the-top
is par for the course. I enjoy it every time I watch it, but in the same way I
enjoy "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". It's crazy, wild fun.
Al Pacino plays Tony Montana, a cuban punk who ends up being a big cocaine
kingpin in Miami in the early 80's. He marries Michelle Pfieffer, he has
mountains of coke on his desk, life is good. But Tony's a bit of an asshole,
really. I take it that Tony's supposed to represent the greed in the society of
that day. He has it all, but he wants more.
I recently saw the 1932 version of this film, and was amazed at how effectively
Howard Hawks was able to tell the EXACT same story in 90 minutes. This movie is
LONG. But it never really drags, because Pacino is being very entertaining. He
wears women's hats, watches his friends make obscene gestures to women, buys
fancy cars with leopard cushions, walks around with a white nose - Pacino has a
BALL. He makes the movie, and his dialogue is among the most memorable in
recent memory.
Criticizing this movie is impossible, because Stone and DePalma pretty much
dare people to criticize it. It's all so desperately over the top that it goes
beyond scorn or derision - "Scarface" KNOWS that it's all silly. It's
in on the joke. It's an immensely entertaining movie, but don't watch it with
your parents.
Play the "Scarface" drinking game - do a shot
every time someone says "fuck". You'll be passed out in the first
hour.
Slant
Magazine review
Martyn Bamber
It's not often that a Brian De Palma film has
dialogue that becomes part of pop culture lore. This isn't to say that his
films aren't commercially or artistically successful, simply that De Palma
primarily expresses himself visually. While The Untouchables
has its fair share of quotable lines (courtesy of David Mamet), it's the
dialogue from Scarface that's endlessly repeated (preferably with a
heavy Cuban accent), as affected by Al Pacino as the ruthless small-timer Tony
Montana, who rises rapidly to the top of the underworld. He gets the money, the
power, and the woman (Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer) that he desires, but
it's not long before he just as quickly falls from on high, in spectacular
style. Aside from the now-famous lines, Scarface is also remembered for
other reasons: the huge amount of swearing; the graphic violence (particularly
the chainsaw murder), the mountain of cocaine that Tony buries his face in (the
perfect symbol of destructive excess and oblivion), and the climatic "Made
it, Ma! Top of the world"-style gun battle, to name but a few.
It's therefore surprising to think that this hugely popular and highly
influential update of Howard Hawks's classic Scarface met with howls of
criticism when it was originally released. Remaking a Hawks film may have
seemed sacrilegious at the time, but this Scarface remake is vastly
superior to the majority of recent updates of classic films and TV shows.
Instead of an actor, director, and screenwriter working on autopilot, Scarface
has the impressive filmmaking triumvirate of De Palma, Stone, and Pacino. This
combination of talent in front of and behind the camera must have had the
executives at Universal eagerly anticipating another Godfather-style
epic; a tasteful and sober examination of organised crime and the Miami cocaine
business, and a film that would bring in big bucks and gain critical kudos. The
result, though, wasn't a subtle dissection of gangster life, but the equivalent
of a bloodstained and bullet-riddled body, with De Palma and his crew ripping
the guts out of the gangster movie and leaving the result on the operating
table for all to see.
Scarface presents us with a tacky, gaudy, sleazy world, where billboards
and murals depict a paradise of sunsets and palm trees (a "fake
paradise" look that's carried over into Body Double
and reappears in Snake Eyes), which hides the ugly reality of the drug
world, and eventually serves as a backdrop for violence and murder. Although
the combination of gangsters, guns, and cocaine promises a rapid-fire pace with
flashy camera moves to match, this is one of De Palma's most visually
restrained films. The camera often drifts slowly into scenes from above and
picks out characters, or starts in close-up on an object and pulls out into a
wide shot. But the languid camera moves are deceptive, slowly luring us into a
world full of flamboyant characters who express themselves through aggressive
talk and violent action. The sunlit streets and disco nightclubs (backed up by
Giorgio Moroder's electronic score, reinforcing the artificiality of the film's
world) suck these gullible characters into a corrosive capitalist nightmare
that will consume and destroy them.
Although the film depicts a nightmarish world, it's also very funny. There's
the "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" one-upmanship between Tony and
Omar (F. Murray Abraham), Tony telling a little kid on the beach to watch as
the mafioso's friend Manny (Steven Bauer) gets slapped by a girl, and Tony
wearing Elvira's sun hat (leading to a burst of laughter from Pfeiffer). But
alongside the humor there are elements of horror. When Tony's bloodied hand
reaches into frame and rests on a sleeping Elvira, it's like a beast rousing
his beauty, or the Phantom of the Paradise getting his Phoenix. But the
monstrous Tony also has a code of honor, an example being the moment when he
refuses to blow up a car with children inside—an agonisingly suspenseful scene
that was recently echoed in Spielberg's Munich,
and is a nod to Hitchcock's Sabotage). This fateful decision
precipitates Tony's downfall: as frequently happens in De Palma's unforgiving
film world, if a character suddenly acquires a conscience, they're mercifully
punished for it.
Like the tiger chained up outside his mansion, Tony eventually becomes a
prisoner in his own palace. He's the '80s gangster equivalent of Charles Foster
Kane—a demented capitalist trapped in his own Babylon, who ends up being bored,
alienated, and alone. We only see Tony enjoying the high life in a brief
montage sequence (the rapid scenes conveying the fleeting pleasures on offer),
with the remainder of the film concerned with his slow descent into mistrust
and paranoia. Tony ends up destroying himself and those he loves, including his
younger sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), an innocent whom he swiftly
corrupts. The promise (seen on the side of the Goodyear blimp) that "The
World Is Yours" at first seems like a gift to Tony, but it soon becomes a
millstone around his neck, and finally an ironic epitaph when he dies, with the
neon sign above the fountain where he falls to his death like an engraving on a
headstone.
At the beginning of Scarface, we see archive footage of Fidel Castro
giving a speech and Cuban refugees arriving on boats in Florida, echoing LBJ's
appearance on TV in Greetings.
But the '60s mix of idealism and scepticism (with De Niro and his crew in Greetings
rushing around New York dodging the draft and trying to get laid) is replaced
by the '80s business ethos (with Pacino & Co. pursuing the era's dream of
accumulating wealth at the expense of anything else). When Tony berates the
social x-rays and businessmen in a fancy restaurant, we're seeing a Bonfire of
the Vanities-type saga filtered through the gangster genre. Tom Wolfe's
hefty tome may be considered the literary summing up of the "greed is
good" decade, but Scarface is the cinematic equivalent: a
gun-toting, coke-snorting, chainsaw-wielding, no-holds-barred epic. "Push
It To The limit" goes one song in the film and De Palma wilfully obliges.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
A masterpiece of guilty pleasure.
Without further ado, fifteen
reasons to love Brian De Palma's "Scarface."
1. Al Pacino's Tony Montana just
might be his gravestone role, the one everyone knows — moreso even than Michael
Corleone (whose legacy was hampered by a weak third movie). Pacino, of course,
goes way over the top and through the floor on the other side — and that pretty
well describes the arc of his character and his performance. He starts out
young and hungry, his eyes mischievously alive in the detainment room, and ends
up face down in (literally) a pool of his own blood. Along the way Pacino
invests the scummy Tony with a surprising amount of humor, compassion, and
humanity.
2. Brian De Palma just wants to have fun.
Occasionally he can be serious, as in Casualties of War (for me his
masterpiece). But for the most part he's a coldly brilliant prankster with a
camera. He fools you into thinking you saw the chainsaw carve up Tony's
unfortunate partner (you didn't); he pulls off any number of dazzling
set-pieces thick with menace, as when Tony and Manolo (Steven Bauer) stalk
Rebenga through a chaotic detainee tent. If your blood doesn't freeze when
Manolo calls out "Rebengaaaaa!!" and De Palma cuts to Manolo's
hand holding a knife and Manolo picks up the chant "Libertad! Libertad!",
you don't have any blood.
3. Oliver Stone, in his day, was the rudest screenwriter ever to win an Oscar
for screenwriting. Other screenwriters used the F-word — Stone used it 218
times. And he contributed dialogue that will outlive almost anything else he's
ever written (with the possible exception of Wall Street's "Greed
is good" speech). I won't take your time quoting it all, but I will say my
personal favorite is the "Say good night to the bad guy" monologue
(it truly begins, I think, when Tony is seated and feeling sorry for himself:
"Is this it, Manny?"), which hits amazing notes of pride and
contempt.
4. Giorgio Moroder (who also scored the Stone-scripted Midnight Express)
gives us an immediately recognizable theme — a spaghetti-western sound weighed
down by the Miami heat and piles of cocaine. Ominous yet fundamentally cheesy,
the music nonetheless fits the images like a leopard seat. And don't get me
started on the songs, many of which turn up in Grand Theft Auto on the
radio station. Rush, rush, get the llelo...
5. Michelle Pfeiffer, at that point, could've been just another chilly blonde
(though she'd shown some spirit in Grease 2 the year before). In
retrospect, after years of complex performances, we can better appreciate what
Pfeiffer is doing as the jaded, coked-out Elvira Hancock ("Like a bird
flyin' around," Tony comments rather inaccurately — Elvira barely moves
if she doesn't have to, even on the dance floor). Pfeiffer has the perfect look
for a snooty white girl that a crude Cuban like Tony would fall for, but she
backs it up with subtle intonations of disdain and also sadness at the glitzy
but hollow life Elvira has chosen.
6. Robert Loggia. He owns you. He owns everything. And he would own this movie
if not for the extreme competition all around him. His Frank Lopez is a
past-his-prime mobster, soft in the middle and no match for an amoral
up-and-comer like Tony. Frank is pathetic and murderously duplicitous, but he
retains our guarded affection right up until Tony's cruel "I won't kill
you" switcheroo. Frank's indulgence of choice is food and booze, not
cocaine, so he has no edge, and Loggia etches a funny and, in the end, poignant
portrait of a man who has outlived his own effectiveness in a violent career.
7. What has F. Murray Abraham done besides this movie and Amadeus? (Go
ahead, think about it. I'll wait.) Even if those two roles were all he did,
what more do you need? Abraham raises the bar the second he hits the screen as
the slimy Omar, who has one of the absolute all-time great Oliver Stone
dialogue exchanges with Tony:
Tony: Okay, fuck you. How's that?
Omar: ...Fuck you.
Tony: Fuck you.
...I mean, if you can't appreciate that, we really have nothing more to say to
each other.
8. Harris Yulin as corrupt cop ("Whoever said you was a cop?")
Mel Bernstein, if only because he paves the way for perhaps Al Pacino's
funniest line reading ever: "HOKAY MEL." But Yulin is more than that
— his Mel is so puffed up with white male privilege he's negotiating with Tony
even after a bullet to the gut: "We'll just get this fixed up..."
Talk about denial, man. I love that his final choice of words on this earth is
a hearty "FUCK you!" — again, Oliver Stone in action.
9. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Tony's mercurial little sister Gina, who
wastes no time hoovering cocaine with some dork in a toilet stall once she gets
some money. Gina is the most significant holdover from the Hawks/Hecht Scarface
of 1932, wherein Tony's sister also dallied with his best friend, thus fucking
with Tony's twisted incestuous fixation on her. In this version, Gina gets to
wear a skimpy nightgown and offer the coke-befuddled Tony what he really wants.
Mastrantonio commits to the moment wholeheartedly without looking foolish, no
mean feat for any actress, never mind a 25-year-old in her first movie.
10. John A. Alonzo's cinematography makes the most of Miami's sizzling lurid
topography, from the neon nightclubs (with their mirrored walls that made the
scenes a bitch to shoot) to the bleak clutter of motel rooms where drug deals
go sour. Without this movie's influential look, you have no Miami Vice
(TV series, not movie) and none of the many, many urban action flicks to
follow.
11. The character actors that thicken the tapestry of evil: Al Israel as the
chainsaw-wielding Hector ("Ahora tú!"); Paul Shenar as the big boss
Alejandro Sosa, who inspires that Pacino phone-juggling moment that always
makes me laugh like an idiot; Mark Margolis as Alberto the assassin, whose
insistence on blowing up Sosa's target along with wife and kids provokes Tony's
legendary post-mortem tirade ("I tole you, no fuckin' kids! No, but you
wouldn't listen! Well, you stupid fuck — look at you now!"); and
the wordless Geno Silva as "The Skull" (the baddest-ass name in a
movie full of bad-ass names), who finally pulls the trigger on Tony.
12. The novelization by Paul Monette, before he started writing about AIDS. It
offers a lot of backstory on what Tony was doing in Cuba before he came over
with the rest of the Marielitos. I just thought I'd give the book a shout-out,
since novelizations usually suck, especially novelizations from the '80s, but
this one is worth seeking out. There's also, as yet unread by me, a new Scarface
series of books that launched in December 2005.
13. The network-TV version, worth watching just for the hilariously
insufficient substitutions for all that Oliver Stone obscenity. For instance
"Miami is one big pussy just waitin' to get fucked" becomes "one
big chicken just waitin' to get plucked." Not quite as funny as
"melon farmers" in the TV edit of Repo Man, but close.
14. The sheer ballsy length of it. Sure, it takes De Palma ten minutes shy of
three hours to tell a story that took the 1932 version 90 minutes to cover. I
don't care. I never find it boring, except maybe for the scenes at home
with Tony's disapproving mother. It's a movie you sit down with and either
nibble on or kick back for the whole ride. It's a big thick colorful comic book
you can open up at any point and lose yourself in.
15. The enduring cult. The hip-hop culture has embraced Tony and his upwardly
mobile ethos, apparently without irony. I can go to the corner convenience
store and buy Scarface keychains and stickers — who anticipated that
in 1983? Analysis of this particular phenomenon is better left to analysts of
such things, but I'll give it a shot anyway (hey, you got this far, didn't
you?) — I think it's just that Tony is the original bad-ass mofo, and Scarface
was playing endlessly on cable when so many rappers in their impressionable
formative years watched it and studied it. They wanted the mansion, the
bodyguards, the piles of cash, maybe the white girl. First you get the money.
Then you get the power. Then you get the women.
Well, that about covers it. To
paraphrase John D. MacDonald's intro to Stephen King's "Night Shift":
If you have read this whole thing, I hope you have plenty of time. You could
have been watching "Scarface."
Reverse Shot [Leah Churner]
DVD Talk (Preston Jones) dvd
review [3/5] [Platinum Edition]
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [2.5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
Movie-Vault.com
(John Ulmer) review
NYC
Film Critic (Ethan Alter) review
[3.5/5]
Scarface to A Sense of Loss Pauline Kael
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan] 20th Anniversary Edition
Vern's review Anniversary Edition
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers] reviewing both the Platinum and Anniversary
Edition
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Anniversary Edition
American
Cinematographer dvd review Kenneth Sweeney, Anniversary Edition
DVD Talk (James W. Powell) dvd
review [4/5] [Anniversary Edition]
DVD Town
(Tim David Raynor) dvd review Anniversary Edition
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5] Platinum Edition
DVD Town
(William David Lee) dvd review Platinum Edition
DVD Verdict - Platinum Edition [Rob
Lineberger]
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr, Collector’s Edition
The
Digital Bits dvd review [Collector's
Edition] Todd Doogan
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin
Jacobson, Collector’s Edition
Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd
review [Special Edition] Andrew L. Urban
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/5]
BBC Films review Nick Hilditch
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] in 1983
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] in 2003
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
A
Foul Mouth With a Following; 20 Years Later, Pacino's 'Scarface' Resonates With
a Young Audience Bernard
Weinraub from The New York Times,
BODY DOUBLE
Blazing Saddles to Bombay Talkie Pauline Kael
Brian De Palma, working with
material that he has grown past: a murder mystery set in LA, in the overlapping
worlds of "serious" acting and performing in porno films. The big,
showy scenes recall VERTIGO and REAR WINDOW so obviously that the movie is like
an assault on the people who have put De Palma down for being derivative. This
time, he's just about spiting himself and giving them reasons not to like him.
The central role-that of an actor who suffers from claustrophobia-is played by
Craig Wasson, whose conscientious acting is a drag on the movie. Things pick up
close to the midway point, when Melanie Griffith arrives and gives a tickling
performance as Holly Body, a porno star with a punk-vamp haircut and a sprig of
holly tattooed on her rump. Holly is like a dirty-minded teenage seductress,
and what she says has an element of surprise even for her; her talk is so sexy
it gives her ideas and drives her eyebrows up. But most of the movie lacks
zest. In De Palma's CARRIE, when the camera moves languorously around teenage
girls in a high-school locker room there's a buzz between the camera and what
it's filming. Here, De Palma saves the languorous camera for the sleek,
expensive settings, such as the Beverly Hills shopping mall called the Rodeo
Collection, and there's not only no comic buzz-the camera seems wowed,
impressed. The voyeuristic sequences, with Wasson peeping through a telescope,
aren't particularly erotic; De Palma shows more sexual feeling for the swank
buildings and real estate. With Deborah Shelton, Gregg Henry, Guy Boyd, David
Haskell, B.J. Jones, and Dennis Franz. The script by Robert J. Avrech and De
Palma is from De Palma's story (a contraption). Cinematography by Stephen H.
Burum; the score, by Pino Donaggio, seems to be ladled on. Columbia
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info James Stroble
The 80s were a heady time: Apple released the Macintosh, Eli
Lilly brought you Prozac, and Brian De Palma was constantly inventing new and
exciting ways to fail the Bechdel test. BODY DOUBLE (1984) had the unenviable
task of following up the director's DRESSED TO KILL (1980), BLOW OUT (1981),
and SCARFACE (1983). Say what you will about those films—I think the horse is
still breathing—but in the waning days of New Hollywood they occupied a certain
place in its pantheon. Caine, Travolta, Pacino. Add to that mononymous list:
Wasson. "Nobody's perfect" is the De Palma mantra though,
and BODY DOUBLE manages to transcend its flaws en route to realizing
its unique vision of Reagan-era Los Angeles. Craig Wasson plays Jake
Scully, underemployed actor and amateur claustrophobic. When we meet Scully he's
just suffered a series of unfortunate setbacks: he has a fit on the job, he
catches his wife cheating on him, and is thus booted from their home.
Temporarily adrift, an acting acquaintance offers him a plush housesitting gig
high, high in the Hollywood Hills. From this lofty vantage point Scully makes a
habit of spying on exhibitionist neighbor, Gloria, and under the
flimsy pretense of chivalry the practice eventually evolves into outright
stalking. No points for catching the Hitchcock nods; De Palma's allusions
to (or outright theft of) works like REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO are so overt
as to signal jumping off points rather than ends in themselves. In a
surreal segue toward the end of the film, a lip-synching Holly Johnson of the
band Frankie Goes to Hollywood leads Scully, suddenly decked out in
thick-rimmed glasses and argyle, onto a porno set to the tune of
"Relax." The sequence functions as a movie-within-a-movie; it's
De Palma's "Broadway Melody Ballet," if you
will, except Gene Kelly didn't find Cyd Charisse behind a door labeled
'SLUTS.' The "Relax" scene marks a tonal crossroads in BODY
DOUBLE. Soon after, the proceedings begin to accelerate at an almost
nightmarish rate and the tightly plotted thriller De Palma fashioned in the
film's first half starts to unravel as the limits of internal plausibility
are pushed to the extreme. If you're on De Palma's wavelength though it's a
worthy tradeoff, as tension gives way to near mania. When the film was
released, Roger Ebert characterized BODY DOUBLE as having De Palma's
"most airtight plot" yet—an assertion it's hard to imagine
Ebert leveling without cracking a slight smile. The virtue and, dare
I say, greatness of BODY DOUBLE come not from bulletproof narrative or
even rudimentary character development, but instead from a messier
place. De Palma synthesizes a multitude of disparate references into
a scathing critique of nice-guy chauvinism, critical Puritanism,
and countless other -isms, all under the guise mindless genre fare.
My initial review of "Body Double" went something like this: "Brian De Palma's stylish yet empty-headed exercise in thriller mechanics from the Hitchcock school of 'Vertigo' has little to offer beyond stylish mechanics. Not that it is a bad film, far from it, it is putrid but so cheaply entertaining and rudely exploitative that it is hard to forget." Well, this was a review I had written two years ago but never posted or published since. Seeing the film again a few times since, I can honestly say it is a truly stylish, erotic film that offers something unique from De Palma (which he usually manages to accomplish without reservation) - he knows how to keep you hooked into the story and it is definitely hard to forget.
Craig Wasson is Jake, the listless, wan and unintelligent hero of the film, playing an actor fired from a low-budget vampire flick thanks to his outbreaks of claustrophobia. His wife is sleeping around with other men and so now he needs a place to crash. Another aspiring actor offers a UFO-shaped house on stilts as accomodation. This house also has another distinguishing feature - a telescope allows one to spy on the sexy neighbor who stripteases every night with the blinds open. Wasson is so intrigued that he watches her every night, until tragedy strikes. Of course, I would not dream of revealing any more of the plot except to say that if you've seen Hitchcock's excellent "Vertigo," then you'll know how this turns out. Even then, De Palma has a few tricks up his sleeve.
"Body Double" was one of my favorite films of 1984. When I saw it again two years ago, I thought it was a slipshod, mediocre thriller that at least keeps one interest in seeing how much De Palma has blatantly borrowed from good old Hitch. And I can't say I agree with that assertion anymore. "Body Double" grows on you and makes you want to watch what happens next (a phrase used by the Wasson character during a porno shoot sums it up: "I like to watch."). De Palma has that hook that grabs you tight and won't let go. Many great directors have it, including Stanley Kubrick, and even if all their films are not masterpieces, they keep you watching.
There is no reason for this film to work but Wasson's
uncharacteristically strange, voyeuristic Jake (who becomes a temporary porn
actor at one point) is watchable enough, particularly his trip into the porn
industry where he discovers a sexy starlet (Melanie Griffith). She describes in
a pre-"Boogie Nights" monologue all the acts she will and will not perform
for the camera.
What else there is to enjoy is De Palma's fabulous tracking shots inside a mall (echoes here of "Dressed to Kill"), an ugly murder involving a power drill, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" performed as a musical backdrop for a porno flick, Guy Boyd as Detective McLean who calls Jake a "peeper," Wasson's hilariously overdone claustrophobic acts, a ponytailed Indian who follows the sexy neighbor (played with true sex appeal by Deborah Shelton) everywhere, and Dennis Franz's sleazy independent director who is ready to fire Jake at any moment.
Though this is not as monumentally good as De Palma's
"Dressed to Kill," it does have plenty of style to spare and has more
interesting characters than "Blow Out." I just do not know how to
describe the feeling I have every time I see "Body Double." Perhaps
its story of
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
In the introduction to Slant's symposium on the
director, I mentioned that Brian De Palma was possibly the only mainstream
director capable of lobbing a hate crime in the form of a pop film a la
Godard's Weekend. What I didn't mention
is that he already has. Body Double, De Palma's relentless declaration
of war against his critics, bars no holds. The only other time he stepped this
close to the precipice over the pit of nihilism was with the first 90 minutes
of Femme Fatale. The later film,
of course, flowers into something considerably more life-affirming and benign.
The saving grace of Body Double is that De Palma could willfully make a
film so successfully debased and still position the entire experience as an
apparatus to prove the axiom "it's only a movie." It's more than
that. It's a movie movie in the same sense that Little Caesar offered
"pizza pizza"—a diminutive svengali selling a cut rate product that
gets the immediate job done and leaves a lot for leftovers.
"What
are you, some kind of method actor?" asks a grimy porno producer to failed
actor Craig Wasson halfway through the movie. I call the failed actor Craig
Wasson not because I can't remember the character's name but because Wasson's
off performance is one of the crucial keys to understanding De Palma's
Herschell-Gordon-Lewis-meets-Radley-Metzger-by-way-of-Bertolt-Brecht routine.
No, make that porno Pirandello! Call the whole film Six Set Pieces in Search
of a Sleazy Subtext (or maybe Six Movie Reviewers in Search of a
Beatdown), but appreciating Body Double means taking stock of the ways
the film's pieces don't add up. You could say that Wasson isn't a
particularly convincing actor as an actor, but he's not supposed to be.
Wasson's transparency makes him the perfect fall guy for the hideously ugly man
who wants to murder an extremely sexy woman. Similarly, Wasson's swing-and-miss
performance (from a technical, emotional standpoint) in Body Double
helps De Palma achieve more radical distancing experimental tropes than he'd
ever attempted to pull before while ostensibly in Hitchcock thriller mode.
More
than any other De Palma film, Body Double requires the audience to step
outside of their role as spectators and, instead, examine the fissure between
what the director is conveying and how they're processing it. In other words,
they have to observe how they observe. He does this by inserting movies within
the movie. Wasson is filming a movie, or was until he gets fired for his
inadequacies. Melanie Griffith's porn pixie Holly Body stars in Holly Does
Hollywood, a movie dubbed the Gone with the Wind of porn. The two
meet on the set of a porno sequel that recreates the making of the earlier
film. (A mirror shot that Wasson claims he created reveals the camera crew.) Body
Double even begins and ends with deliberate deconstructions, tricking the audience
into accepting scenes at face value and then breaking down the reality of a
film set's goings on. (Of course, we're watching De Palma's false set-ups of
the film-within-a-film's false set-ups, which compounds the complication.) It's
heady, but the cavalcade of titties help the medicine go down, which is why Body
Double has far more potential to demonstrate avant garde concerns,
techniques, and cognitive dissonance than anything by, say, Peter Kubelka.
(Unless, of course, you prefer your tits National Geographic-style. Then, by
all means, double bill this one with Unsere Afrikareise.)
Though
it's evident that De Palma was taking petulant pot shots at the bluenoses who
turned Dressed To Kill's classy, good-natured ribaldry into the
purported number one cause of all rapes committed between 1980 and 1981, Body
Double's manufactured assaults never cross the line. Like Godard, who was
also a master of mixing bile with a steady sense of fatalistic humor, De Palma
isn't capable of perpetrating hate crimes. Just hate humps. Not every attack on
the hypocrisies of what is and what isn't acceptable in mainstream sensuality
comes from the business end of an erect power drill. For instance, whenever
Wasson catches a glimpse of his own "Madeline"/"Judy"
double (i.e. a doppelganger of a doppelganger) dancing in nothing but
headphones and panties, De Palma has Pino Donaggio score the discovery as a
parody of Tangerine Dream's "Love On A Real Train" from Risky
Business. Without drawing too fine a point of it, he seems to be mocking
the set of standards that romanticize the corruption of virile, high school
boys at the hands of non-Chlamydia-carrying whores. But heaven forbid a
middle-aged woman should have a remotely risqué sexual fantasy life without the
middle-aged film director taking the flack.
Body Double, while
not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma's signature film. It's a
wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face
value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it's worth. Hell, try
taking on all three at once. Ever since Dionysus, De Palma has
force-fucked the intellect with the libido. Even though the assistant director
on the set of Holly Body's new porno epic quips, "I thought we were doing Body
Shop here, not Last Tango," that's no reason for you not to
masturbate over the footnotes. What are you, some kind of method cinephile?
Double Reflections: Beyond the Shadow of the Double Giuseppe Puccio from 24LiesASecond, July 18, 2004
DVD Times Mike Sutton
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Body Double (1984) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 14, 2009
Reverse Shot (Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega]
not coming to a theater near you (Teddy Blanks) review
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]
Reel.com dvd review [2.5/4] Brie Beazley
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [1/5] Richard Scheib
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
WISE GUYS
USA (100 mi) 1986
Made in between Scarface and The
Untouchables, De Palma's third gangster movie of the '80s is something
completely different: a light-hearted and extremely wacky caper in which DeVito
and Piscopo play small-time errand-runners for a local mobster. Failing in
their efforts to essay a little double-crossing, each finds himself faced with
a contract to kill the other. Instead they go on the run, and end up on a
spending spree using the mob's credit card. Some great laughs, but it isn't
hard to see why the film was never released theatrically in Britain: at times
it just gets bogged down with over-the-top performances. The ending is great,
though.
Wife vs. Secretary to The Wiz Pauline Kael
Danny De Vito, as the bumptious
Italian Harry, and Joe Piscopo, as the Jewish simpleton Moe, are the two
clownish underdogs who come out on top in this Mafia burlesque--a broad,
slapstick farce, set in Newark and spattered with boyish gross-out humor. The
directing, by Brian De Palma, is canny and smooth, but this musty genre calls
for fresh jokes and sharp, colorful personalities, and that's not what he's
working with. The frankness of the picture's grubby anti-glamour is its only
claim to charm. Maybe you'd have to be part of what is delicately referred to
as the undemanding audience--say, somebody who watches every rerun of the
Abbott and Costello pictures--to succumb and find the antics and the mugging as
uproarious as they're meant to be. The script is credited to George Gallo. With
Dan Hedaya, Captain Lou Albano, and, in brief appearances, Harvey Keitel, Ray
Sharkey, Patti LuPone, Julie Bovasso, Mimi Cecchini, Antonia Rey, and Anthony Holland.
Cinematography by Fred Schuler. MGM/United Artists. For a more extended
discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Hooked.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
If you love the rancorous humor of gangster films — the
scenes in which the ethnic goons strut, gesticulate, and insult each other —
you’ll enjoy this screwball mob comedy.
Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo are two New Jersey mob lackeys
(and best friends) who screw up while placing a large bet for their boss, the
smooth, remorseless Dan Hedaya. The boss gives each man one last chance to
redeem himself: DeVito is ordered to rub out Piscopo, and vice versa. Not
knowing they’ve been set up, but knowing they’re dead one way or the other, the
two hit the road and go to Atlantic City, where DeVito hopes his uncle — a
former heavy-hitter for the mob — will bail him and Piscopo out.
Everyone in the large cast sparkles, but the standout is Captain Lou Albano as
the colossal Frank the Fixer, who barks profanities for the whole movie (“This
is the strangest pillowcase I’ve ever seen,” says a flunky; “IT’S MY UNDERWEAR,
ASSHOLE!” bellows Frank). Captain Lou isn’t an actor, but we start laughing
every time he waddles onscreen, because he’s so relentlessly, monotonously
irascible he’s hilarious.
On its own terms, this is a terrific piece of throwaway
entertainment, a fun return to comedic roots for Brian De Palma.
Slant
Magazine review
Fernando F. Croce
Not even Brian De Palma's most ardent champions
came to claim Wise Guys: Pauline Kael deemed it fit for Three Stooges
fans only, while Armond White assumed its creator was as embarrassed as he was.
A mid-career faux pas, or the director's equivalent of the coruscating,
laugh-stuck-in-your-throat dissonance of The King of Comedy? One way or
the other, De Palma points to Scorsese from the start, with Danny De Vito doing
a Travis Bickle oration in front of the mirror while being mimicked by his
young son in the next room, the wall between them providing a parody of De
Palma's own trademark split-screen. Working from a wonky screenplay by George
Gallo and Norman Steinberg, the filmmaker modulates the feeble gags through
sheer visual elegance: a slow, 360-degree circular pan in the middle of a New
Jersey street is sped up for full Mack Sennett effect; and the local capo di
tutti (Dan Hedaya) puts a cigarette into a holder in huge close-up, then the
camera pulls back so that half a dozen lighters can spring into the frame to
vie for the honor of lighting it. Harry (DeVito) and Moe (Joe Piscopo) are best
pals and lowly mob flunkies whose to-do list routinely includes such items as
doing laundry and trying on bulletproof jackets. A chronic gambler and dreamer,
Harry longs to open "the first Italo-Judeo combination
restaurant-deli" and convinces Moe to take a chance at the horse races
with their boss's money; a fortune goes down the drain, of course, and, as punishment,
Hedaya assigns one friend to kill the other. Following the rich avant-gardism
of Body Double, Wise Guys is a frenetic
step toward mainstream filmmaking, a course duly completed the next year with The Untouchables. The macho bluster taken
seriously in De Palma's gorgeous but uninterestingly pumped-up Elliott Ness
saga is here intriguingly skewered, with the two guys off to Atlantic City in a
pink Cadillac belonging to vein-popping assassin Captain Lou Albano, who digs
into a mountain of lobsters with his bare hands to illustrate the director's
bold, nearly Eisensteinian gift for caricature. Such subversive touches show
how, though toiling in a manic studio assignment, De Palma understands that
"the issue here is loyalty," as one of the characters puts it—the
loyalty of Harry and Moe to their friendship and unashamed comic mugging, and
also of the auteur to his artistic instincts in the hack-infested grounds of
'80s commercial Hollywood.
Qwipster's Movie
Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]
Teen
Movie Critic (Roger Davidson) capsule
review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Walter Goodman) review
THE UNTOUCHABLES
Time-honoured mayhem in the Windy
City, and if there are few set-ups you haven't seen in previous Prohibition
movies, it's perhaps because De Palma and scriptwriter David Mamet
have settled for the bankability of enduring myth. And boy, it works like the
12-bar blues. The director's pyrotechnical urge is held in check and trusts the
tale; the script doesn't dally overmuch on deep psychology; the acting is a
treat. Connery's world-weary and pragmatic cop, Malone, steals the show because
he's the only point of human identification between the monstrously evil Al
Capone (De Niro) and the unloveably upright Eliot Ness (Costner), and when he
dies the film has a rocky time recovering. Costner looks like the kid who got a
briefcase for Xmas and was pleased, but painfully learns under Malone's
tutelage how to fight dirty. De Niro establishes his corner courtesy of a
bloody finger in close-up, and unleashes uncontrollable rage to electrifying
effect, most notably at the blood-boltered baseball-bat board meeting. The
Odessa Steps set piece at the railway station could maybe do with one more
angle to shuffle, and the battle at the border bridge diminishes the
claustrophobic grip of the corrupt city, but the narrative thunders to its
conclusion like a locomotive.
Ugetsu to Utu Pauline Kael
Set in Chicago circa 1930--Al Capone's
capital of crime--this Brian De Palma movie, from a script by David Mamet, is
like an attempt to visualize the public's collective dream of Chicago
gangsters. Our movie-fed imagination of the past is enlarged and given a new
vividness. De Palma is a showman here. Everything is neatly done in broad
strokes, and the slight unbelievability of it all makes it more enjoyable.
Robert De Niro's Capone is a plump peacock with receding hair and a fat cigar
in his mouth. The four men who fight to restore the honor of a corrupted
society--the four who can't be bribed, the Untouchables--are the fresh-faced
young Special Agent Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner; a smart, ornery
veteran cop, played (magnificently) by Sean Connery; a rookie-cop sharpshooter
(Andy Garcia); and a small, middle-aged accountant (Charles Martin Smith). It's
not a great movie; it's too banal, too morally comfortable--the script is too
obvious. But it's a great audience movie--a wonderful potboiler. It's a rouser.
The architectural remnants of the era (including solid traces of Louis Sullivan
and Frank Lloyd Wright) have been refurbished to provide a swaggering showcase
for the legend. Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum; music by Ennio Morricone.
(Every now and then you may wonder what Morricone's throbbing disco-synthesizer
beat is doing in this period.) With Jack Kehoe, Billy Drago, and Richard
Bradford. Paramount. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book
Hooked.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Kian Bergstrom
For the most part, De Palma's career has moved between the very personal, deeply self-reflexive, and politically agitational films which he has largely written himself (the major exceptions here are the astonishing late ‘70s pair OBSESSION and THE FURY) and the impersonal, formalist exercises in genre and narrative construction for which he has mainly been a hired director for the projects of others. These journeyman pieces tend to be opportunities for him to explore tensions and structures in the creation and manipulation of space, of rhythm, of imagery that are more daring and extreme than what is found in his more organically built films. Depending on the very conventional, very unproblematic scripts and Hollywood-standard casting developed through the studio processes has allowed him to be more wildly and dangerously experimental in many ways in his direction, knowing that his competent and star-powered actors and predictable, predigested dialogue and story patterns will be reliably intelligible to a mainstream audience no matter what devious or disruptive visual strategies he might deploy around them. THE UNTOUCHABLES is one of De Palma's most extraordinary deviations from the norms of cinematic narrative, though its propulsive, fascistic screenplay by David Mamet and wooden, aw-shucks central performance by Kevin Costner do wonders in disguising that. De Palma creates a Prohibition-era Chicago that is drunk on violence and corruption, in which the vileness of the city's degradation and humiliation by Al Capone's rule of terror seeps up from the streets like a miasma, distorting the world as though the very atmosphere was drunk, as though the city buildings themselves were insane. He shoots in disconcerting, narratively-unmotivated wide angles, and makes his camera weave in eldritch patterns through corridors, through shootouts, through windows and off the edges of rooftops, creating a kind of evil-eyed counterpoint to the staid and simplistically heroic tale of white hats battling black hats that the movie's ostensibly telling. As the film progresses, the incoherence between the deeply sane, self-satisfied, and respectably inoffensive Hollywood half and the mad, self-critical, and cartoonish De Palma half reaches a breaking point in the justifiably lauded sequence in which Costner's Eliot Ness attempts to capture Al Capone's bookkeeper amidst a firefight in Union Station. Any pretense of realism is abandoned as De Palma teleports characters from one end of the station to another, has gunshots propel victims multiple yards through plate glass walls, dilates time well past its breaking point, and does this all as part of a grand upstaging of himself by building the shootout around a short moment lifted and perverted from Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. While others of his films are more accomplished and powerful and disturbing—there is nothing here to rival, for instance, the anti-patriotism of BLOW OUT and its vision of America as a machine for turning the deaths of the poor into capital, or the distressingly insoluble problems of free-floating personal identity, determinism, and illusory mental states that are at the heart of FEMME FATALE's double roles and unreliable narration—but the constraints provided by the crutches of so much prima facie normalcy come with their own radical freedoms. This is top-notch B-grade De Palma.
The Untouchables (1987) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
I have been happily viewing my way though the box set of
the first season of The Untouchables television series, including the
original two-part Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse pilot, directed by the
great Phil Karlson and theatrically released as The Scarface Mob. (I
wrote that up as a "Noir of the Week" at The Blackboard and
will post it here as soon as I can unearth it; that board's online archives
don't go back very far, and I can't seem to find it on my own computer.)
I thought I should take a look at Brian De Palma's 1987 film version of The
Untouchables, which I had never seen. It is reasonably
entertaining but nothing great; Leonard Maltin gives it four stars and I'd
maybe give it two (largely on the basis of Sean Connery's fine supporting performance).
The aesthetic of late Fifties television serves this material so much better
than the aesthetic of late Eighties blockbuster film-making! The celebrated
noir look of The Untouchables series lends it an atmosphere and
intimacy that the movie can't touch. You are drawn into that world.
With his moral rectitude and his sharp way of wearing a three-piece suit, Kevin
Costner is spot-on casting for Eliot Ness, a worthy successor to Robert Stack.
But Robert De Niro's Al Capone is strictly a cartoon-style villain. By having
This has to be the most anonymous film by Brian De Palma that I have ever seen.
The riff on the famous baby carriage scene from Eisenstein's Battleship
Potemkin is a fun, stylish bit, but most of the rest of the film could
have been helmed by any competent
DVD Times Mike Sutton
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Untouchables (1987) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, July 31, 2009
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
filmcritic.com (Mark Athitakis) review [4/5]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Michael Pflug
The Digital Bits dvd review Greg Suarez
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Harral) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review series of fanboy reviews
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]
Lars Lindahl retrospective [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] DarkHorse
Eye for Film (Josh Morall) review [5/5]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5] Special Collector’s Edition
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [3/5] [Special Collector's Edition]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio & Hock Guan Teh) dvd review Special Collector’s Edition
PopMatters Leigh H. Edwards, Special Collector’s Edition
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Verdict - Special Collector's Edition (HD DVD) [Ryan Keefer]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
BBC Films review Neil Smith
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Yunda Eddie Feng
DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]
CASUALTIES OF WAR
De Palma is not a director one looks
to for conscience, and his track record on the issue of rape has been innocent
of moral debate. It's odd to find him dealing with both, and the
non-sensationalist approach seems to have taken a toll on his energies: Casualties
of War is dull. Sgt Meserve (Penn) kidnaps a Vietnamese girl to service his
squad during a dangerous reconnaisance mission, and only the rookie Eriksson
(Fox) opposes him. The quarrel is as static as their characters - Meserve plain
nasty, Eriksson a model of decency. They shout at each other lots; when
Eriksson reports the crime, Meserve tries to blow him up in the latrine. The
official reaction - what's a crime in wartime? - only comes to life when Lt
Reilly (Rhames) explains what injustice means to a black Southerner. David Rabe's
screenplay is disappointing in the light of his brilliant Streamers, and
the conclusion in which Eriksson achieves catharsis back home with a Vietnamese
girl on a campus is preposterously corny.
Casablanca to Charlie Bubbles Pauline Kael
A great, intense movie about war
and rape, based on a Vietnam incident of 1966 that was reported in The New
Yorker, October 18, 1969, by the late Daniel Lang. He gave an emotionally
devastating account of the actions of a squad of five American soldiers who
kidnapped a Vietnamese village girl, raped her, and then covered up their crime
by killing her. One of the five men refused to take part in the rape, and,
despite threats and attempts on his life, forced the Army to bring the other
four to trial. He's the one who suffers from guilt: he can't forgive himself
for his inability to save the girl's life. Directed by Brian De Palma, the
movie is the culmination of his best work. Sean Penn gives a daring performance
as the squad's 20-year-old leader; Michael J. Fox is impressive as the soldier
who can't keep quiet; Thuy Thu Le is the dazed, battered girl who haunts the
movie long before she's dead. Also with Erik King as Brownie, John Leguizamo as
Diaz, John C. Reilly as Hatcher, Don Harvey as Clark, Ving Rhames as Lieutenant
Reilly, and Sam Robards as the chaplain. The adaptation (too explicit in a few
places) is by David Rabe; the cinematography is by Stephen H. Burum; the music
is by Ennio Morricone. Columbia. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline
Kael's book Movie Love.
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
It is inconceivable to me that anyone who kills or harms another human being can be considered a hero; any act of violence represents a failure of the person's humanity and imagination. It is inconceivable why people should feel the need to kill, simply to survive, profit, or as a matter of emotion. There is no reason a human being cannot transcend this. Yet not only are most humans incapable of doing this, they put their faith and trust in those who have less control than they themselves do.
The plot for Casualties of War is apparently based on an actual event from 1996: five soldiers are serving in an unit during Vietnam War, led by Meserve (Sean Penn), a forceful but effectively psychopathic personality. Eriksson (Michael J Fox) is a new member of the unit, and still unjaded by the violence around him. Frustrated, Meserve leads his team into a village where they kidnap a young girl, Oahn (Thuy Thu Le) and rape and violate her, physically and emotionally. They take her along with her, and force her to be their slave. Eriksson refuses to take part in this and attempts to set her free. However, in the end, the battered and broken girl is killed by Meserve's team, with Eriksson unable to do anything to stop it.
Eriksson tries to find some semblance of justice, but runs up against a wall of people who refuse to look into the abyss. But he perseveres and finally the people who committed the actions are brought before a military tribunal.
Sean Penn portrays Meserve highly effectively. Michael J. Fox is surprisingly good as the naive recruit. The performance of Thuy Thu Le is heart-wrenching. Brian DePalma's direction of the primary subject matter (the brutality of Meserve and his unit; and Eriksson's conflicted position) is top-notch. The film is based on Daniel Lang's article in a 1969 New Yorker, and a subsequent book. The score by Ennio Morricone is excellent. The ending is a bit of a cop-out.
Casualties of War is one of the best war films I've seen. It s emotionally manipulative but it's effective (unlike films like Saving Private Ryan). It illustrates how war demonises in a stirring manner, while also showing that it doesn't need to be that way.
War is the refuge of the lazy and the foolish. Institutionalised violence represents the failure of humanity as whole. Casualties of War brutally illustrates the affect of institutionalised violence, and how it shapes ones thinking so that any action can be dismissed (not justified or rationalised). By not taking a position on the Vietnam War itself, and by illustrating the resistance Erikson runs into when he wants to do something right, the film goes beyond war and points to the failure of humanity's institutions as whole.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review
Within the impressive array of Vietnam War films released in
the 1980s and '90s, few entries are more disturbing than Brian DePalma's Casualties
of War. Unlike other more rollicking pictures that display the intensity of
the jungle atmosphere, this story takes a more personal look at the effects of
the war. A band of five American soldiers embarks on a typical reconnaisance
mission through the wilderness. However, this task becomes much different when
they commit horrible atrocities on a young, innocent Vietnamese woman (Thuy Thu
Lee). These acts reveal the vicious flipside of the
Private Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) has spent only three weeks in
The group of soldiers taking this fateful journey are an odd collection of
individuals brought together by the war. Eriksson is a bright-eyed young man
with a wife at home who has yet to develop any pure hatred of
Director Brian DePalma (The Untouchables, Dressed to Kill) is widely known
for injecting loads of style into his films, with varying results. Although
this story plays in a fairly straightforward manner, it still includes some
inventive moments. During Eriksson's plight in the tunnel, the camera pans
straight down from his body and reveals the danger hidden beneath the ground.
DePalma also uses several extensive takes that allow the actors to jump into
their roles. The camera avoids showing the worst moments of the terrible
incident, and this omission adds to the disturbing nature of the scene.
Casualties of War places the audience directly into the war environment
and grabs us during the chilling trek across the impressive landscape. The pace
hardly slackens during the introductions, through the kidnapping and its
ultimate resolution. However, the moments following this event fail to match
the same intensity of the previous occurrences. This is a minor problem,
though, and can be forgiven, considering the effectiveness of the earlier scenes.
Nevertheless, I see no reason for the inclusion of the bookends back in
Casualties of Genre, Difference, and Vision: Casualties of War James Moran from 24LiesASecond, April 28, 2004
Rape and captivity Elliott Gruner from Jump Cut, June 1994
DVD Times [Extended Cut] Mike Sutton
Reverse Shot [Justin Stewart] Extended Cut
DVD review (DVD Times) Raphael Pour-Hashemi
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Movie-Vault.com (Arturo García Lasca) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chuck Aliaga) dvd review [Extended Cut]
Reel.com dvd review [Extended Cut] [3/4] Jerry Renshaw
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review Extended Cut
DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [4/5] [Extended Edition]
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan
eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby) review [4/5]
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers
Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman
Movieline Magazine review Richard Natale
DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Onion A.V. Club also reviewing MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
USA (125 mi) 1990
De Palma's film of Tom Wolfe's dark,
hilarious magnum opus bombed in the States - amid charges of racism - and it's
easy to see why. It's norra lorra laffs. Wolfe's book about the inhabitants of
the Big Bad Apple has a Dickensian scope and a Faustian dynamic: 'What shall it
profit a man, if he gain the whole, but lose his soul?' His view of an ethnic
pressure-cooker society is ironic and caustic but even-handed. In the movie,
simplification and scaling down - plus significant changes in ethnicity - lose
the balance. In a twin-track movie, we watch dipso journo Peter Fallow (Willis)
- who narrates - rise as adulterous Wall Street trader Sherman McCoy (Hanks)
falls. Fallow is put onto a story: a poor Bronx black is a near-fatal hit-and-run
casualty. The car turns out to be McCoy's Mercedes - scoop! - and the jackals
descend. What De Palma delivers is merely a mediocre yuppy nightmare movie,
stylistically flashy but with little pace, bite or pathos. As usual with De
Palma, the woman gets shafted (here Griffith as McCoy's mistress). If anything,
it's a Hanks 'little boy lost' movie, more in the Big tradition than The Big
Tradition.
Slant
Magazine review
Paul Schrodt
Since any positive retrospective of Brian De
Palma's career must inevitably be pitched as a defense of the director, it goes
without saying that a key film in such a feature would be The Bonfire of the
Vanities, his most unpopular work after Mission to Mars and one ravaged by critics
with a vitriol that still seems remarkable. It's remarkable because, in
retrospect, Bonfire of the Vanities is one of De Palma's tamer movies,
no doubt eviscerated for not living up to the same image critics held in their
heads when they read Tom Wolfe's enormously popular novel three years earlier;
hype always did kill the cat, and the movie's nastiest pans came from
journalists comparing it to the book—one called it a "fascinating
calamity" and another, more frighteningly, commanded readers to
"destroy this film."
That latter comment exposed something else: critics' completely unfounded,
shamelessly unmasked hatred for De Palma the auteur. Watered-down as it may be,
Bonfire of the Vanities channels much of the same rambunctious, anarchic
spirit of his deeply personal Vietnam-era films, Greetings and Hi, Mom!, which makes complacent viewers
tremble. Politically and artistically, Bonfire of the Vanities is a
challenge—a visceral wake-up call to the mind and the senses. And as in any De
Palma film worthy of its director's name, in this one the audience plays the
role of participant as much as it does spectator. To watch De Palma lampoon the
self-indulgence of the '80s, as Wolfe did much more straightforwardly in his
book, is to be forced to confront a long list of off-kilter images and
incongruous tones—embodied here by the innately good-natured Tom Hanks's
performance as Sherman McCoy, a slimy, adulterous investment banker; Melanie
Griffith's gleefully absurd vixen mistress Maria Ruskin; and, most important of
all, the sudden and jarring shift from farce to straight-faced moral
declaration that is Morgan Freeman's masterful courtroom speech (which draws
its inspiration from, cleverly, a similarly positioned political decree within
Jean-Luc Godard's own social critique, Weekend).
"I don't do satire," De Palma reportedly said in one interview, and
in a sense, he doesn't, because satire suggests a sly ironic twist to otherwise
stern material, whereas De Palma prefers to wear his parody with a big, dumb
grin—or alternatively, with his fangs fully protracted. Tom Wolfe's novel was
satire; the movie is broad comedy, playing up its characters' vices and follies
to viciously cartoonish levels, rendering them more laughable than
contemptible. This is why it was ultimately necessary that the movie's
corporate sleaze bucket be played by, of all people, Hanks, who up to that
point had been tied to light comedies. And why, naturally, Melanie Griffith
chose to make her character more daffy than sexy; likeable or detestable, De
Palma's protagonists fumble at everything they do. And it's worth noting that
both actors punctuate their billboard-size representations of greed, racism,
and infidelity with some of the more gut-busting moments in movie history, such
as when Griffith squeals at the ominous sight of two approaching black men in
the Bronx, "Oh my God, natives!"
De Palma's characterizations may not have the subtle tongue-in-cheek wit of Tom
Wolfe, but his version of the story is both more comic and angrier for it.
Behind Hanks's and Griffith's vaudeville act (and to a much lesser extent,
Bruce Willis's dull work as a alcoholic journalist who ties the narrative
together), De Palma's sinuous camerawork suggests a fiery examination of New
York's racial and economic head-butts—if critics were searching for the film's
muscle, this is where it was at. A glorious time-lapse shot opens the film,
observing 24 hours in the city's vibrant goings-on from atop the Chrysler's
building's high perch. On one hand ecstatically unifying all New Yorkers under
one sky, the image is also strangely foreboding, as a peering eagle statue
looking down on the landscape insinuates the precarious social imbalances that
exist among different neighborhoods. Never since has there been such a
brilliantly singular distillation of a city's cultural strife—certainly not in Crash's contrived
fender-bender-as-peacemaking visual metaphor.
For all its polish, Bonfire of the Vanities neither sustains the
feverish, revolutionary energy nor reaches the visceral
But not hopelessly, as Morgan Freeman articulates in his genius climactic
speech—absent from the novel—playing the only good-natured character, a judge
who presides over McCoy's case. With a gavel in his hand to symbolize De
Palma's own measured plea for common sense, and approaching the camera
directly as if to lecture the audience, Freeman turns various groups'
self-righteousness back on them, exposing each one's duplicity and crying out
for "decency." "It's what your mother taught you," he
explains, in a down-home vernacular that reverses, radically, the movie's
giddy parody into earnest speechifying. It's still self-aware, of course (De
Palma tests his audience's limits in more than one way), but the sentiment is
meant sincerely. De Palma doesn't do straight satire, and as such his coda
puts everything prior into a clarifying moral focus while simultaneously
challenging the way we watch movies: In an unjust world, law is our
"feeble attempt" to make things right. Bonfire of the Vanities
is De Palma's. Don't like it? "The court directs you to shut up!"
brian de palma - The Screengrab When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Paul Clark, November 18, 2008
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1/4]
eFilmCritic.com review [2/5] Hawkboy
Entertainment Weekly review [D] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
RAISING CAIN
Dealing here with the potentially
juicy subject of multiple-personality disorder, De Palma provides an
irresistible vehicle for Lithgow in a variety of parts stemming from child
psychologist Dr Carter Nix. The first half-hour is deliberately unnerving and
confusing before the plot settles down to examine why and how a number of
children and a few adults have disappeared. There's a great deal of humour, not
least in the persons of Carter's evil alter ego Cain, and their equally nasty
father, a psycho-scientist who thinks nothing of driving his own kin completely
round the twist in the name of research. And Sternhagen is superb as a
cancer-stricken doctor who first sparks off suspicions about the aforementioned
Lithgow brood. More to the point, De Palma, as an avowed disciple of Hitchcock,
is back at his chilling best with a series of real seat-ejectors. Lithgow is
consistently brilliant, while Davidovich makes a good fist as his wife. A
really exciting 90 minutes worth, so long as you don't take it too seriously.
Jerry Saravia retrospective [3/4]
There are very few thriller directors you can count on nowadays (I've lost all hope with John Carpenter after the boring "Vampires"), but Brian De Palma is one that manages to deliver, witness his more recent films such as "The Untouchables" and "Mission: Impossible." "Raising Cain" came in between "Carlito's Way" and the outrageously uneven "The Bonfire of the Vanities," and it is a goofy and sporadically scary thriller that at least shows the director still has command of the medium with his deft sleight-of-hand.
The film stars the perfectly cast John Lithgow as child psychiatrist Carter Nix, who may have multiple personalities, including that of his evil German (or Norwegian?) father and his leather-jacketed, sleazy brother, Cain (all played by Lithgow). The tormented Carter is seemingly happily married to his unfaithful wife (Lolita Davidovich), who longs for a handsome widower named Jack (Steven Bauer). Oh, no!!! And all hell breaks loose when Carter finds out.
"Raising Cain" is fun, but it is not intended as a
serious thriller since it too often mocks itself. De Palma borrows freely from
his favorite director of suspense, Hitchcock, and even rips himself off (look
at the infamous shot of tennis shoes from "Dressed to Kill"). This
makes for a highly uneven thriller, albeit with one or more red herrings than
necessary. An example would be the cliche of the dream-within-the-dream that
Davidovich has, which makes me squirm each time I see it (a similar sequence
took place in "An American Werewolf in
The performances may be over-the-top and silly, but it is still an intriguing movie to watch - a definite case of style over substance. De Palma knows how to engineer an efficient, suspenseful, chilling thriller, and for better or worse, that's exactly what "Raising Cain" is.
Slant
Magazine review
Eric
Henderson
Rather than attempt to stay way ahead of the
audience, Brian De Palma's thrillers just are usually one step aside you—the
better to lull you into admiring the scenery before guiding you smack into the
seedy part of town. With Raising Cain, a truly nutzoid psychological
mindfuck in which the experience of trying to pin down where reality stops and
dream states begin makes John Lithgow's crippling schizophrenia look like an
attractive alternative, De Palma hands you a map to an entirely different city.
Dressed to Kill, in comparison, is his greatest triumph of
fastidiousness—a tight, tense, well-oiled calliope of suspense. The film's
jolts don't stem from the plot taking unexpected detours, but, rather, they
grow from one's slow-dawning realization that De Palma is so talented he can
make a film about mistaken and concealed identities without a single shred of
doubt over who's tailing who and you're still enthralled, grooving on the pleasure
of technique.
In
contrast, the gauzily astringent Raising Cain recoils from the surfeit
of technique, and pleasure takes a holiday. The rickety frame of the story
involves John Lithgow as Carter Nix, a child psychologist whose father, also a
psychologist, used him as a test subject to examine the factors by which a
young personality can be formed. Unfortunately, Nix the elder apparently
thought it best to focus his research on seeing just how many maladaptions a
single brain can hold. Despite a long, annotated case history from Frances
Sternhagen that plays out just long enough to merit one of De Palma's bravura
traveling shots, it's never clear how many fractured fragments of psyche make
up the title character (Cain is Carter's amoral, almost beatnik alter ego).
Accentuating the confusion, De Palma turns the film's second act into a
disorienting labyrinth of dream sequences within flashbacks within fantasies.
As Carter's cheating wife Jenny, Lolita Davidovich spends at least 10 minutes
of the film either waking up in the wrong man's bed or dying violently, over
and over.
Rather
than clarifying, De Palma's technique with Raising Cain effectively
obliterates the audience's bearings. Which gives the film's final sequence—on
the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento's killer reveal at the climax
of Tenebre—a nasty twist. De
Palma has frequently used dream sequences in his films as a way to demonstrate
transference: the bequeathing of erotic terror to Nancy Allen sleeping in Angie
Dickenson's bed in Dressed to Kill or the fear of isolation from peers
that Carrie sanguinely (in every way) teaches Amy Irving. But in Raising
Cain, there's no forum for this type of psychological exchange because
there isn't a rational control group. ("There was no body because there
was no murder," as Jennifer Salt would say.)
The
film is, from frame one, a tapestry of dreams; the first shot shows Carter and
Jenny's daughter Amy sleeping on the parental surveillance video (in fact, she
spends most of the movie either sleeping or waiting to sleep). It's not
difficult to accept much of the film as emerging from deep within her abused
psyche. Not only does the final (rationally impossible) shot suggest it, but so
does the film's creepiest grace note: the curly-haired little boy emerging from
a park bathroom to rasp "I know what you're going to do. It's a bad thing,
and I'm going to tell" to Cain, his voice sounding eerily like John
Lithgow on helium. I know if I were Amy and trying to make sense of why my
daddy wanted to put me in a cage, I might start by making one of his
personalities in my own age bracket. Ultimately, the reason the final shot is
so perversely effective is because of its absence of transference.
Instead, it reveals a psyche (or a bunch of them) hopelessly caught in a cycle
of insanity.
The
Key to De Palma's Raising Cain
Dmetri Kakmi from Senses of Cinema (2000)
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Raising Cain (1992) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 8, 2009
Reverse Shot
[Michael Koresky]
Raging
Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review
[2.5/4]
SF, Horror
and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib
DVD
Talk Review [Justin Felix]
Thriller Pack Quadruple Feature
Entertainment
Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [0/5]
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
CARLITO’S WAY
A fairly straightforward '30s-style
gangster tragedy about a man doomed to an early grave by his society and his
own code. Carlito (Pacino) wants out of the rackets, but to get there he has to
'play Bogart', running a discotheque, and even then he can't escape his friends
- lover Miller and lawyer Penn. Just as Carlito can't reconcile who he is and
where he came from, so Brian De
Palma can't quite craft an anonymous mainstream movie. The picture comes
alive in its set-pieces, most notably in the climax at Grand Central Station.
It runs long and is ultimately not much more than a showpiece, but Pacino looks
every inch a movie star, and De Palma provides a timely reminder of just how
impoverished the Hollywood lexicon has become since the glory days of the '70s.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Brian Welesko
What compelled Cahiers du Cinema to name Brian De Palma's CARLITO'S WAY among the best films of the 90s? At first—and for some maybe even second—appearances, this one is a head-scratcher. Al Pacino plays a just-released heroin dealer with a new appreciation for life, setting out to remake himself as a law-abiding citizen. Dreaming of running off to the tropics with his girlfriend, and despite his optimism, Carlito gets dragged down by the undertow of his former life. Rife with allusions to other gangster films, such as De Palma's own SCARFACE, CARLITO'S WAY hews closer to creative imitation. But where most gangsters opt for the shootout-cum-temper tantrum, Carlito's mid-life reemergence is a realization of his agency and an attempt to move beyond recriminations. Well shot and iconic in its own right, CARLITO'S WAY is worth viewing, but best film of its decade? Though ranking films is rarely edifying, the film's placement at the top might be in recognition of its ability to both capture and comment on the prevailing temperament of the 1990s. After years of material excess and rampant capitalism brought little more than an exacerbation of societal problems, the film's optimism that life is worth living despite such hardships—and that a modicum of inner peace can be found even in a world that is doomed from the beginning—is a message of hope, however thin and however problematic.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Lang) review
Al Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, an ex-con who decides to make his new way an honest one in this stylish action thriller from De Palma. But his determination is hampered by the pressure which his crooked lawyer friend (Sean Penn) puts on him, taking advantage of the fact that Carlito feels indebted to him for obtaining his release from prison. Carlito gets back together with his ex-girifriend, a beautiful dancer with whom he had split up because he thought that they would never see each other again, and they dream of getting away to paradise together However, Carlito's association with his lawyer puts his life and liberty in peril; for him, a different kind of joumey beckons.
The character of Carlito represent someone who is stuck between two ways: the criminal way of the street, which, represented by his drug-addict lawyer; Carlito now finds unattractive; and the honest way, represented by his girlfriend and by the dream which he shares with her of getting away. But it is being trapped in the middle that threatens to destroy Carlito - he now finds the dishonhest way repulsive, but his history has been to stick by it, and by those in it - and while he continues to do so, he cannot realise his aim of life on the straight and narow.
De Palma directs with flair and vigour, and he is helped a lot by good performances from the three main characters. Penn is particularly noteworthy as Kleinfeld, Carlito's dishonest Jewish lawyer. But as well as being an excellent action movie, Carlito's Way is at times an emotional one, especially at the ending (another shoot-out at a station, in fact). De Palma will have to make his next film a really exceptional one if he is to better this.
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
After too long in the wasteland, Brian De Palma has once again
found his footing. With Carlito's Way, De Palma has turned out a
masterful piece of entertainment anchored by an interesting story and fine
performances and hoisted by an intoxicating field of vision that nevertheless,
maintains a sharply focused perspective. In some ways the movie is reminiscent
of De Palma's last reteaming with Pacino in Scarface, but only in the
sense of their narrative settings in drug underworlds. Yet Carlito's Way,
though violent, has little of that baroque, drug-paranoid barrage of bulletry
that pocked Scarface. Carlito (Pacino), through whose eyes we witness
the whole movie, is a man who carries a gun; it's part of his work, a part of
who he is. But rather than say that Carlito is willing to use his gun, it's
perhaps more to the point to say that he is not unwilling to use it. Set in
Spanish Harlem in 1975, the story is derived from a couple of novels by Edwin
Torres, a New York State Supreme Court justice. Opening with the inexplicable subway
shooting of a character to whom we're yet to be introduced, the sequence is
filmed from this character's skewed point of view as seen from his gurney. That
character is Carlito who next we see as he's being sprung on a technicality
from a 30-year jail sentence after five years by his wily attorney and old
friend Kleinfeld (Penn). Formerly a major player in all sorts of underworld
economies, Carlito returns to his barrio a respected figure despite the fact
that he wants to go straight and open a car rental agency in the
Reverse Shot [Matt Zoller Seitz]
DVD Times Mike Sutton
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Carlito's Way (1993) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 28, 2009
A Revelation: Carlito's Way Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4.5/5] Ultimate Edition
Slant Magazine review Zach Campbell
The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]
Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
Reel.com dvd review [Ultimate Edition] [3/4] Ken Dubois
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Ultimate Edition] Colin Jacobson
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Ultimate Edition
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Ultimate Edition]
DVD Verdict (Brendan Babish) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd review Keith Lofthouse
Eye for Film (Gary Duncan) review [4.5/5]
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Ted Prigge retrospective [3.5/4]
Exclaim! dvd review [Ultimate Edition] Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver - HD DVD review [Gary Tooze]
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
Twenty minutes into this
big-budget update of the '70s spy series, half the cast has been wiped out, and
Cruise's Ethan Hunt has been 'disavowed' by his employers, the CIA. To clear
his name and avenge the death of his mentor Jim Phelps (Voight), Hunt assembles
a crew of rogue agents to break in to CIA headquarters, playing a precarious
double game with breathless self-assurance. 'Mission: Impenetrable': a
bewildering, ludicrous, but mostly fun, sometimes even smart postscript to a
genre that went out of fashion with the Cold War. There's more and less here
than meets the eye. More, because De Palma, the cinematographer and the
screenwriters have concocted an elaborate series of conceits and deceits, masks
and trompe l'oeils, which slyly undermine the paranoid imperatives of the
original series - and, indeed, the Cold War itself. Less, because De Palma is
the most hermetic of American film-makers; combine that with the pressure to
deliver a mainstream blockbuster and you've got a recipe for superficiality.
Despite the snags, De Palma remains a virtuoso puppet-master, pulling the
strings taut in a nail-biting robbery sequence, switching from micro to macro
with Hitchcockian panache, and finally letting rip with a hell-for-leather
climax.
Mike D'Angelo
review
There are two disclaimers that
absolutely must accompany my favorable opinion of this ridiculous movie. The
first is that I have never seen even as little as five seconds of the TV series
on which it's (apparently rather loosely) based. There's been no small amount
of criticism regarding the ways in which the movie negates or ignores the
fundamental tenets of the show, and these complaints may well be valid, but I
wouldn't know. Never saw it. The second disclaimer: I like caper movies. If you
make a film in which a group of people work as a team to infiltrate some
impregnable fortress and retrieve some vital document, I'm along for the ride;
you'll have to work overtime to make a film of this sort that's so awful that I
won't enjoy it. I liked Sneakers, okay? Hell, I liked The Manhattan Project,
and there wasn't even a team -- just a single geek! Mission: Impossible, to be
honest, is pretty darn stupid. The
double-crossing-back-stabbing-second-guessing plot is convoluted and largely uninteresting,
and De Palma and/or various writers don't help matters by inexplicably
revealing one of its twists far too early. Tom Cruise, who does fine work when
he's cast opposite a "heavyweight" like Paul Newman or Dustin
Hoffman, is in Superstar Mode here, and provides his usual serviceable but
bland performance (he's still better than Keanu Reeves in Speed). Emmanuelle
Beart, in her first English-speaking role, is utterly wasted. On the other
hand, Cruise and Beart are surrounded by a host of terrific character actors
having tremendous fun: Kristin Scott Thomas, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, the always
interesting Henry Czerny, and especially Vanessa Redgrave, who alone seems to
fully understand what kind of dopey movie she's in. The narrative is ultimately
unsatisfying, but it does manage to keep you awake while it's unfolding (unlike
that of another summer blockbuster I could name), and the set pieces, when they
arrive, are truly spectacular; the Langley break-in may have been borrowed
wholesale from a couple of Dassin films, but it's still a bravura piece of
filmmaking, and precisely what De Palma does best. The more I think about the
movie's flaws, the more I'm tempted to downgrade my rating, but the fact is
that I enjoyed it while it was in front of me, which is all that I ask. That
I'll have completely forgotten it by next week doesn't matter.
Deep Focus
(Bryant Frazer) review [B+]
The mere title sequence of Mission: Impossible, this summer's second big blockbuster, is more thrilling than all of Twister. The titles were designed by Kyle Cooper of R/Greenberg Associates (he created the knockout opener for David Fincher's Se7en), and they're made up of ridiculously quick cuts, flashing lights, big noise and sharp graphics. In about 30 seconds, they capture the very ephemeral essence of a weekly television program as well as the in-your-face aesthetic of Action '96, and suggest the concept of continuing franchise even more succinctly than the film's final scene.
They announce a picture that knows enough about style that it's absorbing to watch even when nothing much is going on. Framed in director Brian De Palma's stubbornly widescreen viewfinder (it's like nobody ever told him about the "TV-safe" area), each shot is an almost abstract delight. Tom Cruise looks great, whether he's peering over the screen of his laptop, or doing the James Bond thing on the top of a hurtling, cgi-rendered train. The settings, which range from old-world ornate to a cold high-tech style that recalls Kubrick, are exquisitely rendered. And while the movie never really revs up the headlong rush that I was hoping for, it's a pretty good nailbiter, with a handful of clever set pieces culminating in a nicely realized special effects showcase that knows when to quit -- a rarity in this age of double and triple "surprise" endings.
Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, a member of the elite "IMF" team led by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) to infiltrate delicate situations and extract important information. At the beginning of the movie, one mission goes terribly awry when the force is ambushed and everyone but Ethan is apparently killed. The target of this ambush is a computer disc containing a list of IMF agents worldwide. When Ethan hooks up with a senior agent in Prague, he learns that since he is the only survivor of the raid, he's suspected of being the "mole" working inside the organization, trying to get at the data. Ethan figures out immediately that the only way to clear his name is to escape his superiors and deliver the real bad guy ... mission? Impossible.
And that's why this movie is so much fun. The storyline is stubbornly implausible, but it's not dumb -- in fact, I can't recall a stops-out action picture so precisely calculated, performed, and timed since Andrew Davis's The Fugitive. (On second thought, Luc Besson's The Professional is pretty damned good.) The three acts are defined by their attendant action sequences. In the first, we see Ethan's friends gunned down and blown up one by one. In the second, we watch spellbound as Ethan and new pals Luther (Ving Rhames, Marcellus from Pulp Fiction) and Krieger (Jean Reno, from The Professional/Leon) infiltrate CIA headquarters in Virginia to hack the main computer system (yes, it's utterly ridiculous -- and totally cool). And at the end of the third, loose ends culminate in the aforementioned train sequence, which is eye-popping and almost convincing. (Is it my imagination, or is Tom Cruise completely computer generated in one of these shots?) The major bummer is that if you've seen the trailers, you've already seen too much of the climax for it to be as much of a kick as it should be.
Cruise himself certainly has screen presence, and his sculpted good looks are complementary to the film's vacuum-packed visuals. As Claire, Phelps' wife and Cruise's ostensible love interest -- and the only other member of Ethan's ill-fated mission who manages to survive -- Emmanuelle Beart (Manon of the Spring, Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud) is sleek and gorgeous, even though her presence is barely felt (DePalma told USA Today that what must have been an important opening scene exploring the relationship between Claire, Ethan, and Phelps was cut after test screenings). Reno and Rhames are more than welcome here, although they're not really full-blown characters -- rather, they're exploited as cinematic shorthand, spirits from other movies. And most delightful is Vanessa Redgrave, playing the cultured villain, a charmer among charmers who nevertheless falls under Ethan's spell. (Unfortunately, Cruise can be most irritating when he's trying hard to be charming, and in his scenes with Redgrave, his exaggerated mannerisms made me want to yell "Cut!")
The director loads the film with his own imagery, which is characteristically derivative but distinctive in a post-Hitchcock way. As DePalma films go, this one is relatively satisfying, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it lacks the bizarre circumstances that distinguish much of his work. There's a great scene about two-thirds of the way through, where we're invited inside Ethan's head as he works out the puzzle facing him, even as the fellow he's talking to spins an elaborate lie. It's not a flashback, and it's not "reality." Disorienting stuff for mass consumption, maybe, but audiences should be smart enough to keep up, or at least to wait until everything becomes clear. Does it all make sense? Well, not quite. For instance, in the showdown between Ethan and the real villain, you have to wonder why the baddie, who's pointing a gun right at Tom's lovely chest, doesn't just shoot him dead to get the chief obstacle out of the way. But don't fret over it, or the ludicrous scenes involving computer hardware, or even Cruise's picture-perfect disguises, which apparently involve some magical substance not of this earth. Like the ad man says, "expect the impossible." Indeed.
It's perhaps disconcerting that the productions Hollywood lavishes the most attention on, that it's most proud of, are the ones that are, like this one, pretty much devoid of realistic human feeling and sensitivity. But for me at least, it's heartening when a movie recognizes itself. Mission: Impossible has a heaping helping of well crafted action, a twisting, involving storyline, strong enough performances, and few pretensions. The most pressing question facing Ethan Hunt is who's going to try to kill him next -- there's no time for him to ruminate on the meaning of it all, or to bed down with his co-star. And that seems to suit him, and this movie, just fine.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Mission: Impossible (1996) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 4, 2002
Slant
Magazine review
Zach Campbell
Salon
(Charles Taylor) review The
Filmmaker Who Came in from the Cold
Philadelphia
City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
Nitrate Online
(Carrie Gorringe) review
Chicago
Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review also reviewing two other films
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Movie Reviews UK review [3/5] Damian Cannon
Mission Impossible
(2-Disc Special Collector's Edition)
Eamonn McCusker from DVD Times
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3/5] Special
Collector’s Edition
Reel.com dvd review [Special
Collector's Edition] [2/4]
Jerry Renshaw
DVD
MovieGuide dvd review [Special
Collector's Edition] Colin
Jacobson
DVD
Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review Special Edition
DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd
review [3/5] [Special Collector's Edition]
DVD Verdict
(Joel Pearce) dvd review [Special Collector's Edition]
Exclaim! dvd review Thomas Quinlan, Special Collector’s Edition
DVD
Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review
[3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd
review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Ultimate Collection] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Ultimate Collection] [HD DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Verdict (David Ryan) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review also reviewing
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II
Decent
Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review
[C+] with links
to MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II and III
The Onion A.V. Club also reviewing CASUALTIES OF WAR
Entertainment
Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman
Tucson Weekly (Stacey Richter) review
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [2.5/5]
Washington Post review links to Hal Hinson and Desson Howe
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
SNAKE EYES
De Palma's coldly executed
techno-thriller opens with a signature sequence: a continuous Steadicam shot
starts outside an Atlantic City sports arena, then snakes its way along
corridors, up stairs and down an escalator, to reveal the packed crowd awaiting
the start of a heavyweight boxing match. We're following flamboyant Rick
Santoro (Cage), a corrupt cop who revels in the fact that he sees every angle.
Inside, his old pal, Navy commander Kevin Dunne
(Sinise), is keeping an eye on Secretary of Defence Kirkland, who has a
ringside seat courtesy of arena owner and munitions tycoon Gilbert Powell
(Heard). Minutes later, the odds-on favourite hits the canvas, a shot rings
out, and Kirkland is fatally wounded. Santoro immediately seals the crowd
inside the arena and, using TV and surveillance camera playback, scans the
screens for clues as to the killer's identity. As Santoro interviews key
witnesses, the film turns into Rashomon with action replays, as we see
flashbacks from multiple points of view. The film echoes the technical wizardry
and complex plotting of De Palma's best film, Blow Out. Edgy suspense
and powerful kinetic energy are generated by the intriguing revelations and
razor-sharp editing, while the truth behind its convoluted conspiracy has a
surprisingly serious political and emotional undertow.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
The first 20 minutes of Brian De Palma's new movie Snake Eyes are
among the most imaginative and energetic minutes of film I've seen in a while.
Nicolas Cage plays Rick Santoro, a dirty cop in
Of course the Secretary is shot during the fight's climax. A sexy woman in a white suit and blonde wig is also shot at but gets away. Cage and Sinise order the entire fight arena sealed off. "We've got 14,000 witnesses," Cage says. From there, Cage and Sinise try to piece together what happened through an elaborate series of flashbacks -- only someone's not telling the truth. Cage finally catches up with the sexy blonde, now a brunette (Carla Gugino), who had been trying to inform the Secretary of a military cover-up. Her story is told in a split-screen flashback, comparing it side-by-side with Cage's story.
I think I'll stop there and not ruin any of the film's surprises or discoveries. I will say that the films' ending (perhaps the last 10 or 15 minutes) seems sloppy and patchwork, especially for two experts. Brian De Palma and his screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote Carlito's Way and Mission: Impossible for De Palma) seem to have run out of either time or interest in their story, and after 80 minutes of brilliant, crackling filmmaking, the ending drops over a cliff. I'm still recommending the movie on a mathematical ratio. It's worth your price of admission to see the 80 good minutes.
It's also worth it to see Nicolas Cage. Cage continues to develop as an actor, and Snake Eyes is among his greatest treats. He dances and bristles with energy. He's like a delirious whirlwind. As the story breaks open, and Cage is forced to reckon with forces he hadn't foreseen, he becomes slowly deflated, and the fireworks are replaced by confusion and hurt. It's a mighty performance. Gary Sinise, another great actor, keeps a steely reserve, and marches around grimly like Robert Patrick's character in Terminator 2, but within the context of Snake Eyes, it works.
Brian De Palma is an extraordinarily primary filmmaker. After more than 20 films, he is still fascinated with and excited by the medium itself, and the ways with which you can move it and cut it. He is the most obvious of voyeurs. He doesn't get very deep into characters very often, but he loves to watch them in their private moments. He continues to invent new styles while paying less attention to his stories.
De Palma has been strongly defended by veteran New Yorker critic Pauline
Kael, while other critics have both demolished his work and admitted to having
guilty pleasures among his films. He is at his best with dark suspense, horror,
and crime where demons are flying about as in Sisters (1973), Carrie
(1976), Obsession (1976), The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill
(1980), Blow Out (1981), and Scarface (1983). Somewhere along the
line
That said, Snake Eyes falls somewhere in the middle of De Palma's work, but it's an incredible body of work. Spotty, maybe, but full of personal demons and exorcisms. May De Palma's soul never be clean enough to stop him from making movies.
Slant Magazine review Paul Schrodt
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [C+]
Snake Eyes | Reverse Shot Justin Stewart
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Rob Nelson
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review …No Dice
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) review
Chicago NewCityNet (Ray Pride) review
New York Magazine (David Denby) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review
eFilmCritic.com (Paul Bryant) review [1/5]
CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]
Edward Johnson-Ott review [2.5/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [D] Owen Gleiberman
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [3.5/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
MISSION
USA
2020: a manned mission to Mars has run
into unexplained trouble on the red planet and a rescue team has the risky task
of going in after them. With three of his colleagues dead and no radio contact,
Cheadle draws the short straw. He has to hole up on the Martian surface, grow a
beard and wait. The cavalry are coming, however, and they're the best that
NASA's got, including ace helmsman Sinise and wise commander Robbins. All they
have to do is align themselves to the correct orbit, but a dangerous fuel leak
may be about to jeopardise their plans. De Palma's best stuff is in the middle
of the movie, where he gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of the precarious
rescue attempt and constructs a couple of flawless suspense sequences. The
deliberate approach is most refreshing, but nothing else in the movie matches
up to it - not the draggy set-up and certainly not the dismally unimaginative
final half-hour, when we uncover the age old secrets of Mars. Given the glaring
mismatch between the able performers, comic strip dialogue and monumental
Morricone score, the whole thing reeks of a perversity unusual among today's
machine tooled blockbusters, but that's hardly an unqualified recommendation.
Missions Impossible - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 - Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice
Mission to Mars is a movie to warm John McCain's
heart—a rescue saga full of a touchy-feely esprit that's predicated on equal
parts Buck Rogers bravado and backyard barbecue, the whole burnt burger
drenched in Ennio Morricone's elegiac western-style score. Despite one
unmistakable De Palma gag—a visual joke evoking the Challenger
explosion—the project is scarcely more personal than
Suavely shot by De Palma's frequent collaborator Stephen H. Burum, Mission to Mars has its sensuous aspect. The weightless camera moves under, over, sideways, down. Everything is aestheticized. (Even the—here extremely—red planet might be the site of Constantin Brancusi's greatest project.) De Palma almost never cuts when he can use a slow dolly to close-up. The performances are less limber. Don Cheadle, Tim Robbins, and, most anxiously, Gary Sinise rush around pretending to be soldiers—although no one is as awful as Armin Mueller-Stahl as their blustering CO.
Despite an ending that out-Spielbergs the master, Mission to Mars mainly coarsens 2001 in its mix of cosmic consciousness and "naturalistic" product placement (Dr. Pepper bloblets and multicolored M&M's floating around the cockpit). As in the Kubrick trip, the middle voyage is best. Halfway through, De Palma literally explodes his narrative to orchestrate a superb deep-space float-opera replete with runaway modules, high-tech lassos, dramatic self-sacrifice, and, in the most surprising maneuver, a montage-driven modicum of actual suspense.
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have been having a
right go at Mission To Mars - judging from the reviews you'd think it
was some kind of cinematic disaster on the scale of, say, The Avengers
or any of those films where Jude Law plays Jude and Ray Winstone plays Ray. But
I went along with an open mind. The trailers I'd seen were pretty promising,
and while Brian De Palma's last film, Snake Eyes, was a major disappointment,
it nevertheless proved that, although he'll never regain the heights of Carrie
and Blow Out, he's still one of the most technically audacious
film-makers in Hollywood, with a keen (if bitter) sense of humour and a
terrific visual skill.
And I must admit I quite enjoyed Mission To Mars. It's nothing special -
the only Mars film that's much out of the ordinary is probably Total Recall -
but to brand it "one of the all-time bad movies" (Variety) is
way off the mark, and suggests that the reviewer in question doesn't visit his
local multiplex very often. Yes, the film does borrow many ideas and images
from previous science-fiction epics, but it does so in an original and
interesting way. For example, De Palma's clearly referring to 2001
during a sequence which shows the characters walking round the walls of their
spacecraft, but he puts his own stamp on the scene by having the camera
itself also floating, weightless, around the various cabins. He's famous
for his use of long, technically demanding tracking shots - he's showing off
his mastery of the latest technologies, but here it's also entirely appropriate
to the material.
The film is full of such impressive visual flourishes. I especially liked the
sequence in which the astronauts walk through a 3-D holograph showing the
history of Mars and Earth and the evolution of Earth's creatures. The elaborate
effects work stands in nice contrast to the very straightforward, refreshingly
uncluttered story: in the year 2020, a NASA expedition - featuring Don Cheadle
- lands on Mars but is attacked by a mysterious force - an enormous, malevolent
tornado which is controlled by unseen powers. A second expedition - featuring
Sinise and Robbins - sets out to find out what happened and bring back any
survivors. After various mishaps, the astronauts discover much more than they
bargained for - nothing less than the secrets of the origin of life on Earth.
In many ways, this is a typical American space movie, full of dopey
philosophical speculations, gung-ho jargon, unbelievable scrapes and
last-minute rescues. To put it mildly, it isn't much of a stretch of the actors
involved - Cheadle, in particular, is sadly wasted, and you'd never guess that
he's one of the half-dozen most talented performers in Hollywood at the moment
(as a video double bill of Boogie Nights and Out Of Sight should
easily prove). But that isn't really the point. This kind of thing stands or
falls on its visuals and its set-pieces, and on not dragging too badly during
the down-time. On those scores Mission To Mars is a very solid entrant
in the genre, and De Palma is still capable of bringing more talent flair to
the project than most directors could even dream of. So don't believe the
critics - apart from me, of course.
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
Is Mission to Mars an auteurist litmus test
for the Y2K generation in the same sense that Baby Face Nelson or The Girl Can't Help It were in
the theory's salad days? Or is Mission To Mars the ultimate in hackery?
Is De Palma etched into every CGI-loaded frame? Or can't his personality
overcome a budgetary tidal wave in the shape and magnitude of $80 million?
While it's tempting to shrug such questions off with a "go fiddle with
your Hatari and jerk your Steel Helmet somewhere else, there's
formalism to be seduced here" (yes, even in this context of a critical
appraisal of a singular talent), the impulse would rob an already gravelly
underrated movie of its context. It would suck the air out of Mission to
Mars like space robs Tim Robbins of his every last droplet of essential
moisture. Leave a movie like Mission to Mars to fester among the slaves
to the genre, and you'll wind up with a bloated and laughably irrelevant Web
page of technical gaffes over on IMDB. So
while an auteurist reading of Mission to Mars might invite self-involved
chatter over whether the movie or the viewer is supplying the meaning, at least
you won't find yourself sharing an oxygen mask with a caste of Trekkie
outcasts. And Trekkies can't dance in outer space.
Sure,
De Palma may have been able to direct movies with an AARP card in his back
pocket since 1992's Raising Cain, but without Mission
to Mars and Sinise's haunted memories of Kim Delaney, De Palma could've
never found it within himself to make Femme Fatale, his answer to
that immortal one-two "old man cinema" punch of 1964: Hitchcock's Marnie and Dreyer's Gertrud. While the obvious
connection between these three films won't necessarily win over feminists for
whom auteurism is another way of saying "no girls allowed," all three
mark a decisive point of psychological capitulation on the part of otherwise
resolute personalities.
Mission to Mars'
redemptive coda opened the door for the subsequent film's continuing figurative
and literal sanguinity. There are few sights more disturbingly beautiful in the
De Palma canon than Jerry O'Connell's miniature globes of blood dancing in the
air as they drift toward a hole in the Mars-bound shuttle's structure. At once
referencing bodily danger and assisting the crew and allowing them to repair a
potentially greater danger, the fluidity of the film—from its blood to its
serpentine cinematography—testifies to its elegance. Not to say there's not a
little hardening in De Palma's heart even at this stage. It's more a reflection
of our culture's reactionary values than of De Palma's radicalism that this
film airs on the Disney-owned ABC television network without its poetically
direct 3D diorama of Earth's evolution, suggesting the redolence of a
corporation in hysterical self-censorship mode. But even De Palma turns the
majority of the film's saintly NASA heroes away at film's end, leaving them to
turn around and return to a planet of genetic inferiority. A planet where
gravity makes it awfully difficult to dance through air.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Mission to Mars (2000) Philip Strick, May 2000
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Mission to Mars (2000) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections of TV/Film, September 18, 2009
Mission to Mars Bernardo Rondeau from Reverse Shot
Salon (Charles Taylor) dvd
review September 29, 2000
"Mission to Mars" In space, no one can hear you jeer, by Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, March 10, 2000
A nerd's rhapsody In Defense of “Mission to Mars,” by Ray Sawhill from Salon, March 16, 2000
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
PopMatters (Tobias Peterson) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Scott Von Doviak
Urban
Cinefile MISSION TO MARS (Australia) review, Louise Keller, Andrew
L. Urban, and Shannon J. Harvey, including a review of the Urban
Cinefile MISSION TO MARS: SOUNDTRACK
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Reviews by John (John Haywood) review [3.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]
Reel.com review [3/4] Mary Kalin-Casey
DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review
Reel.com review [3/4] Ray Greene
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Nitrate Online (Joe Barlow) review the hate corner begins around here
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) review
[1.5/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [1/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [2/5]
Images (Elizabeth Abele) review
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[1.5/4]
Memphis Flyer (Mark Jordan) review
SPLICEDwire
(Rob Blackwelder) review [2/4]
Movie
ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
Movie Reviews UK review [1/5] Michael S. Goldberger
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [1/5]
Goatdog's
Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review
[1.5/5]
Flipside
Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review
[D+]
The UK Critic
(Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [0.5/4]
That Cow (Andrew Bradford) review [0/10]
AboutFilm.com
(Carlo Cavagna) review [F]
Entertainment
Weekly review [C-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety.com
[Todd McCarthy]
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rich Groen
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1/5]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
FEMME FATALE B+ 92
A cinéphile's cinéaste, Brian De
Palma is a genre unto himself these days, and this elegantly dreamy Femme
Fatale (unreleased theatrically in the UK) is as rich and strange as
anything he's made for a while. It includes a twist which, as the
writer/director admits, will alienate half the audience. But go with the flow.
Beginning with an exquisitely designed diamond theft set against an
authentically recreated red carpet premiere at the Cannes film festival, the
film introduces Marnie to Rear Window, Obsession to Dressed
to Kill. The result is outrageous, provocative, fun. I'm not convinced
she's the answer to De Palma's feminist critics, but tall willowy Rebecca
Romijn-Stamos (X-Men) makes a poised, confident anti-heroine, and
the visuals are often breathtaking.
VideoVista review Ian Shutter
Ever the Hitchcockian
stylist, De Palma's skilfully constructed European thriller of deception,
revenge and mistaken identity evokes the Master's unique brand of mystery
narrative and innovative movie exposition. With chillingly suspenseful moments
of alluring sexuality and simmering violence, obsessive attention to intriguing
details, and expert handling of visual design and editorial techniques, here's
another endlessly fascinating piece of cinematic wizardry that's boiling over
with impressive trickery, audacious revelations, and a vivid sense of sheer
exhilaration worthy of Dario Argento's best work.
Femme Fatale
stars Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as bad girl Laure, and kicks off with a
sophisticated heist sequence at the Cannes film festival, where the plan by a
gang of diamond thieves to steal body jewellery from a supermodel known only as
Veronica (Rie Rasmussen), goes horribly wrong and the shooting starts. Black
Tie (Eriq Ebouaney) gets wounded and goes to prison, while sexy blonde Laure
assumes the identity of suicidal runaway Lily and flees to the USA.
Seven years on, luckless
photojournalist and wannabe collagist Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) is hired
for the paparazzi mission to get the first ever pictures of the reclusive wife
of Bruce Watts (Peter Coyote) - the American ambassador to France, a job at
which he succeeds despite interference from security agent, Shiff (Gregg
Henry). Eventually, however, Bardo regrets his actions and tries to make
amends, only to become embroiled in a fake kidnapping scheme to extort ransom
from the moneyed Watts...
De Palma's cinematic technique, such as it is, remains faultless. From startling camera angles to a variety of pastel and noir colour schemes, it's always arresting. Where Femme Fatale goes off the rails is with the scarcely adequate performance of Romijn-Stamos in dual roles. Far too much of this sensational and exploitative melodrama relies on the leading lady's acting talents (which, it must be said, are as scanty as her night scene's costumes), and no matter how often Laure/Lily tells Bardo (and, by implication, the audience) that's she's thoroughly wicked, there's just no hope of convincing anyone familiar with numerous other examples of the archetypal film noir female of the title that Rebecca fits the bill. Alongside the bold Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct or ultra bitchy Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, poor Romijn-Stamos is unfortunately lacking in both spirit and polish.
Although she looks
absolutely stunning and does make a great supporting player as blue-skinned
Mystique in the X-Men
films, Romijn-Stamos simply hasn't got the expressive depth or the ballsy
attitude to carry a movie such as this.
Happily, the director's
thematic and contextual references to his own back catalogue - Mission:
Impossible (1996), Body Double (1984), and especially Blow Out
(1981), itself inspired by Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) - are not
particularly intrusive or too self-indulgent, instead seeming less a
straightforward repetition of earlier works and more like a tolerable auteur
signature. As with De Palma's most successful productions, Femme Fatale
is more concerned with provocation and emotional resonance than with logic or
plausible story development - hence the premonitory 'dream' sequence taking up
so much of this film's running time.
Slant
Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Brian De Palma's formal obsession with
allusions to seeing and sightlessness have forever brought to mind the works of
Dario Argento, perhaps the only
other living director who can create and sustain the kind of delirious artifice
on fierce display in Femme Fatale. While its Cannes Film Festival
sequence must count as one of the most impressive set pieces ever mounted by a
director, it is the film's opening long shot that deserves special mention.
Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) watches Double Indemnity on French
television, studying Barbara Stanwyck and rewriting herself as a modern femme
fatale. She and a group of thugs break into the Cannes Palais, hoping to swipe
a fortune in diamonds from Regis Wargnier's whorish girlfriend Veronica (Rie
Rasmussen). Wargnier's hideous East-West plays to the crowd while Laure
and Veronica make out in the femmes bathroom.
Though
De Palma's latest cinematic thesis may pale in comparison to both his own Body
Double and Argento's Tenebre (the giallo director's
audacious defense of auteur theory and possibly the best film De Palma never made),
the remarkable use of water imagery throughout Femme Fatale welcomes a
Jungian analysis and beckons comparisons to Argento's Trauma. Seven years after
betraying her cohorts in crime, Laure returns to
Laure
packs a gun and a one-liner or two, challenging the way men perceive women and
using that perception to consume and spit out her men. De Palma remarkably
superimposes Romijn-Stamos's face over that of the film's many women (Stanwyck
during the film's opening shot and Mellais's Ophelia when Laure chit chats with
Nicolas over cold espresso), at once reinforcing the nature of the character's
split self and the overall dreamlike momentum of the narrative. There's an
overwhelming sense here that the past is looking forward into the present and
any given move can forever change the way of things. De Palma's formal fixation
with multiple dualities is so precise and pervasive that it can be read into
any given aspect of this elaborate puzzle of a film: Banderas and the silent
Frenchman who "watch" Romijn-Stamos as she seduces them with the
power of her sex; the dash that separates East from West in the title of
Wagnier's water-logged film; and a larger more personal conflict between the
U.S. and France.
De
Palma has made remarkable use of split-screen before (perhaps most prominently
in his masterpiece Sisters) though his use of the technique in Femme
Fatale deserves special mention because of its riveting self-reflexivity.
Nicolas came to
Femme Fatale | Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton
Femme Fatale | Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski
Femme Fatale Noel Vera from Noel Movie Reviews, February 9, 2003
Scanners opening shots from FEMME FATALE by Jim Emerson
Slate (David Edelstein) review
CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [5/5]
Kamera.co.uk review Neil Jackson
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A-]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
Movie-Vault.com (Scott S.) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review also seen here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [4/5]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
A Film Odyssey: <i>Femme Fatale</i> (2002) Rob Humanick
DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review
Reel.com review [2.5/4] Rod Armstrong
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [2/5]
filmcritic.com (Aaron Lazenby) review [1.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [2/5]
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review with a few comments tucked away at the bottom of Page 2
Exclaim! dvd review James Keast
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2/4]
Entertainment Weekly review [F] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
The Globe and Mail review [2/4] Liam Lacey
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
De Palma's exquisite madness sparkles in 'Fatale' - seattlepi.com Sean Axmaker from The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Definitive Gaze - Film+TV - LA Weeklypage 1 - LA Weekly Amy Taubin from LA Weekly, November 7, 2002
Get To Know Your Rabbit John Powers from LA Weekly, November 14, 2002
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Los Angeles Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Filmmaker Magazine: Blog Reverse Shot Calls Out Dargis, May 20, 2005
THE BLACK DAHLIA B 88
Nothing stays buried forever. Nothing.
Another de Palma film that is hyper-saturated in
artificiality and style, depicting
Known as Fire and Ice, Hartnett is the reserved, strong silent type, perhaps too nice a guy and too soft-spoken in his narration, while Eckhart wildly leads the action, ambitiously diving headfirst into the headline grabbing Black Dahlia police crime, becoming obsessed, behind the scenes, by the lure of this enthralling young woman in black, the apparent victim of a sex crime. Eckhart starts taking benzedrine to sustain his manic drive, but seems to be losing a part of himself in the process. Years ago he made his career by putting away a bad guy, Bobby DeWitt (Richard Brake), stealing his girl (Johansson), now living with her but he may not be sleeping with her, which leaves an opening for his partner, so the three become fast friends. Hartnett is immediately smitten with Johansson, they are real-life lovers off the screen, but here their passion remains on ice. Early in the film, from a distance in that wild crane shot, we see the title character’s dead body lying in a ditch, a woman sceaming for help, but the crane then swoops away to other action, taking us completely away from the Black Dahlia story for the next hour of the film, only to return again in a flurry at the end which makes everything that came before, that seemingly had nothing to do with the story, somehow complicit in her murder. Hartnett on his own begins tracking down potential witnesses, where we get a picture of a developing story within a story, opening with a brilliant set piece in the huge expanse of a lesbian bar where K.D. Lang, dressed as a man, is singing while scantily clad women gyrate in a suggestively provocative dance. With no help from the women, about to give up on his leads, in walks Hilary Swank, dressed in black, staring at him with “that look.”
Following Swank’s strong, overly physical role as a female boxer in MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2004), here she is horribly miscast as Madeleine Linscott, a sex kitten who attempts to exhibit a dark feminine allure, who couldn’t be more out of her element as a tantalizingly demure femme fatale, yet flaws and all, the intrigue is to see how playing against one’s own nature will unfold. And she’s not alone, much of the acting resembles the Gloria Swanson school of dramatic arts, yet it’s set in such a murky atmosphere of over-stylization that it never stops being a joy to watch. It’s hard to fault de Palma for the obvious relish he has in filmmaking. Swank is a spoiled, pampered ultra-rich socialite, very similar to the family dysfunction in THE BIG SLEEP, but her family is so outrageous that it veers towards The Adams Family, perhaps more at home in the oddly macabre ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944). Dinner with the Linscotts is a memorable experience, as her mother Ramona (Fiona Shaw), actually has spells where she exhibits a feeling of light-headed faintness, like she’s about to swoon at any moment, mostly generated by her consumption of alcohol, but she lives her life in this state of neverending delirium, or is it inebriation, prone to a barrage of inexplicable verbal assaults directed towards anyone that suits her, usually her husband. John Kavanagh plays Emmett, her 1930’s screwball comedy BRINGING UP BABY-style father, the kind of guy who would get satisfaction telling the same story he’s told dozens of times, as if it was the first time, as his life has been diminished to a neverending monologue of listening to himself in a series of one-sided conversations. Madeleine has a flirtatious younger sister Martha (Rachel Miner), and thrown into this mix, Hartnett, is like a fish out of water. He hasn’t got a chance.
Into this swamp of murky delights, throw into the spotlight the showcasing of an altogether inhibited and tongue-tied Johansson, whose part calls for a wildly provocative, uninhibited sexual movie siren, like a stay at home Jean Harlow, but instead she sleepwalks through the part, which again, adds a kind of strange, out of place allure; throw in a largely incomprehensible story that delves ever deeper into sexual exploitation and depravity, all while the director is fully aware that he’s saturating the screen with a flood of sexually exploitive imagery, most of which are seemingly irrelevant side plots; throw in a dramatic, scene-stealing moment that appears to be a cross between V FOR VENDETTA (2005) and Zorro; and throw in a grainy, black and white stag film made at the scene of the crime, where what initially looks like harmless, soft core porn by an aspiring actress eventually leads to the brutal offscreen murder of one of its participants, Betty Short, the Black Dahlia played here by Mia Kirshner, which features the oddly disorienting technique of the actress staring straight into the lens of the camera, used again with Swank, reminiscent of the experimental camera style of the 1947 film LADY IN THE LAKE.
This film is a potpourri of oddly mismatched characters and
storylines that feel like we keep stumbling into mysterious detours that
continue leading us astray, luring us into a netherworld that exists only in
the imagination of the author, expressed through incomprehensible, momentary
fragments in time, which when simultaneously mixed together, feel like an
interesting experiment gone wrong, especially when de Palma, unlike THE BIG SLEEP,
inexplicably reveals the secrets to all the mysteries that had been building up
throughout the film. Had they remained
under the surface, the film might have become one of those intoxicating
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Nathan Rabin
The qualities that make Josh Hartnett such a washout as a
romantic lead—his emotional opacity, his inexpressive, coal-black eyes—make him
a natural for the world of film noir, where stoic men cut themselves off from
their emotions to avoid being swallowed whole by the darkness surrounding them.
In Brian De Palma's masterful adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia,
Hartnett embodies two hardboiled types: the cop who gets too close to the case,
and the boxer who must take a dive. Hartnett and co-star Scarlett
Johansson—that most fatale of current filmic femmes—are naturals for this kind
of noir-hued material, but the pairing of Ellroy and De Palma proves a marriage
made in hardboiled heaven.
In many ways, Dahlia is De Palma's History Of Violence—a
virtuoso thriller by a wildly idiosyncratic filmmaker working at his most
restrained and commercial. But it nevertheless touches on many of De Palma's
pet obsessions, from kinky sex to voyeurism to classic film. In a surprisingly
commanding lead performance, Hartnett plays a boxer-turned-cop partnered with
fellow boxer-turned-cop Aaron Eckhart. After a struggling actress (Mia
Kirshner) is found murdered and gruesomely disemboweled, the two L.A. golden
boys set out to solve her murder, in an epic quest that brings Hartnett into
the warped circle of Hilary Swank, a kinky rich girl with an insatiable
appetite for sex and low life.
Though Dahlia features De Palma in restrained-classicist
mode, he can't entirely resist the urge to show off, most notably in a morbidly
funny sequence shot entirely from Hartnett's perspective as he's introduced to
Swank's nouveau-riche horror-show family. Elsewhere, De Palma's obsession with
voyeurism and the power and danger of watching and being watched—so endemic to
film as a medium, and De Palma's work in particular—finds its most haunting
expression in a series of heartbreaking scenes where an unseen director
interviews Kirshner during a vaguely sinister audition. She glories in the
subversive power of exhibitionism while betraying the innate vulnerability of
every struggling actress angling for a big break that'll never arrive. Where
Swank is empowered by her raging sexuality, Kirshner is destroyed by it, just
another casualty of a city and an industry that chews up pretty girls and spits
them out whole.
Slant
Magazine review
Keith Uhlich
Brian De Palma eschews the Classics Illustrated
mannerisms of L.A. Confidential in his adaptation of James Ellroy's
novel The Black Dahlia, a fictionalized take on the still-unsolved
murder of aspiring starlet Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner). An ostensible
work-for-hire, the film is nevertheless distinguished by De Palma's expert
navigation of its frighteningly finite space. This is a fever dream vision of
the City of Angels, the shared nightmare of its principal players whose every
move, we realize in retrospect, is helplessly preordained. Dante Ferretti's
elaborate sets, built almost entirely on Bulgarian soundstages, are quite
intentionally hollow (one wrong turn by prop or character and the scenery would
no doubt cave in on itself) and it is out of this—as opposed to more
standardized, gut-punch narrative twists and turns—that the film's primarily
psychological tensions arise.
Though its main actions take place in 1947, the world of Black Dahlia is
essentially timeless. De Palma tips his hand via the film's key exchange
between warrants cop Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and the
brunette Dahlia doppelgänger Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank). Standing before
a portrait of Gwynplaine, the deformed protagonist of Victor Hugo's novel The
Man Who Laughs, Bleichert says, "I don't get modern art." To
which Madeleine responds, "I doubt modern art gets you either." De
Palma is as much a historian as a filmmaker, so his intense focus on and
present-tense reading of the painting (an incidental plot point in Ellroy's
book) is no accident. This is a film that understands its influences, tracing a
line from Hugo's Romanticism (and likewise incorporating his cutting critique
of aristocracy) to German Expressionism and film noir (in its brilliant use of
Paul Leni's silent film adaptation of The Man Who Laughs). It's a short jump from
there to Black Dahlia's flamboyant lesbian bar sequence featuring k.d.
lang in full Dietrich drag, singing "Love For Sale" among slinky
French-kissing chorines, and to De Palma's own Greetings homage that sees the director
himself assuming the impatient voice of authority in Elizabeth Short's screen
tests.
But it's not all film theory. A throwaway sequence sees Bleichert stumbling
upon the bodies of two Chinatown residents whose deaths he inadvertently
caused; the bullet-ridden tableau suggests and points the way toward Vietnam,
highlighting a retroactive sense of guilt, helplessness, and rage
all-too-applicable to our own current events. It's often forgotten (or casually
elided) that De Palma is a political filmmaker; even Black Dahlia's
finest set piece (a subjective-camera "first date" between Bleichert,
Madeleine, and her dysfunctional family) gets at the push-and-pull of the
democratic system, with all its hierarchical factions and subdivisions fighting
for power and the final say-so. The tragedy of Black Dahlia is that
there is no finality for anyone—solving the "mystery," so to speak,
counts for next-to-nothing. Ellroy himself said it best in an interview
("Closure is bullshit") and De Palma likewise understands that
experience lingers and that there's no telling where, when, or how the ghosts
of our life will haunt us.
Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]
SHOT: The Black Dahlia | Reverse Shot Keith Uhlich
House Next Door [Matt Zoller Seitz]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Black Dahlia, The Jeremy C. Fox from Pajiba
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
The Black Dahlia Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]
REVERSE SHOT: The Black Dahlia | Reverse Shot Elbert Ventura
DVDTalk Theatrical - [Jamie S. Rich]
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
Beyond Hollywood review Brian Holcomb
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Jim Hemphill
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [2.5/5]
european-films.net Venice Film Fest review Boyd Van Hoeij
VideoVista review Richard Bowden
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [2/5]
Reel.com review [2.5/4] Pam Grady
Cinephile Magazine [Richard X]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [D]
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [B]
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review also another review here: cinematical.com
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum) review
Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [2/5]
stylusmagazine.com (Jeffrey Bloomer) review
Film School Rejects (Neil Miller) review [D]
CBC.ca Arts (Stephen Cole) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Observer (Philip French) review
Time Out London (Ben Walters) review
Boston Globe review [2/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
FILM REVIEW; Out of the Past: In a Noir Los Angeles, Murder Most Lurid Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, September 15, 2006
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Steve Rose talks to director Brian De Palma | Film | The Guardian Crazy, huh? September 8, 2006
The Black Dahlia The San Francisco Brian DePalma Theory Collective, a taped transcript of the post viewing discussion, September 15, 2006
REDACTED
USA Canada (90 mi) 2007
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The interplay between maker and subject is just what's missing
from Brian De Palma's Redacted,
a strained anti-Iraq War mock-doc based on a real-life incident in which
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Form follows function, or at least it is supposed to. It's
alarming how little this idea actually applies to most American filmmaking.
Maybe that's why "Redacted," Brian De Palma's "fictional
documentary" inspired by reports of a real-life war crime with unnerving
parallels to De Palma's 1989
De Palma won the Best Director award at
Using the techniques of non-fiction filmmaking, news, video
diaries and propaganda, he charts events surrounding an American platoon
guarding a checkpoint in
These two aggressively racist soldiers are caricatures rather than characters. They represent both a particular brand of ugly Americanism and the desperation of the armed services to recruit new men (they're serving their country to avoid serving time). The performances are neither conventionally theatrical nor convincingly naturalistic, which only serves to further distance us from this dramatic construct.
"Redacted" is as much a cinematic experiment as a movie, a deconstruction of our ideas of objectivity, subjectivity, and the way we relate to screen characters. Under De Palma's cool disconnection is an anger, and it's this anger that drives his act of political theater. It's maddening and frustrating, challenging and alienating, hard to like and harder to shake off.
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Brian De Palma’s Redacted uses a variety of multimedia means to fictionally recount the true-life 2006 rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. soldiers: surveillance camera footage, YouTube-ish Internet videos, a pretentious French documentary, and, most of all, the camcorder diary of Private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) shot during his tour of duty. As implied by his film’s title – a term that refers to material removed from a document – De Palma is interested in confronting the way in which truth about the war is presented. And thus, the deliberate phoniness of his various aesthetics (which always seem purposefully stagy) is an intentional attempt to illustrate the unreliability of media-filtered information. Or at least, that’s the best excuse I can come up with for the awful awkwardness of Redacted, a furious diatribe against the U.S. military and – even more so – against the government and media’s willful manipulation of reality that misses no opportunity to have one-dimensional characters (all embodied with embarrassingly wholesale amateurishness) conveniently spout talking points about the various facets of the war. De Palma apparently intends for his film, which follows the soldiers’ transition from palling around to committing heinous atrocities, to play out like a hodgepodge of self-consciously artificial visuals and didactic dialogue. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s a tolerable tack to take, and more often than not, Redacted feels like the work of a director so righteously angry and so pleased with his formal experimentation that he doesn’t realize how painfully, inelegantly obvious he’s being.
Brian De Palma’s Redacted uses a variety of multimedia means to fictionally recount the true-life 2006 rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. soldiers: surveillance camera footage, YouTube-ish Internet videos, a pretentious French documentary, and, most of all, the camcorder diary of Private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) shot during his tour of duty. As implied by his film’s title – a term that refers to material removed from a document – De Palma is interested in confronting the way in which truth about the war is presented. And thus, the deliberate phoniness of his various aesthetics (which always seem purposefully stagy) is an intentional attempt to illustrate the unreliability of media-filtered information. Or at least, that’s the best excuse I can come up with for the awful awkwardness of Redacted, a furious diatribe against the U.S. military and – even more so – against the government and media’s willful manipulation of reality that misses no opportunity to have one-dimensional characters (all embodied with embarrassingly wholesale amateurishness) conveniently spout talking points about the various facets of the war. De Palma apparently intends for his film, which follows the soldiers’ transition from palling around to committing heinous atrocities, to play out like a hodgepodge of self-consciously artificial visuals and didactic dialogue. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s a tolerable tack to take, and more often than not, Redacted feels like the work of a director so righteously angry and so pleased with his formal experimentation that he doesn’t realize how painfully, inelegantly obvious he’s being.
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Harry Chotiner
It has been a strange year in terms of movies about the
Inspired by a true story, Redacted recounts how a
handful of American soldiers raped a fourteen year old Iraqi girl, and then
murdered her and her entire family. We first meet these and other soldiers as
they do what most soldiers do: tend checkpoints, obsess about sex, try to relax
during their down time, complain, bond and bicker with each other, and
anxiously count the days until they can come home. DePalma seemingly
structures his story in a conventional way. We get to know the guys,
decide whom we like and whom we don't, see the toll that the war is taking on
them, and then see that toll explode in horrific violence. DePalma himself used
this familiar narrative device to criticize our involvement in
But if this conventional type of anti-war film seems familiar, DePalma cues us from the get-go that he's doing something different. Making this a quintessentially post-modern film, we are given no single, true perspective from which to see the story. Instead, the film is a mélange of documentaries. Primarily, our perspective is the view-finder of one soldier's camcorder. Angel (Izzy Diaz) is making a documentary of his experiences for use as a future ticket to enter film school. Other vantage points include those of a French documentary film crew, the video being shot by terrorists for their website, and security cameras. The reliance on these forms of video seems to give the film a particular claim to authenticity. Presumably everything we see, experience, and know is the uncensored truth derived from the ubiquity of the digital. DePalma is clearly intrigued by how much "truth" is being recorded all the time, everywhere, being broadcast for free, and giving us unprecedented access to levels and layers of human experience. And DePalma the director is intrigued by how this technology allows him to make a serious, ambitious feature film for ridiculously little money.
Once we get accustomed to the lack of a master narrative and the
proliferation of smaller, more intimate, amateurish visions- the content becomes
as radical as the form. An anti-war movie usually depicts fundamentally
decent guys who are so badly damaged by combat that they become capable of
monstrous behaviors. But DePalma never gives us decent guys. While
not necessarily monstrous, the GI's in this film range from banal to brutal,
from psychologically damaged to raving psychopaths. But the point is that
whether monsters or just morally hollow men, it's not the war that has made
them this way. They, like the war, are the product of
The treatment of sex is illustrative. As long as there have
been war movies, there have been soldiers missing and yearning for love and
sex. But in DePalma's world, the sex is more than a basic need. It
has been transformed into a misogynistic drive that colors every interaction
and reduces American soldiers to Hobbesian aggressors. It's not that these
guys are horny. It's that their sexual needs control them and take an
ugly, hateful form. Being in
The most upsetting characters are two friends- Flake (Patrick
Carroll) and Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman). Flake has a driving need to inflict
sexual harm on women. Rush is more than happy to go along for the
ride. But again, we understand that the war didn't make Flake what he
is. He reminisces about how happy and proud he was when his brother murdered
a dissident labor leader. Flake and Rush were deeply damaged individuals
long before they arrived in
DePalma intends his movie to be anti-war. And he intends to
show how the war damages everyone it touches. It certainly harms Iraqi
civilians. But he has a made a movie where the war has not harmed decent
American boys and scarred a fundamentally decent
The problem is that for all the creativity in the form and the
interesting provocation in the content- it's still not a very good movie. DePalma
wanted to work with un-recognized actors, which is fine, but none of the performances
are all that good. We learn about the characters from the lines they
speak, not from anything surprising, moving, textured or idiosyncratic in the
acting. But the deeper problem is that the film is almost unwatchable. It's
not just that we know that we're headed for rape and murder. And to DaPalma's
credit, that is shown off-camera; there's no gratuitous violence. The deeper
problem is that we simply can't stand the people we're with. It's not
only that there's not a mensch in sight- someone with an ounce of moral courage
and real integrity. It's that there's not even someone with some simple
softness and decency that we can come to care about. And given that our
reactions to these characters leave us feeling somewhere between repulsed and
unengaged, the film can shock us but never burrow more deeply inside. The
depiction of daily routines is done very well. The concept of seeing the
war as like a reality TV show or an assortment of what's available on You Tube
is richly suggestive. And there's an interesting audacity in not indicting
a terrible war but indicting the terrible society that birthed this war. But
dramatic tragedy requires our deep emotional engagement with the
material. If DePalma could have complemented his anger at
(Note: In the
real incident that inspired this story, an Iraqi girl was raped and she and her
family murdered by four GI's: Paul
Cortez and James Barker pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 90 and 100 years
in prison, respectively. They will be eligible for parole in ten years. Jesse
Spielman, who did not participate in the rape and murders but was there for the
planning and execution, did not cop a plea. He was tried, found guilty, and
sentenced to 110 years in prison. Steven D. Green, the mastermind and driving
force behind the crimes, was discharged from the army for psychiatric reasons
before the crime was fully investigated. Now a civilian, he is to be tried on
rape and murder charges in a federal court in
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich] also seen here: Zoom in Online (Mike Raffensperger) review
Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C]
World Socialist Web Site review Sandy English
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
The New Yorker [George Packer] October 18, 2007
The New Yorker (David Denby) review November 19, 2007
Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek] which includes an interview with the director: Salon (13 November 2007)
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Twitch [Michael Guillen] also seen here: The Evening Class
Film Journal International (Chris Barsanti) review
DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [3/5]
CBC.ca Arts (Katrina Onstad) review
Culture Wars [Hugh Ortega Breton]
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann, also seen here: CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
Redacted Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Film Monthly (Doc Pedrolie) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Screen International review Dan Fainaru in Venice
cinemattraction (Martin Tsai) review
DVD Verdict (Ben Saylor) dvd review
filmcritic.com (Paul Brenner) review [1.5/5] also seen here: Reel.com [Paul Brenner]
The Nerve Film Lounge: Q&A: Brian DePalma
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [3/6]
Boston Globe review [1/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Tribune (Tasha Robinson) review
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
NYFF: Brian DePalma's Blowup Katey Rich from Cinema Blend, which includes a transcript of the October 11, 2007 interview by J. Hoberman that ended up in a shouting match with a Magnolia Pictures representative (see YouTube footage below)
De Palma Versus Cuban: Edelstein Enters the Ring David Edelstein from the New York magazine, October 11, 2007
Brian De Palma Gives Up in the Battle Over ‘Redacted’ Darrell Hartman from the New York magazine, October 12, 2007
Conversations podcast: Brian De Palma | Salon Arts & Entertainment Stephanie Zacharek interview from Salon, November 13, 2007
Brian De Palma's Redacted is schlock fantasy. - By Fred Kaplan ... War Porn, Slate, November 16, 2007
Raising Cain Pat Graham from the Chicago Reader Blog, November 16, 2007
Redacted The San Francisco Brian DePalma Theory Collective, a taped transcript of the post viewing discussion, November 17, 2007
Less is more Andrea Gronvall from the Chicago Reader Blog, November 19, 2007
Close-Up Film Interview - Brian De Palma Re: REDACTED
The Nerve Film Lounge: Q&A: Brian DePalma Re: REDACTED
YouTube - Brian De Palma interrupted at NY Film Festival ... October 11, 2007 (6:44)
de Penguern,
Artus
GREGOIRE MOULIN VERSUS HUMANITY (Grégoire Moulin contre l'humanité) B+ 91
Director Artus de Penguern, playing the lead character himself in a drop dead hilarious farce that is one of the funniest films in years, a film that works in the opening 30 seconds, keeps up a frenetic pace thoughout and continues over the credits, so don't walk out early, again, featuring some quite memorable sequences
de Sica,
Vittorio
from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm
Vittorio De Sica was one of the world's most influential directors, and also held a career as a prolific actor appearing in more than 150 films. Born in 1902, Vittorio was encouraged at the age of 16, by his proud father Umberto, to join a local theater company where his handsome demeanor rapidly made him a matinee idol. During World War II, De Sica turned to directing and his collaborations with author and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini brought the world three of the most significant films of the Italian neorealism movement, 'The Children Are Watching Us', 'Shoeshine' and 'The Bicycle Thieves.' With little funding to produce his films, De Sica pioneered the use of real locations and non-professional actors. He had a natural gift for communication and understood the sensitivities of fellow performers exercising exceptional perceptiveness utilizing children in major roles.
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies
Italian director Vittorio De Sica was also a notable actor who appeared in over 100 films, to which he brought the same charm and brightness which infused his work behind the camera.
By 1918, at the age of 16, De Sica had already begun to dabble in
stage work and in 1923 he joined Tatiana Pavlova's theater company. His good
looks and breezy manner made him an overnight matinee idol in
With the end of the war, De Sica's films began to express the
personal as well as collective struggle to deal with the social problems of
post-Mussolini
De Sica continued his career as an actor with sufficient success to finance some of his directorial projects, playing a host of twinkling-eyed fathers and Chaplinesque figures in films such as "Pane, amore e gelosia" (1954). His later directorial career was highlighted by his work with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in "Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow" (1963), which won the Oscar as best foreign film. After a period of decline in which he came to be perceived as a slick, rather tasteless master of burlesque, De Sica resurfaced with "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1971), a baroque political romance which won him another Oscar for best foreign film.
Active to the end, De Sica appeared as himself in Ettore Scola's "We All Loved Each Other So Much" (1975), which was released after his death.
Film
Reference Joe Kanoff
The films of Vittorio De Sica are
among the most enduring of the Italian post-war period. His career suggests an
openness to form and a versatility uncommon among Italian directors. De Sica
began acting on stage as a teenager and played his first film role in 1918. In
the 1920s his handsome features and talent made him something of a matinee
idol, and from the mid-1930s he appeared in a number of films by Mario
Camerini, including Gliuomini che mascalzoni!, Darò un milione, and Grandi
magazzine.
During his lifetime, De Sica
acted in over one hundred films in Italy
De Sica's directorial debuts, Rose
scarlatte and Maddalena, zero in condotta, were both attempts to
bring theater pieces to the screen with suitable roles for himself. In 1943,
with I bambini ci guardano, De Sica teamed with Cesare Zavattini, who
was to become his major collaborator for the next three decades. Together they
began to demonstrate elements of the post-war realist aesthetic which, more
than any other director except Visconti and Rossellini, De Sica helped shape
and determine. Despite the overt melodrama of the misogynistic story (a young
mother destroys her family by deserting them), the filmmaker refused to narrow
the perspective through an overwrought Hollywoodian mise-en-scène, preferring
instead a refreshing simplicity of composition and a subdued editing style.
Much of the film's original flavor can be traced to the clear, subjective
mediation of a child, as promised in the title.
De Sica's intense feeling for
children's sensibilities led him to imagine how children viewed the failing
adult reconstruction of society after the war. Sciuscia, a realistic
look at the street and prison life of poor, abandoned children, was the result.
It is the story of how the lasting friendship of two homeless boys, who make
their living shining shoes for the American G.I.'s, is betrayed by their
contact with adults. At the end of the film one boy inadvertently causes the
other's death. Although Zavattini insists that his creative role was minimal in
this instance, the presence of his poetic imagination is evident in the figure
of a beautiful white horse. This horse serves to cement the boys' mutual bond
and their hope for a future. Though a miserable failure in Italy
For the balance of the neorealist
period De Sica fought an uphill battle to finance his films through friends and
acting salaries. Ladri di biciclette anchors searching social
documentation in metaphor and a non-traditional but highly structured
narrative. Workman Ricci's desperate search for his bicycle is an odyssey that
enables us to witness a varied collection of characters and situations among
the poor and working class of Rome
The story of Toto the Good in Miracolo
a Milano remains one of the outstanding stylistic contradictions of the neorealist
period (there are many), yet one which sheds an enormous amount of light on the
intentions and future of the De Sica-Zavattini team. The cinematography and
setting, markedly neorealist in this fable about the struggle to found a shanty
town for the homeless, is undercut at every moment with unabashed clowning both
in performance and in cinematic technique. Moreover, the film moves toward a
problematic fairy tale ending in which the poor, no longer able to defend their
happy, makeshift village from the voracious appetite of capitalist
entrepreneurs, take to the skies on magic broomsticks. (The film has more
special effects than anyone would ever associate with neorealism; could De Sica
have left his mark on Steven Spielberg?) Still, Zavattini, who had wanted to
make the film for a number of years, and De Sica defend it as the natural
burlesque transformation of themes evident in their earlier work together.
By this time De Sica's films were
the subject of a good deal of controversy in Italy
Continually wooed by Hollywood Rome Moravia
The filmmakers returned to
comedic vehicles in 1954 in L'oro di Napoli .
Human comedy emerges from the rich diversity and liveliness of Neapolitan life.
Though still within the confines of realism, the film foreshadows the
director's entrance into the popular Italian market for sexual satire and
farce. The exactitude with which he sculpts his characters and his reluctance
to reduce the scenario to a mere bunch of gags demonstrates his intention to
fuse comedy and drama, putting De Sica at the top of his class in this
respect—among Risi, Comencini, and Monicelli. Often with Zavattini but also
with Eduardo De Filippo, Tonino Guerra, and even Neil Simon (After the Fox),
De Sica turned out about eight such films for the lucrative international
market between 1961 and 1968, the best of which are: Il giudizio universale,
which featured an all-star cast of international comedians; Ieri, oggi,
domani and Matrimonio all'Italiana, both with Loren and Mastroianni;
and Sette volte donna. Il giardino dei Finzi Contini, based on a Bassani
novel about the incarceration of Italian Jews during the war, shows a strong
Viscontian influence in its lavish setting and thematics (the film deals with
the dissolution of the bourgeois family). Una breve vacanza, an
examination of a woman who has managed to break out of the confines of an
oppressive marriage during a sanitorium stay, reinstitutes the tensive
relationship between comedy and tragedy of the earlier films. De Sica's last
film, Il viaggio, is from a Pirandello novel.
All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny
Sony Pictures
Biography and filmography
Strictly Film
School Acquarello
De Sica, Vittorio They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
RED ROSES
(Rose Scarlatte)
Italy (65 mi)
1940 co-director: Giuseppe Amato
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States
Vittorio De Sica's never-seen and
almost totally unknown first film as director is a light-hearted, ironic,
tongue-in-cheek dissertation on on marriage and the temptation to adultery. It
has some elements of a Lubitsch or Clair comedy. It is based on the 1936 play
by Aldo De Benedetti (1892-1970) "Two Dozen Red Roses", a perennial
favorite that is probably as often performed in Italy as "Arsenic and Old
Lace" is in America.
The comedy of errors (and design) begins when Alberto (Vittorio De Sica)
receives a phone call, in error, ordering two dozen red roses. The husband is
amused and dreams of an adventure with an unknown woman. His wife Maria then
receives the flowers with a card signed "Mystery" and this leads her
to want to encounter the man who has sent them. The husband realizes what has
happened and sees how far he can push the gag to test his wife's reactions and
the strength of her fidelity and continues to send roses every day. He becomes
jealous of the "phantom sender", in reality himself.
So does the desire for potential adultery constitute the real thing? Both
husband and wife are guilty…but of what? Of desire, but not of any action. All
turns out well, but the question remains.
The story is a clever enough one and has a certain appeal but never really
rises above its contrivance although it is amusing enough to watch it unfold.
Renée Saint-Cyr plays the wife, Umberto Melnati does a nice turn as the
husband's friend and accomplice in the wily machinations.
The film is very difficult to see today and has long been considered lost, but
a French-dubbed copy has appeared on French television.
MADDALENA, ZERO FOR CONDUCT (Maddalena, Zero in Condotta)
Italy (79 mi)
1940
User comments from imdb Author: (pierrealix@cybercable.fr)
This is definitely one of the best
comedy ever made anywhere...In a Technical school girl students learn to write
commercial letters to a Mr Doe in Germany...one day one of these letters is
posted by mistake..the problem is that this Mr Doe really exists...The
exquisite vittorio de Sica was a great performer before reaching stardom in
1946 with "the bicycle theft"...The movie is always charming ,never
vulgar nor stupid and you really get off the movie theatre happy with yourself
and life in general..Mussolini censors used Cinema to divert people in those
black days...its is not the only movie of its kind but it is the best by
miles..After 1960 Italian Directors like Fellini or Scola reacted strongly
against this type of comedies..Now they dont seem to know how to make them
anymore
DO YOU LIKE
WOMEN (Teresa Venerdì)
Italy (92 mi)
1941
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States
This minor but winning little filmic
treasure from the Italian fascist era was directed by Vittorio De Sica before
he made all the films that brought him international fame like SHOE SHINE,
BICYCLE THIEF, MIRACLE IN MILAN, and UMBERTO D. De Sica himself plays a young
physician in an orphanage for girls where a young girl named Teresa
"Venerdi'" or "Teresa Friday" (because that was the day she
arrived) becomes infatuated with him. The doctor is carrying on a romance at
the same time with a flirtatious singer, Loletta, played by a feisty Anna
Magnani in a short but fabulous supporting role. The expressions of boredom on
her face as she goes through a tiresome and tacky dance number are a wonder to
behold. Teresa, the love-struck heroine, is played by the lovely Adriana
Benetti, whom Italian film buffs remember from Blasetti's landmark QUATTRO
PASSI FRA LE NUVOLE, made a year later.
A GARIBALDIAN
IN THE CONVENT (Un Garibaldino al convento)
Italy (83 mi)
1942
User comments from imdb Author: Sabrina
(mgieri) from Toronto, Canada
The film is of particular interest for two reasons: firstly, it
is a film about the Italian Risorgimento, and yet a fairly a-typical one among
those made during Fascism; secondly, it is a fairly intriguing early film by
soon to be Neorealist master Vittorio de Sica, the author of such masterpieces
as Shoeshine and Rome Open City.
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald
A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States
This early film by Vittorio De Sica,
who would later gain enormous world-wide fame for "Shoe Shine,"
"The Bicycle Thief," "Umberto D" and many other films is a
relatively minor film but, nevertheless, a truly pleasing one.
It is about two girls attending a boarding school in 19th Century Italy during
the time of Garibaldi's movement to take Sicily and southern Italy from the
control of the despotic King of Naples and unite it with the Kingdom of
Piedmont of the north, thus creating a unified Italy. This was the movement
know as the "Risorgimento" or re-awakening of Italy.
One day, a wounded "garibaldino," or soldier of Giuseppe Garibaldi,
is found at the boarding school. He is Franco, played by Leonardo Cortese.
Mariella (Maria Mercader), who had known him previously and is in love with
him, and her friend Catarinetta (Carla del Poggio) take the risk, with the help
of patriot grounds keeper Fausto Guerzoni, of harboring the injured man.
When the conservative nuns who run the school find out this man is a Garibaldi
soldier, they are shocked. "Garibaldi, that bandit!" And they make
the sign of the cross in choral unison.
The troops of the Neapolitan king come to the school for a search. Franco is
found. Some skirmishes occur. One of the girls is able to reach the troops of
Garibaldi for help, that is, Nino Bixio, a rebel leader, played in a cameo role
by director Vittorio De Sica.
Eventually Franco, who had been taken prisoner, is saved but volunteers to
rejoin his comrades in the liberation of Italy.
The whole story is told through a framing device of the two girls many years
later as old women. We find out that Franco had died during the course of the
struggle and that Mariella had lost her true love forever.
The film exudes a kind of wistful and bittersweet quality, is nicely acted,
well-staged, and skillfully performed. It really should be better known.
THE CHILDREN
ARE WATCHING US (I Bambini ci Guardano)
The image on The Children Are Watching looks very good - the best I have seen this film ever look. Although made prior to both the Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine it has a superior image than the currently issued DVDs of those films. It is very clean, no real blemishes and the transfer is quite dark with no untoward manipulations. It may possibly have blackness boosting, typical of Criterion in the past, but it is not extensive enough to warrant any visible intrusion on the viewing experience. It is not exceptionally sharp but looks very acceptable considering the age of the film. Audio is consistent with only one minor instance of a brief crackle/gap. Subtitles are again at Criterion usual excellent level. Both new video interviews are excellent, but I would prefer that they were longer - but am very grateful that they are included. The liner notes booklet is beautiful - printed on good quality paper with photos and 2 detailed essays.
This is one of my favorite De Sica offerings and I strongly recommend this new Criterion package. The film is immensely impacting. It is such a pleasure to see DVD production companies that take real care in what they produce. I, personally, consider this an essential DVD.
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4.5/5]
In order to achieve true cinephile status you must spend some
time watching the classic Italian World War II-era neorealist films of the
great Vittorio De Sica. If you've already seen his devastating masterpiece The
Bicycle Thief, then move on to one of one of his lesser known but
equally excellent dramas, The Children Are Watching Us.
The title alone is a serious guilt trip, De Sica's condemnation of immoral
adult behavior that ends up damaging the innocent children who inevitably
suffer the consequences of Mom and Dad's bad decisions. In this case, the
adorable victim is five-year-old Prico (Luciano De Ambrosis), a wide-eyed only
child who revels in the adoration of his parents (Emilio Cigoli and Isa Pola)
and his nanny. Though it's wartime, Prico is insulated from the world outside
until one day, on a walk in the park, his mother slips behind a tree and chats
with a strange man (Adriano Rimoldi).
Prico has no idea who this man is, but he immediately intuits that the stranger
is a disruptive force in his tidy little universe. Sure enough, Mom flies the
coop with her lover the next day, leaving Dad, who is not a particularly secure
or forceful person, devastated not only by his cuckoldry but also by the
insidious gossip that sweeps instantly through his apartment block. Meanwhile,
Prico just wants to know where Mama went.
Eventually she returns, but a reconciliatory seaside family vacation goes
horribly wrong when Dad has to return to the city early, leaving Mom and Prico
alone. Her lover shows up, and it all starts over again. This time, her betrayal
of her son is even worse.
De Sica elicits a bravura performance out of a child so young he probably isn't
even sure what acting is. De Ambrosis is amazing; you simply can't take your
eyes off him. Be sure to check out The Criterion Collection DVD's extras, which
include an interview with the now elderly De Ambrosis as he fondly recalls the
kindness of the cast, the crew, and De Sica himself. Poor kid. He spends most
of the movie in abject distress. It's good to know the adults around him were
watching out for his well-being.
The final minutes of The Children Are Watching Us comprise one of those
searing movie moments, with images you'll never forget. It's at this point that
the title of the film really packs its punch. As an adult you'll feel guilty by
association, and if you're a parent, you'll walk away from this drama
reevaluating your relationship with your kids. Powerful stuff in beautiful
black and white from a master storyteller supremely attuned to the tragedies of
the human condition.
Slant
Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
People are finally coming around to The Children Are Watching
Us, the first collaboration between Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini.
Culture vultures dismissed the film at the time of its release because of its
protoneorealist sentimentality, but this is precisely what makes De Sica's work
so special, if still quite imperfect. The problem with the film, released the
same year as Luchino Visconti's seminal, neorealist kick-starter Ossessione,
is not that it's told through a child's consciousness but that its mélange of
little melodramas is amorphously shaped, though this probably has less to do
with De Sica and Zavattini, who were still finding their sea legs at the time,
than their shared screenwriting credit with four other hands—busy ones at that,
because their effusive work shows in many scenes, not least of which the ones
that too often play to the film's title.
In two of the film's lesser scenes, De Sica comes down especially hard on Nina
(Isa Pola), who leaves her husband Andrea (Emilio Cigoli) for another man:
During the first part of the film, she pauses over the word "decent"
in the middle of a prickly outburst, and during the film's superior second
half, a captive beachside crowd appears to hold vigil over her failed
motherhood. De Sica is above such trite, face-rubbing orchestrations, which are
meant to show she's conscious and guilty of her sin. Too often the film
displays the seams of too much or not enough screenwriting, but it's almost
fitting that the story slobbers over itself in spots and doesn't explode when
you expect it to in others, because the film is often akin to a newborn child
with a still developing fontanel—soft, sensitive, and incomplete, but always
endearing. You forgive the film its flaws because it's always trying to figure
out the right thing to do, not unlike the man who alternately screams at and
asks Andrea and Nina's son Pico (Luciano De Ambrosis) if he's okay after catching
the boy stopped in horror near Rome-bound train tracks.
The Children Are Watching Us is a marvel of complex visual and emotional
scope, and its surface is no less simple than the fabulous shells of Shoeshine
and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. There's always a sense of harsh
movement in the film, lines of action isolating objects and characters into
different stratums of the frame. A geometric, spider-like pattern emerges
throughout, with little Pico caught in the center, gasping for breath like an
ensnared animal, threatened from either side by all sorts of twin pressures.
Whisked off to his grandmother's countryside abode, he comes between her aunt
and the medicine man she courts by moonlight; during a dinner sequence with his
parents, the combination of heads, plates, and buildings and windows in the
background cast the boy in the center of an awfully pained, synthetic pieta of
family discord; and abandoned by his father at a boarding school, the boy's
face is caught between two columns.
There is an elevator in the film that only goes up, a symbol of Andrea's lack
of foresight. Similarly, De Sica's camera often travels forcefully in one
direction away from his characters. During a wonderfully hypnotic beach scene,
an effete gentleman with a little dog tries to seduce Nina with his eyes and
the movement of the camera suggests the woman is being torn apart like a piece
of taffy—on one side by her pleasure-seekingness, on the other by her
dedication to her son, whom she holds in her hands trying to teach how to swim.
But the camera always holds on or moves with Pico, as in his vigilant
attempt to walk back to Rome from his vacation retreat or, more arresting but
equally hopeful, the way he runs along the beach as if holding hands with the
stream of dawn's last light. Nature, in essence, is on the boy's side.
In 1944,
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Ken Dubois
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Steve Evans) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
SHOESHINE (Sciuscià)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Vittorio de Sica's 1946
production gave neorealism its first popular success, though today--now that
we're used to seeing dramas filmed in the streets--it's hard to locate what's
"realistic" about it. De Sica has simply adapted studio shooting
techniques to open-air situations; the film has none of the freshness and
formal innovation of Rossellini's contemporary Open City and Paisan.
Cesare Zavattini, De Sica's longtime collaborator, wrote the screenplay: it's
about two shoeshine boys who get involved in the black market, are thrown in a
Nazi jail, and end by betraying each other. It has plenty of opportunities for
easy sentiment, and De Sica neglects none of them. With Rinaldo Smordoni and
Franco Interlenghi. 93 min.
Made for $20,000 in 1946, "Sciuscià," Vittorrio de Sica's film
of two shoeshine boys used by the elder brother of one to fence stolen
merchandise, was called by no-one less than Orson Welles "the best film I
have ever seen." He elaborated, " In handling a camera I feel that I
have no peer. But what De Sica can do, I can't do. . . The camera disappeared,
the screen disappeared, it was just life." The most passionate American
film critic of the day, James Agee, wrote that "Shoeshine is about as
beautiful, moving, and heartening a film as you are ever likely to see."
I especially wonder what Agee could have regarded as "heartening." It
seems to me that the film is still moving, but heartbreaking rather than
heartening. One of the best and most famous of Italian neo-realist films, I
also wonder about the screen disappearing and witnessing "just life."
That is, the story, particularly the denouement seems very operatic to me. Not
the opera of monarchs and warriors, but verismo opera. Verismo opera without a
soprano, though probably if Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) sang, his voice would
be a boy soprano.
But he doesn't sing (in any sense). Thinking that he is stopping the whipping
of Giuseppe, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) "sings," incriminating
Giuseppe's brother. Giuseppe does not forgive this, and does not relent even
after Pasquale really is whipped. Giuseppe throws his lot with the bully of the
cell in which he is consigned, Arcangeli (Bruno Ortensi).
Pasquale tries to protect another younger boy, who has tuberculosis and is
trampled in the fire and riot that accompany the escape of Arcangeli and
Giuseppe. More pain and betrayal follows. The reform "school" has
transformed the boys from relatively innocent accomplices of criminals into
desperate, hardened young men. The destruction of their friendship is only part
of the pulverization of their innocence.
The younger (and doughier) of the boys De Sica cast grew up to be a baker. The
darker, handsomer fifteen-year-old Franco Interlenghi is still appearing in
films (other than "Sciuscià," the best-known of them is Fellini's
1953 "I vitelloni," in which he played Moraldo). Although De Sica
went on to win two more Academy Awards (as director of best foreign films
"Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" and "The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis" and to play the title role in Rosselini's masterpiece
"Il Generale della Rovere"), he never made as compelling a film as
"Sciuscià."
I was not entirely convinced by the idyllic opening of the film, when the boys
are happy with the horse they have bought together. I wonder if the rhetoric
which lawyers produce in Italian movies has any relationship to what is said in
Italian courts. The cell-block looks like it was lifted from "The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari" or some other interwar expressionist German film. And the
studio-shot finale is a bit pat. However, the loss of innocence is shown
convincingly. There is no lecturing, the music is only occasionally a bit
hectoring, and the dialogue is far less important than what is written on the
young non-actors' faces.
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Ian Johnston]
DVD Outsider Slarek
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford
PopMatters (Stephen Tropiano) review
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Strictly Film School (capsule review) Acquarello
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
The New York Times review T.M.P.
DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
HEART AND
SOUL (Cuore)
Italy (91 mi)
1948 co-director: Duilio Coletti
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States
This film was based on Edmondo De
Amicis' 1886 book CUORE, meant to instill patriotic and moral values, and which
has been filmed several times. It is set in 19th Century Turin, and its central
character is a paternal and caring teacher, Maestro Perboni (Vittorio De Sica)
whose young students adore him. This version includes a connecting plot, about
the amorous longings of his co-teacher and co-boarder Clotilde (Maria Mercader)
and her failed love for an ambitious young Lieutenant Gardena (Giorgio De Lullo).
The best things in the film are the portrayals of the young boys and their
personal lives. Of particular note among the young performers are Luciano De
Ambrosis, who had been so unforgettable in De Sica's "The Children Are
Watching Us;" Gino Luerini, the boy in love with Pier Angeli in
"Tomorrow is too Late;" Vito Annichiarico, who was Anna Magnani's son
in "Open City;" and Carlo Delle Piane, the Jimmy-Durante-nosed
performer who would have success as an adult actor as a favorite in Pupi
Avati's films. It is said that De Sica himself directed the sequences with the
kids rather than credited director Duilio Coletti. This was made, after all, in
the same period that De Sica shot his landmark "The Bicycle Thief."
Made too at the time of great political turmoil in Italy, there is a subtext
here of the need for social justice, as well as an anti-war message, and
Perboni is a socialist whose ideas get him into trouble with the school
authorities. Excised from the American release version called "Heart and
Soul" are some of the political activities of Perboni as well as the
patriotic vignettes about heroic boys that are in the uncut version as well as
in the book. This is, all in all, a lovable and charming film, although much
less rich than Luigi Comencini's 6-hour TV version of 1984.
THE BICYCLE
THIEF (Ladri di Biciclette)
aka: Bicycle Thieves
A working class
Italian, out of work for some time, has the bicycle stolen which he needs for a
new job; he and his son wander round Rome looking for it. Often hailed as an
all-time classic, Bicycle Thieves tries to turn a simple story into a
meditation on the human condition, but its greatest achievement is in bringing
the lives of ordinary Italian people to the screen. However, like so many of
the films grouped together under the heading of Italian neo-realism, its grainy
monochrome images and simple storyline never delve beneath the surface of the
characters' lives to reveal the social mechanisms at work there. It is as if,
just by portraying the events unobtrusively, De Sica imagines that they will
yield up their essential truth by a process of revelation - a very appropriate
image for a strain of liberal humanism strongly influenced by Catholicism.
Observant and sympathetic it is, politically perceptive it is not.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Zoe Grainge) review
Vittorio de Sica directed and cowrote this simple yet moving film. A working class Italian manages to find a job after months of unemployment. The new job is dependent upon his owning a bike and, needless to say, when his bicycle gets stolen his job is jepordised. The film then follows the man's journey as he searches the city for the culprit. Together with his son, he encounters many different characters and situations, some frustrating, some amusing but all a poignant rendition of a working class life.
A brilliant study of ravaged postwar
Bicycle Theives contains all the elements of typical neo-realism: harsh cinematography, poverty of the principle characters, urban squalor and, of course, a lack of judgement at the character's predicament. A classic from the Italian neo-realist movement.
Wheels of History - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 - Village Voice J. Hoberman from the Village Voice
The most influential movement in film history consisted of about 20 movies produced between 1944 and 1952. Italian neorealism was the original new wave. The inspiration for Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes, Satyajit Ray and Ousmane Sembene, André Bazin and cinema verité, neorealism was understood as a double renaissance—both the medium's post-World War II rebirth and a means for representing human experience outside the conventions of the Hollywood entertainment film.
Roberto Rossellini's Open City came first. This
dramatization of Italian partisans was planned under Nazi occupation and went
into production only weeks after
Open City created the neorealist paradigm—location shoots using available light, long takes, and few close-ups; postsynchronized vernacular dialogue; working-class protagonists played by nonactors (especially children); and open-ended narratives. But it was The Bicycle Thief (1948), directed by the Fascist-era matinee idol Vittorio De Sica from a script by veteran screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, that parlayed that paradigm into what was surely the most universally praised movie produced anywhere on planet earth during the first decade after World War II.
The Bicycle Thief, which opens Friday at Film Forum in
a rich, if somewhat dark, new 35mm print, was the latest manifestation of a
recurring impulse—the desire to wrest a narrative movie from the flux of daily
life. Zavattini had expressed the desire to make a film that would do no more
than follow a man through the city for 90 minutes, and, in some ways, The
Bicycle Thief is that film. Bazin, who would be neorealism's key celebrant,
praised The Bicycle Thief's premise as "truly insignificant... A
workman spends a whole day looking in vain in the streets of
If The Bicycle Thief understood neorealism as a style,
Bazin appreciated it as "pure cinema… No more actors, no more story, no
more sets… the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality." In fact, De Sica
created a neorealist superspectacle. Six writers worked on the script; at one
point, the project was even pitched to
Although the three leads were all nonactors, The Bicycle Thief's modest $133,000 budget was far larger than those of previous neorealist films, including De Sica's own Shoeshine. De Sica used many more locations and extras—40 market vendors hired for a single scene—and even effects (fire hoses employed to simulate rain-soaked streets). The production was deliberate. The crowds were rehearsed and the camera moves choreographed. Editing took two months.
Scarcely a story found in the street, The Bicycle Thief
is an allegory at once timeless and topical. (Among other things, it reflects
the battle for the lucrative Italian movie market. The first poster the
luckless Ricci puts up is for the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda. There
were 54 movies made in
Ricci is a member of the crowd, a walker in the city. He's one
step up the social ladder from Chaplin's Little Tramp in that he has a wife and
a child. Throughout, De Sica's mise-en-scène emphasizes the urban mass (waiting
for jobs and streetcars) and its mass-produced objects—the piles of pawned
linens, the rows of bicycles. Translated correctly from the Italian, the title
should really be the more provocatively totalizing Bicycle Thieves.
The city is alternately empty and teeming. Although shot in an
authentic environment, The Bicycle Thief is no less stylized in its way
than the other European masterpiece of 1948, Jean Cocteau's Orpheus.
There are few establishing shots. Unlike Rossellini's, De Sica's
Where the optimistic Open City celebrated a potential alliance between Communists and Catholics, The Bicycle Thief parodies both party and church as unable to help the humiliated Ricci. Indeed, the hero's experience of these institutions, as well as the police, borders on the Kafkaesque. There is no justice. Ricci's life is ruled by a catch-22: he needs a bicycle to get the job that will enable him to buy a bicycle. Not for nothing is the bicycle brand-named Fides ("Faith") or the innocent vision of Ricci's seven-year-old son Bruno (one of the greatest kids in the history of cinema) increasingly privileged.
Although not a comedy, The Bicycle Thief was inevitably compared to Chaplin in its content, its structure, its pathos, and its universality. (The mournful music and circular narrative predict the post–neorealist mannerism of Federico Fellini.) The Bicycle Thief looks back at the nickelodeon and forward to the European art film. De Sica's masterpiece was not so much part of a new wave as the crest of an old one—the epitome of movies as a popular modernism.
Turner Classic Movies review James Steffen
DVD Times - Criterion Noel Megahey
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay Carr
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [4/4]
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A] also indicating the film is one of the 15 films listed in the category “Values” on the Vatican film list
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
DVD Talk - Criterion edition [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [5/5]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [5/5]
Eye for Film (Ben Sillis) review [5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
Bicycle Thieves Acquarello from Strictly Film School
Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash) review [4/4]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Austin Chronicle [Jay Hardwig]
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
MIRACLE IN MILAN (Miracolo a Milano)
Made the year
after Bicycle Thieves, this is a less coherent but more exuberant film,
with De Sica injecting a stiff dose of fantasy into what could have been
another plangent tale of gentleman tramps and shantytown life: the humble
down-and-outs threatened with eviction by business speculators escape - thanks
to angelic intervention - to their reward in heaven. Outrageous sentimentality
undercut by outrageous cheek.
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review
Vittorio De Sica's 1951 follow-up to The Bicycle Thief
welds a Rene Clair-inspired social fantasy to the precepts of neorealism. Based
on a novel by Cesare Zavattini, the film tells of the fight between a band of
shantytown poor and the industrialist who wants to explore for oil beneath
their village. The leader of the revolutionaries is a visionary young man armed
only with his ideals and, for a while, a magic dove. Though the fight proves
hopeless, they all fly off on broomsticks to a better life--implying that magic
is the only means of rectifying social ills. 100 min.
Flipside
Movie Emporium (Gabe Leibowitz) review
[A]
Miracle in Milan is a delight. Unlike director Vittorio De
Sica's masterpieces The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D, it is not an emotionally
gripping film. Rather, it's a satire of an emotionally gripping film. Even
during its darkest moments, a cheerful score accompanies the on-screen events
and the mood never blackens.
As an infant, Toto (Francesco Golisano) is found in a
cabbage patch by an old woman who raises him until she dies. Toto is sent off
to an orphanage and emerges from it looking for work. Unable to find any, he
joins the army of the homeless and becomes their unspoken leader, spurred by
his contagious optimism. They build huts in a vacant lot and develop unity.
Even when town bigwig Mobbi (Guglielmo Barnabò) attempts to kick them off the
shantytown properties, the smile never leaves Toto's face and he receives some
magical aid to foil Mobbi's selfish schemes.
Miracle in Milan represents the dreams of homeless people
everywhere -- an angel swooping down and giving them the better life. De Sica
treats it as such -- a dream. There's a wonderful scene in the first 30 minutes
where the vagabonds stage a sunset at dusk, lining up chairs and collecting
money from those who wish to view it. This is as close as we get to De Sica's
usual neorealism. From then on, the film comfortably dissolves into fantasy.
The final shot of the homeless flying away on broomsticks, quite daring for its
time, is an image of the fantastical.
Symbolism that would feel too obvious elsewhere seems
natural here. A broken statue is discovered in a car trunk in the junkyard and
two of the squatters fix it up and display it proudly at the central square. In
Mobbi's office, where Toto leads a group to protest their eviction, a statue of
Michelangelo's David stands behind Mobbi's desk. The contrast of sneering
wealth versus timid poverty is quietly sarcastic, as is Miracle in Milan at its
heart. Aldo Graziati's cinematography alternates between bleak and upbeat,
capturing De Sica's visual style; a touch of depression, a large splash of
hope. Emphasis is placed on faces; the camera focuses on the eyes of those who
look beaten and those filled with hope. By the end of the film, it consists
almost exclusively of the latter.
We care deeply for Umberto in Umberto D because his plight
feels so authentic. Miracle in Milan is a fairy tale -- it even begins,
"Once upon a time." We rarely pity Toto despite his harsh situation.
He won't let us pity him for he won't stop smiling. And we smile right along
with him.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
VideoVista review Gary Couzens
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Eye for Film (George Williamson) review [3.5/5]
FilmExposed dvd review Andrew Pragasm reviewing the 5-film Neo Realist Box Set
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
UMBERTO D A 98
Everyone takes
advantage of the ignorant
Masterful, a heartbreaking portrait of an aging
pensioner whose best years are behind him, who now has only the companionship
of his dog, featuring a wonderful portrayal by his maid, and an extremely
ungracious landlady who only threatens to evict him while surrounding herself
with extravagance, typifying the changing, uncaring world. There are memorable scenes such as using
burning newspapers to rid the kitchen of ants, or a visit to the dog pound that
is more like an enormous death camp, incinerating dogs no one wants, asking
what we should do with old people that no one wants any more. There are beautiful scenes of a city in decay
as his thoughts drift to suicide, but he can’t find a proper home for his dog,
the last love of his life, as all of his friends are gone or are too busy for
him. The film was dedicated to De Sica’s
father, and is believed to be the director’s favorite film.
Judging by his demeanour, the D stands for
Deep Depression. But the old man at the centre of De Sica's famous film from
the heyday of Italian neo-realism hasn't got much to be happy about, stripped
bare as he is of all money and all friends except a little fox terrier. There's
no denying the director's compassion, nor the dignity and strength of Carlo
Battisti's performance, but there's nothing so wilting as doom and gloom
couched in sweetly sentimental terms.
Reverse
Shot review
Saul Austerlitz
Vittorio
De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, the director and writer of Umberto D,
dreamed of one day making a film that would be the ne plus ultra of
Italian neorealism. In it, the camera would follow one individual for exactly
two hours. Not possessing any prior knowledge of their history or personality,
the spectator would watch a small chunk of their lives. At the end of the
allotted time, the film would end. No conflict, no resolution, no three-act
storyarc—just the life of the common man onscreen. De Sica and Zavattini never
got the chance to realize this dream project, but its closest relative is the
effulgent Umberto D. The title character, a retired Roman, suffers the
slings and arrows of everyday fortune, buoyed only by the presence of his
preternaturally perky dog Flick. The film’s humanist perspective allows it to
avoid the Big Statement in an effort to detail the specifics of untrammelled reality.
Umberto’s strained circumstances are captured expertly by De Sica’s direction—
you can practically touch the peeling paint on the walls of his rooms. The
closing sequence, where Umberto loses, and then recovers, Flick, is a release
of all the emotion patiently stored up by the filmmakers over the course of the
film, and here it becomes evident that Umberto is one of the great characters
of the cinema. Even De Sica and Zavattini’s resplendent Bicycle Thieves
cannot match Umberto D’s quotidian radiance.
Umberto
D. [ideas swiped from Victor J.
Morton, with permission] Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
More heartbreaking than The Bicycle Thief, less twee than Miracle
in
Unfairly dismissed by some as too sentimental, Umberto D., unlike
many other films of its kind, refuses to traffic in facile notions of
victimization. Battisti's resolutely dignified performance in the title role,
in particular, lends the film much of its power. Yes, Umberto is down and out,
but his economic circumstances aren't half so dangerous as the foolish pride to
which he desperately clings. Introducing himself to strangers by his full name
and standing at attention, he clearly fancies himself an aristocrat; when he's
reduced to begging, he places his cap in Flick's mouth, getting the dog to do
the dirty work while he cowers behind a nearby pillar, fearful of being seen.
Evidently, many people are under the impression that we're supposed to feel sorry
for this pathetic old man, when in fact our empathetic exasperation with the
character's narcissistic melancholy is precisely what De Sica wants to provoke.
It's significant that the movie ends not in tragedy but in abrupt, unexpected
glee, despite the fact that Umberto's circumstances haven't changed in the
slightest. If you make it to the end with your eyes completely free of
moisture, you might want to consider having your heart professionally thawed.
Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]
The overlooked 1952 masterpiece of Italian
neorealism "Umberto D." is enjoying a deserved re-release this
summer, opening today at the American Film Institute Theater at the
Umberto Domenico Ferrari is a retired civil servant who is barely able to keep alive on his state pension. Living alone with his beloved dog, Flike, Umberto D. clings desperately to the manners and civility that define him as a gentleman, retaining a quiet dignity that only becomes more heartbreaking as his life falls apart around him.
We meet Umberto D. at a demonstration, where his fellow retirees are marching for higher pensions. Umberto and a friend peel away from the crowd, and the camera follows Umberto through his dispiriting day: He is kicked out of the lunchroom where he feeds his dog, he is threatened with eviction by his landlady, and he discovers that the young maid in his rooming house is pregnant. In the ensuing few days, Umberto will become increasingly despondent, trying to find a way to survive without joining many of his friends who have become beggars on the street corners of Rome.
Although not quite a real-time day in the life of a
faceless Italian of the 1950s, "Umberto D." has the intimate,
spontaneous feel that characterized the neorealist classics. And, like those
films, its main character is played by an amateur, in this case a
And make no mistake: Much of "Umberto D." is excruciating, especially a sequence in which Umberto agonizes over whether to beg at the steps of the Pantheon, as well as the film's devastating final passage. But filmgoers – even the dog lovers among them – are encouraged to stay the course. Heroes like Umberto D. are hard to find, and your life will be better for having met him.
Turner
Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
In
a limited two-week run at The Film Forum in New York City, Umberto D. (1952), one of the key films of the Italian
neo-realism movement, is being presented in a newly restored 50th anniversity
print with a new translation and subtitles. Directed by Vittorio De Sica, the
film depicts a few days in the life of Umberto, a retired bureaucrat facing
eviction from his apartment of 20 years. When government institutions and
former friends fail him in his plight, he is forced to roam the streets; his
only emotional connection to the real world is his beloved dog and his friendship
with an uneducated maid who is in desperate straits herself. Although the film
arrived at the end of the neo-realism cycle, its narrative about an elderly,
poverty-stricken man and his struggle to maintain his dignity in an uncaring
society is just as powerful and relevant today as it was when it first
premiered in Italy.
In the title role, De Sica cast a non-professional actor - Carlo Battisti (a
University of Florence professor in real life) - who delivers a heart-breaking
performance without resorting to easy sentimentality or grand theatrics. And
the film was truly a labor of love for the director (he often said it was his
favorite film) and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who collaborated on most of
De Sica's important films including Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle
Thief (1948).
Unfortunately, Umberto D. was attacked in its own
country by the Italian Minister of Culture who accused the film of airing the
country's "dirty laundry" in public. Nevertheless, the film went on
to international acclaim including an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and
the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film. And today, it's
universally recognized as a masterpiece of world cinema. This dazzling new
restoration of Umberto D. is due to the efforts of
Giuseppe Rotunno, the famous cinematographer of Visconti's Rocco and His
Brothers & Fellini's Satyricon, and film stock expert Vincenzo
Verzini, known as the "Little Giotto" of Italian movies. Verzini
began his film career working for Roberto Rossellini on Open City (1945)
and established his reputation as an expert in developing and printing the
sophisticated lighting contrasts in films such as Luchino Visconti's White
Nights (1957). In addition to Umberto
D, he has
restored such classics as Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962), Rossellini's The
Flowers of St. Francis (1950), Fellini's The White Sheik (1951) and I
Vitelloni (1953), and Pietro Germi's Un Maledetto Imbroglio (1959)
for Mediaset.
In Il Mio Viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy), Martin Scorsese's
passionate new documentary on Italian cinema which airs on Turner Classic
Movies in June, the director says, "As powerful as The Bicycle Thief
was, for me, De Sica and Zavattini's greatest achievement together was Umberto D....a great movie about a hero of everyday life. That
was De Sica's precious gift to his father. And to us."
According to Peter Brunette in a New York Times article, the current
print of Umberto D. showing at the Film Forum
is a remarkable improvement over past prints: "Damaged or missing frames
in the original negative of Umberto D. were replaced, the
splicing between reels upgraded and the lighting improved. The soundtrack was
also restored by transferring it to digital audio tape and filtering it with
modern equipment."
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
DVD Journal Clarence Beaks
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Filmjourney Doug Cummings
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
DVD Talk (James W. Powell) dvd review [2/5] [Criterion Collection]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
The Boston Phoenix review Steve Vineberg
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Review by Umberto Eco [Italian]
INDISCRETION
OF AN AMERICAN WIFE
aka: Terminal Station (Stazione Termini)
De Sica started out wanting to film a small
scale love story, but the casting of Jennifer
Jones brought with it the attentions of her producer husband David
Selznick. He insisted on shooting in Rome's grand new central railway station
and drafted in Truman
Capote to polish up Zavattini's screenplay about an ill-fated romance
between a visiting American and an Italian with an American mother (Clift, who
gives a tender performance). In the end, though, Selznick reckoned the finished
picture too arty and cut it to 72 minutes for US distribution (as Indiscretion
of an American Wife).
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Famed
Italian neorealist director Vittorio de Sica (The Bicycle Thief, Umberto
D.) succumbed to the lure of Hollywood when producer David O. Selznick
presented him with Terminal Station, the story of a married American
woman (Jennifer Jones) lingering at a train station, unable to completely break
it off with her Italian lover (Montgomery Clift). The film succeeds when
focusing on small moments, gestures, etc. But De Sica can't resist loading the
film up to make it feel more significant than it really is. Selznick, of
course, was displeased with the final product, cut 20 minutes and retitled it Indiscretion
of an American Wife. Truman Capote contributed to the film's dialogue, and
Ben Hecht reportedly worked uncredited on the titles.
Criterion's
disc presents both films, but for some reason Selznick's shorter version
received more extensive restoration and is the only one with a commentary track
-- it looks and sounds much better than the de Sica version.
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Margarita Landazuri
Producer
David O. Selznick was as avid a film buff as he was a filmmaker, and in the
early 1950s he was enthralled by the work of the Italian neo-realist
filmmakers, in particular Vittorio De Sica. Looking for a new direction after
the critical failures of Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Paradine Case
(1947), Selznick persuaded De Sica to make a film with him, starring Selznick's
wife, Jennifer Jones. De Sica's idea was a panorama of life in Rome's new
railroad station, with a variety of stories going on at once. The central story
is the final parting of an adulterous couple, a married American woman, played
by Jones, and her Italian lover. Montgomery Clift would play the Italian, and
most of the other roles would be played by Italians. The film would be called Stazione
Termini in Italian and Terminal Station in English.
Both Selznick and De Sica were used to being in complete control on their
films, and both thought they could impose their will on the other. How wrong
they both were would become clear as soon as the film went into production at
the end of 1952. There were two teams of scriptwriters, one for the Italian
version, led by De Sica's usual collaborator, Cesare Zavattini, and another for
the English-language version. Selznick hired novelist Carson McCullers for the
English version, but was unhappy with her work. Eventually, Italian novelist
Alberto Moravia, Paul Gallico and Truman Capote all had a crack at the script,
along with Selznick himself.
Clift arrived in Rome to find that De Sica, who spoke no English, had hired a
stand-in for Clift. De Sica planned to give direction to the stand-in, and
Clift was expected to imitate what the stand-in did. Clift, of course, refused.
Shooting took place in the actual Stazione Termini in the evenings and ran late
into the night. Tempers frayed, and the language barrier only made things
worse. All night long, Selznick sat in the lounge of the station, rewriting
scenes and composing 40-page memos on every aspect of the production, memos
that he would expect De Sica to respond to the next day. Jennifer Jones, who
was emotionally fragile anyway, became more and more distraught. While shooting
an intimate love scene, she snapped and ran out of the station, barefoot and
hysterical. Selznick followed, and she slapped him, breaking his glasses.
Clift, who had his own demons, was kind and gentle with Jones, and she became
fond of him. Truman Capote claimed that Jones fell in love with Clift, not
realizing he was a homosexual, and that when she found out about his sexual
preference, she got extremely upset and stuffed a mink jacket into a toilet.
Clift, however, told friends that Jones was "madly in love" with
Selznick, that she still felt guilty about leaving her former husband Robert
Walker, and that both she and Selznick were "in deep analysis." When
the film was over, Jones gave Clift an expensive Gucci leather briefcase. The
brass clasp kept unfastening, and Clift told friends, "it's beautiful, but
it doesn't quite work -- how like Jennifer."
De Sica liked a realistic look to his films, and did not do many close-ups.
Selznick, of course, wanted the full Hollywood glamour treatment, and
complained constantly about the lack of close-ups of Jones. Finally, Selznick
and De Sica compromised. De Sica would shoot the film in his customary manner,
with his Italian cameraman. Selznick hired English cinematographer Oswald
Morris to do close-ups with the full Hollywood glamour treatment.
The film was released in Europe at a length of nearly two hours. Selznick was
not happy with De Sica's version, and took the film back to the U.S. to
re-edit. He took out the subplots, focused on the love story, added close-ups
and a theme song sung by Patti Page. He retitled it Indiscretion of an American Wife, and released it at 64
minutes. In the end, De Sica had his version, Selznick had his, and the result
pleased neither the critics nor the public. Seen today, however, it is a
fascinating failure, an interesting attempt to mix two distinct and
incompatible styles, with intensely emotional, moving performances by Clift and
Jones.
The
Criterion disc contains both versions of the film and it's fascinating to note
how they both differ on both an emotional and narrative level. Of the two
transfers, Indiscreet is the sharper looking of
the two since Terminal Station was taken from a 35mm
dupe negative and features the above mentioned musical short with Patti Page
performing two songs inspired by the film. The latter is an elegantly designed
short directed by renown art director William Cameron Menzies and photographed
by the great James Wong Howe.
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
IT HAPPENED
IN THE PARK (Villa Borghese)
Italy France
(98 mi) 1953 co-director: Gianni Franciolini
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States
(Includes spoilers) VILLA BORGHESE is a
film consisting of six vignettes (cut to five in its U.S. release) that are all
set in the Roman park that bears that name. All the episodes take place within
one day. The first episode, taking place early in the day, is called
"Servant Girls and Soldiers" and is a trifle about a couple of guys
trying to put the makes on a couple of young girls. The second piece is called
"The Greek Letter Pi" and is a poignant little anecdote about a
schoolgirl (Anna Maria Ferrrero) who is urged by her classmates to approach
their Greek professor (François Perrier), so that they can photograph them
kissing and perhaps blackmail the prof for a passing grade. It turns out the
professor has a sad story to tell the girl…that he is going blind. The tearful
girl cannot go though with the plan. The third episode is the funniest and
probably the best in the film. It's called "Incident at Villa
Borghese" and features tour-guide Vittorio De Sica as an incorrigible over-cologned
woman-chaser who comes between Giovanna Ralli and her furiously jealous
boyfriend Maurizio Arena. The dramatics that ensue among the three…and
others…is absolutely hilarious. In one delicious moment, De Sica sits in the
car with the boy on one side of him, screaming at the girl, and the girl's
breasts on the other side, pressed against De Sica's face as he barely conceals
his lust. In "The Marriage Arranger" Eduardo De Filippo is the father
of a girl he is trying to marry off. The discussions between the relatives
center on rather selfish interest…money, dowry. Then the increasingly
ill-at-ease girl is revealed to have a handicap, involving her foot, and the
young suitor comes to the emotionally distraught girl's side and, through
simple humanity and kindness, saves the day in a way the crude relatives were
not capable of doing. Of all the relationships we witness in the film, this is
the only one that seems to have a future. "The Lovers" is a
bittersweet episode about a man breaking up his affair with a married woman…as
the woman's small children play in the park with their nurse and call out to
their adulterous mommy. It is nicely acted by two great stars of the French
cinema, Micheline Presle and Gérard Philippe. The final racy episode,
"Beauty Contest," is a Felliniesque dissertation about two rival
Roman street–prostitutes, who as they are about to be rounded up by the police,
wind up at a Miss Cinema beauty contest taking place in the park. The younger
of the women (Eloisa Cianni) eludes the police by going off with an older man
in his car. The other and older one (Franca Valeri) is not so lucky and the
episode and the film end as she is driven off in a police vehicle. It is late
at night.
The movie was released in the United States in 1957, inexplicably, in a
French-language version, which didn't match the content, despite the presence
of some French performers. It was retitled IT HAPPENED IN THE PARK.
Furthermore, the first decent-enough episode was shorn, also inexplicably,
because the film was already a short one. The direction by Gianni Franciolini
is subtle and finely-tuned throughout, and the ensemble of actors in the
production makes, of itself, a worthwhile experience of the movie, which should
not remain as forgotten as it is.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE GOLD OF
NAPLES (L’Oro di Napoli)
Italy (131 mi)
1954 US cut version (107 mi)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
A four-part anthology (1954), written and directed by the redoubtable team of Cesare Zavattini and Vittorio De Sica. The episodes range from farce to pathos, though the dominant tone is one of strained sentimentality. With De Sica, Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano, and Toto. 107 min.
User comments from imdb Author: Author: madrig80 from Italy
It is not
easy to find a movie like this, that makes you laugh and think at the same
time. It is like a trip not to Italy, but to the most precious souls and minds
of the people of Naples, the real "gold" of this city. A forgotten
masterpiece, with exceptional performances by Toto', Sofia Loren and Marcello
Mastroianni.
User comments from imdb Author: Author: ecaprarie from Italy
I am Italian
and I saw this movie on TV a few days ago. I had not seen it in the past. Totò
is absolutely fantastic in his role. But the most astonishing episode is that
of the 'funeralino', the funeral of a child: that is very 'neapolitan' to me.
Sorrow and attention to manners are co-existent and you never know whether it
is true sorrow or pure acting. Paolo Stoppa is also excellent in his role as a
new widower. Of course, the movie is quoted because of Sofia Loren, who was
helping her husband in his job of making pizzas. This is the movie where her
nickname 'la pizzaiola' came from. While watching it, I did not realize that it
had been made so many years ago. It well deserves to be seen.
User comments from imdb Author: zkasher from Ramat Gan, Israel
"L'oro di
Napoli" is the kind of movie which has everything in it. Human emotions,
good and evil in Humankind, great sceneries of Napoli and its Golf, great
music, great actors and most of all a genius director, Vittorio De Sica.
This is the kind of movie one may watch again and again without getting bored.
As for myself, I even took a trip to Napoli on August 2001, to find out the
beautiful sites where the movie took place.
I found the beautiful "Castello Dell'Ovo" and the "Fontana
Dell'Immacolatella", which are not mentioned by name in the movie.
Amazingly both sites look the same as in 1954, as well as some neighboring
buildings.
I managed finding a collection of the most beautiful Neapolitan Canzoni
(Songs), including the song `A Marechiaro' which plays at the end of the movie,
a song I cherished for long, before watching the movie.
To summarize, as far as I am concerned, `L'Oro Di Napoli' (The Gold of Napoli),
constitutes a genuine treasure in the history of movies, which I'll always
cherish deep in my heart.
moviediva
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE ROOF (Il
Tetto)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
VITTORIO DE SICA'S vast compassion for the poor people of
Belated, we say, because this picture, produced in
For "The Roof" is essentially a happy and valorous little film, for all the evidence it gives of misfortune and material poverty. The young newlyweds, who are its principals, may be dismally and piteously poor and they may have to endure absurd discomforts and inconveniences before they get themselves a meager home. But the point is that they are courageous, they have spirit and they are in love. Out of these basic strengths, De Sica has composed a lovely little seriocomic film.
If we seem to stress the word "little," that is because the dramatic range, as well as the physical production and the human population, is small. This is simply the unpretentious story of how a young married couple tries to live, first in the crowded apartment of the husband's family, until a shattering quarrel occurs, and then temporarily separated, with the husband sleeping in a toolshed and the wife with a servant-girl friend. Finally, they summon their resources and their sympathetic and obliging pals and throw up a shack that will serve them as a private dwelling, all in the course of one night.
The trick is to get the house finished before the police arrive, since the law is that people cannot be evicted from any house on which there is a roof. And this gives De Sica opportunity for a busy race against time, in which serious and poignant complications are deftly blended with comical twists.
Lest credit be piled on De Sica, who merely directed and produced, let a share go to Cesare Zavattini, his favorite writer, who prepared the script. Brilliant bits of pictorial invention, such as people pausing in the middle of a dispute to cross themselves as a funeral passes or a quick shot of a homely girl's soaplathered face, aid the swift communication of penetrating ideas. And, combined with De Sica's sense of pathos, they make for a kind of poetry.
More of same is in the performances of the two "unknowns," Gabriella Pallotti and Giorgio Listuazi, who play the newlyweds. She is a lovely, sensitive youngster with a face as pure and warm as the sun, which reveals, in its clouded moments, the passage of difficult moods. And he is a tall, good-looking fellow with sudden aggressive attitudes that suggest the ambition and frustration of an honorable underprivileged youth.
Gastone Renzelli is excellent as a quick-tempered brother-in-law and Maria Sittoro brings understanding to the role of the mother of the lad. Several others give shape to credible characters in De Sica's famous neo-realist style, which makes "The Roof" a believable, as well as a deeply touching film.
MichaelDVD - Region 4 DVD review [Steve Crawford]
TWO WOMEN (La
Ciociara)
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review
Director Vittorio De Sica
(The Bicycle Thief, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) hits his
stride in this powerful 1961 story of a mother (Sophia Loren) and her daughter
who meet with tragedy and violence in the waning days of World War II. Loren
won a deserved Oscar for her performance as the life force encased in a
magnificent body, and De Sica has rarely done better work. In Italian with
subtitles. 99 min.
American cinema never learned how to exploit
Loren's voluptuously earthy appeal, as revealed here in her Oscar-winning
performance - the only actress to win this award for a foreign-language film.
The performance and the powerful narrative made the film one of the few foreign
pictures to enjoy real success in the
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Really depressing and well done, if that's what
you're into. Well done I said, but not great. I would definitely take issue
with anyone claiming this as Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece. Umberto D. would
be my choice and I wouldn't argue strongly against the consensus Ladri di
biciclette, both serious enough to be downers in their own right, but not
like this. Sophia Loren portrays strength, yes, but it never looks like it's
going to be nearly enough. She's marked, they're marked from the opening
frames. It's a remarkable performance and won her the big award but I suspect
that the voters were too suddenly taken by her character, and her,
more than even her performance. It's not, again, her greatest role or even her
greatest performance for De Sica, which would have to be Il Viaggio .
Please don't take this as knocking the film too much, only my preference
for…feeling good, being happy, art that inspires rather than depresses. May
strike others as artistic, strikes me as pointless. I guess it probably took a
lot of guts at the time to represent allies of the Allies this way, but it's
hardly surprising given what we now know about…well, the taking of Berlin for
example. War is bad and a lot of times women are collateral damage. I would
hope everyone already knows that, and doesn't need to be reminded in this way.
Turner Classic Movies review Felicia Feaster
In director Vittorio De Sica's acclaimed drama Two
Women (1960), set in 1943 Rome, the city is a continual target of Allied
bombs. With a fragile, sheltered 13-year-old daughter Rosetta (Eleonora Brown)
to protect, widow Cesira (Sophia Loren) decides to leave her small grocery
store and return to the relative safety of her native village Ciociara, in the
Italian countryside.
Though there are assorted dangers along the way, the women arrive safely in
Ciociara where they reintegrate themselves into the life of the community. They
befriend Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the earnest, Marxist son of a local
farmer and help two British soldiers stranded in the countryside. It is when
Cesira and Rosetta decide to return to Rome to escape the food shortages and
more bombs that De Sica's film shows the misery of war and how it almost
destroys the loving bond between mother and daughter. The villagers scatter,
setting out on different paths to safety and Michele is taken by a ragtag group
of German soldiers as a guide. In an isolated church where the women stop to
rest they are brutally raped by Allied Moroccan soldiers, an act which turns
the innocent, loving Rosetta into a blank-eyed stranger to her own mother.
Vittorio De Sica's earthy connection to the real travails of Italians living in
postwar Europe helped create the film genre of Italian Neo-Realism and
masterworks like Shoeshine (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto
D. (1952). The film was adapted from a 1957 novel by Alberto Moravia, La
Ciociara, which translates to "The Woman From Ciociara." The
novel was inspired by Moravia and his wife's experiences as antifascists during
World War II.
Sophia Loren won the first ever Oscar® awarded to a non-American actress in a
foreign language film for her role in Two Women as well as the Best
Actress Award at Cannes and from the British Film Academy and the New York Film
Critics Circle Awards. Stage fright kept Loren from actually attending the
Academy Awards to claim her statuette, so Greer Garson accepted the award on
Loren's behalf, heralding "this wildly beautiful and talented girl."
Loren attributed her searing, acclaimed performance in Two Women to
"sensory recall" and her own painful memories of wartime when Loren's
mother had fiercely protected her two illegitimate daughters from the terror in
her hometown of Pozzuoli, near Naples.
In Warren G. Harris's biography of Loren, she is quoted as saying "With my
own memories to draw upon, you would think I would have had an easy time of it.
But it was very hard for me to relive my girlhood terror and at the same time
to transform the reality of my feelings into the role I was acting. In memory,
I still looked at my experiences with the eyes and emotions of a girl, but the
role demanded that I see them with the eyes of a tortured woman."
Loren credited De Sica with emboldening her "to go far beyond where I had
ever gone before." She spoke fondly of the confidence the director gave
her to pull off such a difficult role and attested to seeing De Sica crying
along with her character at several points during the making of the film.
The great Italian legend Anna Magnani -- an illegitimate child like Loren who
had starred in De Sica's Teresa Venerdi (1941) -- was originally slated
for the lead in Two Women, with Loren cast as her daughter. But Magnani,
who was fifty-three at the time, refused what she saw as the professional
indignity of playing Loren's mother. The extent of Magnani's jealousy of being
possibly usurped by Loren as the celebrated star of the Italian cinema was
affirmed after she finally saw Two Women. Magnani remarked that Loren
had copied all of her own gestures and mannerisms.
The film's producer was Carlo Ponti, who had been romantically involved with
Sophia since she was a teenager. Ponti eventually obtained a divorce from his
first wife in Mexico, a divorce the Italian Catholic Church refused to
acknowledge, declaring Sophia and Carlo's relationship bigamous.
The original director attached to Two Women was George Cukor, though
Ponti had hoped to film on location in Ciociara with either De Sica or Roberto
Rossellini directing. It didn't work out but Ponti compensated Cukor by hiring
him to direct Loren's upcoming film, a Western based on a Louis L'Amour novel, Heller
in Pink Tights (1960).
To raise the money to make Two Women, Ponti worked on a coproduction
with a French company. But French regulations required that one of the stars be
of French nationality. And so Jean-Paul Belmondo, who had recently delighted
audiences in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), was retained to play
the part of Michele. Another actor had to dub the French-speaking actor's lines
in Italian, though Loren did her own dubbing into English for the American
release of Two Women.
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
George Chabot's Review of Two Women (La Ciociara)
Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web
All Movie Guide [Wheeler Winston Dixon]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE LAST JUDGMENT (Il Giudizio Universale)
Italy France (100 mi) 1961 ‘Scope
User comments from imdb Author: M. J Arocena from New Zealand
The great duo: Vittorio de Sica and
Cesare Zavatine present us with a hyper, neo-realistic, surreal vision of our
fears in a magic mixture of horrors and joyfulness. Black and white and color,
hope and desolation with an ensemble cast that it's as bizarre as it is
extraordinary. Alberto Sordi, Melina Mercouri, Vittorio Gassman, Anouk Aimee,
Jack Palance, Ernest Borgnine even Jimmy Durante and Renato Rascel. The
interconnecting vignettes have an inexorable point of reference. The end of the
world. The film, at times, appears to be a "divertimento" that builds
to something apocalyptic and finishes in a hurried fizzling note, but it is in
fact a superb exercise playing wittily with the fear of our ultimate and
unavoidable demise. Among the many delights that the film offers there is a
superlative performance by Alberto Sordi in one the most repellent characters
in his long collection of repellent characters. A strange, funny, unsettling
and fascinating film.
THE CONDEMNED OF ALTONA (I Sequestrati di Altona)
Italy
France (114 mi) 1962
‘Scope
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
An awful film, but one that will always be remembered for
getting Jean-Paul Sartre an Academy Award nomination (he lost). Based on
Sartre's play, it's the story of a dying German war profiteer (Fredric March)
and his two sons--one a swinger (Robert Wagner) married to an Italian movie
star (Sophia Loren), the other a psychotic ex-Gestapo agent (Maximilian
Schell). Needless to say, the opportunities for overacting do not go neglected,
especially under the laissez-faire direction of Vittorio De Sica (1963).
User comments from imdb Author: BarneyBergman from United States
This is a
darkly disturbing film of a Nazi war criminal, still wearing his German army
uniform, who is hidden in his father's house, and led to believe that World War
II is still going on. The ending of the movie is a bizarre mix of Fellini and
Capote. Schell escapes his "prison" and walks around the streets only
to be "shocked" that there is no destruction or war raging. He ends
up in a local theater and salutes an actor playing Hitler. I won't give the
ending away, but it's a shocking surprise ala Play Dirty or To Live and Die in
LA. The acting is great, the black and white film make the movie realistic and
it captures a time in history which hopefully is gone for ever. An excellent
film.
User comments from imdb Author: mlraymond from Durham NC
I only saw this film once, nearly forty
years ago, on television. I later read the original Sartre play in a drama
class, and found that the movie was reasonably faithful to the original. It is
apparently unavailable on home video, unfortunately.
I remember being fascinated by the compelling performance of Maximilian Schell
as the former Nazi officer who is believed dead, but actually hiding out in his
family's attic. His sister, for some reason ,lets him think the war is still
going on, twenty years later. She reads him made-up news bulletins about the
Allies' destruction of Germany, feeding his madness.
The most memorable scene was when the recluse Schell left the house, and went
out into the city for the first time in twenty years or more. People stare and
laugh at him, as he walks around the modern city in his old Nazi uniform. He is
bewildered by all the modern buildings and signs of prosperity in a Germany he
had believed utterly destroyed forever.In a particularly clever touch, he
somehow ends up in a theater, where a Nazi era satire is being performed. The
modern German audience laughs at the caricatured Hitler and his followers. As a
kid, I realized it was some kind of Hitler spoof, but the whole thing was in
German, and I had to guess at its significance. I now believe that it was most
likely a play within a play, namely a scene from the climax of Bertolt Brecht's
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. It's been a long time since I saw this film,
but it seems to me that Schell, in his madness and confusion, mistakenly
believes it's some kind of real Nazi rally, and starts saluting
"Hitler" , while the audience thinks he's part of the show.
It's unfortunate that this movie isn't available for a new audience to
appreciate. With any luck, it will come to home video eventually.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
BOCCACCIO ‘70
De
Sica segment: La Riffa (The Raffle)
Italy France (208 mi)
1962 omnibus film with 4 directors, Vittorio De Sica “La Riffa”
segment, Federico Fellini “Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio” segment, Mario
Monicelli “Renzo e Luciana” segment, and Luchino Visconti “Il Lavoro” segment
Probably the best
remembered of that exasperating sub-genre, the portmanteau film, largely
because the directors concerned (the undisputed heavyweights of their time) let
rip in their most vulgar styles in an attempt to recapture the spirit of
Boccaccio. The filmettes also reveal a startling fear of women in general.
Fellini's episode concerns an outsize Ekberg who steps out of a billboard
poster to torment an ineffectual puritan; while Visconti delivered a vicious
tale of a beautiful young wife (a stunning performance by Schneider) who takes
revenge on her husband by making him pay for her body. De Sica and Monicelli
went for broader, more traditional comedic effect - less pretentious, but
perhaps inevitably in this company, less memorable.
Being
There Magazine [Nathan Williams]
In 1962,
Inter-continental super-producers Cesare Zavattini, Carlo Ponti, and Joe Levine
dreamed up the idea of matching four top directors with four bombshells, all in
the style of the Renaissance poet, Boccaccio. They wrangled Fellini, Visconti,
De Sica, and b-level talent, Mario Monicelli, as well as a substantial budget
for their four-part (and nearly four-hour) tribute to gorgeous women. The
results are mixed, but the total film is better and more thematically coherent
than any other of the genre (if, at 208 minutes, a bit of a cinematic endurance
test).
Monicelli's segment, "Renzo and Luciana" is a touching depiction of
the difficulties of marriage in the modern industrial
Fellini's segment, "The Temptation of Dr. Antonio," produced between La
Dolce Vita and 8½ is disappointing. The good doctor is a moralist
who becomes obsessed with an Anita Ekberg poster, 50-foot Anita comes to life
to torment him, and a victory is won for sexual freedom. Despite some impressive
flourishes of style, the whole thing is relatively uninspired, and silly to the
point of inducing boredom. Fans of a certain early Scorsese short, however,
should note this as a source of inspiration.
Visconti's segment, "The Job," is easily the best of the quartet.
Contrasting strongly with the large-budget, on-location competition, Visconti's
film takes place entirely in a handful of small rooms. Romy Schneider, as a
countess who wants to earn her own living, is tremendous under Visconti's direction.
Also fascinating are small hints of the film he would shoot next, The
Leopard: (the relationship, the large dog, the novel itself on the couch).
De Sica bats clean-up with, "The Raffle," a depiction of a carnival
worker (Sophia Loren) who sells her sexual services via lottery. De Sica gets
success with the dangerous combination of the savvy Loren and his usual
assortment of non-actors. The dropped jaws at Loren's beauty isn't acting, it's
regular Italian men genuinely excited to be sharing space with her. Indeed,
without this charm, the film would be nothing more than an above average sitcom
episode.
The transfer is unexceptional, but not distracting in any way. The extras are
minimal (a mildly diverting interview with De Sica as the highlight) and the
sound is fine. Not an especially good introduction to any of these directors,
and not among their best work, but far from their worst. For fans of Italian
cinema, required viewing.
At the height of the craze for European art films when Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni were in peak form, super-producer Carlo Ponti dreamed up this omnibus opus, four lengthy short subjects each directed by a major talent. Clocking in at a whopping three hours and eighteen minutes, American importer Joseph E. Levine immediately lopped off Mario Monicelli opening episode, leaving a more easily distributed film by the three directors with bigger reputations among New York critics: Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.
Most American viewers have only seen Boccaccio '70 in this tryptich form, and usually pan-scanned in faded Television prints. The new DVD outfit NoShame Films (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) gives us this interesting landmark production at its full length, uncut, and in a brightly-colored transfer.
Renzo e Luciana: The marriage between low-income factory
workers Luciana and Renzo (Marisa Solinas and Germano Gilioli) is kept a secret
because of company rules. Their home life is frustrated by the lack of privacy,
or funds to buy any - that and the unwanted attentions of Luciana's pushy boss,
who assumes that she's available to be his girlfriend. Le tentazioni
The American trailer for Boccaccio '70 tries to explain that the title refers to what Boccaccio would come up with if he were to make a film in 1970; in other words, it's meaningless. What we get are four rather good mini-movies by top Italian filmmakers. There was some talk of Mario Monicelli's episode not fitting in with the others, but the obvious reason it was dropped from international distribution was to cut down the length of the film. If Monicelli's show seems different, it's because the other three each have a more exploitable sex element. The producer's natural favorite Sophia Loren does yet another of her big-tease-but-no-payoff farces, Romy Schneider provides some discreet but intoxicating near-nudity, and Anita Ekberg sends up her bosomy bombshell image from La Dolce Vita by appearing as a literal mountain of flesh, a Colossus of Sex.
Each episode presents a different facet of Italian art filmmaking of the time. Mario Monicelli's tale of frustrated newlyweds is a Neorealist exercise, sketching the day-to-day reality of love oppressed by economic concerns. Renzo and Luciana have to sneak across town to marry on a work break. As they can't afford a place of their own, the pair spend a miserable honeymoon surrounded by curious children and insensitive adults. If they want a drink when they dance, they should probably walk home. And all the while they must put up with the unwanted advances of Luciana's loutish office supervisor.
Monicelli's episode is handsomely produced and needs make no excuses, but viewers will probably be anxious to get on to the big names and sexy actresses of the later chapters. The chopping of this section by Joe Levine invites comparison with the Japanese horror omnibus Kwaidan. It was shorn of an entire chapter for American art houses as well. That spirit lived on in the Miramax company's routine editing of their foreign imports of the last fifteen years - Like Water for Chocolate, Italian for Beginners, etc.
The most famous episode is Federico Fellini's The Temptation of Dr. Antonio, the "1/2" in 8 & 1/2. Here's the first time we see Fellini's "crazy circus" filming style in all its glory, as Nino Rota's bouncy, maddening jingle Bevete più latte ("Drink more milk") provides the music for the mad parade of boy scouts, schoolgirls, nuns, firemen, jazz musicians and ordinary citizens that rallies around the giant billboard of "Anita" holding a glass of milk in a seductive pose. Fellini is taking time out from 'meaningful' epics to have a bit of fun and doesn't mind pulling in references from Frank Tashlin (remember Ekberg's mammary competition Jayne Mansfield holding the milk bottles in the suggestive cartoon The Girl Can't Help It?) and of course American science fiction films with Allison Hayes and Dorothy Provine as fifty-foot females on the prowl. Ekberg becomes the monstrous incarnation of the prudish Dr. Antonio's repressed desires - his 'enemy' is at one point revealed to be a lost mommy figure. Antonio is indulged and tolerated by even his conservative friends and Church officials also consider him a pest; he's as alone as the figure of St. George slaying the dragon that hangs on his wall. The episode is unique, highly enjoyable, and shows Fellini at his fun-loving best.
The most profound episode is Luchino Visconti's Il lavoro, a deft and thoughtful one-act that's modest in production value. The devastatingly beautiful Romy Schneider is the center of the show, before her dilution in comedies like What's New Pussycat? She totally eclipses Thomas (Tomas) Milian, who would later become a fixture in political Spaghetti westerns. This chapter makes a Boccaccio-esque comparison between a wife and a whore, as Schneider's pampered frau discovers her real place in her fairy-tale of a marriage. The husband whines and pleads for his straying to be ignored and his allowance untouched, which prompts Schneider to put him to the test. It's all conveyed through costume changes and elaborate 'business' in their palatial home, with servants serving food, starting baths and rounding up Schneider's collection of kittens. She acts nonchalant and teases her insolent hubby with her body, while revealing several layers of inner disillusion and disappointment. Visconti pulls off an almost perfect character analysis, without the grandiose trappings of his other masterpieces (Senso, The Leopard, The Damned) . Schneider's wife never says explicitly what she has in mind but her crushed, rueful look when Milian thoughtlessly falls into her trap expresses much more. It's a masterful sequence that sums up A Doll's House in just a few telling moments.
The final chapter is a light comedy in Vittorio De Sica's 'down
in the streets' mode. If I were Italian I might wonder just how condescending
is the director's typing of common folk as mostly sweet but crude buffoons.
Sophia Loren's unlikely gutter princess is just another side of beef in a
stockyard fair, the grand prize in a blind raffle. Prospective lechers of all
shapes and sizes show up to "see the goods" as if they were
inspecting a prize heifer. In an inspired bit of sex-play, the writers contrive
to make Loren remove her red blouse so as not to arouse a mad bull. The bull
calms down but the assembled Italian cowpokes are aroused en masse by
the sight of the star's (obviously custom-fit) underwear. As in a number of
other sex farces with Ms. Loren the episode has to be all tease. Events
conspire to make sure that the meek churchgoer with the winning ticket doesn't
collect his prize, and that the naughty girl's profits are returned, etc. The
fun here will depend greatly on one's attraction to
Showing up in various bits throughout the show are name actors Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Paolo Stoppa (practically a cameo) and Romolo Valli; the amusing gallery of sad sacks in La Riffa are said to be non-professionals.
Turner Classic Movies Paul Sherman
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson)
Monsters At Play Gregory S. Burkart
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [5/5] Daulton Dickey
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
DVD Beaver Gary W. Tooze
II BOOM
User comments from imdb Author: kristen skullerud (kskuller@tiscalinet.it) from Rome,Italy
Sweet-sour comedy on
The whole film is a grotesque comedy on Italy's obsession of those times to be
"respectable" i.e. be rich, show it, and give the impression of being
part of the respectable upper-middle class even though "secretly" you
are just another of those "noveau riches". The film is very realistic
and at times hilarious! Worth to see!
YESTERDAY,
TODAY, AND TOMORROW (Leri, Oggi, Domain)
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review
[4/5] Daulton Dickey
Late in “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”
Marcello Mastroianni plays a business man who’s traveled three hundred miles to
bed Sophia Loren’s precocious prostitute. But she has unwittingly become the
object of her neighbor’s affection, a young man who is on his way to seminary
school. Obsessed with Loren, this boy is ready to give up priesthood in order
to be with her. Distraught, his grandmother pays Loren a visit, and Loren makes
a vow to give up sex for one week and convince the boy to do the right thing
and follow a higher calling.
Now we return to Marcello Mastroianni, frustrated, trying everything in his power to get Loren in the sack. Desperate for sex, he is the comedic gem in this piece, stomping around the apartment, grunting, sighing, and throwing his hands in the air. The poor man wants a lay, and damn it if he can’t get it.
“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” winner of the 1964 Academy Award
for best foreign film, is a comedic anthology of three sex related pieces
starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in each of the three shorts.
Playing different characters in different parts of
In the first story, we meet Loren and Mastroianni as two peasants. Loren hocks cigarettes in a local marketplace while Mastroianni is an out of work soldier. Trouble occurs when Loren is faced with jail time for committing fraud. Pregnant, she soon learns that she cannot be arrested as long as she’s carrying a child. So she exploits this loophole and decides to get pregnant every nine months.
Cut to five children later: with a grand total of seven kids, Loren is intent on bearing as many children as possible to skirt prison, but Mastroianni, poor Mastroianni, is sexually exhausted, providing a brilliant contrast to the randy character he plays in the last chapter. His wife’s demands are too great. The poor man cannot “breed” on demand. And when he finds great difficulties in maintaining a sexual relationship with his wife, she is faced with an all-too real reality of going to prison.
The middle story features Loren as a bored, wealthy snob who despises the lower class, even though she is having an affair with a man of limited means. The man, Mastroianni once again, is tired of Loren’s horrible attitude toward lower class men and women, and their back and forth is tense and often subtly rude.
This story is certainly the weakest of the three, and prevents the film as a whole from being an out and out masterpiece. It goes nowhere and seems to exist despite its lack of a real point. It’s just there, which is not always a bad thing, hell, some films work entirely on that level, but viewed in the context of the other two stories, this one just doesn’t hold up.
“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” is a clever film about relationships without getting heavy handed or ham fisted. The movie works well as a sublime comedy about the battle of the sexes and the variety of reasons people rely on sex. It is a relatively simple film with sharply defined characters who each go through a small change of some kind—though the changes are never ballyhooed or brought to the viewers’ attention.
Vittorio De Sica is a master storyteller who takes his time in developing his characters and situations. He trusts the audience to be as intelligent and as understanding of this world he’s created as he is, and he is in no hurry to second guess the audience, or to speed up the film on their behalf. And the man is a fantastic shooter who knows how to fill a frame without drawing attention to his compositions.
“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” is a fun, at times charming, film about relationships and the S word. And if that doesn’t sell the flick, then perhaps Sophia Loren doing a striptease will.
Yesterday,
Today and Tomorrow - TCM.com
Rob Nixon
Although many Italian reviewers considered the risqué comic
anthology Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963, aka Ieri, oggi,
domani) beneath the talents of director Vittorio De Sica and writer Cesare
Zavattini, it was a big hit with the public at home and abroad and earned an
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a Best Foreign Actor Award
from the British Academy for Marcello Mastroianni. The director who created the
landmark neo-realist works Shoeshine (1946), The Bicycle Thief
(1948), and Umberto D. (1952) was viewed with "sorrow" by one
Italian critic who noted both De Sica's "decline" and the
"difficulty in trying new ways" exhibited by Zavattini, who had
written those great De Sica works as well as a number of other classics.
Another critic said of De Sica, "The great patriarch's sun has set and he
doesn't realize it." Not everyone in Italy agreed; the picture was given the
Donatello Award (the country's top film prize) as Best Production, and it was
one of the biggest box office hits of the year.
Impressive behind-the-camera credits notwithstanding, the real attraction, of
course, were the two leads. Sophia Loren was at the time one of the biggest
global stars, with tremendous success at home, in Hollywood (where she made a
dozen films between 1957 and 1960), and in big international co-productions
like the costume epic El Cid (1961). She had returned to Europe in the
early 60s, further cementing her stardom there in Boccaccio '70 (1962),
another sexy anthology that featured a number of well-known European actors and
direction by the likes of De Sica, Fellini, and Visconti. She also won the
Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the young refugee mother in
De Sica's Two Women (1960), based on the novel La Ciociara by the
great Roman writer Alberto Moravia.
Mastroianni had also come up through the ranks of the Italian film industry,
beginning as an extra in the early 1940s and eventually becoming the epitome of
the jaded, smoldering leading man with a keen talent for comedy, achieving
global recognition through his work with Fellini and Antonioni.
The two had not appeared together since Lucky to Be a Woman (1956), and
their reunion proved to be a delight. They play lovers in three vignettes, each
telling a tale set in a different city. In the Naples-based "Adelina"
segment, she is a black-market cigarette dealer and he is her unemployed
husband, compelled to keep her pregnant to take advantage of an Italian law
preventing the imprisonment of expectant mothers. In "Anna," Loren is
a wealthy, bored Milanese woman who picks up and discards writer Mastroianni as
her temporary lover. And in "Mara," she plays a Roman prostitute who,
upon falling for a chaste young seminarian, takes a vow of abstinence, driving
her most frequent client (Mastroianni) to utter distraction.
Although there is no evidence of her sorrow on screen, Loren was upset over one
of several failed attempts to have a baby with Carlo Ponti, her husband and the
film's producer. During production of the "Adelina" segment, she
realized she was pregnant. Because of numerous earlier difficulties, her doctor
ordered several days of bed rest and banned all automobile travel. To
accommodate this, she traveled by train from Naples to Milan. The episode shot
in that city, however, took place largely in a car, a luxurious Rolls-Royce
Silver Cloud (the actress was allowed to keep it after shooting ended). The
scenes were shot in a studio with rear projection, but the car was mounted on a
hydraulic lift to simulate the bumps and jolts of driving, and Loren suffered a
miscarriage in the fourth month of her pregnancy. Loren and Ponti would have to
wait another five years before the birth of their first child.
The "Mara" segment (the first filmed, based on a story by Moravia)
contains a scene that has become iconic for both stars: a torrid striptease
Loren does for Mastroianni, so sexy and provocative that he howls like a wild
animal. The international sex symbol had never actually seen a stripper perform
before and was nervous about doing the bit. De Sica arranged for Jacques Ruet,
the choreographer for the legendary Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, to fly to Rome
and instruct Loren. "I had three or four sessions with him to learn the
basic moves, struts, and teases," she recalled. "But then, using
those routines, I had to mold them, with De Sica's help, into my own personal
interpretation." Clad only in two layers of sexy black lingerie, she
insisted the set be cleared the day of the shoot. Nervous as she was, she
performed the routine to everyone's great satisfaction, even hers. "No
scene ever gave me more pleasure," she said. So fixed was the moment in
the minds of audiences, and so sexy and appealing were the stars even more than
30 years later, that Robert Altman had them spoof the scene in his
multi-character satire on the fashion industry, Prêt-à-Porter (1994).
Just as the production was about to move to Naples, the real-life counterpart
of "Adelina" threatened to shut down production unless she received
compensation. Concetta Musscardo, aka "Black Market Connie," was such
a local legend for her tendency to get pregnant every time she got in trouble
with the law that the filmmakers thought it would be no problem to fictionally
recreate such a public figure. Because she reportedly had friends in the feared
Neapolitan crime syndicate, the Camorra, Ponti agreed to pay her two million
lire (then about $3,200) for her story.
De Sica and His Dynamic Duo Do What They Do Best: Close-Up on ... Jeremy Carr from Mubi, January 8, 2017
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review
Monsters At Play (Gregory S. Burkart) dvd review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
MARRIAGE
ITALIAN-STYLE (Matrimonio all'Italiana)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
The interest is all in the cast as Sophia Loren chases
Marcello Mastroianni through this predictable 1964 Italian farce, directed by
Vittorio De Sica in weak imitation of Pietro Germi's black comedy, Divorce--Italian
Style. Devoid of the protective coloring of neorealism, De Sica's style--as
it does so often in his late films--seems heavy and sluggish.
A wonderfully silly comedy about a conniving mistress (Loren) and her stupidly vain lover of 20 years (Mastroianni). He is about to marry his nubile young fiancé but gets a message that Loren is on her deathbed. He dashes to her side and in a weak-minded moment, convinced of her imminent death, promises that he will marry her. Of course, she recovers almost immediately, holds him to his promise - and presents him with three grown-up sons. If De Sica can find a joke, he goes for it, and is gleefully joined by his stars.
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States
MARRIAGE Italian STYLE is a glossy
rendition of Eduardo De Filippo's Neapolitan play "Filumena Marturano",
which he himself had made into a film in 1951. In this 1964 version Sophia
Loren and Marcello Mastroianni take the roles previously played by Eduardo and
Titina De Filippo. The story deals with the long love affair between a wealthy,
arrogant and selfish Neapolitan businessman (Marcello Mastroianni) and the
seemingly ignorant ex-prostitute (Loren) who attempts to trick him into
marriage by pretending to be dying and then bouncing back to life. She does all
this because she wants to guarantee a better life for her three semi-secret
children. One of her children is his, she tells him. Which one, she will never
say.
To say that Mastroianni and Loren had on-screen chemistry is an enormous
understatement. They are both as marvelous together here as is other films
together, most notably YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW and A SPECIAL DAY. For me
one of the best moments in the film is Loren's walk down a sidewalk in
User comments from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA
"Marriage Italian Style" is director Vittorio De Sica's
fourth collaboration with the actress Sophia Loren. Loren's sensual exiting
beauty, fine comic timing, combined with a brilliant script and the rare
chemistry with the co-star Marcello Mastroianni makes the film an excellent
combination of a sparkling and amusing farce and a poignant drama of one
woman's life and struggles in the post-war Italy. As Domenico Soriano, a
wealthy, arrogant and selfish Neapolitan businessman, Mastroianni is on the
verge of marrying a younger woman when he hears that his long time mistress,
ex-prostitute Filomena, is on her deathbed. He rushes to her side and agrees to
marry Filomena in hopes to soon become a widower but when she recovers "miraculously"
he recognizes that her illness was only a trick. Then, in her flashbacks, we
learn that she did it for the sake of her three children of whom Domenico knew
nothing about and one of them (or maybe all) could be his... Mastroianni and
Loren had perhaps the best on-screen chemistry ever; it is delight to see them
together in this film as well as in "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow"
and "The Sunflowers" - little known but wonderful Soviet - Italian
film, both by Vittorio De Sica. I also liked them together in Altman's
"Prêt-à-Porter" (1994) aka "Ready to Wear". One scene in
Marriage Italian Style should be on the list of the best ever filmed - young
Filomena walks down a sidewalk in
User comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
Starting with
"Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" in 1963, Marcello Mastroianni and
Sophia Loren began a series of films together that were the comic equivalents
of the series of movies made by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in the
1940s to 1966. The comparison is an apt one, surprisingly, because the two sets
of performers perfectly complemented each other in their films together and literally
examined the relationship of man and woman in these films beyond most of their
contemporaries. If the Italians were able to be more explicit about sexual
relations than the Americans were, I remind the reader that in "Sea of
Grass" the paternity of Tracy and Hepburn's son Robert Walker becomes a
questionable matter to the former, and in "Adam's Rib" Hepburn's last
comments about the similarities of man and women boil down to only one major
difference (a small one - she does not say a penis but it is hinted).
"Matrimonio all'italiana" ("Marriage, Italian Style") is
based on a play by writer and actor Eduardo de Filippo, and is not a sequel to
Mastroianni's great international breakthrough comedy "Divorce, Italian
Style". The latter had dealt with a Sicilian baron manipulating events and
people to set up an unwanted wife into the position of being adulterous so that
he could "legally" kill her and be free to marry a younger female
cousin. "Marriage, Italian Style" deals with responsibility and
growing old. It's a serious theme actually, and there are moments when the film
turns serious with stunning effect (when Loren confronts Mastroianni on his
suspicions and behavior towards her and her sons). The conclusion is not funny
but given the antics of the entire film understandable and true.
Loren is Filumena Maturiano, a young woman who became a prostitute towards the
end of World War II. She meets Domenico Soriano (Mastroianni), a hard headed
businessman in a brothel in 1945 and a long term sexual relationship develops
(though there is a two year gap at the start). Domenico treats Filumena as a
sex object, but she is a smart woman and soon rises to be his business assistant,
helping him run a series of stores (several of them bakeries or coffee shops).
After twenty two years he tells her he is planning to settle down and marry a
younger employee. But Domenico is informed by another employee, Alfredo (Aldo
Puglesi) that Filumena is dying. Domenico runs to her bedside, and agrees to
her dying wish to marry. But as soon as the ceremony is over Filumena rises
from the bed and tells Domenico that she isn't dying, but now they are finally
married. Furious Domenico tells her he will get the marriage annulled as it was
under false pretenses.
She has her options - Alfredo has known her as long as Domenico, and offers to
marry her if she wishes. She thanks her friend but she explains that she has
another real secret to unload on Domenico. Eventually she explains to him that
she had three sons, and one of them is Domenico's. The boys have been brought
up separately, and she is now getting them together for the first time.
Domenico is naturally quite interested in this situation, but when he asks
which of the three boys is his Filumena acts quite coy, and later more
belligerent.
She finally explodes, pointing out to Domenico that if she ever tells him which
of the boys is his, the two half-brothers who are not Domenico's will grow up
to hate the third half-brother. This doesn't register at first, so Domenico
tries to find out by himself, with some very comic results (in trying to
compare his hand with one of the boys, all he ends up doing is overhearing the
boy tell a co-worker that Donenico must be a homosexual). Gradually it does
sink in that he has no right to put the three boys and Filumena through the
ringer trying to pick out his actual son. In the end Domenico remarries
Filumena, but one sees after the ceremony that while it is her victory it is
not a complete one - Domenico is far from totally pleased that he has had to
accept a situation that he never had any control over. Our last sight of them
is of Domenico looking exhausted and old, and Filumena crying - possibly for
joy at her victory, but just as likely out of realization that this is going to
be a difficult marriage.
Believe it or not "Marriage, Italian Style" is a comedy but one that
is grown up in it's sensibilities. There are no quick remedies here - just like
Domenico could not find a quick solution as to which of the three sons was his
real son. One likes the final result of the film, as it is a realistic result
of the battle of the sexes waged by the two protagonists, but the final results
are funny only in the most extreme cynical way. It is hardly a merry ending.
Still for a solid entertainment "Marriage, Italian Style" is hard to
beat.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
AFTER THE FOX
(Caccia alla Volpe)
Try to imagine a comic
farce co-scripted by one of the founding fathers of Italian neo-realism, Cesare
Zavattini, and a wisecracking Jewish playwright, Neil Simon.
Pretty funny, yes? No! Ill-fated international co-production isn't in it: we
are talking turkey here as master criminal The Fox (Sellers) escapes from jail
into streets full of excitable Italians, executes a gold bullion robbery and
saves his sister's honour. Marginally enlivened by Mature's witty self-mockery
as a beefcake movie star fretting over his fading charms.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States
I recall this film when I saw it once
on television in the early 1970s. While I see it has gotten many favorable
write-ups on this thread, I have to admit it disappointed me. It was that long,
long (too long) series of third rate films that Sellers got involved in after
his peak in the middle 1960s, when only an occasional film ("The Wrong
Box", "There's A Girl In My Soup") reminded people of the comic
and acting genius he was. In my memory the only good performance was that of
Victor Mature as the aging actor, who is best recalled by the public in that he
is always in a role wearing a trench coat. The highpoint of Mature's
performance is when he, Balsam, and several others are stuck in a car that is
stalled on a railway track, with a train bearing down on it - and Mature is
screaming the most. Finally the train passes them and they are safe. Everyone
is just silent and sweaty from their near-thing ordeal, and Mature suddenly
smiles and acts as though he could have told them not to worry.
But the best line I remember deals with Sellers and fellow conman Akim
Tamiroff. Sellers has to introduce Tamiroff (named "Mr. Okra") to
Mature, Balsam, Britt Eckland, and the others on the film set. He says, with
great formality, "This is Mr. Okra...inventor of
"Okrascope"." I am still waiting to see what
"Okrascope" was.
Turner Classic Movies review Genevieve McGillicuddy
Most
avid fans of Italian cinema may already be familiar with such Vittorio De Sica
classics as The Bicycle Thief (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951) and
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971). In stark contrast to those, After the Fox (1966) is an anomaly in De Sica's career - a comedy
starring Peter Sellers, then at the height of his international career. Sellers
plays "the Fox," a somewhat inept character reminiscent of the famous
Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther comedies.
An incompetent thief, "the Fox" breaks out of jail to arrange for the
transfer of $3 million in gold from Cairo to Rome. Hiding in various disguises
(prison doctor, Italian policeman, New Wave film director, to name a few), Fox
cooks up a plan to "film" a movie in which the gold is transferred in
a "scene." He crosses paths with an aging star played by none other
than Victor Mature, who came out of retirement to poke fun at his own screen
persona.
In an odd twist of casting, Britt Ekland, the Swedish model and ingenue, plays
Fox's sister, donning a brunette wig to play an Italian. Sellers was
responsible for the hiring of Ekland, who was then the second Mrs. Sellers. The
final swingin' '60s touch is provided by Burt Bacharach's irresistible score
featuring a duet between the Hollies and Peter Sellers on the theme song.
Unfortunately, during the filming Sellers was neurotic and unpredictable. Days
after production began, he tried to have De Sica removed from the picture and
argued constantly with Ekland. One evening, he even threw a chair at Ekland,
who took temporary refuge in the rented home of Neil Simon, who was responsible
for the screenplay of After the Fox.
Simon later recalled his screenwriting debut as an experience reminiscent of a
Marx Brothers comedy and has acknowledged that the film retains a "cult"
following. As Simon notes in his autobiography, De Sica always began shooting
late in the day and had a penchant for phoning the local casino to place bets.
He and his Italian crew also entertained a host of superstitions on the set --
at one point, when a frustrated Mature threw his script into the ocean, a
priest was summoned to bless the soggy sheets.
After the Fox takes its place among the
unofficial genre of wacky '60s comedies (such as Candy, 1968; The
Magic Christian, 1969; Skidoo, 1968) that feature an unlikely
combination of director, actors and offbeat storyline. The results make for a
unique, if bizarre, testament to the melting pot that was '60s culture.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
erratica.co.uk Matt B
Don Ignacio's Movie Reviews (Michael Lawrence) capsule review [C-]
Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review
WOMAN TIMES
SEVEN
Italy France
USA (100 mi) 1967
Seven episodes putting seven aspects of a woman's personality on
display. If watching Shirley MacLaine in all seven roles getting it on (or not)
with seven different men sounds like your cup of tea, look no further. However
Woman Times Seven is uneven and even the direction by De Sica, who occasionally
was too prolific for his own good, doesn't add sufficient wit and charm to make
this of more than academic interest to those not doting on MacLaine. After this
effort she probably never had to go an audition again, having made the perfect
showreel displaying all her possible moods from A to G.
It's difficult enough doing one role well, but playing several parts in the same movie is a nearly impossible feat requiring the talents of an Alec Guinness or a Peter Sellers. MacLaine had not yet achieved the maturity or the acting ability to bring this off, and the result is just ol' Shirl' in a host of different costumes, hairstyles, and makeup. Shot on location in Paris with interiors at the Boulogne Studios, this set out to be a tour de force but ends up only a tour de France.
In the first segment, she's a widow accompanying the coffin of her late husband to the cemetery; on the way, she finds romance with old friend Sellers. The second piece has MacLaine returning to her home to find her husband, Brazzi, cavorting in the sack with another woman. She storms out and learns some lessons about men from the local streetwalkers. Next, MacLaine is seen as a hippie who attracts the competing sexual attentions of Gassman and Grey, resulting in some lubricious games. In the fourth segment, MacLaine is a grumpy housewife married to Barker, a successful author of trashy novels that feature a wild, passionate heroine. In order to compete with this fantasy figure, she tries to be equally impulsive, but only succeeds in convincing everyone she's gone mad. The fifth episode has MacLaine as a rich Parisian matron plotting to foil a social rival, Adrienne Corri, in a dispute over a designer gown. In No. 6, MacLaine and Alan Arkin are lovers married to other people who make an ill-fated suicide pact. The final section of the film has MacLaine, married to Noiret, out shopping with her best pal, Anita Ekberg. When MacLaine spots Caine watching her, she's flattered that such a handsome man would find her attractive--never dreaming that Caine has been hired to keep an eye on her by her jealous husband.
All of the segments, save the first, run between 14 and 16 minutes. The funeral episode goes about eight minutes, which is all it's worth. Ortolani's music is second-rate, but the rest of the technical credits are all excellent. Special note should be taken of Alex Archambault's hairstyles and the makeup work done by Alberto De Rossi and Georges Bouban. Although Marcel Escoffier gets credit for the well-planned costumes, it was Pierre Cardin who designed MacLaine's gowns.
DVD
Verdict (Tom Becker) dvd review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
AMANTI (A
Place for Lovers)
Italy France
(88 mi) 1968
User comments from imdb Author: Alonso Duralde from Dallas, TX
One of the biggest disasters ever to be
perpetrated by a major film-maker, Vittorio de Sica's "Amanti"
("A Place for Lovers") is a wheezy romance involving Faye Dunaway --
as an ultra-glam fashion designer -- and Marcello Mastroianni -- as a married
man who has an affair with Faye, not realizing that she's dying from one of
those mysterious Hollywood Starlet terminal diseases. The production design is
fabulous, but the acting and the script are not to be believed.
User comments from imdb Author: Ismar Tirelli Neto (mister_sebastian@yahoo.com) from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
... is a
rather odd and thankless task. I never dreamt of thinking about the likes of
Vittorio De Sica, Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni without using the
highest of praise, but this uninteresting, plodding 1969 film provided me with
a chance to do so.
This film is proof that the unthinkable, what we judge to be impossible and
beyond imagination, can happen.
Dunaway is Julia, a peculiar, to say the least, american woman who makes a
living out of designing gowns, who has an affair with Valerio, a married
italian engineer working on the development of the airbag.
They're rich, they're glamorous, they're beautiful, they're in love... nothing
could part them. Except Julia is suffering from a terminal illness, and is
bound to die in a matter of days.
Sticking to the basic rules of screenwriting as I know them, this movie is
irritatingly plodding. We only discover that Julia is dying towards the end, and
we never know whose is the main dilemma - Julia's or Valerio's. Should they
stick together and face bravely Julia's last days on Earth? is the main query,
I guess. The only problem is that this query, this dilemma, is presented to the
audience in the last twenty minutes of film, and resolved - better yet,
unresolved - in the last five. The other 70 minutes or so of film are spent as
they stay together and play amusing little games with each other. A time in
which the five writers of the film could easily delve into their main
characters psyches - if anything else - is wasted. Julia's just plain weird and
depressed, and Valerio seems terribly cold and unfeeling.
It also clearly aspires to be profound. It aims at being something lyric, but,
trapped inside it's own pretentious attitude, it becomes a schmaltzy
tearjerker.
The acting is not bad at all, though. But the script provides Dunaway and
Mastroianni with little chance to showcase their many talents. Also, the set
designs are gorgeous, as mentioned by the first reviewer, and the soundtrack is
lovely. The title song, written by Manuel De Sica - hail, nepotism! - is sung
by none other than Ella Fitzgerald.
Well, all in all, this movie is a bizarre one, but it is worth viewing
nevertheless, mainly as existing proof that nothing - I mean, nothing - is
impossible. :)
Movieline Magazine review Edward Margulies
Even if she'd never played Joan Crawford, Faye Dunaway would
forever be a Bad Movie goddess for the indelible trio of haute couture hellcats
she essayed in three quite terrible films. There was the fashion model in Puzzle
of a Downfall Child. Then came the fashion photographer in Eyes of Laura
Mars. And utterly in a class by itself is the fashion designer in 1968's
deadly A Place for Lovers. The fashionista heroine of this frighteningly
European tale has long since fallen victim to ennui by the time we meet her.
She spends hours of what feels like real time wandering through the
empty halls of a villa in the Italian countryside, meaningfully
"lost."
When she spots "just about" married engineer Marcello Mastroianni on
TV and recalls that he once tried to pick her up, she impulsively phones him
and he impulsively speeds down to the villa. Before he can say a word, Dunaway
announces that he may only spend two days with her. "I know you must want
to ask me all kinds of questions," she says to him. "Like, why I
telephoned you? I had an impulse to see you, maybe because for awhile anyway, I
need to be with people I don't know--strangers--in unfamiliar places that don't
remind me of anything... Then there are times in life when nothing is
important, and everything is important, and the simplest things can be the most
confusing." Whew! This blast of existential hot air promptly puts
both stars to sleep--and beware, it could have the same effect on you.
Before long, though, Mastroianni gets himself on Dunaway's
philosophical wavelength: "Why two days? Why not four or five?"
Dunaway replies, "In 10 days I have to go back to America. It's up to you
to ask me for the rest." She then shows him consideration not extended to
the audience: "I can't expect you to stay if you become bored with me in a
day or two."
Because this is a frighteningly European movie, the villa turns out to be
overflowing with decadent party hounds straight out of La Dolce Vita.
One of them entertains the dinner table with an X-rated slide show depicting
statues in various sexual positions, after which everyone plays a parlor game
involving mate-swapping for quickie sex. "The seven minutes each couple is
given," we're told, "represents a magic suspension from the endless
monotony of everyday life." Or the endless monotony of this
movie--whichever comes first. When Dunaway looks eager to play, a shocked
Mastroianni flees the scene. What kind of woman would cheat on her lover
while he's cheating on his fiancee, anyway?
Soon reunited with his lover and showing signs of the wear and tear entailed in
keeping company with her, Mastroianni giddily smears greasepaint all over
Dunaway's face, whining, "You Americans, the more you paint up, the better
you are. You're still Indians--you'll never change." In a frighteningly
European way, the mood then shifts, and in an extended happy-lovers montage,
Mastroianni, home movie camera in hand, films and films and films
Dunaway. Finally, she takes the words right out of our mouths: "Don't you
have enough of my face already?"
Such bliss can't last, of course. One of Dunaway's intimates
phones Mastroianni to tell him the secret she doesn't want him to know:
"She's ill, seriously ill--it's a matter of days." Turns out
Dunaway's suffering from Gorgeous Movie Star Malady, that disease where, as the
end draws near, the supernova appears lovelier than ever. "Come
dance," she coos to her lover, putting on a record. "It's a
spiritual. You dance and you pray at the same time." Whereupon she and
Mastroianni groove so soulfully to an African-American spiritual that you find
yourself praying for her to die immediately. Then, suddenly, Dunaway
intuits that Mastroianni knows. "Don't look at me. I can't take any
more sad eyes. I don't want a grieving nurse sitting on the edge of my bed in
pity!" Not about to leave the overacting to Dunaway, Mastroianni roars,
"What pity? I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU!" Whereupon they make
passionate European love on the coffee table.
Dunaway doesn't die nearly soon enough. The fates allow her time to do things
like run through the snow in her high heels. The actress wrote of the
torrid affair she had with Mastroianni during the making of this film in her
1995 biography, noting, "Oh, we laughed so much, Marcello and I."
Faye, darling, so did we.
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1.5/4]
SUNFLOWER (I
Girasoli)
Italy France
Russia (101 mi) 1970
Time
Out review
Tom Milne
Excruciating tosh in which Loren plays a
bereft Italian spouse wandering over what feels like the whole of Russia
looking for hubby Mastroianni, who never returned after serving on the Russian
front in World War II. Much picturesque scenery and soul-searching later, she finds
him with a Russian wife, a child, and amnesia. Off she slogs back to Italy to
forget, marry, have a child. At which point guess who turns up, having
remembered? It's much worse than it sounds.
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd
review also seen here: Turner Classic Movies dvd review reviewing the Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection
I Girasole is a bittersweet
melodrama definitely out of step with film trends in 1970. Many Italians fought
and died on the Russian front in WW2, and Vittorio De Sica's film stars Loren
and Marcello Mastroianni as a married couple separated by the conflict. Antonio
feigns insanity to keep from being shipped to Africa, but is found out and sent
to the Russian front. He fails to return, and ten years later Giovanna journeys
to Russia to search for him. She's convinced that he somehow survived, and by a
strange chain of events finds him in a small town in the Ukraine. But the story
is far from resolved.
De Sica steers the film away from bathos with his straightforward direction,
aided by Loren's good acting. It's still a drawn-out handkerchief picture, with
every sad scene backed by Henry Mancini's tender music score. The movie also
functions as a Russian travelogue, with scenes filmed in Red Square. Out in the
countryside we see an immense field of sunflowers (in Italian, Girasoli)
covering a mass grave of Italian dead. A poem on a monument asks, "Why did
you soldiers from Naples leave your beautiful Mediterranean to die in the snows
of Russia?"
The narrative is more than a little lumpy. A stock footage war montage goes on
seemingly forever, and the third act wanders aimlessly in search of an acceptable
climax. One inessential episode showing a Russian family moving into a new
apartment complex might have been imposed on the film by the Russian
authorities. Fans of soapy romances will find the show highly enjoyable.
The print of I Girasoli is grainy, with okay color. Giuseppe Rotunno's
cinematography has an almost documentary look for exteriors but uses expressive
shadows in a reunion scene in a darkened apartment. The movie appears to be
full-length.
The Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection wraps up with a
featurette that discusses the actresses' life, showing only clips from the four
films and filling in with largely irrelevant historical detail. A limited
number of stills are repeated several times each, as are some stock shots.
Loren's children and the producer of I Girasoli appear, along with some
knowledgeable historians.
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection
DVD Verdict- Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection [Dylan Charles]
PopMatters [Erik Hinton] Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection
theDVDLounge [Joe Corey3rd] Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THE GARDEN OF
THE FINZI-CONTINIS
Time Out review Tom Milne
De Sica's
most watchable film in years of crude farces and coarse melodramas. Based on
the novel by Giorgio Bassani and set in Ferrera in 1938, it deals with the net
of persecution that gradually closes in on Italian Jews as Mussolini models his
state ever more closely on Hitler's
Nashville Scene (Noel Murray) review
As lovely and
brittle now as it was when it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of
1971, this newly restored Vittorio de Sica classic deserves to be rediscovered
in its latest video release. Set in pre-World War II Italy, the story revolves
around a wealthy Jewish family living behind great stone walls on the main
street of a village. The protagonist is Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a
working-class youth dealing with his political awakening and with his romantic
feelings for the remote, capricious Micol Finzi-Contini (the lovely Dominique
Sanda, who looks as though she were carved into the marble walls of her
character's lush estate). On one level, the film is a harsh critique of
classism, particularly in the face of an evolving fascist state. On another,
more engaging level, it's a film about longing--both for the unattainable
things of the present and for the imagined stability of the past.
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
Vittorio de Sica's essay on the fate of Jews under fascism, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is deceptively beautiful to look at, deceptively bittersweet in tone. Not accidental deceptions these, but deliberate, calculated constructions by de Sica to put into ironic perspective the history of the time as the story evolves to its inevitable conclusion.
Two families. The aristocratic and wealthy Finzi-Continis, living behind high walls in a luxurious chateau, retain at least some of their Jewish identity as seen in their observation of Passover. As with many Jews in the diaspora, the family identifies as Italian, as well as Jewish. The same is true of the second, upper middle class family whose elder son has been the friend of the Finzi-Contini daughter, Micol, since childhood and now suffers from his unrequited love for her. Micol, played by Dominique Sanda, is aloof, even teasing; she seems an ice princess.
From the start, de Sica provides evidence of encroachments by the anti-Semitic fascist regime of Mussolini on this group of privileged Jews, who remain in varying degrees of denial as their freedoms are pared away one by one, until, finally, they are confronted with the ugliest of realities. If the wealth of the Finzi-Continis seems to give them greater protection at first, it becomes clear in the end that those who are different will find no garden in which to hide for long.
The idyllic settings, lush music, and hot house atmosphere of the film become a stark contrast to the fate of the beautiful and privileged inhabitants within.
Hailed when first released, and the winner of an academy award, this film seems to some extent to have fallen from current critical favor. While it may not have the tightness, conviction, and sheer power of de Sica's Bicycle Thief, it remains a highly effective piece of work by an always interesting and thoughtful filmmaker.
User comments from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal
In this haunting work by Vittoria De
Sica an aristocratic Italian-Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, serve as a
symbol of European civilization in the hands of the brown shirts on the eve of
World War II. Seeing it again after thirty years I find myself saddened almost
as much by the story of a stillborn, unrequited love as I am by the horror of
the cattle cars to come.
Dominique Sanda with her large, soft eyes is mesmerizing as the beautiful,
enigmatic, but icy Micol Finzi-Contini. Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is her
childhood friend, a boy from a middle-class Jewish family, now grown up. He's
in love with her, but her feelings for him are that of a sister. He is confused
by her warmth, and then as he tries to get close, her cool rejection. It has
often been expressed metaphorically that Europe in the thirties was raped by
fascism. However in this extremely disturbing film, De Sica is saying that it
wasn't a rape, that the aristocracy of Europe (here represented by the
Finzi-Continis of Ferrara, and in particular by the young and beautiful Micol)
was a willing, even an eager, participant in the bestial conjoining.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is far from perfect; some would say it is also
far from De Sica's best work. Certainly it comes after his prime. The editing
is a little too severe in places, while some of the scenes are too loosely
focused. Nonetheless this is an enormously powerful film that finds its climax
in one of the most disturbing scenes in all of cinema. There is little point in
discussing this film without looking at this scene. Consequently, for those of
you who have not seen the film and do not want to risk having it spoiled for
you, you should stop reading now and come back afterwards.
Everything in the movie works toward setting up the cabana scene. We see the
dog several times, hinting at a crude, animalistic side to Micol. And there is
the wall that separates the Finzi-Contini's garden of civilization from the
brown shirts in the streets, a wall that also separates the rich from other
people, particularly from the middle class who support the fascists (as we are
told in the opening scene). We see Micol leading Giorgio by the hand about the
estate, but always when he tries to caress her, she pulls away. Finally she
explains to him why she doesn't love him. She says, "lovers want to
overwhelm each other...[but]...we are as alike as two drops of water...how
could we overwhelm and want to tear each other...it would be like making love
with a brother..." But hearing these words is not enough. Giorgio goes to
the wall one last time, sees a red bicycle there (red and black were the colors
of the Nazi party) and knows that Micol is with someone else. He climbs the
wall and finds the dog outside the cabana so that he knows she is within. In
the opening scene she referred to the cabana with the German "Hütte,"
adding that now "we'll all have to learn German." What he sees when
he looks through the window fills him with a kind of stupefying horror, as it
does us. Not a word is spoken. He sees her, he sees who she is with and what
the circumstances are. She sees him, turns on the light so that there can be no
mistake and they stare wordlessly at one another. She projects not shame, but a
sense of "This is who I am. I would say I'm sorry, but it wouldn't change
anything. This is what I'm drawn to."
What is expressed in this essentially symbolic scene, acted out in sexual
terms, is what happened to Europe. Micol is at once the love he wanted so much,
deflowered by an anonymous, but clearly fascist man, and she is also the
aristocracy of Europe, polluted by fascism.
I wonder if it is just a coincidence that the famous poem by Robert Browning,
"My Last Duchess," is also set in Ferrara. In that poem the narrator
reveals himself through the unfeeling brutality of his speech and actions to
be, although an aristocrat, an incipient fascist. I also wonder if De Sica is
saying that the Jews in some sense contributed to the horror that befell them,
and by extension, all of humanity. We see this expressed in the person of
Giorgio's father who continually insists that it's not that bad yet, as step by
step they lose their status as citizens, a prelude to the dehumanization that
is the precursor of genocide. Certainly the closing scenes in which the Jews of
Italy are seen to be compliant as they are led to the slaughter suggests as
much. I know that the central feeling expressed by Jews after the war and especially
in Israel was simply, never again. Nevertheless, there is a certain sense of
the inevitable about this film that I find particularly disturbing. Passivity
in sexual terms, a "giving in" to one's nature is one thing. A
passivity in political terms is quite another, and yet it is part of the power
of this film to show us how they are related in our psyches.
Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris, March 1997
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [3.5/5]
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
Urban Desires review Stan Schwartz, which includes an interview with actress Dominique Sanda
Boxoffice Magazine review Kim Williamson
DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [4/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Steve Rhodes retrospective [3.5/4]
DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review
Epinions.com review of Garden of the Finzi-Continis by jrk
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
WE’LL
CALL HIM ANDREW (Lo Chiameremo Andrea)
Italy (100 mi)
1972
User comments from imdb Author: Chip_douglas from Rijswijk (ZH), The Netherlands
Nino Manfredi and Mariangela Melato are
a couple who teach at the same elementary school and are dying to have a child
of their own. At this school all the little students wear uniforms that make
them look like miniature Austin Powers'. They also accompany the soundtrack
with insipid songs that tell you what you are looking at. Whether you
understand Italian or not, it soon gets on your nerves.
The couple decide to visit a Swiss sexuologist who uses a gay translator as a
go-between. Paolo (Manfredi) does not seem to be having any problems down
below, so it must be Maria (Melato)'s fault. He buys a special bed, she tries
to commit suicide. Maria prefers old wife's tales over cold scientific facts,
making her imagine a pregnancy that is not really there. It takes her a long
time to tell Paolo the truth. Too long in fact (for him and for the viewer),
since they are already throwing baby showers and decorating a room for little
"Andrea".
I suppose actress Mariangela Melato was more popular with women than with men,
as she got to play more female friendly parts than her contemporaries. Instead
of having to spend the whole film being just a love interest or a object of
lust, this large eyed, slender woman actually got to put forth a feminist
standpoint (occasionally). There is also some typical early seventies social
commentary on pollution, and Nino Manfredi shows he plays a nice guy really
well. Still, neither the characters nor the viewer get a satisfactory feeling
of closure. Like the similarly themed 'Maybe Baby' (2000), the movie simply ends.
5 out of 10
A
BRIEF VACATION (Una Breve Vacanza)
Italy Spain (112 mi)
1973
Time Out review Tom Milne
De Sica and Zavattini administer the
last rites over the corpse of neo-realism in this travesty which starts with
one of those vociferous Italian domestic squabbles, but soon switches to
masturbatory fantasy with a gushy celebration of romance in a mountain TB
sanatorium. Bolkan, as the working-class housewife drudging to feed a thankless
family who is sent to the clinic at the government's expense, deserves better.
User comments from imdb Author: mdibner from Durham, NC
This is an amazingly beautiful film.
The story of a woman of little means and a horrendous family life who learns
much about the world in a sanatorium in the Italian alps. It gives her a brief
vacation from a hard life. And understanding. And hope. Truly wonderful.
Florinda Bolkan is a great actress ... emoting without emotion. This movie has
many levels of plot and story rolled into a single, seemingly simple story.
There are many levels of relationships in the movie. Of particular interest is
the set of relationships formed between patients from the upper class, the
'paying' patients and those who are in the sanatorium paid for by the national
health. The juxtapositions between have and have not, happy and sad, sick and
healthy, doctor and patient, hardworking and lazy and many others form the
basis of what we see as Clara's learning process and set of life dilemmas.
Turner
Classic Movies dvd review Lang Thompson
By the time Vittorio De Sica directed his first film in
1940 he had acted in about two dozen films with titles like But It's Nothing
Serious, I'll Give a Million and The Cuckoo Clock. His
earliest films as director continued more or less in this line of mild
entertainment until in 1944 he teamed with writer Cesare Zavattini on The
Children Are Watching Us, one of the earliest efforts at shaping the
naturalist, anti-entertainment genre that would be called neo-realism.
Immediately after the war, De Sica made Shoeshine and The Bicycle
Thief, establishing both his international reputation and neo-realism.
Jump ahead a few decades to De Sica's next-to-last effort, A Brief Vacation (1973) again
co-scripted by Zavattini, and you can see both impulses at work. The film
focuses on Clara (Florinda Bolkan, a veteran of films by Visconti and Lucio
Fulci, surely the artistic extremes of Italian cinema), a harrassed factory
worker with a less-than-pleasant home life. She develops a weakening illness
and despite fear of losing her job finally visits a doctor who sends her to a
sanitarium in Northern Italy to rest. Clara meets a variety of people, has a
brief fling with a younger man and basically sheds her cramped thinking. Will
she return to her family?
The opening of the film has the feel of something much like neo-realism. The
colors are muted, the landscape decayed urban, the weather a continual drizzle
and people mostly self-absorbed or mean. Life is a struggle, not red in tooth
and claw but more a sombre brown. Once Clara heads north into the mountains the
film undergoes an almost Wizard of Oz change into bright soap opera and
glossy 60s-styled light comedy. Her fellow inmates have such interesting
problems as they dress in solid, sparkling colors and drive around through the
clean snow discussing which doctors are most attractive. They chat, flirt,
discuss their personal lives, develop even more deadly diseases, argue.
Everything changes and moves. You could argue that this stylistic change
represents the expansion of Clara's perception of life or you could claim that
De Sica and Zavattini didn't really think the whole thing through.
Home Vision's DVD is a solid effort. The image is crisp, capturing mist in the
dim light of early morning just as easily as the blaring whites of a
snow-coated mountainside. The sound is good though the lipsynching is at times
noticably off, most likely a problem from the original production. (Italian
films are shot silent with sound added later, essentially making them dubbed even
in the original language.) The subtitles appear to be complete. The only extra
are a couple of short extracts from De Sica's 1967 English-language Shirley
MacLaine comedy Woman Times Seven, possibly to promote a forthcoming
DVD.
User comments from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida
I have never understood why Vittorio De Sica is not thought of as
one of our greatest directors. I have heard and read gobs of praise for
Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, Godard and many others but have rarely
noticed similar accolades for De Sica--yet he was responsible for many of the
greatest films I have seen. Aside from his super-famous film, THE BICYCLE
THIEF, few have seen or discussed his masterpieces such as MIRACLE IN MILAN,
UMBERTO D. or THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US (my personal favorite)--yet these
and many more of his films are among the greatest ever made. He was one of the
directors responsible for creating a style of film ("Neo-realism")
but here in the States, you'd never know this unless you are a crazed film fan
(like myself). The trademark of these Neo-realist films are non-actors
performing in very ordinary situations that usually are ignored in big-budget
films. Despite what you may think, these films are definitely NOT dull and grab
the viewer emotionally because he truly learn to love and care about the
characters in the films. Generally, these small-budget films are super-true to
life and the acting and writing are phenomenal.
I made this little rant to set the stage for A BRIEF VACATION, as it is a late
Neo-realistic film by De Sica. Once again, the characters are very simple
Italian folk--the sort you'd almost never see featured in a film. In addition,
the actors are not easily recognizable to the audience. As a result, you truly
grow to care about the central character and root for her. But, also because
it's a Neo-realistic film, the ending is true to the character instead of
having a Hollywood-style ending where everything works out fine! The plot of
the film involves a very over-worked and completely unappreciated working
mother. She is the sole provider for a home with three small children, a lazy
and obnoxious brother-in-law, a meddlesome mother-in-law and a temporarily
disabled husband. When she has trouble keeping up at work, she goes to the
local clinic and find out she has TB and needs to go on an extended rest--paid
for by the state health care system. However, her selfish family insist she's
fine and want her to stay on the job because they are just awful people who
want her to stay and take care of their needs. Unfortunately, this nice lady is
so nice, she has a hard time standing up for herself. But, when the problem is
too much, she does finally go to the sanitarium despite their petty protests.
At the sanitarium, her life changes. Instead of being so quiet and shy, she
slowly comes out of her shell and makes many friends. She even attracts the attentions
of a handsome younger man who desperately wants to marry her and take her away
from her rotten home life. Seeing the lady blossom is amazing but true to the
spirit of Neo-realism, the film ends on a less than fairy tale-like fashion but
one very true to the characters.
This is an excellent film with exceptional acting and direction. Some might
find the subject matter a tad mundane, but believe me, it's worth some
patience.
Images (David Gurevich) review
CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [4/5]
DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [4/5]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE
VOYAGE (Il Viaggio)
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
I don't know why the poets and writers keep saying it: follow
your heart, don't bother with "duty" as defined by patriarchs. Just
because it's true I guess, and because new people are being born. Anyone that
still doesn't get it never will, no matter how beautifully it's said. Sophia
Loren is a most extraordinary mixture of casualness and elegance. Richard
Burton does sincere thinking and stammering thing better than anyone. They both
have incredible presence, which in her case more than compensates for the
occasional and slight dramatic lapse. Vittorio De Sica films and creates Italy
like no one else. Imagine an Italian convertible that can go 20 mph!
This barely tolerable Loren-Burton soap opera takes place among
the wealthy classes in turn-of-the-century
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
de
Their, Thomas
FEATHERS IN MY HEAD (Des plumes dans la tête)
B+ 91
Belgium (100 mi) 2003
Can humans co-exist with nature? A film examining life on the fringes of a giant, polluting sugar plant, where exotic birds seem to flourish in the nearby reeds and ponds, featuring exquisite photography, among the best seen in this or any other year, blending truly remarkable exterior naturalist imagery with extremely darkened interiors, with only brief glimpses of light from a door or a window or a dimly lit lamp. Virginie Saint-Martin is credited as the cinematographer, but the writer-director started out making wildlife documentaries, which is quite evident throughout, including an opening underwater shot of a fish snatched out of the water by a diving bird. In one scene, kids are outside on the street playing, and they literally stop and look up at the geese flying in formation. There are really two parts to this film - the opening 45 minutes, which is indescribably beautiful, showing a husband and wife very much in love with their inquisitive young son, and all seem in perfect harmony with their surroundings. But the boy disappears, a fact of nature that the mother, boldly and tragically played by Sophie Museur, refuses to believe, and she is haunted by his continuing presence even after it is learned he has drowned. This second half, while featuring some stark imagery, is less remarkable, resembling REPULSION, as in her grief, she downward spirals into dementia, afraid to touch or be touched by her husband, not wanting to lose this contact with her son. Languishing in this single mood, the film slows to a near stop, perhaps stuck, as the character is, in a state of mental unbalance. The film loses some of its focus here, lingering too long, leaving the viewer too emotionally disconnected with what we are seeing onscreen, but the director tries to balance interiors and exteriors, things seen and unseen, focusing on the sounds of nature and the silence of someone who is completely cut off from the world, featuring long, wordless sequences. Sylvain Chaveau provides extremely spare and fragile music, something resembling the moods of Kieslowski. While dramatically uneven, much of what's worthwhile in this film is the intricate attention to detail, the extraordinary balance and out of balance imagery, and just how fragile it all sounds. Many felt this was the best of the 2003 Facet’s French Fest, as the director had a clear understanding of how to present his material.
de
Toth, André
All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson
The son of a Hungarian military officer, Andre De Toth studied
law at the
Senses of Cinema de Toth Adrian Danks, February 2003
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost
TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES Michael T. Toole, TCM Remembers Andre de Toth
Chicago
Reader Article a retrospective film
overview by Fred Camper,
Museum
of Lone Pine Film History by Chris Langley
HackWriters: An
Appreciation an obituary and
filmography by Alex Grant, November 2002
De Toth, André They
Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Wise
Guys roundtable discussion with
André de Toth, Budd Boetticher and Jules Dassin by Patrick Francis from LA Weekly
Senses
of Cinema Interview (2001) by Alain
Silver, originally
published in Film Noir Reader 3 on
NONE
SHALL ESCAPE A- 94
USA
Blunt, intense Nazi
war trial with flashbacks to events in a small town in
Time Out review Tom Milne
Scripted by Lester Cole (later one of the
HUAC 'Hollywood Ten'), this anticipates the end of WWII and the Nuremberg
Trials to stage an International War Crimes Commission in
Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule review
Andre de Toth anticipated the
Turner Classic Movies review James Steffen
At the International
Tribunal of War Crimes held after the Second World War, Wilhelm Grimm, a Nazi
commandant, is charged with crimes against humanity. A series of witnesses
ranging from a Polish priest to his former fiancée recount his bitterness at
the defeat of Germany in the First World War, his life in a Polish border
village where he is forced to leave after raping a girl, his return to the
village after the invasion of Poland, and his role in the deportation and massacre
of Jews.
Andre De Toth (1912-2002) is popularly remembered as the eye patch-wearing
director of Westerns and the 3-D picture House of Wax(1953), but a
closer look at his work reveals a varied career. Not least among his
achievements was None Shall Escape (1944), one of the first
The film's unusual "European grit" to which Insdorf refers is hardly
accidental. Born in
None Shall Escape, De Toth's second film for
De Toth, still a young and relatively untested director in
None Shall Escape was released in February of 1944 to mixed reviews.
Bosley Crowther of the New York Times complained that it "says
nothing about the Nazis that hasn't already been said," and that it was
"bombastically directed." The Hollywood Reporter was closer to
the mark, noting that "[De Toth's] treatment of the subject, his handling
of the actors and his unbelievable ability to create new departures from
routine procedure are evidence of his artistry as a director. His work has the
fresh tang of unbridled daring in some respects, and in others seems to borrow
from techniques we have long known but forgotten how to use."
Senses of Cinema (Sylvie Pierre) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
RAMROD B 88
USA
Grim, cynical,
psychological western where characters each face a moral dilemma, featuring an
evil Veronica Lake, who was married to de Toth at the time.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Andre de Toth's bizarre Freudian western (1947, 94 min.) features
Veronica Lake in drag and Joel McCrea as a fading phallic symbol (you thought
the title was accidental?) performing a barely sublimated sadomasochistic
ritual--she's a lady ranch owner who teams up with her foreman to put her chief
competitor, her father, out of business. With Arleen Whelan,
Time
Out review
Tom Milne
Despite an enigmatic
opening reel, the issues soon sort themselves out in this striking
'psychological' Western.
User comments from imdb Author: mi6nick from Melbourne, Australia
Contrary to
previous reviews of Ramrod, de Toth's film is much more interesting than a
"simple cattle vs. sheep" plot-driven western. Just look at
Sexually alluring Connie uses her potent sway over men to achieve her greedy
ambitions of wealth and power, and is unafraid to send men to their deaths for
her cause. Connie's strength of character is atypical of the western genre at
this stage, and her strength seems to come from the relative weakness of the
film's hero, played by Joel McCrea; who seems to lack the strong sense of moral
certainty that the typical westerner was founded upon.
Along with Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), and Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon
(1948), Ramrod stands as one of the few hybrids between film noir and the
western. Regardless of your standpoint on the status of film noir, all of these
films contain typical elements from the pessimistic noirs of the 40's and 50's,
particularly formal and stylistic devices, as well as recurring personnel,
especially directors, stars (ie. Robert Mitchum), and cinematographers.
Crucially though, the western genre before this stage was a particularly
optimistic one; look at Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), Dodge City (Michael
Curtiz, 1939), or even My Darling Clementine (Ford again, 1946); the three
films I mentioned beforehand, including Ramrod, all offer instances of
pessimistic worldviews, and morally ambiguous characters and situations, even
though they all end with the hero getting the girl and riding into a westward
sunset.
User comments from imdb Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York
Ramrod is light years from Preston Sturges. Based on a Luke Short novel it's a
pretty grim and violent film. Preston Foster is the owner of the big spread in
the neighborhood and a close ally of his is Charlie Ruggles who has an
adjoining piece of territory. Foster's taken a shine to Ruggles daughter
She's got her own piece of land now and hires Joel McCrea to run it for her.
The range war starts, but
The result of this is a whole lot of dead bodies piling up. A windfall for the coroner.
As always Joel McCrea is the moral centerpiece of the film, he's once again the
gallant western hero. Preston Foster is the town bully you love to hate. Foster
did a variation on this part again in Law and Order a few years later.
Cast against type are Don DeFore and Charlie Ruggles. DeFore who was usually
the hero's best friend and a jovial kind of guy, is a violence prone sort of
fellow, who
This film is significant for
Ramrod may be one of the earliest examples of an adult western. It is grim and
violent, but fascinating.
Senses of Cinema (Rick Thompson) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
The New York Times review A.W.
PITFALL B 89
USA
Leave It to Beaver
America meets film noir murder in the form of an obsessed and evil Raymond
Burr, who doesn’t murder anyone himself, but causes others to by the mania he
has driven them to
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
A grimy, superior film noir by
Andre de Toth (1948). Dick Powell is a foursquare family man who enjoys a
harmless dalliance with model Lizabeth Scott, unaware that he's risking the
wrath of a psychotically jealous private eye, Raymond Burr. An iconographical
plus is Father Knows Best's Jane Wyatt as Powell's patiently beleaguered
wife.
Time
Out review
Tom Milne
Rather flatly
scripted, but a not uninteresting clash between moral tale and film noir.
Powell plays the archetypal suburban man, blessed with family, home and job,
but suffering a vague itch of awareness that life hasn't lived up to
expectations. His work as an insurance claims agent lures him into involvement
with a siren (Scott) and the inevitable aftermath of violence, deceit, and
sudden death. From this he is rescued by the exercise of a double standard
(Scott pays for her murder, Powell gets away with his); but the film still
contrives a troubled intimation that things ain't quite what they used to be in
suburbia. Burr, modelling himself on Laird Cregar (who would have made more of
the role), gives one of his better performances as the hulking yet oddly
pathetic private eye who digs the pitfall in trying to pursue his own hopeless
infatuation.
Film
Noir of the Week Steve-O
By the time he helmed Pitfall in 1948; Hungarian
born émigré director André de Toth
had a filmography consisting of a handful of largely forgettable films, and was
perhaps better know as the one-eyed husband of the beautiful Veronica
Lake. Although he’d have limited success later in his career, most
notably with the 3-D horror film House of
Wax, a growing number of people, myself included, have come to
believe that in Pitfall he has created one of the finest, and most
unique, entries in the film noir canon.
Pitfall opens with the seemingly
idyllic suburban life of John Forbes (Dick Powell),
insurance company claims adjuster, his wife Sue (Jane Wyatt) and their
young son Tommy.
It soon becomes apparent that this vision of the American dream is simply an
illusion, at least to the melancholy John who dryly complains of the rut “six
feet deep” that he feels himself caught in and his longing for something more
exciting and less routine in his life.
Forbes finds his excitement through ‘Mac‘ MacDonald (Raymond Burr), a private
investigator hired by his firm to track down and recover insurable gains.
MacDonald points Forbes in the direction of Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott),
possessor of several items purchased for her by her imprisoned ex-boyfriend
Bill Smiley using stolen money insured by Forbes’s company. During the course
of his investigation MacDonald, known as ‘gruesome’ around the office, has
developed an attraction towards Mona. Forbes opts to go and see Mona himself to
re-inventory the stolen gains.
After a very rocky start, in which Mona strikes at the very heart of Forbes’
personal dissatisfaction with his current life by calling him a “little man
with a briefcase”, the two spend the afternoon boating and sharing cocktails
before Forbes returns home quite late into the night after the implied
adultery. It is worth noting that Forbes does not offer up the information that
he is a married man, nor does he wear a wedding ring. Forbes’ late return is
not lost on a lurking, and jealous, MacDonald.
After warning, then threatening Forbes who meets again with Mona, MacDonald
takes a more physical approach and administers a brutal beating to him. Hearing
that Forbes is sick and out of the office, the faithful Mona attempts to
deliver some cheer and chicken soup, only to learn the truth of Forbes’ marital
status which leads to severing their relationship. MacDonald, however, doesn’t
quite buy into this and continues his stalking of Mona and threats against both
her and Forbes, including informing the soon to be released Bill Smiley of the
dalliances between his girl Mona and Forbes in the hopes of forcing a
confrontation.
This all leads to the
ultimate confrontations where an armed (by MacDonald) Smiley heads to a
forewarned Forbes’ house and MacDonald, awaiting the outcome of this
confrontation in which he expects one man to end up dead and the other
imprisoned, heads to Mona’s to force her into leaving with him.
Smiley is killed by Forbes and upon hearing the news over a police scanner,
Mona in turn kills MacDonald. Although in the apparent clear, Forbes has a fit
of conscience and confesses all to his wife who declares that in the interests
of maintaining the illusion of their perfect family he not tell the police.
Continuing his need for conscience cleansing, Forbes does tell all to the
police. Forbes’ killing is considered justifiable self defense, but Mona may
not be so lucky. In the words of the DA, he believes they are “holding the
wrong person upstairs”.
Forbes stumbles from the police station to find his dutiful wife awaiting him,
willing to give their marriage another chance, while Mona’s fate hangs in the
balance.
In Pitfall, de Toth has largely removed
the noir film from the urban settings of the large, looming city, populated by
gangsters and cops, and placed it firmly in the suburbia of
One other characteristic standard that de Toth manages to turn upside-down in
Pitfall is that of the femme-fatale. In other reviews or comments on this film,
I’ve frequently seen Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) referred to as the
femme-fatale of the story. My own view is quite different as I view Mona as the
doomed innocent. Mona’s lone faults are that she commits with her heart and she
attracts the wrong men. Of the three men in her life throughout the film, one
is arrested for embezzling in order to provide her gifts, one is a sadistic
stalker and one is a philandering husband who manages to place her in further
peril. In none of these instances is Mona responsible for leading the
‘innocent’ male characters towards their doom. Instead, it is the actions of
the men who lead Mona to hers. Indeed, Mona’s respect for the sanctity of
marriage and the family, only further imperil her to the point of requiring
forceful self defense in an act that may ultimately mean jail or death for
herself, while the cheating Forbes is returned to his loving, though damaged,
family. Clearly it is Mona who suffers the most of the pair at the hands of the
film’s homme-fatale(s).
In the final retrospective, Pitfall represents something of a zenith on several
fronts. As a unique and subtly complex noir, I believe it to be the best work
from
director André de Toth (at least of the several films I’ve seen to date). It
also represents some of the finest acting from the three main leads – Dick
Powell in a more nuanced role than that of Philip Marlowe and one in
which he hits it perfectly, noir icon Lizabeth Scott in what I consider to be
her best role and Hollywood heavy favorite Raymond Burr delivering at the top
of his game as well.
Sadly, Pitfall remains without a DVD release on the horizon and while TCM occasionally
airs it and collectors copies are available to those that search them out, this
is one film that noir lovers should be clamoring to see.
Pitfall Trivia:
• de Toth was originally hired to do a rewrite of the script before accepting
the director’s chair.
• Humphrey
Bogart was originally cast as the film heavy MacDonald, but was
vetoed by de Toth in favor of Burr, an actor he had never seen work before.
• de Toth was also responsible for the casting of Lizabeth Scott.
• Powell was originally attached to the project as an executive producer.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Boston
Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]
SLATTERY’S HURRICANE
Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule review
Director Andre de Toth shapes this 1949 love-quartet melodrama to his own
mordant vision with images and camera movements that connect betrayals and
their effects, noble gestures and their less-than-noble causes. Will Slattery
(Richard Widmark) meets an old buddy now married to his former flame Aggie
(Linda Darnell), and he pursues her at the expense of his own drug-addicted
girlfriend Dolores (
User comments from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
VERONICA LAKE was married to director
Andre deToth at the time she made SLATTERY'S HURRICANE, a tale told in
flashback by RICHARD WIDMARK as he pilots a plane through a horrendous storm
and recalls a love affair he had with his best friend's wife (LINDA DARNELL).
The friend is well played by JOHN RUSSELL, an actor under contract to Fox who
never got to do much of anything but seemed as competent as any of the other up
and coming contract players.
LINDA DARNELL, looking every inch a femme fatale, is only given a minor role in
the proceedings and is quite forgettable.
Slow in getting started, it actually only gets into high gear once the storm
scenes reach hurricane proportions--but by that time, you might have trouble
staying awake through a very mediocre plot.
Based on a book by Herman Wouk (THE CAINE MUTINY), it's hardly a distinguished
work.
Based
on a novel by Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, War and
Remembrance) and directed by eyepatched hard-boiled André de Toth (Crime
Wave, Pitfall) "Slattery's Hurricane" (1949) was sharply photographed
by Charles D. Clarke (whose many credits include the aerial photography in two
Korean War Air Force flicks, "The Bridge at Toko-Ri" and "The Hunters").
Although the movies is mostly shot by day, the adulterous passion Richard
Widmark has for the very buxom Linda Darnell is very noirish. Darnell looks
like a femme fatale here, but is hesitant and has less screen presence than
Richard Widmark plays a heel who is a very brave, very skilled, and extremely
insubordinate a commerical, former US Navy pilot (whose his head clears when it
is away from Darnell). The supporting cast -- especially John Russell (tv's
"Lawman," the villain in Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider") as
another pilot who has become Darnell's husband since her earlier affair with
Widmark's Slattery) is good.
Widmark, who died a week ago, was a memorable villain/psychoticin "Kiss of
Death" and "No
Way Out" and very interesting playing lowlife characters who were not
completely villans/criminals (and not psychotic!) as in Sam Fuller's "Pickup on South Street"
(where he played a pickpocket who would not cooperate with Soviet agents), as
the pilot Slattery, and as the shill with ambitions in Jules Dassin's great Night and the City
(1950).
The black-and-white hurricane footage with late-40s cars, etc. is interesting,
and de Toth brings the aviation and romance action to an obviously
censorship-decreed ending in brisk fashion. However, the set-up is slow, so
some viewers may nod off or switch off before the hurricane gets going. (In
addition to the flashback structure, the multiple betrayals and corruptions,
Widmark in his noir days, and the femme fatale, the hurricane provides a sort
of particularly perilous darkness, so that the movie is at least
"noirish" if not a full-blown cinema noir).
The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost
The New York Times review T.M.P.
MAN IN THE SADDLE
When the going gets tough, De Toth gets
going. The violent confrontations impress most in this otherwise standard
Western. Familiar elements set the story in motion, what with rancher Scott
losing former sweetheart Leslie to land baron Knox, who has designs on the
properties surrounding his own (Scott's included), and isn't above having his
dirty work done for him by hired heavies. The screenplay might build friendship
and community among the plucky band being cut down as they stand up to naked
greed, but the standout scenes are the remarkable gunfight in a darkened saloon
and a vigorous punch-up in a collapsing mountain shack. Scott looks the part,
as ever, and his affectionate scenes with independent cowgal Drew have an
understated warmth he didn't always get to display. The first of six films
Scott made with De Toth, before shifting his allegiance to Budd Boetticher and
the work which crowned his career.
User comments from imdb Author: loydmooney-1 from United States
It seems that all the comments here are
somewhat ordinary, and miss some of the fantastically extraordinary touches of
de Toth. True the western drags in places, but there are moments that only a
director of the quality of de Toth can create. His humor was always very sly,
here no exception. For another instance look at the way he handles Gary Cooper
in Springfield Rifle. But back to the case in point. Near the start Scott and
Williams are about to leave and this 75 year old lady comes through the door
carrying a bundle and says, excuse me gentlemen. Look at it carefully and you
will see it is a fantastic grace note, and very funny. Then look at the way
Scott is rolling a cigarette when Isham pulls up, talks over his shoulder etc.
Also why does Clagg break a stick to get Ellen Drews attention coming up the
hill? Its almost perverse and never explained. Then the end in as good a dust
storm as was ever filmed short of the one in Treasure of Sierra Madre.
And saving the best for last, the fight scene between Scott and Clagg, is
simply stupendous. Over quickly, very real, tense, the long roll down the hill,
etc. It may be the best single fight ever on the screen.
These alone raise de Toth into a level reached by very few other directors of
westerns. His subtlety is very great: in fact his sense of humor is still, for
me, the very best. Nobody better.
Turner Classic Movies review Rob Nixon
When he joined forces
with producer Harry Joe Brown in the late 1940s to form the production company
Ranown, Randolph Scott transformed himself from a second-string star, with a
hodgepodge of leading man roles interspersed with action pictures to his
credit, into one of the biggest box office attractions of the 1950s. He became
an indelible icon of the Western, a genre in which he worked exclusively until
he retired a very wealthy man in the early 1960s.
Man in the Saddle (1951) was the first of six Westerns Scott filmed with
director Andre De Toth, and if they are not as fondly remembered or critically
acclaimed as the seven movies Scott made with director Budd Boetticher later in
the decade, they nevertheless served to establish him in the genre and boost
his popularity.
The story casts Scott as a peaceful farmer and rancher who has to resort to
violence to defend himself and his property against a powerful and ruthless
land baron. In the process Scott's character, Owen Merritt, is caught between
two women, the ambitious Laurie Bidwell (Joan Leslie) and the down-to-earth Nan
Melotte (Ellen Drew).
The Scott Westerns proved to be a boon for De Toth as well. The Hungarian-born
director made his first film in
In addition to his six pictures with Scott, praised for injecting adult
storylines and complex characterizations into the Western, De Toth is best
known for his noir melodrama Guest in the House (1944); the aviation
adventure Slattery's Hurricane (1949), which featured his wife at the
time, Veronica Lake; and the 3-D horror film House of Wax (1953).
In later years, De Toth wrote humorously about his professional relationship
with Scott, who he described as a "blue-book millionaire...with a hobby
which he thought was acting." Of producer Brown, he noted his heavy
drinking, "mundane taste" and "nickel-and-dime" approach to
his job. De Toth claimed neither Brown nor Scott read scripts (They preferred
to spend their time with the Wall Street Journal) so they rarely argued
with him over story points. "They were both gentlemen, nice people,"
he said.
The screenplay for Man in the Saddle is based on a novel by Ernest
Haycox, one of the 20th century's most important writers in the Western genre.
Through his dozens of stories and novels (many of them were first serialized in
popular magazines), Haycox helped to bring the genre into the mainstream of
American fiction and pioneered many styles and themes that have now become
conventions of the form, adding a deeper sense of realism and historical
detail. Films adapted from his work include all three versions of Stagecoach
(1939, 1966, 1986), Union Pacific (1939), and
Man in the Saddle also helped launch the career of singer Tennessee
Ernie Ford who appears in a small role and sings the theme song.
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [3/5]
The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost
DVD Verdict (Paul Corupe) dvd review
SPRINGFIELD RIFLE
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay S. Steinberg
The Gary Cooper historical actioner Springfield Rifle (1952) has recently
made its DVD debut bundled in Gary
Cooper: The Signature Collection from Warner Home
Video. The firearm of the title is much more a final-act device than the film’s
focus, which deals with the birth of military espionage. It’s not top-shelf
Cooper, but it’s a serviceable enough vehicle from the latter phase of the
laconic lead’s career, and his fan base should be pleased by its arrival.
The scenario by Frank Davis and Charles Marquis Warren concerns the struggles
of the Union command to protect its drives of much-needed Cavalry horses
through the
Certain officers in the field, however, act on the gravity of the situation by
staging a covert ruse. Major Lex Kearney (Cooper) a Virginian whose Southern
sentiments are open to question, is transferred to the outpost in the hopes
that he can lead a drive past the looters, but turns rather than fight once
confronted by them on the trail. He’s summarily court-martialed for cowardice,
and the combination of his experience and his apparent bitterness gets the
attention of Archie McCool (David Brian), a local rancher who reveals himself
as the ringleader of the rustlers.
Director Andre de Toth bears a certain amount of cult cache for efforts like House
of Wax (1953) and The Gunfighter (1950), but the workmanlike job
that he put forth here was not particularly remarkable. Notables in the
supporting cast include Lon Chaney, Jr. providing dimwitted bluster as McCool’s
head lackey; as well as Paul Kelly and Phillip Carey for keeping the audience
guessing in their respective roles as
Warner’s mastering job on the DVD does no disservice to the rich palette of
Edwin Dupar’s cinematography, but the disc is bare-bones in terms of extras. In
addition to Springfield Rifle,
Gary Cooper: The Signature Collection also contains Sergeant York
(1941), The Fountainhead (1949), Dallas (1950) and The Wreck
of the Mary Deare (1959).
The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost
Springfield Rifle (1952) has similar subject matter and characters to de Toth's later Crime Wave (1954), even though Springfield Rifle is a Civil War era Western, and Crime Wave is a modern day film noir. Both star decent men who have been disgraced in the eyes of the law. Both men are caught between gangs of outlaws and the authorities. Both men have decent but traumatized wives. They are the only people in the picture with any sort of family or relationship to women: both the authorities and the gang of crooks seem to be part of all-male, all business worlds. The hero and his wife meet in the only domestic spaces in both films; everybody else is seen only in public places or official headquarters. The authorities are a bunch of nasties who persecute the hero in both films, while the crooks are a bunch of no-good low lifes who are unpleasantly vicious. The crooks are into illicit money making schemes in both films. The authorities are elaborately uniformed in both films, and have a militarized environment.
Despite the similarity in titles, there is little resemblance between Springfield
Rifle and Anthony Mann's
Winchester 73 (1950). In Mann's film, there is a single rifle, and it
plays a continuing role in the plot of the entire film from start to finish. In
Springfield Rifle, the title rifles only show up at the finale. There
are large groups of them, used in the final battle, and no individual rifle is
of any importance. The
Edwin B. Du Par, who photographed the film, had shot numerous Warner Brothers shorts during the 1930's, such as Roy Mack's The Red Shadow (1932). During the 1950's, he became a special effects photographer at Warners. Only from 1950 onwards did Du Par concentrate on the principal cinematography of feature films.
Elements of this film recall the undercover subgenre of semi-documentary films. It is especially close to Gordon Douglas' I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), which was also shot at Warner Brothers the year before. In fact, Du Par was cinematographer on both films. As in the earlier film, the hero is unable to tell his family about his undercover role, thus causing anguish for his teenage son, and problems at his school. Also, in both films the hero tries to leave his undercover role, but is refused by his superiors. In both films, the hero is set up to appear not just as a crook, as was typical of most semi-docs, but as an actual traitor to the United Sates, and as an ally of its enemies, here the Confederacy. However, Springfield Rifle lacks the right wing political propaganda aspects of I Was a Communist for the FBI. The hero's motivation for his actions is to bring the US Civil War to a speedy end, thus saving lives. This sentiment is repeated twice in the picture, and is clearly endorsed by the filmmakers. It is an unusually pacifistic message. There is also a scene where the hero taunts a military officer about the way he led his men to death. Otherwise, the film stays out of the politics of the Civil War. It is in fact careful not to offend the sensibilities of either Northerners or Southerners. Aside from its brief pacifistic sentiments, the film has no political elements whatsoever.
Springfield Rifle unfolds beautifully, like a piece of music. It has great storytelling flow. Many of the scenes introduce a new character, often in relationship to an existing character. In the scene, the viewer wants to find out everything about the new character, and his relationship to the other people and the plot. This desire is usually fulfilled very satisfactorily. Then the whole cycle starts over in the next scene, and another new character. Even when we already know both characters in a scene, we usually get some new relationship between them. Eventually a huge mosaic is built up. Interwoven with all of this is a mystery, which is set forth right at the start of the film: how are the rustlers getting their inside information on the Union soldiers' cattle treks? This mystery runs through the film, and is gradually filled in. Springfield Rifle is more of an actual mystery story than are many crime films. It starts out with a mystery, one that is gradually and logically resolved by the end of the picture.
Each encounter with new characters is staged by de Toth in a visually pleasing manner. This beautiful flow of images seems to work hand in hand with the flow of the plot. It gives the film its musical effect, a cinematic experience that seems to unfold with the sort of inner logic and beauty of a piece of classical music.
Pans
The chief kind of camera movement here is the pan. They are regularly employed by de Toth. The pans often follow the movements of characters. They can be slightly and beautifully out of sync with the characters too, creating a beautiful syncopated feel.
Springfield Rifle shows some of de Toth's spectacular, nearly 360 degree pans. One very fine shot opens with cameras panning across some young horses, gamboling in a field. After the camera has turned through nearly 180 degrees, it picks up people for the first time, including the hero. It then keeps panning, following the progress of the men. It is a truly spectacular shot. Either half would be a well constructed, memorably composed pan. Putting them both together all in one shot gives a thrilling visual experience.
de Toth also moves the camera forward to match the progress of his characters. These movements tend to underscore the motion of the actors.
de Toth loves to show his characters in motion. A film about the Cavalry gives de Toth plenty of opportunities to show columns of men in motion, either on horseback or on foot. Many of the shots have a kinetic quality, with the characters in full tilt motion across the screen. This motion is combined with the frequent pans and other small camera movements to underscore the kinetic effect. The whole can be considered as a work of Kinetic Art, a little device in near constant motion.
Film
Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
Classic Film Guide review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing the 5-film Box Set Gary Cooper
– The Signature Selection
Channel
4 Film capsule review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
HOUSE OF WAX 3D
Time Out review Tom Milne
One of the better 3-D epics (Warners'
first, pioneering effort). Handsomely mounted and directed with great care, it
nevertheless remains oddly lacklustre by comparison with the 1933 Mystery of
the Wax Museum, despite being an often word-for-word remake. One reason is
that where the original acquired an additional charge of bizarrerie by locating
its Grand Guignol monster within a private enclave of bustling, contemporary
New York, this remake is much more conventionally set in the fantasy world of
gaslight, ground fogs and opera cloaks. Still, Price is fun (this was the film
that typed him as a horror star), the fire in the waxworks is good for a
gruesome thrill, and De Toth brings off one classic sequence with Kirk fleeing
through the gaslit streets pursued by a shadowy figure in a billowing cloak.
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
The first major studio production filmed in 3-D, André de Toth’s House of Wax wastes an idiotic amount of time showing off its then-nifty special effects (were two appearances by the man with the ping-pong paddle really necessary?). But as was so often the case, Vincent Price brings a touch of creepy class to this otherwise middling B-level horror story. A wax sculptor who loves beauty and loathes exhibitions that depict murder and mayhem, Henry Jarrod (Price) undergoes a monstrous transformation after he is disfigured in a fire started by his insurance money-craving partner. Emerging from the inferno as a maniac with a ghoulish new House of Wax featuring historical and contemporary villains (and Charles Bronson as his sidekick Igor!), Jarrod takes a liking to sweet, financially strapped Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), who suspects that Jarrod’s Joan of Arc exhibit has been made with the corpse of her recently murdered friend Cathy (Carolyn Jones). Because we’re intimately aware of Jarrod’s cadaver-fueled waxadermic activities, de Toth doesn’t generate much suspense from his scenario (based on 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum). Still, the campy Price, skulking around the nighttime city clothed in a black cloak and hat (an outfit later worn by Sam Raimi’s Darkman), is nonetheless devilishly charismatic as the emotionally and psychologically scarred artist-turned-serial killer.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Hungarian immigrant Andre de Toth was an excellent filmmaker who made tough little Westerns and crime stories with maximum efficiency and little waste. He also wore an eyepatch over his left eye and could only see in two dimensions. Nevertheless, he was the only director to take the 3-D medium of the mid-1950s seriously. House of Wax was his only horror film, and it was amazingly well suited to the 3-D medium. (He made one other 3-D film, the Randolph Scott Western, The Stranger Wore a Gun.)
A remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the superior House of Wax stars Vincent Price as the master sculptor and owner of a wax museum in turn-of-the-century New York. Charles Buchinsky (later known as Charles Bronson) plays his assistant. A fire destroys all of his creations, especially the sculpture of a woman to which he is particularly attached. (The fire sequence, with its depth-of-field and the melting faces, is absolutely mesmerizing -- both in 3-D and on home video.) It is assumed that the sculptor perished in the fire, but Price returns as a faceless monster out for vengeance. He begins to collect dead bodies to cover in wax and show as his latest creations. (The film also stars Carolyn Jones, who went on to play Morticia on "The Addams Family" TV series.)
House of Wax is not particularly scary or suspenseful, but it is a lot of fun and effectively creates an atmosphere of dread using bright colors and shadows. One great 3-D effect has Buchinsky leaping from just under the foreground, so that it looks like he has come out of the audience. The movie also has a sense of humor, as shown by the use of the paddleball man in front of the wax museum who whacks the toy into the audience. The movie is also known as Vincent Price's first foray into horror, for which he is now best remembered.
Turner Classic Movies review Lang Thompson and Jeff Stafford
Even though this movie was originally shown in theatres in 3-D with special
glasses provided, we are airing the "flat" version.
The year was 1953. The relatively new medium of television had the big motion
picture studios scared. How were they going to entice viewers away from the
comfort of their living rooms and back into movie theaters? It was going to
take a gimmick.
In late 1952, a crude and cheaply made safari adventure called Bwana Devil
showcased a new filming technique called 3-D that required special glasses for
viewers. A few months later, the honchos over at Warner Brothers decided that
they were not only going to make a big-budget 3-D flick, but they were also
going to introduce the world to WarnerPhonic Audio, a primitive precursor of
Surround Sound. The result of this savvy move was House of Wax (1953).
Directed by Hungarian-born Andre de Toth, House of Wax is actually a
remake of Warner's 1933 flick The Mystery of the Wax Museum
(interestingly enough, also directed by a Hungarian, Michael Curtiz). De Toth,
better known as Mr. Veronica Lake (he was married for eight years to the blonde
actress), was an unusual directorial choice because he only had one eye. This
handicap made it virtually impossible for de Toth to actually see the 3-D
process he was creating but, like other gifted but visually impaired filmmakers
of his era (Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, etc.), his complete understanding of the
medium resulted in one of the most effective 3-D films ever made. At the time,
though, studio head Jack Warner warned de Toth not to wear his eye patch on the
set; he didn't want the director or House of Wax to be the butt of jokes
in
The by-now familiar plot of House of Wax, which owes more than a nod to The
Phantom of the Opera, goes something like this: sensitive sculptor lovingly
creates historical figures out of wax, which he displays in his New York-based
wax museum. Sculptor's greedy business partner wants to burn down said museum.
Fight follows, fire breaks out. Assuming that sensitive sculptor is dead,
greedy partner collects insurance money. But sensitive sculptor isn't dead! Instead
he's hideously disfigured and more than a little loony. Wacko sculptor goes on
killing spree, fonduing the bodies of his victims in boiling wax and using them
as exhibits in his new museum. Will the police catch the fiend before he kills
again? Will Scott Andrews (Paul Picerni) rescue Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) from
becoming the next wax attraction - Marie Antoinette? Will the busker with the
paddleball ever work in
Vincent Price, who had only dabbled briefly in the horror genre before this
film, plays Professor Henry Jarrod and the role marked a major turning point in
his career; afterwards, he found steady work in the movies playing a variety of
homicidal maniacs and cursed aristocrats. In The Horror People by John
Brosnan, Price admitted that House of Wax was "very demanding as I
had to get to the studio every morning at
In addition to Price, House of Wax co-stars Phyllis Kirk, who went on to
play Nora Charles in the hit TV series The Thin Man (1957-59), and Frank
Lovejoy, in the role of Lieutenant Tom Brennan. Lovejoy made a career out of
playing no-nonsense authority figures in films like I Was a Communist for
the F.B.I. (1951) and Retreat, Hell! (1952). Also look for Carolyn
Jones (aka Morticia Addams of TV's The Addams Family, 1964-66) in a
brief but memorable performance as both blonde victim Cathy Gray and wax
centerfold Joan d'Arc. And Igor, Professor Jarrod's Neanderthal deaf mute
assistant, is none other than Charles Buchinsky. Don't recognize the name? Well,
Buchinsky later went on to star in a slew of '70s action hero roles like Death
Wish (1974), under the name Charles Bronson.
Today, the then-innovative recording techniques of House of Wax are all
but lost on the television screen. As for the 3-D technology? Well, without the
benefit of cheap Polaroid glasses, today's audiences won't see what the fuss
was all about. Yet, even without the special glasses, viewers will notice
camera set-ups where images are thrust toward the screen, such as the wild fight
scene in the museum at the beginning which climaxes with a fiery wax meltdown.
(This sequence obviously inspired the makers of The Devil's Rain, 1975.)
There's also a completely random and overly long paddleball gag. And, of
course, what would any period horror movie be without an extended cancan
sequence? While the high-kicking chorus line looks dazzling in Technicolor and
3-D, it also brings the plot to a screeching halt. But, House of Wax is
great fun, nonetheless. As the film's worldly Scott Andrews says to the prim
Sue Allen, "You can't get entertainment like this in
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]
Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski, also seen here: Hollywood Gothique
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [3/5]
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review
HorrorTalk Alien Redrum with plenty of photos
Eccentric Cinema Lyle Horowitz
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
CRIME WAVE A- 93
USA
Fast-paced,
hard-edged crime caper, a thriller noir featuring tough-as-nails Sterling
Hayden as a cop on the case who wants to use ex-felons as stool pigeons, a
model for CHINATOWN or LA CONFIDENTIAL in the realism and the locations, which
features an all-too-jaded LA landscape, also with Charles Buchinsky (aka
Charles Bronson).
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Andre de Toth's 1954 noir is
gritty, powerful, and economically told. Sterling Hayden plays a sour,
toothpick-chewing LA cop on the trail of an ex-con (a rare dramatic role by
dancer Gene Nelson) who's forced to participate in a bank robbery. Among the
secondary cast are Crane Wilbur, Brian Foy, Phyllis Kirk, and Charles Buchinsky
(later known as Charles Bronson). 74 min.
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
His plans for a
straight-and-narrow life undone by three escaped convicts (including Charles
Bronson, né Charles Buchinsky) who appear on his doorstep in need of a hideout,
ex-con Steve Lacy (Gene Nelson) finds himself at the center of a tug-of-war
between his former criminal compadres and Sterling Hayden’s determined
detective in André De Toth’s neorealist noir gem Crime Wave (aka The
City is Dark). The film’s highlight arrives early, during a scintillating
tableau of police station plaintiffs and potential crooks that hints at the
titular illicit flood, though de Toth’s no-nonsense direction also gives the
subsequent action – in which Lacey is roped into his pals’ plans for a bank
heist and airplane getaway to Mexico – a hard-boiled poeticism. Regardless of
its mildly cynical edge, the upbeat ending doesn’t completely agree with the
film’s preceding pessimistic outlook on the viability of positive
transformation (Lacey seemingly doomed by his desire to change his stripes).
Such a false final note, however, isn’t enough to sully Hayden’s vigorous turn
as a no-nonsense cop, nor De Toth’s heart-pounding portrait of moral
confliction.
Crime Wave Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
Something like a god looks down over
Crime Wave (André de Toth, 1954) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled
A seventy-three minute morality litmus test in the form of a crime caper
haiku, Crime Wave’s first and last “lines” are extraordinarily terse and
clipped, and the more elongated middle “line” reveals a new shade with each
carefully considered syllable. That is to say, the film’s framing story
involves Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson), an ex-con trying to maintain his
lower-middle class, happily married, one-bedroom flat paradise. Unfortunately,
he doesn’t get much help from a trio of prison buds who just busted out of the
clink with the blueprints for their ten-years-in-the-making bank heist. Key
increments in their titular wave of iniquitous ingenuity include murdering gas
station chubbers wanton, bribing a nebbish veterinarian (who’s extremely
pervious to the fuzz) to look after their battle scars, and holding Lacey and
his private, problem-solver wife hostage so that the certified pilot will fly
them across the border after their stick-up. (Because apparently the police
would never expect it, aside from the fact that they put the pressure on flyboy
Lacey before the con trio even arrive at his grey apartment.) That’s the
nutgraph, but one of the film’s longest and most memorable shots shows the
P.O.V. of investigative officer Sterling Hayden as he walks down a line of
desks providing the backdrop for jittery 1 a.m. interrogations, beginning with
an apologetic married couple trying to explain off a moment of seemingly
pre-coital domestic abuse and winding up with a teary blonde of the night,
which widens out the story’s barely-there noir premise into what is almost
Italian neorealism. Like the shot of the warehouse filled with pawned sheets in
The Bicycle Thief, it momentarily widens out the scope of the story to
suggest that Lacey’s plight is but one of many, that there are tons of
relatively innocent people who are (depending on your view) either the police
force’s bitches or the only hope for an overwhelming wave of crime. This is the
first film by André de Toth I’ve seen, so I can’t yet parse what some of his
signature concerns might be. (Of course, there are no doubt some auteurists who
would recommend watching films by de Toth while covering one eye with your
hand.) Anyway, the director’s zero-flab momentum centralizes the film’s acting
to an intimate extent, and the pert casting decisions extend well beyond the
expected bulldog professionalism of Sterling Hayden (who gets a winning
Sterling Hayden® digression when he jabbers on about having to quit smoking and
his swift switch to toothpicks). Protagonistic Nelson exudes an appropriately
albino translucence that shoulders the burden of explaining just why three
beef-eating thugs would choose a reformed Saint as their mark. And Charles
Buchinsky (soon Bronson) puts in an early beefcake appearance here, picking his
caps with a page ripped from the Stanley Kowalski method manual.
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold
Director Andre De Toth once said, "I saw Crime Wave (1954) as a snake
sliding through the night; a small snake with saliva, wanting to swallow big
things as it slithers through the gutter of the night of crime... Since the day
I started to make pictures, I wanted to shoot one like Crime Wave... I wanted the viewer
not only to eavesdrop on life, but to live it as it was happening. There is a
big difference, in emotional involvement, between watching from the safety of
the shore a man swept away by a raging torrent, and being in that
torrent."
Crime Wave,
now available as one of the ten titles in Warner Home Entertainment's new Film
Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, is tough, gritty and first-rate, largely
because of De Toth's ability to achieve the realistic effect he described. He
shot the picture in 13 days entirely on
The movie tells a simple story. A gang of hoodlums holds up a gas station one
dark night, but things go awry and a shootout leaves a cop dead and one bad guy
(Nedrick Young) wounded. Young splits from his cohorts and finds his way to the
nearby apartment of Gene Nelson, a parolee and old prison-buddy who is now
married to Phyllis Kirk and trying to lead a straight-arrow life. Of course,
this being a film noir, Nelson finds himself getting sucked into the lives of
his shady friends against his wishes. Eventually he is wanted for murder and
chased through the city by police detective Sterling Hayden, in one of his
best, most scowling performances.
Standard stuff this may be, but De Toth really elevates it into something
special. The locations add hugely to the yarn's immediacy. For a climactic
sequence in a Bank of America branch, De Toth got permission to shoot in a real
one for one night only, and he made the most of it. The opening gas station
shootout, filmed in downtown
Toothpick-chewing Sterling Hayden may be terrific in Crime Wave, but Nelson and Kirk
also turn in excellent, sensitive performances, and Charles Bronson (billed as
Charles Buchinsky) steals his scenes as one of the bad guys. Tim Carey, perhaps
the best-ever player of movie psychos, plays one here, as another of the
crooks. The aforementioned Nedrick Young was also a screenwriter who happens to
have written the script for the other film noir sharing this disc: Decoy
(1946). Young was a fine writer whose career was badly affected when he was
blacklisted. Eddie Muller, on his commentary track, fills in the details and
provides his usual interesting points on this film. Joining in the conversation
is a jokey James Ellroy; between the two of them, they're able to identify just
about all the locations used in Crime Wave - no small feat! Also on the disc is a trailer and a brief
featurette including filmmakers, critics, and De Toth himself (from an archival
interview) discussing the film.
Film Noir of the Week Steve-O
The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson] brief B-Noir reviews
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Viennale '08 capsules
not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) capsule review
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2
DVD Verdict [Rob Lineberger] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2
HorrorDVDs.com [Rhett Miller] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2
The New York Times review H.H.T.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze, Film Noir Classic Collection, 5 discs, Ten Films
HIDDEN FEAR
User reviews from imdb Author: GUENOT PHILIPPE
(philippe.guenot@dbmail.com) from
I haver never seen an American film noir shot in Danemark before.
That's really the first time.
The story itself offers no great surprises. Payne plays an American cop who
tries to clear his sister of a murder charge. He has to fight against
counterfeiters. I must admit that we have already seen this before, a thousand
times. Especially Payne who is as hard boiled as ever.
But it's a tough thriller, no boring at all with, at the end, a good chase
through the country side around
A rare Andre de Toth movie that deserves to be discovered.
Hidden
Fear (1957) Mark Harris from Patrick
Murtha’s Diary
Andre De Toth’s Hidden Fear (1957) is poised between two
styles, and enacts the transition between them over the course of the movie’s
running time. The first style is the Euro-moody postwar thriller in the vein of
The Third Man and Mr. Arkadin, which dominates the first
two-thirds of the film; the second style is the Sixties action thriller, which
is prefigured in the last third, especially with an extended multi-vehicle
chase sequence (car / motorcycle / helicopter / boat).
Hidden Fear was a location shoot in
Mike Brent is no exception. “Brennt” is “burns” in German, a language
well-known to Danes, and Payne, his career on the wane – this was his last
feature film until 1968 – expresses plenty of fiery rage, when he is not merely
grim. Payne was 44 when Hidden Fear was made, about to put his time in
on one of the ubiquitous TV Westerns of the era, The Restless Gun. He is
quite physically imposing; at 6’2”, he towers over his European co-stars, and
De Toth often puts him dead center in the frame, striding purposefully in his
sharp-cut, shoulder-padded suits. Sneering and potentially lethal, he is a
precursor to Dirty Harry.
The local atmosphere in the night scenes is rather fun, with the typically
shadowy streets and alleys, and flavorful musical accompaniment (is that an
accordion I hear?). But the noirish flourishes are mostly decorative. We do get
a tour of the Danish bar scene, including one nightspot with a revolving indoor
carousel. We learn, no surprise, that Danish girls like American men, and American
men like Danish girls. Had it been made a decade later, the film would have
pushed that angle considerably harder!
The plot, such as it is, involves a double-crossing counterfeiting ring led by
Alexander Knox and Conrad Nagel. Their scheming is not of much consequence
except to set up the cat-and-mouse antics of the film’s final section. It must
be admitted that the chase is nicely done, with cool POV and helicopter shots,
and a nifty explosion. James Bond beckons.
POSTSCRIPT: Fellow Blackboarder Dan in the MW pointed out that
John Payne was actually one of the first actors to take an interest in playing
James Bond; he held an option on the novel Moonraker in the mid-Fifties,
although nothing came of it. The Payne on display in Hidden Fear would
have made a quite credible Americanized Bond, with the anger turned down and
the charm turned up.
The very first on-screen Bond was another American, Barry Nelson, in an
hour-long adaptation of Casino Royale that aired on the television
anthology series Climax! on
Hidden Fear Trailer, Reviews and Schedule for Hidden Fear ... TV Guide
DAY OF THE OUTLAW B+ 92
You
won't find much mercy anywhere in
A spared down, low budget, mercilessly bleak, Black and
White American “B” western from the late 50’s, adapted from a Lee E. Wells
novel, the last western made by this director known for his grim psychological
dramas, this one defined by the tough as nails intractability of the lead
characters, none of whom can stand up to the barren ruggedness of the natural
outdoor landscape, which kicks human butt in this movie. Shot on location in the
Taking place in a small isolated settlement of only twenty
people in
Led by Burl Ives as deserting Army Captain Jack Bruhn, carrying sacks of stolen gold, they are just ahead of the tracking cavalry but need to ride out the night in a safe and warm place, where Bruhn needs a bullet extracted from his chest, but despite his men’s preference for women and whisky, Bruhn tells the local folk to hide their liquor and protect their women, as both are hands off to his men, claiming he needs them all sober when they leave at dawn. With his men itching to get what they want, knowing there’s a long ride ahead, they continually press the boundaries and tempt fate. Bruhn always seems to magically appear just as his men are about to stray, bullying them into backing off. But they do convince him that there’d be no harm if he’d allow a social dance with the town’s four women. “We only want to borrow them - - we'll give them back.” Diametrically opposite to the grace and sweep of most dance sequences, think of the opulence of Max Ophuls or the legendary grandeur of Visconti’s THE LEOPARD (1963), this one is painfully difficult to watch, as the endless barroom piano music never ceases, growing more and more physically aggressive as the men try to catch a kiss as the women continually back away in disgust. This is as raw and primitive as it gets, but in some strange and delirious way an antecedent to Béla Tarr’s hypnotic but mind numbingly repetitious dance in SÁTÁNTANGO (1994).
When morning comes, Bruhn is barely alive, but he’s too stubborn to recognize it, commandeering Starrett to lead them safely through the mountains, though the snow has made them completely impassable at this time of year, a fact Bruhn comes to realize but withholds from his men, but that doesn’t stop them from what feels like a suicide march, telling Starrett: “I guess every fool has his reason.” If Bruhn’s deteriorating condition is not enough, the elements have turned so hostile, where frozen breath can be seen coming from both the men and their horses, with snow up to their bellies, completely covering the landscape, the horses can barely find a way to take one step after another, yet they’re forced to push on. Rarely are animals seen exerting themselves in this level of difficulty where there are no CGI special effects, they are simply staggering to keep their feet in the brutally harsh conditions. Beautifully shot by Russell Harlan, knowing what’s inevitable only adds to the pounding psychological dread of this death march, as the men soon start to turn on one another in an insatiable display of greed and avarice, where the music by Alexander Courage is heavy handed and amped up to the max. Imprisoned by the snow around them, it’s apparent there is no escape, as first horses and then men do start to die in the blistering winter cold where the wind is too ferocious to even light a fire. It’s telling that in this exceedingly concise rendering, there are no shots of the cavalry, and by the end, no one is pointing a gun at these men’s heads, yet they feel a compulsive desire to follow this mythical trail to that elusive freedom that never arrives, to make that last great escape. Instead they ride into their own trap. The story isn’t entirely bleak, as de Toth even adds an element of dark humor to show the demise of one of the last holdouts. By the end, however, none of the original issues that were worth dying for at the time hardly seem to matter any more.
Cine-File Chicago Patrick Friel
This is, simply, one of the greatest films ever. A towering masterpiece of severe landscapes, existential dread, and psychic pain. A beautiful, harsh, poetic western that rips at your gut and dazzles the eye with its formal brilliance. My hyperbole is warranted. Do Not Miss!
Wednesday 5/4: “Day of the Outlaw” at the Portage Theater Julian Antos
Burl Ives rides into a snowy, isolated town (yeah, just like in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, but he ain’t so jolly here) in the far West as the leader of a murderous renegade cavalry unit, threatening the lives of Robert Ryan and Tina Louise until they agree to lead him out of the town. While it’s claustrophobic tension and bouts of absurdist violence peg it as a quintessential western noir of the 1950s, the Monthly Film Bulletin in England rightly called Day of the Outlaw a western “in the best William S. Hart tradition,” too. It may be one of the bleakest films ever made, with wintry landscapes recalling Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall and a messy sense of hopelessness that predicts Heaven’s Gate, the Western to end all Westerns.
Day of the Outlaw | Chicago Reader Fred Camper
Arguably Andre de Toth's greatest film, this 1959 western combines a hostage situation with a bleak, snowbound terrain to produce a gripping vision of hopeless entrapment. Robert Ryan stars as a rancher who's about to start a gunfight over land when a motley gang of outlaws led by Burl Ives ride in and take over the town. Because it's at the end of the trail, the outlaws become "prisoners of a white silence," in de Toth's words: isolated, surrounded by snow, they're about to run wild with the townswomen when Ryan leads them on a false escape route through the mountains. Their final ride is one of the most despairing visions in all cinema: the turning course followed by the men seems to twist back on itself, and the stark black-and-white background of rock and snow forms a closed, lifeless world excluding all human warmth.
User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
This is an excellent western by Andre de Toth. It is mainly remembered for
its final thirty minutes, an extraordinary ride in the snow where the director
makes the best of black and white pictures while he's filming all the tired
horses ...Hell freezes over.
But the first hour is absorbing as well with its depiction of an one-horse town
lost in the snow,a dead end where one never really knows which ones are
prisoners and which ones are guards. The "ball," during which the
four women are really having a bad time (particularly Tina Louise) is one of
the most violent scenes ever filmed in a western. And all they are doing is
dancing. It has to be seen to be believed! Robert Ryan is, as always,
excellent, as a tired blasé man who just wants to live in peace.
Metroactive.com [Michael S. Gant]
André De Toth's black-and-white 1959 Western is as stripped down,
spare and unsparing as Robert Ryan's powerfully contained performance. Ryan
plays Blaise Starrett, a
Read
TCM's article on Day of the Outlaw
Brian Cady
Day of the Outlaw (1959) is one of those little-known gems that
hard-core movie fans love to discover. At a time when television and movie
studios were grinding out one generic Western after another, Day of the Outlaw
added twists that made it unique.
Robert Ryan stars as Blaise Starrett, hard, bitter and remote as only Ryan
could play him. A cattleman, he's out to settle scores with Hal Crane (Alan
Marshal), head of a small town of settlers putting out barbed wire and starting
farms. Complicating the rivalry is the fact that Starrett was once the lover of
Crane's young wife (Tina Louise). On the surface, it's rather standard fare for
a fifties Western but the first twist comes from the locale. The action is set
in
The second twist comes just as Starrett and Crane square off for their big
showdown. Before the two men can draw their guns, a gang of outlaws invade the
town, collecting all the guns and holding everyone hostage. The gang's leader,
renegade Union officer Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), is the only one keeping the gang
from drinking all the whiskey and taking the town's women as their prizes.
Unfortunately, he may be dying from a gunshot wound. Now the antagonistic
cattleman and farmer, along with Bruhn, have to form new alliances to keep
disaster at bay. However, it is the freezing cold outside that is actually
sealing their fate.
Director Andre De Toth was a Hungarian director who fled to the
"[The producers] didn't understand where I was heading - a sphere I had
been exploring for some time: is it worse being the jailer, instead of the
prisoner? Is it worse being incarcerated by white snow in white silence, or by
the blankness of black silence? Which of the human flock would fall apart first
under the tightening band of their communal deep freeze?
"I wanted the town to be built and ready to shoot three, four months
before the start date. I wanted the weather, the rain and snow to age the
buildings, not painters' spray and cotton wool for snow on the roofs. The
weather and the natural snow were cheaper than studio material and labor.
"I built a small Western town in my backyard,
De Toth also had to fight the producers to shoot the movie in black-and-white:
"It was a story of tension and fear, survival in a prison of snow. Had I
shot it in color, the green pine trees covered with snow, the soft glow of
candles, the dancing tongues of flames in the fireplaces would have radiated
warmth and safety and the joy of peace on earth. A 'Merry Christmas' card from
fairy-tale land."
The director's meticulous care created one of the great Westerns of the
Fifties, constantly surprising and creating a bone-deep chill that makes Day of
the Outlaw memorable long after so many of the other hastily-made Westerns of
that time have been forgotten.
User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from
"Now listen," says Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), renegade former captain
in the U. S. Army, to the frightened men and women of Bitters, population about
20, four of them women. It's deep winter and Bruhn and his men have just barged
into the saloon as rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) was about to gun down
farmer Hal Crane. "Do as you're told and you can go about your business
just like we're not here, almost. But we are here so it's best you know with
what you're dealing. Pace here gets pleasure out of hurting people.
For the rest of the day and through the night Bruhn by force of will is going
to control his motley, dangerous gang. He'll deny them liquor, deny them the
town's women, and undergo an excruciating operation by the town vet to extract
a bullet from a lung. They're on the run with $40,000 in gold in their
saddlebags. The U.S. Cavalry is on their trail. Bruhn is a complex man with an
odd sense of honor. He was responsible for a massacre by soldiers under his
command. His justice is ruthless. His authority is complete...as long as he
lives. Right now he is the only one capable of keeping his gang of killers from
tearing up Bitters by its roots.
And that includes Blaise Starrett, an angry rancher...angry at being rejected
by Hal Crane's wife, Helen (Tina Louise), angry with Crane for the barbed wire
that Crane will be putting up next to his land, angry at the farmers moving
into the town and the territory that he cleaned up and made safe. That showdown
with Crane that Bruhn interrupted would have been no more than murder. Crane
wore a gun but couldn't use it well, and Starrett was purposely goading him.
And in this complex, austere western both Starrett and Bruhn are going to find
in themselves a capacity for surprising decisions. For Starrett, it will mean
the realization that killing Crane won't solve anything, the realization that
Helen Crane will not leave her husband for him, and the realization that the
only one capable of outfoxing Bruhn is Starrett, himself...by leading Bruhn and
his killers through a way out of town in the deep winter that will most likely
kill them all. For Bruhn, he survives the operation. He's given a little
morphine. He's back on his feet...and he's starting to cough. Let's just say
Bruhn knows what's going to happen
All the while in this achingly cold western, snow is on the ground and the
weather is frigid. When Starrett leads the gang out of town there is freezing
white mist in the air and the snow is nearly up to the horses' bellies. The
last 30 minutes of the movie are exhausting, with the horses struggling through
the deep snow, with the wind blowing too hard to start a fire, and with men
dying.
It's no spoiler to say that Blaise Starrett survives. It might be a spoiler to
say that while he may no longer be the angry man we met at the start of the
movie, he'll probably be just as lonely.
You could flip a coin to decide who holds this movie together more
impressively, Robert Ryan or Burl Ives. Ryan brings all his impressive presence
to his role. Ives, however, by force of acting and authenticity, makes his
ability to impose his will on this gang believable. It's a first-rate
performance. But, oh, if only this movie could have been made without the
women. Two of the four actresses can't act, and those two are ones the story
lingers on. Tina Louise as Helen Crane is completely out of her skill range.
Her lack of acting ability severely undercuts the notion that a man like Blaise
Starrett, especially when played by such a fine actor as Ryan, would ever carry
a torch for her. Tina Louise's Helen Crane is too dull to lust after. And while
all the men look like they seldom see a bar of soap more often than once a week
(and in the case of Bruhn's gang, once a month, maybe), all the women look as
clean and groomed as if they'd stepped out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue. Some
of their tidy polish gets rubbed off, however, at one of the most ominous
dances in a western. Bruhn has decided that the women will dance with his men
to lower their resentment over being denied whiskey and assault. Bruhn keeps
control during the dance, but these leering, groping villains take advantage of
the four women every chance they get, and the women dare not do anything about
it. It's a nasty, uncomfortable, well-staged scene.
Day of the Outlaw is a corny title, but even with its flaws the movie is
engrossing. I almost put on a sweater while I watched it. It's one of the
bleakest, coldest looking movies I've ever seen.
Harsh Master | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Fred Camper
Posts
from the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by Fred Camper,
DVD Savant Review: Day of the Outlaw Glenn Erickson
Dave's Blog About Movies and Such [Dave Enkosky]
The Best Movie I Saw Last Month: Day of the Outlaw Brandon Nowalk from But What She Said
Deja View Becky
Day Of The Outlaw (1959)/Lost film | Oregon Movies, A to Z
The Films of André de Toth [Michael E. Grost]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
User reviews from imdb Author: rockbroker
(rock.broker@gmail.com) from
User reviews from imdb Author: AKA_Paul_Murphy from
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: westerner357 from
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: JohnRouseMerriottChard
from
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Robert J. Maxwell
(rmax304823@yahoo.com) from
"Deschutes
& Ochoco National Forests - Mt. Bachelor Volcanic Chain"
PLAY DIRTY B 83
Great Britain
WWII desert war
drama opens with a jeep speeding through the desert sands to the music of Lili
Marlene, featuring lots of camp humor in the choice of music, and interesting
desert locations where the absence of morality inside all of us is the ultimate
desert experience where “none shall escape,” a DIRTY DOZEN of sorts revealing
the price you pay for evil and deception - - terrific photography.
A workmanlike rip-off
of The Dirty Dozen, with Caine leading a group of ex-criminals in an
attack on a German supply dump in
Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule review
This 1968 desert caper, the last
film directed by veteran Andre de Toth, ranks among his best work. An
inexperienced World War II captain (Michael Caine) leads a sub-Dirty Dozen
crew on a mission behind German lines in
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold
"War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with
criminals." - Col. Masters (Nigel Green), in Play Dirty
Everyone plays dirty in Play Dirty
(1969) - the characters, the screenwriters, and the director, too. "Forget
the medals, Throw away the rule book," ordered the posters, and sure
enough, that command applies not just to the men on screen but to the audience
watching. The result is one of the great under-known combat pictures, one which
no less than Martin Scorsese has called a guilty pleasure.
Right off the bat, Play Dirty
tells us things will be different. A German-uniformed man (Nigel Davenport)
drives a jeep across a rickety desert landscape with a dead body in the
passenger seat. A German song, "Lilli Marlene," blares from his
radio. As he approaches a checkpoint, he switches his German hat for a British
one and changes the music to "You Are My Sunshine." It's a British
checkpoint and the man responds to the soldiers suprisingly sarcastically,
though he is clearly British and is let through... Very quickly, then, what we
think we know to be the case is undermined by what actually happens, and we
learn not to believe or trust everything we see - a quality which will keep us
on edge throughout the entire movie and will ultimately convey much of the
film's meaning.
Because Play Dirty
deals with a group of fighting men who are all despicable former criminals and
convicts, the movie was and still is often compared to The Dirty Dozen
(1967). It's an unfair comparison; the two pictures are more different than
similar. Not only does Play Dirty
not develop the convicts' characters anywhere near as much as The Dirty
Dozen, but it conveys a degree of cynicism and nastiness that The Dirty
Dozen never really tries to approach. Further, as film historian Jeanine
Basinger has pointed out, the men in Play Dirty never come together to form a cohesive group, instead
remaining unsympathetic loners. More generally, The Dirty Dozen unspools
as a fairly traditional, albeit superb, Hollywood action flick, while Play Dirty is far more edgy and
disturbing, right on through to its final frames.
Play Dirty
gives us the traditional elements of a WWII combat movie - hero, group, military
objective - but turns all three upside down in a big way. The story, possibly
inspired by the real-life Popski's Private Army (a British reconnaissance unit
in northern Africa during WWII), has the underqualified Capt. Douglas (Michael
Caine) being plucked from his cushy job to lead a unit deep behind enemy lines
to blow up a Nazi fuel depot. The group is made up of thoroughly amoral, vile
men operating outside of the mainstream military. They look to their own Capt.
Leech (Nigel Davenport, outstanding in a role originally meant for Richard
Harris) as their true leader, and Davenport and Caine spend the film at odds
over power until Caine gradually succumbs to the group's "dirty"
tactics and is accepted. The objective [SPOILER ALERT!] turns out to be a fake,
a decoy, until the men decide for themselves to find and destroy the real one.
What they don't know, however, is that their superiors back at base have
decided that the real objective is now no longer an objective at all, and the
tables are now turned against the group in a deeply cynical way.
The characters in Play Dirty
act out of greed or selfishness instead of national pride or military
correctness. The iconography of military uniforms is subverted, too; several
times in the movie, characters wear the uniforms of the enemy, which Jeanine
Basinger has written "is considered a despicable thing to do" in war
and war movies. Even a harrowing attempted-gang-rape sequence, astonishingly
enough, is successfully capped by a humorous, ironic - and thus totally
unexpected - image. All these and more are examples of a movie that twists,
subverts, and comments upon what we all already know from countless other war
movies - and it never loses its entertainment value in the process.
Director Andre de Toth would have argued with the word
"entertainment." Asked about Play Dirty's comparison to The Dirty Dozen, he said, "The
Dirty Dozen was a good and entertaining motion picture. How could it be
compared to Play Dirty,
a bitter slice of real life and certainly not entertainment? I wanted to rub
our noses in the mess we have created and how we shy away from our
responsibility to clean it up. I showed what I wanted, the naked truth, the
truth of life and war. I wanted to disturb, to open closed eyes and scramble brains,
hoping they'll think."
Think we do, even as we enjoy one fantastic scene after another. Two memorable
examples: a drawn-out affair in which jeeps are hauled up a steep cliff by
means of pulleys and cables, and a well-edited burial montage which, according
to de Toth, was originally scored with "the happy voice of a children's
choir. The harsh contrast to the macabre scene disturbed [the producers] so
much that after I delivered what I thought was the finished picture, the
children's voices were taken out the day before the release prints were
ordered. Nothing I could do."
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Sgt. Slaughter Goes to War (Ben Cressy) review
de Van, Marina
IN MY SKIN (Dans ma peau) B+ 91
France (93 mi) 2002
Not since Norman Bates in PSYCHO has someone taken such a passionate interest in the choice of cutlery. I am admittedly squeamish when it comes to screen horror, but that's not how I viewed this film, which not only deals with self- mutilation, but self-cannibalism as well. There is a truly loopy dinner sequence where her arm turns into the arm of DR. STRANGELOVE, as it seems to have a mind all of its own. The degree of excess is mind-boggling, and the young woman is completely oblivious that there's anything amiss, as it produces a kind of calmness in her life that eradicates all outside pressures. The lead performance by the writer-director is naturalistic, curiously not overplayed, as her body becomes fertile grounds for exploratory territory. The subject itself is horrifying enough, but I saw this as much more of an interior journey, and herein lies the film's strength; it's completely non-judgmental, perhaps even understated, which lures us into her psyche, as we wonder why – a question the film, very much like Gus Van Sant's Columbine supposition, ELEPHANT, never answers. Instead, the film raises questions, like what inner turmoil could possibly lead to this, or how is this a reflection of women? Are women more prone to mutilate themselves than men? Could this actually be a feminist treatise on exasperation or anguish, as it takes incredible courage to place something like this before the public? Are there ramifications about a world gone wrong, so wrong that this is an expression of a kind of madness that we have not yet allowed ourselves to even think about? Despite the disturbing nature of the film, the material is never gratuitous or exploitive. It's intelligently presented and thought provoking, always fully respecting her state of mind. Not for the meek or timid, the film is underscored by the soft, Bill Evans-style, cool jazz of Esbjorn Svensson, twice voted the Swedish jazzman of the year, featuring the song "Strange Place for Snow."
In
My Skin (Dans Ma Peau) Gerald Peary
Dans Ma Peau/In My Skin is a
slasher film for arthouse intellectuals, theorists of "the body," and
swimming-against-the-stream feminists. It's a kind of on-film performance
piece, written and directed by, and also starring, France
In My Skin tells the freaky, also
undeniably absorbing tale, of Esther (De Van), a thirtyish Parisian research
analyst, who, one strange evening, enters a masochistic netherworld when she
trips outside a party, badly bloodying her leg. Rather than wipe up or get
medical attention, Esther lowers her pant leg, allowing her wounds to fester.
She goes home, examines them, becomes absorbed with the hurt, fascinated with
the topography of bruises, scabs, and red drips.
Finally, a doctor bandages her
injury. In revolt, Esther goes feverishly after the bandage with scissors, so
she can liberate her naked, maimed flesh. Grown antsy at her staid office, she
races to a subterranean hideout where she can razor more of her body. Back at
her computer, she resumes work, but with a stealthy, smutty smile.
As Esther becomes more possessed,
private and public space inevitably interact. She attends a formal business
lunch, and while her straight-laced colleagues drone on about the beautiful
city of Lisbon
Why do you do it? Vincent
demands. "I don't know," Esther honestly answers. In her haze, she's
like Catherine Deneuve's schizoid, murderous protagonist of the Roman Polanski
1965 classic, Repulsion.
De Van the screenwriter/director
offers no facile psychological explanation for Esther's pathological behavior,
nor does she sanctimoniously condemn it. Interviewed, De Van admitted an
autobiographical connection with the character she so intensely plays: a
traumatic childhood car accident left her with a deformed leg. "It
reinforced my feeling of strangeness," she explained. "During my
entire adolescence my body both interested and intrigued me." In contrast,
Esther, the workaholic, has cut herself off from her body, until that fateful,
bizarre, epiphanic night.
De Van: "...(T)he body is,
in effect, a bit absent from our culture. It is a calculated abstract idea, but
it is lived relatively little... Self-mutilation is a very elementary and
strong way to reconnect with the present, the moment, and with sensation. A
re-appropriation of the body comes with pain."
Interestingly, Esther never
touches her breasts or genitalia when she's slicing away, never mutilating
them, never even masturbating, no matter how blatantly sexual her charge when
she's violating her flesh. In My Skin is a potent text for those debating what
does, or does not, constitute "pornography." There's a long, juicy
section in which Esther's face goes down on her bleeding arm, and she licks it
and sucks on it as if she's mouthing a ripe, wet vagina. But it's not a vagina,
it's an arm. Does that therefore disqualify as porno?
Those who have argued that
horror-movie bloodsucking is displaced oral sex will adore In My Skin,
especially since De Van, with her dark, shaped eyebrows and pronounced teeth,
looks so prototypically vampiric. Dracula's daughter!.
DON’T LOOK BACK (Ne Te Retourne
Pas)
France Luxembourg Belgium (110 mi) 2009
Cannes '09: Day Three Mike
D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V.
Club, May 17, 2009
Even scary French actress Marina de Van let me down today. Don’t Look Back, her second film
behind the camera (and one of my most anticipated films of the festival),
screws up everything that her gut-wrenching debut, In My Skin, got
miraculously right. A big part of what made the earlier film so
intensely disturbing is that its heroine’s descent into obsessive
self-mutilation (bring the kids!) has no apparent cause, no glib Psych 101
explanation. Don’t Look Back boasts an equally arresting premise: A
professional biographer attempting her first novel (Sophie Marceau) first sees
objects in her house in different places than she’s always remembered them,
then watches in horror as her husband and two children turn into different
people altogether, and then herself turns into Monica Bellucci (obviously an
upgrade, but never mind). This time, however, a traumatic and reductive
incident from Marceau/Bellucci’s past is to blame—hence the title—which makes
the entire film feel like the laborious setup for a dopey Twilight Zone
twist. And where In My Skin was clinically detached and matter-of-fact, Don’t
Look Back leans hard on a conventionally atonal musical score and cheap
shock cuts, as well as some dubious special effects. (At one point the
protagonist’s face is half Marceau and half Bellucci, which was clearly
intended to be creepy but made half my audience bust out laughing.) That I can
easily imagine an American remake is perhaps most damning of all.
Todd Brown at Cannes from Twitch, May 16, 2009
Jeanne’s
reality is bending. The successful journalistic author is loosing her
hold on reality - her family becoming literally unrecognizable, her belongings
changing and moving without being touched and without any recognition of the changes
from anyone else, even her own face is shifting in the mirror. Is Jeanne
going mad or is something else at play here, something connected to the strange
girl only she seems to see and the book she is trying to write about the lost
years of her childhood - the years before she turned eight, of which she can
remember nothing? This is the world of Marina De Van’s Ne Te Retourne
Pas.
Sophie
Marceau is Jeanne. Monica Bellucci is also Jeanne. But how can this
be possible? And who are this new people who keep replacing her mother
and husband and child at odd intervals with nobody else noticing? What is
happening here? This is the central conceit and device of the film - one
that can’t really be talked about at length without diving into spoilers - and
one that works remarkably well for the first two thirds of the film.
Sadly the ending is plagued with both some very poor effects work and an
unsatisfyingly soft resolution that render this one significantly less than it
could have been.
Well shot
and very well performed by it’s sterling cast - Marceau and Bellucci are
entirely convincing as the same character, which is no easy feat - Ne Te
Retourne Pas plays like nothing so much as a genre film intended for people who
don’t like genre films. It dabbles in the same pool here where directors
like David Lynch have been known to dive right in and, as a result, is less
than satisfying for people who actually Do like genre films. The concept
of perception versus reality and how that affects identity is a potent one -
one that has been tackled with varying degrees of success a number of times
before - and with writer-director De Van the concept receives a largely surface
treatment. Pretty, well done as far as it goes, but ultimately just an
appetizer dressed up as a full meal.
Don’t
Look Back (Ne Te Retourne Pas)
Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily
A woman
searches for identity. An audience searches for elucidation. Both wind up
equally perplexed in Don’t Look Back, an initially intriguing,
ultimately incoherent mind-bender from second-time director-writer Marina de
Van. Ostensibly a more mainstream project than her previous film, the very
personal In My Skin, Don’t Look Back begins as a psychological
thriller in a Hitchcock/Polanski vein, then strays into a thicket of
distracting special effects, before heading for the far shores of existential
nightmare. The film, released in France on June 3, could gross well initially
purely on the appeal of its two female leads (Sophie Marceau and Monica
Bellucci), but bad word of mouth will surely limit its life span. Sheer
outlandishness might ensure a cult DVD afterlife, but export and festival
prospects look equally thin.
A former
collaborator with François Ozon, De Van made an eerie impression acting in his
films Sitcom and Regarde la Mer. In her own In My Skin,
she played a woman addicted to self-mutilation and established an auteur
preoccupation with the traumas of female identity, which she explores further,
but far less compellingly here.
Heroine
Jeanne (Marceau) is a successful biographer and former child prodigy who comes
unstuck when branching into fiction. Her publisher brusquely advises her to
stick to her proven skills, rather than attempt to fictionalise her life. But
Jeanne is fascinated with the mysteries of her past, having no memory of
anything that happened before she was eight. At home with husband Teo (Di
Stefano) and their two kids, odd details about their apartment become
unfamiliar to her, and then she sees the face of another woman (Bellucci)
replacing hers in a video.
The next
thing she knows, Teo’s and the children’s faces transform, becoming bizarre,
mask-like combinations of their own and someone else’s physiognomies. Jeanne
changes too, her features getting stuck halfway between Marceau’s and
Bellucci’s – to the merriment of the audience at the film’s first Cannes
screening, proving there’s a thin line between the nightmarish and the just
plain daft, especially when too-literal digital effects enter the mix.
The film
takes a moderately revitalising left turn in the second hour, when Jeanne (now
completely Bellucci) travels to Italy, and Italian dialogue, to solve the mystery
of her past. Some teasing switcheroos are played, with both Di Stefano and
Brigitte Catillon (Jeanne’s mother) appearing as different characters entirely.
But the film soon slips its moorings, accumulating overtones of Lynch,
Cronenberg, M. Night Shyamalan and Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, with a
mysterious child, repeatedly glimpsed by Jeanne, guiding her to enlightenment.
The solution, such as it is, is both banal and implausible, and the final shot
places a kitsch stamp on proceedings.
The film’s failure
is all the more disappointing in that the first half-hour hints at an elegant
entertainment, with appealingly sleek camerawork and production values. De
Van’s left-field sensibilities promise a distinctive Freudian-feminist gloss on
the kind of identity-scramble puzzler epitomised by Polanski’s The Tenant.
But De Van offers us insufficient signposting, so that we never feel sure
whether to take the film as psychological thriller, abstruse parallel-world
story or pure reverie. She also pushes her leads too far in the direction of
eye-rolling panic, although of the two Jeannes, Marceau is the far more
sympathetic and plausible.
Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from
Cineuropa, May 15, 2009
Cannes.
"Don't Look Back" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 16,
2009
Peter Brunette at Cannes from The
Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2009
Derek Elley at Cannes from Variety,
May 16, 2009
Deal, Carl and Tina Lessin
TROUBLE THE WATER A- 94
It
felt like we lost our citizenship. —Kimberly
Roberts
A wonderfully unpretentious film that by tracing the path of one family gets to the heart of the matter of the government’s notorious absence in New Orleans after Katrina leaving residents, but mostly poor and black residents where the greatest damage occurred, to fend for themselves. Without explaining how she happened upon a video camera, apparently a $20 camcorder that feels left over from the CLOVERFIELD (2008) movie set, Kimberly Roberts from her home on France Street in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans starts filming her house and everything around the neighborhood in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina, as she wanted a recording of what it looked like both before and after. Greeting everyone she meets on the street, asking what their plans are, also filming while riding her bike, where you can hear the click click click as the pedal hits the kickstand, we get a good sense of how she sees her neighborhood and the people familiar to her living in it, some of whom, including several in her own family, will not survive the storm. She has a natural ease with people and the good sense to narrate while the camera is running explaining what we are looking at as she stocks up on food, ice and emergency provisions. Unable to afford “the luxury” to get safely out of town (apparently their car had recently been stolen), she and her husband Scott decide to ride out the storm from her home, producing about twenty minutes of some of the most intense footage of the storm in action, where after the levees break a mere three blocks away, she comments “It’s like an ocean out there” as the water rises and her street is flooded as high as a stop sign. Her family is forced into the attic and eventually move to a house across the street that is one story higher, where she and about a dozen others including children, elderly and an infirmed have to be carried over a river chest high by her husband who uses a punching bag as a flotation device. With no help in sight and a 911 operator that tells them the city is not prepared to offer them any rescue assistance at this time, they have to wander through this nightmarish deluge on their own.
As we piece together footage after her battery runs dead where the film is framed with time headings—Two days after the levees fail, or one week after the levees fail, we learn that despite an abandoned Navy barracks several blocks away that had already been closed due to cuts in federal funding, where only a skeleton crew remained protecting the base, this family was turned away from more than 200 empty beds at the point of M-16’s locked and loaded pointed directly at them, ordering them to disperse. Instead they spent several nights in an abandoned school before they found a boat to take them to a Red Cross shelter, which is where they met the documentary filmmakers who were originally attempting to do a story on the travails of the National Guard, over-extended both in Iraq and now back here at home, but the Guard refused to cooperate. Among the most devastating footage captured was the deadly aftermath where in a rented van filled to capacity with 25 of her neighbors they drive past the New Orleans Superdome, where a long tracking shot resembles the look of the Civil War wounded in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), capturing defenseless, helpless people who have no way out, many lying on the ground sick or near death from lack of water while several buses remain idle parked right across the street. While this entire catastrophe is amateurishly documented, Roberts has an amazing ability to offer her own soulful perspective whose raw insight and authenticity adds to the harrowing realism of the moment.
Actual news footage shown on TV is interspersed with what Roberts sees on the ground, oftentimes at complete odds with one another, especially when President Bush or FEMA director Mike Brown affirm their alleged successes, or when we get a good look at the tourist video that the city still proudly uses. The Roberts family exits the city for their first time for a home 200 miles away owned by an uncle which has no running water, where in a typical day in the life scenario, the water department comes out to turn the water on at one point, only to return minutes later to turn it back off again. That uncle lost his mother when she was abandoned in a hospital during Katrina, as the entire staff evacuated and left the patients behind to fend for themselves. From this location they can visit FEMA centers where they line up next to “Gate B – Cattle entrance” and reapply for emergency funds that never came, after which they hope to move to a safer location, believing everything has been lost at home. When they make a return visit several weeks later to obtain what they can, the streets are a sea of mud and obliteration patrolled by neglected, near starving stray dogs. Kimberly feels blessed that a photo of her mother remains intact, explaining her mother died of AIDS when she was 13 and this is her only surviving keepsake. Amazingly their two dogs left behind survived, though they have been living on highly contaminated water, while the corpse of one man seen in the before-Katrina footage still lays dead in his living room. The National Guard is summoned to obtain the body. Again a long tracking shot of several city blocks both a few weeks after the flood and shown again a year later shows one or two houses either rebuilt or still standing on her block while everything else remains a wasteland of utter demolition. Nothing has changed as there is simply no sign of life left there at all.
Instead they set out for Memphis, Tennessee where another relative lives, bringing extended family and the dogs, where in a nice, clean neighborhood it’s clear the additional burden is asking a lot of anyone. At first, the peace and quiet and relative safety is like an oasis after the storm, but after a period of time, having nowhere else to go, they eventually return to New Orleans where Scott gets a job working with a building contractor reconstructing houses. Kimberly has a budding rap career under the name Black Kold Madina which is on full display after she discovers her own rap demo previously believed lost when she provides an audacious, foot stomping performance of her song (I Don't Need You To Tell Me That I'm) “ Amazing,” Black Kold Madina - "Amazing" YouTube (3:54), while standing outside an overstuffed closet in a crowded bedroom with her husband proudly watching which is in perfect synch, a song that offers plenty of insight into her personal history, including that knife scar across her husband’s jaw, their life before Katrina as drug hustlers, and her literal resurrection into a woman with a clean slate and a new attitude about her future. It’s not so much a song as an anthem of joy and triumph in the face of diversity. There’s a defiant “Won’t Get Fooled Again” mentality that Kimberly develops after she’s had a chance to see schools outside New Orleans actually prepare kids for college and the future, while with the highest incarceration rate in the nation New Orleans is instead “preparing us for prison." Kimberly Roberts has come full circle with her before and after footage. Little did she know that what she couldn’t film, the growing maturity inside of herself, is what ended up changing the most. This disaster movie which is filled with first hand observations from an every day black perspective turns into a film of personal triumph, and in a moment of rare humility, Kimberly is brought to tears when one neighbor actually thanks her for the efforts she made on behalf of all her neighbors.
PASTE Review - Trouble the Water Jesse Jarnow
Like a Shakespeare adaptation, Trouble the Water’s plot will be
unreassuringly familiar: levee breaches, failed bureaucracy, general awfulness. Even without adding to the well-covered
Hurricane Katrina narrative, documentarians Tia Lessin and Carl Deal still get
it completely right. Edited around home videos by Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a
vivacious 24-year-old resident of
"Trouble the Water,"
the Sundance Grand Jury Prize
winner by
Roberts, who is African-American in a notoriously racist city, is an aspiring young rapper who embraces all aspects of her life, whether it be past drug dealing, slicing up her husband Scott's face, or committing herself to Christianity. Lessin and Deal follow her and the more low-key Scott while they revisit sites of tragic significance from the Katrina days, when broken levees flooded their neighborhood. Using Roberts's and archival footage, and shooting in 16 mm, the directors wisely opted for a nonlinear approach. The film ends with Roberts singing a rap song she wrote, a testament to fortitude and an openness that we can all learn from. "I've been picked up and let down but I bounce right back," she chants. "Come on and take a look and know that I'm amazing." We know, we know.
Moving Pictures Magazine [Alexis Madden]
When Katrina's storm surges breached the levees, water inundated
With a haunting first-person perspective, Kimberly Rivers Roberts (aspiring
rapper Black Kold Madina) captures the images and observations of her 9th Ward
streets and neighbors in the final pre-Katrina moments with her video camera.
After the rain begins to fall and the wind picks up, Roberts divulges her
own requiem of the storm. "This is on its way. It's me, reporting live,
Kold Madina... here we go."
Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott continued to film the
unforgettable moments as the water swallowed their streets and belongings and
while friends and neighbors hid in their attic. "They put it on the news
that we should get out, but you got those people that just couldn't leave, like
me. Not because we ain't want to, but because we couldn't afford the luxury. I
believe in Jesus. The Lord will send me through this one. Whenever the
Lord allow it, I'll be able to tell the story.
Then the battery goes dead and the screen goes black.
Two weeks later, the couple, followed by filmmakers, returns to
Roberts remarks on her determination to use the devastation to move forward: "I couldn't see it when I was on the inside, but I can see it now. It was a good thing in a way because it forced us out."
However, without a high school education, moving out of the 9th
Ward proves harder than expected, and the film follows the
Robertses as they wrestle with their new outlook. Unable to find work
in
A hand up, not just a hand out, is what
they ask for. It's the only way to truly rebuild a city, a culture and a
brighter future for the people of
Yellow tapelines stretch across the
final moments of the film to display the staggering post-Katrina facts: The
rent in
Trouble the Water illustrates more than a storm and its aftermath. It
illuminates a world moving forward with an important segment of its population
left behind. They deserve our determination. They deserve us turning toward
them, facing the hard issues together... head on.
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review from The House
Next Door
Two days after Bliss, the festival
struck gold again with Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water.
It isn’t only the best documentary to play at SIFF this year; it isn’t only one
of the few genuinely great films to burst through the festival dross: it is a
superbly paced and directed, at times ferociously angry masterpiece on the
worst moral failure in modern American history—that is, our conservative
Christian government’s “response” to Hurricane Katrina—and it is one of the
imperative movie-going experiences of ’08.
On
The co-directors, Kim, and their editor T. Woody Richman
(he also cut Fahrenheit 9/11) seamlessly move from the everyday to a
sense of the inexorable. From within the Roberts’s besieged house on August 29,
the camera’s eye captures a front steps view of how the levee system failed,
and the dark shots of water rising, especially those where the only light
source is a flashlight, are terrifying. Those who stayed behind, garrisoned in
Kim’s attic, comment on the rain seeping through windows below, watching the
wide swath of waves where paved roads were: “like an ocean out there.” The
filmmakers mix in audio of phone calls made to police operators, who tell
residents trapped inside their engulfed bungalows, “At this time, they are not
rescuing.” The water, meanwhile, has risen nearly to the top of a stop sign;
perched above it, a one-way arrow takes on an ominous dimension. As the voices
on the phone attest, there was no way out.
Inserted here and there are clips of FEMA figurehead Mike
Brown, whose fleeting appearances drew hoots of contempt from the audience I
saw the movie with, and George W. Bush, whose colossal phoniness has rarely
seemed shriller than in his live broadcast on the day of the devastation. While
patients defenselessly drowned in their beds at
A few National Guardsmen show up in the Ninth Ward, long
after the waters have receded; Kim and Scott’s friend Brian tells them, “I hope
you don’t have to go back to
This stunning movie cuts to the quick of each issue it
touches on. It implicitly condemns the
Musically, the filmmakers’ choices are spot-on. Citizen
Cope’s “Hurricane Waters” underscores tracking shots of thousands of evacuees
stranded at a debris-littered shelter, the contrast between the song’s lovely
humanity and the reality of how
If only all nonfiction features playing at SIFF were made
with such integrity. Alas, it is so rarely the case, as our next film, an
instance of mere festival filler, so regrettably demonstrates.
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The Village Voice [Jim Ridley]
indieWIRE review Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Film Journal International (David Noh) review
The New York Sun (S. James Snyder) review
Screen International review Colin Bown at Sundance
Zoom in Online (Nathaniel Rogers) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson
New Directors/New Films: Part Two · MadisonAvenueJournal.com September 25, 2008
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [4/6]
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [5/6]
San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Study: La.'s incarceration rate leads nation | News for New ... Louisiana leads the nation in overall prison rate, from WWLTV News, December 1, 2006
Deadly lockdown in New Orleans | Salon News Robin Templeton from Salon, August 23, 2007
>: Louisiana's Incarceration Rate "Highest in the World" Mississippi Project, October 25, 2007
Racism in New Orleans Criminal Justice System: Among nation’s worst pre-Katrina, still worse now Jordan Flaherty from San Francisco Gray Panthers, August 30, 2007
Study: La.'s incarceration rate leads nation | News for New ... WWLTV in Louisiana, June 11, 2008
La.'s incarceration rate leads nation - Law Enforcement News Corrections One News Bulletin, August 15, 2008
D'Alliance New Orleans Solidarity, by Vera Leone September 3, 2008
Dean, James – actor
James Dean biography from the profile page from Turner Classic Movies
One of the most iconic figures in American cinematic
history, James Dean remains forever etched as a brooding, romantic figure, the
quintessential 1950s teenager thanks primarily to his roles in "East of
Eden" (1955) and "Rebel Without a Cause" (1956). Intelligent and
projecting a sexual charisma that appealed to men and women, Dean may be best
recalled for his three major movie roles, but behind that small output was a
serious-minded, disciplined and trained actor.
James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931 in Marion, Indiana
to a dental technician and his wife. Dean's father relocated the family to
California in 1935 but following his mother's untimely death from cancer in
1940, young Jimmy was sent back to Indiana to live with relatives. A star
athlete in high school, he also excelled in theatrics and was encouraged by the
school's drama teacher Adeline Nall. After graduation, Dean landed his first
professional gig, a 1950 TV commercial for Pepsi Cola and then headed West to
attend college, but he soon dropped out in favor of pursuing an acting career.
After making his TV debut as the Apostle John in "Hill Number One"
and landing bit roles in films like "Sailor Beware" (both 1951), he
began studying acting with James Whitmore who encouraged the talented neophyte
to move to Manhattan and work with famed teacher/coach Lee Strasberg. Heeding
Whitmore's advice, Dean landed in the Big Apple in the fall of 1951 and worked
odd jobs (including pre-testing the stunts on TV's "Beat the Clock")
until he gained a berth at the Actors Studio. He soon was landing roles on
stage ("See the Jaguar", "The Immoralist") and in many of
the live television dramas of the day.
By 1954, Dean was put under contract by Warner Bros. to
star in Elia Kazan's film version of "East of Eden" (1955). As Cal
Trask, the troubled son of a wealthy businessman, he perfectly captured the
neurosis and jealousies of the character. While Dean did have a tendency toward
over-emoting, the cumulative effect of his performance ultimate proves
rewarding to viewers and was recognized by the Academy with a posthumous Oscar
nomination as Best Actor.
One can only speculate on what heights (or what depths)
Dean may have hit had he not been killed in a car accident on the night of
September 30, 1955, Combining the sensitivity of a Montgomery Clift with the
incoherent, explosive anger and sexuality of a Marlon Brando, James Dean came
to epitomize the phrase "rebel without a cause". His hypnotic,
angst-ridden turn in the 1955 film of that name (released less than a month
after his death) struck a chord with teenagers the world over and solidified
his reputation as the voice of his generation. Dean's early death forever froze
him as that surly but sensitive teenager and made him the epitome of all that
was "cool". His third and last film, "Giant" (1956), was a
sweeping generational epic and his strong turn as the lonely tortured Jett
(which netted a second Best Actor Academy Award nomination) helped raise the
material above its soap opera-ish qualities.
While critics were divided over Dean's work in his own time
(Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called him a "mass of histrionic
gingerbread" in "East of Eden" but praised his "stylized
spookiness" in "Giant"), history has upheld his popularity and
seen dozens upon dozens of emerging actors hailed as "the new James
Dean". A virtual cottage industry for the literary set with over a dozen
biographies, Dean and his life also have been plumbed by filmmakers ranging
from Robert Altman (the 1957 documentary "The James Dean Story") to Mark
Rydell (2001's TV biopic "James Dean"). Not since Valentino had a
film actor attracted such legions of fans in life and in death.
glbtq >> arts >> Dean, James Jim Provenzano biography from an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture
James Dean, Tribute to a Legend
A Tribute to James Dean Classic Movies
American Masters . James Dean | PBS
Rebel Without A Cause: Movie fan website
Rebel Without A Cause : A tribute to James Dean British fan site
On "Thinking of James Dean" Brad Gooch, from City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara at Modern American Poetry (1993)
James Dean - One of the Gang--The Making of Rebel Without a Cause personal essay by Jack Grinnage, a member of the cast, from American Legends (undated)
Irreverent Iconographer Brandon Yip interviews Warren Beath, the author of The Death of James Dean, from American Legends (undated)
A Historian Looks at James Dean The James Dean Scrapbook introduction by Vagn Hansen from American Legends (undated)
James Dean: A Rebel for All Seasons The James Dean Story introduction by Ron Martinetti to the paperback edition, from American legends (1995)
PBS: "James Dean: Sense Memories" transcript of a discussion about the American Masters documentary, from The Washington Post, May 12, 2005
Mad about the boy James Dean was the embodiment of young male vulnerability, heroism and torment. Who would have guessed he was gay? Fifty years after his death, it's all too obvious, argues Germaine Greer from The Guardian, May 14, 2005
James Dean. - By John Swansburg - Slate Magazine May 19, 2005
THE THREE FILMS OF JAMES DEAN previously at Film Forum in New York ... July 19, 2005
Remembering Two Icons: James Dean and Bruce Lee : AsianWeek Philip W. Chung, September 30, 2005
Johnny Depp on James Dean ... on Radio 2 Mike Lawson from The Guardian, September 27, 2005
AMC's James Dean Photo Gallery: Living Fast and Dying Young also seen here: 10 James Dean Essentials: Photo Essay
William Bast Dean’s biographer
The religion of James Dean, actor
The Death of James Dean Franks Reel Reviews
BBC ON THIS DAY | 30 | 1955: James Dean killed in car smash September 30, 1955
James Dean MEMORIAL JUNCTION photos and memorabilia
Fairmount Historical Museum artifacts
Cholame - Shandon, CA - James Dean Memorial
James Dean (1931 - 1955) - Find A Grave Memorial
James Dean - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Youtube: 1950 Pepsi commercial (54 seconds)
Paul Newman and James Dean Screentest for East of Eden | Open Culture (1:28)
DeCillo, Tom
JOHNNY SUEDE
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Shallow open-ended subjective allegory that successfully poses as
impressionistic and deep for 25 minutes or so. The problem isn't so much that
the eccentricity becomes familiar, as that the eccentricity itself lacks focus,
consistency, and endodermis level development. Make no mistake, this is a very
funny movie, particularly the first half. Brad Pitt is sporadically spectacular
as the pompadoured protagonist but just can't carry the burden, or isn't
interested in the tedium, of portraying someone with an IQ 100 points lower
than himself. The guy that plays Flip Doubt (Peter McRobbie) also did a fine
job. The little noises, bird chirping as introductory percussion, etc., are
cute but lose their punch once you're conditioned to expect them.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Right from the start, it's clear that
the young eponymous hero (Pitt) is madly in love with suede shoes, Ricky
Nelson's songs, his plans to become a rock'n'roll idol, the romantic notion of
finding a dream girl, and - most of all - himself. So when, after a flattering
fling with alarmingly changeable damsel in distress Darlette (Moir), Johnny
meets the more down-to-earth Yvonne (Keener), you know he'll finally have to
choose between his immature fantasies and the love of a good woman. On to this
slim, slightly moralistic fable, DiCillo grafts an appealing veneer of droll
slow-burn humour, wacky caricature, and pseudo-hip posing. Much of what is said
and done is deliberately and delightfully absurd. But the movie is saved from
becoming too knowingly flip not only by DiCillo's sure sense of pace and mood,
but by the performances; especially Keener, who displays a fine mix of
strength, savvy and vulnerability.
Johnny Suede Movie Review (1991) from Channel 4 Film
Tom
DiCillo's surreal first feature provided a breakthrough lead role for the then
undiscovered Brad Pitt, with strong support from Catherine Keener
Based upon a one-man show by
Tom DiCillo from his earlier stage days, Johnny Suede was the director/scriptwriter's
first film. It's a character-lead series of vignettes brought to life by a
mixture of material he'd been mulling over since film school as well some
autobiographical details (including most of his own wardrobe). Brad Pitt was a
little known actor who'd just wrapped a film called Thelma & Louise when
DiCillo choose him to play the eponymous slacker who evades reality by
conjuring up the life of a would-be 1950s teen idol.
Stuck
with decorating apartments for a living, Johnny escapes into a nostalgia trip
of rock 'n' roll ballads and hairdos modeled upon his idol Ricky Nelson until
divine intervention takes hold and a pair of perfect suede shoes drops from the
heavens into his possession. Armed with his dream footwear, Johnny gets serious
about forming a band, even more so when his dream girl (Moir) - a manipulative
ingénue bedecked in pink - turns out to be the daughter of a record producer.
Only when he meets teacher Yvonne (Keener) does Johnny have a chance to find an
anchor in real life, even if he has trouble dealing with it.
Set in secluded, decaying New York, with Brad Pitt walking around like he's
just stepped off the set of Grease, the film's surrealist tone is set up
early on and is clearly influenced by David Lynch and Luis Buñuel. DiCillo
tries to make a modern fable, fashioning an off-beat and often darkly humorous
tale out of one man's inability to acknowledge the one thing of most value in
his life but, to the detriment of the movie, he relies on superficiality a
little too often. However, with Pitt on form and Keener bringing an emotional
core to the film, there is at least a resonance to the final scenes.
Imaginative and intelligent, this may not be DeCillo's best but as a
debut, made under typically demanding indie restrictions, it shows what he's
capable of.
DVD
Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review
[2/5]
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[3.5/5]
Eye for
Film (David Stanners) review [3.5/5]
Critical-Film.com (Scott Wood) review [3.5/5]
Cinema Crazed
[Felix Vasquez Jr.]
Austin Chronicle (Pamela Bruce) review [3/5]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
LIVING IN OBLIVION
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
DiCillo's second feature gets great
mileage out of the simple, familiar premise of an idealistic film-maker
struggling to complete his movie. The director is Nick (Buscemi), an arty tyro
believed by some to be 'tight with Tarantino' and by himself to be in love with
leading lady Nicole (Keener). Nick's main headache, however, is leading man
Chad Palomino (LeGros), a petulant hunk whose vanity outweighs his doubtful
commitment, and whose philandering inflames rivalries between various women on
set, notably Nicole and producer Wanda, whose lover Wolf was never too fond of
Chad in the first place. And then, as further irritants, there are the errant
booms and malfunctioning smoke-machines, the eye-patches and goatees, the
senile mothers, psycho-analysing drivers and hypersensitive extras - a total
nightmare. The ingenious narrative, told from differing perspectives and
incorporating tales within tales and teasing elisions between 'film' and
'reality', is actually informative about the nuts and bolts of shooting a
movie, and not only as a catalogue of technical disasters - through the
shamefully under-rated Keener, we get a real insight into screen acting and the
way fatigue, memory, stress and surroundings can take their toll. Hers,
however, is merely the finest of a whole host of spot-on performances. A treat.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun) dvd review
I once read an article where musician Steven Tyler
exclaimed that he found no humor whatsoever in his first viewing of the rock
and roll satire This Is Spinal Tap.
Tyler
Though irresistibly hilarious, the film is actually more of an ode to the
heartbreak of independent filmmaking rather than a parody, a sly wink to all
the struggling artists who have "been there, done that." As
inspiration for this wickedly realistic send-up, writer/director Tom DiCillo
drew from his own experiences in the low budget film industry and created an
almost autobiographical tale of his frustrations. Originally penned as a
half-hour short, DiCillo later structured Oblivion into a three-part, 90-minute
film. While the first half hour is unquestionably the best sequence, the entire
film works wonderfully as an hysterical exploration into the horrors and
pitfalls of making a motion picture. A credit to the visceral power of the
film, I actually found myself becoming as frustrated as the fictional
filmmakers when one shot after another went awry.
In addition to DiCillo's shrewd understanding of his subject matter, the film
thrives on fantastic performances. From the main players to the supporting
roles, all of the characters are wholly indicative of those I would expect to
see working on a low budget film. At the top of the ladder is Nick Reve (Steve
Buscemi), the frazzled director with big aspirations undermined by faulty
equipment and a neurotic cast and crew. Buscemi masterfully portrays the bitter
agitation of a struggling director, yet still remains sincere and appealing to
the audience. Dermot Mulroney turns in a riotous performance as the
cinematographer, Wolf, the type of egocentric "artiste" who
unquestionably considers himself the most valuable on the set. Nicole Springer
(Catherine Keener) and Chad Palomino (James Le Gros) are also exuberant
standouts as characteristically unstable actors; Nicole is ripe with talent but
plagued by insecurity, while Chad Hollywood big shot whose smug
unpredictability turns the lives of the cast and crew into a living hell.
Living in Oblivion is a movie based upon the disappointments of one thing after
another going wrong. For 90 minutes, we watch these poor filmmakers endure just
about every kind of problem possible. The film may sound dreadfully monotonous,
but thanks to the keen sense of realism caught by DiCillo, there is never a
dull moment. Unlike many fictional films, the best scenes are those grounded in
reality; those that made me believe I was watching a real-life documentary on
low budget filmmaking. In contrast, the moments when the screenplay resorts to
unnecessary slapstick often feel silly and contrived. However, maybe these
instances are also part of DiCillo's nightmarish memoirs. The bottom line is
that this production is a thoroughly entertaining and successful comedy. It may
not be a particularly profound film, but it is guaranteed to tickle just about
anybody's funny bone—anybody with the exception of, perhaps, struggling
filmmakers.
Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review
AT THE CENTER of the
immensely entertaining Singin' in the Rain is a sequence that ranks
among the funniest in film history. While silent-screen movie star Jean
Hagen attempts to perform in her first "talkie," everything that
can go wrong does: the microphone rustles, the sound drops out, and a romantic
scene's effectiveness is ruined by the once-mute actress' shrill squeaky voice.
Singin' in the Rain has many other pleasures, but this
scene has the educational benefit of accurately depicting the real on-set
frustrations of filmmakers trying to create sound pictures in the late '20s.
For movie buffs it's a must-see.
In Living in Oblivion,
director-writer Tom DeCillo takes the rhythm and structure of the
afore-mentioned scene and successfully expands it into a full-length movie. His
subject matter may be different--he depicts the frustrations of modern-day
independent filmmakers--but the source of humor is largely the same.
Moviemaking is revealed as a small war between the cinematic dreamers and the
multitude of egos, accidents and other irritations that get in the way of
capturing their dreams on celluloid. Though Living in Oblivion has a
small scope, as far as movie fanatics are concerned, it too is a must-see.
The film is neatly divided into
three parts, each one of them detailing the struggle of a first-time director (Steve
Buscemi, as fun to watch as ever) to ward off Murphy's Law during the
creation of a scene. He's fighting a losing battle: While trying to capture the
raw emotion of a revelational mother-daughter conversation, one of the grips
drops the boom mike into the frame, a cameraman's assistant loses control of
the focus, the uninspired actors forget their lines and the cinematographer
becomes ill from some bad milk left sitting around. I won't give away this
segment's punchline, but let's just say that even when things finally go right,
they still go wrong.
Tom DeCillo got his start as a
cinematographer (he worked on Jim
Jarmusch's Stranger
Than Paradise). From there he made a terrific independent feature of his
own, Johnny
Suede--which stars Brad Pitt in one of his most enjoyable performances. Knowing
this makes Living in Oblivion's second segment, in which the low-budget
crew must contend with the production's sole star--a very Brad Pittish
heartthrob played by James
LeGros--doubly amusing. LeGros' character is an overconfident dolt who
lazily seduces most of the female crew and intimidates the director into
letting him steal a love scene with his co-star, played by the appealing Catherine
Keener (an alumna of Johnny
Suede who starred opposite Pitt). Buscemi, trying to be diplomatic
about the soiled off-screen relationship between the actors, aims for
appeasement but only alienates them further. This second segment, like the
first, ends in hilarious chaos.
What's most satisfying about Living
in Oblivion, aside from the spirited ensemble-acting and playful mix of
black-and-white and color film, is the accuracy of the picture's mini-reality.
Though I've only hung around a few
movie sets in my day, the characters in Living in Oblivion comically
represent many of the types of people you might find investing their energy in
a low-budget picture. There's the too-cool cinematographer (Dermot Mulroney)
who sports a beret and eye patch; the ruthless assistant director (Danielle von
Zernick) who affects a phony sweetness with the director while maintaining a
demeaning tone with the less-powerful crew members; and a lighting man who
dreams of making his own movie, even carrying the script around in his back
pocket. DeCillo also nicely touches upon how the uneasy sexual relations of the
crew add to the overall tension on the set. All of this he does while
maintaining a gently quirky comedic style.
In the third segment, efforts to
create a dream sequence with a dwarf go awry wen the dwarf resents being
typecast. "Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it?" he asks, making
a good case against the formulaic weirdness of filmmakers like David Lynch. By
the time this third and silliest segment ends, director Buscemi has become
negative about his abilities as a filmmaker, Keener has almost decided to give
up acting, and yet somehow everybody pulls together and makes things (sort of)
work. In a brilliant coda, we take a peek into each character's final thoughts
while everyone waits silently so the sound man can record room ambience. This
scene, with its series of brief fantasies, may be the longest 90 seconds ever
filmed. And that's somehow fitting, since Living in Oblivion is so fun
to watch that it's one of the shortest 90-minute movies I've seen in a long
time.
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
PopMatters
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw
CultureCartel.com
(David Abrams) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Grouch at Epinions.com
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Ben Stephens) review
Eye for
Film (Caro Ness) review [5/5]
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Entertainment
Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Scott Rosenberg) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
BOX OF MOONLIGHT B- 82
USA Japan
A very whimsical comedy about a middle-aged crisis in the life of an everyday,
average Joe, played by John Turturro, who runs into a long-haired,
freedom-loving nature boy, The Kid, played by Sam Rockwell, living in one half
of a trailer, as the other half is out in the open under the moonlight. The two go skinnydipping with girls, have
tomato fights in a farmer’s field, shoot up a warehouse under construction, and
just generally act like goofballs while the average Joe continues to maintain
his modern armor, still in the midst of his modern male crisis, continuing to
call home every day where life is predictable and the same, while life with The
Kid is all new choices and new experiences.
This is a small film with small revelations, more fun and prankerish
than good. Of interest, DeCillo was Jim
Jarmusch’s cameraman beginning in 1980 with PERMANENT VACATION, again in 1984
with STRANGER THAN PARADISE , and more recently
working on COFFEE AND CIGARETTES.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
After DiCillo's delicious Living in
Oblivion, this comes as a disappointment. Turturro's on form as the
straitlaced, clock-watching, by-the-book construction foreman who cracks up
when a job is cancelled and goes looking for a happy-holiday lake from his
youth. Fair enough, but when he falls in with Rockwell, a half-crazed hippy kid
into self-sufficient country life and irresponsible behaviour, you know
Turturro's in for a trite lesson in living. Not as funny, deep or original as
it would like to be, although things pick up with yet another fine turn from Catherine
Keener.
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Andrew Hesketh) review
Tom DiCillo had a hard act to follow after he left the ranks of Jim Jarmusch (he was the director's main cameraman). But, in Box of Moonlight, he seems to have established his position and rank in the American indie film field. That position and rank are far above those warranted by age or experience.
Box of Moonlight tells the story of Al Fountain (John Tuturro) who, while
laying pipeline for his employers, discovers his coworkers' true opinion of him
and his first grey hair. DiCillo makes this the final icing on the cake as
Fountain undergoes a sort of psychological breakdown; his coffee pours backward
and general hallucinations ensue. When his employers lay him and his team off
he decides not to return to his wife and instead to retrace his roots in
DiCillo's script is as sharp as they come, full of witticisms and
observations to make you laugh and cry Empire described it as "an
all-talking, touchy feely road movie of sorts"! In its journey to find the
self however, it makes close to the bone observations that apply to us all. One
might even call this tale moralistic as it presents lessons for today's
consumer obsessed society. It is not just a polemic though. Tuturro gives us an
unbelievably fine performance as a man on the edge and Sam Rockwell as the
forestdwelling hermit Buckie presents us with a character straight out of
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Movie Magazine International [Monica Sullivan]
Entertainment Weekly review [C] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (John Anderson) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Deitch, Donna
DESERT HEARTS
USA (96 mi) 1985
To Reno (in 1959) comes a
mid-thirtyish New York teacher, her hair in a bun and her nerves in shreds, in
search of a divorce from a stultified marriage. She puts up at a local ranch, and
it's not long before she is succumbing to the advances of a much younger woman,
though not without resistance. Suspicions that the film will simply be a period
piece, viewed through the modern lens of post-feminist wishful thinking, are
soon allayed however. Redneck Reno might still adhere to the old frontier
notions of anything-goes morality, but it still harbours enough of the puritan
spirit to make life uncomfortable for lesbians. Moreover, the ranch is more of
an emotional snake-pit than first appears. Deitch is well served by Shaver as
the teacher and Charbonneau as the young seducer. Best of all, however, is the
way the movie dignifies all its characters. There is also an incendiary
consummation of the affair, and Patsy Cline on the soundtrack; two features
which had this paleneck by the throat.
Bright
Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris, February 2008
Desert Hearts happened because producer-director Donna
Deitch wanted to make a lesbian movie "that didn't end in a bisexual
triangle or a suicide." This legendary 1986 film, based on Jane Rule's
acclaimed novel Desert of the Heart, has only the merest hint of bisexuality
and nary a glimmer of suicide. The film wisely replaces such tired tropes with
unabashed images of two gorgeous, vibrant women in love.
Set in 1959, Desert Hearts is bookended by train scenes,
comings and goings. Uptight Columbia University Professor Vivian Bell (Helen
Shaver), who looks like one of those grim, "glacial" blondes from a
Hitchcock movie, has come to Reno to get a divorce. We don't learn the details
of her backstory, but we see her consistently struggling to keep her hard mask
of composure intact. Soon she meets local wildwoman Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charonnbeau),
who'd love nothing better than to remove that mask and spends much of the film
trying to do so. Along the way are a variety of subplots involving Cay's
friends like ranch owner Frances (Audra Lindley), her chanteuse pal Silver
(Andra Akers), and her love-struck boss Darrell (Dean Butler). All this is
backgrounded by period country tunes from Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves and some
spectacular Nevada desert scenery.
Desert Hearts is not without its problems. The dialog is
often stiff and sometimes smarmy. "He reached in and put a string of
lights around my heart" would surely fit better on a Hallmark card. And
it's a question whether Reno in 1959 could really have been as gay-friendly as
it appears. Homophobia is barely evident in this world — even the good old boys
at the local casino smile and nod at the gay shenanigans.
But Desert Hearts is about love, not homophobia, and on
that basis there's much to recommend, not the least being the acting. Shaver
and Charbonneau manage to overcome the script problems to emerge as authentic,
complex people, while Audra Lindley is especially effective as a lonely,
confused woman whose motherly interactions with Cay hint at deeper needs. Most
powerful is the long-awaited love scene between Cay and Vivian. Some recent gay
films have reverted to old bad habits in avoiding the details of queer bodies
going at it, particularly when the stars are 'fraidy-cat heteros. Happily,
Desert Hearts, starring two apparently straight actors, keeps it real in a
full-throttle love scene.
Note: Wolfe Video's two-DVD set contains an informative
director's commentary, a documentary, interviews, alternate takes, a trailer,
and other goodies for the completist.
The hypothetical lesbian heroine Chris Staayer from Jump Cut, April 1990
AfterEllen.com - Lesbian and Bi Women in Entertainment review Sarah Warn
PopcornQ review Lauren King
Reel.com dvd review [Vintage Edition] [3/4] Pam Grady
DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review
DESERT HEARTS - A Review By Phineaskc - Epinions.com
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review also seen here: DVD review page
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
del Toro, Guillermo
All-Movie
Guide Lucia Bozzola
A film prodigy dedicated to Latin American cinema even as his
success gave him a ticket to
Born in
Del Toro's feature directorial debut, Cronos (1993), heightened his prominence as
a rising star in Mexican film. A low-key, superbly acted horror movie, Cronos' imagery of the vampire as parasite
was at once a smart revision of the genre and a veiled allegory about Mexico
and the United States. Winner of the critics' prize at the Cannes Film
Festival, Cronos put del Toro on the world-cinema and American-independent
map. Along with serving on the selection committees for the Sundance Film
Festival and the Independent Spirit Awards, del Toro followed Cronos with his first foray into
Returning to
Gratified by the experience making The Devil's Backbone and clear-eyed about
what Hollywood could offer, del Toro followed his personal movie with the
big-budget, Wesley Snipes comic-book vampire thriller sequel Blade 2 (2002). Del Toro also began to develop several other
American projects, including works with notable
Subsequently preferring to pull back a bit from
By this point, Hellboy fans were beginning to wonder
whether or not the long-gestating rumors of a sequel to that modestly
successful Mike Mignola adaptation would ever bear any
tangible fruit. Then, in 2006 Universal announced that they had acquired the
rights after Sony withdrew funding from Revolution Studios and were looking to
move forward with the film, with director del Toro once again teaming with writer Mignola and stars Ron Perlman and Selma Blair to chronicle the further adventures of
everyone's favorite BPRD agent.
Del Toro Films official fansite
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Angels and Insects: The Cinematic Spawn of Guillermo Del Toro David Greven from 24LiesASecond, December 2, 2005
del Toro, Guillermo They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Film
Monthly Interview (2002) by Paul
Fischer,
Film
Monthly Interview (2006) by Paul Fischer,
What is a Ghost? An Interview with
Guillermo del Toro by Kimberly
Chun from Cineaste
Sight & Sound
Interview (2006) by Mark Kermode,
December 2006
GreenCine
Interview (2006) by David D’Arcy
(click on his name), December 31, 2006
CRONOS
Luppi, an elderly antiques dealer, discovers
a gold gizmo which a mysterious alchemist had hidden inside a statue centuries
before. The old man becomes immortal, his body undergoes a bizarre
transformation, and he develops a thirst for blood. Resisting the efforts of
dying businessman Brook and his henchman Perlman to get hold of the so-called
Cronos device (it has strange body-piercing abilities), Luppi struggles to hold
on to his humanity even beyond the grave. Del Toro gives an intriguing spin to
the time-honoured vampire pic. Out goes gratuitous blood letting, in comes dry
wit, a sombre pace and a substantial emotional kick, as Luppi seeks to maintain
the powerful bond with his wife and young granddaughter, even though he looks,
well, like something from a horror movie. A most startling genre piece: tender,
imaginative and wholly its own.
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]
What a strange film this is. The second-highest-budgeted
Mexican movie since Like Water for Chocolate, this import is an
impressive, disturbing rumination on the ancient theme of eternal life, and the
lengths men will go to in pursuing its brass ring. In the opening voice-over,
we are told that a 16th-century alchemist created a small, palm-sized Cronos
device that would bestow the gift of agelessness on its possessor. Naturally,
the wizard comes to a bad end (before even the opening titles), and Cronos
cuts to modern-day Mexico, where an elderly antique dealer (Luppi) and his
daughter (Shanath) discover the scarab-like device hidden inside a grimy and
roach-infested wooden archangel. When he puts it in his hand and winds the
mechanism, tiny retractable pincers emerge and burrow into his palm. Exactly
what drives the Cronos device -- an insectile demon hidden deep within the
clockwork innards -- is never quite explained, but the next day, the old man isn't
feeling all that old anymore. He isn't looking too badly, either. Meanwhile, a
dying, reclusive billionaire and his evil nephew (nicely essayed by Ron
Perlman, who's looking more and more like Forties horror star Rondo Hatton
every minute) are searching high and low for the device. Their quest ends when
they discover the battered archangel in the old man's curio shop, and from this
point on it's a deadly battle of wits between the two men, one of them gravely
ill and the other extremely deceased. Del Toro has a wonderful eye for this
sort of dark fable: his shots are filled with expressive camera angles,
pounding rains, and gossamer fogs. Rarely has modern-day
Beyond
Hollywood review James Mudge
The Mexican movie “Cronos” is undoubtedly one of the better horror films of the 1990s. At times unsettling, at other times moving and compassionate, this is a vampire film that never conforms to any of the given rules or wisdom regarding the genre. Beautifully made, this is a true gem; a thoughtful and creepy experience awaits those who seek it out.
The story follows aging Mexican antiques dealer Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi, also in the director’s “The Devil’s Backbone”), who comes across an odd, beetle-shaped device in an old statue. As he inspects it, the artifact whirs to life, sprouting claws that dig into the flesh of his hand. The next day, Jesus finds himself feeling younger and more energetic than he has in years, a fact that he rightly attributes to the mysterious contraption.
However, this new vitality comes at a terrible price, as Jesus develops an uncontrollable thirst for human blood. His dark voyage of self-discovery is complicated by the violent attentions of the sinister millionaire Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) and his vicious thug of a son, Angel (Ron Perlman, “Hellboy” himself). Addicted to the use of the device, Jesus comes to realize that he is evolving both physically and emotionally into a monster that may be a threat to the granddaughter he loves so dearly.
Guillermo del Toro is one of my favorite directors of recent years, having been responsible for the underrated killer cockroach flick “Mimic”, the wonderful ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone”, and more recently, “Hellboy”. “Cronos” is a perfect showcase for his skills, and del Toro directs it with a real sense of maturity and patience. This is a film where the horror creeps up slowly, through the seductive guise of a wondrous miracle that turns tragically sour.
Although it is a reworking of the vampire myth, the plotting in “Cronos” is measured and subtle, with no sudden or needless twists. Del Toro skillfully builds the solemn atmosphere without the use of any tacky devices or the unnecessary insertion of artificial set pieces. There’s even very little gore. Having said that, there are a few unpleasant moments, including one disturbing scene where Jesus licks blood from the floor of a restaurant bathroom.
Although suspenseful and quite unsettling in places, “Cronos” is not a film specifically played for sudden frights or shocks. This is the type of movie that sticks in your mind, providing thought provoking chills rather than jump out of your seat shrieks. This might make the proceedings seem somewhat slow to the impatient viewer, but I personally found the story completely absorbing.
Another aspect of this film that I particularly enjoyed was the very European feel to the set design and cinematography. The film has a beautiful look, and great attention has obviously been paid to even the smallest details. Every frame has an unobtrusive and gothic appearance, especially during the scenes in Jesus’ antique shop. This result in the viewer leaving with the impression that they have just watched a sinister fairy tale. The golden Cronos device itself is a real joy to behold, a fantastically crafted item whose baleful whirring heralds doom for all who would make use of it.
The acting in the film is excellent, especially from Luppi. Tamara Shanath, as his young granddaughter, is far less annoying than young actors often are in this sort of situation. Ron Perlman too is superb in the awkward role of a very human thug, whose obsession with plastic surgery provides the film’s only comic relief.
The film benefits greatly from the fact that in Jesus, we are given a well-written and believable character. The audience views the film through his eyes, and we accompany him through the horrors and wonders of the changes that are affecting his body and mind. This is done very successfully, and we come not only to empathize with the man, but more important to care about what happens to him. This of course makes the horror all the more effective.
I would strongly urge any film fans to seek out “Cronos”. A true work of craftsmanship, this film is fascinating, moving and unsettling. Del Toro is definitely one of the most promising directors to emerge from the horror genre in recent years, and given the strength of his recent Hollywood outings, his star will only continue to rise.
not coming to a theater near you review Simon Augustine
DVD Outsider Slarek
DVD Times Anthony Nield
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun) dvd review
Bloody-Disgusting review [4.5/5] Lyle Henretty
And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley) review
Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [5/5] [10th Anniversary Special Edition]
Monsters At Play (Ed Festini) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]
Classic Horror review Jason Jones
Moda Magazine (Kage Alan) dvd review [Special Edition]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
MIMIC
USA
The first
Movieline
Magazine dvd review Joshua Mooney
In the '50s, it was man's arrogant tampering with the
secrets of the atom that led to the unleashing of B-movie horrors like The
Amazing Colossal Man and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In Mimic,
it's our fooling with DNA that lets loose the primordial nightmares--insects
the size of linebackers who threaten to crunch up the Big Apple. Unlike
self-consciously self-referential genre flicks like the Screams, Mimic
is defiantly, refreshingly true to its formulaic drive-in forebears, from its
simplistic setup--Help! Huge bugs are eating everyone. How do we kill them?--to
its unabashedly corny climactic romantic clinch. It may be a throwback, but
it's not just a cheesy schlock throwback. And Mexican-born director Guillermo
Del Toro is hardly content to churn out an A.I.P.-style yuck-fest--he's a
soulful cinematic artiste who paints in wide swatches of terror and doom.
Judging from his earlier Cronos as well as Mimic, it's clear he's
obsessed with all things insectoid--and that he has a Cronenberg-ian knack for
generating dread.
Here's the setup: a mysterious epidemic, spread by roaches, is killing New
York's kids. Entomologist Mira Sorvino engineers a designer bug that, when
released into the subway, wipes out all roaches. But instead of
self-destructing, as it was bred to do, the good bug reproduces and mutates at
an astounding rate, gradually learning how to mimic its only enemy, man. Helped
by Jeremy Northam (Mr. Knightley of Emma), gutsy, vulnerable Sorvino goes down
into the ancient, labyrinthine underground train system (the expert production
design is by Cronenberg veteran Carol Spier), where a motley crew of
Manhattanites (including Giancarlo Giannini and Charles S. Dutton--not your
average sci-fi bug food) must make their last stand from a stranded subway car
(now there's a nightmare).
Del Toro carries off this basic, primal, make 'em squirm,
make 'em jump, make 'em queasy stuff with relentless, insectlike efficiency
himself. He attends to the delicious ickiness of it all (the extensive
entrails-and-viscera content is not for the weak-stomached) and employs a
meticulously crafted, multilayered soundtrack that jolts us with all manner of
monstrous skitterings and mandible-grinding horrors. He's also a cunning master
of mood: an early shot of an abandoned schoolyard, its fence aflutter with
ribbons honoring the lost tykes, is chilling. Later, a body is yanked down a
sewer opening it can't possibly fit through--that's Del Toro's subtle yet
completely unnerving introduction to the inhuman forces lurking below.
Because Mimic plummets us into the bowels of New York before the midpoint
and stays there, the proceedings are relentlessly murky. If you watch Mimic
on a 20-inch television screen in a sunlit room, therefore, it tends to devolve
into impressionistic shadows. Watch it at night, however, and it scores its
ultimate fiendish goal, reminding us why we humans are instinctually afraid of
the dark.
Deep Focus
(Bryant Frazer) review [C]
In the interest of giving credit where credit's due, let me first mention that Mimic has great bugs. Under the supervision of longtime SFX maestro Rob Bottin (Se7en, John Carpenter's The Thing), this film's swarm of giant, mutated cockroaches is ravishingly sickening. One shot in particular, which you may have seen when star Mira Sorvino appeared on the Letterman show, is so crazy and startling that it had the audience at my screening breaking into applause. Mimic is evidence that inspired special effects can be their own reward. (Bottin's directorial debut will be, um, Freddy vs. Jason, which pits the epochal slashers of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series against each other, presumably en route to Hell.)
But if you guessed that the bugs are the only good news, you're right. Mimic starts out as a pedestrian thriller and deteriorates slowly into a depressingly bad one. It's not without a few good sequences, and director Guillermo del Toro once again exhibits a great respect for the genre. (Ole Bornedal, whose remake of his own Nightwatch has been sitting on Miramax's shelf for close to a year now, has a producer credit!) But in the end, Mimic turns out to be an apt title for a film that shamelessly snitches its best ideas from better pictures.
Sorvino plays Susan Tyler, a brilliant scientist who, in a prologue, engineers a new "Judas" breed of cockroach to wipe out more traditional New York roaches who have been spreading a deadly disease that attacks children. Three years later, the story picks up as two street urchins sell Susan an impossibly big specimin of cockroach they found at the Delancey Street subway station. No dummy, Susan doesn't waste time deducing that her genetically engineered roaches didn't die out exactly as they were supposed to. Somewhere beneath Manhattan, there's a whole colony of these resilient little buggers, which could spell big trouble for humanity.
So Susan and her husband Peter (Jeremy Northam; they're trying, unsuccessfully, to get her pregnant) venture underground to investigate. Stupidly, Peter goes deep with only buddy Josh Brolin and a cranky transit cop (Charles S. Dutton) for support. Also involved are a shoeshine man (Giancarlo Giannini) and his son (Alexander Goodwin), who can tell the size and style of somebody's shoes just by listening to them, and who learns to mimic the sounds of the big insects.
Del Toro helmed Cronos (released in the U.S. in 1994), which was a fairly interesting Mexican riff on the vampire legend, but he's a lot farther from home this time. The more conventional Mimic moves fitfully, with bracing special effects sequences that are pretty much counter-balanced by the leaden pacing of the stuff in between. For the first half, we're interested enough in learning as much as we can about these critters that the film's herky-jerk rhythms are almost pleasantly off-putting. And the pay-off scenes tend to be creepy-crawly doozies, with ugly little cockroaches leading the way to more distressing looking big ones. (Who is that guy in the trenchcoat, anyway?) The obvious ancestor is Alien, which relocated the slasher movie to outer space. But Mimic has more in common with your garden variety slasher film, where clumsy exposition and character development always lead up to a centerpiece sequence of flesh-ripping, than with Alien's more challenging SF metaphors.
When two of the heroes find themselves isolated in a long-abandoned underground subway terminal, it becomes apparent that del Toro is most assuredly not much of an action director. So Mimic winds down into a tedious cramped-quarters thriller that has so little sense of character that nothing at all seems to be in jeopardy. There's no sense of place, either. For all its reliance on the threat of an infested subway system, Mimic has as much New York ambiance as Rumble in the Bronx -- that is, none at all. All that remains is to watch the characters sacrifice themselves for one another in tag-team fashion. (Sorvino even gets to mar her hand with a symbolic stigmata.) Still, the ending is pretty upbeat. Even though F. Murray Abraham, in a performance billed as a "special appearance," chastises Susan for letting her "little Frankensteins" run amok underground, Mimic wouldn't dream of making her pay for her hubris.
Elsewhere, the picture is simply lacking in new ideas. Graphic designer Kyle Cooper should sue himself for ripping off his own title sequence from Se7en. Co-screenwriter John Sayles (Lone Star) should choose his projects a little more carefully. And I'll look forward to seeing del Toro's next movie. But those bugs are really, really great.
Tucson Weekly (Zamfir Quackenbush) review
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [2/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
KPBS Movie Blog [Beth Accomando]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib
Urban Cinefile (Australia) Louise Keller and Paul Fischer
Best-Horror-Movies.com Dr. Chills
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]
Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Richard Harrington) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (El espinazo del Diablo)
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A classy Hispanic horror pic written and
directed by the Mexican cinephile who made Cronos and Mimic. Like many Spanish
movies about the Civil War, it filters that traumatic conflict through the
partly comprehending eyes of a child. After his Republican father dies in
battle, 10-year-old Carlos (Tielve) is left in a desert orphanage, where
crippled widow Carmen (Paredes) and kindly Professor Casares (Luppi) hope to
protect their charges from advancing Fascists. But danger exists inside the
fragile sanctuary, too - not only does Carlos clash with older bully Jaime, but
there's surly, self-serving janitor Jacinto (Noriega) to worry about, not to
mention chilling rumours about a kid who went missing. If only for its
technical aspects, this would rate as a pleasurably superior supernatural
psychological thriller, with polished but subtle special effects, painterly,
atmospheric cinematography and vivid performances from a top-notch cast. What
lifts it, however, is an adept use of generic elements as a poetic/metaphorical
gloss on political and historical realities. Hence a ghost mystery becomes a
tale of opposing forces building to a deadly, explosive denouement in which
concealed passions finally burst forth.
The Devil's Backbone Gerald Peary, also seen here: The Boston Phoenix review
Some trendspotters
say the next big thing for international cinema is a swing to the young
generation of Mexican directors, post-Arturo Ripstein and post-post Bunuel.
Perhaps, but there's a way to go when The Devil's Backbone by Guillermo del
Torro (Cronos, Mimic) is touted as a seminal film of the Mexican New Wave. Del
Torro is good at spooky atmosphere, and he's utilized a first-rate locale, an
isolated, abysmally run-down fort (?) baked under the hot, yellow Mexican sun,
and which stands in for an orphanage. But the acting is clunky, and the story
is straight-to-midnight movie stunted and not very believable. Why is it set in
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Guillermo Del Toro's films are rabid commentaries on
the suspension of time, often told through the point of view of children. In Cronos,
a young girl keeps life-giving insects inside her innocent-looking dolly while
the "funny shoes" boy from the underrated Mimic prognosticates
entomological death without losing a body part of his own. With The Devil's
Backbone, Del Toro pulls an Amenábar by dishing out sophisticated war
commentary with bone-chilling dread. A bomb is dropped from the skies above an
isolated Spanish orphanage, which leaves a boy bleeding to death in its
mysterious, inexplosive wake. His corpse is then tied and shoved into the
orphanage's basement pool. When a young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), arrives
at the ghostly facility some time later, he seemingly signals the arrival of
Franco himself.
The
abandoned Carlos learns to put a lid on his prissy behavior with the help of
his mentors: Cásares (Federico Luppi), the orphanage's aged professor/doctor,
and Carmen (Marisa Paredes), the one-legged ex-wife of a famed leftist poet.
The bomb from the film's opening sequence still lies in the center of the
orphanage's courtyard; this is Del Toro's remarkable way of displacing the past
into the present. Carlos collects the snails that emanate from the school's
basement, oblivious to the ghostly wails that allude to some unfinished
business. Carmen clings to her nationalist ideals and her hidden bars of gold
while promising her youth refuge from the war still going on in the distant
horizon. Santi (Junio Valverde) arises from his swampy tomb, seemingly
bemoaning his own abandonment. Carmen tells Carlos that many boys run away from
her home, unaware that one was unceremoniously dropped into her stagnant pool.
Del
Toro's living ghosts are as stuck on the past as are his deadly apparitions.
Santi is the devil's backbone: a resurrected ghost never meant for human life,
now a mere insect trapped in amber. Santi may represent the stifled Spanish
citizen, rallying for the rights of the underclass by taking on the country's
political complacency; unlike Cásares, he is an unrealized man of essence. In
this home of superstition, a viper is found in caretaker Jacinto (Eduardo
Noriega). Loathsome despite his pretty looks, Jacinto beds the one-legged woman
that saved him from himself when he was left at the orphanage. She clings to
him incestuously while he schemes to take away from her the orphanage's gold
bars. Jacinto is not unlike a selfish revolutionary, so insensitive to his
war-torn land that he will blow up his own family.
The Devil's Backbone
works both as art-house spooker and political allegory. Santi appears and
disappears at will—he's feared at night but forgotten during the day. As the
sun burns above the orphanage's desert home, young teacher Conchita (Irene
Visedo) receives a makeshift ring from the hostile Jaime. Hormones blazing,
Jaime could pass for a sympathetic Jacinto-lite—his future as a savior of
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Film of the Month: Devil's Backbone, The (2001) Paul Julian Smith for Sight and Sound, December 2001
The Devil's Backbone combines history with horror for an
uncanny take on the Spanish Civil War
The Devil's Backbone, director Guillermo del Toro's masterly
supernatural thriller set in an orphanage haunted by the ghost of a young boy,
is the latest in a distinguished line of features exploring the legacy
of the Spanish Civil War from a child's point of view. It's a tradition that
has long combined the domestic and the horrific. Víctor Erice's 1972 The
Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), for
instance, had its youthful protagonist Ana - a cinematic ancestor of the orphan
Carlos at the centre of this film - come face to face with Frankenstein's
monster, an all-too appropriate allegory for Spanish dictator Franco.
But two aspects distinguish The
Devil's Backbone from such recent UK releases as José Luis Cuerda's
saccharine Butterfly's Tongue (La lengua de las mariposas)
and Montxo Barrios Armendáriz's Secrets of the Heart (Los
secretos del corazón). The first is its status as a Spanish-Latin
American co-production, made jointly by Almodóvar's El Deseo and Mexico's
Tequila Gang. Until now El Deseo has limited itself to Spanish or Basque
directors who, given unprecedented artistic freedom, realised such varied fare
as Alex de la Iglesia's coarse science-fiction comedy Acción mutante (1993)
and Daniel Calparsoro's taut political thriller Pasajes (1996).
But Backbone falls within a rapidly changing Spanish production
context distinguished by a two-way transatlantic connection. Augustín
Almodóvar's strategic alliance with foreign co-producers (long practised for
the funding of his brother Pedro's features) parallels Spanish media giant
Sogecable's successful move into English-language production with Alejandro
Amenábar's The Others and mirrors Sony's recent decision to launch
a Spanish-language production operation in Spain. Increasingly projects are
addressed to both Spain and Latin America, territories whose cultural tastes
remain diverse. In this context the expert casting of The Devil's
Backbone is significant. The two leads (both schoolteachers in the
orphanage) are Argentine Federico Luppi, who has frequently worked in Spain,
and Spaniard Marisa Paredes, who has starred in Mexican maestro Arturo
Ripstein's Deep Crimson (Profundo carmesi, 1997) and No-one
Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba,
1998).
The second intriguing feature is
the record of del Toro himself. Exploiting his professional background in
special effects and make-up, his first feature Cronos (1993)
was a brilliant essay in body horror in which a mechanical vampire
transforms a mild-mannered antique dealer (Luppi once more) into a rabid
zombie. More importantly perhaps, Cronos is set in an eerily
deracinated Mexico City where Argentine tangos (associated with Luppi's
character) collide with Russian street signs and dialogue alternates between
Spanish and English. The vampire machine, brought to the New World by a Spanish
colonist, is an uncanny allegory for the mixed and warring roots of Mexican
culture. Widely praised, Cronos was followed by the much cruder Mimic
(1997) in which Mira Sorvino fights off giant cockroaches in the New York
subway. Rescued from Hollywood by the brothers Almodóvar, how does del Toro
cope with his first film made in Europe and in a period setting?
The Devil's Backbone features all the visual brilliance that
once made del Toro seem destined to be the founder of Mexico's own 'cinéma du
look'. The opening montage of a falling bomb, wounded child and body parts
drifting in amber liquid is dazzlingly realised. Expert cinematographer
Guillermo Navarro alternates the stark day-lit exteriors of the central Spanish
plain with nocturnal interiors that either glow warm and brown in
Velázquez-hued domestic scenes or shimmer blue and grey in the child's
supernatural encounters. The digital swirl of dust and flies around ghost child
Santi is executed with panache. And the accomplished visual effects are matched
by a subtle sound design, in which the conflict between brutal Spaniard Jacinto
(played by matinee idol Eduardo Noriega, now hardened into a convincingly
repellent macho) and kindly Casares (Luppi) is played out through their choice
of music: the traditional Spanish songs of Imperio Argentina (Spanish
collaborator with the Nazis) or the tangos of Argentine national hero Carlos
Gardel.
While del Toro reconciles
European and Latin American elements in the film, he has more trouble adapting
his distinctive sensibility to a historical setting. Casares' opening voiceover
suggests a psychological explanation for the uncanny: 'What is a ghost? A
terrible moment condemned to repeat itself over and over... a sentiment
suspended in time.' And del Toro's narrative (he is one of three credited
screenwriters) echoes the conflict between the two Spains played out in the
Civil War itself: the scientific rationalism of the leftist schoolmaster versus
the supernatural irrationalism implicitly embodied by fascism. This
sophisticated approach chimes with Freud's analysis of the uncanny, in which
the supernatural is defined as a displaced or repressed version of the real,
but it tends to undercut the frisson of the horror genre. While del Toro can
faithfully execute a suspense sequence worthy of his master Hitchcock in the
scene where the boys fetch water in the dead of night, the appearances of the
ghost are too prosaic to satisfy genre aficionados. This is largely because of
the interference of the historical setting in the supernatural drama. At the
height of the Civil War it hardly requires supernatural intuition to predict,
as ghostly Santi does, that 'many of you will die.' Likewise Casares remarks to
his beloved Carmen that it is they, the outnumbered and vulnerable Republicans,
who are the real ghosts. If the uncanny is diagnosed too well, then surely its
potency is lost?
But del Toro's dazzling way with the image pulls him and the picture through: a massive unexploded bomb stands in the centre of the children's playground (one child claims you can hear its heart beat); a mysterious clockwork frog takes the place of Cronos' vampire machine. Perhaps the eerie basement where child and torturer meet their end in a womb-like water cistern also has a particular resonance: Mexican culture is also built over ancient and violent foundations, and it's not too far-fetched to compare the film's doomed Spanish orphanage to the great baroque buildings of Mexico City. In spite of an overextended final act, then, The Devil's Backbone remains the work of a great stylist with a uniquely disturbing attraction to, and vision of, the frontier between life and death.
Senses of Cinema (Julian Savage) review
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
DVD Outsider Slarek
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]
Kamera.co.uk review Todd Harbour
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [4/5]
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Classic Horror review Chris Justice
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [B+]
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
KPBS Movie Blog [Beth Accomando] featuring an interview with the director
DVD Talk (Phillip Duncan) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe)
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4.5/5]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2.5/4]
Moda Magazine (Kage Alan) dvd review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Bloody-Disgusting review [4/5] Elaine Lamkin
Movie-Vault.com (Arturo García Lasca) review
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
Foster on Film - Ghost Stories
Urban Cinefile review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban
Boxoffice Magazine review Ed Scheid
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib
hybridmagazine.com review Clint Davis
mazzyboi's movie page (Angelo Aquino) review [3/4]
Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) dvd review [B-] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Christopher Varney
Film Monthly (Joe Steiff) review
Reel.com review [2/4] Rod Armstrong
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review capsule review
Variety (Jonathan Holland) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
HELLBOY
USA (122 mi) 2004 Director’s cut (132 mi)
Time Out London review which includes: Guillermo Del Toro Q&A (11/23/06), Guillermo del Toro: interview (01/29/08), and Guillermo del Toro: interview (08/11/08)
Fun. It’s a crucial but often
overlooked element in a summer blockbuster comic-book adaptation and it’s in
‘Hellboy’ by the spadeload. How could it not be when the central figure is a
grouchy 60-year-old adolescent seven-foot half-human devil with a giant right
arm and woman problems? Heartfelt horror is del Toro’s stock-in-trade, and
‘Hellboy’ resounds with the director’s glee at being handed the keys and told
to cut loose on Mike Mignola’s cult comic-book creation. But for all Mignola’s
vision and del Toro’s panache, this is Ron Perlman’s
film: all in red and larger than life (clever photography beating CGI to
buggery), he burns up the screen as the eponymous hero. This wisecracking,
gun-toting, cigar-chomping, trenchcoat-wearing cross between Humphrey Bogart,
Hannibal Smith from ‘The A-Team’ and Clint Eastwood is a long way from Peter
Parker. No navel-gazing identity crisis here; the only concession Hellboy makes
to the human world is filing his horns ‘to fit in’.
As del Toro rips through the opening half-hour exposition, we learn that
Hellboy crawled into this world from another dimension during World War II. He
now works for the US military alongside scientist and father figure Professor
Bruttenholm (John
Hurt, a ringer for Hergé’s Professor Calculus), battling an eternal evil
that currently manifests itself in the form of Rasputin, some Nazis and a
chilling sand-veined cyborg in a gimp suit. Relishing these absurdities and
with no tedious old aunties to accommodate, del Toro gets on with the business
of furious entertainment, racking up a sequence of coruscating set-pieces
against elaborate, urban-occult backdrops while giving Perlman space to cast a
baleful eye over a burgeoning romance between his dream girl (and twisted
firestarter) Liz (Selma Blair)
and military apparatchik Agent Myers (Rupert Evans).
Del Toro, in love with his source but never overawed by it, keeps things
moving; Perlman ties it together with some of the driest witticisms this side
of Indiana Jones. Like we said: fun.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Film of the Month: Hellboy (2004) Kim Newman, September 2004
A film of Hellboy comic has more than its share of fights
and monsters. But it brings the character to life with a big red heart, says
Kim Newman.
Few comic-book franchises have been brought to the screen
by a creator as committed to honouring the original material as Mike Mignola's
Hellboy, a project nurtured over several years by Guillermo del Toro. The
writer-director's love of arcane mechanics laced with bug imagery makes him
perfectly attuned to the world of Mignola, an artist whose major cinema
presence to date was as a source for the Jules Verne-styled 'steampunk' design
of Disney's 2001 Atlantis The Lost Empire. The bio-mechanical intricacy that
has been a del Toro touchstone since the insect-and-clockwork device at the
heart of Cronos (1993) is central to Hellboy on the page and on screen, where
the devices are bigger -using grinding stone and creaking iron -but as visually
delightful.
Hellboy the character has been around for over a decade,
appearing first in one-off stories before receiving a proper introduction in
the mini-series Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (the source for del Toro's
screenplay); rather than being published continuously, the Hellboy comic has
been issued in limited series subsequently repackaged as books. Though a few
other artists have been allowed to draw the character and Seed was scripted by
John Byrne, Hellboy remains essentially Mignola's property, ensuring a visual
consistency in the character's presentation along with a gradual revealing of
the world in which he lives.
A tall, bulky, red figure with a prehensile tail and bumps
on his forehead where he sawed off his demon horns ("to fit in"),
Hellboy is one of comics' big kids in non-human bodies (like the Thing, the
Hulk or Swamp Thing). He's living proof of the nurture-over-nature theory in
that despite his demonic origins, his all-American upbringing has led him to
feel like a real boy and act like a regular, grouchy, cigar-chomping action
man. The key moment in the comic, reproduced perfectly here, comes after
Hellboy has been snatched from the Nazis who would raise him as an Antichrist:
the demon baby poses for a photograph with a crowd of smiling World War II-era
GIs and the academic foster father who will raise him to live like these
regular-Joe heroes.
A 60-year-old adolescent, Hellboy consumes large quantities
of pancakes, beer and Baby Ruth bars then faces up to ultimate evils with a
comically big gun and an even bigger (though less comical) stone hand. Ron
Perlman, often seen under make-up since his debut in Quest for Fire (1981) and
a del Toro regular since Cronos, seemed to have found the role of a lifetime in
the television series Beauty and the Beast but trumps that lovelorn
hero-monster part here. His fed-up-hero mannerisms, nervy crush on Liz and
solid presence in the many, many deathtrap scenes bulk out the comic-book
character.
The first problem any Hellboy film has to overcome is
presenting the big red hunk as a believable part of the real world, and here
del Toro goes against the prevailing wisdom (cf: Hulk) that such characters can
be realised only with CGI. Though perspective tricks are used to make the
full-grown Hellboy tower over regular humans, he is almost entirely a physical
presence -first found in a lair surrounded by pussycats and food, with the
rasping sound of Tom Waits' 'Heart Attack and Vine' mixed in as a character
touchstone. Of course Hellboy is superb in the several action scenes, and we
get as many locations for skirmishes as levels in a videogame: a museum of
antiquities, a funfair at Halloween, the New York subway and an impressive
world of traps and dungeons under Rasputin's supposed tomb outside Moscow. But
it's to Perlman's credit that Hellboy works as well in the wry comedy moments
and the temptation sequence when his horns regrow (with a flaming crown
floating between them) and he has a vision of the position he might hold as a
master of a ravaged world.
Having tackled a comics project in 2002's Blade II (with
Perlman in a supporting role), undertaken as a demo piece to prove he could
make this, del Toro still doesn't quite deliver a script that contains all the
comic's great material. The device of using Rupert Evans' Agent Myers
(new-minted for the film) as a way into the world of the Bureau of Paranormal
Research and Defence (BPRD) and the trigger for an understated love triangle
makes some sense, but the long prologue means our viewpoint character doesn't
turn up until the mood is already established. Myers is a lot less fun than
anyone else in the room (including John William Johnson as the agent he is
supposed to be replacing) and is swiftly reduced to a tag-along character with
only a few more lines than the Star Trek-style 'red shirts' who are taken into the
catacombs to be killed off by deathtraps the higher-billed heroes then cope
with.
John Hurt narrates the set-up and has a dignified extended
cameo as Bruttenholm (the film doesn't quite understand that 'Broom' is how the
name is pronounced, not a separate nickname). Unfortunately, the spiky,
indulgent, affectionate but troubled relationship between Hellboy and this
human father is given less weight than the hero's more conventional love for
Liz. In a brilliant move, Bruttenholm's death not only spurs the emotional
climax but makes room for another welcome player in Jeffrey Tambor's officious,
wry BPRD commander -who finally bonds with Hellboy by showing him how to light
his cigar properly.
The bad guys have great looks, but the conflicted hero
shoulders the complexity. Karel Roden's bald, glowering Rasputin -Hellboy's
putative mentor who has survived his historical death -is a plot function
rather than a person, though he arises magnificently from a pool of blood at
the centre of a mandala carved into a temple floor outlined by the spilled gore
of a sacrificial guide. The CGI-tentacled entities he brings into the world
encourage messy action along the lines of the Blade films; a subway chase
echoes one in Stephen Norrington's original Blade; and the big-monster finish
seems a polished version of the climax abandoned for that film but included on
the DVD. The best of the villains is mime artist Ladislav Beran as Hitler's
surgery-addicted assassin Kroenen: a lipless, eyelidless mummy seen in a
disturbing gas mask and/or full SS regalia. Like the sensitive Black
Lagoon-style creature Abe Sapien (swum by Doug Jones and voiced by David Hyde
Pierce), Kroenen is a sinuous, prissy, almost effeminate presence beside the
thumping Hellboy and has an elegant human cruelty that makes his final
confrontation with the hero more satisfying than yet another squid-squashing
effect. It may offer a big battle too many, but Hellboy succeeds because it
brings the visuals from the page to life with a beating red heart.
Slate (David Edelstein) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
DVD Outsider Slarek
CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [4/5]
stylusmagazine.com (Jay Millikan) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]
click HERE for a second opinion on Hellboy by Sheila Seacroft from Jigsaw Lounge
DVD Times Review [Tiffany Bradford]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Bloody-Disgusting review [4.5/5] Lyle Henretty
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
VideoVista review Amy Harlib
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [C]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review April 1, 2004
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A-]
CultureCartel.com (Chris Madsen) review [3.5/5]
The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review
Movie-Vault.com ("Greg C.") review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
Reel.com review [2.5/4] Sarah Chauncey
DVD Town (James Plath & Justin Cleveland) dvd review
DVD Times [D.J. Nock] 2-disc Special Edition
Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Jerry Renshaw, 2-disc Special Edition
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review [Special Edition] July 26, 2004
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Jeffrey Robinson) dvd review [2/5] [Blu-Ray Version] [Director's Cut]
DVD Times (Kevin Gilvear) Director’s Cut
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [4/5] [Director's Cut]
DVD Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review [Director's Cut]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Director's Cut] Nicholas Sheffo
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
hybridmagazine.com review Jeffrey “The Vile One” Harris
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
CHUD.com (George Merchan) dvd review
Beyond Hollywood review Joseph Savitski
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
CineScene.com (Mark Sells) review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [2/5]
Film Monthly (Joe Steiff) review
The Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [2/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [3/5]
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B+] Dalton Ross
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]
PAN’S LABYRINTH (El laberinto del fauno) B 87
PAN is visually stunning, veering off into the strange and exotic imagination of a young child who is afraid of the real world around her, set during Franco's era in Spain, visually extravagant, but grim, dark, gloomy, and overly sadistic, which certainly detracts from the many positives of this film. In my view, undeserving of the “masterpiece” label that has been hurled in this film’s direction, much of which is obtained through the use of computer graphics. Yes, that is becoming a fairly elementary part of filmmaking, and those that excel at its use deserve praise, but not overpraise. A film must still succeed not through computer skills, but through an emotional connection with the audience, and in that area this film disappoints, as besides the elaborate development of the girl’s persona, who else matters? The melding of real and fantasy is wonderfully intermixed in the mind of the girl, and fantasy is certainly a psychological defense mechanism to avoid the real, but besides the overall impressive look, the interior dimension of both worlds remains a cold, cold place, not one I would care to venture into again, unlike, say, the intersecting real and fantasy mix of David Lynch films, which have infinite appeal, offering greater ambiguity and film poetry.
Ivana Baquero is Ofelia, an 11-year old girl who has lost her father, so
she immerses herself in the world of books and fairytales. Set in 1944 just after the end of the Spanish
Civil War, Franco’s fascist troops are attempting to round up all the
Republican militants from the mountains and exterminate them all, led my Sergi
López as Captain Vidal in another one of his cherished roles where he is the
living personification of evil, the murderous sadistic commander who relishes
killing and pain. As the film opens,
Ofelia’s pregnant mother is being driven in haste to meet in a remote military
outpost with the Captain, her new husband.
En route, during a brief stop, Ofelia wanders into the woods and
discovers a dragonfly that is aroused by her presence, befriending her
throughout the film, leading her into a strange and exotic underworld of
fairies and monsters where they believe she is a returned princess. Simultaneous to the vicious world that awaits
her under the Captain’s rule, which at least includes one friend, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú from Y TU
MAMA TAMBIEN), a helpful housekeeper who sympathizes with the militants, is an
equally dangerous parallel fantasy world where the dragonfly transforms into a
fairy and leads her to an awakened faun who harshly demands complete obedience
under his rule, challenging her to perform three tasks to prove her worthiness
as an immortal, each more dangerous than the last.
Ofelia’s
connection to each world remains tenuous, as her mother is near term but gravely
ill, and as she’s not sure whether to trust the faun or not. Both worlds collide and suddenly become
indistinguishable from one another, easily the most terrifying moment in the
film, as she has to all at once answer to multiple forces that are compelling
her to obey. The captain comes charging
into her room and orders her to disregard something the faun has told her she
must do, and her mother is at the same time telling her that fairy tales don’t
really exist, that she needs to listen to her new father, yet the horrible pain
of reality is veering out of control, which is especially terrifying in the
mind of a child, interestingly expressed through an ERASERHEAD Lynch-like
creation which she has been instructed to place under her mother’s bed, and in
her anguish when everything goes wrong, she turns to the fantasy world for
help. Eventually she gets her taste of
each world, one filled with bloodshed and torture, with demands for blind
obedience, and the other leads her into an underground cavern of an ogre with
eyes in his hands, who threatens to devour her after she fails to obey her
instructions.
Reality never
can stand up to the elaborately designed parallel universe in this film, as
Ofelia is much more fascinated, as is the director, in pursuing her own
curiosity. What she discovers
underground is ultimately much more satisfactory than the one-dimensional
universe of living under the thumb of a fascist dictator. A rhythm of life under the Captain’s rule is
never fully developed, but remains sketchy and overly gruesome, as everyone
comes to a terrible unjust end, while the faun as well appears to be luring her
into some kind of trap. It’s a terrible
predicament for a young child, as she feels the dark effects of both worlds
caving in on her instead of any sense of happiness or joy, which fantasy
usually brings. When the story comes
full circle, bookended by a narrator whose “Once upon a time” story led us into
these coinciding worlds, we’re left sympathizing with the girl and her
troubling dilemmas, but also with an equally troubling indifference for the
rest of them.
FINALLY delivering on the promise of his 1993 debut Cronos, Mexican writer-director
del Toro - who has been moving between arthouse metaphysics (The Devil's Backbone) and
These are the two worlds between which moves our spirited young heroine, the
bookish, eleven-ish Ofelia (Baquero), after she arrives with her mother Carmen
(Ariadna Gil) at the sprawling rural estate in northern
A glance at the title, poster, stills and synopsis for Pan's Labyrinth might give the
impression that the picture was somehow 'kid's stuff' - or perhaps a dark-edged
romp in the Tim Burton mould. Such impressions would be far wide of the mark:
hardened critics at advance press-shows have found themselves averting their
eyes or wincing in discomfort at some of the more horrific sequences of what is
often a tough, disturbing watch (the details and atmosphere influenced as much
by Bacon, Brueghel and Bosch as Bunuel or Erice.) But proper fairy-tales were
never meant to be fluffily pleasant: the beautifully-crafted, engagingly
fast-paced Pan's Labyrinth is
a startling collision of the Grimm (subterranean beasties) and the grim
(totalitarian brutalities) - and its astonishing, ambiguous finale is all the
more powerful when you remember just how long it was until Spain was able to
wake up from the all-too-real Franco nightmare.
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Noel Murray
Balancing childlike enchantment with grown-up horror isn't
easy, and for a good long stretch at the start, Guillermo del Toro's populist
fable Pan's Labyrinth seems bound to fumble. Set just after the Spanish Civil
War, the film stars Ivana Baquero as a pre-teen girl who prefers to disappear
into books, especially when her pregnant, widowed mother remarries and moves
them to a remote mountain outpost to live with the ultimate wicked stepfather:
a cruel army captain played by Sergi López. Throughout Pan's Labyrinth, del
Toro cuts between López's attempts to smoke out the remaining rebels camped in
the surrounding forest, and Baquero's retreat into a fantasy world where she's
a reincarnated princess, asked by a towering faun to carry out three tasks and
thereby complete her transformation into an immortal.
Obviously, parallels develop between the war story and the
fantasy story. Both are about quixotic quests and demanding authority figures,
and both have their share of magic keys and special potions. But for most of
its first hour, Pan's Labyrinth doesn't fit together neatly. The fantasy
sequences are wildly stylized and simplistically plotted, while the war
sequences are bloody and brutal. But in the second hour, the stories begin to
merge, as Baquero's tasks start intersecting López's mission, and she has to
decide whether she can trust the creepy-looking mythological creature who's
telling her what to do.
It would be a mistake to read Pan's Labyrinth simply as a
heroine's journey, with a little girl representing all the Spaniards who stood
up to the fascists. This isn't really a movie about one person or one
historical moment; it's about the larger question of how history judges what we
do. The republicans lost the Spanish Civil War, yet even though history is
written by the winners, almost no one thinks of the fascists as the good guys
in that story. In Pan's Labyrinth, Baquero disobeys and makes mistakes, but
she's still the heroine. In the movie's moving final lines, del Toro shows a
flower blooming, and holds Baquero up as an inspiration to anyone who feels
that the world has gotten too dark for any light to break through. He's
deliberate in getting there, but after two hours of dazzlingly fantastical
images and stomach-turning gore, del Toro winds around, and finds his story's
center.
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Guillermo del
Toro's films do not starve for creatures of baroque ingenuity, and Pan's
Labyrinth, the vividly aestheticized tale of a young girl's journey through
the gothic rabbit hole of her imagination, is cluttered with insects that morph
into faeries, a faun who gatekeeps an unknown dimension, a large toad with a
secret in its volatile tummy, and a merciless monster with eyes in the palms of
its hands. Not knowing what to make of the film's spectacular collision of
glossy reality and gaudy fantasy, some critics have succumbed to ignorance—like
Time's Mary Corliss, who described the film as "Lewis Carroll meets
Luis Buñuel," as if del Toro shares anything in common with Buñuel besides
a Spanish tongue. Del Toro is smart but he's no theoretician, and though he
takes aim at fascism, his vision is scarcely surreal; though prone to
sensualist shocks, his comic-con aesthetic is so tidy and discreetly alluring
Buñuel might have called it bourgeois.
Pan's Labyrinth
is a fancy retooling of The Devil's Backbone: the
political context is the same, except a girl replaces a boy, a forest subs for
a vast desert plain, fantasy usurps horror, and escape is a more prominent
obsession than revenge. A young girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), arrives with her
sick mother to meet her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergí Lopez)—a lackey,
ostensibly, of the Franco regime—in a hideout secluded in the middle of a woodsy
Spanish countryside where rebel soldiers lurk. When Ofelia offers Vidal the
wrong hand in order to greet him, the ogre nearly crushes her arm with his
grip. Del Toro insufficiently dramatizes the relationship between Ofelia and
her pregnant mother and cruel stepfather, asking us to accept her bitter
reality at face value, but his biggest mistake is using the film's pretense to
fairy tale as an excuse to slip cardboard portraitures past his audience.
When
Ofelia walks into a rocky labyrinth near her stepfather's manse for the first
time, there is an immediate sense of the girl trying to reconcile her present
by slipping into fantasy, yet the child's disconnect from the goings-on around
her is so strong the film feels oddly disjoined. Two worlds spar for dominance
here (Vidal's slick territory of cruel violence and the ornate cubbyholes of
Ofelia's mind), and though each one is meticulously imagined, del Toro doesn't
adequately assess the conflict between them. Like the cut Vidal incurs on his
face in one scene, giving him a sinister Joker-like smile that he ghoulishly
redresses, the split between the story's disparate realms is so clean it's
almost pathological. How strange that for all the attention del Toro pays to
conveying the callous violence of Vidal's well-oiled political dominion and the
gothic splendor of Ofelia's imagination, he pays so little mind to the
metaphysical pus that should leak from the fissure that separates them.
Unlike
The Devil's Backbone, Pan's
Labyrinth's allegories are not so rich, and though sexism might explain why
del Toro filters his young female character's crisis through a fairy tale
scrim, the film's fantasy sequences remain seductive pageants of spiritual and
cultural nuance. Though del Toro allows the war between Vidal and the rebels to
transpire in cold, unimaginative autopilot, using moody Aura-like visual
textures and transitional swipes resonant of George Lucas's comic-book lexicon,
Ofelia's world remains a wondrous and unique place to visit. Proof of del
Toro's commitment to detail is how Pan (Doug Jones) relies heavily on the vosotros
form when speaking. Such classic touches mean that Ofelia's fantasies work to
evoke a strong sense of longing for the past and faith in its bygone
traditions. So, while the surface of del Toro's film exudes a chilly,
pretentious crispness, one must dig deeper to discover and bathe in the
soundness of a warm spiritual center.
Pan's Labyrinth | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian
A bold juxtaposition of real and unreal worlds is at the heart of
Guillermo del Toro's visually inventive fantasy about
Like Del Toro's 2001 picture The Devil's Backbone, Pan's
Labyrinth is about the Spanish civil war. It is 1944; the struggle against the
Republicans has been won in
Ofélia has somewhere to escape. This intelligent, bookish child has discovered a secret labyrinth beneath the house inhabited by a magnificent, awe-inspiring faun who hails Ofélia as a Princess, but tells her she must carry out terrifying tasks to enter into her destiny; this she does, without telling the grown-ups of this strange other world beneath their feet. Nor is Ofélia the only double agent in the film. Vidal's housekeeper and doctor have treacherous Republican sympathies.
Fascism is perhaps the ultimate example of that sleep of reason
which brings forth monsters. Del Toro's monsters are pretty extraordinary. He
has said that his designs are influenced by Arthur Rackham, the English
Victorian artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare. This
description doesn't do justice to the originality of Del Toro's pictorial
devices. At the film's beginning, Ofélia has a little pinafore dress recalling
At any rate, it is an excellent performance from 12-year-old Baquero. Ofélia must confront a giant and loathsome toad in a claustrophobic tunnel. She must square up to the giant and imperious faun, Pan. Most dauntingly of all, she has to approach the nightmarish figure of the Pale Man, whose eyes are in his hands - he is able to see her when he holds his palms up to the sides of his head. That extraordinary image alone is worth the price of admission.
What do these creatures say about fascism? Or, what does fascism
say about them? Del Toro asks us to consider Pan's exotic world side-by-side
with political history. We have to consume them on equal terms, like chewing
cake and cheese together. It's a bold and intriguing proposition, but I'm not
sure it comes off. Del Toro does well to remind us of the cruel reality of
Franco's
PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review
not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny) review
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Beverly Berning
World Socialist Web Site review Paul Bond
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [4/4] also reviewing CHILDREN OF MEN
Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski
DVD Outsider Camus
DVD Times - Pan's Labyrinth Michael Mackenzie
the 4/27/07 issue of Businessworld Noel Vera, also seen here: Critic After Dark
Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]
Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]
House Next Door [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [A-]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s Sweater
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib
Beyond Hollywood review Gopal
Cannes Review: Pan's Labyrinth - Cinematical James Rocchi at Cannes from Cinematical
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]
Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Mr. Disgusting
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review
Commentary Track [Rishi Agrawal]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C-]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review which includes: A Symbol of Transition: Interview with Guillermo del Toro
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Reel.com review [4/4] Pam Grady
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner
Twitch (Kurt Halfyard) review at Toronto
Twitch review Opus at Toronto
Twitch (Todd Brown) review at Toronto
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Urban Cinefile review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann, also seen here: CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review
stylusmagazine.com (Paolo Cabrelli) review
cinemattraction (Brandon Fibbs) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
DVD Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [5/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [5/5] [Platinum Series] 2 disc
DVD Verdict dvd review [Platinum Series] Joel Pearce
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Tim Knight, 2 disc Platinum Series
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review - 2 Disc Ed. [Jeff Swindoll] Platinum Series
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] U.J. Lessing
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) review [A-] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
hybridmagazine.com review Roxanne Bogucka
Three Movie Buffs (Scott Nash) review [4/4]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
KPBS Online Reviews [Beth Accomando] an interview with the director, January 12, 2007
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Time Out London (Ben Walters) review
Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [4/6]
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [4/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
RogerEbert.com (Jim Emerson) review [4/4]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY
USA (110 mi) 2008
"It's
not about monsters being real—it's about us allowing them to exist in our
imagination and our soul. If you allow the magic, it's not necessarily that
you're going to transform water into wine, but you'll certainly transform the
boring expectations of everyday life into a spiritual one. I believe in the
spiritual, but I am not a religious guy. It's a strange conceit, but it's true.
If you allow the magical to live in you, [the world is] a better place."
—Guillermo del Toro
Time Out London (Nigel Floyd) review [4/6] which includes: Guillermo Del Toro Q&A (11/23/06), Guillermo del Toro: interview (01/29/08), and Guillermo del Toro: interview (08/11/08)
Guillermo
del Toro’s Fabergé egg of a fairytale is not so much a sequel as a fusion
of the fabulist imagination of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ with the witty, irreverent
comic-book action of his own ‘Hellboy’. The teeming Troll Market in the film
exemplifies his approach, an eye-ravishing spectacle that invests each
‘monster’ with its own personality. Witness the cute infant who, when soppily
cooed over, angrily retorts: ‘I’m not a baby, I’m a tumour.’ Virtually a
stand-alone film, it pitches the red-skinned, devil-horned Hellboy headlong
into a mythical clash between his adopted human world and an ancient underworld
of elves, faeries and trolls.
The plot, in brief, concerns the plans of usurped King Balor’s son, Prince
Nuada (Luke
Goss), to awaken the dormant Golden Army, pitiless clockwork uber-warriors
commissioned and later mothballed by his horrified father. To prevent this, the
prince’s twin sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton)
– to whom he is telepathically linked – elicits the help of Hellboy, his
pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair),
aquatic empath Abe Sapien (Doug Jones)
and a newcomer to the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Johann Kraus,
an ectoplasmic mystic housed in a metal diving suit. Together, they battle
against the rebellious Prince, seething swarms of ‘Tooth Fairies’, towering
troll henchman Wink and the terrifyingly beautiful Angel of Death.
Perfectly cast, Ron Perlman
(below) plays Hellboy as an anti-superhero, a blue-collar guy who is happier
chugging beers and eating pizza than fighting evil. The fanboy indulgence of
the spectacular action scenes sometimes arrests the plot’s forward momentum,
but what del Toro calls ‘the bloodline of moral choice’ runs through the richly
imagined story like a scarlet thread. Crucially, no distinction is made between
the humans, the tame ‘monsters’ of the BPRD and the glamorous ‘freaks’ they are
charged with policing. All are capable of the whole gamut of ‘human’ emotions.
A thinking person’s ‘creature feature’ graced with two contrasting love stories
– Abe Sapien falls for the pale and interesting princess; Hellboy’s hesitant
girlfriend Liz is unable to tell him she is pregnant with his child – ‘Hellboy
II’ is also a heartfelt plea for bio- and cultural diversity.
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Fathers figure prominently in Hellboy II: The Golden Army – their sins, their legacies, and the responsibility that comes from turning into one. In this superlative sequel from Guillermo Del Toro, a cloud of parental duty hovers over Hellboy (Ron Perlman), who – having lost surrogate dad Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (John Hurt) in the 2004 original – grapples with issues of commitment, allegiance and sacrifice while oblivious to the fact that firestarter girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) is pregnant. Maturation, though, isn’t quite what Del Toro is after for his horned protagonist in this rollicking, affecting comic book adaptation, as he continues to be the same crass, sarcastic and cantankerous secret government agent of his prior outing. That badass attitude, perfectly in tune with his muscular red-skinned physique, remains grafted to a surprisingly tender heart, with the hero still struggling to prove – to both himself and to the public from which his boss (Jeffrey Tambor) wants him hidden – that he’s more man than demon. His of-two-worlds nature becomes an especially pressing concern once ancient exiled Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) shatters his paterfamilias’ truce with the humans and pursues the key to the unstoppable Golden Army in order to incite war against mankind, a battle in which Hellboy, Liz, and psychic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) – all supernatural creatures employed by mortal men – find themselves mired.
Del Toro’s baroquely bizarre imaginativeness has never been more mesmerizing than in Hellboy II, its cornucopia of extraordinary creatures (some beautifully melding flesh with metal) seemingly stolen from children’s nightmares, and its preponderance of metal gears intrinsically linked to the saga’s fascination with fate and free will. Tableaus of gorgeously disgusting majesty abound, such as one involving an angel of death whose eyes are situated in its wings, as well as two movies-worth of breathtaking action sequences, each notable for their distinctiveness, propulsive energy, and coherent visual dexterity, this last quality particularly present in Hellboy’s throwdown with the titular battalion. There’s a proficiency to each of the film’s set pieces – including Hellboy fighting a towering forest god while protectively cradling an infant – but, as importantly, a poignant center to the often-frenzied mayhem. Embodied by Perlman with a blustery gruffness that masks a sensitive soul, the rebellious Hellboy is a fountain of hilariously acerbic wisecracks. For all the humor, however, Del Toro consistently focuses his narrative on the crimson giant’s earnest, anguished desire to fit in, a yearning that stems from a conception of himself – formed during a childhood of watching Howdy Doody and clutching shiny toy six-shooters in bed – as fundamentally human.
The pain of outsiderdom and corresponding need for companionship course through Hellboy II’s heroes and villains, with Del Toro bestowing considerate complexity upon Prince Nuada by positioning him as a would-be destroyer driven by desperate self-preservation impulses. Empathy runs deep for these characters, providing the narrative with a sentimental spine that gives meaning and value to their rollercoaster-ride predicaments. Even more than in his much-heralded Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro wields outsized, seamless CG-animated fantasy to amplify internal turmoil, staging hectic, frenzied showstoppers that are emboldened by emotional and relationship dynamics. While the gaunt, acrobatic Nuada too closely resembles Blade II’s baddie (both portrayed by Goss), the director otherwise laces his mythic tale with shrewd cinematic allusions, be they an overt clip from Bride of Frankenstein (“We belong dead!”) or a sly, strange nod to Total Recall-via-Kindergarten Cop (a kid attached to a mutant adult’s torso states “I’m not a baby, I’m a tumor”). Yet abundant references aside, Hellboy II is about a man, a woman, and their attempts to achieve normalcy despite social alienation, identity confusion, and constantly intruding chaos, a story intensely rooted in that most essential of feelings – love – and the mad, selfish, destructive things people will do to both attain and retain it. Thrilling and touching in equal measure, it’s on the short list of great superhero films.
PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review
Ever wonder what it would be like if your favorite filmmaker had
the creative freedom to realize his or her own inner artistic aims? Ever lament
the fact that directors like Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, or Darren Aronofsky are
stuck working within a studio system that demands certain commercial sacrifices
over an individual’s aesthetic desires? Well, welcome to the world of Guillermo
Del Toro. Here’s a man brimming with imagination and invention, and yet no film
has really allowed him the kind of collective carte blanche to fulfill his most
outlandish visions…until now. Thanks to the universal acclaim of Pan’s
Labyrinth, and a future helming The Hobbit, someone finally gave Del
Toro a limitless paintbox. The brilliance that is Hellboy 2: The Golden Army,
is the result.
Long ago, when the Earth was green, mankind and the elements of magic battled for control of the planet. Seeing the error of their ways, the two sides came to a truce before the mythic Golden Army (a goblin-made indestructible mechanical killing armada with no remorse) could complete their directive. Now, centuries later, the son of King Balor, Prince Nuada, wants to pay humanity back for its crimes against his fellow creatures. He seeks the three pieces of the royal crown, the device that controls the feared robotic redeemers. Crossing over into the real world, he unleashes his otherworldly minions to help him seek the sections. Naturally, this puts him in direct conflict with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. Along with the fire-conjuring Liz Sherman, and the aquatic empath Abe Sapian, it will be up to the heroic Hellboy to stop Nuada and save the day…if he can.
In a summer already overloaded with brash, bravado cinematic turns, Hellboy 2 has got to be one of the biggest and ballsiest. Stamped with a kind of genius rare in today’s Tinsel Town terrain, Mexican madman Guillermo Del Toro has fashioned a kind of supersonic spectacle, an intensely engaging epic that finds a way to keep both its scope and entertainment value legitimate and yet larger than life. Loosely based on the Mike Mignola comics, and clearly the product of its director’s outsized originality, we are treated to two hours of monsters, myth, and moviemaking majesty. Since he no longer has to give us the title character’s origins, and can swiftly bypass any further character introduction, Del Toro goes right for the throat. From the opening stop motion animation that sets up the storyline, to the finale which pits armored automatons against our heroes, this is nothing short of pure visual bliss.
Del Toro has always been a geek, an old school nerd who plies his obsessions with a fetishist’s fascination. You can sense him marveling at his own novelty over the course of the film, his camera capturing the actual awe and inferred wide-eyed wonder. Our synapses shouldn’t fire this liberally or often, and yet Hellboy 2 makes the overload feel like a familiar friend. This is big screen fantasy as a wish fulfillment free for all, a far out fairytale told in the most intricate of celluloid calligraphy. Luckily, this is one director who makes room on his crowded canvas for moral fiber and subtext. This movie is more than just a collection of setpieces showing off the best that CGI and other F/X have to offer. Instead, it’s a deep meditation on magic, and how civilization has lost touch with its ethereal power.
Returning to remind us of how great they were the first time around, Ron Pearlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman), and Doug Jones (now also voicing Abe Sapian) provide the nexus for our emotional involvement, and all do splendid work. Especially impressive is our title titan, a muscled bad ass with a soul as sensitive as a little child. This version of Hellboy may not match his graphic familiar note for note, but as a conduit to how Del Toro views the world around him, this link between the various planes of existence remains a remarkable work of fiction. And thanks to how Pearlman plays him - strong yet unsure, macho yet mindful of his purpose - we grow to like him more and more as the movie progresses. Jones is also good at channeling Abe’s inner turmoil, a battle Hellboy fought semi-successfully in the first film.
Par for his creative course, Del Toro delivers villains who moderate their evil with a sense of purpose and potential decency. Prince Nuada (beautifully underplayed by Luke Gross) doesn’t only want to destroy the human pestilence that populates his world - he wants to reset the order, to regain the respect and dignity the supernatural forces once held among the living and undead. He goes about it in nasty, underhanded ways, but the valiance in his purpose is not unnoticed. Similarly, the various creatures created for the film rely on a Brothers Grimm kind of seriousness to support their sinister purpose. They aren’t just the things that go bump in the night. These are the nightmares meant to remind man, as the movie says, of why they originally feared the dark.
There is a clever, almost kitschy way in which Hellboy 2: The Golden Army delivers its delights. It’s like a freakshow film noir where Men in Black meets Clive Barker’s Cabal (or Nightbreed, for those of you not literarily inclined). There is a telling texture to this filmic universe, a real sense of gravitas and threat. When Hellboy battles a massive earth Elemental, it’s Cloverfield conceived as an old fashioned serial cliffhanger, imperiled infant and all. Indeed, Del Toro keeps the riff references and homages coming, touching on the entire history of horror and fantasy in just under two hours of spellbinding cinema. And we sense the director continuously building on his legend, opening the door for a brain melting final installment/trequel sometime after he completes his trip through Tolkein.
And frankly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more knowledgeable guy. It’s rare when Hollywood gives the eccentric and iconoclastic a chance to shine, let along a second one. One misstep and you’re usually sitting in entertainment exile, wondering where your creative cache went. In this case, through a sheer force of will and an unreal amount of invention, Guillermo Del Toro has rewritten the rulebook. All that post-Pan Oscar cred didn’t hurt, but there’s got to be some substance to support a repeat performance. Apparently, this filmmaker has more than enough on his plate to feed an imagery-starved fanbase. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army may say ‘Hell-friggin’-yes’ to another excess time and time again, but when the meal is this ridiculously rich and refined, we’ll gladly indulge. In a summer soaked in spectacle, this dish is just divine.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Hellboy II The Golden Army (2008)
Michael Atkinson, September 2008
Critic After Dark Noel Vera
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Delépine, Benoit and Gustave
Kervern
AALTRA A- 94
A terrific looking black and white ‘Scope film, that opens with the title on the screen which is so small you can barely see it, then the screen expands to a widescreen image of a bullet train making its way across the screen. One thing this film has plenty of is attitude, and it’s in all the right places, as this slowly developing story, created by and starring the co-directors themselves as two pestering neighbors who hate each other, expands to an entirely different universe, turning into a road film with two despicable subjects that earn no sympathy, which is actually their endearing charm. Yet somehow, through expert placement of shots in a largely wordless film, also demonstrating extreme patience in allowing their scenes to develop, the film slowly grows on you until it becomes hilarious by the end, buoyed by a brief appearance by none other than Aki Kaurismäki, who is simply perfect in his part. The film is a carefully constructed series of Tati-like sight gags, including untranslatable arguments which are not subtitled, immersing us into a culturally mixed European land with no borders, where we are subject to French, German, Dutch, Finnish and English languages at some point or the other.
Two bickering farmers live across the road from one another, with love having deserted them both, so the only love they have is in annoying the hell out of the other one, eventually leading to a tractor accident that oddly leaves them both paralyzed below the waist. When the doctor tells them it’s time to send the “twins” home, they have second thoughts about what they want to do, and both end up at the train station, one wheelchair right behind the other at the ticket office. Traveling together, yet utilizing every opportunity to split from the other one, they end up at a motocross race, where they each budge their way to the front of a fence where they can see, basically driving their wheelchairs over people. The camera is set at wheelchair level, so there’s an interesting scene with a father and son where we never see the father’s head. It’s always out of the frame, but it’s our first hint at dark humor. One gets a ride in a van, and as they’re about the leave the parking area, we see through the front windshield the other in his wheelchair hitching a ride. Somehow the two are taken by a nice family to the beach, wheelchairs comfortably in the sand, where we see them share a bottle of vodka that they stole from the van’s cooler, both eventually falling asleep in their chairs. An argument breaks out in a foreign tongue, no words are translated. Off in the distance we see the van that brought them slowly pull away, leaving the twins alone on the beach. The water rises, and rises. They boys are in trouble, but it plays out beautifully.
When the twins turn up together in a punk bar, we see them off in a corner as the camera scans the entire establishment, and the thought of them in this raucous atmosphere seems plenty ridiculous. Later we see them sprawled on the sidewalk the next morning, their money and credit cards stolen, but this hardly deters them. They somehow steal an electric wheelchair from an unsuspecting elderly couple, they steal an automated motorbike from another serious racer who was generous enough to give one of them a ride, but who afterwards comes after him with a vengeance to get his bike back, but on and on they go, always pulled off to the side of the road, sitting in complete stillness in their wheelchairs waiting for a ride. There’s a wonderful image of them wheeling themselves down a highway while a row of giant windmills, the kind that generate electricity, spin gently in time off to the side of the road.
They wheel into a neatly manicured middle class neighborhood and slowly edge into the back yard where a family is eating outside, gesturing that one of them needs help recharging his electric battery. The other is offered food, and what follows is priceless, as he appears to take food off of the plate of just about everyone there, even out of the hands of the kids straight into his mouth, always asking for another beer, or later, still there for dinner, the camera angle is placed behind his shoulder as the parents stare befuddled, as if caught in a temporary coma, as one of the twins happily mixes the salad, filling his plate, asking if there isn’t any sauce? Later the parents are in bed, wide awake in the middle of the night, as we hear the sound of the electric wheelchair buzzing for more service. The next morning, they are left on the side of the road, their things thrown in the middle of the road as the van pulls away, and we can read the roadside sign, “Highway to Hell.”
The boys have an interest in going to
But they find their final destination, the Finnish Vaaltra tractor factory, where they make their presence known, demanding 6 million euros each for their injuries. As they yell and shout their demands through a glass enclosed partition, like a currency exchange, behind the glass, a secretary completely ignores them as she idly chats away her time, without a care in the world, as the twins are frantically getting more and more hysterical. We see them parked on the merchandise floor the next morning, nicely groomed and dressed in a tie, expecting to meet the president of the company and settle this once and for all. But they are instead informed they are at the Vaaltra factory, not the one they want called Aaltra which is across town. We see them frantically wheeling through the woods, arriving at what appears to be a dilapidated, broken down auto repair business, inside, nothing but guys in wheelchairs performing who knows what work tasks, welding, soldering, assembling things together, with nothing resembling a tractor in sight. The camera closes in on Aki’s stern face. “I see you’re familiar with our product.” Outside, in a light rain, they all sit in their wheelchairs passing the vodka bottle around, commiserating in their misery. As each brief segment ends, suddenly it fades to black, which is the style that Aki Kaurismäki uses in his films, so one after another we see brief little segments, each fading to black, closing out the film, a nice little tribute to the king of minimalist deadpan comedy.
LE GRAND SOIR
France (92 mi) 2012
Le Grand Soir: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Megan Lehmann at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 2012
Gerard Depardieu and Albert Dupontel star in this punk rock comedy that is up for an Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival.
Punk is not dead but graying at the temples in another screw-the-system comedy from anarchic French directing duo Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern.
Characteristically scabrous but still kind of sweet, this Un Certain Regard entry sends up its soul-deadening strip-mall milieu and takes jabs at the failings of a consumerist society without ever taking itself too seriously. Its humor’s screwball in a minor key and much of the satire is peculiarly French, making this France-Belgium co-production sure to score with domestic audiences on its release June 6 but a tougher sell abroad.
The self-professed “oldest punk in Europe with a dog,” Not (Benoit Poelvoorde) is also, it seems, a bit of a fan of John Cleese circa Fawlty Towers, his chaotic energy periodically exploding into gangling fits of rage.
He’s a forty-something non-conformist who wears the punk uniform of camouflage fatigues, mohawk and jackboots. He sleeps in dumpsters, gets drunk and goes to concerts but mostly hangs about the shopping centre where his parents (the singer Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem) have a snack shop. Not’s brother, Jean-Pierre (Albert Dupontel), is a mattress salesman in a chain store there too and he is Not’s opposite, straight-laced and line-toeing.
When Jean-Pierre’s life starts to unravel and he is threatened with unemployment, the veneer of acquiescence quickly crumples and it doesn’t take long for Not to woo him over to the rebellious side of the street.
Le Grand Soir follows on from Delepine and Kervern’s absurdist 2011 road trip comedy Mammuth (that film’s star Gerard Depardieu has a cameo here as a fortune-teller) and has the same sense of action unfolding organically, thanks to the duo’s fondness for shooting scenes in chronological order.
Le Grand Soir Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily
The latest film by French comic provocateurs Delépine and Kervern (Louise-Michel) could be described as
knockabout farce in the name of the Revolution. Proving that you’re never too
old to be a punk, however ratty your balding Mohican, Le
Grand Soir is the most commercial offering yet from the writing-directing duo, best
known in France for their contributions to the Groland satirical TV shows.
Following their languid Gérard Depardieu vehicle Mammuth, Le Grand Soir is a much more focused and aggressive romp, and should crack up domestic audiences, thanks to the genially abrasive presence of popular faces Albert Dupontel and Benoît Poelvoorde. Exports should be healthy despite some verbal humour defying translation; luckily the visual comedy speaks its own language.
The opening shot is an extreme close-up of the lizard-like fin on the head of middle-aged punk Not (Poelvoorde), name tattooed on his forehead in ballpoint pen. Not hangs out on the streets of his town, where his parents (respected French musical duo Fontaine and Belkacem) run a cafe specialising in potatoes. Not prides himself on living outside the bourgeois order, with his faithful mutt ‘8-6’ (who gets some of the biggest laughs growling at a cat poster).
In contrast, hyper-conformist brother Jean-Pierre (Dupontel) likes the local soulless shopping malls - for him, they’re a fit place for the “up to standard” people he admires. But Jean-Pierre is in danger of losing his job as a furniture salesman, because he’s not meeting sales targets, and despite last-ditch attempts to sell a ‘smart foam’ mattress, he’s soon out of a job. At which point Ben introduces him to the joys of hardcore punk and showing a finger to the system.
Set entirely in the antiseptic corporate world of the shopping precinct - with interludes at the punk club where Benoit loves to crowdsurf - Le Grand Soir uses vividly coloured widescreen photography to invoke an oddly oppressive and absurd world, albeit one that’s horribly true to daily life.
Flinging impudent grit by the sackload into this world are the two leads: Poelvoorde likeably laidback and shambling as the rebel who believes in saving his energies for moments of confrontation, while Dupontel’s tightly clamped-down nerviness gradually simmers up to a manic explosiveness recalling John Cleese in his prime.
The film has its share of brisk verbal play - there’s a priceless volley of distracted verbiage between Belkacem and B & K regular Bouli Lanners - but the film is boisterously inventive in its visuals too, making terrific use of the CCTV screens on which Ben’s troublemaking is observed by an unseen security staff. An uproarious sequence has him striking punk poses in front of a mirrored window, not realising that he’s on full view to the pizza eaters on the other side.
Legendary avant-garde chanteuse Fontaine contributes to an oddball soundtrack, and makes a fabulously mannered showing as the brothers’ eccentric maman. Gérard Depardieu offers an unlikely cameo as an unreliable clairvoyant. The displays of two-fingers school-of-77 defiance may come across as infantile, but that’s the point, given that the rebels in question are two middle-aged buffoons.
Cannes Film Festival 2012: 'Le Grand Soir' review John Bleasdale from Cine-Vu
Deleuze, Gilles – film historian
The Green Garbage Bins
of Gilles Deleuze Luc Moullet
from Rouge
Poubelle, ma belle a response by William D. Routt from Rouge
Delisie, François
TWICE A WOMAN (2 fois une
femme) D+ 64
Canada (94 mi) 2010 ‘Scope
While the subject is intriguing, spousal abuse of such severity that the wife must seek the anonymous help of similarly abused women who develop a secret network to safely guide women out of the home into a new identity and new life somewhere far away from their husband’s reach, this Quebec director fails to develop the complexity needed to take this subject seriously, though he claims to have spent two years in preparation for this movie. The director acknowledges he never spoke to abused women, social workers, or even the women’s groups who tirelessly work on abused women’s behalf, but instead relied on police reports and discussions with police officers. As a result, it’s hard to believe this film offers anything new, though the lead character, Evelyne Rompré, is excellent as the compliant spouse who nearly gets killed by her abusive husband, then lies to the hospital staff that is smart enough to offer her help. The mother tells her teenage son Leo (Etienne Laforge), a fragile and reclusive kid with an Ipod in his ear at all times, that they are leaving for a vacation, quickly packing some belongings but leaving the rest, then head out for some northern destination in Quebec near the Ontario border.
What the director fails to realize is the degree of commitment from the women’s network that risk their own lives whisking her away, as in this film they never share their experiences with the runaway mother, and therefore never earn her trust, as instead they demand total compliance and act with the same robotic rigidity as the abusing husband, which is absurd, but this director invents a story where the woman doesn’t really “need” anyone else’s help, preferring to believe that she could resolve this problem on her own. This is really the social conservative’s view, that people don’t need help from government or other help agencies, that they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It’s clear, however, that without the help of the similarly abused women, this mother would never have gotten out alive. The director is fond of images in the seclusion of the forest where Rompré swims naked in the rivers and streams, or takes long walks in the woods, and works part time at a food distribution center packaging food. Meanwhile her son has difficulty fitting in at his new school and he’s teased to the point of physical abuse. Where does that leave her? This film borders on reckless irresponsibility in the direction that it takes, suggesting the mom can’t handle it, that perhaps the boy would be better off with his father, as if a bully himself would be better equipped to fend off other bullies, the mere suggestion of which is revolting. While the personal aspects of the story are intriguing, the director’s dereliction of responsibility in addressing this issue is abominable.
DeMille, Cecil B.
Film Reference Eric Smoodin
For much of his forty-year
career, the public and the critics associated Cecil B. De Mille with a single
kind of film, the epic. He certainly made a great many of them: The Sign of
the Cross, The Crusades, King of Kings, two versions of The Ten
Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth, and others. As a result, De Mille
became a symbol of Hollywood
Although he made films until
1956, De Mille's masterpiece may well have come in 1915 with The Cheat.
Even this early in his career, we can locate some of the motifs that turn up
again and again in De Mille's work: a faltering upper-class marriage, the
allure and exoticism of the Far East , and
sexual attraction equated with hypnotic control. He also made a major aesthetic
advancement in the use of editing in The Cheat that soon became a part
of the repertoire of most filmmakers.
For the cinema's first twenty
years, editing was based primarily on following action. During a chase, when
actors exited screen right, the next shot had them entering screen left; or, a
director might cut from a person being chased to those characters doing the
chasing. In either case, the logic of the action controls the editing, which in
turn gives us a sense of the physical space of a scene. But in The Cheat,
De Mille used his editing to create a sense of psychological space. Richard
Hardy, a wealthy businessman, confronts his wife with her extravagant bills,
but Mrs. Hardy can think only of her lover, Haka, who is equally obsessed with
her. De Mille provides a shot/counter-shot here, but the scene does not cut
from Mr. Hardy to his wife, even though the logic of the action and the
dialogue seems to indicate that it should. Instead, the shots alternate between
Mrs. Hardy and Haka, even though the two lovers are miles apart. This sort of
editing, which follows thoughts rather than actions, may seem routine today,
but in 1915 it was a major development in the method of constructing a
sequence.
As a visual stylist, however, De
Mille became known more for his wit than for his editing innovations. At the
beginning of The Affairs of Anatol, for instance, our first view of the
title character, Anatol DeWitt Spencer, is of his feet. He taps them nervously
while he waits for his wife to make breakfast. Our first view of Mrs. Spencer
is also of her feet—a maid gives them a pedicure. In just seconds, and with
only two shots, De Mille lets us know that this couple is in trouble. Mrs.
Spencer's toenails must dry before Anatol can eat. Also from these opening
shots, the viewers realize that they have been placed firmly within the realm
of romantic comedy. Such closeups have no place within a melodrama.
One normally does not think of De
Mille in terms of pairs of shots. Instead, one thinks on a large scale, and
remembers the crowd scenes (the lions–versus–Christians extravaganza in The
Sign of the Cross), the huge upper-crust social functions (the charity gala
in The Cheat), the orgiastic parties (one of which takes place in a
dirigible in Dynamite), and the bathrooms that De Mille turns into
colossal marble shrines.
De Mille began directing in the
grand style quite early in his career. In 1915, with opera star Geraldine
Farrar in the lead role, he made one of the best film versions of Carmen,
and two years later, again with Farrar, he directed Joan the Woman.
Again and again, De Mille would refer to history as a foundation to support the
believability of his stories, as if his most obvious excesses could be
justified if they were at least remotely based on real-life incidents. A quick
look at his filmography shows many films based on historical events (often so
far back in the past that accuracy hardly becomes an issue): The Sign of the
Cross, The Crusades, Union Pacific, Northwest Mounted Police, and others.
When history was inconvenient, De Mille made use of a literary text to give his
films a high gloss of acceptability and veracity. In the opening credits of The
Affairs of Anatol, for instance, De Mille stresses that the story derives
from the play by Schnitzler.
In both his silent and sound
films, De Mille mixes Victorian morality with sizable doses of sex and
violence. The intertitles of Why Change Your Wife?, for example, rail
against divorce as strongly as any nineteenth–century marital tract, but the
rest of the film deals openly with sexual obsession, and shows two women in
actual physical combat over one man. Similarly, all of De Mille's religious
epics extol the Christian virtues while at the same time reveling in scenes
depicting all of the deadly sins. Though it is tension between extremes that
makes De Mille's films so intriguing, critics have often made this aspect of
his work seem laughable. Even today De Mille rarely receives the serious
recognition and study that he deserves.
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Images
Journal Feature Cecil B. DeMille: The Visionary Years 1915 – 1927, by Gary Johnson
FILM;
Winning a Battle but Losing The War Over the Blacklist Greg Mitchell from The New York Times, January 25, 1998
DeMille, Cecil B. They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Jean-Pierre
Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema,
October 1961)
THE VIRGINIAN
User reviews from imdb: DLewis from United States
Interesting silent from the very early days of Universal, based on a popular Owen Wister novel and perhaps partly scripted by him. What impressed me the most about it was the command that director Cecil B. DeMille has over feature editing at this early stage. His handling of the principal actors is not particularly outstanding; and DeMille would not further distinguish himself in this area as his long career unfolded. But DeMille understands how to intercut separate scenes so they fold into one another and move the story forward. Also DeMille shows skill in coordinating crowd scenes, which would certainly serve him well in his later biblical epics. In these respects "The Virginian" is one of the most advanced features of it's time, at least of the ones from 1914 which we can still see today.
CARMEN
Carmen Gary Johnson from Images journal
Carmen (1915) stars opera diva Geraldine Farrar, who had
already brought her version of Bizet's Carmen to the stage (singing
opposite the great Enrico Caruso). From 1910 to 1920, Farrar was one of the
world's top opera performers.
DeMille saw Carmen as the
ideal vehicle to introduce her to movie audiences. However DeMille faced a
copyright problem if he tackled Bizet's Carmen (the copyright owner
demanded outrageous sums). As a result, DeMille turned to the original source
material, a story by Prosper Merimee that had long since passed into public
domain. The results, while not entirely successful, make for some fascinating
drama. Shorn of her great voice by the silent camera, Farrar relied on just her
acting alone. She becomes earthy and vivacious in the lead role, but she's less
than alluring or exotic--an actress trying too hard to convince her audience of
her sexuality. The movie contains few of DeMille's trademark directorial
touches: you won't find any strange flashbacks to biblical times or any overt
moralizing. The storytelling is uncluttered and straightforward as DeMille
rushes through the story in only 59 minutes. A fascinating tale told at
breakneck speed.
THE CHEAT
"East is East and West is West and never the twain shall
meet," quoth an intertitle in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915),
before the trial for the shooting of a Burmese aristocrat ensconced in
Gatsby-land.
The ethnocentric festival's best film isn't even by a member of
any of the tribes in question. DeMille's The Cheat stars Sessue Hayakawa
as Arakau Haka, a wealthy ivory merchant who throws parties for the smart set
at his
Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe
The silent melodrama The Cheat (1915) was a key film in
the early career of Cecil B. DeMille -- one that helped establish his
reputation as a top-echelon director. According to DeMille biographer Anne
Edwards, the film "set standards of acting, decor, frame composition and
lighting which were not surpassed for years." Although D.
Broadway actress Fannie Ward stars as Edith Hardy, an irresponsible socialite
who gambles away $10,000 she has collected for the Red Cross. Without the
knowledge of her husband (Jack Dean, Ward's real-life husband at the time) she
borrows that amount from wealthy Japanese ivory dealer Tori (Sessue Hayakawa)
to cover her indiscretion. The catch is that Tori expects sexual favors in
exchange for the loan. The distraught Edith finally turns to her husband for
money to repay the loan -- but an enraged Tori calls the poor woman a
"cheat," attacks her and, to mark her as his "possession,"
brands her with a hot iron. After Edith defends her honor with a gun, her
husband steps forward to take blame for the shooting and the matter is resolved
in a sensational trial.
Re-released during World War I, when
The Cheat, which was remade several times but never to greater effect,
won much critical praise for DeMille, especially for its striking visuals and
low-key lighting effects. "Never before has the skillful play with light
and shade been used to such marvelous advantage," wrote one reviewer. But
the director himself was less impressed by great reviews than in popular
acceptance. After The Cheat enjoyed only lackluster box-office success
in the
JOAN THE WOMAN
User Reviews from imdb: David Atfield (bits@alphalink.com.au) from Canberra, Australia
All the Demille trademarks are here - huge crowd scenes, wild orgies,
torture - but there is also a beauty and imagination here that is lacking in
some of his later work. The use of double exposures for Joan's visions, the
magnificent use of lighting and colour tinting, reveal a film-maker of greater
depth than we might expect.
Opera diva Geraldine Farrar seems a little old and hefty for Joan of Arc, but
once you get past that she truly gives an excellent performance. And Wallace
Reid as her English lover lends strong support.
The camera is a little static and the "spectacular" battle scene is
really just hundreds of people running around waving sticks in the air and
falling backwards off walls (and I think very little attention was paid to the
safety of the extras and the horses), but this is still a very rewarding and
innovative film. And we get the original 1916 score performed on a Wurlitzer.
The historical story is framed by a World War 1 (then currently raging in
Joan The Woman Gary Johnson from Images journal
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer
WHISPERING CHORUS
For a long time I
thought Cecil B. DeMille was a talentless hack. Then I saw The Cheat
and The Whispering Chorus
and realized it wasn’t that he lacked talent, it was just that after 1920 he
seldom chose to exercise it. DeMille cruised through most of his exceptionally
long and commercially successful career on a popular formula of titillation and
censoriousness. It came as a surprise to discover that for a few years at the
beginning of the feature era, he was an innovative and critically lauded cinema
pioneer.
The
Whispering Chorus is a
fine example of traditional Hollywood filmmaking, combining strong
storytelling, effective performances, good production values and special effects
on the then cutting-edge. The protagonist is a non-hero, a weak man who
embezzles money from his employer and abandons his wife. He has no real
ambitions or positive desires, he simply sees disappearing with a little money
in hand as an easy escape route from an ordinary daily life he’s grown tired
of. Within a very little time he becomes consumed by a paranoid fear of
discovery and arrest. His changing physical circumstances through the film
reflect his steady mental decline, culminating in a climactic psychological
struggle between right and expediency.
In the film’s
most striking sequences, his mental struggles are depicted in a sophisticated
variant on the familiar picture of a man with an angel on one shoulder and
devil on the other. Visions of people from his past and his present appear to
exhort, cajole and excuse his choices and desires. It is an elegant
visualization of interior monologue, and a remarkable technical achievement.
A bare recitation
of all the twists and turns of the plot would make Chorus sound like a
cut-rate melodrama. The reason it is not that is because it is essentially a
character study that is grounded in sincere performances and DeMille’s
understated and skillful direction. Chorus has a gripping, if
admittedly wildly implausible story, but it is not a plot-driven movie.
Perhaps the best
evidence for my assessment of Chorus as character study is that the
theft is not portrayed as the cause of the man’s troubles, as you would expect
in a typical Hollywood crime doesn’t pay melo, but rather as one (and not the
first) misstep in a series of wrong steps. While one misstep leads to another
and leads the man into increasingly degraded circumstances, the wellspring of
his troubles is the essential flaws in his character.
The
Whispering Chorus Gary Johnson from Images
journal
MALE AND FEMALE
Legend has it that Cecil B. De Mille retitled this 1919 version of James M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton because he was afraid that audiences would think it was a navy picture. Crammed with sin, sex, and sermonizing, Male and Female is a perfect opportunity to examine the dominant and most delirious directorial personality of the 20s at its height. With Gloria Swanson and Thomas Meighan. 116 min.
The original tale that
foreshadowed Swept Away, We’re Not Dressing and other stories where the
roles of servants and masters are reversed, James M. Barrie’s The Admirable
Chrichton, was adapted in 1919 by Cecil B. DeMille as a silent feature,
with Gloria Swanson as the spoiled rich girl who is part of a group shipwrecked
on a deserted island, and Thomas Meighan as her former butler and the only one
in the group who has any survival skills. There is a wild dream sequence, in
which the two imagine themselves in ancient Babylon
The picture is in black and
white, with some tinted sequences. The tinting tends to go overboard, but for
the most part the source material is in very good condition and the picture
looks relatively clean, with sharp, well-defined contrasts and minimal wear. There
is an adequate stereophonic score, consisting primarily of a piano, backed up
by a reasonably good-sized orchestra.
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)
Male and Female Gary Johnson from Images journal
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
USA
When Charlton Heston was still a gleam in his father's eye,
Cecil B. De Mille was rolling out this 1923 version of the Old Testament story,
which includes several scenes in early two-strip Technicolor. With Richard Dix,
Theodore Roberts, Estelle Taylor, and Rod La Rocque. 146 min.
User
Reviews from imdb Author: pninson
from
Cecil B. DeMille's original silent version of the Ten
Commandments is mostly a heavy-handed morality play set in 1923. The prologue,
which runs just over 40 minutes, shows an abbreviated version of the Biblical
story of the Exodus. Most of the dialogue is taken from the Bible. Despite the
technical limitations of the era, it succeeds as a fast-paced spectacular. The
parting of the
I wish I could say the same about the main part of the feature. After Moses
punishes the Hebrews for worshipping the golden calf, the film moves to the
present day (1920s). A mother reads to her grown sons from the Bible. The two
brothers are basically Goofus and Gallant. From here, everything is completely
predictable.
It's well done so that one can overlook the lack of subtlety. DeMille has a
very explicit religious message, and he's not above bludgeoning the viewer over
the head with it. That was the style of the day, and the limitations of the
silent film force a certain amount of overstatement.
However, unlike most films of this period, this one goes on far too long. It's
about ninety minutes but seems far longer. The bad son goes out into the world,
declaring that he's going to break all 10 Commandments! Naturally, he becomes a
successful businessman... while his humble older brother (a carpenter,
naturally) tries not to envy him or covet his wife. There's never any doubt
about how it's all going to end: DeMille's message is that "the wages of
sin is death", but he takes far too long to get there.
The complete film is about 135 minutes, which must have been an epic length for
that era. I would have enjoyed it more if the modern story had been trimmed by
about 15 minutes.
In his way, DeMille was the forerunner of Mel Gibson. Both are gifted
filmmakers with devout religious beliefs --- short on subtlety, heavy on the
bloodshed and headlong action. The 1956 remake of Ten Commandments is a
spectacular example of epic film-making, and as this 1923 silent original is
now included as an extra disc in the DVD, it's worth checking out. I can't imagine
wanting to sit through the modern story again, though; I'll probably shut it
off once Moses segues off screen.
THE VOLGA BOATMAN
The Volga
Boatman Gary Johnson from Images
journal
With The Volga Boatman,
Cecil B. DeMille kicks into his extravagant mode--but with a difference. This
is a big-scaled epic, but it is also a surprisingly fast moving and exciting
romantic melodrama. It's more than a little silly, but that's part of the fun.
The Volga Boatman was influenced by the Russian Revolution. And what
was DeMille, a conservative Republican, doing making a movie about the
overthrow of the Czar? Well, the situation was ripe with extravagant dramatics.
DeMille didn't attempt to politicize the drama; the aristocracy comes off
worse, but no one looks particularly good in this movie. The Volga Boatman
stars William Boyd of Hopalong Cassidy fame. Brawny and charismatic, he is
forced to pull barges up and down the Volga River
THE VOLGA BOATMAN - d: Cecil B. DeMille Danny Fortune from the Alternative Film Guide
The Cecil B. DeMille epic The Volga Boatman should be book-ended with DeMille’s 1929 drama The Godless Girl. Both tell compelling stories without a clear, definite point of view.
Picture it:
The object of her attention is the manly Feodor (William Boyd). He practically glows with his piercing eyes and curly blond hair. He notices her too, but flips her off as one of the bourgeois aristocrats who will soon be defeated and overthrown.
When the revolution comes, Feodor is a leader of the Red Army, intent on wiping out the Royalists. When his troops come upon Princess Verna and her father, they invade the palace and overturn the status quo of the household. The ragtag soldiers order the servants to sit at the table and the Princess and her father to serve them. But when the White Army approaches, Feodor flees with the Princess. (As I said, she had the hots for him.)
The power struggle shifts again and the Princess — disguised as a peasant — is captured by the Royalists. What comes next is probably one of DeMille’s most sordid and perverse scenes. The Princess is forced to dance on a table top while being ogled by the soldiers. One by one, they approach her and remove an article of her clothing, until she is apparently down to her skivvies. They leer and lust at her lasciviously. At first Prince Dimitri, thinking Verna is dead, allows the abomination, but when he recognizes her he is mortified.
The struggle between the Red Bolsheviks and the White Royalists continues. Each side is shown to have its good points and its bad points. But history has shown who the winner is, so Feodor and the Princess are reunited with the Reds, along with Dimitri. But because Feodor is considered a traitor for trying to save Royalty, they are all yoked together to pull the barges to the river, just as in the beginning.
And this is where the movie should end. The tableau picturing the three of them strapped in unison is breathtaking. They were, after all, in it together. Unfortunately, DeMille couldn’t resist a happy ending…
The Volga Boatman is a powerful movie. William Boyd, for one, casts a stunning figure as the leader of the peasants. He is sensitive, yet masculine and strong. And his piercing stare was mesmerizing.
Although DeMille is often accused of being an unapologetic right-winger, his sympathy for the Reds in The Volga Boatman is quite evident — even though they are shown to be just as ruthless as the White Army. (The film’s story was adapted by Lenore J. Coffee from Konrad Bercovici’s novel.) Through it all is a romantic fable of love and passion that fits in beautifully with the real-life drama of the Russian revolution.
KING OF KINGS
USA (155 mi) 1927
For many infidels, the Jesus movie of choice remains Cecil B.
DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings. This silent blockbuster was recently
screened at the
Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster
One of the cinema's most important religious epics, Cecil B.
DeMille's masterwork, The King of Kings (1927), tells the story of
Christ's final experiences, from his meeting with Mary Magdalene, to his
Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension.
As with so many other films treating the story of Christ, from Martin
Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to Mel Gibson's The
Passion of Christ (2004), The King of Kings met with controversy in
its day. Jewish groups criticized DeMille's film because they said it condemned
them as Christ's crucifiers. Others said DeMille simply pandered to his
audience's emotions while some called him a Christian propagandist. Upon
viewing the film, John Steinbeck was said to have remarked, "saw the
picture, loved the book."
In an attempt to honor the material, DeMille had both a Jesuit Priest and
several other members of the clergy (including a Rabbi) on hand during filming
to ensure that the proper reverence was being paid to the film's subject
matter.
DeMille took a particular liking to the representative from the National
Catholic Welfare Council, Father Lord, and tried to play upon his obvious
interest in Hollywood by offering to teach him the film business. But Lord was
not interested in leaving the clergy and reportedly replied that he wouldn't
trade his life "for anything in the world."
The film's first day of shooting was honored with prayers offered by
representatives of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist and Moslem faiths.
Anxious to set the proper ecclesiastical mood, each morning DeMille entered the
set to the strains of "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" and spiritual
music was continually piped onto the set during the production. Cast members
were all given Bibles and asked to call each other by their Biblical names
whenever they were on the sound stage. At one point, an impatient DeMille
reportedly demanded to know "where in the hell is Judas?" garnering
an angry dressing down from the producer.
So concerned was DeMille with paying the proper respect, that the actor who
played Christ, H.B. Warner, was required to endure a fair amount of religious
deprivation. Warner was told not to speak to anyone on the set except for the
director and told not to be seen in public during the production. Such
overzealous attention to "how things looked" might have been due to
an early experience on The King of Kings set in which a newspaper
photographer snapped a shot of H.B. Warner in full Christ garb lounging in a
chair while smoking a cigarette and reading the sports pages.
That's not to say that DeMille did not take some artistic license with the
material, even inventing a love affair between Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) and
Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan). The opening scene of The King of Kings
is pure DeMille, featuring Mary Magdalene in her decadent surroundings, first
getting the news that Judas has been "seeing" someone else. Dressed
in a revealing jewel-studded bra, Mary sets off in a zebra-drawn chariot driven
by a brawny hunk, to confront her rival for Judas's attention.
DeMille had already proven his suitability to the Biblical epic with the 1923
version of The Ten Commandments, which many predicted would fail but
which instead made an enormous profit despite production costs of $2,265,283.
DeMille wanted The King of Kings to achieve a similar success and in an
early effort to spike its popular appeal, the film was divided into two parts,
the first the Christ story and the second a sin-filled modern story to
illustrate human ignorance of Christ's message. However, that modern epilogue
was eventually abandoned.
It is said that worldwide, some 8 billion people have seen DeMille's film
partly due to the Cinema Corporation's policy of loaning the film to civic and
religious groups for a small fee to help replace worn prints. Reportedly no
week passes without The King of Kings playing in some corner of the
world. Missionaries have carried the film all over the world in support of
their ministry. The King of Kings was reportedly the first film Eskimos
in
The film debuted, to much pomp, at the newly completed Grauman's Chinese
Cinema. The King of Kings was reissued in 1931 with the addition of a
synchronized musical score.
But The King of Kings was not a success in all regards. The part of
Christ was less than a boon to the acting career of its star, H.B. Warner.
Because
King of Kings: Showman of Piety Criterion essay by Peter Matthews, December 06, 2004
The King
of Kings Criterion essay by Charles
Musser, May 25, 1992
The King of Kings (1927) - The Criterion Collection
Easter
2014, Part Un: A Tale of Two Kings: DeMille's Silent Classic on ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 20, 2014
Review:
The King of Kings (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1927) - Patheos Peter T. Chattaway, December 7, 2004
Past
Perfect: Criterion Classics - The King of Kings (1927) | PopMatters Bill Gibron, January 16, 2007
King of Kings Gary Johnson from Images journal
not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)
DVD Savant Review: The
King of Kings - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson, also here: Turner Classic Movies
Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]
Modern Sound Pictures plenty of big photos here
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)
The New York Times (Charles Morgan)
THE GODLESS GIRL
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton
Trapp]
He wasn't right all the time, obviously, but Cecil B. de
Mille recognized the immense potential of film as a consciousness-raising
device. He panders to the prejudices of his audience, but that's how you get
'em to change: Hey, I'm one of you, and here's a little sugar for your coffee.
Atheists and Bible-thumpers unite! Yes, actually, that's the message more or
less, one of tolerance, but I think you can look a little bit deeper than that.
At its heart the film urges the young (of any generation) to see beyond the
prejudices and ignorance of their elders. Radical maybe, but no less necessary
and productive. It's Cecil's final silent film-and I'm sure he knew it would
be-so it's interesting to watch the nearly ubiquitous "Silence" sign
move around the screen, in good times and bad, throughout mental sickness and
towards health. However much its heart is in the right place, or near it, as a
film it's not really all that much. The faces are all dramatic, and the
allegedly true-life (presumably embellished) plot misses few tragedies or
triumphs, but none of I it is particularly convincing or even successfully
manipulative. It's funny how we've grown exhausted with plots about innocents
being imprisoned, as an audience; but no less inclined to keep imprisoning them,
as a culture. Repetition just isn't everything. With all the darkness, and
efforts towards light, and prisons and escapes of many sorts, it reminds me
more than a little bit of the Jim Jarmusch film Down By Law , though
Jarmusch handles both the technical and philosophical details with much greater
success, and DeMille strikes out on joy whereas Jarmusch busts that move.
Banned in
User Reviews from imdb Author: overseer-3 from Florida
The Godless Girl (1929), Cecil B. DeMille's last silent film, has
been lovingly restored by George Eastman House from a print obtained from
DeMille's estate, and featuring a powerful and moving soundtrack created by
Carl Davis; original themes in addition to some classical religious pieces. I
am sure that once more silent film fans get a chance to see this beautiful
movie it will increase in reputation, and it certainly deserves more than its
current 6.0 average rating out of 10.
Of all of DeMille's silents this one is perhaps the most visionary. The title
cards are especially beautiful and impressive and topical for our own time. One
doesn't have to go back to Bible times to create a spiritual film which can
touch audiences, and to me personally therein lies the real appeal of this
motion picture. It goes in directions you don't expect it to and it surprises
you at every turn. The film is really a plea for tolerance between believers in
God and non-believers. Both groups can display intolerance toward one another
and then nothing is gained, because nothing is understood when it is cloaked in
anger. Whatever someone's faith is, or lack of it, we are all still part of the
human family and should treat each other with respect.
Regarding the cast, I thought all the actors were very good and brought pathos
and humor to their roles. I liked seeing Lina Basquette in a silent, there isn't
much available for her, and I really enjoyed seeing Marie Prevost in sharp
focus, acting her heart out as Lina's character's friend (other silents
available for Marie tend to be public domain mangled prints). She gives the
best performance of her career in this one! Tom Keene looked slightly old to be
playing a teenager but he was a good actor and brought many layers to his
performance. Eddie Quillan was comic relief and did a great job. Noah Beery
played the villain, something he was noted for, and did another outstanding
job. Mary Jane Irving was touching as the young girl who dies, which
precipitates the others being arrested for involuntary manslaughter and sent to
a reformatory.
From video clips I had seen of this film in a DeMille documentary I didn't
think I would like it, but this movie surprised me. It has some beautiful
moments and glistening cinematography and thoughtful title cards, many with
decorative backgrounds. I suspect DeMille's long time assistant Jeanie
Macpherson had a lot to do with the latter. I'm not sure but I can imagine that
this film was a hard one for 1929 audiences to take, but for us in 2007 it
really hits home.
Alternative Film Guide [Danny Fortune]
This one took me totally by
surprise! Cecil
B. DeMille’s last silent movie (one version has added talking scenes), The
Godless Girl, starts out as an intriguing story (by Jeanie Macpherson)
about high-school hijinks — but instead of Sharks and Jets, the gangs consist
of Atheists and Believers. Fronting the "Godless Society" is Judy
(Lina Basquette), a pretty girl who has a crush on a fellow student,
Bob-the-Bible-Boy (George Duryea — later known as Tom Keene). She tries to
recruit him to attend her Atheist meetings, but being the good Christian that
he is, Bob instead forms a gang of hoodlums to invade the gathering and beat
those evil non-believers over the head with their Bibles.
At this point, I am siding with
the Atheists. At their meeting, the proselytes have to swear allegiance by
placing a hand on a monkey’s head (ostensibly representing Darwin
Then the pace changes. The kids
are put into a Juvenile Detention Center and the real horrors begin. The guards
are all sadistic and the punishments never fit the crime. And since both
Believers and Non Believers are treated with the same cruelty, their differences
don’t seem to matter anymore. Judy’s best friend, Mame (Marie Prevost), becomes
a shining example of what a good Bible-believing Christian is really made of.
She is compassionate and protective of her Atheist friend.
Meanwhile, on the boys’ side of
the prison, Bob and his friends are subjected to all forms of sadistic torture.
The brutality is convincingly realized as The Godless Girl suddenly
becomes an indictment against inhumane conditions in the juvenile penal system.
Despite their religious disagreements,
Judy and Bob learn that they love each other — even though they live on
different sides of the detention center — when they both get crosses burned
into their hands after touching each other through the electrified fence. And
the symbolism doesn’t stop there. While Bob changes his prison tag,
"7734," by turning it upside down and altering it with a marking pen
to read "HELL," Judy alters hers from "3107" to read
"LOVE." As he is losing his faith, she is gaining hers.
The lovers make their escape,
they are caught, they are tortured. The whole drama climaxes with a
conflagration so convincing, so real, that I felt like I was there with them. I
have seldom been so caught up in a drama that my eyes have been riveted to the
screen — and I never once wanted to look away. That’s how compelling I found The
Godless Girl.
In fact, The Godless Girl
haunted me for days. I kept thinking of what point of view Cecil B.
DeMille wanted his audience to take. Did he want us to side with the
Believers? They were the ones who began the attack that killed one of the
students. Or are we to side with the Atheists and forever be branded as
"godless"? That might have been what I admired so much about this
movie.
Granted, Judy becomes a
god-fearing believer by the end, but at no time were the Atheists demonized or
portrayed as evil. The viewer was free to identify with either side.
Thought-provoking movies, such as The Godless Girl, disturb my jaded
passivity by thoroughly involving me.
Thank you, Mr. DeMille, for
shaking my cynicism and making me a believer once more. Not about religion, but
about filmmaking.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] reviewing Treasures III: Social Issues In American Film 1900-1934
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
An apt name for a Cecil B. DeMille film, this one about circus
life. It earned him his only non-honorary Oscar, Best Picture, on his only BP
nomination; his direction was also nominated and the film also took home the
Writing Oscar. However, I think he too benefited from a split vote between High
Noon (1952) and John Ford's The
Quiet Man (1952). As previously mentioned, Ford won the Best Director
award (over DeMille). It stars Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston,
Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Grahame, Henry Wilcoxon, and John Ridgely (among
others). Great "every man" Jimmy Stewart plays a circus clown never
seen without his make-up throughout the entire movie. Bob Hope & Bing
PopMatters Jesse Hassenger
The Academy Award for Best Picture has been bestowed on any number of unworthy candidates over the years, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one less deserving than The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 circus melodrama. Now available on DVD, it is the standard by which all bad Best Pictures can be measured.
It's also a study in empty spectacle before empty spectacle was
But if Barnum's shams at least made fir good stories, the legacy of this burn is considerably less lively; screen it for anyone lacking a sense of film history, and you might turn her off "old" movies for life. It conforms to virtually every stereotype of a 50-year-old film: The dialogue is unintentionally hilarious, the special effects are primitive, and it goes on for what seems like forever (actually, 150 minutes).
It wouldn't be so long if it weren't for the endless breaks in the action for displays of real circus performances; there are lots of slow, long shots where the camera pans by multiple acts and curiosities, occasionally cutting to slack-jawed audiences. DeMille, ever the innovator, discovers something worse than reaction shots of children or reaction shots of animals (though both are present in abundance here): reaction shots of clowns.
Was the circus really so exotic to 1952 audiences? I suspect not, but the movie nonetheless treats it as a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. The voiceover during the behind-the-scenes passages breathlessly piles metaphor upon metaphor, mixing and matching like some kind of patent-pending random narration generator. Thus the circus crew perseveres, "no matter how tangled the stain of their lives may be." (I rewound the disc several times to check this quote.)
Occasionally, the film pauses for a story that would fill about half an hour in a movie with any kind of economy, centered around Marc (Charlton Heston), a hard-boiled, no-nonsense circus boss. Heston is tossed into a love triangle with ingénue acrobat Holly (Betty Hutton) and smooth superstar acrobat Sebastian (Cornel Wilde). But the only sparks that fly come from a climactic train wreck ("You're not gonna put that guy's blood in me!" chokes Marc, referring to Sebastian, his romantic rival and possible blood donor, with more passion than he ever shows poor Holly).
Appearing as Heston's love interest -- even a young, handsome Heston -- is never easy. Even so, Hutton is singularly charmless here. Of course, it's an awful role: Holly is a screwball without comedy, running back and forth between a grim Marc and an oily Sebastian. Most of her romantic scenes feature some sort of complaining. Gloria Grahame's Angel, the standard sarcastic gal pal, is more appealing, as she seems to regard the activity around her with appropriate disdain.
If The Greatest Show on Earth's flaws can be boiled down to a central failing (and I'm not sure they can), it's DeMille's inability to place these characters in a circus environment with the kind of flimflam that made Barnum so fascinating. The circus crew is depicted as a cross between Santa's Workshop and the U.S. Army; they are impossibly virtuous, toiling endlessly for the delight of children. Even a clown with a dark past (Jimmy Stewart!) regards the big top as some sort of community service. The narrator refers to the circus as a "wild tangle of man, machine, and beast." If that didn't sound sort of entertaining, I'd say it describes this movie perfectly.
Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco
Film Freak Central Review [Travis Hoover]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
USA
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
It takes something special for a motion picture to enter the
Biblical canon. But ask any Christian what happened to Moses before age 30, and
they'll likely relate to you the plotline of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten
Commandments.
Surprise! As DeMille himself tells us in a (somewhat silly) opening narration
-- where he comes out from behind a curtain and addresses the audience -- the
Bible skips Moses' formative years altogether. One minute, as a baby he's
fished out of the
Eventually Moses discovers his birthright -- or lack thereof -- and sends
himself to the slave pits of
Shot in widescreen Technicolor, The Ten Commandments remains the
standard by which Biblical epics -- and many epics in general -- are measured.
DeMille is heavy handed, but that's DeMille. Heston scowls and Brynner emotes;
they are archetypal versions of themselves. Many of DeMille's sets and stunts
are obvious fakes(that animated pillar of fire wouldn't scare a house cat), but
most are impressive even today. When Moses turns his staff into a snake and
back again, the effect is seamless. His turning of the
Say what you will about the factual content here -- as it turns out, the film
is based on a collection of novels, not historical texts -- this is a
movie about spectacle and excess. It doesn't feel particularly religious or
spiritual; it's an adventure on the grandest -- and longest -- scale. Heston
may as well be screaming about Soylent Green, but damn if he doesn't make for
one hell of an inspiring leader.
A DVD commentary track from Katherine Orrison, who wrote a book about the
movie, is nothing short of awful. (She adds little to the flick, just going on
and on about how she loves various shots and mispronouncing "
The 50th Anniversary set includes both the standard DVD (with commentary and
documentary) plus the 1923 silent film of the same name. Also with commentary
from Orrison.
Turner Classic Movies Fred Hunter
The 50th Anniversary Edition of The Ten Commandments,
Cecil B. DeMille's epic remake of his own 1923 film, tells the story of Moses
from the infancy to his receiving of the title documents. When the Pharaoh
learns of a prophecy of a newly-born leader springing from the Israelite
population, he orders the killing of all Hebrew infants. A Hebrew woman named
Jacobeth has recently given birth to a son, and tries to save his life by
setting him adrift on the
When Moses becomes an adult he learns of his true origins, and decides to go
among his own people, where he finds to his horror that they are treated like
animals. Fighting back on a small scale would be futile, and Moses doesn't know
what to do to remedy the situation -- but an encounter with a burning bush
would change that. The voice of God speaks from the bush, and tells Moses that
he was meant to liberate the Israelites from their bondage. Moses travels back
to
The Israelites are released in a mass exodus (that literally employs a cast of
thousands) and set out into the desert, led by Moses. But it isn't long before
Pharaoh hardens his heart again, and mobilizes his army of charioteers to go
after them. The chase leads to the
The 1956 version of The Ten Commandments is a time-consuming spectacle
that goes an awfully long way to the payoff at the
For any faults the film may have, it delivers something that is rarely seen
today: true spectacle. Watching this film with its massive, giant images and
hordes of people will prove to you that there really is a difference between an
army made up of people, and a computer generated army, which despite
improvements in technology still do not look real. On the heels of his success
with The Greatest Show on Earth, De Mille set out to make the epic to
end all epics, and he fulfilled his wish, going out with a bang.
The 50th Anniversary Edition is rife with extras, beginning with the inclusion
of De Mille's original 1923 silent version of the story. This proves to be a
faithful retelling of the story, though it doesn't cover as much ground as its
successor. It is also quite a odd film in it's own right: it follows the Moses
story until the parting of the Red Sea, then reverts to modern day where it
attempts to act out the effects of breaking each of the commandments in a story
of two brothers, each of whom take separate roads.
Both films include a commentary by Katherine Orrison, the author of Written
in Stone: The Making of Cecil B. DeMille's Epic. There is interesting
six-part documentary (totally about 35 minutes) about the making of the film
with new interviews with Heston and some of the younger cast members. Also
included are "The Ten Commandments in New York Premiere Newsreel,"
three trailers for various releases of the '56 film, and hand tinted footage of
the exodus and parting of the Red Sea sequences from the silent version.
The transfer of the 1956 version is splendid, with deep, rich colors and deep,
solid blacks. Flesh tones are consistent, and the film is beautifully
contrasted throughout. The audio features rich, full-bodied tone quality, deep
bass, and dialogue that is crystal clear.
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]
PopMatters John G. Nettles
ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jesse Shanks)
50th Anniversary Edition - DVD Town [John J. Puccio and Yunda Eddie Feng]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
The New York Times (Howard Thompson)
Demirkubuz, Zeki
Turkish Cinema Newsletter: 2005 biography
Born in Isparta in 1964, Demirkubuz was jailed for three years at
the age of 17 for alleged communist ties. On release from prison he became a
film-maker - more, he claims, by accident than by design. After working as an
assistant director, he set up his own production company, Mavi Film,
deliberately situating himself outside of Istanbul's mainstream Yesilcam
Studios (Turkey's answer to Hollywood). Independent and uncompromising,
Demirkubuz controls almost every aspect of his films, making few concessions to
prevailing trends.
FATE (Yazgi)
Turkish Cinema Newsletter: 2005
Fate (Yazgi), the
brilliantly accomplished fourth feature of Turkish writer-director Zeki
Demirkubuz, is an adaptation of Albert Camus' L’Etranger (The Outsider), transposed to present-day Istanbul.
Musa (based on Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus' novel) is a blank but wryly
amused customs clerk who lives quietly with his elderly mother. He seeks no
control over his own destiny but simply allows life to take its course. When,
one day, he finds his mother dead at home, he shows no sign of emotion and
maybe even experiences a sense of relief. But life, driven by fate, has some
unexpected twists in store.
Born in Isparta in 1964, Demirkubuz was jailed for three years at the age of 17
for alleged communist ties. On release from prison he became a film-maker -
more, he claims, by accident than by design. After working as an assistant
director, he set up his own production company, Mavi Film, deliberately
situating himself outside of Istanbul's mainstream Yesilcam Studios (Turkey's
answer to Hollywood). Independent and uncompromising, Demirkubuz controls
almost every aspect of his films, making few concessions to prevailing trends.
Written, directed and edited by Demirkubuz, Fate
is austere cinema with a blackly comic edge. Beautifully controlled, with its
restrained performances, long takes and sparing use of music (apart from two
brief bursts of Mahler), it is a daring and deeply compelling enquiry into the
nature of personal responsibility.
Together with the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (whose Uzak [Distant] was released last year to great acclaim), the work
of Demirkubuz has sparked an international revival of interest in Turkish
arthouse cinema. With two of his feature films, Fate and Confession, selected
for the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in 2002, Demirkubuz established
himself as a talent to watch and was hailed as an important new auteur. His
films were subsequently spotlighted at the Edinburgh, Vienna and Toronto Film
Festivals, also receiving a complete retrospective at New York's Anthology Film
Archives. With the release of Fate, bfi Distribution is proud to introduce a
major new talent to UK audiences.
THE WAITING ROOM (Bekleme odasi) C+ 78
Turkey
It’s unusual to get the opportunity to see a Turkish film, as there are
only two playing at this festival, and one, WAITING FOR THE CLOUDS, never
showed up. This one might be titled SON
OF DISTANT, as thematically, they both reveal such identical, parallel images
of the mulishness of men. I kept waiting
for this guy to flip on the porn in his apartment, as it so perfectly matched
the same scenes in Nuri Bilge Ceylon’s DISTANT (2002). If sullen and uncommunicative men are your
thing, then this film’s for you. The
minimal plot centers around a brooding, self-loathing film director who is
searching for an actor to play Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. Funny that he never thought to look in the
mirror. The pace is very slow, and the
mood rarely, if ever, changes, and I was reminded of one of the classic porn
films from the early days, what is it? THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES, featuring Georgina Spelvin and the director, Gerard Damiano? Anyway, the final shot shows this guy stuck
in purgatory, imprisoned, alone in a “waiting room,” apparently never able to
get a hard on again. Well this guy isn’t
too far off, as his life appears doomed to make the same mistakes over and over
again, providing little if any effort in making a relationship work, making the
other partner provide it all for him, until eventually, like a disposable
partner, he grows tired of her and throws her away until the next one comes
along. He’s like defective
merchandise. The film does have an
eloquent final shot.
Demme,
Jonathan
Film Reference Norman Miller, updated by Rob Edelman
Jonathan Demme Keith Uhlich from Senses of Cinema
All-Movie Guide bio from Mark Deming
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Kael on Demme: Reviews excerpted New Yorker reviews on Demme films by Pauline Kael, reprinted on Storefront Demme
"Kael & Demme:
Meeting of Two American Film Heavies"
by Rob Nelson from the Badger
Herald,
Demme, Jonathan They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
1984
L.A. Weekly Interview Start Making Sense, by Michael Dare,
Guardian
Unlimited Interview by
BBC:
Calling the Shots interview by
Stella Papamichael
CAGED
HEAT
USA (83 mi) 1974
Time
Out review
Tony Rayns
The US drive-in audience's taste for
renegade women has thrown up some pretty bizarre movies, but few more
distinctive than Demme's directorial debut. It starts out as a bare-knuckled
women's prison pic and turns into a 'girl gang' rampage, by way of a lot of
witty feminist gags and the incursion of what William Burroughs would call a
'technological psychiatry' theme. A percussive, Velvet-y score by John Cale
and several casting surprises (including the long-absent Barbara
Steele) help keep both pace and interest high. It's no more than passable
as a thriller, but the density of invention and energy in other respects is
enough to shame a dozen contemporary major studio movies.
On its original 1974 release, Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat
became an immediate favorite of Marxist-leaning cultural theorists, who
detected a left-wing, revolutionary agenda just under the surface of this
steamy women-in-prison exploitation flick: the lumpen gals are multicultural,
the honky prison officials (including British cult actress Barbara Steele, in a
wheelchair) are insidious behaviorists. Even the apolitical Hollywood Reporter,
weighing in on Caged Heat, came on like Foucault: "Prison is a ready
metaphor for the repression of modern life, and the women who break their way
out . . . suggest a positive, even militant reaction to sexist
victimization."
Maybe so. But a quarter-century later, the genre stuff in
Caged Heat prevails mightily over the Demme deconstuction of the genre. Comely
damsels in jail being strip-searched and showering so that the audience can
peep at tits and ass -- that's what the movie is about. Still, Caged Heat is
definitely entertaining in a trashy way, because Demme, years before The
Silence of the Lambs, is a talented filmmaker, Tak Fujimoto is a top-line
cinematographer, and there's an energetic soundtrack by ex-Velvet Undergrounder
John Cale. Also, there's an unusually fine ensemble of incarcerated hussies,
including rough-and-ready blaxploitation actress Juanita Brown and, my absolute
favorite, the ever-disrobing blonde starlet (where is she today?) Rainbeaux
Smith.
not coming to
a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Roger Corman appears to be a man of sophistication if you
hear him speak. He looks like a grandfather, even, listening patiently and
entirely kempt, the sort of person you can never picture swearing. This
impression is unbefitting of a man who has produced over three hundred films, a
substantial number of which are titled with either an action verb, an
exclamation point, or both.
His prolificacy his comparatively attainable trait, the
remarkably exclusive feature of Roger Corman is his fostering of the careers of
some of the more critically prominent contemporary directors. Corman has
produced the early features of Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha), Francis Ford
Coppola (Dementia 13), Ron Howard (Grand Theft Auto), and James Cameron
(Piranha II: The Spawning). Among this string of audacious debuts is Jonathan Demme’s
Caged Heat, which I find to be the most laudable of Corman’s training wheels.
Within seconds guns fire and people die. Jacqueline (Erica
Gavin, the buxotic title character of Russ Meyer’s Vixen!) is caught and taken
to a women’s penitentiary. The location is summarized in a tracking shot across
the prison cells that finds moans coming from many women.
In the title alone is the implication that this film is set
to depict the sexual thirst of repressed women. Caged Heat is, after all,
contractual exploitation, an example of Corman’s trademark bargain filmmaking
with obligated nudity and violence. For Demme, conclusively, the film (which he
wrote and directed) is an opportunity to transcend the genre. His film has
interest in subtext and subversion, a film made for men that stands doubly as
an affront to them. There is merit in these intentions, as well as the film’s
biography, but Caged Heat is diminished in comparison to Demme’s later works.
Corman’s done better as well, and worse.
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
When freshman
director Jonathan Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto were making the 70's
drive-in T&A sexploitation flick CAGED HEAT, do you think they had any
inkling that they'd go on to do such impeccable films as SILENCE OF THE LAMBS?
Despite the fact that it's a glaring example of the genre, it's also a
surprisingly effective and disturbing one that rises above the average B-grade
tittyfest.
Caged Heat is yet another gem from the Roger Corman camp, in the
tradition of The Big Bird Cage, The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, etc. Films that make up for zero budget and even less
thespian prowess with an abundance of pointless and exploitative nudity and, occasionally,
a script that is surprisingly clever and effective.
On the surface, Caged Heat is a simplistic "women in prison" tale with the
expected racially diverse breast fest and implied (but sadly not displayed)
jailhouse lesbianism. It centers on a group of women who have been violated and
mistreated by the system, and who escape to wreak their revenge. But when
you're not busy trying to count all the hooters, you may notice that there's a
rather sharp edge to the script that includes some truly bizarre and disturbing
dream sequences, an extended scene of electro-shock therapy that's genuinely
unnerving and difficult to sit through, and Warren Miller giving a surprisingly
creepy performance as the prison doctor who likes to experiment on the women in
his care (including a scene of him taking polaroids of one unconscious and
naked young woman that is, tangentially, the most unsettling thing I've seen
since Ted Levine's portrayal of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs).
The result is an odd but compelling mish-mash of breast parade and hokey action
sequences, combined with dark and visceral imagery that lends caged heat more
street cred than it would normally deserve, and makes for one of the finer
"chicks behind bars" flicks you're likely to see.
Carnage and Carnality
-New prisoners forced to strip for "medical inspection" while creepy
doctor relishes in pulling on a thick latex glove
-More boobs in more shower scenes than I can keep track of
-Nude solitary confinement
-soaped-up and down and dirty catfight on shower floor
-grueling extended sequence of electro shock-therapy.
-Doctor drugs young woman, takes off her clothes, then fawns over her while
taking Polaroids and kissing her. GENUINELY DISTURBING!
-hokey shootouts of the "guy stands there shooting rifle as a blood squib
goes off in his shirt" variety
-Honorable Mention - Cute blonde Cheryl Smith gets the coveted "worst
acting/best nudity" award for her outstanding work in both categories here
DVD extras include a brief interview with Roger Corman, and best of all, the
previews for other T&A titles in the catalog that feature the ubiquitous
deep-voiced announcer guy spouting lines like "Their bodies were caged,
but nothing could shackle their desires" or "Pent up emotions
crescending in a violent climax".
God, movies like this make me
miss the Drive-In. If there isn't a boxed set of CAGED HEAT, WOMEN IN CAGES,
THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, THE BIG BIRD CAGE, HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, and CANDY STRIPE
NURSES by now, then tell me where to sign the petition.
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]
Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review
Monsters At Play (Bradley Harding) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Ian Visser) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Matt Mulcahey) review [3/5]
DVD Drive-In - dedicated to horror, sci-fi & cult film Christopher Dietrich
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
CRAZY
MAMA
USA (83 mi) 1975
Another slice of opportunism from the Corman stable, melding the kitsch
nostalgia of American Graffiti with the less sinister aspects of late-60s
gangster films, stealing the charm of Bonnie and Clyde but dispensing with the
violence. Three generations of women (Sothern, Leachman and Purl) travel across
America from California, picking up men and embarking on a crime spree, as they
head for their family home in Arkansas. Demme plays it all for laughs and
revels in the 50s clichés of rock 'n' roll and the romance of the road. Cheap
and cheerful.
Not so much a sequel to Corman's Bloody
Mama, more a good-natured parody of the Bonnie and Clyde family
gangster genre, scripted by Robert Thom.
Demme took on this riotous Corman production at very short notice, and played
up the laughs rather than the violence. Set in the '50s, the story centres on
Depression child Melba Stokes (Leachman) and her journey from West to East
coast along with mom (Sothern) and daughter (Purl), gathering together en route
a motley band united in their sufferance at the hands of the law. Demme brings
to the sly social commentary his usual deft choice of rock'n'roll standards,
and draws enthusiastic performances from his wacky cast.
User comments from imdb Author: Lee Eisenberg (eisenberg.lee@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA
Apparently, Roger Corman likes it when
"Happy Days" cast members hot rod across the country (he was involved
in "Grand Theft Auto", directed by and starring Ron Howard, and
co-starring Marion Ross). In "Crazy Mama", Cloris Leachman plays
Melba, a woman who runs a beauty parlor in Long Beach with her mother Sheba
(Ann Sothern) and daughter Cheryl (Linda Purl) in 1958. Their Arkansas farm was
repossessed by the banks in 1932. When slimy banker Mr. Albertson (Jim Backus)
tries to repossess their beauty parlor, they decide to return to Arkansas with
Cheryl's boyfriend Shawn (Don Most). So begins a crazy car chase across
America. In Las Vegas, Melba falsely marries a man (Stuart Whitman) to make it
look like she's married, and they also get greaser Snake (Bryan Englund,
Leachman's real-life son) to go along. In the process of everything, a lot of
cars get wrecked and some people get killed.
I will admit that this is a pretty silly movie, but it is so fun! I never would
have guessed that Ralph Malph and Thurston Howell III had ever co-starred in a
movie (by the way, Linda Purl also starred on "Happy Days"). And the
fact that they all co-starred with Frau Blucher just adds to the wacky factor.
Oh, and by the way, B-movie character actor Dick Miller plays a cop. Jonathan
Demme just always seems to have something good up his sleeve.
User comments from imdb Author: southpatcher from South Carolina
Cloris Leachman was spinning off from a
supporting role on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" to headlining her own
series "Phyllis" in 1975, the same year this goofy road movie was
released. Leachman stars as Melba Stokes, who runs a beauty parlor in Long
Beach, California with her mother Sheba (Ann Sothern) and her daughter Cheryl
(Linda Purl). When the shop is repossessed by banker Jim Backus aka Thurston
Howell III (a great little cameo) Leachman and ladies head back to Arkansas and
the family farm which was stolen away from them when Melba was a girl. Along
for the ride is Cheryl's boyfriend, surfer boy Donny Most aka Ralph Malph who
finds out he's going to be a daddy thanks to Cheryl. The ladies knock over a
filling station, which sets about their plan to rob their way back to Arkansas
earning the money to buy back the farm.
Stopping over in Las Vegas, Melba hooks up with Jim Bob Trotter (Stuart
Whitman). Cheryl falls for greasy biker Snake (Bryan Englund, Leachman's real
life son), and Sheba makes a friend in elderly Bertha (Merie Earle) who
believes that the secret to casino winning is to spout cliches before she pulls
the handle on the slot machine. Jim Bob and Melba decide to have a phony
wedding so the makeshift gang can rob the chapel, and then it's back on the
road!
The ladies continue their crime spree, knocking over a grocery store and a
bank. Meanwhile, back in Texas, Jim Bob's depressing wife (Sally Kirkland) is
startled to hear that he's been kidnapped. Another plan by Melba and company to
raise money, this one turns out in a bad way for the group. When Melba and her
gang finally return to Jerusalem, Arkansas they are disappointed to see that
the farmland of their youth has been turned into a country club. Needless to
say, there is a hijacked wedding and more car chases.
This is a funny movie (with a GREAT final scene) that is given spirited
performances by Leachman, Sothern, and especially Merie Earle as the nursing
home escapee who finds a few thrills in her last days. There is some surprising
violence, an eclectic 50's soundtrack, and control over the whole crazy-quilt
through the direction of Jonathan Demme. The most touching scene in the film is
when the weary travellers stand under a tree and remember their fallen friends
by "shouting them into Heaven".
Hopefully, this one will be released on DVD in my lifetime.
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Drive-In George R. Reis
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
FIGHTING
MAD
USA (90 mi) 1976
A terrific little revenge flick from Demme, made while he was still
churning out quickies for Roger Corman. A number of Arkansas farmers have been
driven off their land by a ruthless developer and are not happy. Fonda is the
peaceable man who takes up his bow and arrow after his brother is killed, to
become a righteous killing machine. The story is a little slight, but Demme
develops it well, making it far more interesting than the premise suggests.
Fonda, too, brings an interesting edge to his character, an anxious liberal who
has had enough.
Engaging piece of exploitation that
manages to both paint in broad colours and pay attention to detail at the same
time. It's rednecks vs yellow hardhats as Arkansas farmers find themselves
bulldozed off their property by the unscrupulous mining corporation. Into this
conflict comes Fonda, who has got scruples, and a bow-and-arrow. Once his
brother and sister-in-law and father have been murdered, he wreaks his own
vengeance, blowing up, and maiming, and adjusting his liberal spectacles after
every killing. Where writer/director Demme scores is in extracting maximum
story value from his cast andlocation, so that every scrap of sex and violence
is highly realistic, and advances the plot. Altogether, another winner from the
House of Corman.
eFilmCritic.com review [3/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
1976:
Bespectacled Peter Fonda is still getting mileage out of his turn in "Easy
Rider," plowing through a series of chiefly fair-to-middling action
flicks. Young director Jonathan Demme, a decade-and-a-half away from
"Silence of the Lambs" and Oscar glory, is still making produce for
Roger Corman's sausage factory. Join Subject A with Subject B, and you get
"Fighting Mad," a minor footnote in '70s cinema, basically nothing
special but certainly not bad as far as these ass-kicking epics go.
Fighting Mad plunges the viewer straightway into Billy
Jack territory, as our hero Fonda goes after an evil (of course) land
developer in a sleepy rural town. It's another foray into the
little-man-battling-for-social-justice genre, exactly the sort of flick that
went over like gangbusters on the drive-in circuit in the American South back
in the '70s. But it's better made than most.
Fonda, true to the formula, is called upon to kick some ass--often two or three
at a time, natch--roughly every five minutes or so. It's a solid enough
performance, but if you ask me Fonda's not entirely suited to the action-hero
role. It's not just those goofy glasses. He's such a laid-back presence on the
screen that he seems to have trouble summoning self-righteous rage--whenever he
flies into action, grinding his teeth and staring bullets at his opponent, he
looks less like an avenger than some guy throwing a hissy fit.
On the directorial front, Mr. Demme proves to be up to the task, filling the
screen with plenty of montages featuring various objects getting blown up. (And
I'd swear they were reusing the same shots over and over, a cost-cutting
gimmick not unknown to the Roger Corman school of production.) Demme's script
does a pretty good job of making the characters three-dimensional. Fonda's
rocky relationships with his father (the late John Doucette) and his girlfriend
(goose-necked Lynn Lowry) are more carefully developed than is customary in
B-movies. Even at this stage in his career, Demme seems to have had a sure hand
at the helm, and the film's climax even seems to foreshadow the
sneaking-around-the-darkened-basement finale in Silence of the Lambs.
It's ultimately an ode of sorts to pure beer-guzzling machismo and
working-class honor. When he's not beating the hell out of people, our hero
bonds with his son, makes out like a racehorse with his girlfriend, stands up
for the oppressed, does what's right for his family, and finally rides off into
the sunset, wrongs righted and mission accomplished.
You've seen this movie before--and if you're a B-movie nut like me, you've seen it many times before--but it's a competently put-together little flick, worth watching on a rainy Sunday.
User comments from imdb Author: Woodyanders (Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last New Jersey Drive-In on the Left
User comments from imdb Author: Jonathon Dabell (barnabyrudge@hotmail.com) from Wakefield, England
DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [2/5]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
HANDLE
WITH CARE
aka: Citizen’s Band
USA
A graduate of the hard school of movie publicity and Roger Corman
productions, Demme knew how to work on a shoestring, and this lively
unpretentious film makes the best of its modest idea. Set in the Southwest, it
doesn't have much of a narrative but strings engaging people together via the
once popular craze of CB radio. Le Mat plays a kind of missionary scout leader
who protects the airwaves. The neatest idea is having two women with different
personalities who both turn out to be married to the same trucker. Good
performances all round stop the humour flagging and the characters falling into
stereotypes.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
The film's original title, Citizen's Band, evokes
its origins as an exploitation film designed to cash in on the short-lived CB
craze, but, as Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard) directed and Paul
Brickman (Risky Business) wrote it, the picture was too good for its own
good: audiences weren't expecting humor of this degree of piquancy and charm,
and it was a failure. The action takes place in a tiny southwestern town, where
the residents--among them Paul Le Mat, Candy Clark, Roberts Blossom, and Marcia
Rodd--use their adopted radio personas as a means of escape from the dingy
identities life has imposed on them. Demme is satirical but never cruel, and
sweet but never syrupy: this film marked the emergence of one of the most
appealing directorial personalities of the New Hollywood. With Charles Napier,
Alix Elias, Bruce McGill, and Richard Bright (1977).
User comments from imdb Author: Woodyanders
(Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last New Jersey Drive-In on the Left
One of Jonathan Demme's earliest and
best movies, this quirky, seriocomic, thoroughly amiable and disarming
slice-of-Americana gem bombed at the box office, but was widely hailed by
critics and has gone on to garner a much-deserved loyal fan following.
Centering on a small rural community populated by assorted flaky eccentrics who
gab over the CB radio under outrageous aliases and similar wildly exaggerated
personalities to boot (nowadays these folks can be found on countless internet
chat-rooms and web boards, so the premise really hasn't dated at all; it's just
taken on a different manifestation in the new millennium), this honey stars the
outstanding Paul LeMat as Spider, a fervent, obsessive, self-appointed
vigilante who wants to get rid of all the nutcases chattering away on emergency
channels. Among the targets of Spider's wrath are Ed Begley, Jr. as a zealous
priest who sermonizes over the air; the delightfully daffy Alix Elias as sweet
hooker on wheels Hot Coffee, who advertises herself over the airwaves and turns
tricks in the back of her camper (!); a lewd adolescent male operating under
the self-explanatory moniker the Hustler who tells dirty tales of his alleged
spicy sexual misadventures over the radio, and a strident Aryan Nazi scumbag.
Spider becomes so absorbed with his single-minded mission that loving, but
frustrated girlfriend Candy Clark starts cheating on him with his hard-nosed
competitive high school basketball coach brother Bruce McGill and even steams
up the airwaves speaking raunchy talk over the CB radio to some dweeb who calls
himself the Warlock!
The always great Charles Napier contributes a terrific performance as amicable,
big-hearted bigamist trucker Chrome Angel; Ann Wedgeworth and Marcia Rodd are
likewise excellent as Chuck's flighty, blowzy wife and practical, more
down-to-earth better half, respectively. Roberts Blossom (the nutty middle-aged
Ed Geinesque lunatic in the supremely chilling psycho knockout
"Deranged") turns in a hilariously crotchety characterization as
Spider's ornery, batty old coot father who only comes to life while talking
over the CB radio. Chiefly addressing the lack of direct, intimate
communication between people in contemporary society and the basic need to
transcend the drab mundaneness of ordinary life through the assuming of another,
altogether more colorful, outlandish and exciting made-up alternate identity
(substantial themes which are still quite timely and pertinent even today),
Paul Brickman's bright, astute, truly whimsical and episodically structured
script offers a wealth of precisely observed little moments and a generous
helping of warmth and compassion which accumulate into a totally unique and
engaging whole. Demme's peppy, sparkling, sympathetic direction displays an
equally heartfelt and heartwarming affection for everyday oddball middle-class
Americana, pacing and shaping the deliciously dense and winding narrative with
utmost ease and consummate expertise. Jordan Cronenweth's flashy'n'splashy,
richly saturated cinematography and Bill Conti's folksy, gently lulling and
harmonic score further add to the frothy, gleefully off-center merriment. A
fabulously idiosyncratic treat.
All Movie Guide [Donald Guarisco]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
LAST
EMBRACE
USA (102 mi) 1979
An ace, offbeat thriller from Demme - compelling early proof of just
how innovative and exciting a director he is. Scheider heads the cast as a
government agent who, back on the job after recovering from the murder of his
wife, is plunged into a maelstrom of paranoia when he begins to suspect that
the governments want him dead, too. When a mysterious young woman (Margolin)
shows up in his apartment, the plot thickens. Demme infuses the action with
twists that could have come straight from Hitchcock and so gives Scheider his
best-ever role.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A delicious excursion into the world
of Hitchcockian suspense. A taut, complex conspiracy thriller, it sees Scheider
- a former 'agent' for an assassination firm - threatened by mental breakdown
(guilt over his wife's death), by his former employers who find him dangerously
superfluous, and by an obscure Hebraic society bent on revenge for some unknown
reason. Scheider is admirably haunted as the justifiably paranoid gunman (who
gets involved with a strange, duplicitous femme fatale), the whole thing is
beautifully shot by Tak Fujimoto,
and Miklós Rosza's stunning score augments Demme's careful control of
atmosphere and set pieces. But what finally impresses is the way that the
various references to Hitchcock and other classic thrillers are never used as
an end in themselves; rather, they simply add resonance and depth to a film
that works perfectly well in its own right.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Jonathan Demme doing Brian De Palma doing Alfred Hitchcock.
Emerging from a sanitarium after a breakdown, intelligence agent Roy Scheider
has to deal not only with the guilt of having lost his wife in a cantina
shootout, but also with death threats sent in Aramaic. Is his former secret
government agency (headed by Christopher Walken) trying to rub him out? Or is
tag-along gal Janet Margolin something more than Love Interest? Without giving
too much away, it involves a string of interconnected murders,
cross-generational revenge, and a crabby old Jewish sidekick (Sam Levene,
natch). Despite the vaguely corporate paranoia of the early New York scenes,
the picture's jaunty tone is far from the somberness of the decade's
Watergate-soaked thrillers (The Parallax View, Night Moves) -- from the
start, Demme sends his camera sailing into Hitch-quoting territory, with
prowling shots marinated to Miklós Rózsa's deliriously obtrusive score. As transparent
a genre exercise as Obsession, though lacking De Palma's own obsessive
grappling with the tropes of suspense cinema, the film has the feel of an
artist bending his own temperament to salute another whose tensions he does not
share (not as disastrously as Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, though
just as forcedly an act of worship). Accordingly, the movie breathes when Demme
is Demme (in his handling of actors, his cherishment of human quirkiness) and
dies when Demme strains for the Master (the bell tower shootout and the Niagara
Falls climax, both botched by technique applied willfully, unfeelingly).
Adapted from Murray Teigh Bloom's novel The 13th Man. With John Glover,
Charles Napier, and David Margulies.
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
MELVIN
AND HOWARD
USA
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A beautifully
observed, beautifully performed offbeat comedy. The story is slim: milkman
Melvin Dummar (Le Mat) picks up a grouchy old hobo in the Nevada desert one
night, lends him a quarter while disbelieving his claim to be Howard Hughes,
and then returns to a mundane life of work, divorce, remarriage, and failed
songwriting attempts, until eight years later he appears to have been left a
fortune by the dead tycoon. But this remarkable (factually based) plot is
merely a hook on which to hang an unglamorous account of American working class
life. Melvin and his wives' experiences are double-edged examples of the allure
and failure of the American dream of success, fame and wealth, although Bo
Goldman's script and Demme's understated direction never become overly serious
or 'significant'. And the film's delightful humour derives - unusually in these
days of brainless Animal House spoofs and one-liners - from the
characters, who are affectionately observed but never patronised.
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
This is the film that landed director Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense,
Something Wild, Silence Of The Lambs) into the top grade in
Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) picks up a hobo (Jason Robards) who has crashed
his bike in the
The opening credit sequence, an endless highway unspooling in a car's headlights, hints at a road movie, and with the constant shifts from Nevada to Califomia to Utah and the picking up and dropping of several characters on the way it certainly feels like it. But this is a film about money and relationships not the American dream.
The characters are observed in an affectionate, good humoured, and most important
unpretentious way, emphasised by Tak Fujimoto's (
Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Pam Grady
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Apollo Movie Guide [Elspeth Haughton]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
BBC Films (George Perry) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
WHO
AM I THIS TIME?
aka: American Playhouse Theater TV
USA
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Made for television, Demme's adaptation of a
Kurt Vonnegut story is totally delightful. Sarandon is the new girl in town who
joins an amateur dramatics group and falls for local star Walken. The only
trouble is that, offstage, he is terminally shy. Finally, of course, she gets
her man, but not before Demme has fleshed out the slim plot with vivid,
likeable characters (both leads are superb), and a great deal of charm and wit.
One of his very best.
Susan
Sarandon is so enchanting that the disc is worth obtaining for her performance
alone. The hour-long romantic comedy is about a woman who joins an amateur
theatrical group and becomes enamored with her leading man (played by
Christopher Walken), although his personality offstage is a complete cipher.
The picture is grainy and unattractive and the sound is uninteresting.
Sarandon, however, embodies her part so accurately and so seductively that
while you are watching the show, nothing else matters. She makes you root for
her character and then passes along the happiness when her character succeeds.
Written by Kurt Vonnegut and directed by Jonathan Demme, Who Am I This Time?
is a blissful hour of entertainment which puts many longer programs to
shame. It was filmed in
Reel.com dvd review [3/4] James Plath
Seven years after she appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
a young Susan
Sarandon played a lonely telephone worker whose life takes an interesting
turn when she gets involved in community theater.
Airing in February 1982 as part of the PBS American Playhouse series, which presented original films based on literary works, Who Am I This Time? paired Sarandon with Christopher Walken in a role totally different from his usual creepy, menacing parts. This time he's a painfully shy hardware store employee who only comes out of his shell when he's onstage. Whether he plays Cyrano de Bergerac, Abraham Lincoln, or Captain Queeg, Harry Nash gives such a powerful performance that he makes grown men weep and young women swoon. But none of that translates into real life. The minute the curtain falls, Harry retreats, even before the applause has died out. No matter how many of the town's beauties assail him on the street the day afterwards, he acts as if the performance never happened.
All that changes when director George Johnson (Robert Ridgely) persuades Helene Shaw (Sarandon), an itinerant telephone worker new in town, to try out for the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club's production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Nash shows up already inhabited by the spirit of Stanley Kowalski, and his reading with Miss Shaw is enough to make her feel things she hasn't felt before in her lonely life of constant travel. That sets the stage for a sophisticated and understated romantic comedy that's as charming as it is intelligent. Both Walken and Sarandon deliver memorable performances. Walken as Brando as Kowalski is by turns hilarious and poignant, while Sarandon is able to shift effortlessly between the role of Stella and a suddenly smitten woman who, for the first time, thinks she's found love.
Based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Who Am I This Time? is both a tribute to community theater and an endearing portrait of small-town life. But be warned: there's nothing warm and fuzzy about the production values. Well, fuzzy maybe. In an age of hi-res this and HD-that, the picture quality is a throwback to VHS tapes. It's extremely grainy and soft-focused, which is too bad, because the production itself is so wonderful. But you can tell it was low-budget to begin with. It appears to have been shot with a single camera using multiple takes, with mostly two-shots to frame two characters at a time and occasional pull-back shots or awkward close-ups. The writing and performances merit 3.5 stars, but the camera work and picture quality aren't nearly as strong.
Those weak production values haunt you again when you try to access the bonus features. After accessing text-only bios for the author, director, and screenwriter, when you click on the bio for either Sarandon or Walken you get a clip of the actor and music that's at least eight notches louder than the production itself. It's enough to rattle the windows. That's all there is in the way of extras—just five brief bios and a "study guide" that's better suited for classrooms than TV rooms.
American Playhouse turned out some interesting productions in the 1980s, with a number of them available now on DVD for the first time. Along with Who Am I This Time?, which is one of the best, Under the Biltmore Clock (1985) is also excellent. Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, it stars Sean Young and Barnard Hughes. And as with Who Am I This Time?, it was filmed in Chicago, but the production lengths vary considerably. Under the Biltmore Clock runs 79 minutes, while Who Am I This Time? clocks in at only 56 minutes. It's a tribute to director Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs) that those 56 minutes feel rich and full.
SWING
SHIFT
USA (100 mi) 1984
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A gentle romantic comedy set during
World War II, which sees housewife Hawn finding her feet when hubby Ed Harris
goes off to fight. First, against his wishes, she takes a job in an aircraft
factory, then - after a lengthy courtship - she takes a lover in the form of
hunky, helpful, hot trumpeter Kurt Russell.
Hawn, atypically cast and supported by all-round excellent performances, proves
that she can act. But still this bitter-sweet concoction is very much Demme's:
not only in the warming celebration of friendship and community values (the
unsentimental generosity extended towards the characters positively glows), but
also in the assured handling of period, place, music and mood.
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Oh what a tangled web we weave...when we run around fucking
everybody. With America in the thralls of family values and good ol'
conservatism what could Goldie Hawn do but make a film about cheating on a
husband off fighting the Japs? It's another angle to the trevails of war,
things can never be dull enough on the home front for the boys on the front
lines. And they aren't always. They're both deserving and accomplished actors,
and have sustained a lasting relationship in the most difficult place on earth,
but the only weakness in Goldie and Kurt Russell's performances is the lack of
passion between them. You'd like to think something like "Attention from
Kurt Russell and stuck married to Ed Harris, what's a poor girl to do?",
but instead it's more like "Why are any of these people acting like
this?" This would have to be about the last thing that you'd expect from
Jonathan Demme (who directed Caged Heat). Boredom and loneliness have to be
part of the equation but that's not the way that the script is working it.
Cinematic realism, offering important and specific insights but without the
feel of reality.
Turner
Classic Movies dvd review Jay S. Steinberg
At the time of its green-lighting in the early '80s, the
Goldie Hawn vehicle Swing Shift
(1984) bore plenty of promise. A young director on the rise - Jonathan Demme -
was chosen to helm a nostalgic exploration of the influx of women into
America's manual labor force while their men were in the trenches of World War
II. The end product, which has recently made its bow on DVD courtesy of Warner
Home Entertainment, went through a mill of backlot intrigue, with the final cut
taken from Demme's hands. After twenty years, the film still plays pretty much
the same; a middling entertainment, with some nice performances from its
principal players, that could have been much more.
The film's scenario, credited to the fictitious "Rob Morton," was
originally crafted by Nancy Dowd, and tweaked in succession by Bo Goldman, Rob
Nyswaner, and Robert Towne. Hawn is cast as Kay Walsh, a pliant young Santa
Monica housewife with little else in her life but tending to her husband Jack
(Ed Harris). After the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, Jack enlists in the Navy,
and Kay is soon bored waiting at home for his pay envelope. Inspired by a movie
newsreel, she signs up for assembly work at a local aircraft plant, joining a
long line of similarly situated servicemen's wives.
In spite of the patronizing attitude of the company's remaining male populace,
Kay and her peers pick up the skills necessary to perform. Kay also handles the
daunting task of bonding with her brassy co-worker and neighbor Hazel Zanussi
(Christine Lahti), a struggling nightclub singer who Jack had always snubbed.
Her work ethic and other attributes don't go unnoticed by shift leadman Lucky
Lockhart (Kurt Russell), a 4F draft reject who moonlights as a jazz trumpeter.
Kay struggles with her fidelity to Jack in the face of Lucky's attentions, and
it's a war that she ultimately loses. The war years breeze by, with Hazel
pretending to be Lucky's girlfriend for the neighbors' benefit, but the
consequences are felt when Jack gets an unannounced leave home.
Dissatisfied with Demme's original edit, producer/star Hawn oversaw the final
cut. Depending upon whom you ask, she did so in an effort either to make Kay
seem more sympathetic, or to keep Lahti (who got an Oscar® nomination) from
walking away with the picture. In the form in which it surfaced for the public,
Swing Shift
isn't without its virtues. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto and the production
design team gave the enterprise a crisp period look, and the central players,
particularly Lahti, offer creditable performances. But even though the film had
been reworked, the viewer isn't given a lot of reason to care for the
characters. Kay's co-workers, who include a young Holly Hunter, don't become
anything more than stock figures. The script tries to establish Kay as the
textbook Hawn heroine who gets the audience on her side as she gains
empowerment, but the character's betrayal of a husband whose biggest sin
against her was paternalism works at cross-purposes.
The reviews and returns from Swing
Shift's theatrical run were nothing special, but all involved
rebounded well; Hawn and Russell still maintain the housekeeping that started
on the set, an eternity by Hollywood's standard. Demme, of course, has gone on
to better things, and has put the experience well in the rearview mirror. In
the late '80s, a bootleg video of Demme's cut had reportedly been in
circulation; now that would have been an extra for DVD release.
Unsurprisingly, insofar as supplemental materials go, the DVD of Swing Shift only offers the
theatrical trailer. (If you don't like it, you get the principals in one
room for the full-length commentary.) Warners provided a sharp mastering job in
the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.
filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto) review [4/5]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Mark Van Hook) dvd review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
STOP
MAKING SENSE
USA
STOP MAKING SENSE
created an energetic synthesis of music and imagery, filled with the
off-kilter, poetic interpretations of Talking Heads who seemed a little out of
the mainstream, capturing what felt like a spontaneous artistic vision that
still stands alone as a concert film.
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A]
Ecstatic. Jonathan
Demme must have been closest to his element when he made this concert film
showing the Talking Heads at the height of their powers. Demme cements the
Heads' status as punk-era demigods by reproducing a personal take on their
performance and simultaneously remaining absolutely unobtrusive -- a trick many
lesser filmmakers would do well to learn. Demme also directed one of my
favorite music videos (New Order's "The Perfect Kiss") and captured a
Spalding Gray monologue (the riveting and hilarious Swimming to Cambodia)
before he started making Oscar-winners (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia).
He'll never go hungry, but he also may never direct another perfect picture.
A documentary record of Talking Heads in
concert, using material from three shows in
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
In nearly every shot, STOP MAKING SENSE makes the case that Demme
may be the greatest director of musical performance in American cinema. It
isn't difficult to convey the joy of making music, but Demme's attention to the
interplay between musicians (and, in some inspired moments, between the
musicians and their crew) conveys the imagination, hard work, and camaraderie
behind any good song. And, needless to say, the songs here are very, very good.
By this point (the performances are culled from three concerts from 1983),
Talking Heads were the headiest American band to achieve their degree of
success, and they made the most of it, doubling their line-up to include
back-up singers and a few instrumentalists from the golden years of George
Clinton's Funkadelic. It's never openly acknowledged that the five new members
are black and the Heads are white; the sheer creativity of the music, which
fuses everything from soul to traditional African rhythms to then-advanced
electronic effects, is fully utopian in its spirit.
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
FROM the opening frames of Jonathan Demme's ''Stop Making
Sense,'' which opens today at the
It's worth noting some of the things that are not to be found here: screaming crowds, gaudy skintight costumes, candid scenes of the band members backstage. Talking Heads' performance style is unlike anything that has ever been captured by a standard concert film, and Mr. Demme is very well attuned to the group's eccentricities. Even the first image - the shadow of a guitar neck looming against a white wall - wittily suggests the menacing and mechanistic qualities of Talking Heads' music, as well as the clean, bold visual imagery they manage to make so surprising. The sight of this sexually and racially integrated nine- member ensemble, in white sneakers and neutral-colored playsuits, jogging in place as if practicing aerobics becomes at least as exciting as any standard rock spectacle.
The focus of both the film and the performance is David Byrne, the lead singer, who is one of the group's four core members. With his hollow-eyed stare and bizarre gestures, Mr. Byrne is surely one of the oddest rock singers; he's also one of the most galvanizing. Mr. Byrne, or at least the sight of his sneakers, is initially seen alone, wandering onto the stage to perform the stark and rousing version of ''Psycho Killer'' that begins the show. (The other band members enter one at a time, a new one with each song, as a technical crew wanders conspicuously in their midst. Only in its latter half does the film build into an elaborately staged production, with Mr. Byrne in his Big Suit costume and words like ''time clock'' and ''dustballs'' flashing on a colored backdrop.)
Mr. Byrne's studied casualness is matched by a fierce intensity. Even his most peculiar gestures - darting his head and tongue like a lizard, or dancing with stiff, jerky motions and a perfectly immobile torso - have an originality and a mesmerizing strangeness.
And Mr. Byrne's vocals maintain their lucid, unsettling energy
throughout the performance (the film actually draws upon four 1983 concerts at
the Pantages theater in
Mr. Demme, in addition to avoiding any visual monotony, has gracefully tailored the film to suit the band's stage show. Using long, slow camera motions (the handsome cinematography is by Jordan Cronenweth), he captures the group members at close range without losing the overall visual effects they achieve on stage. The show's conception, which is both subtle and sophisticated, is credited to Mr. Byrne.
''Stop Making Sense'' owes very little to the rock film-making formulas of the past. It may well help inspire those of the future.
DavidByrne.com - Stop Making Sense press/reviews - Pauline Kael ... Pauline Kael from David Byrne’s website, originally from the New Yorker, November 26,1984
"Stop Making Sense" makes wonderful sense. A concert
film by the
Clean-shaven, with short hair, slicked back, and wearing white sneakers and a light-colored suit, with his shirt buttoned right up to his Adam's apple, the gaunt David Byrne, who founded the group, comes on alone (with his acoustic guitar and a tape player) for the first number "Psycho Killer." He's so white he's almost mock-white, and so are his jerky, long-necked, mechanical-man movements. He seems fleshless, bloodless; he might almost be a black man's parody of how a clean-cut white man moves. But Byrne himself is the parodist, and he commands the stage by his hollow-eyed, frosty verve. Byrne's voice isn't a singer's voice—it doesn't have the resonance. It's more like a shouter's or chanter's voice, with an emotional carryover—a faintly metallic wail—and you might expect it to get strained or tired. But his voice never seems to crack or weaken, and he's always in motion—jiggling, aerobic walking, jumping, dancing. (They shade into each other.) Byrne has a withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality, and though there's something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun. He gives the group its modernism—the undertone of repressed hysteria, which he somehow blends with freshness and adventurousness and a driving beat. When he comes on wearing a boxlike "big suit"—his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys' large suit of felt that hangs of a wall—it's a perfect psychological fit. He's a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, It isn't as if he were moving the suit—the suit seems to move him. And this big box that encloses him is only an exaggeration of his regular nerd-dandy clothes. Byrne may not be human (he rejects ordinary, show-biz forms of ingratiation, such as smiling), but he's a stupefying performer—he even bobs his head like a chicken, in time to the music.
After Byrne's solo, the eight other members of the group come on gradually, by ones and twos, in the order in which they originally joined up with him, so you see the band take form. Tina Weymouth, the bass player, who also sings, comes on next; a sunny, radiant woman with long blond hair, she's smiling and relaxed. (She couldn't be more unlike Byrne—he's bones, she's flesh.) Watching her, you feel she's doing what she wants to do. And that's how it is with the drummer, Chris Frantz, and the keyboard man, Jerry Harrison, and the others in the sexually integrated, racially integrated group. The seven musicians and the two women who provide vocal backing interact without making a point of it; you feel that they like working together, and that if they're sweating they're sweating for themselves, for their pleasure in keeping the music going. They're not suffering for us; they're sharing their good times with us. This band is different from the rock groups that go in for charismatic lighting and sign of love and/or sex. David Byrne dances in the guise of a revved-up catatonic; he's an idea man, an aesthetician who works in the modern mode of scary, catatonic irony. That's what he emanates. Yet when the other Talking Heads are up there with him for a song such as "Once in a Lifetime" the tension and interplay are warm—they're even beatific. The group encompasses Byrne's art-rock solitariness and the dissociation effects in the spare—somewhat Godardian—staging. The others don't come together with Byrne, but the music comes together. And there's more vitality and fervor and rhythmic dance Ion the stage than there is with the groups that whip themselves through the motions of sexual arousal and frenzy, and try to set the theatre ablaze.
It's slightly puzzling that this band's music absorbs many influences—notably African tribal music and gospel (the climactic number here is "Take Me to the River")—yet doesn't have much variety. The insistent beat (it stays much the same) works to the movie's advantage, though. The pulse of the music gives the film a thrilling kind of unity. And Demme, by barely indicating the visual presence of the audience until the end, intensifies the closed-off, hermetic feeling. His decision to keep the camerawork steady (the cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, used six mounted cameras, one hand-held, and one Panaglide) and to avoid hotsy-totsy, MTV-style editing concentrates our attention to the performers and the music. The only letdown in energy, I thought, was in Byrne's one bow to variety—when he left the stage for the Tom Tom Club number. It's a likable number on its own, but it breaks the musical flow. (It's also the only number with a cluttered background, and it has a few seconds of banal strobe visuals.) One image in the film also stuck in my craw: a shot of a little boy in the audience holding up his white stuffed unicorn. It's just too wholesome a comment on the music. But these are piddling flaws. The movie was made on money ($800,000) that was raised by the group itself, and its form was set by aesthetic considerations rather than a series of marketing decisions. (This is not merely a rock concert without show-biz glitz; it's also a rock-concert movie that doesn't try for visual glitz.) Many different choices could have been made in the shooting and the editing, and maybe someone of them might have given the individual numbers (there are sixteen) more modulation, but in its own terms "Stop Making Sense" is close to perfection.
The sound engineering is superb. The sound seems better than live sound; it is better—it has been filtered and mixed and fussed over, so that it achieves ideal clarity. (The soundtrack-album versions of some of the songs that are also on the Heads' 1983 album "Speaking in Tongues" are more up, more joyous.) The nine Talking Heads give the best kind of controlled performance—the kind in which everyone is loose. At the end of the concert, they're still in control, but they're carried away. And Jonathan Demme appears to have worked in exactly the same spirit.
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] D.R. Jones
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]
Philadelphia City Paper (A.D. Amorosi) review
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
DVD Verdict (Dean Roddey) dvd review
DVD Movie Guide [Colin Jacobson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
DVD Talk (Chris Hughes) dvd review [2/5]
Boxoffice Magazine review Alan Karp
All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
Stop Making Sense - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stop Making Sense (album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LA Weekly interview with Jonathan Demme on the making of Stop Making Sense Michael Dare from The LA Weekly, November 9, 1984
david byrne stop making sense funny dance on YouTube (54 seconds)
Stop Making Sense Original Trailer (1:43)
Talking Heads Video Montage (3:11)
Found a job Talking Heads (3:17)
Talking Heads - And She Was (3:29)
Talking Heads - Heaven (3:40)
Slippery People Talking Heads (3:45)
Talking Heads "Burning Down the House" (4:01)
Talking Heads - Road To Nowhere (4:03)
David Byrne Interview (4:30)
Talking Heads Making Flippy Floppy (4:51)
Talking Heads - Girlfriend Is Better (from Stop Making Sense (5:11)
YouTube - Talking Heads-Psycho Killer- Live! (5:16)
Talking Heads-Once in a Lifetime-live! (5:25)
Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime (5:42)
"Psycho Killer" - Talking Heads (from Stop Making Sense) (5:50)
Talking Heads - Life During Wartime (5:57)
Talking Heads - What A Day That Was (6:35)
Talking Heads - Take Me To The River (8:02)
SOMETHING WILD
USA (113 mi) 1986
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
When squeaky-clean
Big Apple businessman Charlie Driggs (Daniels) walks away from a diner without
paying the bill, his brief excursion into crime attracts the attention of
Louise Brooks lookalike Lulu (
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Ben Stephens) review
Five years before bringing us the haunting, unsettling The Silence Of The Lambs, director Jonathan Demme made this slightly less sombre (yet equally unsettling in its own way) tale of love, abduction, S&M and liberation from the constraints of yuppiedom.
He also pulled off the rare feat of making the only good Melanie Griffith movie ever made. The usually-annoying, whispery-voiced Ms. Griffith brings an energy and charm to this film that she has never really recaptured. She plays Lulu, a black bob-sporting wild child who catches uptight yuppie Charlie Driggs (the ever-underrated Jeff Daniels) walking out of a diner without paying his bill. Under the pretence of driving him back to work, she then kidnaps him, drives him out to a motel and bonks him senseless.
Daniels plays the anal accountant letting his hair down with glee and gusto, after a little initial shock, and his transformation is a joy to watch. As the unlikely pair embark on a prolonged joyride that comes to an abrupt end when they arrive at her high-school reunion and run into her violent psycho boyfriend (played with outward charm and steely menace by the scary-as-hell Ray Liotta). The partially reformed Charlie must now decide where his priorities lie, whether he is committed to his new lifestyle or whether it was nothing but a fun little jaunt.
Never in danger of palling due to a witty and incisive script, colourful, sun-drenched visual style, quirky soundtrack (Talking Heads, John Cale, Laurie Anderson) and, above all, likable characters we actually care about, this bright, breezy slice of the `80s is guaranteed to put a spring in your step.
Movieline Magazine review Jonathan Bernstein
In Melanie Griffith's finest film performance, she's a baby-voiced,
bubble-headed, pneumatically cantilevered sex cyborg constructed solely for the
purpose of pleasure. Accompanying her infantile enunciation are a toddler's
irresponsibility, emotional hairpin curves and self-obsession. Her conflicting
components both infuriate and stimulate. She stinks of the stuff that drives
men mad. Of course, until someone actually takes the plunge and makes The
Melanie Griffith Story, her greatest role is still imaginary.
Offscreen, Griffith apparently has a deadly allure. In Truth or Dare,
Madonna aimed herself at Antonio Banderas like an ICBM, but he deflected her
advances with a smile, a shrug and a glance at his wife. A whiff of Griffith
and Mrs. Banderas was dust in the wind. On-screen, when attempting to portray
anything other than a Big Sex Toy, Griffith is mobile milk. But on one
memorable occasion that was instrumental in making her a viable star, her
private appetites collided with her public persona. The film was Jonathan
Demme's 1986 Something Wild.
This pinnacle of the yuppie-in-peril cycle kicks off with newly promoted
brokerage veep Jeff Daniels wrangling with the devious notion of skipping the
check in a Manhattan diner. Evaluating his dilemma are a pair of eyes peering
out from beneath a severe Louise Brooks bob. The owner of the eyes is
Griffith's black-clad spider woman who answers to the name Lulu. The moment
Daniels summons up the nerve necessary to scuttle from the establishment, Lulu
knows she's found her prey.
Within seconds, she's intimidated him into playing hooky from Wall Street,
guzzling Seagram's 7 Crown in a speeding car and making a fast getaway from the
scene of another skipped check. All the while, Griffith deploys her bitch-baby
sexuality to devastating effect, simultaneously mocking and tempting Daniels
til he can't make a move without stumbling over either his tongue or his
erection. She applies relief to both areas in a motel room handcuff scene that
became the boilerplate for a million similar but inferior straight-to-cable
sizzlers.
Griffith takes Daniels home to Pennsylvania, and by the time she brings him to
her high school reunion, the Louise Brooks bob and spider woman getup are gone,
replaced by blonde curls and a summer dress. Lulu has turned back into Audrey
Hankel. Griffith is remarkable as a woman attempting to work her way back from
the edge and trying to take refuge in a small-town idyll that probably never
existed in the first place. The moment Ray Liotta enters the story as Audrey's
psycho ex-husband, Griffith's character stops driving the story and the focus
is on the previously-submerged duality of Daniels. We're cheated out of knowing
how Audrey got to be Lulu and why she wants to go home again.
To say Griffith never recaptured the form she showed in Something Wild
is akin to making the observation that Ringo Starr's solo career didn't quite
scale the heights of his previous employment. But there's always hope. After
all, Jeff Daniels didn't find another partner to taunt him, tempt him, enrage
and arouse him enough to unleash his wild side til Dumb and Dumber.
PopMatters David Sanjek
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review
Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Brad Laidman: Elvis Needs Boats review
Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
In filming Spalding
Gray's mesmerising monologue 'about' his experiences acting in Roland Joffé's The
Killing Fields, Demme simply shoots the raconteur seated behind a table and
lets him rant. Equipped only with a glass of water, two maps, and a
pointing-stick, Gray takes us on a meandering magical mystery tour that
encompasses poetry, humour, political education and the confessional. Linking
it all is a lucid personal history of
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
When Spalding Gray disappeared a few years back, and was
later discovered to have committed suicide, a lot of us were shocked without
actually being surprised. Gray was a complicated man, wracked with neuroses
that informed his famous monologues as much as they likely made his existence a
burden. "Swimming to Cambodia," smoothly directed by Jonathan Demme,
was the film that broke Gray into the near-mainstream after years of being
known mainly to Off-Broadway audiences.
Gray's swooping, neurotic delivery carries us through his
story of how he came to be cast in a small role in 1984's The Killing Fields
(we see clips of his scenes in the film), his experiences on location (mostly
downtime filled with sex shows and "Thai stick"), and his education
about the Cambodian suffering under the Khmer Rouge.
Some critics, such as Pauline Kael, questioned Gray's motives in dealing with
real atrocities in the midst of generally whimsical material. "It's a
superlatively skillful piece of filmmaking," wrote Kael (an admirer of
Demme's work), "but at its center is a man who doesn't know that heating
up his piddling stage act by an account of the Cambodian misery is about the
most squalid thing anyone could do." I can understand the point — what if
a monologuist had been an extra in Schindler's List and devoted the middle
section of his otherwise comedic performance to describing the conditions at
Auschwitz? — but I don't necessarily agree with it.
It's clear that Gray wants us to perceive the arc of consciousness of a
non-political man who starts off worrying about trivial things, learns about
true atrocity in detail, then gradually goes back to worrying about trivial
things again, because he has to. But perhaps now he has some slight perspective
on things. I also don't think Gray chose the subject just to "heat
up" his act; would Kael have preferred him not to discuss the Cambodian
history at all? Gray pulls together genocide, pleasure-seeking, military paranoia,
filmmaking, and even an anecdote about rude neighbors to paint a coherent
portrait of aggression.
Demme shot the film for $485,000 at the Performing Garage in New York, over the
course of three performances. Unlike Nick Broomfield in Monster in a Box — the
second of the three Gray concert films (Steven Soderbergh's Gray's Anatomy
rounds out the trilogy) — Demme doesn't try to jazz things up with flashy
editing; the editing here (by Carol Littleton) feels completely organic,
building the kind of rhythm that amounts to a better-than-live experience — the
filmmakers know exactly when to pull back and when to move in. John Bailey's
smooth cinematography and Laurie Anderson's evocative score help to take us to
the mindscapes Gray is describing. (Anderson's score is never intrusive here,
unlike in Monster in a Box, where her music verged on overbearing — sometimes
Gray seemed to be shouting above it.)
By its talky nature the film is necessarily not as
electrifying as Demme's musical pieces, but it's compelling enough. Spalding
Gray, we hardly knew ye.
not coming to a theater near you (Teddy Blanks) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [5/5]
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
MARRIED TO THE MOB
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
When philandering
Mafia hitman 'Cucumber' Frank de Marco is killed by his boss Tony 'The Tiger'
Russo, his widow Angela (Pfeiffer) decides to abandon her stockbroker-belt home
(bursting with stolen goods) and start anew with a job and a dingy room on the
Lower East Side. Easier said than done: obsessively amorous Tony (Stockwell)
courts her with a vengeance, while FBI agent Mike Downey (Modine) suspects that
she planned Frank's death with Tony. If the slim plot of Demme's romantic black
comedy lacks the outrageous panache and exhilarating twists of Something
Wild, the film nevertheless delights through its sheer good-humoured glee
in all that is kitsch or off-the-wall, and its wealth of inventive incidental
details. While it's all relentlessly shallow, the performances, music and gaudy
visuals provide a fizzy vitality for which many other directors would give
their right arm. Amazingly, for all its hip anarchy, it's finally an oddly
old-fashioned slice of entertainment. Preston Sturges might have approved.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
One of the saddest injustices of recent cinema is that this gangster comedy — yet another happy classic from Jonathan Demme — went ignored by the public, probably because its trailer made it look lame.
Everything in it is wonderfully right. Michelle Pfeiffer is
Angela, a mob wife whose husband (Alec Baldwin) has just been rubbed out by his
boss, Tony "the Tiger" Russo (Dean Stockwell), who wastes no time
putting the moves on the new widow. Angela isn't interested, and besides,
Tony's insanely jealous wife Connie (Mercedes Ruehl, simultaneously hilarious
and frightening) would kill them both.
So Angela takes her young son and dog and moves to a rat-trap apartment,
unaware that FBI agents Matthew Modine and Oliver Platt are watching her. In
the movie's only real nod to convention, Modine falls for Pfeiffer. It all
leads to a climax that gets my vote as the funniest gunfight ever filmed. An
inventive and rewarding comedy, with a hip score by David Byrne and
wall-to-wall party music, plus the usual eclectic supporting cast (watch for
Chris Isaak in the Burger World scene).
If it had been marketed with any competence, it might actually
have made some money. Demme's next was 'The Silence of the Lambs,' which made
money.
Apollo Movie
Guide [Brian Gross]
Married to the Mob, directed by Jonathan Demme (Stop Making
Sense, Philadelphia), is a mob movie spoof about a hit man and his wife who has
grown tired of the mob life. Frank the Cucumber (Alec Baldwin) is a hired gun
who knocks off the bad guys (or good, depending on your point of view) in
between Italian meals with the family. He gets a bit out of line with the head
mobster’s moll and finds himself paying the ultimate price. Too bad for Frank
the Cucumber. But there’s always a silver lining, and for Frank’s wife Angela
(Michelle Pfieffer), this is the perfect opportunity to start a new life with
her young son – far from the bad influence of the crime family she married
into. But when Angela tries to escape this life, she finds that Tony “The
Tiger” Russo (Dean Stockwell), the local boss who offed her dearly beloved has
the hots for her and isn’t so keen on her departing.
Angela’s refuge in a dumpy Manhattan apartment
is short-lived when she starts getting attention from a cute FBI agent named
Mike Downey (Matthew Modine). The competition for her hand becomes extremely
complicated with both Mike and Tony interested in her.
There are lulls to be sure, with a few sight gags thrown in for good measure,
as Married to the Mob is The Godfather on laughing gas; an anti-Goodfellas look
at the Mafia life, with plenty of Joisey accents. This movie features enough
laughs and romance to be light popcorn fare for couples looking for a different
sort of romantic comedy. It is an amiable, campy and colourful film where only
a director like Demme could make so many mob characters likable.
Look for a spot-on performance from Mercedes Ruehl as the very jealous wife of
Tony Russo, and decent work by the rest of the cast. Stockwell is also excellent.
By the time she took on this role, Pfieffer was well on her way to establishing
herself as a major star, and while this isn’t exactly star-making material, it
also didn’t hold back her career. Same goes for the other leading players, who
aren’t especially impressive here, but nor are they objectionable. Demme uses
scenes cut out of the movie’s final version over the end credits. It’s as if
he’s purposely spray-painting graffiti on any potential high-gloss finish. This
isn’t one of Demme’s more interesting directorial efforts, but his distinctive
touch is still evident throughout. As usual, he rolls in a jukebox-load of
diverse and rousing music, including reggae, rockabilly, David Byrne scoring,
new wave and even Rosemary Clooney pricelessly singing “Mambo Italiano.”
Married to the Mob is too often predictable but it manages to avoid many
potential satire pratfalls, making it unique in several respects and mostly
enjoyable.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
In its own
old-fashioned way, this is as satisfying as that other, more modernist Thomas
Harris adaptation, Manhunter. When FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Foster)
is sent to conduct an interview with serial killer shrink Dr Hannibal Lecter
(Hopkins) in his high-security cell, she little knows what she is in for. The
Feds want Lecter to help them in their search for homicidal maniac 'Buffalo
Bill'; but in exchange for clues about Bill's behaviour, Lecter demands that
Clarice answer questions about herself, so that he can penetrate the darkest
recesses of her mind. It's in their confrontations that both film and heroine
come electrically alive. Although Demme does reveal the results of the killer's
violence, he for the most part refrains from showing the acts themselves; the
film could never be accused of pandering to voyeuristic impulses.
Under-standably, much has been made of
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
I remember just like it was yesterday when I bought this
film when I was 14 years old. A film I heard so much about that I just had to
see it, whether it was good or bad, and it has stayed on my mind forever once
the last frame rolled. Based on the Thomas Harris novel and arguably Jonathan
Demme’s best film and armed with a distinct brand of atmospheric suspense,
direction, story and stellar performances, The Silence of the Lambs will
forever stand high as one of the most intelligent and suspenseful films ever
made.
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a FBI agent trainee whom
has been lured as a bait by Behavioral Science head Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn)
in order to grill information out of renowned psychiatrist and psychopath Dr.
Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) on several unsolved cases,
most notably the case of the serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). After the
kidnapping of a Senator’s daughter in the State of Illinois, Lecter offers a
psych profile on Buffalo Bill to Starling in exchange of Starling’s personal
feelings. As Clarice treads deeper into the case and into Lecter’s mind, she’ll
have to try her best to conquer her fears in order to solve the case before the
girl is killed.
At the film’s core it’s a character study of both Lecter and Starling while all
the same relying on effect and mood in order to give the film the suspense it
demands and pulls it off masterfully. Anthony Hopkins gives the character of
Hannibal Lecter a three-dimensional portrait rather than a caricature-like
beast; depicting a simple looking man with a deadly instinct hidden but always
present within him and an ever-mysterious tone looming across his personality.
He’s like a lion, holding calm and still, waiting until the right moment to
strike. Thanks to this, Hopkins is clearly believable. Jodie Foster’s Clarice
Starling is the larger of the two focal points, a determined yet vulnerable
person whom is still a child at heart and wants to fight her fears as later
revealed in the many conversations with Lecter, in order to become her own
woman. The screenshot of Starling looking towards the window reflect of
Lecter’s face pretty much summarizes the film’s main intentions.
The rest of the story, which was adapted by Ted Tally, is just as intriguing as
its characters. Besides delivering excellent character development and clever
symbolisms, it also plunges the viewer down deep into the dark side of humanity
and studying its psychological aspects; all of which we encounter in everyday
life, and also makes us think about our own personal aspects of our lives. The
screenplay is perfectly blended with Demme’s direction which includes the usual
a gritty, faded discolored photography courtesy of Tak Fujimoto and Howard
Shore’s bold and moody score (which ranks amongst his best scores). These two
elements along with the solid acting allow Demme to inject a dark, moody and
unpredictable atmosphere which is capable of being as volatile as a hydrogen
balloon. Demme’s Oscar is well-deserved though Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott
gave him a run for his money that year.
In the end, this film is a certified classic and a kick-ass
piece of work which one will enjoy time after time (at least I have);
definitely worth seeing at least once in your life. 5-5
Turner Classic Movies review Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt
Ever since movies like Halloween (1978) and The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) sparked a horror-film renaissance in the
1970s, audiences have cheered for the "final girl," the last survivor
of a serial killer's mayhem--usually a young woman, stuck with the grim job of
subduing the slayer and returning home to tell her story. Of the many offbeat
touches in Jonathan Demme's legendary thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991), none works more
effectively than the decision to let the final girl also be the original girl
and the only girl, matching her wits against the murderer's from beginning to
end.
Not that Clarice Starling is exactly a girl. She's a smart, no-nonsense woman,
and she's played by a smart, no-nonsense actress: Jodie Foster, who won an
Academy Award for her work. Oscars® also went to Demme for Best Director, Ted
Tally for Best Adapted Screenplay, Anthony Hopkins for his chilling performance
as Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, and the movie itself as Best
Picture of 1991. The film's editing and sound were also nominated. It was
almost unprecedented for an R-rated film to sweep the top five Oscars®, and the
triumph was taken as a welcome sign that Hollywood was growing up at last—able
to embrace a tough, challenging story told in a tough, challenging way.
The first main character we meet is Starling, who's earned a psychology degree
and joined the FBI as a trainee. She's assigned to help a senior FBI agent,
Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), track down a serial killer called Buffalo Bill
because he skins his (always female) victims as if they were so many bison on
the hoof. Crawford's idea is to figure out Buffalo Bill's thought processes
with help from Hannibal Lecter, M.D., a former psychiatrist and world-class
fiend who's serving life in prison for his crimes. In their first conversation,
Starling mentions that serial killers often keep "trophies" from
their victims' bodies. Lecter points out that he never did, and Starling stands
corrected. "No," she accurately replies, “you ate yours.”
Her urgent goal is to locate Buffalo Bill before he kills and flays Catherine
Martin, a U.S. senator's daughter who's his latest victim. Starling has about
seventy-two hours to accomplish this, since after kidnapping a woman BB keeps
her for three days in a home-made dungeon, starving her so her skin will better
suit his purpose—which is to tailor himself a "suit" that will
enhance his hoped-for transformation into a female version of himself. Lecter
can help if he wants to, but he'll do it only on his own psychotic terms.
Starling plunges into the case, assisted by enigmatic clues from Lecter that
are almost as mystifying as BB's whereabouts. One of the film's most engrossing
elements is the contrast it strikes between two different senses of time, as
critic Yvonne Tasker points out in her book on the movie. All the characters
are passing through a three-day period that will end with victory for either
the FBI or the killer. By contrast, Lecter is already in prison, which frees
him from the clock and calendar. He never speaks or moves with undue haste,
savoring the suspense he's inflicting on Starling by handing her puzzling hints
in exchange for personal information about herself.
Hannibal Lecter was born as a secondary character in the 1981 novel Red
Dragon by Thomas Harris, a former crime and police reporter known for his
reclusive personality and meticulous attention to detail; he'll spell out the
difficulties of working with disembodied skin, for instance, or the condition
of a "floater" corpse eaten away by the water it was dumped into. Red
Dragon has been filmed twice—as Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann
in 1986, and under the novel's title, with Brett Ratner directing in 2002.
Brian Cox plays Lecter in the 1986 picture, oozing the same understated
weirdness that Hopkins brings to The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, the sequel
directed by Ridley Scott in 2001. French actor Gaspard Ulliel plays him with a
more aggressive, less effective kind of menace in Hannibal Rising, the
2007 prequel. More actors may take on Lecter in years to come, but Hopkins will
always own the character; it's been that way since the moment we and Starling
first saw him behind the cannibal-proof glass that shields Hannibal's jailers
from his deadly grasp. This is the role that made Hopkins a full-blown star,
and deservedly so.
The Silence of the Lambs
performed well at the box office, becoming the last hit released by Orion
Pictures before the company went into bankruptcy the following year. The film's
popularity, due in part to the superb cast and crew, may also have been boosted
by real-life associations that audiences brought to it. Many moviegoers
remembered that would-be assassin John Hinckley said he tried to kill President
Ronald Reagan in 1981 as a way of getting Jodie Foster's attention after he saw
Taxi Driver (1976) umpteen times; and the real serial killer Ted Bundy
wore a cast on his arm to appear harmless, just as Buffalo Bill does on screen.
Not everyone hailed The Silence of the Lambs.
It sparked controversy in the gay community for portraying Buffalo Bill as a
wannabe transsexual with stereotypical gay mannerisms, and some reviewers found
it too violent. Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that "the purposes
to which it places its considerable ingenuity are ultimately rather foul....For
creepy, sicko kicks, I'd rather watch the evening news." By contrast, many
feminist critics praised it as "a slasher film in which the woman is hero
rather than victim, pursuer rather than pursued," in Amy Taubin's words.
One of the factors that put Harris's novel onto bestseller lists was the
careful, almost affectionate precision he uses to bring horrific scenes alive.
Drawing on research with the FBI and painstaking study of real serial-killer
cases, he lends even the goriest matters a morbid fascination that's hard to
shake. Demme provides a movie equivalent via gruesome crime-scene photos,
graphic filming of a blood-drenched jailbreak scene, and lots of ghoulish
dialogue. "A census taker once tried to test me," Lecter tells
Clarice in one of his jovial moods. "I ate his liver with some fava beans
and a nice Chianti." Lines like this passed instantly into the pop-culture
hall of fame, helping the movie become a classic of its genre as well as an
Oscar®-winning hit.
It also did a lot for Demme, previously known as an art-minded director (Melvin
and Howard [1980], Stop Making Sense [1984], Swimming to Cambodia
[1987]) with a liking for quirky subjects and performances. The Silence of the Lambs
made him a major Hollywood auteur, and remains the defining work of his career.
Foster and Hopkins have also reaped great rewards from its success. Whatever
they might accomplish in the future, the may never outdo their unique
achievements in this remarkable thriller.
Ted Tally on Silence of the Lambs on the screenwriting adaptation
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer K. E. Sullivan from Jump Cut, July 2000
Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Journal - Special Edition Dawn Taylor
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Special Edition
AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [A+]
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
Movieline Magazine dvd review Christopher Walters
Classic Horror review Chris Justice
outrate.net (Mark Adnum) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [5/5]
not coming to a theater near you (Chiranjit Goswami) review
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib
Encyclopedia Of Fantastic Film & TV
Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall]
The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Todd Doogan
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson, also Special Edition: DVD MovieGuide dvd review
DVD Journal - Criterion Collection D.K. Holm
The Onion A.V. Club dvd review [Collector's Edition]
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Collector's Edition]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson
The Trades (R.J. Carter) dvd review [Collector's Edition]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review Collector’s Edition
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Movie-Vault.com (Arturo García Lasca) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Vanessa Vance, Special Edition
Basic Instinct Judith Halberstam essay from Popcorn Q on BASIC INSTINCT and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Movieline Magazine dvd review Chris Phillips, MANHUNTER and SILENCE OF THE
LAMBS
Newsweek (David Ansen) review Of
Cannibals and Kinks, February 18, 1991
Newsweek (David Ansen) review The
Flowering of a Late Bloomer, January 17, 1994
Newsweek (David Ansen) review The
Imitation of Death, November 6, 1995
Newsweek (David Ansen) review Bloody
Good Flicks, April 3, 2006
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [4/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4] Roger Ebert in 1991
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] Roger Ebert in 2001
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
COUSIN BOBBY
USA Spain (70 mi) 1992
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
It's perhaps characteristic of Demme's
quirky integrity that he should follow The Silence of the Lambs with a
low-key, 16mm documentary about a long-lost relative. Typical, too, that the
film, for all its seeming amateurishness, ends up being far more than a home
movie. For the Reverend Robert
Castle, the cousin Demme hasn't seen for over 30 years, is not only a
colourful figure - a politically radical Episcopalian minister battling against
the poverty, racism and drugs that blight Harlem - but a welcome reminder that
even in Bush's America the Left has just about managed to survive. If the
film's loose structure means it occasionally lacks focus, Demme's relaxed, open
narrative style allows him to paint a wide-ranging portrait of America.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
A fascinating and highly moving
documentary by Jonathan Demme about his cousin Robert Castle, whom he hadn't
seen for 30 years before this film. A 60-year-old white Episcopal minister
working in Harlem with a multiracial and multidenominational congregation,
Castle is a passionately committed community organizer who started out in
Jersey City and forged strong links with the Black Panthers and other radical
organizations of the 60s and 70s. He comes across as something of a
saint--unpretentious and unself-conscious, though by no means simple--and this
unpreachy film, which also shows us a lot of Demme's developing friendship with
his cousin, is similarly direct and unaffected. Some of our questions about
Castle's peripatetic family life are left unanswered, and it's not clear
precisely where home movie is meant to shade off into political document, but
such ambiguity carries a certain charm and conviction; at the end one simply
feels grateful for having spent some time with these people (1991).
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE fact that Jonathan Demme had not seen his cousin the Rev. Robert Castle in 30-odd years is not sufficient to explain "Cousin Bobby," Mr. Demme's documentary account of his cousin's life. Plenty of people have long-lost relatives, and not all of those relatives' stories belong on film. But something special was at work here: a true meeting of the minds, which the film captures effortlessly, and a remarkable family trait both cousins share. Both Mr. Demme, the Academy Award-winning director, and Father Castle, the priest in charge at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Harlem, are avid enthusiasts, and both are fueled by an idealism that elevates "Cousin Bobby" well beyond the home-movie realm.
It seems fitting that Mr. Demme, in one scene, wears a shirt displaying a map of the world. As the major director with Hollywood's most exotic resume, Mr. Demme has explored an enormous range of interests, making a collection of films bound together by the film maker's sheer fascination with his subjects rather than by any unifying themes.
His features are as different as the meticulously chilling "The Silence of the Lambs" and the antic, dreamlike "Something Wild"; his documentaries range from one of the best and most ingenious rock concert films, Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense," to a simple, riveting treatment of Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia" and the political essay "Haiti Dreams of Democracy." "Cousin Bobby," an hourlong film made with what proves to be deceptive nonchalance, shares with these other projects an unwavering intensity and strong sense of purpose. Most important, it shows off Mr. Demme's unusual ability to draw audiences close to the subjects he embraces.
"Cousin Bobby," which opens today at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, gets to know Father Castle the way anyone might explore a new acquaintance: gradually, casually, in a circular rather than linear fashion. Seemingly at random, the film supplies old photographs, relatives' reminiscences and scenes of the priest among his parishioners. The film quickly establishes that he has carved out an unusual role for himself within this Harlem congregation, and searches through his background to explain that aspect of his character. From the film's seemingly random observations -- that Bobby's father, Mr. Demme's great-Uncle Willy, once bowled a 300 game -- to its scorching political invective, "Cousin Bobby" eventually assembles a moving and fully formed portrait.
Father Castle's view of racial politics in America seems to surprise even some of his black parishioners, and the film recounts the ways his radical stance has brought him both satisfaction and trouble. In his Jersey City parish in the 1960's, he was closely involved with the Black Panthers and was particularly influenced by the late Isaiah Rowley, one of the people to whom "Cousin Bobby" is dedicated. Without exploring Father Castle's politics in great detail, the film does visit with his first wife, who recalls the couple's four children asking, "How much is the bail, Mom?," on one of the various times the priest was in jail.
Father Castle himself remembers being told by his Bishop, "Bob, there should be a job for you here in the Diocese of Newark, but there isn't." This prompted a move to Vermont in 1970, where the Castles planned to run a general store. Instead, Father Castle was again drawn to the church, and eventually he returned to the New York area, setting up St. Mary's as a kind of all-purpose community service center for its parishioners. Father Castle is seen doing everything from holding mail for neighbors who are in jail or missing to railing against drugs, poor living conditions and a huge pothole in the middle of the street. The film becomes so intimate with his concerns that the news of this pothole's being repaired becomes a major triumph.
As they stroll together through the settings that shaped Father Castle's life, from the Harlem street corner where he delivers a sermon to the Vermont hillside where one of his sons is buried, the director and the priest share a developing bond that is captured on film. They attend a family reunion; they visit the house where they last saw each other; they share impressions, sometimes terribly moving ones, about relatives who are now gone.
By the time the viewer hears the poignant story of Father Castle's final encounter with his father, and learns the priest's thoughts on his faith and the possibility of an afterlife, the film has achieved a rare degree of intimacy. There's a lot to be learned from the apparent guilelessness with which that intimacy is developed, and the precise modulation of topic, tone and background music used to construct this studiously unself-conscious style.
"Cousin Bobby," handsomely shot by several cinematographers including Ernest Dickerson, concludes on a stark, sobering note with archival scenes of the fiery damage caused by American race riots in the 1960's and bracing sounds of rap "Edutainment" by KRS-1, comparing ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures and stressing the importance of black history. This final touch, eerily timed in light of recent events, fits perfectly with the film's presentation of Father Castle's ideals.
It also suits Mr. Demme's larger mandate in making this film, since it was commissioned by an independent Spanish production company making a series "On Shooting Reality." Reality is seldom found onscreen these days, but it is alive and well here. Cousin Bobby Directed by Jonathan Demme; edited by David Greenwald; music by Anton Sanko; produced by Edward Saxon; released by Cinevista. At the Joseph Papp Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, Manhattan. Running time: 70 minutes. This film has no rating.
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
PHILADELPHIA
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Turner Classic Movies review Scott McGee
After more than 10 years of dealing with one of the
greatest health crises in history, a mainstream Hollywood film finally stepped
up to the plate and dealt honestly with the issue of AIDS in director Jonathan
Demme's Philadelphia
(1993). With a stellar cast that boasted the likes of Tom Hanks, Denzel
Washington, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, and Joanne Woodward, Philadelphia had the pedigree to be
a heavy favorite when it came time to hand out Oscars. The popular film did not
fail to meet those expectations. Tom Hanks won his first Oscar for his stirring
portrayal of a young attorney whose professional and personal life is cut
short, while rocker Bruce Springsteen walked off with his first Oscar for Best
Song, a haunting ballad entitled "Streets of Philadelphia." It was
the first time Springsteen lent his writing talent for a motion picture
production.
The film's journey from script to screen was a long, rocky road. At one time
under the working title People Like Us, Ron Nyswaner's script went
through 25 drafts over a period of five years. Shortly after Nyswaner began
writing, Orion Studios, the money tree funding the making of Philadelphia, filed for bankruptcy
in December 1991. As a result, the story idea became embroiled in the Chapter
11 proceedings. Ed Saxon, the Oscar-winning producer of Demme's The Silence
of the Lambs (1991), had to go through the formality of appearing in
bankruptcy court in order to rescue the film project from oblivion.
The arduous road did not get any easier after that. Once word got out that an
AIDS-themed film was in the works in Hollywood, members of the film industry
and gay activist groups began to anticipate the movie as the first public
statement of how mainstream Hollywood would confront AIDS and homophobia. But
after the film was completed and released, those same groups began to harshly
criticize the film for sugarcoating the reality of living with AIDS. Despite
the controversy created by the film, Philadelphia was a moving experience for most audiences and grossed
about $77 million in U.S. after its January 1994 wide release.
While Philadelphia
certainly generated discussion about social issues, it also served as the
unlikely inspiration for a comedy. In the hit 1997 comedy In & Out,
Kevin Kline plays a much loved and respected high school drama teacher who has
much to celebrate; an impending marriage to fiancee Joan Cusack and
professional pride in his former student Matt Dillon, now an Oscar nominee.
When Dillon wins the coveted award, he not only thanks his former teacher, but
also inadvertently "outs" him on television, forcing Kline to come to
terms with his sexuality and his equally perplexed family and friends.
Screenwriter Paul Rudnick came up with this very funny premise after Hanks, in
his Oscar speech, graciously thanked his former mentor and high school teacher,
Rawley Farnsworth, for being the inspiration behind his performance.
Cineaste magazine (c/o UCB Media Resources) review Roy Grundmann and Peter Sacks, Summer 1993 Cineaste maazine (c/o UCB Media Resources) review
Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich
outrate.net (Mark Adnum) review
PopcornQ review Mark Finch
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons) dvd review [Anniversary Edition]
Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [4/5] [Anniversary Edition]
The Cinema Source (Ray Dademo) dvd review [A] [Anniversary Edition]
DVD Verdict (Maurice Cobbs) dvd review [Anniversary Edition]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation [Anniversary Edition] Guido Henkel
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Anniversary Edition] Colin Jacobson
DVD Verdict (Dean Roddey) dvd review
eFilmCritic Reviews M.P. Bartley
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBC Films (George Perry) review
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE COMPLEX SESSIONS
USA (30 mi) 1994
Movie
Vault review Rob
Gonsalves
Neil Young has many fans, but I'm not among them. I neither like nor dislike him (though I admired his fuzzbox soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man) -- he neither annoys nor pleases me, musically. He just exists. So I looked forward to seeing Jonathan Demme's footage of him and Crazy Horse as they perform in a studio setting. Would Demme turn lead into gold? Or was my love of Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock based significantly on my love of the music?
Well, Neil Young fans will probably love the tape. All others, particularly those who actively dislike Young but might be lured on the strength of Demme's participation, should probably pass: this is no Stop Making Sense. Young and Crazy Horse play four songs from their Sleeps with Angels album -- "My Heart" (Young on piano), "Prime of Life," "Change Your Mind," and the aptly titled "Piece of Crap," at the end of which Young wrecks his guitar strings.
Throughout, Young comes across as a self-absorbed furball. Roger Ebert, panning the 1996 Young-and-Crazy-Horse rockumentary Year of the Horse (directed by Jarmusch), ridiculed Young's habit of whomping around onstage like an autistic Cro-Magnon, and Young does the same thing here, making the time-honored Guitar Face all rock guitarists are legally required to display when churning out a masturbatory solo. The songs are ... well ... Neil Young. If I heard them on the radio I'd keep working on whatever I was working on and let the songs go in one ear and out the other. Seeing them performed by the humorless Godfather of Grunge is the annoying part. On the plus side, the video is only 27 minutes long. I watched it once and donated it to my local library.
Demme does what he can. This time he's got Tak Fujimoto (who shot Demme's Silence of the Lambs, and also The Sixth Sense more recently), as well as smooth editing by Andy Keir, but for the most part their combined efforts just made me wish those efforts had been expended on a musician who deserves them. Ani Difranco, say, or PJ Harvey -- maybe it's time for Demme to turn his camera to a female artist. Lacking that, there's always Robyn Hitchcock...
STOREFRONT HITCHCOCK
Jonathan
Demme's off-kilter concert flick features former Soft Boy/Egyptian Robyn
Hitchcock. Strikingly filmed outside a Manhattan shop front, it's an endearing
profile of one of English pop's most wayward talents. This unlikely collaboration between Philadelphia/The Silence Of The Lambs director Demme and REM favourite Robyn Hitchcock is
clearly a labour of love for all concerned, and the result rivals the
director's own work with Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense.
For over 20 years Hitchcock, who with eccentric new wavers The Soft Boys
declared "I Want to be an Anglepoise Lamp" has ploughed a lonely
furrow. His music, a literate blend of psychedelic punk and pastoral folk, is
usually characterised as an acquired taste but there's nothing difficult about
the sweet, sad, Syd Barret-esque compositions he delivers here, nor his
rambling inter-song ruminations. "I don't know what kind of church you
like to imagine," he says genially. "But I like to imagine a church
full of carcasses."
Most of the tracks come from his excellent 1996 solo album 'Moss Elixir'. Set
dressing consists of a light bulb, a mirror ball and a giant tomato, and
Hitchcock's own mix of charm and humour is well up in the mix. An intimate
portrait of the cerebral surrealist, and one with plenty of low-key thrills.
Verdict
Simple but successful concert movie that allows Hitchcock's idiosyncratic
material to speak for itself
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Storefront Hitchcock (1997) Neil
McCormick from Sight and Sound, January
1999
Cult British singer-songwriter
Robyn Hitchcock stands in a shop window chatting and playing songs to an unseen
audience inside the shop. He is joined intermittently by violinist Deni Bonet
and guitarist Tim Keegan. A constant stream of cars and pedestrians can be seen
passing behind Hitchcock's back. Occasionally someone will stop and peer
through the window. During what appears to be one continuous performance, the
background shifts from day to night and back again.
Robyn Hitchcock is not exactly a
household name. His seminal band, The Soft Boys, surfaced in the late 70s
playing what he himself has described as "sedate hippie gibberish"
when the music industry was being engulfed by punk rock. Confronted by
widespread indifference to such singles as '(l Want to Be an) Anglepoise Lamp'
they broke up in 1981, though Hitchcock has continued writing and recording in
much the same vein ever since, at first backed by a band called The Egyptians
but latterly completely solo. He draws on 60s psychedelic pop as the basis for
melodic and emotional compositions, blending bitterness, weirdness and surreal
humour in unusual settings. Some critics would argue that Hitchcock's sprawling
body of work (he has released over 15 albums) remains one of the great undiscovered
treasures of modern pop. But there are probably just as many who think it
should remain undiscovered.
Rock superstars REM are among
Hitchcock's biggest fans and their endorsement in the 80s helped introduce him
to the American college audience who comprise his most loyal fan base.
It was after a typically low-key
show in New York that Hitchcock was approached by Jonathan Demme about making a
movie. At first glance, the very idea of a feature-length concert film being
made about an obscure English eccentric by an Academy award-winning American
director seems almost as absurd as one of Hitchcock's off-the-wall monologues.
Attempting to explain his appeal, Hitchcock has previously commented: "My
stuff is not widescreen. It doesn't look good from a distance. It's more like
an etching. You have to get right up close and look at it carefully." So
what is he doing on the big screen?
Winning new friends and
influencing people, probably. Before the enormous success of Silence of
the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme enjoyed critical acclaim
for his simple, performance-based films about author and raconteur Spalding
Grey (1978's Swimming to Cambodia) and art rock group Talking
Heads (1984's Stop Making Sense). Shot over four days and nights
in a storefront in New York, Storefront Hitchcock follows the same
stylistic pattern as the earlier films: a stripped-down minimalism that forces
the viewer to focus intently on the performer. It is, in this sense, closer to
the etching Hitchcock imagined than to anything routinely thought of as a
widescreen experience.
Apart from a somewhat incongruous
four-panelled split-screen during a guitar solo, Demme employs few of the
techniques usually associated with rock videos and performance movies. There is
almost no camera movement (discounting the occasional subtle zoom or slight
pan), no rapid-fire cutting or extravagant staging (one song is performed by
candlelight, another beneath a single electric bulb), no audience-reaction
shots. The only distraction is provided by the intriguing setting. The
out-of-focus, constantly moving backdrop of the city and the subtle yet
peculiar shifts from day to night create a dreamlike sense of distorted time.
Hitchcock truly seems to be in a world of his own, which some would say has
always been the case.
Hitchcock is an acquired taste -
and if you don't acquire it, the film is likely to prove unbearable. His thin,
reedy voice will have some wondering whatever might have convinced him he could
sing. And his epic monologues (which sometimes resemble jokes without a
punchline) are as likely to baffle as many people as they delight. Yet if you
have the patience to settle in, relax and slowly adjust to his peculiar point
of view, Hitchcock is a revelation. Although there is much humour in his act, he
is not a comedian. His songs address a huge span of ideas and emotions and
Demme's close-up style allows all Hitchcock's nuance and subtlety to register.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5] also seen here: Movie Vault review
The Village Voice [Douglas Wolk]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
All Movie Guide [Perry Seibert]
Austin Chronicle [Russell Smith]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
BELOVED A 98
USA
From the breathtaking opening scene, it's
clear that Demme won't be content to sit back and preach. Inspired by the true
story of a runaway slave driven to commit unspeakable murder rather than
re-submit to her chains, Toni Morrison's ghost story takes the lid off the
blistering, restless tumult, the 'screaming baboon' that is the legacy of
American racism. When Paul D (Glover) arrives at the home of his old friend
Sethe (Winfrey), he's confronted with a spectre of violence more powerful than
he can comprehend, and peremptorily ousted by
Beloved David Denby from the New Yorker
One of the more high-minded and painful follies of recent years. Toni
Morrison's celebrated 1987 novel "Beloved"—difficult, allusive, and
filled with ghosts—is probably unadaptable, but Oprah Winfrey, with director
Jonathan Demme in tow, went ahead with the project after eleven years of
discouragement. Oprah plays Sethe, the former slave who, in 1873, lives in an
Ohio farmhouse with her teen-age daughter, Denver (Kimberly Elise), her old friend
and new lover Paul D (Danny Glover), and the ghost of the daughter she killed
long ago when the girl was about to be retaken into slavery. The ghost, at
first an unseen presence, smashes crockery to the floor, then appears as a
beautiful young woman (Thandie Newton) who growls and talks very, very slowly.
The movie would seem to be completely misconceived: rather than dramatizing the
moral condition of people burdened by an unspeakable past, it dramatizes the
domestic problems of living with a spirit-demon. For most of the hundred and
seventy-four minutes we are stuck inside that farmhouse, and when the
filmmakers do cut back to complicated events occurring earlier (during the
slave years) we can't always tell what's going on. But there are moments of weirdly
poetic natural beauty and also some wonderful actresses—Kessia Kordelle as a
half-mad runaway white girl who helps deliver Sethe's baby in the woods, and
Beah Richards, who shakes and shouts as the elderly preacher Baby Suggs and
momentarily brings the show to life.
Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp
Filled with some of the most extraordinary images of
recent years, Jonathan Demme's Beloved was apparently too powerful for
audiences to handle back in 1998. Producer and star Oprah Winfrey delivers a
strong-willed and richly complex performance as escaped slave Sethe, a free
woman who survived the brutality of a
Flipside Movie
Emporium (Eric Beltmann) review
[B+]
Unlike Schindler's List, a picture it has been compared to, Beloved depicts the horrors of its chosen injustice -- slavery -- by concentrating solely on the psychological damage it engendered. Significantly, this underappreciated adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel about slavery takes place in 1873, more than a decade after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. What makes it an exceptional film is the way it illustrates the emotional impact of imposed servitude that must certainly have lingered long after a slave was granted freedom. Using both literal and surreal metaphors, the director, Jonathan Demme, has fashioned the book into a poetic, metaphysical journey through the soul of Sethe (Oprah Winfrey), a former slave tormented by a long-ago backfire of maternal instinct that is, shockingly, both reprehensible and completely noble.
Now free, Sethe is still suffering from the wounds left by slavery; her mind carries psychological scars far more painful than the physical scars on her back. Her previous indiscretion literally haunts her, in the form of a ghoulish apparition inhabiting her home, rattling the windows and tossing the family dog around the kitchen. Eventually, it materializes as a croaking two-year-old in the body of a beautiful, unbalanced waif (Thandie Newton). Demme's phantasmal visualization of this spirit is earnestly far-fetched; it may suggest to you Alice Hoffman crossed with The Exorcist. But it's also an effective metaphor: like her memories, this creature reminds Sethe of her previous life as a commodity, it terrorizes her in bursts of undeserved violence, and it forces her to become stronger.
Somewhere in this process, Demme dares to ask (as Morrison did) whether death was an inviting alternative to life under American slavery. It sounds like sanctimonious melodrama, but in the hands of Demme, one of America's most gifted and humane directors, the matter is handled with intelligence and genuine compassion. In flashback, when one slave kills another, the white masters do not consider the killer to be guilty of murder. Instead, the killer is guilty only of destroying property. When your entire race is considered no more valuable than livestock, what kind of toll does that exact on a person's psyche? That question is the film's true subject, and it's a topic that distended crowdpleasers like Amistad don't even bother to approach. By grasping that slavery had long-lasting implications far beyond abusive physical oppression, and by depicting those ramifications with such poetic force, Beloved becomes the first film to truly get the horror -- the harrowing human repugnance -- of slavery on the screen.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Beloved (1998) Charlotte O’Sullivan from Sight and Sound, March 1999
Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is an extraordinary feat, a version of the judgement of Solomon. In the Bible story we learn that a natural mother would do anything rather than see her child cut in two. Morrison's project is to show how Sethe, a former slave, when pushed to nightmarish extremes could fight for the right to commit the bloody act herself.
Unfortunately, the film of the book seems to have aroused similar passions. Its parentage is also contested: is this an Oprah Winfrey project (Winfrey, one of the film's co-producers, has been nursing this baby for over a decade), or a Jonathan Demme movie? As a result it doesn't quite fit together. It's impossible, of course, to know who exactly did what, but it feels as if Winfrey claimed as her own the parts concerning her character Sethe and Sethe's mother Baby Suggs (Beah Richards), while Demme adopted Beloved (Thandie Newton), the title character who may or may not be a reincarnation of the daughter Sethe slaughtered rather than let her become a slave. Either way, both Winfrey and Demme get a lot wrong. Winfrey, for instance, should never have cast herself in the lead. She is very good in some scenes, but she is never startling or overwhelming, her pleasant, sturdy face capable of projecting only one feeling at a time.
More importantly, she has altered the contexts surrounding Sethe and Baby Suggs. We never learn, for instance, how Beloved's gravestone gets her name carved on it (in the book, Sethe has to have sex with the stonecutter). It's as if such a detail might sully our notion of the noble Sethe. Nor do we see, or even hear about, the magnificent party which in the book alienates the community from the two women. Essentially Sethe and Baby Suggs' beneficence makes the townspeople fizzle with jealous rage. As a result, they don't warn the two women of sadistic slave-owner Schoolteacher's imminent arrival. A crucial passage in the book, the party demonstrates the limits of both the group and the individual. By leaving this out, a myth is kept alive: if you need it, the group will be there for you, while the big-hearted female can never give too much of herself. This is the logic of The Oprah Winfrey Show – too quick and easy by half.
This emphasis on the 'empowering', supportively spiritual female (Baby Suggs' sermons also feature heavily) unbalances the film. Lost are the male stories in the book, an irony given that when Beloved was first published, a number of critics accused Morrison of undermining black men. Denzel Washington allegedly turned down the role of Paul D on the grounds that there was too much bowing and scraping in the role. Such a view bristles with machismo, but in the film, somewhere along the line, black men have been pushed to the sidelines.
Danny Glover plays the part beautifully, but Paul D's individual story
(about how he escapes from a chain gang in
Director Demme is just as guilty of recreating the film in his own image. For Beloved's birth scene, for example, we're plunged into the beautiful, surreal rankness of The Silence of the Lambs (not surprisingly, the two films share the same cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto). Silence's killer's basement hideout crawls with insects; Beloved, similarly, is surrounded by fluttering wings and her body covered inch-thick with ladybirds (not in the book). Later, she drapes herself against a tree and her serpentine awkwardness – a mixture of shamelessness and self-disgust – remind one of Demme's psychopath.
Much work has gone into
Luckily, there are a number of scenes which seem to belong neither to Demme nor to Winfrey, but to embody the best of both. The family's trip to the carnival, for example, transforms a fairly insignificant part of the book into a bold, haunting set-piece. It looks just right, not a soft thing in sight (even the sky looks like a rough piece of metal). Best of all, potentially big points – such as the irony of ex-slaves being entertained by the sight of white "freaks" – are not rammed home. Chains and rusty prison bars are allowed to sink in slowly or not at all (for once, even the music is low key). It's the bright, grimly carnal colours that stay with you, colours which contrast with the shots of wildlife that crop up throughout the film, of animals roaming free and not a human in sight. Often such visions are beautiful, often they're ugly (such as two tortoises mating, wrinkled necks stretched to breaking point). In either case, the screen feels too full. We pull back, overwhelmed as if by an obscenity. What Fujimoto does so well is to produce a natural landscape that appears unnatural, or too natural. Beloved captures what Morrison has to put into words: that once we become accustomed to slavery, freedom becomes frightening and strange.
Implicating the audience in such thinking is the film's real achievement. Beloved may be as discombobulated as the flesh-and-blood ghost herself, but its various bits and pieces prove fascinating (contrary to advance warning, its three hours do go quickly).
The Haunting - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice J. Hoberman
Boston Review (Alan A. Stone) review
Nashville Scene (Donna Bowman) review
Salon (Charles Taylor) review The Designated Martyr, October 16, 1998
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B+]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Images (Crissa-Jean Chappell) review
CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Leslie Dunlap
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
The Providence Journal review Michael Janusonis
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [5/5] Richard Scheib
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Michael S. Goldberger
Beloved : Review : Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review
Oprah gives emotional journey to 'Beloved' Jamie Allen from CNN, October 16, 1998
Entertainment Weekly review [C+] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Liam Lacey
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review No Peace from a Brutal Legacy, October
16, 1998
'Beloved'
Tests Racial Themes At Box Office; Will This Winfrey Film Appeal to White
Audiences? Bernard Weinraub from The New York Times, October 13, 1998
Despite
Hope, 'Beloved' Generates Little Heat Among Moviegoers Bernard Weinraub from The New York Times, November 9, 1998
A
Literary Diaspora Toasts One of Its Own
Somini Sengupta from The New York
Times, November 6, 2000
Beloved (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jaunted By Their Nightmares, by Margaret Atwood book review by Margaret Atwood from The New York Times, September 13, 1987
Toni Morrison: Beloved plenty of essays, articles, and web links
THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE
USA Germany (100 mi) 2002 ‘Scope
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
It's all very well Demme wanting to
get back to his lighter-hearted roots after message movies like Philadelphia
and Beloved, but why rehash the romantic thriller Charade -
itself a thistledown affair - when you don't have leads to match Cary Grant and
Audrey Hepburn? Demme has long been one of America's most appealing
film-makers, but Newton and Wahlberg, as a damsel in distress and a chivalrous
hero offering help when she's suddenly widowed, suspected of her secretive
husband's murder, and menaced by thugs, just don't cut it. It's unfair to blame
the leads, however, when the dialogue's clunky and the perilous predicaments are
so thick, fast and implausible that we care about neither the solution to the
'mystery', nor the interplay of attraction, trust, betrayal and suspicion that
binds the met-cute couple together. But 'there'll always be Paris', or so Demme
and his team appear to believe, swapping the suave gloss of Donen's original
for a flipper, hipper style intended to echo the New Wave ethos of the early
'60s. Tim
Robbins alone (as an embassy bod) seems to know how silly it all is, but he
and the generally proficient execution can't disguise the film's fundamental
pointlessness.
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
First the good news: Not only does The Truth
About Charlie signal a return to form for Jonathan Demme after the clumsy Philadelphia
and the solemn Beloved, but the whimsical
iconoclast may have just made the best Hollywood film of the year. Now the bad:
This remarkable achievement will likely go unnoticed by anyone unfamiliar with
Demme's early work, let alone anyone expecting another Silence of the Lambs.
The Truth About Charlie might be the greatest valentine to the cinema
since Godard's A Woman is a Woman, not
because it's ripe with delicious cameos by Nouvelle Vague figures (Agnes Varda,
Anna Karina) but because its aesthetic gumption is completely free of irony and
pretense. The film also does justice to its equally delightful source material
(Stanley Donen's 1963 classic Charade) while standing apart on its own
modernist terms. With The Truth About Charlie, Demme creates a lark so
graceful and fun to watch it makes Punch-Drunk Love's many flaws
that much more obvious. Thandie Newton stars as Regina Lampert, a young woman
thrust into a web of intrigue and thorny romance when her husband is murdered
aboard a train.
CultureCartel.com
(Keith Uhlich) review [5/5]
Here's the one this year that got away.
Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie
is ostensibly a remake of the 1963 Stanley Donen comedy/thriller Charade, and that alone
practically guaranteed the film's financial failure. Charade is an example, after
all, of the perfect Hollywood film: attractive stars (Cary Grant and Audrey
Hepburn), ingenious script (by Peter Stone), and memorable setting and
atmosphere (using both real and make-believe Paris locations) all combined for
an entertainment that fires on all cylinders. If that sounds like too
mechanistic a metaphor, then perhaps you've caught onto what we might call the
weakness of Charade—it
works so perfectly that the pleasures it gives can feel like perfectly placed
manipulations, cogs in the wheel of the Hollywood machine. No matter—machines
can be beautiful too (and Charade
is certainly one of those perfect mechanoids), but it presents a daunting
challenge to the crazy bastard who wants to try his hand at revisiting the
material. The obvious question: Why remake perfection?
Jonathan Demme, our country's resident crazy bastard moviemaker (I mean this as
a sign of affection, Jon), provides an answer; the results, to my mind, are
phenomenal. Reveling in his true colors as a humanist cinephile, Demme takes
the template of Charade's
plot (widowed female harassed by several people who are after her dead
husband's fortune) and runs with it through present-day Paris. The whitewashed
settings of Donen's film give way to Demme's multicultural playground; all
races and creeds make their way in front of Demme and cinematographer Tak
Fujimoto's always inquisitive hand-held camera. A street corner passerby may
become integral to the story, or he might just be an ephemeral fancy that the
camera finds interesting enough to linger on for a moment. One such latter
instance yields cinephilic dividends: French New Wave director Agnes Varda
unloading umbrellas of Cherbourg in a Paris back alley. If you get the jest,
this is your kind of movie.
Demme's is a Paris far removed from the Hollywood factory. Aside from being
merely a setting, the city is also a participating character. Quite comically,
Demme's Paris often intrudes on Charlie's thriller plot. The monetary reward that was so important
to the characters in Charade
is subsumed here in the hustle and bustle of the locale. Demme has always
seemed an artist more interested in the work itself as opposed to its potential
for monetary gain, and his refutation of Hollywood-style greed is on full
display in Charlie's
light-hearted tone. Most welcome, too, is Demme's benevolent politics. A
climactic, guns-drawn showdown becomes a thought-provoking pacifist statement,
something akin to Hollywood cliché as rethought by Jean-Luc Godard. In our
country's present state of knee-jerk ethnocentrism Demme's "lightweight
entertainment," as some have labeled it, has more profound things to say
than most politicos and their speechwriters could muster in a years-long
campaign.
But back to movie things. The inevitable comparisons between the original Charade's and Charlie's casts make up the
crux of the critical naysayer arguments. Thandie Newton as the widowed Regina
Lambert has enough of Audrey Hepburn's joie de vivre to get off easy in
the critical bashings, but poor Mark Wahlberg as man-of-many-faces Joshua
Peters can't possibly live up to the daunting Cary Grant persona. And the truth
is, of course, that these two actors are nowhere near Grant and Hepburn's
stature. But to that unavoidable fact I posit this question: So what?
The Grant and Hepburn personas couldn't exist nowadays because, to quote an
oft-used cliché, "times have changed." And yet there's a level of
nostalgia built into a cinephile's life. Movies of our youth often entrance us
in the heady rush of adolescent passion that is both a blessing and a curse.
Over time we develop stronger critical faculties; we define our specific tastes
and make more authoritative choices. Thing is, our honed distinction can often
lead to a fuddy-duddy mindset in which we reject what's new because the old
guard supposedly did it better. Much harder is it to be open to the
ever-changing tide of artistic styles and ideas. Certainly we should never reject
the past (it has way too much to teach us), but nor should we lament its
passing into the context of history. So where does that leave us?
In Charlie's
case it leaves us with Wahlberg and Newton, and it is a testament to Demme's
talent that he doesn't attempt to make them into Grant and Hepburn.
Rather, Demme uses their physicality and individual personas as a contrast to
the Hollywood kind of love Grant and Hepburn embodied. Aside from the film's
nonchalant treatment of interracial love, Demme represents this inversion
literally by reversing the male lead's name: Grant's Peter Joshua becomes
Wahlberg's Joshua Peters. Thus is the character imbued with several levels of
contradictions. Wahlberg's brutish, muscular body and off-kilter baby face are
at odds with his attempts to be the dashing playboy. An early sequence has him
wearing a beret that seems ridiculously out of place. The audience always
laughs, and not comfortably so. Yet, like a bullied nerd who's grown a set of cajones,
neither Demme nor Wahlberg apologize for the odd dress. They are not
uncomfortable, we are. The challenge to the audience comes not from the
beret itself, but from the decision that it be worn throughout the movie,
perhaps as a jolting reminder of the Peters character's shifting loyalties.
Over the whole of the story Wahlberg changes wardrobes and identities numerous
times and only at the climax, sitting alone in a nondescript office in a
half-size-too-small business suit (another Demme inversion, perhaps of David
Byrne's "big suit" in the director's concert film Stop Making Sense), do we see the
character for the sad cog in the bureaucratic wheel that he is. It's a
heartbreaking image, a reduction of traditional Hollywood ideas of masculinity
to very human proportions. And so it remains for the city of Paris to finally
take pity on Wahlberg's character providing, in its own way, the film's needed
happy ending.
Newton, a wondrous and glowing dark-skinned beauty, perfectly offsets
Wahlberg's pretty white boy. Demme makes full use of his signature shot—the
camera staring directly into a character's face as if delving into their
souls—on Newton's visage, achieving awe-inspiring results. The power of being
young and in love in Paris is reflected two-fold in Newton's eyes. Stuck alone
in her ransacked apartment in the early going, she readily accepts Wahlberg's
implicit invite for a night on the town. "I need to get out of here,"
she exhales. Her flirty conversation with Wahlberg in the following scene,
observed in reverent silence by a smiling, mustachioed cab driver, ends with an
indelible punchline: The characters raise two unseen wine glasses from below
frame into a gentle clink. Rhetorical and hyperbolic question: Was there ever a
more romantic image in the history of cinema?
Actually, Charlie
is bubbling to the brim with romantic images. In addition to the central love
story, Demme intends Charlie
as a letter of l'amour to the French New Wave filmmakers (Francois
Truffaut's gravestone is lovingly caressed by the camera over the end credits)
who were making their mark around the same time the original Charade was in production.
Imagine Charade
as a collaborative effort between Truffaut and Godard, and you'll have an idea
of what to expect with Charlie.
Demme spices up his film with cameos from New Wave acting icons like Anna
Karina, Magali Noel, and Charles Aznavour (who provides several out-of-nowhere
and enchanting music interludes). These representatives of cinema's past
lovingly guide the new guard through the filmic plot machinations they all know
so well. Wandering like ghosts through Demme's vision of Paris, they haunt this
dreamscape as both reminders and signposts, pointing the way into a joyous
future where all eras of art can co-exist in transcendent purity.
Between Demme's Charlie
and Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale
it seems that Paris, the city of l'amour, is that transcendent, pure
place where two of our best American filmmakers have found the elusive
something that results in cinematic greatness. Like De Palma's film, Demme's Charlie is a spiritual
experience of a kind, cognizant of its own historical muses while confidently
existing in its own time and place, and all the while possessing the power to
inspire those viewers willing to look closer. The truth about Charlie is that there's so
much more here than you've been led to believe.
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [4/10]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Slate (David Edelstein) review
The Film Journal (Peter Tonguette) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
Reel.com review [2.5/4] Tor Thorsen
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Terri Sutton
CultureCartel.com
(Becka Lucas) review [1.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [1.5/5]
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[3.5/4]
Nick's Flick
Picks (Nick Davis) review [C] also reviewing 8
WOMEN
The Filmsnobs
(James Owen) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Gary Mairs
Harvey S. Karten
review [2.5/4]
Movie-Vault.com
(Carl Langley) review
Turner
Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [2/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
hybridmagazine.com review Michelle Fajkus
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[2/4]
Entertainment
Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Jonathan Curiel) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
THE AGRONOMIST
USA (90 mi) 2003
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Jean
Dominique has been renowned for more than 30 years in Haiti for his
fearless, inspirational broadcasts on his station Radio Haiti Inter. During the
Duvalier dictatorships, he faced massive, indeed murderous opposition.
Dominique is a charismatic protagonist, his personal history colourful not only
for his long, evidently satisfying career, his family and his similarly
courageous and committed wife Michèle
Montas, but for how it intersects with and influences the history of Haiti
itself. After a spell in Paris enjoying the nouvelle vague, he returned
home to direct films of his own and open a cinema club, inspiring other
would-be local auteurs. By broadcasting international news, he heightened
awareness among many Haitians of developments in the world outside. In more modest
and effective form here than he has been in his recent feature films, Demme
treats all this in lively but lucid fashion, acknowledging that Haitian history
was shaped in no small way by his own country's leaders and agencies.
Chastening, illuminating and rightly affectionate.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
You
still can see the bullet holes on the facade of Radio Haiti. Perhaps they were
left there as a reminder of the turbulent road to democracy in Haiti, a road
that has since taken another detour. Regardless, they are an appropriate
memorial to Jean Dominique, the radio broadcaster and human rights activist who
defied the despots and military juntas that have plagued Haiti for decades
before he was gunned down in 2000.
Dominique
was not a journalist by training or trade, but (as the title tells us) an
agronomist, without land to cultivate. Jailed for his participation in a
land-reform campaign in the late 1950s, he became inspired by the power of
cinema while visiting Paris and returned to found Haiti's first cinema club (it
was closed in 1965 by "Papa Doc" Duvalier).
Then he
bought Radio Haiti in 1965 and turned what previously was simply an
entertainment medium into a forum for national and international news in
Kreyol, "the language of the people." "A risky business,"
smiles Dominique in one of the many archival interviews that give him voice in
the documentary, for the Duvalier regimes liked to control the flow of
information in Haiti.
More
than simply a portrait of one man who defied dictatorships and championed
grass-roots movements at the risk of his own life, Jonathan Demme's documentary
is the story of Haiti's political and social life in the past half-century.
Demme reveals Dominique's passion, commitment and courage through a wealth of
interviews from the past 20 years, news footage and clips from his radio
broadcasts.
What
Dominique shows us, however, is the tyranny and poverty that Haiti has endured
and America's shameful complicity in Haiti's history. When the despot
"Baby Doc" Duvalier flees Haiti in 1986, we are reminded that he is
carried to safety on an American plane.
Yet
"The Agronomist" is no anti-American screed, but a rousing
celebration of a genuine people's hero and a timely reminder that a free press
is the greatest weapon in the arsenal of democracy and freedom.
Slant
Magazine review
Keith Uhlich
A perfect match of interviewer and subject, The
Agronomist is director Jonathan Demme's informative and emotional video
testimonial to the Haitian radio personality Jean Dominique. Demme, long
fascinated with Haitian culture, history, and politics, began videotaping Dominique
in 1993 during one of the outspoken activist's self-imposed exiles—a result of
Haiti's continual and volatile political upheavals. The Agronomist
portrays the country's tensions as an ongoing fatalistic tragedy, cyclical to
the point of discouragement. Dominique and his companion Michèle Montas provide
an optimistic offset through their involvement in Radio Haiti, which aims to
inform the country's lower classes and give rise to a political voice counter
to the Haitian elite. Framed in one of Demme's signature direct-eyeline
compositions, Dominique's skeletal physique belies his powerful voice and
gesticulations. Taking a page from François Truffaut's The 400 Blows,
Demme freeze-frames his subject during a particularly passionate rant, leaving
Dominique goggle-eyed in a way that is uniquely flattering and ingratiating—his
rhetoric is hypnotic even in silent close-up. This easy identification helps to
carry one over The Agronomist's initial disjointedness. Demme,
rightfully so, attempts to encapsulate Haitian history from the slave revolt of
1803 onwards, but the amount of on-screen text overwhelms at times, taking away
from the director's expressive use of original and stock video footage. Yet
this myriad amount of information is finally appropriate, as it gives us an
emotional sense of Dominique's frustration and passion regarding the country he
loves. An avowed cinephile, Dominique references Alain Resnais's seminal Night
and Fog as the film that turned him on to the political power of the arts,
feeding his anger toward the then-in-power Duvalier regime. That great
documentary arose out of a need to remember a heinous historical time, so it's
perhaps sadly appropriate that The Agronomist never came together as a
movie until a similarly tragic event. Jean Dominique was assassinated in April
2000 outside Radio Haiti and it is around this climactic event that Demme's
picture finds its poetic soul. The intertitles cease and Demme lets the images
of Dominique's funeral play unburdened by voice-over or other easy-way-out
filmic concessions. In a particularly bold single-take sequence, Demme lingers
on Dominique's ashes being poured into a river before numerous onlookers. The
resulting scene reveals profound documentary truths about the weight of a human
life that were so recently muddled by the pseudo-mystical metaphors of 21 Grams. The central metaphor of The
Agronomist—that Dominique is a cultivator of the earth with no true land to
call his own—is itself lovingly disproved by the movie's final sequence. Ever
the humanist, Demme uses the political power of cinema to resurrect Dominique
and re-contextualize one of his happiest moments. As if in answer to Haiti's
continuing cycle of violence, Demme proposes through Dominique a new cycle of
hope.
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw and Bill Chambers
indieWIRE review Peter Brunette
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]
filmcritic.com (David Thomas) review [4/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
DVD Verdict (Adam Arseneau) dvd review
MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [8/10]
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [3/4]
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Tim Knight
DVD Talk (Preston Jones) dvd review [3/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
hybridmagazine.com review Cole Sowell
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review also seen here: SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com review [3/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
Boxoffice Magazine review Susan Green
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle [Jonathan Curiel]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
Time Out London review Geoff Andrew
Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington)
suffers nightmares, related somehow to his experiences in
Given the classic status of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 movie, Jonathan Demme,
his cast and writers Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris were risking ridicule in
taking on another version of Richard Condon’s novel. Happily, this extremely
timely entertainment matches, even perhaps surpasses its predecessor. Suspense
and sly humour are again in abundance, as is political relevance. Here is an
America where truth, democracy and proper ethical considerations are imperilled
not by Cold War enemies but by unbridled late capitalism itself; dynastic
ambition, hollow patriotism, meaningless slogans, the fuelling of fear and
paranoia, media complicity and puppet figureheads under the influence of shady,
self-serving global conglomerates are the order of the day. Nothing surprising
about that, really, except that this is a Hollywood genre movie, and it’s
terrific, for once, to see a sharp, slick, adult, darkly comic thriller whose
more outlandish aspects – brainwashing by implant, say – succeed so well as
metaphors for contemporary reality. The performances (especially that of
Streep) are spot-on, the script extraordinarily up-to-date, and Demme’s
direction – particularly the creation of unease through the subtle use of sound
and odd direct-to-camera dialogue – a real return to form after his last film.
Worryingly superior stuff.
Turner
Classic Movies review Tom Cappello
I keep having this very strange recurring dream. At first
it seems very pleasant as I sit with these elderly women at a quaint garden
party, but suddenly it turns monstrous. Strips of classic films hang from trim
bins all around me, and a man begins to mercilessly chop them to pieces with a
guillotine blade. He has been ordered to do so by one of these genteel old
ladies, and it is as if he has no control of his actions. Slicing and dicing at
will with sprocket holes spewing everywhere. Why is he bent on destroying these
films?
Based on message boards, websites, and Angela Lansbury quotes online, it seems
people have been having this same dream. Remaking classic films for modern
audiences feels like a nightmarish act. "I'm so unhappy," Lansbury
said. "I'm so sorry they had to mess with something that was so
perfect." Film buffs are irate. There is no reason to mess with perfection
and try to improve upon the original film version of The Manchurian
Candidate. Some cinephiles are asking for the heads of Jonathan Demme,
Scott Rudin, and Tina Sinatra on a silver platter for committing such a
blasphemous cinematic act.
Yet most of the reviews say that the new movie works on its own right and
should not be compared to the original. It's more of a straightforward
thriller, whereas the original was an intense psychological melodrama with
elements of black comedy. Tina Sinatra released the rights to the film for a
remake because she says, "(my father) believed, as we do, that premises
can be brought into the future."
Jonathan Demme's take on The Manchurian Candidate really works on a new
level by bringing the paranoid internal conflict of the Bennett Marco (Denzel
Washington) character to the forefront and making it the foundation on which
the entire film is built. Jonathan Demme creates a claustrophobic world where
parental pressure, societal expectations of normalcy, media bombardment,
corporate puppetmasters, and bad science impact the characters. Even people in
the film who do not have brain implants inside them seem to show subtle signs
of brainwashing. Take for instance the opening scene at the Boy Scout meeting
where everyone says all the right things and asks all the right questions of
Bennett Marco, a man who served his country in Desert Storm. Or look at the
Democratic Convention and celebration party where revelers are frothing at the
mouth like Pavlovian dogs willing to believe everything they see. It is all
staged much like current TV -- an invasive presence that runs throughout the
film. Even the visual style supports this internal paranoia with a dearth of
tight close-ups and actors talking directly into the camera. Director of
Photography Tak Fujimoto explains, "(Jonathan Demme) wanted to give
audiences a visual connection between Melvin's room and Marco's mind. In that
way, the cinematography is almost documentary-like, with the camera sort of
poking around, probing to find something in the center of the frame that's not
there."
On an emotional level, The Manchurian Candidate
succeeds, but the film fails when it gets caught up in typical thriller
trappings. All good thrillers have mad scientists, and there is no lack of them
in this one. My personal favorite is the crazy monkey doctor, an Albanian
refugee (played by German actor Bruno Ganz) that has some unexplained
relationship to Bennett Marco, who knows everything about implanted chips in
people and delivers shock therapy as needed. Unfortunately, the emotional
tautness of the film goes slack when it focuses on plot rather than the
characters' inner turmoil. All of this creates severe credibility problems when
men being tracked by the FBI can walk into a political rally, be detected on
camera, be followed the ENTIRE movie around every corner of New York City, and
then be left alone to commit an assassination. The original version of Candidate
works much better on this level, building to a much more disturbing climax.
To say that Jonathan Demme's 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate lacks merit, however, would be
unjust. It's just frustrating to see a potentially great and disturbing
political satire sacrificing compelling character development in favor of convoluted
plot twists.
Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich
The thematic heart of Jonathan Demme's The
Manchurian Candidate is revealed through opposing lines of dialogue spoken
repeatedly by former Army platoon members Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) and
Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber): respectively, "I have dreams"/"I
don't have dreams." Consider the movie surrounding this verbal rhyme as a
dream in itself, color-coated (and coded) as a red, white, and blue
philosophical inquiry into a country where true progress is blocked by a
variety of dichotomous oppositions (Black/White; Republican/Democrat;
Civilian/Politician.) "I ain't no senator's son!" sings Wyclef Jean,
covering Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" over the
film's opening credits. The actors' names wave like defiant American flags in
the breeze and Demme disorients us by fading into a cramped interior space
where a
Demme
often begins a scene in tight, identifying individual faces and personalities
in one of his trademark direct-eyeline close-ups before moving outward and
sketching in the space they inhabit. The squadron's card game is an obvious
referent to the John Frankenheimer Manchurian Candidate, except here it
is what it is—merely a game, not a means to manipulation (and note that the
game played is not the original film's isolationist solitaire). Moving
outwards, Demme places the squadron within a blood-red digital rendering of the
Kuwaiti oil fields, 1991. Questioning our war-torn past (a history the director
constantly represents "like a movie") Demme boldly suggests that we
all have sanguine hands, a crimson-colored culpability that we must come to
terms with at the risk of our own sanity.
The
past is constantly being interrupted in The Manchurian Candidate,
intruded on by a more pressing and paranoia-stricken present. The film's
opening flashback, which culminates in an ambush on Marco and Shaw's platoon,
abruptly flashes-forward on an aural disturbance: a question to Marco from a
Boy Scout. Sound is the key interloper in this Manchurian Candidate. The
steady hum of information, often emanating from crystal-clear, too-lifelike
television images, effectively confuses the reality of every situation and
action, inducing the mindful among us into a deceptive, yet comforting,
white-noise trance (somewhere, Marshall McLuhan cackles.) A trance of sorts is
what preys on Raymond Prentiss Shaw, a literal prisoner to his own name which,
when spoken in a clear, specific order—last name, first name + last name, first
name + middle name + last name—makes him an oblivious slave to corporate wills
(here the shadowy conglomerate Manchurian Global.) This diabolic control switch
provides a kind of masochistic amusement to Raymond's mother, Senator Eleanor
Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), who uses it to further her own sinister,
semi-incestuous agenda, a plot that, at one point, Raymond unconsciously
acknowledges in pun: "I'm a Prentiss. I'm not a Shaw."
Identity
is the solitaire-like trigger of Demme's Manchurian Candidate, a
frightening update to Frankenheimer's war-as-game scenario—except now the
battle is for our very souls. Witness the film's brilliant murder sequence
where Raymond unwittingly drowns two characters beloved to him. Dressed to the
nines in suit and tie, Raymond partially submerges his body as he approaches
the first victim, a forced, half-hearted baptism that eradicates free will from
the spiritual equation. Water imagery recurs throughout the film, suggesting
the fluidity of memory and acting as cosmic balance to the tempestuous
goings-on (the film's ultimate goal is to see the sea.) What Raymond sees in
this sequence is a torturous reflection: a modern-day Narcissus recognizes
himself as a morally devoid shell of a man, his devastating mirror image shot
back like a bullet through a lover's dead gaze. The scene's personalization of
both killer and victims (a consistent Demme trope) only deepens the film's
sense of tragedy and, breathless from this portrayal of man's mechanistic
cruelty, we may be prompted to ask what lies beyond the pitiless mortal coil.
Keeping
with his obsessions, Demme answers by making America a prime supporting
character, juxtaposing its complexities against Marco and Shaw's individual
tragedies and their movie-long philosophical discourse. A sequence where
Marco's confidant Rosie (Kimberly Elise) disrupts an elementary school play
about the Founding Fathers is a particular kind of triumph, a throwaway
transition scene that still manages to contrast an idealized, semi-whitewashed
past (as performed by a multicultural company) with the harsh realities of our
seething, obscured history of sexism and racism. It's to Demme's credit that
his trenchant social criticism is counterbalanced by an effusive love for his
country; even with their scathing critiques his films acknowledge and strive
for an image of
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Manchurian Candidate (2004) Stephen Dalton from Sight and Sound, December 2004
Village
Voice (J. Hoberman) review
Slate (David Edelstein) review
Nick's Flick
Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]
stylusmagazine.com (Jay Millikan) review
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Terri Sutton
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Goatdog's
Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review
[3/5]
Movie-Vault.com
(Julian Boyance) review
World
Socialist Web Site review David Walsh
In
These Times [Michael Atkinson]
Movies into
Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
Reel.com review [4/4] Sarah Chauncey
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3/5]
New
York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [3/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review
[3/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd
review [HD DVD Version]
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [2/5]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere, which also includes: Our
review of the 1962 version
The Onion A.V. Club
[Nathan Rabin]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
Christian
Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review
[3/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [4/5]
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray)
review [B+]
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
The
Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [2.5/5]
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Reel.com dvd review [3/4] James Plath
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review
[3/5]
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [D]
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Alternative
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MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson
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Combustible
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AboutFilm.com
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hybridmagazine.com review Edward Rholes
Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] cartoon
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The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
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Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
NEIL
YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD B+ 90
USA (103 mi)
2006
An intimate,
completely unpretentious, what feels like spiritual tribute, but is in fact
more a living testament, the essence of Neil Young in concert, featuring a
small band along with occasional contributions from Memphis horns, a small
orchestra and a local college gospel choir, filmed over two days at the
legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, a small, intimate setting
in what was once a tabernacle church, using an old beat up guitar that once
belonged to Hank Williams, who last performed on that very same stage with the
Grand Old Opry about 50 or so years earlier.
Supported by a group of musicians that he preferred to call his
“friends,” including his wife Pegi and the irrepressible Emmylou Harris singing
background vocals, the entire performance was toned down and spare, without
spectacle, nothing controversial, no interviews with family and friends, no
images of overzealous fans, simply moving images of performers on stage doing
what they love to do. Demme’s 1984 film
STOP MAKING SENSE created an energetic synthesis of music and imagery, filled
with the off-kilter, poetic interpretations of Talking Heads who seemed a
little out of the mainstream, capturing what felt like a spontaneous artistic
vision that still stands alone as a concert film. A generation ago, Young himself made a
concert film in 1978 RUST NEVER SLEEPS, featuring the incendiary song
“Powderfinger.” This film finds him at a
different stage in his life, almost as if his life is flashing before his eyes
and he is revisiting all the places he has been. Successfully recovering from a recent brain
aneurysm operation, this may indeed have been the inspiration behind the making
of this film.
Shot with small
Super 16 mm cameras, using massive, sliding backdrops painted by Michael Zansky
depicting the spare landscapes of a Canadian prairie life from Young’s
childhood, adding an extra dimension where each song can be a painting within a
painting, capturing close ups and intimate glances between performers who move
around after each song, sometimes featuring a glimpse of musicians we rarely
get to see on stage, even a roadie watching in the wings, Young sounds so
familiar to most of us, his voice so heartfelt and tender, his musical style
unchanged since his early years performing with Crazy Horse. With this film, he cements his legend as
someone who persevered through half a century, from his early rebellious years
to singing on the same stage as the Grand Old Opry, never appearing more mainstream
folksy than he does here. Mixing old
songs with new, he could just as easily be doing a musical version of Garrison
Keillor from the radio show “Prairie Home Companion,” as each song represents a
period in his life when he was thinking of someone, reminding us that these
people reflect the colors of his life, filled with thoughts of death, family,
and friendship, some friends lost along the way, resummoning the places where
he spent his time and the people who meant something to him, including his dog,
King, an old man Lou who was living on the farm he purchased in Canada, and, of
course, his recently deceased father.
The film is dedicated “To Daddy.”
This is some kind of Father’s Day gift, breaking no new ground
artistically, but instead providing a gentle, beautifully understated, humanely
elegant ode to life and love, personified by the closing song, “The Old
Laughing Lady,” sung with just a man and a guitar to an empty unlit house, a
sublime image of craft and musicianship.
Time Out London (Trevor Johnston) review
There are other Neil Young
concert films, of course, most notably 1979’s rudimentary but valuable ‘Rust
Never Sleeps’ and Jim Jarmusch’s 1997 grungefest ‘Year of the Horse’, but this
one is complementary, capturing the long-running rocker at a very particular
moment. Diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening brain aneurysm last
spring, he recorded the ‘Prairie Moon’ album in a matter of days in Nashville
just before surgery – and, after recovery, asked Jonathan
Demme to preserve a subsequent live showcase in the C&W music capital.
So, the Young we see here is not the raw feedback merchant of the Crazy Horse
tours, but a composed veteran reflecting on mortality and core values in a
mellow, lightly countrified vein as his band of top musos shuffle along in
cruise control.
All of which may sound truly soporific to the unconverted, but even those who
haven’t followed Young’s every recent move could well find his performance here
surprisingly captivating. Delivered in front of painted backdrops enshrining
the prairie, log cabin and church, the new-ish material – a direct testament to
the important things in life – proves straightforward, heartfelt and rather
touching, while the show’s back catalogue selections affirm Young the
songwriter’s impressive legacy. Demme’s low-key, attuned direction keeps the
attention on the stage, where the star’s lined features betray almost four
decades in the business, yet his glowing enthusiasm attests to the rejuvenating
quality of gigs like this. An assured filmed record then, and Young’s
affirmation of the centrality of music in his own personal and creative
longevity proves authentically infectious, moving even. The old boy’s not ready
to burn out or fade away just yet.
Exclaim! review Allan Tong
A year ago,
Scattered with personal remembrances and spoken tributes, Heart of Gold is
dedicated to “daddy,” respected
In the first half of the film, Young and his band perform Prairie Wind before
backdrops of a golden field and house, which nicely complement the
cinematography of Ellen Kuras. Demme’s filming and editing are restrained — no
tracking shoots or quick cutaways. Instead, the performances simply unfold. One
touching moment is the duet between Young (playing Hank Williams’ acoustic
guitar) and the ever-luminous Harris on the deeply symbolic “This Old Guitar.”
The full band kicks loose in the film’s second half. Young offers tributes to
his old ranch hand (“Old Man”), his dog (“Old King”), folk pioneers Ian &
Sylvia (“Four Strong Winds”) and, poignantly, old flame Nicolette Larson, who
had a hit with “Comes A Time.”
Well-crafted and tasteful, Heart of Gold remains a conventional concert film,
offering token interviews, while completely ignoring the audience. At times,
Young looks like he’s playing in a vacuum. True, Young does speak through his
songs and intros, which are largely charming and candid, but sometimes they beg
for deeper context.
That said, following the uneven Year of the Horse and the debacle known as
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The path from Stop Making
Sense to Storefront Hitchcock and now Neil Young: Heart of Gold
marks not just a director's trajectory but the progression of life. Each is a
luminous work, celebratory of music, art and human potential, all recordings of
artists at work yet of a piece with the vision of Jonathan Demme, possibly
American cinema's most radiant living humanist. Life and its wondrous flowerings,
bright and dark, are Demme's ongoing themes, although the mortality hanging
pervasively over the director's lovely film of Young's August 2005 concert at
the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville
The Stetson is tipped to father
("I'm trying to remember what my daddy said"), daughter ("You
might say I'm here for you"), spiritual forefather Hank Williams
("This old guitar ain't mine to keep"), and pooch ("That old
King was a friend of mine"), but Twilight Young is scarcely cuddly. This
is the same artist, after all, who made Greendale last year, and whose
"The Needle and the Damage Done" is one of the most chilling drug
laments on record; Demme, himself 62 and responsible for Melvin and Howard
and The Silence of the Lambs (and, above all, the mixture of the
extremes in Something Wild), stages the "Harvest Moon" staple
as a single setup, the camera tracking forward evocatively, as it did backwards
at the close of "I Am a Child," into a needle's eye of a spotlight,
Young's face obscured by the hat, only words and emotions in the darkness. The
gelid Emmylou Harris, Pegi Young, Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, Rick Rosas, Kart
T. Himmel and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers share the stage, but the main
focus remains on the Southern Man, literally the "Old Man" now --
Young's rendition of that trademark hit acknowledges the irony, not with
bitterness but acceptance of the passage of time and, possibly, even death, as
the inside of the Ryman shifts from mock-prairie to stained-glass church. A
communal bow to the audience in the shadows, then one final performance,
"The Old Laughing Lady," with Young with glasses and no hat, picking
his guitar to an empty house as the credits scroll. Keith Uhlich,
characteristically alert and soulful, identified it at Slant as Heaven;
I see it as Earth, transformed by the serenity of age.
Village Voice (Tom Charity) review
"Old man, take a look at my life/I'm a lot like you were . . . " The young hippie who wrote those lines turned 60 last November. Few popular singers have been as mindful of their legacy as Neil Young, nor as indifferent to the expectations of fans, critics, or record labels. In the 1980s Geffen famously sued him for producing records "unrepresentative" of himself, but representing himself is what Neil Young is all about. "Take a look at my life" might be his mantra.
Endlessly prolific and intermittently prodigious, he has
released four original albums, a live disc, an independent film, and a
greatest-hits collection since the turn of the millennium. Diagnosed with a
potentially fatal brain aneurysm last spring, shortly after the death of his
father, Young flew down to
Recorded at the first public performances of Prairie Wind, August 18 and 19 at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium (erstwhile home of the Grand Ole Opry), Neil Young: Heart of Gold recaps and effectively mythologizes this nugget of modern folklore in brief interviews with Young and a band of old reliables, including Spooner Oldham, Grant Boatwright, and Ben Keith.
Plaintive and valedictory, Prairie Wind unfolds as a testament: Almost all the songs default to the first-person singular, and judging by Young's simple, straightforward intros, he means them to be understood as such. "Here for You" is dedicated to a daughter who has left home. "Far From Home" is about the right resting place, and "This Old Guitar" is a tribute to the instrument he "inherited" from Hank Williams and will pass on in turn one of these days. Mortality and remembrance are abiding themes; abiding is another.
Training eight Super-16 cameras and a Steadicam on the show—and none on the audience—Demme reflects the simplicity of the songs' acoustic country arrangements in a languorous lexicon of slow dissolves and close-ups. DP Ellen Kuras gets her shots (Young and Emmylou Harris spotlit centerstage, the auditorium a sea of shadow before them), but the stitching is befittingly ragged.
Canvas backdrops, spartan but expansive, depict the interior of a log cabin fit for giants, a wide-open prairie, or the elongated stained-glass windows of a church. It's the heartland writ large, and the 49th Parallel might as well not exist. Young himself cuts a big, brooding figure in a gray suit, a Stetson crammed low over his eyes. In a flamboyantly mundane bit of staging, guitar tech Larry Cragg picks up a broom and sweeps accompaniment to "Harvest Moon," one of the evocative back-catalog selections from the film's second half.
It's a sentimental show, sure, but Young's pantheistic hymns to family, friendship, and "the time we share together" are nothing if not heartfelt. Turns out it's better to fade away after all. And as the movie's title acknowledges, old Young is not done yet. The opening lines of "Heart of Gold" promise more to come: "I want to live/I want to give."
Slant
Magazine review
Keith Uhlich
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
CBC.ca Arts (Stephen Cole) review
American Cinematographer: Heart and Soul John Pavlus from American Cinematographer, March 2006
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
DVD Verdict (Russell Engebretson) dvd review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto) review [4/5]
stylusmagazine.com (Bob Kotyk) review
Boxoffice Magazine review Francesca Dinglasan
Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Gary Goldstein
eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [5/5]
Reel.com review [3/4] Tim Knight
The New Yorker (David Denby) review Page 2
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[3.5/4]
Variety at Sundance 2006 (Robert Koehler) review
The Guardian (Andrew Pulver) review
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Raoul Hernandez) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle [Joel Selvin]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Neil Young: Heart of Gold - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED A- 94
She used to work in a diner
Never saw a woman look finer
I used to order just to watch her float across the floor
She grew up in a small town
Never put her roots down
Daddy always kept movin’, so she did too.
Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a harley-davidson
Her long blonde hair flyin’ in the wind
She’s been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes.
You know it ain’t easy
You got to hold on
She was an unknown legend in her time
Now she’s dressin’ two kids
Lookin’ for a magic kiss
She gets the far-away look in her eyes.
Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a harley-davidson
Her long blonde hair flyin’ in the wind
Shes been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes.
—Neil Young “Unknown Legend,” neil
young - 1992 - 'Unknown Legend' [studio] - YouTube (4:33)
Written by Jenny Lumet, Sydney Lumet’s daughter, this is one of those nervewracking, autobiographical searches for the missing pieces puzzle, a fiercely intense movie with a distinct emotional tone, which is that of an impending train wreck about to happen, which comes in the form of a former Disney princess (THE PRINCESS DIARIES), Anne Hathaway as Kym, tapping into the manic energy of early Liza Minnelli, sprung from her recent (and still incomplete) stint in rehab to come to her sister’s wedding. Set in a sumptuous estate in Connecticut, Kym finds the overflowing crowd getting on her nerves before she even arrives, finding little solitude or peace, where every conversation turns jarring or confrontational, where it’s clear there’s plenty of unfinished family business here. While no one else is particularly threatening, in fact the landscape on display is an endless picture of multi-ethnic diversity and tolerance, where the bride, Rosemarie Dewitt as Rachel, is marrying a black groom, Tunde Adebimpe. As he’s a musician (in real life a member of TV On the Radio: Official Website), there are a series of different musicians playing quietly off in a corner throughout the entire weekend, creating the impression of a Rennaissance Fair. In addition, several of his friends provide some extraordinary musical heft, adding a defining musical nuance to the film, all of which are brilliantly filmed and integrated into the whole, including the likes of Robyn Hitchcock and Sister Carol, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, performing both solo and with a jazz band, a Brazilian salsa band, Fab 5 Freddy, and during the wedding vows the groom inexplicably breaks into a heartfelt a cappella rendition of Neal Young’s “Unknown Legend.”
A disturbingly dark film bathed in sweetness and light,
Declan Quinn's jittery handheld camera establishes the nervous tone of Kym’s
character, whose acid tongue and incessant rancor with her sister starts out
innocently enough, both over-privileged women who are used to having their way,
with a befuddled father (Bill Irwin) precariously positioned between the two, where
Rachel is sick of her sister stealing the limelight with her largely
self-induced world of woe, but it gets out of hand, especially during one of
the standout sequences in the film, a long, drawn out rehearsal dinner where
the families meet for the first time, which is filled with humor and a spirit
of generosity, where the honored couple obviously adore one another, so the
toasts and tributes (in real time) feel well deserved and genuine, but the
scene of harmony and congeniality curiously extends far too long, which is confusing and at times infuriating. When Debra Winger as the sister’s divorced
mother makes her belated arrival, it’s clear she’s part of a troubled past,
possibly expressed through her divorce, but also by her jittery mood that feels
more like sedated aggravation. By the time
Kym grabs the mike, she takes the air out of the room, as the mood strangely
turns closer to the horror genre, as the tension becomes near unendurable, like
a wedding exorcism. Much of this moment
has the aching feel of exposed nerves rubbed the wrong way, reminding one of an
emotional authenticity right out of Husbands
(1970), featuring the Cassavetes style cinema of discomfort where realism is
expressed through the spontaneous combustion of raw emotions, where the
director intentionally looks behind the various masks people wear in their
awkward and sometimes pathetic search for a sense of belonging. The need for love is paramount, but in this
family setting, despite the protection of wealth and the obvious love in the
air, the hurt feelings and burrowed insecurities instead reveal a horrific
display of dysfunction and human inadequacy, perfectly expressed afterwards by
Rachel’s bitter chastisement of her sister for her reprehensible and
divertingly indulgent toast.
With Hathaway’s remarkable transformance from her earlier association with the innocent and naïve Cinderella character, this is a raw and harrowing journey with an exquisite sense for editing, as cross-cutting throughout the wedding weekend are scenes at Kym’s AA meetings, where people identify they are an addict before confessing something personal about themselves. With the camera not more than a few inches from her face at all times in a signature extended take, Kym reveals her tragic past in an anguished soliloquy of personal sorrow that is perhaps the most stunning revelation in the film. It’s a haunting moment that defines the personal chaos simmering just below the surface ignited by Kym’s all-out assault on pretentiousness and shrouded family secrets. In the same manner, without Kym uttering a single word, her impact is shown in another drawn out scene of seemingly lighthearted gregariousness in the kitchen that turns on a dime, becoming a searing moment of tragic devastation. Kym and her mother on the other hand have a short scene, a burst of unforgettable power with tragic consequences, the impact of which reverberates throughout the rest of the film, where despite one’s best efforts, imperfections can get the best of us, where failings may end up defining our humanity, as if there are built-in family blinders hampering human development. Kym’s reaction to this is profound, as the love she needs from her mother, something she’s always counted on, may have dried up years ago. When she finally arrives at the door for the wedding ceremony with the look of a long lost, wounded puppy, the moment of intimacy between the sisters is like a baptism washing the sins away. Winger may not have a lot of screen time, as the film clearly belongs to Hathaway from start to finish, but the ambiguity of her character and the far reaching impact her troubles have heaped upon her family leaves everyone involved in a state of emotional disrepair. Balanced against a weekend long party celebration where most everyone else is upbeat and hopeful, featuring so much that is positive, Winger’s forced appearance, as if against her will, and Hathaway’s descent into her own personal hell lead to a series of rude awakenings that threaten to derail the entire proceedings. What we get instead is an incisive study of the human condition, where closure may be an illusion, but love is the best option to fend off all impending doubts that plague our weary and beleaguered souls about our worthiness to stand up to our own worst enemy, ourselves.
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] at Toronto
Still, at the mid-fest point,
Constantly teetering on the brink of hysteria and frequently tipping over into it, Rachel contains one 12-step program, two face-slappings, a car crash, an accidental drowning, multiple scenes of benevolent black folk (are there any other kind?) delivering soulful words of wisdom, and, before the end credits roll, copious tears and reconciliation. Some have likened Demme's film to Noah Baumbach's recent Margot at the Wedding, which is actually more like the kind of movie Demme used to make—the ones where the characters had edges and dimensions, and could be by turns loving and cruel, noble and deplorable. Here, we don't doubt for a second that we're watching a bunch of virtuous, good-hearted people who will manage to work out all of their problems, live happily ever after, and vote for Obama.
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Scott Tobias
The Jonathan Demme
touch, like the famed "Lubitsch touch," isn't easy to define, because
it isn't based on any clear stylistic signatures or some uniform, easily
recognizable approach to varied material. At his best—and his new movie, Rachel
Getting Married, finds him in peak form—Demme is simply the most humane of
directors, capable of projecting warmth, vibrancy, and compassion without the
labored earnestness of someone like John Sayles. One of the wonderful things
about Rachel Getting Married is that it has no villains; all the major
characters have the best intentions yet they can't keep from hurting each other
anyway. And as they all convene for the ultimate family affair, a wedding,
there's a heartbreaking tension between the bond that brings them together in
celebration and the perhaps irreparable fissures that threaten to sabotage the
weekend.
Showing depths she's
never come close to suggesting before, Anne Hathaway plays an addict newly
sprung from rehab and headed to suburban Connecticut for sister Rosemarie
DeWitt's wedding weekend. It's a volatile situation: Hathaway has long ago lost
everyone's trust and confidence in her recovery, and for her, being around
family makes her more vulnerable to backsliding, not less. In a weekend that's
supposed to be all about the bride, Hathaway's self-absorption promises to be a
huge distraction if she can't pull herself together. Though her father (Bill
Irwin) touchingly attempts to cheerlead the family back on its feet, their
problems run deep, exacerbated by ex-wife Debra Winger's presence and a past
tragedy that still lingers.
Based on that
description, Rachel Getting Married sounds like a joyless dirge, but
it's actually far from it, and a lot of that is owed to the way Demme harnesses
the genuine love and good feeling that buoys the occasion. If he ever retires
from directing, he could have a great side business as a wedding planner: The
rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, and the reception are brimming with sweet
multi-culti touches and great music, including performances by the likes of
Robyn Hitchcock and TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. (The cutting of the cake,
for one, may be the most moving moment in the whole movie.) With an easy,
freeflowing style—owing partially to the Dogme-style approach that has led some
to compare the film to The Celebration—Demme captures the group dynamic
of the wedding party, with its seismic shifts in mood from celebratory to
melancholy and back again. It may be painful at times, but Rachel Getting
Married sure is one heck of a party.
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Here are two arguments
against seeing Jonathan Demme's remarkable "Rachel Getting Married."
I hope they won't deter you, but in the interest of full disclosure let's get
them out of the way. "Rachel" is similar in theme, though only in
theme, to last year's "Margot at the Wedding." And you're unlikely to
mistake it for drawing-room comedy. The heroine -- not Rachel, but her sister,
Kym -- is the living, breathing, smoking, joking, snarling, mood-swinging
embodiment of narcissistic desperation. That said, the young actress who plays
her, Anne Hathaway, sweeps away all clinical categories with a performance of
phenomenal energy and heartbreaking beauty.
The script was written
by Jenny Lumet in a loose, graceful style that allows the story to flow -- or
sometimes ramble -- freely, and gives the actors all the room they need to
invent and discover as they go along. (Declan Quinn's multiple cameras go with
the flow as if they were all-seeing eyes.) As the film begins, Kym, who's been
in and out of rehab for a decade, leaves a rehab clinic to go home for her
sister's wedding. There, her feverish need for attention and atonement
threatens to turn her into a human wrecking ball, not that her illness hasn't
already inflicted collateral damage on the family. One tacit subject -- in a
movie that declines to divide itself by subject matter -- is the intricacy of
dysfunction; what is cause and what's effect in Kym's tortured family romance?
And what of her future? Not every wounded spirit can be healed; her wounds go
fearfully deep.
If "Rachel
Getting Married" were about dysfunction and nothing else, you might want
to skip it, Ms. Hathaway's brilliance notwithstanding. But the life that swirls
around Kym before, during and after her sister's densely populated, wonderfully
detailed wedding seems to have been caught on the fly in all its sweetness,
sadness and joy. (In its free-form style the film constitutes an elaborate
homage to Robert Altman.) Rosemarie Dewitt makes Rachel an intriguing character
in her own right. Bill Irwin is the sisters' rigid, earnest father; Debra
Winger is their scary, semidetached mother; and the groom, Sidney, is played by
the actor and musician Tunde Adebimpe. I've saved him for last because Sidney
is a musician, many of his friends perform at the wedding, and music --
Jonathan Demme's faithful muse -- is the force that drives the drama once the
ceremonies get under way. It's a life force that plays against Kym's penchant
for self-destruction, and the contest is thrilling.
The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [4/4]
There is jagged
pain, but joy too; there is love and simmering hatred, laughter and anger,
feelings stripped bare and buoyed up. All these opposites compellingly co-exist
in Rachel Getting Married. But there's an important omission too.
Although the ghost of a past tragedy permeates every frame, not a single
flashback appears. None is needed. Instead, like a compulsory guest at the head
table, the past is constantly present and, as it does at every wedding, waits
for its betrothal to the future - what we were marching down the aisle
with what we might become. That's why the marriage ritual, filled with
hope and fraught with anxiety, is so resonant, and never more than in Jonathan
Demme's intriguing, disturbing, uplifting evocation. In fact, to watch this
film is to engage in participatory art - for better and for worse, through
sickness and in health, we're drawn deeply in.
Admittedly, many
movies have employed the focused lens of a funeral or wedding to peer into the
dysfunctions of a troubled family. But Demme, working from a nuanced script by
Jenny Lumet (yes, Sidney's daughter), has forged a unique partnership of his
own, linking the dramatic flair of his fictional features to the hand-held
immediacy of his documentary work. The result combines close-up intimacy with
an edge-of-your-seat tension that will have you leaning into the screen, often
uncomfortable but always entranced.
The action - I
use the word advisedly, this is an emotional-action flick - races over a
weekend in an upscale Connecticut house, the site of both the wedding and the
attendant turmoil. Granted temporary leave from her latest rehab centre, Kym
(Anne Hathaway) shows up for her sister's nuptials toting a whole lot of
baggage - an aborted career as an actress; a severe addiction to drugs; and
direct responsibility for that tragedy's ghost. She was driving, stoned, when
the car careened off the bridge, sparing her but killing her young brother
Ethan. The child's death, we infer, led to the demise of her parents' marriage
- each has since found another partner. Now this marriage has them all
reuniting again, in the same house that used to be a home.
As Kym arrives,
the place is alive with the bustle of activity and the strains of violins,
guitars, saxophones. Paul the father (Bill Irwin) is a record executive, and
counts musicians among his closest friends - they're on hand to provide the
music for the wedding and thus, in a lovely display of diegetic sound, the
score for the film. Sidney the groom (Tunde Adebimpe) is a musician too and
later, poignantly, vows that he feels for his bride the same passion that he
once thought only music could inspire. The bride is white, the groom is black,
yet the script never mentions their difference in colour. Within this assembly,
integration is a given, unworthy of comment. No, the disharmony is elsewhere,
and that discord lies deep.
We hear it in
the initial encounter between Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Kym, the
"good" sibling and the bad. The exchange is sharp, because the
responsible lamb shares with the black sheep the same quick mind and caustic
tongue, a taste for irony with a sarcastic residue. And the lamb wants this day
to herself, unsullied by her sister's chronic narcissism. Their bond is
obviously strong, yet so are the accreted layers of anger and resentment. This
is the complex stew that bubbles, then comes to a rolling boil at the rehearsal
dinner - the first, and longest, of several extraordinarily intense sequences
to come.
Intense, indeed.
Handling his ensemble cast and their overlapping dialogue with Altmanesque
dexterity, Demme sits us down at the table. We're right there for the gaiety
spontaneous and forced, for the speeches gracious and cringe-making. Most
distressingly, though, we're there for the feared yet inevitable moment when
Kym seizes the microphone. She's a mass of good intentions gone horribly sour,
unable to stop from embarrassing herself and everyone around her. Hathaway, who
hinted at her potential in Brokeback Mountain, is a revelation in this
scene, oscillating from bravado to brittleness, revealing the inner hell of a
woman doubly mired in guilt, bearing the twin burdens of her addiction and her
addiction's deadly legacy.
This charged
sequence is a gateway leading to others equally raw. Like the sisters'
confrontation, where DeWitt plays off Hathaway superbly, showing us the depth
of Rachel's enmity, a hardened crust that she's unable or maybe just unwilling
to soften. And like Kym's harrowing confession at a parallel gathering, an AA
meeting, which she punctuates with this awful burst of candour: "Sometimes
I don't want to believe in a God that would forgive me."
But not
everything is gloom. As the wedding progresses, as the crowd swells, laughter
can be heard, love can be felt, and there's always the music, an omnipresent
gift. The point is not that darkness abounds, but that every emotion contains
the seeds of its opposite, and the two can turn in a nanosecond. Watch for a
scene that involves loading a dishwasher, where hilarity suddenly ends in
despair. And watch for another with Kym and her mother Abby (Debra Winger),
where empathy switches instantly to rage. Yet watch too for a silent and
gorgeously still tableau, when the sinner returns with her sins compounded,
only to find what she least expects - absolution, a literal cleansing from a
forgiving hand.
But don't get
too hopeful, at least not before pondering a final heartless moment. After the
drinks have been drunk and the dances danced, the happy bride and her bruised
sister reach out to a mother they've lost, and receive in return only a peck on
the cheek that leaves the faintest trace of lipstick, just the shadow of a
kiss. Some addicts bury their feelings in a fog of drugs, others in a thick
haze of politeness; both are habits hard to kick.
Cinematical (James Rocchi) review
Rachel Getting Married is a terse, smart, funny and
tough family drama about forgiveness and failure written by Jenny Lumet; it's
also a loose, smart, broad and bright film about family and love directed by
Jonathan Demme. When these two things are in sync, the end result is something
truly impressive – a moving story that appeals to your heart and soul without
insulting your intelligence, a film full of big scenes that never stoops to the
most obvious possible iteration of those big scenes, a movie loaded with great
and sincere performances from the top down. When the two parts of Rachel
Getting Married fall out of synch – as they do, most notably, in the
last third of the film during Demme's raucous, joyous post-wedding reception –
it's less catastrophic than it is curious, and the final film is still very
much worth watching.
Rachel (Rosemarie
DeWitt) is getting married; her little sister Kym (Anne
Hathaway) is coming for the big event ... which involves getting picked up
from her most recent stay at a rehab clinic. A cynic could look at Hathaway's
part in Rachel Getting Married and paraphrase Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic
Thunder: Always go full rehab. And while it's true that the Academy and
critics tend to reward gritty, hyperbolic portraits of drug-addiction's misery,
the fact is that Hathaway's Kym is not quite as simple as that. Kym knows all
the things she's done wrong; she also knows she'll keep doing some of them.
Immediately, in the car, the lines of battle are drawn, with Kym going on the
offense as part of her defense mechanisms, asking her dad (Bill Irwin)
and step-mother (Anna
Deavere Smith) about how Rachel's holding up: "Are all of her latent
food issues coming up? Is she still hoarding Snickers and Cool Whip under the
bed?" Soon, Kym's plunged into the thick of the preparations for Rachel's
wedding, responding to the chaos by adding to it. ...
Shot with hand-held cameras, Rachel Getting Married brings us into the
heart of a family, but, to screenwriter Lumet's credit, never over-explains
itself or says everything out loud. In the rehearsal dinner, Kym offers a toast
to Rachel and her fiancée Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe) that starts as an
attention-begging bit of showboating ("I'm Shiva the destroyer, and I am
your harbinger of doom for the evening ...") and continues as Kym flays
herself to the bone in front of the crowd, her self-serving self-loathing
punctuated by asides of nervous laughter as if she were terrified of silence.
Hathaway may be best-known for her porcelain good looks, but here she digs in
to a character, hard enough to show bruises, and she does not make Kym
'sympathetic' so much as she builds Kym into a person who earns our sympathy.
But Rachel Getting Married is hardly a one-woman show; Bill Irwin has a
few great moments as Kym and Rachel's father; DeWitt manages to capture both
sibling rivalry and sisterly compassion, petty jealousy and rough-hewn
forgiveness; as Kym's mother, Debra Winger, much like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary
People, plays a person both cut off from her feelings and captured in the
grip of them. On the groom's side, Adabimpe is stalwart as Sidney, while Mather
Zickel gives a funny, charming, loose performance as best man Kieran, who
has more in common with Kym than just a big role in the ceremony.
Lumet's script is, perhaps, the best thing about Rachel Getting Married;
many things are left unsaid, many things are unexplained, and many things are
said and explained through the natural ebb and flow of the conversation. Lumet
has an ear for dialogue, but she also has an eye for detail, like when Kym
steps into "her" room at the family's house; it's preserved as if in
amber, still and airless and perfect and dead. Lumet also captures the jumbled,
joyous chaos of a modern wedding -- the weird mix of territorial squabbles over
everything from seating charts to roles in the bridal party and warm, loving,
celebration. And as we go from rehearsal to reception, difficulty to disaster,
we learn how much Kym truly has to atone for, and Hathaway, Demme and Lumet
bring to life someone who has, through her own fault, earned a crushing sorrow
that she will feel every day of her life: Kym notes, of her gravest error, how
"I can live with it, but I can't forgive myself ..."; Hathaway makes
us believe it. At the same time, Rachel Getting Married is very funny --
from quick-cut gags to smart character-driven asides to a character's explosion
of annoyance late in the film that may echo the audience's feelings about one
of the film's devices.
Director Demme has spent the past few years making glossy entertainments (The
Trouble with Charlie, The Manchurian Candidate) and digital
documentaries (Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains, Neil Young: Heart of
Gold). Rachel Getting Married offers him a chance to get back to his
roots while still displaying all the talent and craft that moved him forward;
the decision to shoot the film, in his words, "like the most beautiful
home movie ever made," does a lot to help build the intimate, inside mood
of the film. If one thing seems at odds with the small-scale, carefully-crafted
tone of Lumet's script, it's the excess and enthusiasm that Demme brings to the
closing reception scenes.
I can accept that Rachel and Sidney's wedding is full of talented friends and,
thanks to Sidney's career in the industry, live music; when Robyn Hitchcock and
Sister Carol perform at the reception, I found myself distracted, Demme's
desire to include his talented friends undercutting the talent he had
shown in telling the story. Even with that minor moment of excessive exuberance
-- and, really, who among us hasn't been inspired to an excess of exuberance at
a wedding? -- Rachel Getting Married is a rich, real and smart drama,
one that doesn't just mark the arrival of an exciting new screenwriter; Rachel
Getting Married may wind up being the film that took Anne Hathaway from
being a name-brand movie star to being recognized as a talented, committed and
gifted actress.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Rachel Getting Married (2008) Philip
Kemp from Sight and Sound, February
2009
my review. Victor Morton from Rightwing Film Geek
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
indieWIRE review Michael Koresky
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Twitch (Michael Guillen) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad
filmcritic.com (Jesse Hassenger) review [3.5/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [3/4]
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Paste Robert Davis
Screen International review Fionnuala Halligan in Venice
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B]
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/6]
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
DeMott,
Joel and Jeff Kreines
SEVENTEEN
USA (120 mi) 1983
Teen Screen, Winter 2010, Block Cinema, Block Museum, Northwestern ...
Originally commissioned for PBS, this remarkable documentary centers on Lynn Massie, a precocious, sharp-tongued teen, and her hard-partying friends in Muncie, Indiana. The network ultimately balked at the unflinchingly candid final cut, as filmmakers DeMott and Kreines showed no desire to candy coat the lives of their teenage subjects, covering binge drinking, racism, and other subjects deemed too hot for public television. Seventeen is arguably one of the best (if little known, and rarely screened) portraits of American youth ever captured on film.
Seventeen | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Made for the PBS series Middletown but never aired, this 1983 cinema-verite documentary by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines follows a working-class high school girl from Muncie, Indiana, through her senior year. The filmmakers abandon the distance generally associated with the verite movement: their style is warm, intimate, almost embracing. And yet this approach risks turning their subject into a conventional audience identification figure—a "star." She gradually loses her humanity, and becomes a vehicle for the filmmakers' liberal-humanist values: a real-life Norma Rae. 120 min.
User reviews from imdb Author: djtet from Niantic, CT
Check the demographic breakdown for the user ratings. Fascinating.
Apparently young men think this is awful while middle-aged guys (yeah, that's
me) think it's great.
What this is, is simply the most intimate documentary ever made, and it's
subjects are 'regular people', specifically lower-middle-class teens in Muncie,
Indiana. I guess some reviewers feel such folks aren't worth making a film
about, and would rather watch movies about wizards and elfin princesses. For
those who find reality interesting, 'Seventeen' is 'direct cinema' (aka cinema
verite) taken as far as the form can go. It was shot with a fixed focal length
wide-angle lens, which means that the camera is basically within 4-8 feet of
the subjects most of the time. This yields amazing revelatory moments, and perhaps
a sense of queasiness on exactly the same grounds, the subjects are pretty
exposed. This caused a fair amount of controversy. The film had been
commissioned for a PBS series, and PBS (cowards) dropped it. The film has
continued to be largely repressed, and is seldom screened. If you get a chance
to see it, DO NOT PASS IT UP. You will never see anything else quite like it,
and whether you 'like' it or not it's a unique and thought provoking
experience.
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
One of the highlights from Film Comment Selects this year was the
screening of Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines's underseen cinéma vérité film, Seventeen,
a reverent and candid cross-cultural portrait of working class high school
students from Muncie, Indiana that was once deemed objectionable for broadcast
on PBS (the film had been commissioned as part of a documentary series on
middle America) for confronting such (still) relevant social issues as race
relations, drug use, unplanned pregnancy, underaged drinking, and dying young.
Loosely centered on a headstrong girl named Lynn and her circle of friends, the
film opens to the shot of Lynn and her classmates half-heartedly following the
teacher's baking instructions, instead, using the hour to socialize with
friends. In a way, the cooking lesson serves as a metaphor for the students'
casual preparation for their transition into adulthood as well, having been
filmed over the course of a year (the span of time subtly framed between
varsity season and the senior prom). In one episode, news of Lynn's flirtation
with an African American student named John sends the campus gossip mill abuzz,
inciting the burning of a cross in her parents' yard and repeated telephone
harassment by a young woman who may be one of John's acquaintances. In another
episode, fellow cooking student, Robert confirms to the teacher that he is
father of a pregnant student's baby, despite having ended the relationship with
the girl earlier, and is unjudgingly counseled by the well-intentioned teacher
on parental responsibilities. In still another episode, an alcohol-fueled party
at Lynn's house becomes a sobering reminder of mortality when a mutual friend
is gravely injured after a car accident. DeMott and Kreines insightfully frame
the students within the context of home economics and sociology classes that
serve to reflect the teenagers' interpersonal relationships, further
reinforcing the integral role of the school experience as both a microcosm of
an individual's domestic and social environments, and a real-life civics lesson
on the importance of contributing to society.
Joel Demott and Jeff Kreines' 'Seventeen' | International ... Amanda Micheli from Documentary.org
I first saw Seventeen almost 20 years ago, and it took me that many years to find it again. It was my sophomore year of college; I was studying filmmaking in a program at Harvard that exposed me to a wide array of seminal, if obscure documentary films. Seventeen was the one that changed my entire appreciation and understanding of movies. Call it “direct cinema,” call it “cinema vérité” —whatever the label, this is a powerful form of storytelling that contains more truth than any fact-filled historical documentary and more human drama than any Hollywood blockbuster I had ever seen.
This incredible film unfortunately fell victim to a distribution disaster that the filmmakers bitterly resent to this day. It was one of a six-part PBS series slated to air in 1982 called Middletown, inspired by a famous anthropological study of Muncie, Indiana. Things got ugly when Xerox, the corporate sponsor of the series, caught wind that the film showed interracial romance and contained vulgar language. Xerox systematically shut the film down; Seventeen was effectively censored by its corporate sponsor (a real no-no for “public” television) and to this day has never been aired. Today, you can’t find it on Netflix, you can’t rent it at your local video store; it’s a rare specimen sighted only at cinematheques and universities.
The thing that makes Seventeen worth hunting down is the incredible, delicate access that the filmmakers negotiated with the people they were filming. Joel Demott and Jeff Kreines, each armed with a one-man-band 16mm camera and tape-recorder rig (!), would split up; she filmed with the girls, he with the boys. They lived in Muncie for over a year, but unlike those of us now accustomed to burning videotape, they shot at a conservative ratio of 30-to-1. They filmed exclusively hand-held, wide and close, and rarely ever got an establishing shot; they just hung close with the working-class kids of Muncie’s Southside High School.
There are no graphics (not even one lower-third), no dramatic score, no catchy montages; there’s hardly even a credit roll. The only score is what the kids blast in their Lincoln Continentals and request on their local radio station. The film starts unassumingly, at an excruciatingly slow pace, in Ms. Hartley’s loathsome Home-Ec class, much like the start of any dreaded day in high school. The story unfolds with Zen-like patience and grows with powerful momentum into a crescendo of conflict and chaos, without ever sensationalizing.
I was lucky enough to go to one the best public high schools in the country, but even so, the painful scenes of race and class tension, sexual exploits and after-kegger tragedies in Seventeen are all too familiar. Even more than my own experience, the scenes recalled what I witnessed as my older sister, class of 1982, feathered her hair and partied with the townies when rock was really Rock and everybody drove drunk. Neither the canon of fictional teen dramas nor “Reality” TV have even a hint of Seventeen’s authenticity; this is a haunting view into the all-too-real world of working-class teenagers, numbing themselves from the ugly adult culture around them—as the filmmakers say in their own press notes, “fighting and fucking” their way through high school.
The good news is that, 25 years later, the filmmakers are working on getting this film back into the mix. And trust me, it’s worth the wait.
Encore - Film Society of Lincoln Center Rob Nelson from Film Comment, November/December 2008
Learning the Truth at Seventeen in 'American Teen' - July 25, 2008 ... Steve Dollar from The NY Sun, July 25, 2009
40 Frames - Screening Archives - Winter/Spring 2006
Montgomery Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, 2009 – 2010
New challenges for documentary - Google Books Result New Challenges for Documentary, by Alan Rosenthal, pages 354 – 355.
The other side of Middletown: exploring Muncie's African American ... - Google Books Result The other side of Middletown: exploring Muncie's African American community, by Luke E. Lassiter, pages 40 – 43.
'American Teen': Archetype Casting | NevadaAppeal.com Dan Zak from The Washington Post, Juluy 30, 2008
Film Shorts - Portland Mercury March 30, 2006
San Francisco Bay Guardian : Article : GREATER THAN OVER THE EDGE Johnny Ray Huston from San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 15, 2006, also seen here: SF360:Features - Seventeen reasons why "Seventeen" might be the ... Seventeen reasons why “Seventeen” might be the greatest movie about teenagers ever made, by Johnny Ray Huston from SF 360, August 17, 2006 (pdf format)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Demy,
Jacques
Demy,
Jacques World Cinema
One of the outstanding filmmakers of post-war
— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema
Film
Reference Robin Wood, updated by Rob Edelman
Jacques Demy's first feature film, Lola, is among the early distinguished products of the New Wave and is dedicated to Max Ophüls. These two facts in conjunction define its particular character. It proved to be the first in a series of loosely interlinked films (the intertextuality is rather more than a charming gimmick, relating as it does to certain thematic preoccupations already established in Lola itself); arguably, it remains the richest and most satisfying work so far in Demy's erratic, frustrating, but also somewhat underrated career.
The name and character of Lola (Anouk Aimée) herself can be traced to two previous celebrated female protagonists: the Lola Montès of Max Ophüls's film of that name, and the Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich) of von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, to which Demy pays homage in a number performed by Aimée in a top hat. The explicit philosophy of Lola Montès ("For me, life is movement") is enacted in Demy's film by the constant comings and goings, arrivals and departures, and intricate intercrossings of the characters. Ophüls's work has often been linked to concepts of fate; at the same time the auteurs of the early New Wave were preoccupied with establishing Freedom—as a metaphysical principle, to be enacted in their professional methodology. The tension between fate and freedom is there throughout Demy's work. Lola's credit sequence alternates the improvisatory freedom of jazz with the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. The latter musical work is explicitly associated with destiny in the form of the huge white American car that brings back Michel, Lola's lover and father of her child, who, like his predecessors in innumerable folk songs, has left her for seven years to make his fortune. No film is more intricately and obsessively patterned, with all the characters interlinked: the middle-aged woman used to be Lola (or someone like her), her teenage daughter may become Lola (or someone like her). Yet neither resembles Lola as she is in the film: everyone is different, yet everyone is interchangeable.
Two subsequent Demy films relate closely to Lola. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Roland, Lola's rejected lover, recounts his brief liaison with Lola to the visual accompaniment of a flashback to the arcade that was one of their meeting-places. In addition, Lola herself reappears in The Model Shop. Two other films are bound in to the series as well. Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is linked by means of a certain cheating on the part of Demy—Lola has been found murdered and dismembered in a laundry basket, but the corpse is a different Lola. Especially poignant, as the series continues, is the treatment of the abrupt, unpredictable, seemingly fortuitous happy ending. At the end of Lola, Lola drives off with Michel and their child (as Roland of Parapluies, discarded and embittered, departs on his diamond-smuggling trip to South Africa). At the conclusion of Le Baie des Anges—a film that, at the time, revealed no connection with Lola—Jackie (Jeanne Moreau), a compulsive gambler, manages to leave the casino to follow her lover before she knows the result of her bet: two happy endings which are exhilarating precisely because they are so arbitrary. Then, several films later, in Model Shop, Lola recounts how her great love Michel abandoned her to run off with a compulsive gambler called Jackie. Thus both happy endings are reversed in a single blow. It is not so much that Demy doesn't believe in happy endings: he simply doesn't believe in permanent ones (as "life is movement"). The ambivalent, bittersweet "feel" of Demy is perhaps best summed up in the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, where the lovers, now both married to others, accidentally meet, implicitly acknowledge their love, and return with acceptance to the relationships to which they are committed.
Outside the Lola series, Demy's touch has been uncertain. His two fairy-tale films, Peau d'ane and The Pied Piper, unfortunately tend to confirm the common judgment that he is more a decorator than a creator. But he should not be discounted. A Room in Town, a return to the Lola mode if not to the Lola characters, was favorably received. Demy's final two credits, Parking and Three Places for the 26th, are musicals which disappointed in that they were unable to capture the spark of his earlier work. Agnes Varda, his wife of almost three decades, then directed a film about Demy titled Jacquot de Nantes, which was released a year after his death. The film is a poignant, straight-from-the-heart record of the measure of a man's life, with Varda shifting between interviews with Demy (tenderly shot in extreme close-up), sequences from his films, and a narrative which details the youth of Demy in Nantes during the 1940s and relates how he cultivated a love of the movies. The film works best, however, as a beautiful and poignantly composed love letter. Its essence is summed up in one of its opening shots: the camera pans the content of a watercolor, focusing first on a nude woman, then on a nude man, and finally on their interlocking hands.
Jacquot de Nantes is obviously a very personal film. But it was not meant to be a tribute; rather, it was conceived and filmed when Demy was still alive. "Jacques would speak about his childhood, which he loved," Varda explained at a New York Film Festival press conference. "His memories were very vivid. I told him, 'Why don't you write about them?' So he did, and he let me read the pages. The more he wrote the more he remembered—even the names of the children who sat next to him in school. Most children do not know what they want to do when they grow up. But Jacques did, from the time he was 12. He had an incredible will. So I said, 'This [material] would make a good film.' I wrote the script, and I tried to capture the spirit of Jacques and his family, and the way people spoke and acted in [the 1940s]. We shot the film in the exact [locations] in which he grew up. I also filmed an interview with him. It's just Jacques speaking about his childhood. It's not a documentary about Jacques Demy. It's just him saying, 'Yes, this is true. This is my life.' "He saw most of the final [version]. When Jacques 'went away,' I had to finish the film. It was difficult, but that's the only thing I know. I think the film makes Jacques very alive."
Demy was the subject of two follow-ups to Jacquot de Nantes, also directed by Varda: The Young Girls Turn 25, a sentimental reminiscence of the filming of The Young Girls of Rochefort and The World of Jacques Demy, an intensely intimate documentary-biography which includes clips from his films and interviews with those who worked with and respected him.
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Jacques Demy Caroline E. Layde from Senses of Cinema
"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] The Films of Jacques Demy
Flickhead Article (2004) L’ Univers de Jacques Demy, by Ray Young from Flickhead
young girls of rochefort | imodernreview July 3, 2012
Demy, Jacques They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
LOLA A 98
France Italy (90 mi) 1961 ‘Scope
Simultaneously a
tribute to Max Ophüls (to whom it is dedicated), Nantes (its setting), American
musicals, and the joyous but always glorious romantic roundelay centred on the
alluring and enigmatic presence of Aimée's eponymous cabaret-dancer, forced to
choose between a trio of lovers. Its breezy tone, narrative coincidences,
circling camera, and overall brio suggest a certain superficiality, but
at its heart lies a wistful awareness that happiness in love is both transient
and largely dependent on chance. Very beautifully shot, in widescreen and
luminous black-and-white, it is also formally astonishing, with all the minor
characters serving as variations on the central couple.
Lola
Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader
Jacques Demy's first and in some
ways best feature (1961, 90 min.), shot in exquisite black-and-white 'Scope by
Raoul Coutard, is among the most neglected major works of the French New Wave.
Abandoned by her sailor lover, a cabaret dancer (Anouk Aimee) brings up their
son while awaiting his return and ultimately has to choose among three men.
Chock-full of film references (to The Blue Angel, Breathless,
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Revived at Film Forum in a new 35mm print, Jacques Demy's 1961
Lola is a benign Blue Angel, in which the eponymous cabaret
chanteuse and inadvertent heartbreaker (Anouk Aimée) waits patiently for the
lover who abandoned her seven years before.
Demy's insouciant first feature—shot by Raoul Coutard in black-and-white
Cinema-scope in Demy's hometown of
In between café blah-blah and wistful set pieces, Lola toys with a
blatantly underdeveloped criminal subplot, but Demy is far more interested in
evoking the excitement of first love and old movies than orchestrating a
shoot-'em-up. The sailors on leave have their own On the Town moves and
Michel Legrand's score bubbles up under the most banal interactions. Like a
In an time when gunmen walk on ceilings, when men morph into
monsters before our eyes, when future governors of
Or maybe I should say “lives.” Set in the dreary French
Lola’s world is populated by a similarly picturesque group: a young man
who falls in love with her upon visiting Nantes, a sailor who is kind to her son
and who loves her in his own way, the troupe of “singers” with whom she works
in the cabaret, a 14-year-old girl to whom all of life is romance. When Lola
reaches its improbable surprise conclusion, the lives of all of these men and
women are impacted in a way that literally, in my case, can make a grown man
cry. It’s the purest screen magic.
Lola was Demy’s first feature, and it placed him immediately on the
roster of French New Wave mythmakers whose ranks included Truffaut and Godard.
The story was taken up again by the director in his peerless Umbrellas
of Cherbourg a few years later; in that outing, the characters literally
sang every line, as though a romance so intense as that depicted in these two
films could find no other channel. Anouk Aimée, as Lola (the name is a tribute
to Marlene Dietrich in The
Blue Angel), gives a star-making performance; if she never quite
equaled it again, it’s less her fault and more the case that a role like Lola
is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any actress. Raoul Coutard, famed for
his work with Godard, shot the film in a spotless black-and-white, and that
other New Wave stalwart, composer Michel Legrand, provided the rich score.
Screen magic like Lola is rarely found. Its new availability on DVD
restores a true classic to the video shelves.
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014
Lola: Demy’s Paradise Found Criterion essay by Ginette Vincendeau, July 21, 2014
On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014
Lola (1961) - The Criterion Collection
Film Freak Central Travis Hoover
Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara
The
Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters
John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ...
Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve
Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray
Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray
THE
DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Mondo
Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar
Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict
Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing THE BAY OF ANGELS
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing THE BAY OF ANGELS
Criterion's
"The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
THE BAY OF ANGELS (La baie des anges) B+ 92
France
Demy's second feature has a ravishing Jeanne
Moreau, ash-blonde for the occasion and dressed all in white, as a compulsive
gambler who doesn't care what happens to her so long as she has a chip to start
her on the roulette tables. Ostensibly the subject is gambling, but the real
theme is seduction - with Moreau casting a spell on Mann that turns him every
which way - and this is above all a visually seductive film. Shot mainly inside
the casinos and on the sunstruck promenades of Nice and
Bay of Angels Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
Rarely screened in the U.S. since its initial release at the height of
Beatlemania, Bay of Angels is the least musical of Jacques Demy's early
films—and, not coincidentally, the least impressive. Demy's talent was for a
peculiar sort of melancholy exuberance, exemplified in the candy-colored
melodrama The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; even Lola, the title character of
his 1961 debut (which just completed its own run at Film Forum), appears
perennially on the verge of breaking into song. The casinos of Nice and
Any movie about compulsive gamblers is bound to follow a predictable trajectory, roughly the economic equivalent of yo-yo dieting. Virtually nothing happens in Bay of Angels, at least once callow young Jean Fournier (Mann), taking his first solo vacation, meets the dazzingly capricious Jackie Demaistre (Moreau) at the gaming table. They win, they lose, they win, they lose, they win, they lose. Somewhere along the line, Jean allegedly falls head over heels for Jackie; Mann's far too inexpressive an actor to convey any depth of feeling, though, and the film's ridiculously sunny conclusion is scarcely more believable. What lingers in the memory is the way that Demy's camera prowls around the table: following the lovers as they toss their chips onto the felt without breaking stride, pausing with them as they strain to hear "rouge," moving gracefully aside when the croupier calls "noir" and they saunter away, stonefaced. Admirably circumspect—Demy's masterpieces, however, are anything but.
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Entranced, romantic, utopian, and utterly French, Jacques Demy
has always been the most patronized and underappreciated of the major nouvelle
vague voices. Nobody's fave among the New Wavers while he was alive, Demy
eschewed brooding enigma and ironic realism in favor of a one-way ticket to
Happily Ever After. But he was more than a starry-eyed glosser; Demy was aware,
as few directors have ever been, about the similarities between
This singsong fable-spinner seems like an odd choice for
revival these days, but ever since the rediscovery of his 1964 lollipop
avalanche The Umbrellas of Cherbourg some six years ago, gassed-up
Demymania has continued its arc. (You can even find the Miramax-revived The
Young Girls of Rochefort in Blockbuster.) But Demy's films aren't merely confections:
Lola is Demy's A Woman Is a Woman, thick with hanging song cues,
philosophical happenstance, bustling old-movie fauna, and an exhilarating ardor
for its characters and itself. Likewise,
Shot in breathtakingly vivid black and white by Jean Rabier,
Bay of Angels: Walking on Sand Criterion essay by , July 22, 2014
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014
The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014
Bay
of Angels (1963) - The Criterion Collection
La Baie des Anges Lindsay Henderson from Senses of Cinema
ToxicUniverse.com (Dan Callahan)
Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford
The
Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters
John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ...
Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve
Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray
Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray
THE
DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Mondo
Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar
Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict
Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
La Baie des anges Acquarello from Strictly Film School
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)
Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara reviews the DVD
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing LOLA
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing LOLA
Criterion's
"The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
The New York Times (Eugene Archer)
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) A 100
France Germany
Winner of the
Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, one of the most popular films of the decade
which had long been unavailable, but was restored in 1992 by his widow Agnès
Varda, the film is unique as it is a film opera, nothing is spoken, everything
is sung, which takes a few moments of adjustment in the theater before you can
sit back and appreciate the breadth of such an entirely fresh, yet experimental
cinematic experience, which throbs with lavish color. Demy was a great admirer of the Golden Age of
MGM musicals, but this story is bleaker than the look of the film. There are strands of realism strung
throughout this incredibly beautiful production design, which are enormously
appealing, much like Puccini’s La Boheme, an opera set in Paris that was
famous for introducing elements of realism into opera, a scandalous concept at
the time.
This is a stunning
contrast of shifting styles, moods, colors, and rhythms, all set to the music
of Michel Legrand’s dreamy and melodic score, which feels like a true artistic
jazz improvisation, opening to the lilting sound of flutes on a cobblestone
street in the rain, situated next to the docks of a river, where all the city’s
multi-colored umbrellas open like flowers blooming on the pedestrian-filled
streets of Cherbourg. The screen bursts
into a pastel of purples, lavenders, blues, reds, pinks, and yellows before the
music shifts into a jazz riff that establishes the rhythm and pace of the young
lovers in the film, later building to a shattering climax when they sing the
love theme “I Will Wait for You” Love theme from "Les
parapluies de Cherbourg" (1964) - YouTube (7:01), where they’re seen
floating on air at the midway point. Divided into three sections, the Departure,
the Absence, and the Return, there are quick movements, brief sequences with
quick edits, where the lines are initially only 4 or 5 words, all underscored
by a constant beat.
Nino Castelnuovo plays Guy, a handsome garage mechanic, while 20-year old Catherine Deneuve plays Genevieve, his breathtakingly beautiful sweetheart who works in her mother’s umbrella shop. As he’s called away for two years of military service, where in the middle of this romanticized love, the war in Algeria beckons, so they spend a single night together, leaving her pregnant without his knowledge. In the absence, their lives change forever. He gets wounded, but doesn’t write, leaving her heartbroken and alone, so at her mother’s prodding, she reluctantly marries a rich older gentleman (Marc Michel), for whom she shares little affection, but she and her son’s needs are easily provided for. The bursts of color and energy and joy, and their pleas of neverending love from their youth remain a bittersweet memory. The film has a legendary and heartbreaking finale where years have passed and they meet purely by chance at Guy’s gas station, shot above from a high crane shot overlooking Guy’s Esso station, without Genevieve, settled under a white blanket of snow Ending of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" - YouTube (7:03). This is visionary cinema, an enchanting poetic-realist romance that becomes especially poignant with the passing of time. Interesting that, depending on what happens in that final sequence, the audience undergoes a complete emotional shift and transformation, where everything that came before may be seen with an entirely new meaning.
World Cinema: Films -- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) Chris Petit from World Cinema
A novelettish story that in the hands of most directors would be no more
than trivial is transformed by Demy
into something rather wonderful: a full-scale all-singing musical whose
inspiration is
Philadelphia City Paper Jerry White
The directors of the French New Wave occupied two fairly distinct
branches: those who rejected and re-defined conventions (Jean-Luc Godard,
Jacques Rivette, Chris Marker) and those who loved the traditions of classical
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Mike
D’Angelo from Time Out New York
Closer to opera than to the
traditional
Above all, don't be surprised if
In the garage where he works, Guy (Nino
Castelnuovo) plans a trip to the opera. His colleague is unimpressed: ‘All that
singing’s a pain – I prefer movies.’ ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’, it’s safe to
say, would not be for him: every line of dialogue (including his own complaint)
is sung to Michel Legrand’s melodious songbird score. That’s not to say Jacques
Demy’s 1964 favourite is an exercise in whimsy: it might start in the key of
blissful romance – between gorgeous Guy and Catherine Deneuve’s luminous Geneviève,
daughter of the widowed proprietress of the titular shop – but it stealthily
proceeds to such mundanities as teenage pregnancy, conscription and lives
divergent. Like ‘Billy Liar’ – made around the same time – ‘Umbrellas’ makes
escapist play with the stuff of kitchen-sink social realism. It’s an approach
signalled in the overhead shots of the opening credits, which find pattern and
grace in everyday comings and goings, and mirrored by the heightened
mise-en-scène: working for the first time in colour, Demy’s supersaturated
palette flirts with vulgarity, the wardrobe’s rich hues fabulously coordinated
with the decor (Geneviève’s mother is especially well matched to her flock
wallpaper). As the story progresses, the tension between romance and reality –
between the dreamlike aspiration of the musical mode and the sad
getting-on-with-itness of the characters’ lives – only increases. But which
life doesn’t sometimes squirm between secret hope and worldly frustration? When
the film’s attention turns to
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs
Jacques Demy is a cinematic alchemist. Ever present in his body of work is an uncanny ability to transform or combine standard, even banal, elements of various genres into 'gold'--or, rather, something so luminous and rarefied that it can only be Demy who's created it. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is arguably the best of his films, and almost certainly the first film of his to so fully bend genre and style convention. Demy was both inspired by and considered to be a member of the French New Wave, and along with several of his peers, had an unabashed love for Hollywood studio musicals of the era. Demy's most 'New Wave-ish' films preceded THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG; LOLA (1960) and BAY OF ANGELS (1962) were shot in black and white, and dealt more straightforwardly with themes inherent to the movement. Both hinted at Demy's progression, but THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, when viewed in the context of his first three features, certainly stands out. (It's also his first film in color.) In an essay about the film for the Reader, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum admitted that he originally considered it to be a commercial sellout, comparing it to other "corny pretenders" allegedly borne of the New Wave but merely ascribing the label where it didn't belong. Demy's vision, especially in his later films, is understandably confounding, as he uses elements that, when mixed, shouldn't create gold. Virtually undefinable, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is neither just a musical nor entirely an opera. The film's narrative is completely conveyed through song, with a jazzy score by longtime Demy collaborator Michel Legrand providing the music against which the sung dialogue is set. It's about a young couple, Guy and Genevieve; she's the too-young daughter of an overbearing mother who owns an umbrella shop in Cherbourg, he's a mechanic who hasn't yet served his time with the French military. Their courtship is shown in the first part of the film, titled "Departure." Naturally, he's drafted to fight in the Algerian War and soon thereafter Genevieve learns she is pregnant. In this part, titled "Absence," Genevieve's mother compels her to consider the overtures of a well-to-do jeweler while Genevieve wonders if her and Guy's love is waning. (It was common among the New Wave filmmakers to reference other movies and characters in their own films, and here Demy references himself. The jeweler, Roland Cassard, was a suitor of Lola's in LOLA, and Lola herself returns in Demy's 1969 film MODEL SHOP.) Genevieve soon gives in to Roland, who accepts that she is pregnant with another man's child. In the third and final part, "Return," Guy is back from the war and spiraling out of control, likely due to Genevieve's desertion. The ending is bittersweet and surprisingly cynical, two hallmarks of Demy's romantic pragmatism. It has this in common with his previous films, and somewhat separates it from his 1967 film THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, in which all is happy in the end despite Demy's overall tone of deceptively joyful endurance. This and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT are noted for their use of color, but the color schemes in each are distinct. In the latter, the fluffier of the two, sunny pastels and bright whites obscure any hint of grimy realism. In THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, which is more operatic in tone and structure, Demy utilizes bolder, more primary colors. This further allows for hints at the film's fateful bitterness. All that glitters is gold in Demy's world, but his is a gold that illuminates the screen while implying its own artifice.
"The Past Recaptured" by Terrence Rafferty - Reocities Terrence Rafferty from The New Yorker, April 15, 1996
When Jacques
Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was first released, in 1964, it
won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and became an enormous hit in
both
Demy's
movie has, in fact, aged as gracefully as its impossibly beautiful leading
lady, Catherine
Deneuve, who was only twenty years old when the picture was released. Her
character, Geneviève, is seventeen when the film begins—a restless provincial
girl who rebels against her overprotective widowed mother (Anne Vernon) by
stepping out with a handsome auto mechanic named Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). In the
early scenes, Geneviève and Guy are idealized, movie-mythic young lovers,
rushing across rainy nighttime streets into each other's arms, strolling and
singing on the docks of the harbour, and professing their undying passion at
every opportunity. The music (by Michel Legrand) that accompanies their
courtship alternates between ebullient Latin-accented jazz and swoony Gallic
balladry, and thus expresses both the bursting exuberance and the exquisite
pain of adolescent love. Everywhere Geneviève and Guy go, they're surrounded by
bright springtime colours, as if their story were taking place not in a small,
dull
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, that is, leaves itself vulnerable to the
charge that it's merely a sweet, pretty, gooey confection. It's a picture that
dares to evoke strong, basic emotions, and Demy
obviously doesn't care if he's considered naïve. Or perhaps he simply couldn't
help himself. It was clear from his first feature, Lola
(made three years before Umbrellas), that his aesthetic aims were
crucially different from those of New Wave peers like Godard
and Truffaut
and Chabrol.
Unlike those directors, he had never been a film critic. He loved American
movies as much as they did, but, while they played with and commented on
In a way, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a much more pessimistic film
than Lola.
Here first love turns out to be transitory, and, when it passes, the young
lovers—contrary to their romantic expectations—do not wither and die. In fact,
the hero of Lola,
Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), who lost Lola to her first love, turns up
in Umbrellas and gets the girl. While Guy is in the Army, fighting in
Now that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg can again be seen as Demy intended it to be seen (the restoration, which he began shortly before his death, was completed by Varda with help from Legrand), it's hard to avoid thinking that the movie's reputation as a sentimental, crowd-pleasing novelty item is a gross injustice. And as you watch Deneuve's alert, sensitive performance it seems inconceivable that in the sixties she was often condescended to as merely an extraordinary camera object, cold and inexpressive. It's as if both the movie and its star were being punished for the miraculous simplicity—the sheer obviousness—of their beauty. In the context of the New Wave, Demy's accessibility and scrupulous craftsmanship were always anomalous: his method in Umbrellas—having the actors' movements determined by a pre-recorded score—necessarily precluded the kind of loose-limbed, improvisatory style that made other young auteurs' movies seem so fresh and liberating. Today's audiences might not be as conscious of the differences between Demy and his colleagues, and therefore might be better prepared to accept the idiosyncratic and highly wrought, but very real, imaginative liberation that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg proposes. The film comes now, as it did thirty-two years ago, out of an enchanted nowhere—out of Jacques Demy's dream of an ideal union between movies and ordinary life. It's been a long time since a movie has carried us away in a white Cadillac with the top down, and it was worth the wait.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: A Finite Forever Criterion essay by July 23, 2014
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014
The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014
On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! photo gallery, December 22, 2014
Restoring The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Criterion video, July 21, 2014
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) - The Criterion Collection
Songs in the Key of Everyday Life - JonathanRosenbaum.com May 17, 1966
Senses of Cinema Peter Kemp from Senses of Cinema, September 2001
not coming to a theater near you Ben Ewing
The House Next Door Veronika Ferdman
The Village Voice [Jessica Winter]
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg | DVD Video Review | Film @ The ... Anthony Nield from The Digital Fix
The
Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters
John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ...
Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve
Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray
Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray
THE
DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Mondo
Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar
Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict
Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray
ReelViews James Berardinelli
Kinocite Nicola Osborne
Review for Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) - IMDb Dragan Antulov
DVD Savant Glenn Erickson
digitallyOBSESSED.com Jon Danziger
Thoughts on Stuff Patrick
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - Movie Lists - AMC Mark Athitakis
Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) - Articles - TCM.com Felicia Feaster
CineScene.com Chris Dashiell
Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz
Movie Habit Marty Mapes
DVD Town Yunda Eddie Feng
Film Monthly Jerome de Groot
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Movie Martyr Jeremy Heilman
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Eye for Film Nicola Osborne
DVD Verdict Bryan Pope
Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
rec.arts.movies.reviews Jerry Saravia
rec.arts.movies.reviews Steve Rhodes
VideoVista Steven Hampton
Sunday Telegraph [Anne Billson]
Baltimore City Paper Bret McCabe
Washington Post Hal Hinson
Austin Chronicle Steve Davis
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1996
rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] in 2004
Criterion's
"The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
New York Times Bosley Crowther
The New York Times A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review by Gary Tooze
THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (Les demoiselles de
Rochefort) A 100
France
Filmed after the
international success of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964), one of the most
lavishly colorful films ever made, where nothing is spoken, everything is sung,
this is another Demy musical with Catherine Deneuve, also long unavailable,
lovingly restored in 1996 by his widow, Agnès Varda, and a hit in France, the
film was originally released in America with an English dubbed version that was
so poorly received in 1968 that Demy’s career never recovered. THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT centers on, of
course, the beautiful young girls, where the main attraction is the adorable
sisters, blond Catherine Deneuve and her older sister, red-haired Françoise
Dorléac, at ages 24 and 25, both stars from their teens, but this is the only
time they worked together onscreen.
Co-starring as singing and dancing twins, culminating in a show-stopping
final number together, both wearing glittering, skin-tight, slit-to-the-thigh
matching red gowns, inspired by Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe’s musical duo
“Two Little Girls from Little Rock” from GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953) Two
little girls from little rock video - Tunesbaby.com YouTube (2:40). Dorléac played Jean-Paul Belmondo’s stubborn
girlfriend in Philippe de Broca’s THAT MAN FROM RIO (1964), also Truffaut’s
mistress in THE SOFT SKIN (1964), and the young wife in Polanski’s CUL DE SAC
(1966) before dying in a car crash the year this film was released. For years, Deneuve was too distraught about
her sister’s death to even discuss her.
Demy originally contemplated using Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn as
the two sisters. Of note, Bardot was
paired successfully with Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s comic revolutionary
romp VIVA MARIA! (1965). Because of
Demy’s insistence upon using American singer/dancer Gene Kelly, production had
to wait two years until Kelly was free of other commitments, making him 54 at
the time of the shoot, yet seeing him effortlessly dancing down the street
recalls the vibrancy of AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951). Jacques Perrin also appears as a young sailor
and artist who paints his ideal woman without ever actually seeing her, but
nonetheless keeps searching for her, looking exactly like Deneuve, though
they’ve never met, becoming one of the many missed connections of the film. One of Perrin’s first acting roles was
working with Valerio Zurlini in GIRL WITH A SUITCASE (1961), playing a romantic
lead opposite an enthralling Claudia Cardinale, becoming an actor/producer on
the Costa-Gavros thriller Z (1969), where more recently he co-directed the
sensational bird documentary WINGED MIGRATION (2001).
This film reunites
director-writer-lyricist Demy with musical composer Michel Legrand, offering
one of their finest and jazziest scores, which plays over an odd combination of
spoken dialogue mixed with what appears to be spontaneous moments expressed in
song or dance, where characters at random form dancing combinations, seen
twirling or spinning down the streets, often dancing or skipping out of the
frame, where the streets are alive with continuous dance movements, all decked
out in pastel colors, where the intoxicating, lighter-than-air mood of musical
fantasia becomes the collective mindset of the movie. The film was shot on location in the
colorful port city of Rochefort, chosen because of its size and its central
square where most of the action takes place, where Production Designer Bernard
Evein repainted 40,000 square meters of the city’s façades, where the color
white has never been more prominently featured and where every fire hydrant was
painted a different pastel color, where Demy treats the town of Rochefort as if
the city were a set built specifically for him and his movie. The film takes place over a weekend
celebrating the French holiday Fête de la Mer (Festival of the Sea), opening
and closing with the arrival and departure of a caravan of trucks, motorcycles
and horses, including two American actors, George Chakiris, Bernardo from WEST
SIDE STORY (1961) and also Grover Dale, and later Gene Kelly, who choreographs
his own dances, seen driving a white convertible, where all arrive on a movable
transporter bridge that acts as a drive-on ferry, where cars are seen driving
past white clad sailors, white boats, white buildings, men and women dressed in
white, until they arrive in the huge white colored city square where the
sailors do an improvisational dance in front of the fountains with bright
leotarded young girls 『The Young Girls of Rochefort』 Arrival of the Drymen -
YouTube (3:34). Demy’s grand,
colorful, and unorthodox approach pays tribute to the American musical, yet
mixes in French poetic realism, where dreams and reality coexist, though this
may be Demy’s most exhilarating and cheerfully optimistic film, literally
bursting with life and joy, a delirious expression where pure emotions are
translated into motion and music, the essence and lifeblood of a Hollywood
musical.
The look Demy was
after owes something equally to French filmmakers Max Ophuls and Jacques Tati,
his mentor, where the film specifically recalls the charming allure of Tati’s
JOUR DE FÊTE (1949), but also Americans Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, as
Demy was a great admirer of the Golden Age of MGM musicals, creating a
bliss-drenched realm of pinks and gold, where work is viewed as confining, so
characters come alive with a kind of French gaiety that refuses to allow
anxiety and distress to interfere with their otherwise sunny lives, where life
is always upbeat in heavy anticipation of love and romance, not to mention
Deneuve and Dorléac, who always seem to be just around the corner. One of the many wonders of the film is
watching how each of the women carefully selects some outrageously fashionable
hat to wear before they show themselves to the world outside, where they
literally decorate themselves in matching colors. Danielle Darrieux, playing the mother to the
twin sisters, is the only one of the performers in the film who does all her
own singing, while Demy’s real-life wife Agnès Varda can be seen making a cameo
as one of the nuns visiting a music shop run by a young Michel Piccoli, seen
with dairk hair and thick sideburns. The
construction of the film bears an artistic similarity with Hong Kong filmmaker
Wong Kar-wai’s CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), another film that features an
elaborate choreography of near misses, showing ships passing in the night,
where key couples continually criss-cross past one another throughout the
story, usually just missing one another as they go about their daily routines,
so caught up in everyday life to notice what might be waiting for them just
around the corner. This becomes part of
the fun of the picture, as lovers meant to be, in the storybook sense, keep
missing one another. Certainly a central
theme is the frustration of searching for and just missing romance, where so
many of the songs express a lost or missing love, yet they all yearn for that
elusive kind of love expressed in Hollywood musicals that doesn’t actually
exist in real life, where lost in the façade of candy-colored artificiality is
seeing through the dream, where as in all Demy musicals there are dark
undertones to all the bright sunniness.
This hyper-expressive, positively enchanting narcotic of a rapturous,
over-the-top musical best expresses that idyllic dream of youth (where one can
hope, can’t they?), which may never come true, but when we’re young, catching
someone’s eye, or observing someone in close quarters, the instantaneous
reverie and fantasia of love has been and will always be there in our
collective imaginations, dreamily wondering what may happen, or if this is just
another one of those missed opportunities.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
CINE-FILE Chicago Michael Castelle
Jacques Demy, in the preparation for his follow-up to the
downbeat psychedelic jazz opera UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, reportedly waited two
years to cast Gene Kelly as a love-struck American composer in this symmetrical
ensemble of Crayola-coded seaside romantics--a move which helps place the
perpetually sunny ROCHEFORT as one of the best "date movies" in
Demy's otherwise surprisingly existentialist oeuvre. Taking place over the
course of one weekend in and about the town square of the namesake Atlantic
seaport, the film literally "transports" us (via the opening crane
shots on an extended mechanical gondola) into a harmonious lattice of
unresolved heterosexual affinities established through two complete hours of
straight-faced song and dance in Iambic hexameter. With each character in the
network colored fairly exclusively by garish pastel wardrobe signifiers (e.g.
Catherine Deneuve's canary yellow and her sister Françoise Dorléac's lavender),
the viewer--at least on the big screen--can relax their focus on the
protagonists and enjoy the kaleidoscopic spectacle of public space dispersed
into a chromatic orgy of pirouetting passersby. Initially criticized for a
level of semi-professionalism unworthy of its ostensive Hollywood musical
progenitors, the essentially half-assed choreography remains one of the film's
most glorious attributes--a singular mode of expression that attempts to
dissolve the distinction between the individual and the collective. And in a
tableau that reduces the missed connections of a complex urbanity into the
orchestrations of 8-10 amorous souls, Michel Legrand's hyperactive score
projects a traditional musical narrative into just four or five essential
themes that mirror and overlap each other in tandem; behold, the first (and
last) great fugue musical. (1967, 125 min, 35mm)
Girlstown - - Movies - New York - Village Voice Girlstown, by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, August 25, 1998 (excerpt)
A sequel of sorts to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort is the most outrageous argument against the little black dress ever committed to film. Made in 1967, just three years after Umbrellas, the film is a showcase for two ingenue beauties, Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac, who twirl through their scenes in sleeveless sherbet-colored frocks, matching shoes, and frothy picture hats that set off their pale skin, huge eyes, and chiseled features.
Building on the international success of Umbrellas, Demy threw caution to the wind in this tribute to the American musicals that the French New Wave adored. There are sailors straight out of On the Town (okay, they're French sailors, but it's the way they strut in their tight white pants that matters). Deneuve and Dorléac don red sequined dresses and make like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Demy even got Gene Kelly to play one of the six leading roles.
The slim plot revolves around the twin daughters (Deneuve and
Dorléac) of a single mother (Danielle Darrieux) who refused to marry the love
of her life because he had the silly surname of "Dame." Unbeknownst
to her, Monsieur Dame (Michel Piccoli) is back in town running the music store
where her daughters buy their supplies (they give ballet and piano lessons
while dreaming of making it big in
The Young Girls is more optimistic, though not necessarily more convincing, than the bittersweet Umbrellas and the earlier Lola. (Demy considered the three films a romantic trilogy.) Michel Legrand's score is a dull rehash of the one he wrote for Umbrellas (the advantage is that you won't wake up for weeks singing "I will wait for you"), and the script is thin and meandering. The American dancer-actors (in addition to Kelly, there's George Chakiris, of West Side Story fame, and Grover Dale) are game but a bit out of their element. The women, however, are wonderful. Darrieux is rueful and worldly-wise (more than anything else in the film, her character is the inspiration for Chantal Akerman's more radical musical The Golden Eighties, a/k/a Window Shopping). Deneuve and Dorléac are stylish, smart, and spirited, and their awkwardness as dancers makes them even more winning.
Awash in lemon and peach, lavender and baby blue, Young Girls of Rochefort floats from one color-coordinated moment to the next. It earns a place in history by virtue of its production design, which, in this newly restored, wide-screen color version, looks more sweetly camp than ever.
Not the Same Old Song and Dance - JonathanRosenbaum.com one of Jonathan’s very best reviews, ever, November 27, 1998, also seen here (pdf format): Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons - Page 228 - Google B
As eccentric as this may sound, Jacques Demy's 1967 Les demoiselles de Rochefort
is my favorite musical. Yet despite my 30-year addiction to the two-record
sound track, the first time I was able to see the movie subtitled was a couple
of weeks ago--helpful considering my faltering French. It's certainly the odd
musical out in terms of both its singularity and its North American
reputation--a large-scale tribute to
When it comes to charting movie genres and traditions, most of this film's
virtues fall off the map. Joseph McBride invited me to contribute to his
recently published Book of Movie Lists, and I opted for a list of the
ten best jazz films--neither the best films about jazz nor the best examples of
filmed jazz but something more rare-fied: movies in which the aesthetics of
jazz and the aesthetics of film find some happy, mutually supportive meeting
ground. The Young Girls of Rochefort certainly qualifies: from Legrand's
improvised piano solos and big-band arrangements to stretches of scat singing
and Demy's allusions to Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and
Lionel Hampton, this movie swings. Even when the choreography is less
than it might have been, Demy's sweeping cranes and extended pans and intricate
mise en scene cook as infectiously as a first-rate rhythm section. It's also a
musical that periodically defamiliarizes--"makes strange"--the form
of the musical. Defying the obsessive symmetry and frontality of
Most musicals shift back and forth between story (spoken dialogue) and song-and-dance numbers--sometimes creating queasy transitions just before or after these shifts, when we're uncertain where we are stylistically. But The Young Girls of Rochefort often daringly places story and musical numbers on the screen simultaneously, mixing them in various ways and in different proportions. One of the stars may be walking down the street, for example, but the pedestrians around her are suddenly dancing, and she slips momentarily in and out of their choreography. This curious mix produces powerful, deeply felt emotions--an exuberance combined with a sublime sense of absurdity, shot through with an almost constant sense of loss, yearning, and even tragedy. Yet the coexistence of this strangeness and this intensity will inevitably make some American viewers laugh in disbelief and regard the whole spectacle as an esoteric piece of camp. (The same problem exists to a lesser extent in two of my favorite American freak musicals, Love Me Tonight and Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, both of which display a related metaphysical impulse to perceive the musical form as a continuous state of delirious being rather than a traditional story with musical eruptions.)
Some American viewers may find it difficult to feel their way into such an
aesthetic overload. In
Received opinion on musicals is that the genre's greatest achievements--such as the entertaining Astaire-Rogers steamrollers and Singin' in the Rain--are triumphs of engineering, coordination, and expertise; it's almost as if we judge this art the way we judge our smart bombs and sporting events. This quantitative aesthetic doesn't allow for the possibility that a musician with limited technique like Thelonious Monk might be a greater pianist than a virtuoso like Oscar Peterson. And unless you conclude that the only reason for "technique" is to express what you want to say, the technical shortcomings of The Young Girls of Rochefort are bound to be disappointing. The verdict of critic Gary Carey in the late 70s is characteristic: "Unfortunately Demy, who had been so good at choreographing the movements of ordinary people through his camera, does not know how to photograph the choreography of dancers. (He doesn't have much of an eye as to what is good choreography and what isn't, either.) The film falls to pieces whenever anyone begins to dance, and since someone is always dancing, it ends as a pile of very pretty rubble." Pauline Kael wrote in separate articles that "a movie like The Young Girls of Rochefort demonstrates how even a gifted Frenchman who adores American musicals misunderstands their conventions" and "it was obvious from Rochefort that [Demy] had--momentarily, I hope--run dry."
Made on the heels of Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which enjoyed
worldwide success, this extravaganza--which had a much bigger budget than
The film unfolds over a single weekend. On Friday morning a team of boat,
bicycle, and motorcycle salespeople in trucks and on motorcycles and horses,
including Etienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale), arrive in Rochefort
by ferry. As they set up their stands and stages in the huge city square for
the fair on Sunday afternoon, the camera pans, cranes up, then pans again to
the studio where Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and her twin sister Solange
(Francoise Dorleac) are giving a combined music and dance class to kids. We
discover that Delphine is a ballet teacher and dancer, Solange a composer and
singer, and that both dream of meeting their romantic ideals and moving to
It turns out that Delphine's ideal man, whom she's never met, is an artist and sailor currently stationed in Rochefort, Maxence (Jacques Perrin): the ideal woman he's painted, whom he's been searching for across the globe, is a dead ringer for Delphine. His canvas hangs in a local gallery run by Delphine's unsuccessful suitor, Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles). The sisters have a ten-year-old half brother named Boubou; their mother, Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux), runs the cafe-restaurant in the city square, which Maxence, Etienne, and Bill all frequent. Unbeknownst to the family, Boubou's father has recently moved back to Rochefort to run a music store; Yvonne had backed out of marrying Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) years earlier, when she became pregnant with Boubou, because she couldn't face the prospect of being called Madame Dame. Though Simon knew she'd had twins by a former lover, he'd never seen them, so when Solange comes to his shop and they become acquainted, he has no idea that she's one of Yvonne's daughters.
It's love at first sight when Solange encounters an old friend of Simon Dame--famous American composer and concert pianist Andy Miller (Gene Kelly)--while she's collecting Boubou from school. She has no idea this man is Miller, whom she wanted to meet so he could hear her piano concerto. They don't exchange names or addresses, but he has a page from her score, which she inadvertently leaves behind. Meanwhile, when two of the young women in the show planned for the Sunday fair run off with a couple of sailors, Etienne and Bill convince Delphine and Solange to stage a number in their stead, promising them a free ride to Paris afterward... Apart from the ax murder and periodic dark reminders of the nearby soldiers in training, both of which further develop the theme of thwarted desire, these are the basic elements of the plot, and Yvonne's cafe on the square is the hub of all the complex comings and goings. (Like many of the buildings in Playtime, this freestanding structure has huge glass windows, allowing us to see much of the surrounding traffic.) But to summarize these intricate moves, characters who are ideally suited keep missing each other as they go about their daily routines; in most cases they don't even realize that they're occupying the same city. And even though The Young Girls of Rochefort is on all counts Demy's most optimistic film--the one in which every character eventually finds the person she or he is looking for--the missed connections preceding this resolution are relentless, and one may still wind up with a feeling of hopeless despair despite the overdetermined happy ending. Indeed, the split second by which Maxence misses Delphine at the cafe before he's shipped away might well be the most tragic single moment in all Demy's work, perhaps even surpassing the grisly suicide at the end of Un chambre en ville. By contrast, when the "ideal couple" do eventually meet (an event represented only obliquely) in the film's final shot, it's a simple concession to musical-comedy convention, registering only as a sort of offhand diminuendo and postscript; what reverberates more decisively is the sense of dreams just missing realization.
In fact the movie overall leaves one in a unique manic-depressive state, a kind of poetic fugue in which boundless despair and exuberant optimism coexist. This is Demy's vision of life--Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are suffused with much the same ambiguous mixture--but thanks to Legrand's buoyant score and the size of the canvas, The Young Girls of Rochefort conveys it with unparalleled vibrancy and luminosity. If songs and dances represent fantasy, and everyday activities reality, it can't be said that Demy ever privileges one over the other; he's more concerned with how fantasy and reality interact, or fail to interact. One might say that the missed connections in the film represent reality--the characters are too engrossed by everyday life to see that their ultimate dreams are only a block or so away--and that the eventual successful connections represent fantasy, the dreamlike closure of musical comedy. But in fact Demy is a much subtler dialectician, converting the Cartesian principle of French life and culture--"I think, therefore I am"--into "I dream, and dreaming is a part of life, therefore I live." Furthermore, by staging all his musical numbers in real locations rather than on sets, Demy deliberately mixes his modes, with the result that the missed connections are as much a function of his mise en scene as the chance encounters. A poetic realist as well as a dreamer, Demy confused some audiences and critics throughout his career, much as his mentor Tati did, by keeping a firmer grip on the realities he was filming than many were prepared to see at the time. For viewers trained to regard fantasy as an alternative to reality rather than part of the reality of consciousness, Demy's mixture is bound to seem jarring--though it may also jar one into perceiving a richer reality than most entertainments acknowledge.
The film's chance encounters and missed connections are expressed not only spatially but musically, in the score and in Demy's delicately crafted lyrics. Maxence's song about his search is reprised as Delphine's song about her own longings; Simon's account of his lost love becomes, with appropriate alterations in the lyrics, Yvonne's own regrets about having abandoned him; Solange's piano concerto takes on lyrics after Andy intercepts the score. Many other reprises are less obvious than these. The song that goes with policing the crowd, for instance, reprises and adds lyrics to a secondary theme from the opening dance number in the city square. Both sequences emphasize community over individual destiny: here, as elsewhere in the film, Legrand and Demy enrich the meaning of other scenes by playing with the emotional and thematic effects of rhyme.
Masterpieces normally connote perfection, but it might be argued that some
of the imperfections in The Young Girls of Rochefort enhance the overall
experience by bringing it closer to life, making the actors seem more
vulnerable. (Other imperfections, like the product plugs during the climactic
fair--another parallel with Playtime, given some of its neon signs--are
simple reminders of the difficulties of making big-budget French movies.)
Darrieux, for instance, is the only cast member who does her own singing,
though the dubbing of the others is usually carried out well, with the actors'
singing voices carefully matched to their speaking voices (including Kelly's
spoken French). More artificial are Delphine's and Solange's performances on
trumpet and flute. Yet given some of Demy's original plans for the movie, it's
a miracle it turned out as well as it did. Before he selected Rochefort as his
location, he considered making "Les demoiselles d'Avignon," "Les
demoiselles d'Hyeres," "Les demoiselles de
Demy also planned to make more extensive references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg by casting Nino Castelnuovo, the hero of that film, as Bill. When Castelnuovo proved unavailable, Demy had to change the script. But it's worth pointing out that the offscreen victim of the ax murder is Lola, the title heroine of Demy's first feature, and there are many other allusions to earlier Demy films throughout: According to critic Jean-Pierre Berthome, the three successive endings of The Young Girls of Rochefort replicate the final shots of Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Lola. And both Lola and The Young Girls of Rochefort associate Americans with white convertibles.
Given the extraordinary lift Gene Kelly gives the movie, it's hardly
surprising that Demy wanted him from the outset, though he had to wait two
years before Kelly was free of other commitments. Indeed, Kelly brings to the
movie the kind of boundless elation musicals exist to produce, as do Chakiris
and Dale, the other two American dancers featured, though to a lesser extent.
Indeed, it's the combination of this spirit with the soul of the French cast
that gives The Young Girls of Rochefort its distinctive flavor. Like the
pairing of Jean Seberg with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless,
or the mating of a David Goodis plot with Charles Aznavour's mug in Francois
Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, this combination provides the kind of
combustion that powered the French New Wave and the general reinvention of
movie energy in the 1960s. Godard and Truffaut may have watered the roots, but
it was Demy who produced this relatively late blooming flower, combining the
virtues of the
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014
The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014
On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014
A Splash of Red photo gallery, May 08, 2014
Demy Monde Criterion video, August 05, 2014
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) - The Criterion Collection
Senses
of Cinema – Les Demoiselles de Rochefort
Rodney F. Hill, April 2010
The color of love - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek from Salon, September 18, 1998
THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (Jacques Demy, 1967 ... Dennis Grunes
DVD
Savant Glenn Erickson
Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, Jacques Demy) | Brandon's movie ... Brandon’s Movie Memory
The Young Girls of Rochefort (No. 59) | Wonders in the Dark James Clark
The Young Girls of Rochefort (no 8) | Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish
The
Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters John
Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ...
Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve
Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray
Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray
THE
DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Mondo
Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar
Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict
Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray
FilmFanatic.org
rec.arts.movies.reviews Harvey S. Karten
The Crop Duster [Robert Horton]
young girls of
rochefort | imodernreview July 3,
2012
Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz
The Movie Report/Mr. Brown's Movie Site [Michael Dequina]
The Young Girls of Rochefort - Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Spinning Image Andrew Pragasam
The
Lumière Reader » Film » The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) Brannavan
Gnanalingam
Young Girls of Rochefort - DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen
Les demoiselles de Rochefort Blu-ray (France) - Blu-ray.com
the act of seeing with one's own eyes: the young girls of rochefort Jaime
Movies About Girls Ken McIntyre
The Young Girls Of Rochefort - JonathanRosenbaum.com (capsule review)
The Portage Theater: Events Kyle Westphal
Oscar Movies: The Young Girls of Rochefort - Emanuel Levy
Jacques_Demy_AT2008
- American Cinematheque
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Young Girls of Rochefort - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on ... Mubi
The Young Girls Of Rochefort Review TV Guide
Time Out David Jenkins
The Daily Telegraph Sukhdev Sandhu
San Francisco Chronicle [Octavio Roca]
Criterion's
"The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
The New York Times Renata Adler, also seen here: Screen: Offbeat, Dreamlike Musical; Demy's 'Young Girls of Rochefort'
The New York Times Film Reviews: 1999-2000 - Page 58 - Google Books R
The Young Girls of Rochefort: Information from Answers.com
MODEL SHOP
France USA (95 mi) 1969
Time Out Geoff Andrew
Demy's only - and underrated - American film may lack the fairytale charm of his finest French work, but the bitter-sweet delicacy of tone and acute feeling for place are at once familiar. Aimée's Lola, abandoned by her lover Michel, has now turned up in LA where, older and sadder, she works in a seedy photographer's shop, and brings brief respite to a disenchanted young drifter (Lockwood) with whom she has a one night stand. Unlike Antonioni with Zabriskie Point, Demy never even tries to deal with the malaise afflicting American youth in the '60s, but gives us yet another (relatively plotless) tale of transient happiness and love lost. It's also one of the great movies about LA, shown for once as a ramshackle, rootless sprawl, where movement on the freeways (accompanied by the sounds of West Coast band Spirit) is seemingly endless.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Whether positive or negative in outlook—and whether helmed by insiders or outsiders—most of the late-’60s/early-’70s movies that dealt with the American counterculture tended to adopt a tourist’s point of view, treating the long hair, music, drugs, and revolutionary rhetoric as curiosities, to be feared or forgiven. Whatever the failings of Jacques Demy’s lone American film, Model Shop—which is far from perfect—it’s one of the few movies about life in 1969 Los Angeles that feels like a documentary, not a re-enactment. Demy follows unemployed architecture student Gary Lockwood as he drives around the city, trying to bum some cash to make an overdue payment on his roadster. Along the way, he hangs out with his pals at a local underground newspaper, hears the latest from a buddy who fronts the real-life rock band Spirit, and gets into a raging fight with his aspiring actress girlfriend Alexandra Hay, who blasts him for his lack of ambition and for some pictures he took of scantily clad model Anouk Aimée. This all takes place on the day Lockwood hears that his draft board has summoned him to take his physical. There’s big doings afoot, all in some way associated with the turmoil in the culture at large. Yet Demy only treats the times as a backdrop for another one of his studies of delirious, illogical passion.
Model Shop’s main stumbling blocks are its performances and dialogue. Demy reportedly wrote the script in his native French and had it translated, and the result is a talky film in which all the chatter is flat and on-point, with none of the conversational nuance that a native speaker might’ve brought. The movie builds to a long scene where Lockwood talks with Aimée about his dreams, while she lays out her intention to return to France to be with her son. Aimée is playing the same character she played in Demy’s film Lola, and though one of the main points of the scene is to catch Demy fans up on what the character has been up to, Model Shop grinds to a halt while the two actors spend 20 minutes delivering stiff line-readings just past each other. Prior to that though, Demy shows a remarkable feel for the people and the place he’s exploring, and he evokes hippie-era L.A. with none of the heavy-handedness of Michelangelo Antonioni’s similar Zabriskie Point. From the moment Lockwood spots Aimée on the street and follows her from a mansion in the hills to a seedy nude-photography studio, Demy concerns himself with the geographic and architectural diversity of Los Angeles, and showing how the young people of the era were making it their home.
The final (and rarest) episode of director Jacques Demy’s Lola film
trilogy has made its home video debut this month. Unlike the first two, MODEL SHOP
was in English and shot in Southern California.
1961’s LOLA was the story of Roland and his love for the cabaret ‘entertainer’ Lola in the director’s hometown of Nantes. Their affair ended when the father of Lola’s illegitimate son arrived back on the scene. Then in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, Lola was only referred in song by Roland, who by now was a Parisian jewel dealer. Roland married Catherine Deneuve’s character, Geneviève, fully aware she was pregnant by another man. Lastly MODEL SHOP picked up the story of Lola, who had come to the US with a lover who later abandoned her. She’s now working in a rent-a-model storefront near Crescent Heights Boulevard where can’t-get-laid guys dress her up in fetish-wear and photograph her with cameras rented at the front counter.
The movie has been pretty much universally panned, but those
slings and arrows were mainly coming from the popular critical viewpoint of
judging movies by the standards of 19th Century novels, where narrative thrust
and character development are supreme. But MODEL SHOP
isn’t that kind of movie. Bay Area filmmaker Jon Jost (ALL THE VERMEERS IN NEW YORK)
once said that each film is a worldview. I agree. Every movie is
a statement on how cruel or forgiving the world is, how dangerous it is or
isn’t, how available sex is or isn’t, how much Life supports or roadblocks you,
etc.
MODEL SHOP‘s worldview is a worthy one. An expansive, accessible, mobile world grounded in an urban SoCal landscape painted with a palette of tabby. Transversing a more-or-less 24 hour period a guy named George (Gary Lockwood from Kubrick’s 2001) catches sight of Lola (as in the first movie, played again by Anouk Aimée), follows her, beds her, loses her. [According to IMDB, Harrison Ford was the first choice for the male lead but wasn’t considered a bankable actor yet.] Demy’s love of classic Hollywood is the springboard for the story, as George’s day begins like William Holden’s in SUNSET BOULEVARD with a couple of guys coming to his door to repossess his convertible. Driving away from the creditors to ask friends for money to pay the repo guys, he sights Lola and follows her in the style of James Stewart tailing Kim Novak in VERTIGO.
There is a deep love, not only of movies, but of Los Angeles itself in this film. Both Lola and George speak of the city’s beauty. (George is an architect and has some lines about the beauty of its grid.) Lola is first seen swathed in white walking across a pay-by-the-hour asphalt parking lot; yet through Demy’s eyes the image is pure fantastic beauty. Even the Car Culture becomes poignant as George parks his beside Lola’s and haltingly, earnestly confesses his newfound love for her as they both stay behind the wheel, comfortably domesticated in their drivers’ seats. As in real American life, Demy understands the anthropomorphism of autos (hers is a milky-white recent Detroit issue, his a vintage MG, both are convertibles) and what they say about their owners, giving volumes of information about the characters — as much information as a volume filled with Proustian detail.
George and Lola are adrift. He’s shacked up in a loveless arrangement with a longtime girlfriend. He’s unemployed because he couldn’t stomach his corporate gig. And he’s draft-age during the bloodiest time of the Vietnam War. Lola is stranded, working to save the money for a return ticket to France. She misses her son back home. Emotionally hurt, she goes through her life with detachment, keeping her romantic wounds close and life at a distance.
In George’s search to raise money to keep his car, he visits musician friends (the classic ‘sixties band Spirit) and the staff of an underground newspaper. In 1969, I would have found Demy’s representations of alternative, anti-Establishment Americans superficial; but seeing it now, I acknowledge how many small (superficial?) details were captured by him that convey a deep reality of what 1969 was like. It reminded me of Chris Marker’s text in SANS SOLEIL: “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.” The shots from MODEL SHOP curated a velvety lining of the street-level poetics of late-1960s L.A.
The scenes with the band and at the newspaper office were filmed with real musicians and journalists — in other words, non-professional actors — which, combined with the implausible performance of Alexandra Hay as George’s girlfriend, make the non-Lola/George moments sort of hollow. (Obviously Demy’s command of English was not strong enough to bring out good line delivery from most of the minor players.) If performances can make or break a film for you, the supporting cast may make you bail. Also, the interiors between George and his girlfriend were obviously the last scenes filmed, because Lockwood is shirtless (no complaints there) with a glaringly distracting Farmer’s Tan from shooting exteriors in a convertible wearing the same t-shirt for weeks.
As the film concludes, George’s life collapses in entropy like a Robert Smithson artwork: his girlfriend has split; his car is repossessed; Lola has left for Paris. He also gets a note from the draft board to report to the Army induction center for processing into the military: the qualities of his life are erased in a single day.
More than anything else, the film evokes and parallels the dynamics of a married Gay man’s extramarital one-night stand (Demy died of AIDS yet was married to fellow filmmaker Agnès Varda): George’s sudden arresting interest in a passer-by, whom he cruises, eventually breaking the ice; his obsession as he realizes the potential for sex; his rush of emotional liberation when he escapes from his regular life and is alone with the one he wants; the consummated act; then the morning-after of diminished reality as the avenues of his emotional life and personal expression quickly and forcefully are blocked, as he finds the exteriors of his life have sealed him up once more.
Again, as with most Columbia Studios films released by Sony, the new DVD’s extras are minimal. Fortunately there are English subtitles (Aimée’s English can be hard to understand at times), and the original trailer is a great artifact of how arty films were marketed in the 1960s.
The
Essential Jacques Demy - The Criterion Collection
Next Projection [Adam Kuntavanish]
Jacques
Demy's Model Shop and the geography of Los ... Eloise Ross from The Essential
Model
Shop - Turner Classic Movies Jeff
Stafford
DVD Talk Casey Burchby
FilmIntuition.com [Jen Johans]
The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Model Shop |
Variety
San Francisco Chronicle G. Allen Johnson
Criterion's
"The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
New York Times Vincent Canby
Model Shop (film) -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DONKEY
SKIN (Peau d'âne)
France
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Jacques Demy's 1970 musical fantasy, based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale and shot in storybook colors in the forests and castles of the French countryside, could be his answer to Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast." He even casts the Beast himself, Jean Marais, as the King. Though Demy's airy direction is often tongue-in-cheek, his story verges on the perverse. The King promises his dying wife (Catherine Deneuve) that he will only marry someone more beautiful than her, so he settles on his own daughter (Deneuve again, this time in wide-eyed ingénue mode). Fairy godmother Delphine Seyrig sings a song about why girls shouldn't marry their daddies and hides the princess in a forest cottage in a faraway kingdom, where she becomes a veritable Cinderella dressed in a smelly animal hide. It's both innocent and bizarre, with a mischievous sense of fantasy marked by simple but striking cinematic magic (a dress "the color of the weather" with clouds that drift across the material). The film recently was restored and the vibrant costume creations positively shimmer.
The films of Jacques Demy have nothing to
do with reality; they take adolescent romantic dreams and utterly vindicate
them. His first four films (Lola,
Donkey Skin begins
with the sweet words, "Once upon a time," but the narrator's voice
sounds rather detached, almost creepy. Demy focuses intensively on different
shades of blue throughout; many in the film's fairy tale kingdom have blue
faces, including some dwarves who look like early oompa loompas. The King
(Marais) is distraught when his wife (played by Deneuve in a brown wig) dies.
In his grief, he turns to his daughter (Deneuve at her blondest) and insists on
marrying her, at which point everyone watching should get out their Penguin
Freud. Aghast, the Princess is counseled by the Lilac Fairy (Seyrig, wearing
her Daughters of Darkness blond marcel wave) to stall her father by
asking for lots of specific gowns, then by asking for the skin of his magic
donkey, who shits gold and keeps the kingdom in funds. To her horror, he
obliges, and the Princess is forced to take refuge as a scullion in the
provinces. But a handsome prince in red (Perrin) comes to her rescue,
eventually.
Legrand's
score is not up to his usual standard for Demy, and there isn't enough of it.
But the actors and Demy's color scheme, which includes blue and green iris
shots, are striking enough to hide some of the film's weaknesses. Demy's films
set in ordinary French seaside towns emphasize the magic of movies and music to
romanticize the most provincial locales. In Donkey Skin, he takes a
romantic fairy tale and brings it down to earth with prosaic details (modern
personal foibles, a late-arriving helicopter). When the old crone the Princess
works for spits out toads, it seems the most natural thing in the world, as
does the blue and yellow parrot that continually squawks Legrand's anxious love
theme.
There's
plenty of disguised sex in Donkey Skin. Perrin's prince is addressed by
a very vaginal pink rose, the center of which talks at him with a woman's mouth
and looks at him with a woman's eyes. When he's trying to find the Princess, he
has all the maidens in the kingdom come try on a ring, and the phallic
implications are clear. Perrin and Deneuve, who were the perfect blonde couple
always missing each other in Rochefort, are pampered and infantile here,
but in a way that gives pampered infantilism its due. These spoiled kids are
used to indulging themselves; in one wonderful sequence, Perrin does backward
somersaults up a hill while Deneuve rolls herself up. Once on top, they stuff
themselves with pastries and sing narcissistically of their immortal love. The
whole film seems to take place in a refrigerated Disney movie filled with
elaborate and cold French desserts and sexual/intellectual French subtexts.
Donkey Skin: Demy’s Fairy-Tale Worlds Criterion essay by July 28, 2014
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014
The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014
On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014
Demy Monde Criterion video, August 05, 2014
Donkey Skin (1970) - The Criterion Collection
Melancholy
and Euphoria in the Fairytale: Peau d'âne Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
The
Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters
John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ...
Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve
Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray
Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray
THE
DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Mondo
Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar
Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict
Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson)
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Donkey Skin MaryAnn Johanson
Austin Chronicle [Raoul Hernandez]
The Boston Phoenix A.S. Hamrah
Boston Globe Janice Page
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Criterion's
"The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
THE
PIED PIPER
Pleasence, as the nouveau riche
burgomeister of Hamelin, attempts to evade the plague of rats by perching his
chair of office in tubs of boiling water; behind him - pulling the strings? -
the Church struggles on a knife edge for power. The Pied Piper has
everything wrong with it; yet over and over again it will toss up images that
take it towards what must have been Demy's intentions. The film is strongest
when dealing in his characteristic language of images: the corpse left by the
Black Death nestling in the midst of apparent rural bliss, the cathedral-shaped
cake that explodes obscenely with live rats. Too often Demy has seemed to be
doing little but produce cinematic candy floss; this admittedly imperfect film
of Browning's poem is at least trying for more.
Between
Productions [Robert Cashill]
One of my movie wishes was fulfilled
Monday night. Thanks to Paramount Pictures, which has provided a brand-new
archival print, New York'a Anthology Film Archives
has been showcasing Jacques Demy's The Pied Piper for what is a
de-facto 35th anniversary engagement, which ends this Thursday. My Cineaste
colleague and "Anthologist," Jared Rapfogel, tells me that, based on
a request from the George Eastman House, Paramount (which almost certainly did
not treat the film this cordially in 1972) was happy to provide the print,
"so long as more than five people showed up to see it." On a frigid
Monday evening, considerably more than five film cultists showed up at the 7pm
screening, with many more queuing up in the cold to see the 9pm show; the house
was just about full. The opportunity to see one of the great French director's
most obscure features (his second, and last, in English) was just too good to
pass up, temperatures be damned--though it must be added that the opportunity
to see it with its star, the pop troubadour Donovan, in attendance for a
Q&A was completely irresistible. Anthology's hook was well-baited for a
dead-zone night in February, so out I went.
How far has The Pied Piper fallen off the cinematic radar screen? The
plunge is so abyssal I couldn't find a single image on the whole WWW to filch
for an illustration; even the star's website has only a single,
meager black-and-white photo to show for an experience that he remembers well.
[Problem solved, thanks to a reader; see below.] But the image I did
swipe (I mean, pick) is at least apt, as the film, co-written by Demy, Andrew
Birkin (currently Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which with its
mysterious interloper upsetting the bourgeois applecart bears some
relationship)and Mark Peploe, of several Bertolucci pictures, quotes from
Robert Browning's 1888 poem, as well as the Brothers Grimm story, and applies a
critique of 20th century morality to the plotline.
The Pied Piper is one of those pictures that boggles our 21st century
minds with its early Seventies G-rating: the atmosphere in the town of Hamelin
is seamy, thick with the stench of adult hypocrisy, child exploitation and
abuse is rampant, and the most sympathetic character, Michael Hordern's Jewish
alchemist (who is unjustly blamed for the rat plague), is burned at the stake
at the end--not as horrifyingly as Oliver Reed at the end of Ken Russell's The
Devils (1971), maybe, but nothing you'd find as the capper of a Pixar
cartoon, either. The entire mood of the piece, indeed, is closer to one of
Hammer's pastoral horrors of the time(like Vampire Circus) than any
children's film of its (or this) period I can recall, and is much more
unsettling than its companion piece, Demy's bizarre and bawdy fable Donkey
Skin, which was recently re-released. Today, just the unsavory presence of
Donald Pleasence and John Hurt, as the town's most ignoble noble citizens,
would land the film a PG-13. But it's Donovan's cheery, reassuring presence
that is the film's scariest element; with the rest of the cast, you know where
you stand, but there's no telling what goes on behind those mello yellow eyes.
(He's no actor, but largely isolated from the rest of the adult cast and given
less screen time than you might anticipate, he isn't used for his thespian
abilities. His larger contribution, the 15 or so minutes of medieval-flavored
score used in the film, is fine.)
And what a supporting cast Demy, the director of one of my very favorite films,
the bittersweet and peerless The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
imported to Germany. The late Jack Wild, a Supporting Actor Oscar nominee as
the Artful Dodger in Oliver! (1969), had one of his biggest subsequent
roles here, aiding Hordern's alchemist. In her first film, 11-year-old Cathryn
Harrison (granddaughter of Rex) plays Hurt's intended; believe it or not, it
was not her strangest assignment, an honor that goes to Louis Malle's
unclassifiable apocalyptic fantasy Black Moon (1975), which will throw
you for a loop the next time it airs on the Showtime channels, as it has been
lately (every director, it seems, has to make an end-of-the-world type picture;
The Pied Piper, which closes with the eruption of the plague and the
literal fade-out of Hamelin's children, is Demy's). Burly Peter Vaughan (Straw
Dogs and Time Bandits) plays the sanctimoniously red-robed bishop, the one who
suggests that Hamelin's rats are a "Jewish problem," and
writer-director David Leland (Mona Lisa) has a small part. Roy Kinnear, an
indispensable presence in many Richard Lester pictures, is faultless as the
fawning, obsequious burgomaster. I especially enjoyed seeing, as his
status-conscious wife, none other than Diana "Swingin'" Dors,
Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe--that heyday didn't last, but she's funny
here, not least when wearing a ram's horn headdress.
The costuming and sets, suggesting a medieval fair, are excellent. But The
Pied Piper, as much as I liked seeing it, isn't quite a lost masterpiece.
Demy had his DP, Peter Suschitzky (of numerous David Cronenberg films), shoot much
of the film at a discreet middle distance, I suppose to capture the actors and
settings in different tableaux, like ancient woodcuts; there are few closeups,
and little cutting within scenes, and for as stylized as the film is a certain
lassitude sets in by the midpoint. And I'm afraid the rats disappoint, as they
so often do in movies. On the street, or scurrying about the New York subway
tracks, they're properly verminous. But the plump, shiny-coated trained rats
used in most films, like his one, are, well, kind of cute. In the film's most
memorable image, which I'm sure Werner Herzog had in mind for his Nosferatu
remake, they burst forth from a cathedral-shaped wedding cake. That worked, but
they otherwise lack menace, a shortcoming of Willard and its sequel, Ben,
which were highly popular at that time. There's much to appreciate about this Pied
Piper but not much that really appeals. [I should add that the image was
lovely but Anthology's sound system couldn't quite handle the audio.]
What, then, of the guest of honor? I've liked Donovan since his song
"Atlantis" was used to accompany a ghastly murder in Goodfellas;
I don't know if he appreciated that, but as he has no qualms about his biggest
hits being recycled in commercials, and being an everthing-is-connected kind of
person, I doubt he minded. He resembles a frizzier-haired version of the actor
Peter MacNicol, and speaks in a hushed, theatrical cadence, appropriate for a
mystic (he and David Lynch are currently odd-coupled trying to get TM taught in
schools). He said he had little contact with Demy on set, as he played his part
in the overall vision, but that Demy's wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda, was
constantly second-guessing him, trying to get Demy to make more of a children's
story and less of a modern-day metaphor out of the material. I saw who won that
battle.
I asked him about working with the rats. "I had a kind of kinship with
them," he said. "One made himself very comfortable on my shoulder. I
looked at him and said, 'Who's your agent?'"
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD Review: Pied Piper (1972) Tim
Lucas, July 2008
The Pied Piper Neo-marxist
fairy tale, by Reynold Humphries from Jump Cut, 1976
The
Pied Piper (1972) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Nathaniel Thompson
Film Freak Central Review [Ian Pugh]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson]
The Spinning Image [Pablo Vargas]
Fantastic
Movie Musings and Ramblings [Dave Sindelar]
UNE
CHAMBRE EN VILLE
France Italy (90 mi)
1962
Blood
on the Rainbow: Jacques Demy and Une chambre en ... David Melville from Senses of Cinema, April
2010
“There are few films I have so longed to make”, said Jacques Demy of Une chambre en ville. “Few I have dreamed of as much as this.” (1) So it seems oddly fitting that this film – which is rapturously romantic and darkly tragic at the same time – is one of the screen’s all-time great odes to desire. An all-singing opéra populaire set in the director’s home city of Nantes, it tells of the impossible love between a striking metal-worker and an unhappily married bourgeoise. A commercial fiasco on its release (and, arguably, Demy’s last artistic success) it shows desire as an emotion that flourishes where it is most denied – that secret longing inside us that cannot, or must not, be fulfilled.
Although it came late in Demy’s career, Une chambre en ville was in fact his oldest and most long-cherished project. The young Jacques first wrote the story as a novel (unpublished, of course) as a student in the early 1950s. A decade later, established as a filmmaker with Lola (1961) and La baie des anges (Bay of Angels, 1963) – but wholly lacking the resources for such a vast and risky project – he next conceived the story as an opera for the stage. Not until the mid-’70s did Une chambre en ville emerge definitively as a film script. The production was first scheduled for 1976, starring Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu and Simone Signoret. Yet problems arose when Deneuve, whose singing had been dubbed in three previous Demy films – Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967) and Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin, 1970) – now insisted that she and Depardieu should use their own voices (regardless of the fact that both actors were tone-deaf). Not surprisingly, Demy refused, his stars dropped out and the film collapsed.
The project (and Demy’s career) languished for the rest of the ’70s. Hope returned only when he met a more co-operative and less fractious muse, Dominique Sanda. Sanda, a beautiful ex-model turned movie star, was his first choice to play a transvestite swordswoman in his camp French Revolution romp Lady Oscar (1979). Sadly, she was unavailable – but she did appear a year later in Demy’s one film for French television, La naissance du jour (1980). More important was the fact that Sanda, although she was French, was best known for films made in Italian – notably Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970) and Novecento (1900, 1976) for Bernardo Bertolucci – a language she did not actually speak. Hence she had no qualms whatsoever about being dubbed.
By the early ’80s, Une chambre en ville was a reality again – with an all-new cast and a score by Michel Colombier instead of Demy’s long-term collaborator Michel Legrand. Sanda – once described by Pauline Kael as “a Garbo without depth, a trifling Garbo” (2) – gave what is, perhaps, the one performance of her career to seriously challenge Kael’s view. The most extreme in Demy’s gallery of emotionally extravagant women, her character, Edith, flees from an impotent and sadistic husband. Stark naked underneath her mink coat, she trawls the midnight streets of Nantes in search of anonymous sex. (Her costume, or lack thereof, is an echo of Elizabeth Taylor’s in the iconic opening of Butterfield 8 [Daniel Mann, 1960].) Her love for the working-class François (Richard Berry) is clearly doomed from the outset. “In all of Jacques’s films”, observed Sanda, “it’s the only time when a woman dies for love” (3).
The lurid sexual brutality of Une chambre en ville – in which Michel Piccoli, unable to make love to his wife, wields a razor in place of a penis, and Sanda opens her mink to reveal an exquisite body laced by scars – is a subtext hinted at but never explored in Demy’s earlier films. In Les demoiselles de Rochefort, Danielle Darrieux reads a newspaper item about a woman dismembered by her lover and packed into a suitcase. In the Medieval fairytale The Pied Piper (1972), a glistening white bridal cake splits open to reveal a swarm of rats carrying the bubonic plague. With the murder/suicide at the end of Une chambre en ville, Demy consciously echoed the eroticised “love-death” of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde. “In Les parapluies de Cherbourg, the young girl says ‘I could never live without you’,” recalled Demy. “But when her lover goes off to war, she settles down and marries another man. Here she says ‘I could never live without you’ and she doesn’t. She kills herself. That’s unusual.” (4)
Was it the extreme darkness of the love story that harmed the film commercially in 1982? France in that year was a nation flush with optimism – following the election of a socialist government, led by François Mitterrand, after decades of right-wing rule. Visually, Demy is a world away from the flashy but empty cinéma du look – typified by Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981) and La balance (Bob Swaim, 1982) – that was then coming into vogue. That is not to say the “look” of a Demy film does not matter. The colour palette is as iridescent in Une chambre en ville as it was in Les parapluies de Cherbourg or Les demoiselles de Rochefort. Yet every colour and fabric, every shade of wallpaper on every wall, has been chosen for its precise emotional weight. The blood-red womb of an apartment inhabited by Darrieux – here playing Sanda’s alcoholic, sexually frustrated mother – throbs with all the hues of curdled passion. The pale apple green, festooned with white roses, in the hotel room where Sanda and Berry first consummate their passion, makes us feel the lovers are afloat amid the clouds. Stylistically, Demy is as distinct from Beineix as a Greek tragedy is from a Chanel advertisement.
If Demy’s film seems outmoded or “old-fashioned” in any way, it may be that Une chambre en ville – like so much of his work – can be “read” as an essentially homosexual story in heterosexual guise. Rumours about Demy’s sexuality were not entirely hushed by his marriage to fellow filmmaker Agnès Varda in 1962. In her recent autobiographical film, Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008), his widow finally revealed that Demy’s death in 1990 was due to AIDS. Certainly, the basis of Une chambre en ville – an amour fou that ignites while both partners are cruising in a dark street – is remote from most heterosexual experience, but is instantly recognisable to gay men. Indeed, the film evokes Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) as a paean to the night city, to the sexual and romantic potential that lurks in darkened doorways or deserted streets. Hence the poignancy of Sanda’s defiant outburst to her cold, tyrannical mother:
Don’t you know what love is? Or passion? Or obsession? Nothing matters anymore. I’m in love for the first time. Words seem so empty to express this feeling. I love his skin, his smell. His strength, his softness, his laugh…. Nothing you can say will make the slightest difference.
Writing these lines, and hearing them spoken by his new muse, is as close as Demy ever came to a public “coming out”.
All this must have seemed a bit quaint, as France in the ’80s saw the advent of overtly “gay” films such as Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) and L’homme blessé (A Wounded Man, Patrice Chéreau, 1983) – both of which tackled similar themes with a frankness that Demy was unwilling or unable to try. It is not unusual for a film to succeed artistically, yet fail to find its audience, simply because it was out of tune with its time. Indeed, George Cukor’s valedictory film, Rich and Famous (1981), failed in the same year, and for similar reasons.
Yet Demy never did recover from the public’s rejection of Une chambre en ville. His next project with Sanda, Anouchka – an all-singing remake of Anna Karenina – was cancelled when its French distribution deal fell through. Two films that did see the light of day, Parking (1985) and Trois places pour le 26 (Three Places for the 26th, 1988), were marred by artistic uncertainty and – quite possibly, in those days before AZT and combination therapy – by the gradual progression of his illness. Still, Une chambre en ville survives as a darkly magnificent farewell to Demy’s unique and enchanting world. His was films were “as graceful and humane as those of Max Ophuls, as poised between speech and music as Stephen Sondheim” (5). The wonder is not that it ended, tragically, some years before his death. The wonder is that it happened at all.
Une
chambre en ville: Love and Death - From the Current ... Criterion essay from Geoff Andrew, July 29,
2014
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014
The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014
On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014
Demy Monde Criterion video, August 05, 2014
Une chambre en
ville (1982) - The Criterion Collection
Une
chambre en ville - Jacques Demy - film review James Travers from French Film Site
The
Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters
John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ...
Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve
Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray
Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray
THE
DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Mondo
Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar
Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict
Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion's
"The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
Movie
Review - Une Chambre en Ville - Review/Film ... The New
York Times
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Une chambre en ville -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Deneuve,
Catherine – actress
Catherine Deneuve > Overview - AllMovie Rebecca Flint Marx
A model of Gallic elegance, cultivated lust object for art house filmgoers everywhere, and one of the best-respected actresses in the French film industry, Catherine Deneuve made her reputation playing a series of beautiful ice maidens for directors such as Luis Buñuel and Roman Polanski. The daughter of French stage and film actor Maurice Dorléac, Deneuve was born in Paris on October 22, 1943. She made her screen debut at the age of 13, with a role in the 1956 film Les Collegiennes, and went on to make a string of films with directors such as Roger Vadim (with whom she had a child) before getting her breakthrough role in Jaques Demy's charming musical, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964). The burst of stardom that accompanied her portrayal led to two of her archetypal ice maiden roles, first in Roman Polanski's terrifying Repulsion in 1965 and then in Buñuel's 1967 Belle de Jour. Deneuve's startling portrayal of an icy, sexually adventurous housewife in the latter film helped to establish her as one of the most remarkable and compelling actresses of her generation. She further demonstrated her talent that year in Demy's Umbrellas musical follow-up, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which she starred in with her sister, Françoise Dorléac.
Deneuve continued to work steadily through the 1960s and 1970s in films such as the 1970 Tristana (her second collaboration with Buñuel) and A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973), in which she starred with her lover at the time, Marcello Mastrioanni (who would father her daughter, the actress Chiara Mastrioanni). Despite or perhaps because of her stardom, Deneuve chose to avoid Hollywood, limiting her appearances in American films to The April Fools (1969) and Hustle (1975). Tellingly, her most significant American screen work of that period was probably the series of commercials she did for Chanel perfume in the mid-'70s, which led to the creation of her own perfume a decade later. Deneuve also did prolific work through the 1980s, appearing in such films as François Truffaut's Le Dernier Métro (1980) and Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983). The latter film saw Deneuve playing a bisexual vampire alongside David Bowie and Susan Sarandon, and her performance won her an indelible cult status in the States among lesbians, goths, and artistically inclined teenage boys.
In the 1990s, Deneuve garnered further international acclaim for her roles in several films, including the 1992 film Indochine (for which she won a French Academy Award and a Best Actress Oscar nomination) and two films directed by André Téchiné in which she played Daniel Auteuil's sister, Ma Saison Préférée (1993) and Les Voleurs (1995). In 1996, she paid homage to the director who had first given her fame by taking part in the documentary L'Univers de Jacques Demy. Closing out the final years of the 1990's Deneuve remained consistantly working in numerous films (in 1999 alone she appeared in no less than six, including driector Leos Carax's controversial Pola X) and continuing to turn in compelling performances.
In 2000 Deneuve recieved much critical attention when cast alongside eccentric Icelandic singer Bjork in the Lars von Trier's melancholy musical Dancer in the Dark. Though it polarized critics and audiences alike, Dancer nevertheless won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival and continued von Trier's tradition of creating difficult and challenging films that, like them or not, always seem to provoke a strong response.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Theatre of Complicity Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith complete text from Sight and
Sound, April 2005
Our series of performers continues with France's
most beguiling enigma, a "beautiful apparition" whose ability simply
to 'be' on screen disguises the artistry that's made her the best of her era
Catherine Deneuve is the greatest
film actress of her generation – and probably (as Orson Welles used to say in
those old Carlsberg ads, leaving one plenty of room for disbelief) the best
film actress since Lillian Gish, though only time will tell. Yet at first
sight there's nothing much to her, in terms either of her appearance or of her
performance. She is beautiful, yes, with firm features, upright posture,
large dark eyes and thick blonde hair, sometimes worn up but more often
sprawling loosely over her shoulders. But this is not the beauty of Grace Kelly
or Audrey Hepburn, or even of many starlets who never made the grade. In motion
she has nothing distinctive – no Monroe wiggle, no loose-limbed Bardot walk, no
characteristic gesture equivalent to Bette Davis' contemptuous toss of the head
or Danielle Darrieux's sceptical raising of the eyebrows. Nor will she be
remembered for great dramatic performances like Arletty in Les Enfants du
paradis or Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar. Since she rarely
plays melodrama, there is nothing in the style of Barbara Stanwyck in Stella
Dallas, nor does she do much comedy (the recent Eight Women
is an exception), nor villainesses, so she can't be compared with Stanwyck in Ball
of Fire or Double Indemnity either.
So Deneuve is an actress with
limitations, partly self-imposed. But it's worth taking note of what these
limitations are, and what they mean. Both comedy and melodrama are, in their
way, forms of theatre or theatricality. They involve the actor and director
stretching out across the screen to engage the audience; a little signal
flashes up: look, we are shaping this scene to make you laugh or cry.
This is not Deneuve's style. She is an actress who always remains behind the
screen, drawing the spectator towards her rather than projecting outwards, let
alone inviting complicity. She has never done any stage work and has regularly
expressed an unwillingness to do any – or even to act with directors who like
to employ stage actors and generate stagy performances. Asked by the writer
Francis Wyndham in 1968 to name an actor and a performance she particularly
admired and would like to aspire to, she chose Roland Young in Leo McCarey's Ruggles
of Red Gap (1935) – a remarkably understated way of expressing a
preference for understatement as the acme of the actor's craft.
In the same Sunday Times
interview, made during the shooting of Alain Cavalier's 1968 La Chamade,
in which she stars opposite Michel Piccoli, an actor of a very different type,
Wyndham wrote that Deneuve seemed to be "feeling her way towards a style
and a technique so transparent that it hardly counts as 'acting' at all."
If in 1968 she was still feeling her way in that direction, by now – and indeed
for the past 20 years – she has definitively arrived.
To see how much Deneuve can
convey without appearing in any obvious way to 'act', it is worth looking at
the opening scene of François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (La
Sirène du Mississipi, 1969). Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has gone
down to the port of Réunion to meet the boat carrying his mail-order bride
Julie, holding her slightly dowdy photograph. Not finding her among the
disembarking passengers, he retreats to a piece of nondescript land overlooking
the port. He hears a woman's voice behind him, and turns round. "Don't you
recognise me, Monsieur Mahé?" she asks. He doesn't, but the audience does.
Facing him is a beautiful apparition: Deneuve, clad in a large sun hat and a
Saint-Laurent two-piece and carrying a wicker cage with a small bird in it. She
is not like the photograph, nor like anyone one would expect to find in
such a drab landscape. The drama to come is set out entirely in a brief sequence
of shots in which the camera comes close enough, just, to look at the movement
of her eyes as she speaks. She is not the real Julie, so much is clear. But it
is equally clear that Louis is bowled off his feet and any doubts he may have
about the trick being played on him will be set aside. Indeed, until she
absconds with all his money, he pays no attention to those doubts, and even
then is shocked into action more by her disappearance than by his
financial loss.
Needless to say, it is only in
retrospect that the audience will match the upcoming plot events with this
opening apparition. But the scene has presented us with the sort of image only
a true star can produce, with no apparent effort on her part and not much (or
so it seems) on the part of the director.
Deneuve.com fan website
Catherine Deneuve - TCM biography
Catherine Deneuve | Gallery Lenin Imports biography, gallery, and filmography
Catherine Deneuve - Biography from IMDb
Catherine Deneuve bio from 1 World Films
Catherine Deneuve - Filmbug profile page
Cathérine Deneuve Biography - Biography.com
Catherine Deneuve - NNDB profile page
Catherine
Deneuve profile
page from About.com
Catherine Deneuve - Classic Movies
Catherine Deneuve James Travers FilmsdeFrance profile
Deneuve's New Role: Symbol of All France The New York Times, October 16, 1985
Still Sexy After All These Years The New York Times, August 1, 1993
COCKTAILS WITH: Catherine Deneuve;Woman, Actress, Ice Queen And Icon Alan Riding from The New York Times, April 24, 1996
CRITIC'S CHOICE/Film; Deneuve and Belmondo In Restored Truffaut Gem Janet Maslin from The New York Times, January 15, 1999
Style; It's All About Yves Amy M. Spindler from The New York Times, January 9, 2000
SHOPPING WITH: Catherine Deneuve; One Kind of Beauty, Coolly Measuring Another Guy Trebay from The New York Times, August 13, 2000
Feature: Catherine Deneuve Still Belle, John Patterson from The Guardian, November 23, 2002
Observer review: A l'ombre de moi-même by Catherine Deneuve Book review by Liz Hoggard from The Observer, May 2, 2004
Deneuve and Lagerfeld named in chat show gifts investigation Jon Henley from The Guardian, November 19, 2005
Catherine Deneuve: That Perpetual Object of Desire, Unobscured Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, June 11, 2006
David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film #4 Catherine Deneuve, by David Thomson from The Guardian, September 15, 2006
Catherine Deneuve in Venice Catherine Deneuve from The Guardian, September 16, 2006
Offscreen.com :: The Goddess, French Cinema: Catherine Deneuve's ... Daniel Garrett’s book review of Close Up and Personal: The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve, from Offscreen (2007)
France Salutes the Ultimate Couturier Steven Erlanger eulogizes Yves Saint Laurent from The New York Times, June 6, 2008
CRITICS
CHOICE; New DVDs: Deneuve and Loren Still Haunt the Screen Dave Kehr from The New York Times, June 10, 2008
Child
of the Moon: Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve - French Film Actress & Star - IFC.com Ten French Film Stars You Should Know, from IFC (2008)
All Hail the Ice Queen: Catherine Deneuve at 65 - Filmcritic.com Don Willmott (2008)
Laura Barton meets Catherine Deneuve | Film | The Guardian Belle Deneuve, Laura Barton from The Guardian, January 16, 2009
Philip French's screen legends No 45: Catherine Deneuve 1943 - Philip French from The Observer, February 1, 2009
French film legend Deneuve booed at Italian festival Breitbart, August 6, 2009
Catherine
Deneuve: From Repulsion to Adoration: Vogue's Daily ... John Power from Vogue,
Classic
Maiden: Catherine Deneuve - My 2# Favourite Actress Classic Maiden,
Hollywood
Feminist of the Day: Catherine Deneuve | Women & Hollywood Melissa Silverstein from Women & Hollywood,
The
Village Voice [Melissa Anderson] BAM Honors the Peerless Catherine Deneuve, March 2, 2011
Catherine Deneuve The most beautiful woman in - The whole world ... The Gorgeous Hussy, March 27, 2011, also more seen here: #catherine deneuve
Charlie
Rose - Catherine Deneuve 6 TV
interviews by Charlie Rose, from
CNN Transcript - Larry King Live: Catherine Deneuve Discusses ...- Larry King interview transcript from CNN, July 28, 2000
AT THE MOVIES; Deconstructing Deneuve Rick Lyman interview from The New York Times, September 29, 2000
Catherine Deneuve | Interviews | Guardian Unlimited Film- Geoff Andrew interview from The Guardian, September 21, 2005
Proust Questionnaire: Catherine Deneuve | vanityfair.com Vanity Fair questionnaire, January 2006
Q&A airport questionnaire from The New York Times, July 8, 2008
Los Angeles Film+TV - Catherine Deneuve: Belle De 50 Ans - page 1 Scott Foundas interview from LA Weekly, November 19, 2008
Film Society of Lincoln
Center Interview by Arnaud Desplechin, translated by Sarah
Françoise from Film Comment,
November/December 2008
Ice queen Catherine Deneuve looks back - Times Online Bryan Appleyard interview from Times Online, January 18, 2009
Catherine Deneuve Collection Alain Delon DVDBeaver
Catherine Deneuve - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve Pics | Actress Archives picture profile
Catherine Deneuve Pics - Catherine Deneuve Photo Gallery - 2009 ...
Denis,
Claire
Claire Denis was born in Paris but moved to colonial French West Africa when she was only two months old, living in what is now Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal, and Cameroon, where her father was a colonial administrator. Her father moved the family every few years as he wanted them to understand the significance of geography. Her family stayed in Cameroon even after it obtained independence in 1960, where over the next three years her father helped set up a radio station for the new government. At 14, she and her sister both contracted polio, so they were sent back to France, a country they had little recollection of, where Denis made a full recovery, while her sister still walks with a slight limp. Denis spent her remaining teenage years in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris, as her parents wanted their children to complete their education in France. Denis initially studied economics, but found it infuriorating, so she enrolled at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, IDHEC (now École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son), France’s most prestigious film school where she graduated in 1971, learning the technique of filmmaking at a time that France was still galvanized by the events of the May 1968 uprisings.
Her first job on a
payroll was working as an extra on Bresson's Four
Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur) (1971), where you can see
her walking by the Seine in a night scene.
One of her film school teachers was Pierre Lhomme, the cinematographer
on the film, who recruited students to be extras, a job that led to the
attention of Dušan Makavejev who learned
she could speak a little English, where he needed a go-between for him and the French
crew, especially Viennese Action artist Otto Mühl (now a convicted
sex offender) and his Therapie-Kommune, which led to her job as a second assistant on the surrealist
dark satire SWEET MOVIE (1974). As Makavejev's assistant,
Denis apparently lived with the Kommune members through part of the shoot,
where Denis recalls, “They did terrible things.
They wanted me to shave my head, drink my blood, eat my shit, things
like that. But, in a way, I was not
afraid. Maybe because I was smoking pot.” While she is about the same age of
Philippe Garrel, whose association with Godard and leftist politics left an
imprint on his style of filmmaking, which began at age 16, Denis would not make
her first film until the age of 40, deciding instead to work as a scriptwriter
and assistant director under a myriad of diverse directors from Jacques Rivette, becoming
lifelong friends, where her collaboration with Rivette gave rise to the
television documentary portrait, Jacques Rivette – Le Veilleur
(Jacques
Rivette – The Nightwatchman, 1990),
which Denis co-directed with Serge Daney, but also the likes of Dušan Makavejev,
Costa-Gavras, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders, making several shorts before
obtaining the financial backing needed from Wim Wenders for her debut
feature film in 1988 with Chocolat
(1988),
an elaborate portrait of 1950’s French colonialism in Africa as seen through
flashbacks into early childhood memories, which was selected into Director’s
Fortnight at Cannes. Since 2002, she has
been a Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in
Claire Denis occupies a unique place in world cinema, one
not easily categorized or associated with any particular “wave” or style. Both
sensual and rigorous, languid yet at times explosively energetic, her films are
highly idiosyncratic and often focus on those living on the margins of society
usually absent from mainstream work, both in colonial and post-colonial Africa
(where she spent her early youth) and in her native France, but also characters
existing outside the parameters of a white, bourgeois, European ideal. Her films tend to be internationally
financed, multilingual, while outwardly rejecting the cliché’d conventions of
Hollywood cinema, accentuating the personal with the historical, advocating
lyricism and sensuality over any narrative coherence, where she’s sensitive to
issues of exile, homelessness, and border disputes. Denis prefers to work on location, often
framing her actors as if they were positioned for still photography, as in Beau
Travail (1999), where she is especially fond of the male anatomy, using
longer takes that are often captured in perfectly framed long shots, while also
relentlessly focusing upon the faces of her subjects. In this way her films are as much about
sounds, textures, colors, and compositions as they are about themes or
examining social content, where immediate landscape determines her visual
style, suffocating and claustrophobic in the Parisian traffic jams and compact
hotel rooms that effect FRIDAY NIGHT (VENDREDI SOIR, 2002), or the ominous
beauty of the arid African landscape in Chocolat
(1988) or White
Material (2009), captured in long tracking shots, often set to intoxicating
music, where it actually has the transfixing feel of a momentary reverie or
dream, where memory is as fleeting as silhouettes, or a streak of sunlight,
where tone and texture matter more than words or action. According to Denis, “In
Tindersticks
- Claire Denis Box Set
Kinoeye Feature (2003) by Steven Jay Schneider (excerpt)
After spending much of her childhood in
Since then, she has fashioned a remarkable body of work. Her powerfully emotional films are filled with literary references and the sorts of marginalised characters usually absent from mainstream cinema. In this special issue of Kinoeye, five Denis scholars examine a quartet of the writer-director's most evocative and controversial films, revealing the auteurist vision underlying the apparent diversity.
Foreign Bodies: The Films of Claire Denis Mary Rubin from The Siskel Film Center
Born in Paris in 1948, Denis spent most of her childhood in West Africa, where her father served as a French colonial official. After attending the renowned IDHEC film school in Paris, she served a long apprenticeship as assistant director to such idiosyncratic auteurs as Dusan Makavejev, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch. Her first film, CHOCOLAT, was released in 1988 to widespread critical acclaim.
Aided immensely by the versatility of her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard and screenwriter Jean-Pôl Fargeau, Denis’s output has been adventurously eclectic, embracing a wide range of genres and visual styles. She aptly describes her work as “an open cinema.” Still, certain recurring preoccupations stand out.
Denis’s films tend to center on black characters (especially Africans and African immigrants) and on male characters (especially black males, repeatedly played by Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas, but also white males, played by such recurring actors as Grégoire Colin and Vincent Gallo).
“Capturing bodies on film is the only thing that interests me,” Denis has said. An exaggeration perhaps, but the charged presence of the body, especially the male body, as a site of both erotic spectacle and violent struggle, is a major concern (and pleasure) of her films. Actor Grégoire Colin remarked, “She films male bodies as if she were a homosexual man.”
Denis’s films emphasize the perspectives of outsiders, especially immigrants and foreigners (usually Africans, but also the Lithuanian actress in I CAN’T SLEEP and the American honeymooners in TROUBLE EVERY DAY). She has said, “If my films have a common link, maybe it’s being a foreigner.” Her childhood experiences as a white French girl living in Africa (and then returning to an unfamiliar Paris) undoubtedly contributed to this interest, which scrupulously avoids exoticism and fetishization, while her focus on blacks and males also forestalls a too-easy identification.
Whether gritty or elegant, Denis’s visual style is tactile and sensual. As one critic noted, “Her camera doesn’t just capture; it caresses.” Music adds another dimension to that sensuality, as demonstrated by her integral use of both original scores (e.g., her collaborations with British indie rock band Tindersticks on several films) and cannily chosen pop songs (e.g., the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in NENETTE ET BONI, the Commodores’ “Night Shift” in 35 SHOTS OF RUM).
That all-embracing sensuality also determines Denis’s fragmentary and elliptical approach to narrative, privileging the sensory impact of the moment over clarity of story and psychological motivation, but in ways that are intriguing and invigorating rather than incoherent. As Reverse Shot editors Michael Korensky and Jeff Reichert have written in the preface to their valuable special issue on Denis (Reverse Shot 25: Claire Denis—The Art of Seduction), “She chooses to please rather than pillory her audience, invite them into a dialogue around images rather than read sermons from on high... Denis seems to have decided that, in the long, long shadow cast over French cinema by Godard’s early output, the most radical thing to do is not to eschew or batter narrative, but to wrestle with and redefine it, all without losing sight of the essential satisfactions of storytelling.”
All-Movie
Guide Rebecca
A provocative director whose films offer richly textured,
contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation, Claire Denis is one of French cinema's most
distinctive and humanistic storytellers. A prolific filmmaker who is more
concerned with the drive of her characters rather than the plot that weaves
them together, she has been dubbed by one critic as one of the only current
French directors who "has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French
cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary
Born in Paris on
Denis followed her debut the next year with Man No Run, a documentary about Les Têtes
Brulées ("the Flaming Heads"), a
Denis, who occasionally directs for television, next embarked on U.S. Go Home (1994) one part of Tous les Garçons et les Filles de Leur Age,
a made-for-TV series depicting the adolescence of nine well-known directors.
Denis' section chronicled 24 hours in the lives of three teenagers trying to
lose their virginity in the mid-'60s. It marked the director's first
collaboration with Grégoire Colin, a dark-eyed, arresting young actor
whom Denis would also employ to great effect in both Nénette et Boni and Beau Travail.
The former film, made in 1996, was another coming-of-age drama that centered on
the relationship between a lovelorn young man (Colin) and his rebellious,
pregnant 15-year-old sister (Alice Houri). It received an enthusiastic
international reception and a number of film festival honors, and it was one of
the director's most successful films to date. She followed it three years later
with Beau Travail, a military drama based loosely
on Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor. Set in
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Claire Denis - Professor of Film - Biography
Claire Denis - Cinema and Media Studies - Oxford Bibliographies biography
Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis Samantha Dinning, April 2009
Claire Denis | Film Studies For Free
Senses of Cinema – Postcolonial Cinema: Chocolat Fiona Villella from Senses of Cinema, December 1999
“Beau Travail” - Salon.com Charles Taylor from Salon, March 31, 2000
Unsatisfied Men Jonathan Rosenbaum on BEAU TRAVAIL, originally printed in The Chicago Reader, May 26, 2000
Senses of Cinema – Chocolat Diana Sandars from Senses of Cinema, November 2001
Kinoeye Feature (2003) in-depth features on several different films,
June 9, 2003
Hilary Neroni, 'Lost in fields of interracial desire: Claire Denis' Chocolat (1988)' Kinoeye, Vol 3 Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Lost in fields of interracial desire
Todd McGowan, 'Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment: Claire Denis' J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment
Decoding
unreadable spaces Corinne Oster on I Can't
Sleep, from Kinoeye, June 9, 2003
Elena del Río, “Performing the narrative of seduction in Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)”, Kinoeye, vol. 3, no. 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Performing the narrative of seduction
Philippe Met, 'Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess (Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, 2001), Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue, 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess
Senses of Cinema – Travellin' Light: Vendredi soir Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, April 2004
Douglas
Morrey, 'Textures of Terror: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day', Belphégor:
Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique, Vol. 3, No. 2, April 2004
The Hither Side of Solutions: Bodies and Landscape in L'intrus R. Emmet Sweeney from Senses of Cinema, July 2005
Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet Book review by John Orr from Senses of Cinema, October 2005
Acquarello, 'Claire Denis by Judith Maine', Strictly Film School, January 16, 2006 Book review by Acquarello from Strictly Film School
Joe Bowman, '[on L'Intrus]', Fin de Cinéma, 28 April 2006
Claire Denis and the cinema of the body - La Trobe University Ticket to ride: Claire Denis and the cinema of the body, by Adrian Martin from Screening the Past, November 27, 2006
In The Realm of Work and Play: Claire Denis's Vers Mathilde | The ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, January 16, 2007
Senses of Cinema – Jacques Rivette – Le veilleur Paul Grant from Senses of Cinema, February 2007
Senses of Cinema – Beau travail Tamara Tracz from Senses of Cinema, February 2007
Rewriting Documentary: Claire Denis' Jacques Rivette, le veilleur ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, April 23, 2007
Eletrik Alchemy: Claire Denis Films Sonic Youth | Film Comment Daniel Stuyck from Film Comment, January/February 2008
"Petit Soldat-Beau Travail" by Justin Vicari - Jump Cut Spring 2008
Douglas Morrey, “Introduction: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc ... - Film-Philosophy Douglas Morrey, April 2008 (pdf format)
Laura McMahon, 'Deconstructing Community and Christianity: 'A-religion' in Nancy's Reading of Beau travail', Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Icon of Fury: Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
Martine Beugnet, 'The Practice of Strangeness: L'Intrus - Claire Denis (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)', Film-Philosophy, Volume 12, Issue No.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
Anja Streiter, 'The Community According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis,' Film-Philosophy, 11.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
The
Other's Intrusion: Claire Denis' L'intrus
Wim Staat, Thamyris/Intersecting
No. 19 April
2008 (195–208) (pdf format)
Claire Denis, a Stranger Cinema - Harvard Film Archive November 2 – 10, 2008, Harvard Film Archive
Ryland Walker Knight, '35 Rhums on The Night Shift', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 March 2009
Senses of Cinema – Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art ... Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression by Martine Beugnet, book review by Saige Walton from Senses of Cinema, April 2009
Joe Bowman, 'The Decade List: Trouble Every Day', Fin de Cinéma, 3 April 2009
Film Studies For Free: 35 Shots of Claire Denis (and more) April 23, 2009
Reverse Shot Symposium on Claire Denis August 17, 2009
Best of the Decade Derby: Video Essay on L’Intrus for the Reverse Shot Claire Denis Symposium Kevin B. Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, August 17, 2009
Reverse Shot 25: Claire Denis—The Art of Seduction Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot, 2010
Claire Denis's Early Career Good Work, by Leo Goldsmith from Reverse Shot, 2010
The music videos of Claire Denis: “Incinerate” and “Jams Run Free” Bodies in Motion, by Damon Smith from Reverse Shot, 2010
David Thomson on Claire Denis | Film | The Guardian July 8, 2010
Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood reviewing I Can’t Sleep from Film International, January 27, 2011
‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood, reviewing Chocolat from Film International, April 1, 2011
Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012
The Lyrical Space of Claire Denis - nwFilmCenter May 3, 2013
Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013
Claire Denis' Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation - Screening the Past Enfolding Surfaces, Spaces and Materials: Claire Denis’ Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation, by Saige Walton from Screening the Past, October 2013
This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic Marilyn Ferdinand about Chocolat and White Material, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 6, 2013
This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the Nightingale's Christy LeMaster about Nenette et Boni and Beau Travail, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 13, 2013
This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea Gronvall about I Can't Sleep and Trouble Every Day, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 20, 2013
This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia professor Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (and others) about No Fear, No Die and 35 Shots of Rum, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 27, 2013
This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with Melika Bass and Lori Felker about The Intruder and Bastards, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, December 4, 2013
Wim Wenders On Claire Denis The Ibtauris Blog, September 16, 2014
Denis, Claire They
Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Claire
Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut Colonial Observations, Mark Reid interview August 21, 1994,
published from Jump Cut, March 1996
The Guardian: Claire Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney June 28, 2000, also seen here: Claire Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney
BFI | Sight & Sound | Desire Is Violence Chris Darke interview from BFI Sight & Sound, July 2000
Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis: An Interview Aimé Ancian interview from Senses of Cinema, December 2002
Craig Phillips, with Jonathan Marlow, '"Making Film is to Be Inside": a Talk with Claire Denis [on Vendredi Soir]', GreenCine, May 14, 2003 (Continues on Page 2 HERE)
Errata
Interview (2004) Robert Davis
interview September 2004, published December 9, 2004
Robert Davis, 'Outtakes from Claire Denis Interview', Errata, 28 April, 2008 Robert Davis interview September 2004, published April 28, 2005
Senses of Cinema – L'Intrus: An Interview with Claire Denis Damon Smith interview, April 2005
Annett Busch, 'Claire Denis about Intrusions', (Interview, May 2005), Theory Kit, January 2006
Claire Denis interview | Film Comment Gavin Smith interview from Film Comment, January/February 2006
LA
Weekly Interview (2006) by Scott
Foundas, March 15, 2006
Robert Davis, 'Interview: Claire Denis on 35 Shots of Rum', Daily Plastic, March 10, 2009
Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis Darren Hughes from Senses of Cinema, April 2009
An Interview with Claire Denis | Reverse Shot On the Nightshift, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot, 2009
35
Shots of Rum': Claire Denis steps into the spotlight Sheila Johnston interview from The Telegraph, July 8, 2009
The Auteurs [interview
with Daniel Kasman] Kasman interviews Claire Denis from The
Auteurs, October 7, 2009
Q&A:
CLAIRE DENIS, Director of White Material :: Stop Smiling Magazine José Teodoro interview, October
8, 2009
Claire Denis: 'For me, film-making is a journey into the impossible' Andrew Hussey feature and interview from The Observer, July 4, 2010
Claire Denis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
CHOCOLAT A 95
France Germany Cameroon
When
I was making Chocolat I think I had the desire to express a certain guilt I
felt as a child raised in a colonial world […] knowing I was white, I tried to
be honest in admitting that Chocolat is essentially a white view of the Other.
—Claire Denis
When
you look at the hills, beyond the houses and beyond the trees, where the earth
touches the sky, that’s the horizon. The closer you get to that line, the
father it moves. If you walk towards it, it moves away. It flees from you. I
must also explain this to you. You see the line. You see it, but it doesn’t
exist. —Marc Dalens (François Cluzet)
The daughter of a civil servant, Denis spent much of her childhood in different colonial French West African countries in the 1950’s, living in what is now Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal, and Cameroon before returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature who never wrote a novel until her 40’s, she brings an unconventional maturity into her works. She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who moves between an experimental, avant-garde style with slight to nonexistent narratives to more conventional narratives fairly easily, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized characters usually absent from mainstream cinema (immigrants, exiles, alienated individuals, sexual transgressives), and while rarely calling attention to her impeccable craftsmanship, Denis has a highly individualistic aesthetic that favors poetic texture and visualized style over dialogue and action. Often resorting to fractured time frames, she often blurs the lines between dreams and reality, the past and the present, where memory evokes painful references to history, which she uses to question the ingrained prejudices of the dominant white European culture and its supposed myth of civilization and progress. The film is largely a memory piece that has an aching rawness to it as a young woman in her 20’s named France (Mireille Perrier) returns to the African region where she grew up during her childhood, a nation that has since gained its independence, but her reflections recall when it was under French colonialist control during her childhood in the 50’s. A near hypnotic experience, the film stuns by its ability to express with such banality how easily it is to mistreat an entire nation of citizens, as people are seen as less than human, where the colonialist mentality sees Africans as incapable of being anything other than servile domestics, overly submissive servants that wait on the French hand and foot, mostly living in dire poverty themselves which the French ignore while living their own lives of luxury and ease.
France (Cécile
Ducasse) is a young white girl living in a remote colonial outpost in
A single event disrupts the mirage of harmony, when a plane is forced to land nearby, where they are forced to wait for weeks to get a needed part for repair. During this interlude, the French passengers reveal their true colors, at first grateful for the lavish hospitality, but soon become bored and with nothing else to do turn on the African help with an onslaught of racist invectives that are meant to be demeaning and hurtfully cruel, where one in particular, a spoiled young ingrate named Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin), intentionally tries to penetrate through the passive reserve of Protée, continually mocking him, hoping he will break character. This kind of sick amusement only exposes the racist attitudes about Africans back home in France, but also unleashes unspoken sexual desires, as Protée’s solemn presence attracts the desire of Aimée, especially with her husband away so much of the time. This contrast of demeaning humiliation with idealized sexuality expresses with equal measure the arrogance and pure ignorance of the colonial rulers, who have no respect or any knowledge whatsoever of the African people or culture. Africans are routinely seen grooming one another in the afternoon sun, or we hear the sound of children at play, while the French hide indoors, seeking refuge in the shade, often hiding behind dark sunglasses, drinking themselves into a stupor. Africans must bathe in the “Boys shower,” an open air outdoor facility in full view of the main house, where even their privacy is on full display. Despite this nakedness, it’s ironic how little is known of the world of Africans, who are rarely seen and are given minimal dialogue, continually reinforcing the white perspective. It is only in the relationship between Protée and young France that we see evidence of any developing complexity, a relationship that is abruptly challenged when Protée rejects Aimée’s advances and she has him quickly banished from the house, an act that has lifelong consequences for young France as well. The film is a stark reminder of human contradictions, with so many thoughts left unspoken, every gesture ambiguous. Ultimately the film explores the parameters between ourselves and the mysterious Other, where the camera intrudes across various boundaries of the body, the spirit, and the mind, but also borders and culture, often unwillingly asking us to look at what moral lines are being crossed. The silence of Protée is symptomatic of Denis’s sensitivity, as we know little about his character, and can only guess his motivations. Rather than offering an understanding of the Other, it remains an open question where we are left to determine its meaning and value for ourselves.
A young woman called France (Perrier; Ducasse
as a child) returns to the
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: AlexLovesKissing (alexlovestorockandroll@yahoo.com) from Chicago, IL
In Denis' debut film, she explores the social dynamics of a French household during the closing days of colonial rule in West Africa. The bulk of the film is seemingly the flashback of a young adult French woman returning to her childhood African home after living abroad - though this perspective doesn't entirely hold during certain scenes. As an American moviegoer - and thus quite familiar with the baggage of colonial rule - I wasn't surprised by any of the themes suggested/addressed by this picture: second class citizenship, interracial lust, varying degrees of loathing of the colonists toward the ruled, the inescapable resentment that the ruled have towards the colonists. Consequently, I found the film less than compelling. Though competently told, the story shed no new light the complexities of colonial rule - the suggestion that the problems of colonial rule are visible in the microcosm of a household as in the macrocosm of a revolution is nothing new. However, these politics were handled in a minimalist fashion that gave the movie a relaxed if occasionally boring pacing - a pacing that was bearable thanks to DP Robert Alazraki beautifully capturing Cameroon's landscape. I quietly recommend this movie if no other reason than the fact that it is the first film from a major new French auteur.
“Chocolat,” Claire Denis' surrealistic return to her postwar childhood in Cameroon, may not uncover a comfortably structured story, but it conjures up its own peculiar, affecting sense of myth.
In her first feature, shot on location in West Africa with little money or equipment, Denis (who has worked closely with offbeat talents Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch) shows a sure instinct for the kind of open-ended mysteries that make great movies.
Suffused with sunlit, sensual images, "Chocolat" feels rather than finds out, implies rather than blurts out. Like an odd collection of old-time photographs, it seems to hold enigmatic truths -- ones that can't be expressed but that you have an instinctive understanding for nonetheless.
France Dalens (Mireille Perrier), a young woman traveling through Cameroon, recalls her much younger days when her father (Franc ois Cluzet) was a district officer and she developed a deep friendship with the houseboy, Prote'e (Isaach de Bankole'). Denis (co-scripting with Jean-Pol Fargeau) takes you back to when (while Papa's away on business and colonial wayfarers come and go) young France (Ce'cille Ducasse) and her mother Aime'e (Giulia Boschi) discover different qualities in the nobly elusive manservant.
Aime'e, initially resentful of Prote'e's deadpan efficiency, fights an eerie, sexual attraction to him. But France finds in Prote'e a delicate, fraternal bond. He gives her crushed ants on bread to eat, she feeds him from her dinner plate and, in a beautiful night-sky scene, he carries her on his shoulders into the African night, talking out loud to scare away predators.
As Prote'e, de Bankole' (a performer from the Ivory Coast) gives "Chocolat" its hypnotic soul. He seems menacing and innocent, proud and humble, all at the same time, as he tenderly watches over France, slips out of the sticky sexual situation with his dignity intact and knocks a pushy French racist on his derrie`re.
The performances are uniformly strong, including those from Ducasse and Boschi, and more minor offerings from Donatus Ngala as an amusing house chef, Enoch, who is constantly fending off complaints about his British-style cooking, and Jacques Denis as a Mr. Magoo-faced coffee planter who talks coffee late into the night and travels around with an African concubine.
Denis builds up her movie with such small moments and performances, as well as with moods you want to savor -- the lazy haze of afternoon, the romantic allure of evening. And though she may end with a cynical conclusion about cultural divisions, she also leaves you with enough images and (purposely) unexplained mysteries to last you long after you've left the theater.
Senses of Cinema – Postcolonial Cinema: Chocolat Fiona Villella from Senses of Cinema, December 1999
Senses of Cinema – Chocolat Diana Sandars from Senses of Cinema, November 2001
Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis Samantha Dinning from Senses of Cinema, April 2009
‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood, reviewing Chocolat from Film International, April 1, 2011
Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood from Film International, January 27, 2011
Hilary Neroni, 'Lost in fields of interracial desire: Claire Denis' Chocolat (1988)' Kinoeye, Vol 3 Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Lost in fields of interracial desire
Chocolat Colonial Architecture, by Elbert Ventura at Reverse Shot
Chocolat (1988) Darren Hughes from Long Pauses
Chocolat by Claire Denis - Jstor Nikki Stiller from Film Quarterly, Winter 1990-91 (excerpt only) (pdf format)
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Talking Pictures (Howard Schumann)
Memories of the Future [Jesse Ataide]
DVD
Talk (Phillip Duncan) dvd review
[3/5]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Chocolat (1988; Dir. Claire Denis) Film Guide & Resources
Claire
Denis interviewed Colonial Observations, interview on
August 21, 1994 by Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, March 1996
This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic Marilyn Ferdinand about Chocolat and White Material, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 6, 2013
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] also seen here: Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
CINÈMA, DE NOTRE TEMPS – Made for
French TV
JACQUES RIVETTE, LE VEILLEUR
France (125 mi)
1990 co-director: Serge Daney
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Jacques Rivette, le veilleur
Claire Denis’ first-rate documentary (1990) about filmmaker Jacques Rivette, produced for French television, has many things to recommend it. The main interviewer is the great critic Serge Daney, who, two years before his death, converses with Rivette while relaxing in a cafe and strolling around Paris (Denis interjects a few questions toward the end); since both men were former editors of Cahiers du Cinema, not to mention groundbreaking and highly articulate critics, they have a lot to discuss apart from Rivette’s filmmaking. Clips from many of Rivette’s major films (some of which remain difficult to see, like the legendary Out 1) are included, as are interviews with some of Rivette’s actors, such as Bulle Ogier and Jean-Francois Stevenin. Best of all, the film beautifully captures Rivette the man, as both solitary cinephile and exploratory filmmaker. Showing as part of the Block Museum’s invaluable series “Serge Daney: 10 Years After,” which started last month and ends in early December. In French with subtitles; to be projected from Beta SP video. 125 min.
user reviews from imdb Author: OldAle1 from United
States
The film opens with the always nattily-dressed 62-year-old filmmaker walking through a gallery exhibition devoted to the French painter Jean Fautrier, ironically (or not?) as obscure and unknown as Rivette himself. Then we move to a café where the discussion proper begins with the great "New Wave" critic Serge Danay questioning Rivette about faces and bodies -- the reason that he was invited to the Fautrier exhibit being that the filmmakers saw a link between painter and director in this area. Most of the next two hours proceeds with Danay attempting to elicit interesting responses from Rivette on a variety of topics and themes: the beginning of the New Wave, his childhood, language and literature, Paris, architecture, acting, and most of all, the joys of filmgoing and criticism. This is an exceptionally well-done and involving documentary that shifts between various types of locales within Paris, mirroring Rivette's own fictional explorations of the city....it never quite gets to the depths, the heart and soul of this great filmmaker, but that's OK: we are constantly reminded of how private and solitary an individual Rivette is. No doubt my high rating reflects both my passion for the director's work and the resonance I feel with his solitary intellectual (largely self-taught) lifestyle, but I think that anyone genuinely interested in the Nouvelle Vague who has seen a couple of films by the subject will get something out of this nicely-shot and minimally edited film. Scenes from several of the director's works are included, all rarely scene outside of (maybe in?) France, the longest and most fascinating being from Duelle and L'amour fou. Subtitled, bootleg video from British TV (I think), 122 minute cut.
Rewriting Documentary: Claire Denis' Jacques Rivette, le veilleur ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, April 23, 2007
Claire Denis
supporters are warned upon approaching Jacques
Rivette, le veilleur: the imagery for which we have come to love her is
only here in embryonic form. Those lucky few stoked by the
fires of her recent documentary Vers
Mathilde are in for a disappointment when presented with the less
front-and-centre visuals of her second completed work: analysis is also
somewhat tricky, as I have no idea how much of the format was inherited from
the program Cinéma, de notre
temps (of which it is an entry), and how much was influenced by the
film's celebrated critic interviewer Serge
Daney. Still, Denis' tactile, environmental approach is clearly in evidence
here; of a piece with her early work, it suggests both the location specificity
and the unmoored personalities that dot films from Chocolat to I
Can't Sleep.
The film opens innocently enough with the nouvelle vague master wandering the rooms of an art gallery: the art is that of semi-abstract artist Jean Fautrier, and we alternate between his juicy, sensual canvases and Rivette wandering the vast space of the rooms. This, however, is a ruse, and we suddenly smash-cut to the director and Daney at a café, where the critic reveals that the gallery visit facilitates the interview. Fautrier is discussed in terms of his desire to re-define the face; this is contrasted with Rivette's own refusal to use close-ups or heavy montage to emphasize faces or items close up. The director claims that he never had the interest or the "talent" to do such editing theatrics, and the film goes from there, as Rivette and Daney wander from café to café and points in-between, discussing Rivette's background and his artistic concerns.
The emphasis on locations—on the battery of coffee joints and the streets in between—is where Denis begins to rear her creative head. Where a standard interview program would de-emphasize the location in favor of the talk, here they are part of the talk—influencing our perception of Rivette in subtle ways. At one point, he and Daney are walking down a busy traffic laneway (one wonders why the drivers aren't apoplectic at their slowing things down), and Denis' camera suddenly splits off from the figures to travel down another road. The picture suddenly becomes a shot from Le Pont du Nord of Pascale Ogier circling a lion statue in a scooter; this turns into a shot of Jean-François Stévenin driving up on his own BMW motorcycle and beginning an interview. The insistence on spatial continuity is remarkable in a form that normally uses the visual as bland means to an end—and in its way it boldly rewrites how documentary can be used to comment on subjects.
This relates back to the film's catalogue of Rivette's qualities, chief among which are his lonerish tendencies. Bulle Ogier is seen and heard describing him as the last person with whom you go "on the town" for a "back-patting" good time—he's private and withdrawn, and the film represents this by swallowing him up in the city or otherwise emphasizing his smallness. In the first part, "Day", it's largely performed via the wandering through the streets of Paris and thus explores the transitory nature of existing in a large urban metropolis swarming with architecture and people; in "Night", he's sitting on the top of a building, gazing over its railing or sitting in low light. The effect is to consider this person as a sort of transient with no home or country, wandering about or loitering in public space instead of staking out some personal terra firma.
This makes Rivette of a piece with early Denis heroes. Those initial films are obsessed with overwhelming locations (the remote African household of Chocolat, the nightclub/restaurant/cockfighting complex of No Fear, No Die, and especially the Paris of I Can't Sleep); they're also obsessed with people who don't exactly belong to those surroundings (Chocolat's uprooted whites with "no past, no future"; the equally unanchored black cock trainers in No Fear, No Die; practically everyone with a part in I Can't Sleep). That last film most explicitly parallels Jacques Rivette, le veilleur: both are films about a city that does not notice you and which fills you with a profound loneliness, full of people as atomized as Rivette (though with considerably less cultural capital) lost in an urban no-man's-land that swallows them up.
Sadly, the film is less compelling than most of those works of fiction. Though the intimacy achieved with Rivette is considerable, the overall effect is less decisive; one feels a fumbling for a theme and a style rather than a surgically precise zeroing in. Part of the issue is that Denis has to get out of the way for Daney to impose his own order on the proceedings, meaning she has to constantly adjust to his input instead of simply letting her own freak flag fly. Unlike the genuinely collaborative enterprise of Vers Mathilde, where Denis likened herself to a fellow dancer with choreographer Mathilde Monnier, there seems to be less give-and-take between the two authors of the conversation; though the director betrays no discomfort with the arrangement, there is a sense that two sensibilities are struggling for supremacy rather than working in concert for an organic experience.
But even if the early film doesn't stand up to her recent documentary triumph, the two films together suggest a unified approach to the form that makes her a subject for further contemplation. Neither Vers Mathilde nor Jacques Rivette, le veilleur sits still in its contemplation of its artist-subjects: they are both as concerned with the space surrounding the personalities under review as with the personality itself. And they make Denis' documentary output extremely provocative in what they do with a hitherto prosaic form that strives for objectivity. If nothing else, her Rivette film suggests new paths for a genre more tied down than most to explanation and the illusion of non-interference, and what can happen when dry reportage gives way to the personal essay.
Senses of Cinema – Jacques Rivette – Le veilleur Paul Grant from Senses of Cinema, February 2007
girish: Tous les garçons et les filles
NO FEAR, NO DIE (S’en Fout la
Mort) A- 94
It’s
a film that’s influenced by Frantz Fanon’s Peaux noire, masques blancs (Black
Skins, White Masks). I understood something in Fanon’s book that touched me
immensely. I am a very sensitive person who can’t stand the feeling of
humiliation, regardless if black or whites are the objects of this humiliation.
When I read Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), it increased my
anger over the social inequities that groups and individuals are forced to
endure […]. In S’en fout la mort, I deal with a French West Indian man here in
Paris, exploring his psychological weakness and the spiritual tragedy of his
life. Fanon describes a special type of neurosis – colonized people feeling
psychologically defeated even though they are physically free to determine
their future.
—Claire Denis in an interview taking place August 21, 1994
with Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, Claire
Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut
A powerful and brutally disturbing film, easily the most dramatically downbeat of all the Denis films, and the most racially charged work in her entire repertoire. Not an easy film to digest, with metaphoric implications, it is nonetheless a work of extraordinary power, but one that keeps its seething undertones beneath the surface. Coming early in her career, after having made the highly acclaimed Chocolat (1988), which is more of a classically structured, visually impressive European art film, this simply isn’t like that, at times feeling infurioratingly subliminal. While both films deal with the effects of colonization, Chocolat (1988) examines symptoms of a colonized occupation, while NO FEAR, NO DIE focuses more upon the psychological impact left behind, where the postcolonial mindset still has traumatic reverberations from having been imprinted by a colonized mentality. These are highly complex ideas that rarely ever translate well to the screen, where even Richard Wright’s Native Son (1951), starring the author as the lead character, comes across as less incendiary than the novel upon which it is based. While Beau Travail (1999) receives heaps of praise, deservedly so, but especially from white critics, who may be less inclined to endorse a complicated and downbeat work about two black immigrants from former French colonies, where racist attitudes are prevalent throughout, making it intentionally uncomfortable and difficult to watch. A work that was clearly inspired by Frantz Fanon, its grim racial implications are so subtly presented that some may miss it altogether, as Denis leaves plenty to the imagination, and there are no explanatory references communicated to the audience, as this is a film, much like psychological neuroses, that largely exists under the surface.
Isaach de Bankolé,
who played Protée in Chocolat
(1988) is Dah, an African from Benin, while Alex Descas is Jocelyn from the
West Indies, where the two are business partners smuggling roosters into France
for illegal cockfights. Their
destination is an industrial factory district that is little more than a truck
stop, a strange and mysterious landscape in the banlieues outside
The film opens with a quote from black American writer Chester Himes, who emigrated to France in the 1950’s, a contemporary of fellow expatriate black writers Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and James Baldwin: “All men, whatever their race, color or origins, are capable of anything and everything.” Denis finds a way of visualizing this expression through the underworld of illegal cockfighting, a savage ritual that exists in order to please the men who bet heavily on the outcome. The intensity of the men screaming on the sidelines with wads of cash in their hands matches the flurry of blurred movement in the pit where the two roosters continually jump around and peck at one another. This violent portrait of exploitation overlaps with the private worlds of the men who run the operation. No one identifies with the animals more than Jocelyn, who feeds and trains them, while also nursing them back to health after a fight, often seen dancing with them in the training ring while listening to blaring rap music. This draws the attention of Toni, who makes unannounced visits into their lower domain, where the underlying sexual vibe suggests these are the men she’s really interested in, as they name their most prized rooster after her, where the extreme physicality of their world is beautifully captured by the director’s approach to making such uniquely sensual films. It’s in scenes like this where the audience realizes these men have no privacy, where the lowered ceilings offer a claustrophobic environment that couldn’t feel more oppressively suffocating and confined, little more than an underground prison. Jocelyn’s attachment to the animals becomes problematic, as he identifies only with the lower life forms, seething with resentment at the brazenly offensive manner of Ardenne, whose arrogance compels him to freely discuss how he had an affair with Jocelyn’s mother, describing how he has her eyes, where one sees hatred brewing in the eyes of his own son Michel, not to mention Toni, where men crudely brag about their sexual exploits.
A word about Michel, as this character figures prominently
in Denis films, perhaps best represented by Nicolas Duvauchelle in White
Material (2010), the son of the white owner of a coffee plantation in
Relentlessly bleak and uncompromisingly honest, the film
offers a parallel into the dangerous and inhumane living conditions of many
black male immigrants living in France.
When viewed under the lens of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the colonized are forced to live in
disgustingly cramped conditions resembling slave quarters, often made to feel
like animals, which has a way of affecting their psychological outlook, as they
are drawn to failure, feeling defeated before they begin, where the transience
and impermanency of their lives diminishes their human value and self-worth,
resembling the cheap, exploitive goods that are a staple of colonial trade and
commerce. Ultimately humiliated and
ashamed, especially when looked upon by an attractive white woman, where they
are powerless to reciprocate, as it was the kiss of death during the slavery
era, the colonized black man’s view of himself is extremely pessimistic, as his
dignity has been destroyed, where he’s inclined to have a death wish to simply
put an end to his misery. Alongside this
dour mindset, Denis stages a series of high stakes cockfights, where Ardenne,
being the vile and contemptible man that he is, ups the ante, making the fights
even more brutal, believing he can make more money if they tie razors to the
rooster’s feet, which means instant death, as roosters are suddenly carried out
in plastic bags. For Jocelyn, who trains
these animals like they were his own, this is the ultimate indignity and
disgrace. While he wanted to leave
earlier, as he sensed Ardenne’s manic energy was uncontainable, Dah tracks him
down and brings him back, where he’s forced to endure this slaughter of the
only creatures that hold any meaning in his life, all in the name of greed and
money, so reminiscent of the amusement of men obtained by pitting gladiators
against one another in the spectacle that was the Roman Colosseum. Slowly, through strangely unbalanced images,
like a scene of Jocelyn dancing with a white girl, continually holding her too
close, Jocelyn is seen losing his equilibrium, where his ultimate breakdown is
heartbreaking, as is Dah’s comforting response afterwards, where the simplicity
of childhood memories even under colonization reflect a time of happiness and
innocence that had not yet been lost.
Once more, though sparingly used, the raw and soulful music of Abdullah
Ibrahim offers a perfect compliment.
From the director of
the acclaimed Chocolat, this is something else entirely: rough-edged
almost to the point of being documentary, it's a look at the world of
cockfighting in the
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review also seen here: No Fear, No Die | Chicago Reader
S'en fout la mort is the French title of this grim little feature (1990) by Claire Denis (Chocolat). It's the name given to one of the fighting cocks owned by two men; one (Alex Descas), from the West Indies, trains them, the other (Isaach de Bankole), from Africa, takes care of business and narrates this story about their deal with a restaurant owner (Jean-Claude Brialy) outside Paris to stage a series of pit duels. We follow the training, the matches, and the trainer's despondency and drinking after the restaurant owner insists on giving the birds metal spurs. This is basically a noirish B-film with fine, underplayed performances by the two leads (Bankole, who played in Chocolat and Night on Earth, is especially good) and a sordid, depressing milieu; Solveig Dommartin (Wings of Desire) costars.
User comments from imdb Author: liehtzu from Korea
I think, and have thought for awhile now, that Claire Denis is
truly a filmmaker to watch. I think that she's one of a sorrowfully small
handful of modern filmmakers (including Atom Egoyan and Tran Anh Hung) that may
go on to make some truly incredible works of art. With each passing film I
think that she gets closer to a fully mature style. I think that "No Fear,
No Die" is one of the lesser films she's done - that I've seen anyway -
but that's not an insult. Far from it, because I found the film to be an
eye-opening depiction of the truly vicious practice of cockfighting. It is
also, on a larger scale, a portrait of a man who is surrounded by depravity and
violence and who, because he has not totally de-sensitized himself to it like
those around him, cannot help but let it affect him until he finally snaps.
Two West African brothers in France make their living training cocks to become
killing machines. When recruited by a bar owner who wants to open up his own
"ring," the brothers set out selecting and training the animals.
Denis obviously did her homework - her depiction of the rigorous training
sessions is meticulous. Actually, the film is extraordinarily realistic and
also extraordinarily graphic. I was shocked when, at the end of the film, the
words "no animals were harmed during the making of this film"
appeared on the screen. I'm still a little skeptical. The brothers themselves
are both very different, yet they have a very strong bond. Jocelyn is the one
who is most experienced at what they do, kind of like the Yoda of cockfighting.
Dah is the one that handles finances, etc. Ironically, though, it is Jocelyn
who is susceptible to acts of conscious because it is he who is most
experienced and it is he who spends all day with the birds - and becomes almost
a sort of father figure to them - only to watch them butchered in the ring. The
title "No Fear, No Die" comes from the name that Jocelyn gives to the
prize bird, the champion, a bird who until the end seems invincible.
Gandhi once said that the true measure of how civilized a society is can be
found by looking at how it treats its animals. The message of "No Fear, No
Die" seems to be that disregard of and insensitivity towards the lives of
animals leads to insensitivity on a greater scale. Jocelyn lets in get to him
and leads him to an act of near-homicide. In a modern age in which the peoples
of "civilized" nations have become so de-sensitized because of their
cultures of excess, we are steadily running headfirst into the brink of our own
self-destruction. But no one, it seems, can afford to give a damn.
The Cinema of Claire Denis Review: No Fear, No Die (1990) Matthew Blevins from Next Projection
Claire Denis has the unique ability to expose the hidden poetry lurking beneath the seedy layers of any context. She traverses the full extent of what man is capable of in her controversial exploration of the secret world of underground cockfighting in No Fear, No Die, finding men that hide the content of their hearts at all costs and women who have given up on their secret hopes and dreams. We immediately find ourselves in a clandestine world of mystery and bent morality as we set out into the dark autumn night to find the next job, another secret rendezvous with the lost faces of the night, looking for the next crooked connection that will fatten our wallets and starve our souls.
Dah and Jocelyn know no other world as they drift through life bereft of the essential connections that keep a soul at ease. They survey the streets to the sound of smoky jazz, always on the lookout for opportunity or danger in their cruel subterranean world. They are skeptical as they are brought to the new venue that will soon be filled with the sounds of drunken heathens and well-trained fighting cocks. It is a decrepit venue, adequate for the needs of their cock-fighting show but hidden among the ruins of an industrial wasteland as lightshows clamber with the obtuse movement and gracelessness of an industrial trash compactor. They have probably worked in better venues and for better percentages before, but the road behind them offers no escape from the ugly necessities of this final job.
The two trainers are constantly sizing up their surroundings with a look of detached bemusement, seemingly unaffected by the ugliness of their world as they concentrate on the task at hand with unwavering single-mindedness. Jocelyn trains the birds with an admiration and respect for the birds’ innate abilities but with a dutiful detachment as each bird is merely fodder for the next fight. There is no cruelty in Jocelyn’s patient methods as a well-trained bird can be the essential means to an end in his constant search for the next big score. He cares for the birds with more attentiveness than he cares for himself. The cocks offer the only unconditional attachment in this contrived underworld as both men stay detached from the people that surround them. Distractions would compromise the integrity of their work and they have no time for hopes and dreams in this opportunistic existence as attachments bring only fear, obligation, and ultimately death. There is only now and the immediate needs of the day, and the smoky voiced Toni treads in worlds she has no business occupying as she too has given up all hope of a life of love and satisfaction of the soul. They all live a life of strict heartless necessity from the fear that allowing others to enter their closed-off existence would bring only heartache and loss, starving their souls of the essential connections that make life worth living.
We watch these two men live in an impossible reality as one can only fool themselves into denying crucial human connections for so long before the barriers they have constructed for themselves come crashing down. One cannot evade the fear of loss for an entire lifetime and remain unaffected by the needs and fears of those that surround them as even a “heartless” trainer of fighting cocks has hidden hopes and dreams. We can only suppress those emotions for so long before they demand reconciliation, sometimes at the cost of our sanity as we learn life’s essential lessons after it is already too late.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Desire Is Violence Chris Carke
interview from Sight and Sound, 2001
Claire Denis' uniquely sensual films are hard to see in the
Are the films of Claire Denis French cinema's best- kept secret? It certainly seems so in the UK. While her work is regularly praised at film festivals around the world, her last film to be distributed here was her Cameroon-set debut Chocolat in 1988. None of her subsequent films has made more than a festival appearance until now, yet she remains highly regarded. Denis describes herself as "une fille d'Afrique" (a daughter of Africa): born in Paris in 1948, she was two months old when her family moved to Africa and until the age of 14 she lived in a number of countries during the dying years of French colonialism and the coming of African independence. When we met in Paris in March to talk about her most recent film Beau Travail it became clear her childhood is still a key influence.
Chocolat was the fictionalised account of Denis' experiences as a young girl told from the perspective of a woman named France who returns as an adult to her childhood home in post-colonial Cameroon. Denis' second feature S'en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990) opens with a quote from Chester Himes: "All men, whatever their race, colour or origins, are capable of anything and everything." The statement resonates across Denis' subsequent cinematic forays into extreme physicality, rendered with an increasing attention to the sensual details of flesh, the body and the borderline between desire and violence. In S'en fout la mort the underworlds of illegal cock-fighting and French immigrants overlap and feed off each other in a portrait of exploitation and barely buried desires that find shape in the savage ritual. Denis' controversial 1993 film J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep) was based on the notorious case of Thierry Paulin, a serial killer who murdered 21 elderly women in Paris between 1984 and 1987. Denis' film is as much about the anonymity that the murderer, a prostitute, drug-dealer and drag artist played by non-professional Richard Courcet, was able to maintain within a fluid demi-monde of drifters and immigrants as it is about his crimes. While the social canvas of Denis' films has tended to depict uneasy micro-communities of underbelly-dwellers, her filmic style has increasingly moved away from a traditional French realism towards more elliptical, poetic and sensual structures. U.S. Go Home (1994) and Nenette et Boni (1996) indicated that she was developing a startlingly singular style - cinema as an aching reverie of sweat and flesh - that reaches its most refined expression in her most recent work.
Beau Travail is Denis' sixth feature but only the second in which she has revisited the territory of her childhood. Freely inspired by the work of the 19th-century American writer Herman Melville, in particular the novella Billy Budd, and filmed in the former French colony on the north-east coast of Africa that since 1977 has been the Republic of Djibouti, Beau Travail immerses the viewer in the world of the French Foreign Legion as seen from the perspective of Galoup (Denis Lavant), a legionnaire devoted to his CO Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor). The names Forestier/Subor will be familiar to Godard aficionados; the actor played a character of the same name in Godard's 1960 film Le Petit Soldat whom Denis has revisited some 40 years later. Galoup's devotion to duty and the life of the legion is tested by the arrival of new recruit Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) whose selfless heroism Galoup sees as a threat to his authority. A war of nerves ensues, culminating in Sentain's near death in the desert and Galoup's court-martial. But this synopsis doesn't begin to do justice to the way Denis tells her story of hothouse emotions igniting under African skies. Since Nenette et Boni (which also featured Colin) she has developed an extraordinarily sensuous style of film-making whose impact derives from its combination of music (Beau Travail mixes dance music and Benjamin Britten's opera of Billy Budd), editing rhythms and the cinematography of her long-time collaborator Agnès Godard.
No one else in France is making films like Denis' and the combination of the release of Beau Travail and a complete retrospective of her work at the National Film Theatre provides the opportunity to catch up with her development. When we met in Paris Denis was hung-over, having just wrapped the shoot of her next film, starring Vincent Gallo, the night before. Small, wiry and, after a couple of aspirins, alert and forthcoming, she told me how a daughter of Africa found a new home in cinema.
Senses of Cinema – No Fear, No Die Gwendloyn Audrey Foster from Senses of Cinema, June 2012
No Fear No Die | Reverse Shot Lost in Spaces, by Nicolas Rapold from Reverse Shot
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review also seen here: Flicks - December 2005
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Claire Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut Mark Reid interview taking place August 21, 1994, published from Jump Cut, March 1996
This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia professor Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (and others) about No Fear, No Die and 35 Shots of Rum, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 27, 2013
David
Thomson on Claire Denis | Film | The Guardian
The New York Times (Caryn James) review also seen
here: Movie
Review - No Fear No Die - Reviews/Film; The Clash of ...
The Wretched of the Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I CAN’T SLEEP (J’ai pas sommeil) A- 93
A witty and sophisticated drama of interconnectedness, much
of this feels like a choreography of missed connections, where even well past
an hour or so into the film the viewer still has no idea where this film is
heading, and may still be wondering even after the final credits roll, as this
is an oddball, character driven story where the characters take on greater
significance than any story developments themselves, many of which simply
disappear into thin air. A perfect
example is the opening sequence, where two helicopter policemen are seen enjoying
a joke, including extensive laughter that continues at length, yet the viewer
never hears the original joke. Moreover,
these two policemen are never seen again in the film and don’t at all figure
into the action. Nonetheless, they are
the opening shot, flying high above the city of
As Daiga gets her life sorted out, where there is a game of
musical chairs played in the Lithuanian community to determine just where she
will stay, much of this plays out in exaggerated caricature, comic portrayals
rarely seen in any Denis film, where this actually more resembles the strange
visit from the Hungarian cousin who arrives unexpectedly in America in Jim
Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984), one of the directors Denis worked
with before making her own films. Daiga
ends up staying with an elderly Latvian hotel owner, Line Renaud (who can be
heard singing with Dean Martin in the opening song heard on the car radio)
where as it happens, Camille has a room at the same hotel with his
boyfriend. Daiga, who speaks little to
no French, was led to believe she’d have a job in Paris, but when she sees the
theater producer, he’s just been stringing her along in hopes he might get into
her pants. Completely in passing, Béatrice Dalle, who appeared in the
While it’s a long, novelesque set up introducing all the central characters, working with more than thirteen characters, none of whom would typically figure in films we’re used to seeing, as they would be marginal characters relegated to secondary roles, but here it’s an interesting portrait of the alienating aspects of cultural diversity, something later explored in greater detail in Michael Haneke’s CODE UNKNOWN (2000). In Denis’s film, however, these fragmented, often interconnecting episodes are largely unresolved, perhaps reaching a climax when Camille performs at a nightclub in drag, an intensely powerful performance where the audience stands transfixed, all standing just a few feet away, at his anguished “cry of love,” perhaps the theme of the film, but he never once returns their look, eventually turning his back, hiding the inner secrets to his soul, seen here to Jean Louis Murat’s “Le Lien Défait (The Broken Bond)” (J'ai Pas Sommeil - Claire Denis -1994 ), which casts a strangely mystifying aura over the rest of the film. Camille has a volatile relationship with his own blond-haired boyfriend, mirroring the instability of his brother’s relationship, while the two brothers themselves rarely even speak to one another. There’s a telling scene at their own mother’s birthday party, where each brother vies for their mother’s attention on the dance floor. Everyone leads solitary lives, perfectly expressed by the largely unseen, lonely existences of the elderly who are victims of prey, all just part of the isolated lives of outsiders, where the difficulty to be accepted by the mainstream places particular pressures on this group, as they all appear to be drifters leading aimless lives.
Instead of actions driving the narrative of the film, what’s
more intriguing here is what isn’t revealed, what’s clouded under the layers of
silences, especially between the two brothers who remain strangers to one
another. Camille arrives at Théo’s door with something to tell him,
but then leaves without a word, earlier seen at a hospital clinic, where there
is a noticeable mark on his cheek, but nothing more is revealed, where one
might surmise he is HIV positive, but the director leaves this intentionally
ambiguous, adding a brief sequence of Camille dancing in a darkly lit gay
nightclub. Daiga, who eventually finds
work as a hotel cleaning woman, and who couldn’t be less interested in her work,
appears to be the observing eyes behind the film, as we get telling glimpses of
what she sees, like clues unraveling the mysteries of the film, where she sees
behind the hidden lives, being near invisible herself. This is a film of marginalized lives told
through a recent headlines grabbing incident where there was an actual serial
killer of elderly women in
The
Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
For this frustratingly
opaque French release, director Claire Denis decided to throw in all the Hot
Topics (alienation, serial killers, race relations, the fall of Communism,
transvestitism) necessary for An Important Film For The '90s, with little
success. The struggles of a female Lithuanian immigrant are contrasted (sort
of) with the killing spree of an African immigrant and his French lover.
There's an underlying and deeply conservative simplicity to I Can't Sleep,
presumably unintentional given the director's previous work. While mainstream
French culture is portrayed as dangerously banal, all those outside the culture
are seen to be given to explosions of violence. The implicit explanation of the
motiveless killer's behavior seems to be that, by being a gay, cross-dressing
African immigrant, he's pretty much forced to become a killer. While Denis
places the blame for the creation of monsters on the community which excludes
outsiders, she simultaneously justifies their prejudices and offers little hope
for reconciliation. What must have been meant to induce thought is more likely
to prompt apathetic shrugs.
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
I Can't Sleep is an eerie, edgy slice of contemporary
French life, seen as though through a cracked window. A protegé of both Wim
Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, director Denis (Chocolat) earns high marks for
originality in this tale of love and death amongst some nighttime denizens of
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
With I Can't Sleep, French director Claire Denis (Chocolat, No Fear No Die) takes a story from newspaper headlines and creates characters around it. This is a study of three people whose lives crisscross and intersect. There is no beginning and no ending -- only the middle portion upon which Denis has chosen to "eavesdrop." The central event, which comprises the climax of I Can't Sleep, changes the lives of all those involved, but it's impossible to say what will come next, after the end credits have rolled.
The basis for this film was the rampage and capture of the real-life "Granny Killer", a serial killer who terrorized Paris during the late 1980s by stalking and murdering elderly women. I Can't Sleep uses this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty as the background against which to tell three stories: those of Daiga, an exceptionally-attractive Lithuanian visitor to France; Theo, a musician struggling to keep custody of his young son; and Camille, a gay erotic dancer and Theo's brother. One of these three is the Granny Killer, but we don't learn which until about halfway through the movie.
Intellectually, I Can't Sleep can be fascinating. It's essentially a postmodern, existential character study and, as such, it offers a lot to people-watchers. But Denis' style has isolated the characters from us, keeping them at arm's length. While viewing this film, the audience member is an indifferent observer. Involvement on an emotional level is almost impossible. This makes sitting through I Can't Sleep something of a frustrating, not to mention sterile, experience. We want to identify with the protagonists or, failing that, at least understand motivations that too- often are left murky.
In some sense, this film has an incomplete feeling. The characters are not the sort to haunt the viewer after the theater lights come on, but the mood may linger. In fact, the wonderfully melancholy atmosphere is often more tangible than the personalities of the people Denis has chosen to focus on. In the final analysis, I Can't Sleep is interesting, but not involving; beautiful, but detached; and unhurried to the point of somnolence.
User comments from imdb Author: William Ploch (wbploc0@pop.uky.edu) from Lexington, Kentucky
Claire Denis' "I Can't Sleep" is a puzzling movie, one
that is difficult to grasp because its simplicity makes it so daunting. The
story is actually a study of an individual's ability to go about his or her
everyday life while terror permeates the surroundings. The central character is
Daiga, a Lithuanian woman who has moved to Paris and is looking for a job. As
she moves about the city, she gradually begins to notice how the citizens are
reacting to a string of murders that has been hyped up in the media; they do
not express their fears outwardly, but instead seem a little detached and edgy.
As she becomes settled, she begins to meet a few interesting people; they
include a considerate landlady, a struggling musician, and two homosexuals who
just happen to be the killers.
Denis takes a tricky approach to portraying the murderers. She does not condone
their actions and clearly does not have too much sympathy for them, but still
manages to depict them as ordinary human beings who are driven to desperate
crimes because they fail to relate to anything in their environment. She does
this by first showing the effect their actions have on the rest of the city,
with the newspapers blaring sensational headlines and the citizens reacting by
retreating into their homes. But, as the story unfolds, the killers are placed
on the same plane as the rest of the characters, and we see their problems,
insecurities, and apathy fit in with the day-to-day tedium of their lives. They
do not have anyone else to care about, and spend their evenings wandering about
the various below-level dives and nightclubs in Paris. It is not until later on
that we learn these two men are actually the killers. And when we do discover
this, it makes sense in a strange sort of way: their alienation from the rest
of society has made them indifferent to everyone but each other. It's almost as
if they killed not out of anger, hate, or insanity, but out of boredom.
Denis also makes it clear that such crimes have consequences not just for the
victims, but for all of society. In the end, it is Daiga, the immigrant who has
maintained indifference to the slayings throughout most of the film, who is
forced to decide how to expose the criminals. Her `outsider' status gradually
diminishes as she realizes that she is the only person who can change the
course of events.
Still, the drama to the story is not as involving as it could be, and the
characters' different stories are not always well balanced. Nevertheless,
"I Can't Sleep" is still an intriguing tale about how people often
remain indifferent to brutality until it affects them personally.
Senses of Cinema – Gestures of Intimacy: Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep Saige Walton from Senses of Cinema, October 2012
Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood reviewing I Can’t Sleep from Film International, January 27, 2011
‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood, reviewing Chocolat from Film International, April 1, 2011
Todd McGowan, 'Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment: Claire Denis' J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment
Decoding
unreadable spaces Corinne Oster on I Can't
Sleep, from Kinoeye, June 9, 2003, also seen here: Kinoeye
[Corinne Oster]
I Can't Sleep | Reverse Shot Jagged Edges, by Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot
I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil,1994): Network Lives and Non-Sensationalism Auditoire on Film
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Pretty Clever Films [Brandy Dean]
Cynthia Fuchs (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [1/5]
The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Boxoffice Magazine review Estep Nagy
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea Gronvall about I Can't Sleep and Trouble Every Day, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 20, 2013
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
The New York Times (Caryn James) review
U.S. GO HOME – made for TV
aka: Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge,
Season 1, Episode 2
U.S. Go Home Weve Got to Get Out of This Place, by Ryland Walker Knight from Reverse Shot
Although the curious and internet-savvy cinephile can, without too much hassle, find a way to see Claire Denis’s U.S. Go Home, its perpetual medley of Sixties pop songs (and their consequent licensing headaches) has kept it from easy viewing access in the United States. This is a shame. For starters, the film is a breeze: all that fun music all the time buoys its youthful verve and nudges its tentative exploration forward. For another, it’s a window on Denis’s follow-up, its spiritual sequel, Nenette et Boni, as Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri star in both as siblings. But where the later film shows youth to be a daydream, prone to fantasy as often as violence, U.S. Go Home tells us that youth is a dance. Or maybe it should be.
A dance: following your body, feeling the space around you, always moving, always participatory. Even if you’re dancing alone, you’re still dancing with somebody. It starts from expression. There’s George Bernard Shaw’s quip that dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire, of course, and that’s quite often true, especially among the young and horny. More curious is the elemental teenage desire for self-expression—if we understand that as articulating one’s individuality—though dancing to pop music is so often based on repetition. When teens dance it’s kind of a matching game, where very few try to one-up one another. Part of the game, always, is to impress, but you’ll surely dance yourself into a lonely corner if you can’t dance with anybody but yourself. You can’t force it. You have to feel it, and let it build. You give yourself.
U.S. Go Home is a big-night-out movie. Houri’s Martine narrates, and though it’s her desire to lose her virginity that gets the night, and the film, going, Colin’s Alain opens it with a monologue about sexuality’s risk to one’s honor. They live with their mother in a Parisian suburb near a U.S. army base, far enough from the city that fog/smog smears the horizon and keeps the distant distant and out of sight. We might say that distance locks these people in place. Their world is modest, and there’s little room to vent, it would appear, aside from nights out and that window of freedom that a pop song can open. But the film itself is hardly angsty; instead it renders angst with patient observation. There are rushes of light and movement—it’s unavoidable with kids—and for the most part reflects the Denis style of narrative elision. Its hour-long length alone predicates some of its abruptness, but nothing feels rushed. And there’s that music that keeps playing, keeps getting limbs going, keeps the kids up at night. The music tells the story as much as the (minimal) dialogue or the narrative consequences.
Denis made U.S. Go Home as part of a television series called Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge… which gave nine directors (among them, Akerman and Assayas and Téchiné) an opportunity to make movies about teenagers set in their own adolescent era, though not necessarily culled from autobiography, with one major narrative stipulation: there must be a party scene. So this commitment to dancing is not particular to the Denis film per se. In fact, it’s not limited to this Denis film—bodies and movement are a recurrent motif across her work. After L’Intrus (which we might say is, among other things, her film about the corporeal and metaphysical capacities of the heart), Denis made Vers Mathilde, a documentary about the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, which is explicitly about how we inhabit space, how we change any space we participate in, and how we compete for space, simply by being present and active. This is perhaps a good way to define her masterpiece Beau travail away from the common “Billy Budd in the French Foreign Legion” tag, however apt that synopsis, for that film, which also stars Colin, shows us scene after scene of half-naked young men, all muscle, locked in ritual performances; it’s a film of training, but it looks like dance exercise, not military conditioning. The sparring involves circling and swimming and hugging; the only punch thrown looks more a magic transference—the ceremonial spell is only broken at the close (maybe the best ending in cinema) when Denis Lavant lets everything loose, flails in pirouette, twirls like a top, and falls off screen in rhythm. There’s a similar scene in U.S. Go Home, but it comes earlier, when Colin’s Alain rocks out solo to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ “Hey Gyp.” He sings along, he romps around his room punching the sky, he bounces on his bed, he delights himself, all in one take. The only problem is that he’s not alone. We come to realize that he’s been watched not just by us but also by his sister, Martine, as we have shared her vantage. She tries to cut him down, calling him crazy, and he, typical teen, asks why he can’t have some privacy.
A dance: an event organized around possibilities, a prelude to plenty, the best way to get laid. Martine and best friend Marlène (Jessica Tharaud) strike out from the first destination—kids dancing with parents, a dad leading a conga line—and find their way to a real party (without parents) with the lights down low and the music turned up loud, where older young people drink booze and smoke cigarettes and make out. On the dance floor, the camera winds around the varied couples while the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” blares; all the girls hang tight on their boys. Then the song changes, picks up speed, and the camera turns around. Among smiles and bobbing bodies, we see Martine and Marlène lost, still wearing their coats, still looking for Alain as a foothold, still standing at the threshold. Our girls don’t belong, but they push into the party. They enter the hive of hip, still onlookers, and Marlène spies Alain dancing, holding a girl close, moving in slow circles. Alain ignores them. He won’t facilitate. The girls will have to, and indeed do, make their own way into the crowd, into this dance. Marlène moves first, quick to let her hair down and bum a cigarette, while Martine sulks. Overall, Marlène fares better simply because she’s ready, she gives in, she lets go, she has some fun with the new rules and the new roles this night initiates. However, Martine is not strictly hemmed in by her behavior: when she asks the same boy for a cigarette, he ignores her entreaty by telling her Marlène is cute and walks away. After all, Marlène is a pale redhead with big lips and Martine an Arabesque waif with kinky hair, which points to the subtle racism in the party’s social dynamic.
The party (the movie) may not be allegory, but the political is hardly an afterthought. The title of the film itself and the repetition of all this commodified pop music begin to sound suspect, or curious. Who’s demanding the U.S. go home, anyway? In the end, we only hear Martine say the line, parroting a protest she could care less about, another sign of teenage flippancy—and the peculiar hypocrisy, or at least irony, of this film’s world. No big surprise that Anne Wiazemsky, that princess of the left, co-wrote the scenario with Denis, casting over the provincial idyll an American shadow and coloring the petulance of a line like, “I’m a Communist, I don’t drink Coca-Cola,” with doubt and a little amusement. The joke’s on the kids, almost, as they’re rootless pinballs. It just so happens that Alain is the right age to be seduced by the Red and that Martine recollects a leftist anthem (that her brother no doubt introduced her to) in the face of an American.
The tragedy in U.S. Go Home, it would seem, is how desire blocks fun, how motivations are always suspect in youth. Though Marlène lays down with Alain, neither looks happy. After walking in on them, Martine seems the most hurt and disappointed, and when Alain tries to console her, to reassure her of their familial bond, Marlène interrupts—and Alain flees. And then the siblings meet Vincent Gallo. Gallo plays Captain Vido Brown. He’s lonely, sitting by himself, drinking bottled Coke with his car door open. When Martine and Alain stroll past, Martine asks for a ride, and though he’s wary, Brown agrees to give them a lift. He even offers them his last two sodas, which Alain denies on the political grounds quoted above. Alain makes it plain he cannot stand the Army man, and Brown implores Alain to chill out, to not wreck his car, but Alain exits, leaving Martine alone. Martine doesn’t seem to care, really, and neither does Brown. He allows her to charm him, though Gallo’s eyes tell us he knows it’s a foolish game. He drives her around, he hugs her, he gets her past the dawn. Maybe he does this because he wants to, more likely he does it because, as he says, he’s miserable.
But the film does not set the American apart any more than it does Martine; each is alone in a world of optimism, which we see is equivalent to (or that such a posture only leads to) a world of disappointment. Alain, on the other hand, seems to live in a world of hurt, always at odds. Put otherwise, his world is his own and he sees threats from every angle, every body, every utterance—anything from a plea of sympathy to an apology. He paws the girls he holds and he eyes them with a lust as intense as his hands are forceful. Funny and apt, then, that he’s most alive when dancing alone in his room, promising one thing after another—things no communist would want, like a Chevrolet—if he could just get some of some girl’s love. And, perfect hypocrite that he is, as soon as he lands some sweetness, he turns his back and stalks off shirtless.
Really, all teen movies are the same at heart because all teens are the same: each longs to fill a type, to fulfill some expectation only she holds onto or knows of inside some private, pretzel logic. And Denis never judges these teenagers’ choices: her style hovers over the world, at a distance (though her camera is far more mobile than, say, that of one of her inspirations, Ozu). She captures life’s richness by observing behavior, and then lets us develop the picture. What Martine learns in the car with Brown is that in order to lose her virginity she will have to give something, and that to flirt can be fun—though the language barrier helps distance herself from the situation and makes interaction more of a game with this older, hurt, less aggressive man. The dance is worth the risk. But that doesn’t stop the world from turning. In the morning he’s still American and she’s still a French teenager and her brother is still hurt, still judging. The spray-paint on the box car behind Brown still reads, “U.S. GO HOME,” and everybody sits alone, half-awake and dazed in the dawn’s pink light, dreaming.
Memories of the Future [Jesse Ataide]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
rare films of claire denis: us go home & no fear, no ... - pinnland empire Marcus
US Go Home - Mubi Film discussion group, May 6, 2011
Review: 'US Go Home' - Variety David Rooney
NENETTE AND BONI (Nénette et Boni) B+ 91
France
One of the director’s more most sensitive, humane and
accessible films, what initially
appears to be a pair of mismatched lovers only becomes revealed as brother and
sister a half hour into the film, where Nénette (Alice Houri) and Boni
(Grégoire Colin) share a troubled past, where both have grown distant from
living apart following the separation of their parents, each living with a
different parent, culminating with the death of their mother, where Boni is
living in her house. Both earlier played
siblings in Denis’s made-for-French-TV film
The explosively charged opening rant sets the tone for the film, which is layered in a relentlessly dreary existence, much of it set in the financially troubled world of the streets where Boni sells pizzas out of a truck, while he and his gang of friends also invest heavily in black market merchandise, resulting in a reverently adored coffeemaker that becomes his most prized possession. The criminal underworld extends to his father’s business as well, where one of the givens of the film is financial insecurity, once more blending into the emotional instability of the characters. Boni actually kicks out his rebellious sister, even after learning she’s pregnant, showing the heartlessness of his situation. What is quickly realized is that both are essentially alone, two emotionally damaged misfit kids without any real support, living a minimal existence in a house that never has any food, where in an awkward way, he begins to care and feel protective of her. Once he realizes she’s actually 7-month’s pregnant, viewing an ultrasound photo confirming there’s a real baby inside, he develops a strangely fascinating curiosity, which surprisingly becomes the most profoundly affecting aspect of the story, becoming an unsentimental and totally unpredictable emotional journey. Having nowhere else to go, refusing to return to or even see her father, Nénette poignantly explores her deceased mother’s bedroom, which prompts grainy flashback images of a happier youth that feels all too brief. As they warily begin to accept one another, the camera’s exploratory gaze offers a hint of their previous relationship with a memorable shot that begins on Boni’s head and shoulders as he sleeps, slowly panning down until we see both he and Nénette’s feet sticking out at the end of the bed, humorously contrasting in size, where one gets the sense that they used to sleep like this in their earlier years. The film’s rhythm and structure is of paramount interest, as the overriding mood of bleak reality constantly breaks into moments of excruciating tenderness, where perhaps the ultimate irony is seeing Vincent Gallo (the baker), usually seen as such an aggressively macho guy become such a gentle and loving soul, where his wife is the adoring object of his gazing affections, beautifully scored to the Beach Boys “God Only Knows” Nenette et Boni Scene YouTube (1:53). Part of the little treasures of the film is the audience knowing Boni’s fierce sexual obsessions that he keeps to himself while neither the baker nor his wife have any knowledge whatsoever, knowing Boni only as a customer, always treating him with kindness and respect.
A distinctly urban film, filled with characters drifting through seemingly aimless lives, living day to day, hand to mouth, where there’s an emphasis on poverty, with people struggling to make end’s meet. In a city where no one knows anyone else, there’s a bit of an abrupt jolt when the baker’s wife (always dressed in baby pinks or blues) runs into Boni at the shopping mall, his ultimate fantasy, while she’s clearly happy to see a familiar face “from the neighborhood.” This is prefaced by scenes of Boni on the street as he stares at the baker’s wife through a store window, becoming one of the most tender scenes ever committed to celluloid, a love fantasia to the baker and his wife set to the music of Tindersticks “Tiny Tears” Tindersticks - Tiny Tears (From the Soundtrack Nenette et Boni) YouTube (5:54), where the clip is misleading, as the song is only used in the daydream sequence, where natural sound and dialogue follow. From this reverie, she latches onto him, grasping for a connection in the mad holiday rush of Christmas shopping where they’re literally crushed from the overflowing crowds. Their conversation couldn’t take on a more bizarre turn, where she nervously rambles on about the mysterious effects of chemicals used in making perfume, where especially the way she describes it makes it sound like a laughable supposition if it weren’t so true, while he can only stare in disbelief, his brain frozen in dream state. These fantasy interludes are outrageously exaggerated dreams of a perfect marriage, like something depicted in the gloriously artificial universe of musicals, perhaps rising out of the painful void of his own existence, imagining an alternate existence that takes the place of his own. By the end, reality veers into alternate universe territory, but in this strange and mysterious way, it poetically magnifies the theme of unwanted children, showing a teen mother so traumatized by the unmentioned circumstances surrounding the unnamed father (with hints that it could be her own incestuous father) that she doesn’t even want to look at her own child, while at the same time revealing a young father figure gloriously adoring a child that isn’t even his own, going to great lengths to make it distinctly and decisively an integral part of his life forever. A tender and touching portrait of damaged lives filled with lingering emotional scars, shot throughout with symbolism, humor, and an intimacy of expression, this is a film doused in a grim reality that seemingly knows no bounds, but is as optimistically uplifting as any fairy tale.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Boni (Colin) is a pizza cook who harbours obscene, even sociopathic fantasies about the local baker's wife; Nénette (Houri) is his younger sister who runs away from boarding school and asks the embarrassed, reluctant Boni to give her shelter. This fragmented, often overly enigmatic film is a study of the two siblings' mostly aggressive relationships with each other, their friends and their estranged father. There are odd, rather contrived fantasy scenes here which sit uneasily with the generally downbeat naturalism of the rest of the film; and since the script seems determined to tease rather than inform, it's a little hard in the end to fathom exactly what director and co-writer Denis is really getting at. The performances, however, are good, and the music appealing
Nenette and Boni | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Not a total loss but not really a finished film either, Claire Denis' 1996 French feature is much too coy and nonspecific for its own good. Gregoire Colin and Alice Houri, who played siblings in Denis' 1994 TV feature U.S. Go Home, are reunited as the title characters, a troubled brother and sister living in Marseilles. Boni is a horny 19-year-old pizza worker lost in masturbation fantasies; his 15-year-old sister Nenette, seven months pregnant, flees her boarding school to stay with him. Both detest their father, and Denis strongly hints but never confirms that the unborn child is his. More defensibly, the film refuses to discriminate between the 19-year-old's fantasies and his daily life. Basically the film is a collection of funky surface distractions, and as such it's quite watchable; just don't go looking for too much more. In French with subtitles.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
If it were lopped into
manageable, five-minute chunks, the shimmering neon surfaces and teasingly
enigmatic behavior in Nenette And Boni could be turned into a number of
fine music videos. But over the course of a full-length film, director Claire
Denis' (Chocolat) seductive visuals, however well-sustained, fail to
keep frustration from setting in, as characters roam free of motivation and
loose ends dangle. Nenette And Boni is most inspired when imagining the
vivid daydream fantasies in Confessions Of A Wimp, a diary of erotic
scenarios invented by a 19-year-old pizza chef (Grégoire Colin) who lusts after
the voluptuous wife (Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi) of a local baker. His private
world is ruptured when his estranged younger sister (Alice Houri) re-enters his
life, pregnant with a child whose father may or may not be their own. In style,
tone, and theme, Nenette And Boni could be mistaken for the work of
great Canadian director Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter),
who also explores the ambiguous ties of modern families in obsessive, hypnotic
detail. But in her dogged refusal to clarify the feelings her title characters
have for one another—resentful at times, affectionate at others—Denis is guilty
of the chilly aesthetic posturing critics often attribute to Egoyan. Despite an
alluring set-up and heartfelt performances from the leads, nothing ultimately
coheres, and mood trumps logic on every occasion.
The Boston Phoenix review Gerald Peary
Claire Denis's first film, Chocolat (1988), was an anti-colonialist tale set in French West Africa, but with enough attention paid to the white colonialists, and to the jungle scenery, to attract an American arthouse audience. Since, Denis's films have been as unwanted here as they've been uniformly excellent: hardboiled sagas of France's underweb of Third World illegals and marginals trying to make a go of it in their mother-of-an-adopted country. S'en fout la mort (1989) was about African cockpit workers; J'ai pas sommeil (1994) was a politically incorrect story of an African-in-Paris serial killer.
In her tender, mesmerising new Nenette et Boni, Denis switches locales, to Marseilles, but her sibling protagonists are, again, among society's seeming losers. Boni (Grégoire Colin) is an 18-year-old school dropout who runs a pizza wagon, sells contraband fishing rods from Taiwan, and has vivid masturbatory dreams of fornicating with the baker's wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi); Nenette (Alice Houri) is his sour, darkly beautiful, deeply pregnant 15-year-old sister. They've lived apart, and estranged, since their parents split. He's inherited a slum apartment from his recently deceased mother. She's stayed on with her weak-spirited father (Jacques Nolot), though she runs away when she discovers herself with an unwanted child. As Nenette et Boni proceeds, the reticent brother and sister slowly edge together, though nothing is said. This is a quiet, quiet movie of moods, glances, penetrating looks. Ultimately, there's a lovely, unexpected sacrament, and Claire Denis's most (tentatively) benign ending.
The Cinema of Claire Denis Review: Nenette and Boni (1996) Rowena Santos Aquino from Next Projection
Nénette and Boni is arguably a sequel to U.S. Go Home (1994), Claire Denis’ contribution to the French television series Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age (1993), for several reasons. One, the themes of adolescence and explorations of the body, intimacy, and desire between men and women—in a romantic, sexual sense between someone and his/her object of desire, and a fraternal, platonic sense between siblings. In U.S. Go Home, teenage siblings Alain and Martine end up attending the same party, he dancing with his girl and she in pursuit of losing her virginity to ‘catch up’ with her friend who confides to her early in the film that she has had sex. These situations are stitched together by a corporeal contemplation on longing, understanding one’s emotions and those of others through disillusionment, and a growing sense of responsibility and making choices. Two, the young lead actors Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri as the brother and sister. Once Denis made U.S. Go Home with Colin and Houri, she felt that their film collaboration had not yet been adamantly fulfilled. Thus, she made Nénette and Boni with them playing the titular, estranged siblings who reencounter each other.
…the sensual and sensitive beauty of the film springs precisely from Nénette and Boni’s unbridled, rash decisions, desires, and quirks as individuals and as siblings.
U.S. Go Home’s emphasis on the corporeal and contemplative to represent adolescent longing, understanding and disillusionment, and forging a sense of responsibility also continues in Nénette and Boni. The film begins with fragments of Nénette and Boni’s separate yet equally diaphanous lives, she first presented floating face-up in a swimming pool, shot from overhead, calm and unstressed, and he in the passenger seat of a car that races around in a circle, kinetic and senseless. Such scenes betray their youth, and subsequent scenes betray their lack of responsibility.
At the outset, Nénette reveals her rebellious streak and irresponsibility when she flees her boarding school early in the film. He does the same by spending an inordinate amount of time fantasising about the baker’s wife (Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi), while living in disarray in his mother’s house and managing a pizza truck according to his whims. Further irresponsibility on both their parts manifests itself when Nénette suddenly shows up at Boni’s to stay, he rejecting her presence and she pregnant and undecided.
But the sensual and sensitive beauty of the film springs precisely from Nénette and Boni’s unbridled, rash decisions, desires, and quirks as individuals and as siblings. Denis presents Nénette and Boni in a highly affectionate and curious manner while remaining nonjudgmental towards their troubled situations and relationship with each other. They may lack responsibility in a social sense to each other as siblings, but at the same time, they are absolutely in control of their individual desires, be it in Nénette’s decision to escape the boarding school and her father or in Boni’s all-consuming indulgence in his sexual fantasies of the baker’s wife and trying to forge a life of his own, financially and emotionally speaking.
In this regard, the first sequence of Boni’s fantasy of the baker’s wife in his room, shirtless and narrating to himself a sexual scenario, is both comical and thoughtful in its frank revelation of Boni’s emotional hues and sexual im/maturity (ditto for a later sequence involving Boni and some pizza dough). Concluding this fantasy sequence is the brilliant aural element of the sounds of coffee brewing, which initially could be taken for human moans. The following scene operates hilariously like a parody of the proverbial ‘morning after,’ with Boni waking up and caressing his sexual accomplice at his bedside: his new coffee maker.
Denis sprinkles random shots of immigrants throughout Nénette and Boni’s parallel and eventually intersecting trajectories, as if to stand in for the city’s diversity without actually showing city spaces.
The siblings’ first reencounter with each other in the film is also tempered by the corporeal and intimate, such physical closeness continuing that found between the siblings in U.S. Go Home (in which they hold each other in a tight embrace as they slow dance at the party). Having been let into Boni’s place by one of his friends, Nénette surprises Boni in his bed as he is about to masturbate and initiate another sexual fantasy. Also reinforcing the siblings’ awkward, ambiguous, yet affectionate relationship in its intimacy is their small, physical tangle on the terrace as well as the notebook drawing of ‘Nénette and Boni’ by the former in the latter’s notebook. This same notebook contains Boni’s scribblings of sexual scenarios with the baker’s wife, a subtle detail that expresses how their relationship constantly blurs the lines between romantic/sexual and fraternal/platonic. Further blurring these lines is the scene with Nénette’s doctor (Alex Descas), who thinks that they are husband and wife; neither of them corrects him.
Nénette and Boni’s relationship is a constant mixture of softness and roughness, a delicate and fragile creature, especially because of their youth.
The dynamic of their relationship transforms ever so unassumingly and pushes them to grow up in the world that much more quickly, as they confront a host of situations: their father’s eventual search for Nénette and attempts to reconcile with both of them; Boni’s face-to-face encounter with the baker’s wife (who significantly speaks to him of pheromones and the chemical reaction between men and women while ignorant of his feelings for her); and above all Nénette’s advancing pregnancy and their divergent reactions to it, resulting in an unexpected act on Boni’s part.
Also contributing, albeit obliquely, to the film’s energy is the port city setting of Marseille. Denis sprinkles random shots of immigrants throughout Nénette and Boni’s parallel and eventually intersecting trajectories, as if to stand in for the city’s diversity without actually showing city spaces. Indeed, these random shots signify an alternative market and cultural flow of bodies, arms smuggling, and stealing/selling phone cards that briefly come into contact with Nénette and Boni, providing an intriguing, larger context in which to locate their insular lives.
Nénette et Boni Living in the Moment, by Matt Connolly from Reverse Shot
Nenette and Boni | Reverse Shot Sidelong Glance, by Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012
Nenette et Boni - Slant Magazine Bill Weber
ArtsScene [Ilse] Ilse de Mucha Herrera
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
The Claire Denis Collection - Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens
GreenCine Daily: DVD OF (LAST) WEEK: Nenette and Boni Aaron Hillis
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice] also seen here: Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
Sound On Sight Taegan J. Brown
Boxoffice
Magazine review
Kevin Courrier
Siblings struggle with tough questions in Claire Denis's 'Nénette et ... Lindsay Waite from The Examiner
This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the Nightingale's Christy LeMaster about Nenette et Boni and Beau Travail, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 13, 2013
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
Review: 'Nenette and Boni' - Variety
The Claire Denis Collection, DVD review - Telegraph Mike McCahill
Baltimore City Paper: Nenette and Boni | Movie Review Bret McCabe
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
'Nenette' Celebrates Life, Love and Family - Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] also seen here: Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review a,so seen here: New York Times
The Claire Denis Collection - Grégoire Colin - DVDBeaver.com Eric Cotenas
Nénette et Boni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BEAU
TRAVAIL A 96
France
With
banners furled, and clarions mute,
An
army passes in the night,
And
beaming spears and helms salute,
The
dark with bright.
In
silence deep the legions stream,
With
open ranks, in order true;
Over
boundless plains they stream and gleam–
No
chief in view!
Afar,
in twinkling distance lost,
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all that shining host
His mandate sends.
—The Night March,
Herman Melville from Timoleon,1891
Gold
in the mountain
And
gold in the glen
And
greed in the heart
Heaven
having no part
And
unsatisfied men.
—Gold in the Mountain,
Herman Melville from The Works of
Herman Melville, 1924
This film grew out of a French TV commission when Denis was
approached by ARTE, the most culturally progressive European TV channel, and
asked to make a film for a series exploring the theme of “foreignness.” This is the same company that earlier asked
Denis and others, namely Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Cold
Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), and André Téchiné, Wild
Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages)
(1994), to make films about adolescence, which resulted in the one-hour
made-for-French-TV film U.S. GO HOME (1994).
“Since most of my films deal with that anyway, I worried about
how I could avoid repeating myself.”
Having spent her early childhood in colonial French
A taut psychological exploration of the increasingly
antagonistic relationship between a Foreign Legion officer, Lieutenant Galoup
(Denis Lavant), and a charismatic new recruit, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin),
Galoup narrates the tale in voiceover, where he is
fanatically loyal to his commanding officer Bruno Forestier, Michel
Subor, who previously played Bruno Forestier 37 years earlier in Godard's LE
PETIT SOLDAT (1963) which was set during the Algerian
War, actually banned for three years in France prior to the release due to
the presence of torture scenes, where Forestier is now much older, seen with a
chiseled face, sitting alone from the rest of the men, constantly smoking
cigarettes. The Denis film offers a
revisionist perspective by actually engaging in a conversation with that
earlier film through a shared character.
But when new recruits arrive, Galoup expresses extraordinary vehemence
towards the especially attractive Sentain, especially after Forestier has taken
an immediate liking to him, overly insecure and threated perhaps by his own
noticeable lack of good looks. Galoup's
jealousy, like Othello, literally
drives him to murderous insanity. With a
minimum of dialogue, Denis captures the ritual and repetition of a
legionnaire’s life, expressed through beautifully ordered compositions of the
men during various maneuvers, crawling under barbed wire, vaulting over bars,
walking across elevated parallel wires, marching in formation across the
desolate landscape, while also engaged in hand to hand combat. The homoeroticism of the
military experience rises to the forefront from the beauty of the visual
composition, but also from the inner workings of Galoup’s mind, as he expresses
his love of Forestier (carrying around a photo of him as a younger man) and a
growing rage against Sentain.
While the legionnaires come from all races and hues, the film raises
questions about the relationships of whites to blacks, especially given the
perspective of a former French colony, highlighted in scenes where the men go into town on leave and dance with the local women, where
one particular local beauty, Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa), seems to be the
exclusive girl of Galoup, though he treats her paternalistically, as his
primary interest remains Forestier.
While the setting is
Denis
creates a sensuous atmosphere not only with perfectly composed images, but the
dramatic power never diminishes between major and minor events, often
contrasting close ups with long shots, blending music and natural sound into
her film, where she’s not afraid to use silences to match the spacious
emptiness all around. What’s perhaps
most surprising, despite the focus on the men, is how carefully layered women
are into the landscape, becoming a kind of Greek chorus, where their silent
presence is everywhere, amusingly seen staring at the men as they carefully
wash and iron their clothes, lining the street markets selling their goods, or
seen sitting in the buses riding through the endless landscapes. When the legionnaires stream into town on
leave, they’re seen dancing at the local nightclub with native women,
exchanging physical embraces, but rarely words.
The film opens and closes on the dance floor, where the whole film unravels
like continual dance sequences, where even in their silence the women are an
integral and necessary part of a dance ritual, but their presence is hauntingly
ambiguous, silent witnesses, suggesting a potentially unhealthy relationship
with the postcolonial presence of the soldiers, who may not be so welcome in
the region. According to Denis, “You
always have a moment in life when you’d like to start from zero. The Foreign Legion is a place where boys go
to do that, where people who have no place to go can find a kind of family,
especially because they're not asked what they did before. The legionnaires became an erotic object in
film and song—Edith Piaf’s song ‘Mon Legionnaire’ is one of her most famous—but
when I saw them walking in the street or going to clubs, their beauty was more
sad to me than erotic. You could see
that the Legion is about men together.
These boys who never belonged before now belong to one another. It’s very touching.” Tribute to
Beau Travail YouTube (8:15),
featuring the opening dance sequence with African girls in a disco to “Şimarik
(Kiss-Kiss)” by Tarkan (0 to 1:24), calisthenics with a Benjamin Britten
chorale (1:25 to 2:25), more unscored calisthenics, (2:25 to 3:45), dance
sequence with Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa) to ”
(3:45 to 4:30), more unscored calisthenics (4:30 to 5:23), march in formation
to Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart” (5:23 to 6:50), Denis Lavant final dance
sequence up to the end credits to Corona “Rhythm of the Night” (6:50 to 8:15),
while this extends the throbbing dance music through the final credits, singing
almost in defiance, “This is the rhythm of my life, my life,” CD Beau Travail YouTube (4:59).
The full force of the film took critic Jonathan Rosenbaum by
such surprise that he had to admit “I must confess that I’m
embarrassed by most of my other reviews of Claire Denis films,” claiming the
difference between this film and her earlier work “is quite simply
the difference between making movies and making cinema,” comparing it to the
quantum leap taken by certain exalted artists like Robert Johnson or Charlie
Parker in blues and jazz. Some of the
glorified images of male bodies during training exercises or on maneuvers are
comparable to the idealized images of farmers harvesting the fields in
Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930), Eisenstein’s visually astounding battle scenes in
ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), or the glorified sweep of perfectly sculpted battle
formations in Jancsó’s THE RED AND THE WHITE (1967) or Kurosawa’s RAN
(1985). While the history of cinema is
filled with beautiful young women in various shades of undress being leered at
by gawking male directors, male bodies have come under scrutiny before as well,
where the term homoerotic suggests it was largely under the gaze of male
directors, where the names Derek Jarman or Pier Paolo Pasolini come to mind, or
Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), or Fassbinder’s
QUERELLE (1982), which has a similar doomed love theme between a superior older
officer and a gorgeous looking young sailor.
What’s unique here is how rare it is to find similar themes of male
bodies visualized so artistically under a woman’s gaze, including the director
and her lifelong cinematographer Agnès Godard, where you may have to go back to
Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA (1938) for a similar comparison, where one suspects every
single German cameraman in 1938 was male.
If one examines art history, women have typically been systematically
excluded from art training, and this argument is raised every year at the
Ernest Hardy from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Claire Denis is one of the most
audacious, talented directors in the world, and Beau Travail may well be her crowning glory. Based on Herman
Melville’s literary classic, Billy Budd,
the film is set in the rugged outback of Africa, where the French Foreign
Legion—men or every race and hue—are undergoing rigorous training. The stark
desert, with its endless stretch of sand and jagged rocks set beneath a rolling
blue sky, provides a breathtaking canvas for Denis, who captures the rituals of
men exercising, marching, showering, and bonding with a poet’s eye. In her
carefully constructed scenes, the routines of everyday life are transformed
into gracefully choreographed dances. But while this ode to masculinity and
male beauty is unfolding, the jealousy of a military official, Sergeant Galoup
(Denis Lavant) towards one of the underlings, Sentain (Gregoire Colin), builds
towards a tragic ending.
Galoup narrates the tale in voiceover.
The homoeroticism of the military experience is neither forced nor shied away
from, and it doesn’t really qualify Beau
Travail as an example of queer cinema, as so many of the film’s fans and
detractors declared upon its release. Denis’s interests are broader than that.
In brief but powerful strokes, she raises questions about the relationships of
whites to blacks, especially in former European colonies; connections between
gender and racial politics are made in scenes where the men go into town on
leave and mingle with local women. But the film remains steadfastly ambiguous
throughout, never taking any particular stance on these issues. Most
importantly, what Denis does, with a minimum of dialogue and with a primary
focus on hypnotic visuals that fill the screen in long takes, is capture the
beauty of ritual and repetition—as well as the power of monotony to break
spirit, which is as much the reason behind military ritual as the aim of
physical conditioning.
In terms of sheer beauty, Beau Travail pays off frame for frame, whether it’s the sight of the men in formation performing calisthenics, or the happy accident of Denis capturing a ray of sun as it’s refracted in the window of a moving train—or finally, the disgraced officer, dancing beneath a spinning disco ball at film’s end. Denis tells her stories through images rather than through dialogue and plot, with a gift for color, lighting, and composition that is unsurpassed.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Denis' extraordinary
movie centres on Galoup (Lavant) who, while holed up in Marseille, recalls his
time as a sergeant-major in the Foreign Legion. In the desert, he drilled raw
recruits while quietly nurturing feelings of respect and love for his superior,
Forestier (Subor). Then, with the arrival of Sentain (Colin), a soldier
Forestier honoured for bravery, Galoup caved in to resentment, envy and hate.
Though little is spelt out explicitly in this elliptical tale of repressed
emotion leading to murderous jealousy, the film is admirably accessible and
clear throughout. The director shows scant interest in the new recruit as an
angelic incarnation of goodness - her concerns are with how a wide open
colonial outpost may become a prison; how men may cope with an all-male
society; how the physical may mirror the metaphysical. Hence, she and her team
create a fixed, timeless world of mysterious, balletic rites, rippled with
simmering homoerotic tensions. The intensity of mood and thematic resonance
both derive almost entirely from the poetic juxtaposition of music and the
stunning images of beauty and sustained, even surreal strangeness. Prepare to
be blown away.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Tristan Johnson
Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL is a film of
sweltering, oppressive heat; a sun-drenched rendering of Melville's BILLY BUDD
that unfurls across the deserts of Djibouti, where a troop of French
legionnaires perform a dance of drills and exercises as daily ritual. The men
are soldiers, athletes, and the embodiment of physical perfection, and Denis
venerates their physique with framing that recalls Leni Riefenstahl's ode to
human beauty, OLYMPIA. Day in and day out, they adhere to strictly
choreographed routine, their mechanized motions made downright hypnotic by the
operatic overtones of Benjamin Britten. At the center of this tightly wound
fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade
begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty
and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's
stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed
desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will that will bring about his
own undoing. Most notable is the unshakable denouement, where one tragic
soldier at the end of his rope at last finds his ideal form of expression.
Suddenly, Galoup is dancing a very different dance, and as the periodic flashes
of local nightlife foreshadow, salvation may just lie in the universal escape
of pop music.
In Beau
Travail, Claire Denis stunningly updates Herman Melville's Billy Budd
as an allegorical endgame set within a homosocial French Foreign Legion outpost
in Africa . The oppressive neocolonialist
Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) is Melville's Claggart and Gilles Sentain
(Gregoire Colin) is his Billy Budd. When Sentain saves the life of a fellow
soldier after a horrifying helicopter accident, he incurs Galoup's jealousy and
challenges the man's notions of brotherhood. Denis and cinematographer Agnes
Godard elevate Sentain and Galoup's relationship to sweaty, maddeningly
existential levels. When the half-naked men begin to circle each other on a
desolate beach, they come to resemble animals locked in a battle for survival
and Beau Travail takes on the guise of experimental dance art (see the
film's rhythmic workout sequence and final club scene). Art, sex, politics, and
commerce converge and duke it out in Denis' best films. Here, she contemplates
a sweltering struggle between man's instinctual and conditioned self. The
film's men are constantly in training, so much so that they come to resemble
the gears of a machine—and throughout the film, they struggle to maintain a
mechanism of stability by working (and working out) together. The oppressed
African women who live outside the outpost stare into the camp, humored by the
way these men learn and struggle to play house. Denis is sympathetic of
Galoup's insecurities even when the man's jealousy of Sentain leads to chaos.
Denis understands that Galoup was once like Sentain: a young man taught to
react like a machine to anything and anyone who threatens his sense of
complacency. Galoup is merely a rotten byproduct of a dehumanizing military
apparatus, but by film's end he finally learns to let out some steam.
Body Language - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Claire Denis’s Band of Outsiders, by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, March 28, 2000
Claire Denis's latest film, Beau Travail, transposes the homoerotic triangle of Melville's Billy Budd to the contemporary French Foreign Legion. The film has been acclaimed, not only by those who counted No Fear No Die, I Can't Sleep, and Nenette and Boni among the greatest films of the '90s, but also by those who have barely noticed Denis's existence. Though it shares with those previous films the director's fascination with and tenderness toward men who are outsiders—the black cock-fight handlers in No Fear No Die, the French African gay serial killer and his brother in I Can't Sleep—Beau Travailis different in two striking ways. Although the setting is Africa, race is not a major factor. And compared to the neorealist clutter of the earlier films, Beau Travailseems almost abstract.
"You always have a moment in life when you'd like to start from zero," observes Denis. "The Foreign Legion is a place where boys go to do that, where people who have no place to go can find a kind of family, especially because they're not asked what they did before. The legionnaires became an erotic object in film and song—Edith Piaf's song "Mon Legionnaire" is one of her most famous—but when I saw them walking in the street or going to clubs, their beauty was more sad to me than erotic. You could see that the Legion is about men together. These boys who never belonged before now belong to one another. It's very touching."
Denis was approached by ARTE, the most culturally progressive European TV channel, to make a film for a series about being a foreigner. "Since most of my films deal with that anyway, I worried about how I could avoid repeating myself." Being foreign is a way of life to Denis, who spent most of her childhood in French West Africa and then moved to the suburbs of Paris when she was 13. She never felt as if she belonged in Africa, but in France she found her experience so different from that of her friends that she was doubly alienated. She attended film school and then worked as an assistant to various directors including Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. Her first feature, Chocolat (1988), drew on her childhood in Africa. It made an art-house star of Isaach De Bankole and established her relationship with Agnès Godard, the cinematographer for all her films to date.
"For Beau Travail, I started with things I'd always wanted to try—working with a choreographer and with some Herman Melville poems. The word foreignsuggested the Foreign Legion. I knew Djibouti, a piece of lava and salt in the Red Sea. The Legion trains there so that the men learn to withstand the extreme heat. I chose the landscape because it was so abstract and at the same time a real country. It's iso-lated, a world in itself, like a sailing ship in Melville. People, camels, trucks, they each have their place, and the rules are very clear. The abstraction was in the meeting of the landscape and the rules, and all those bodies doing the same thing. So gradually these elements came together and it became a project."
Since the budget was very small, Denis spent a month before the shoot working with the actors and the choreographer. "It was the only way to mold those 15 boys into one body. In the Legion, the head of the troop is the chef du corps, which means the head of the body. Then, in Djibouti, we shot it all in 15 days. We worked so fluently, always running, putting the camera, shooting, putting the camera somewhere else, shooting. Easy, easy, easy. It was only afterward that I realized it was abstract. I told the choreographer that the first time we see the legionnaires they should be like grass in the desert—burnt by the sun and slowly moving in the wind."
Denis focused Beau Travailon Billy Budd's villain, Claggart. He became Galoup (Denis Lavant), the master of arms who, fearing that a newcomer (Grégoire Colin) has gained favor with his adored captain, goes mad with jealousy and destroys his own career. The spare story is told in flashback, as fragments of memory, narrated by the exiled Galoup. The style of the voice-over, which Denis describes as more a reflection than an explanation, came from Godard's minimalist war film, Le Petit Soldat. Denis cast Michel Subor, the star of Le Petit Soldat, as the captain and gave him the same name—Bruno Forestier—as his character in the Godard film. She imagined that at the end of Le Petit Soldat, Bruno might indeed have joined the Foreign Legion.
"From the minute I decided that I would use Galoup's voice-over, I wanted Denis Lavant to do it. His presence conveys that sense that it's all too late. And that had an effect on us. We made an image and it was gone. We were shooting the past. When we shot the scene in Marseilles at the end when he's making the bed, I was so much with him that I forgot I was standing next to a camera making a film."
BFI | Sight & Sound | Beau Travail (1998) Charlotte O’Sullivan from Sight and Sound, August 2000
An ex-soldier, Galoup, looks back
on his days in the Foreign Legion. Stationed in Africa, he enjoys a relationship
with a local prostitute and relishes his role as second-in-command to handsome
commandant Bruno Forestier. A young soldier, Gilles Sentain, arrives. Fearing
his captain will be tempted by this beautiful boy, Galoup tries to tarnish
Sentain's reputation. But when the youth rescues a drowning man, his popularity
increases.
Galoup decides to take a group of
the men, including Sentain, on a series of exercises away from the commandant.
After a few days, he provokes Sentain by picking on one of the men. Sentain
slaps him. Galoup now has grounds to dismiss him; Sentain goes off into the
desert. On return to camp, Galoup faces a court martial and is expelled from
the army. Sentain is later found by nomads. Galoup makes peace with himself.
Review
Claire Denis is good with bodies, and in this most spectacularly somnambulant of narratives they do a lot of work. As soon as we see the soldiers Sentain and Galoup, we know they are two forces which can only cancel each other out. Where Denis Lavant's Galoup has a face as rough as a lion's, Grégoire Colin's Sentain's is as smooth as a stone. Sentain's body tells us nothing about what he's thinking, while Galoup's blares out his sexual secrets. As a result, while we can empathise with Sentain, we never identify with him.
We first see Galoup's beloved captain Forestier in a black-and-white photograph. When this is replaced by the 'real' image of him smoking it's difficult to tell the difference - he still looks as mysterious as any noir hero. The same is true, too, of the men in the army and the prostitutes who service them: they're all gorgeous, iconic and remote.
What you realise, slowly, is that this is because they're all creatures of Galoup's memory. When, as a bitter civilian, Galoup presses an iron into his clothes, he looks stiff and ludicrous - a man doing a woman's job. But when the soldiers iron their clothes, they look fluid and complete. As they do their exercises, the camera crawls up their arms and thighs, asking us to breathe in their perfection. Like Galoup, we can't escape these visions of loveliness and begin to feel almost as oppressed by them. Are we and Galoup the aberrations, or are they? As the glowing landscape - yellow sand, green water, white rocks - pulsates behind the men's bodies, we enter into Galoup's masochistic, waking dream in which the answer, over again, seems to be that it's only the beautiful who belong.
Framing her essay on sexual identity like a thriller - "one stays and two are expelled," says Galoup of the trio he forms with Sentain and Forestier, prompting the question, which two? - Denis hooks our attention. Having allowed us to meet Forestier, she then has the screen fade to black, creating a sense of narrative expectation. The commandant's behaviour reveals flickers of nerves (unlike Sentain, he's self-conscious, given to gazing at himself in the mirror) which makes us wary of how he might treat the possessive Galoup. It's important that we don't sympathise with Galoup (or Sentain) too soon; looking for weak spots or the seeds of triumph in all three men, we see both, everywhere. Unable to judge these characters, we just have to stay with them.
The obvious dramatic models for Beau Travail's jealousy-fuelled narrative are Othello, Herman Melville's Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten's music for the opera based on Melville's novella dashes gloomy panic into our ears) and Greek tragedy. Denis clearly enjoys paying homage to other texts: Michel Subor's commandant is called Forestier, the name of the character the actor played in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1960). Like the soldiers who never engage in 'real' fighting, but merely prepare themselves, endlessly, the film feels like a dress rehearsal, full of props over-eager to simulate life.
The language in the film is excessively formal. Galoup's diary entries are
entirely elegant (unlike the man). And it's as if he's supplying the words for
everyone else, too. Thus a languid Forestier tells his men, "If it weren't
for fornication and blood we wouldn't be here [in
What makes Beau Travail so special - and confounding - is that after all these clotted, self-defeating demonstrations of control, Galoup does find release. Early on, he tells himself that there's "freedom in remorse". It seems like just another sonorous try-out for genuine feeling, but towards the end we suddenly discover a new side to Galoup. He's in a disco, the anthemic club track 'The Rhythm of the Night' is playing and suddenly all the elements we've seen up to now - caged beast, clockwork toy, villain - blaze manically into life. With movements that are almost spasms, Lavant turns Galoup's body into something that takes up space rather than watches others encroach.
It's quite right that Sentain, Forestier and the prostitute should remain
loose ends, untouched by reality. Perfect, saintly young boys may not really
exist; prostitutes may not lead sleepy, ecstatic lives; captains may not
stretch and tease in noir bubbles; but everyone except Galoup already
knew that. It's also right that his sexuality should remain an unknown quantity
- repression can't be undone in a day. What's important is that, while he may
still be invisible to others (the disco is empty), Galoup can at last see
himself and like what he sees - a glorious moment for him and for us.
Blood
and sand: Beau Travail | The Sight & Sound Greatest Films ... - BFI Hannah McGill from BFI Sight and Sound, November 6, 2013
“Beau Travail” - Salon.com Charles Taylor from Salon, March 31, 2000
Unsatisfied Men Jonathan Rosenbaum on BEAU TRAVAIL, originally printed in The Chicago Reader, May 26, 2000
Elena del Río, “Performing the narrative of seduction in Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)”, Kinoeye, vol. 3, no. 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Performing the narrative of seduction
Senses of Cinema – Beau travail Tamara Tracz from Senses of Cinema, February 2007
"Petit Soldat-Beau Travail" by Justin Vicari - Jump Cut Spring 2008
Laura McMahon, 'Deconstructing Community and Christianity: 'A-religion' in Nancy's Reading of Beau travail', Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
“Control: An In-Depth Look at Claire Denis’ Beau Travail” Matt Mazur from the International Cinephile Society, November 4, 2010
‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood from Film International, April 1, 2011
Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood from Film International, January 27, 2011
Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012
Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013
Reconsidering The Landscape of the Homoerotic ... - Film International Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Senses of
Cinema – Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet
John Orr reviews Claire Denis, by Martine
Beugnet, from Senses of Cinema, September 2005
Work
in Progress - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice J. Hoberman
Beau travail: Take One Men at Play, by Andrew Chan from Reverse Shot
Beau travail: Take Two The Great Beyond, by Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot
VideoVista review Michael Brooke
"Petit Soldat-Beau Travail" by Justin Vicari - Jump Cut also Go to page 2, and Go to page 3
World Socialist Web Site review Mustafa Rashid
AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [B]
Beau Travail Gerald Peary, June 2000
Reel.com review [3/4] Rod Armstrong
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
BEAU TRAVAIL Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [2/4]
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Leslie Dunlap
PopcornQ review Brandon Judell
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)
Urban Cinefile (Australia) Jake Wilson
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [2/5]
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Beau travail (capsule review)
Claire
Denis interviewed Colonial Observations, interview on
August 21, 1994 by Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, March 1996
The
Guardian: Claire Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney June
28, 2000, also seen here: Claire
Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney
BFI | Sight & Sound | Desire Is Violence Chris Darke interviews Denis from Sight and Sound, July 2000
This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the Nightingale's Christy LeMaster about Nenette et Boni and Beau Travail, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 13, 2013
Entertainment
Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Deborah Young) review
BBCi -
Films Michael Thomson
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
Billy Budd - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
TROUBLE EVERY DAY B 89
Following the unanimous acclaim for Beau Travail (1999), arguably the director’s most erotic and deeply romantic work, this boldly challenges viewers with what must be what is described as an adult film, as it’s certainly not for everyone, revealing far more than the eye can see, significant as the only Claire Denis film that dabbles in the horror genre, something of a modern era vampire film, a graphically violent and thoroughly disturbing vision of carnal desire as a form of cannibalism. becoming something exquisitely revolting and truly frightening by the end, equating sex with death, and not like anything else out there. Panned at Cannes and critically dismissed in America, the film has undergone a certain revival among cinephiles who recognize rarity when they see it, but the slow and languid pace of the film will likely turn off horror lovers, while the excruciating blood-letting will turn off art film devotees. Despite the raw and graphic subject matter, this remains a Claire Denis film, expressed with an artful flourish and filled with poetic ambiguity throughout. Only a more recent film like Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) conveys a similar attention to detail when it comes to flesh-eating monsters starved for blood, while at the same time offering a haunting sensuality behind the camera. Beautifully filmed by Agnès Godard, this must be viewed as one of her triumphs, as this is a visually stunning film that operates out of its own unique conception, where it lives by its uncompromising rules even as it references vintage horror films. At heart, this is a FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movie, where the tropical experiments of Doctor Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) went awry while researching experimental brain medicine and have now altered the human gene pool, creating vampire-like creatures with a ravenous need not only for blood, but for human flesh.
The film may also be traced to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1977) and CAT PEOPLE (1982), both films with earlier Black and White versions, as the first deals with the grotesque and disfigured effects of medical experimentation gone wrong, while the second deals with erotic transformation, where the sex urge turns humans into blood devouring, flesh eating beasts, returning to human form only after feeding. However, in the hands of Denis, a consummate artist known for her poetic subtleties, much of what’s displayed onscreen is graphically disconcerting. Opening with the music of Tendersticks, it’s one of their better scores, especially the hauntingly beautiful funeral dirge that opens and closes the film and has a way of burrowing under your skin, Trouble Every Day Opening Song Tindersticks - YouTube (3:13), while it’s also extremely effective the way Denis opens with a darkened kiss that fades to black for a lengthy period of time, leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation. Once the picture returns, the familiar face of actress Béatrice Dalle is seen as Coré, flagging down truckers on the side of the road, where all we see is the bloody aftermath, where her husband (Sémeneau) tracks her down and brings her home, tenderly washing the blood off of her, then locking her into a boarded up room in their mansion. Simultaneous to this event, an American couple on their honeymoon are flying to Paris, medical researcher Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his overly delicate wife June (Tricia Vessey), where Shane is inflicted with the same disease, having to continually hide from her every time he’s aroused. While he’s using the honeymoon as a pretext to track down the infamous doctor, June only knows he’s hiding some deep, dark secret, and when she hears him violently masturbating in the bathroom, her pounds on the door evoke sheer terror.
While this is a thoroughly confounding film, one that makes great use of
Béatrice Dalle's physical features, giving her an animal-like presence, the
film pushes the boundaries of cinema, much of it without dialogue, but using
screams of hysteria, reflective of the Silent era, where it weaves in and out
of dream states seemingly at will, and where half of this French-language film,
including the title, is spoken in English, contributing to an otherworldy
effect, like something out of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932). When a young man’s (Nicholas Duvauchelle) curiosity
leads him to Coré’s door, words
can’t describe the sense of grim bewilderment overcoming the audience when they
realize she is incredulously eating him before our eyes, smearing his blood all
over the walls afterwards. While the audience
is aware something is not right with Shane as well, none of the people he meets
have a clue, as he spends most of the film popping pills and hallucinating his
blood-drenched wife, searching for a cure, but to no avail. A seemingly innocuous event leads to the
savage finale, as the maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) lingers in their
room after making the bed, leaving her scent on the bedcovers. Throughout the film this scene has been set
up by shots of the back of the young maid’s neck, which Shane has obviously
been tracking, like wild prey on the loose, eventually unleashing a wild,
animalistic hunger that will not be denied.
It is this exploration of man’s basest rape instincts that prove to be
the most deeply unsettling images of the film, like the horrors of IRREVERSIBLE
(2002), complete with blood curdling screams and graphic sexual bloodletting
that are among the most difficult scenes to endure in a supremely grotesque
finale, as Shane finally gives in to his bloodlust, Claire
Denis - Trouble Every Day... YouTube (5:39). A
haunting shadow of doom overwhelms the senses along with a Tendersticks
refrain, sending the audience out the door in a shivering fright.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Shot and edited with Denis' customary
expertise, but disappointing for both its (admittedly ambitious) script and its
performances, this is rather too elliptical and enigmatic for its own good. It
tells of two individuals consumed by cannibalistic bloodlust, but cared for by
loved ones: Dalle, who keeps breaking out of the house in which disenchanted
boffin Descas keeps her locked up; and Gallo, honeymooning with Vessey in Paris
in the hope that he may make contact with Descas (or should that be Dalle?). Do
the killers thirst for blood because they're victims of medical experiments, or
are the experiments carried out to cure such impulses? Who knows or even, given
Gallo and Dalle's hollow performances, cares. The murders are nasty, the play
with genre tradition uneasy, and certain scenes (Descas wandering cool as a
cucumber into a blazing house) laughably implausible.
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis's perverse follow-up to her critical breakthrough, Beau Travail, is another sort of film maudit. This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.
A tale of parallel afflictions, the movie cuts between the misadventures of two contemporary bloodsuckers. Coré (Béatrice Dalle), the wife of a Parisian doctor, Léo (Alex Descas), is the vampire bat of the highway, luring truckers to their ghastly fate; Shane (Vincent Gallo) is an American medical researcher who flies to Paris with his childlike bride (Tricia Vessey), hoping to find his old friend Léo and learn the source of his barely controllable sexual fantasies—he's a vampire in his mind. For all the cross-cutting, the movie is largely devoid of suspense—too enamored with its gross-out effects to exert the dreamy fascination of Denis's last exercise in lurid psychopathology, I Can't Sleep.
A scarifying Cro-Magnon beauty, Dalle is convincingly feral in gnawing the skin off her lover's face and smearing herself—as well as the walls—with gore. By comparison, the scruffily dandified Gallo comes across as merely petulant. (Descas completes the sense of designer casting with his motorcycle-riding, wonderfully perfunctory doctor: "Cut down on the cigarettes," he tells one patient by way of concluding a physical.) Although not improved by the dialogue (over half in English), Trouble Every Day is helped a bit by cinematographer Agnès Godard's sensuous impressionism and the jagged romanticism of the Tindersticks score.
Review:
Trouble Every Day - Film Comment
Max Nelson, September/October 2013
Denis has been weaving more or less explicit self-critiques into
her films since at least 2001’s polarizing Trouble Every Day. The
difference is that where Bastards finds her impressionistic,
hyper-tactile aesthetic willfully hemmed in, Trouble Every Day suggests
what happens when it’s allowed to run amok. Denis’s films have always been
shot through with a current of menace just waiting to be made explicit: it’s
present in their off-balance close-ups, faintly unstable camera
moves, obsessive attention to the texture of hair, clothes, and skin, and
habit of letting the camera slide caressingly around actors’ bodies when
they’re at their least self-conscious and most exposed.
Where other Denis films seem to circle and drift around
indecisively, Trouble Every Day itches with a kind of nervous
forward momentum. It’s an extended come-on, full of teases and hints and
come-hither gestures, finally climaxing—in every way—with two scenes of
gruesome sexual violence. Like its characters, the movie can’t get off without
(at least metaphorically) consuming its object of desire, and
it’s alarming to think that this might be the ultimate end
of all Denis’s luminous close-ups and seductive camera-crawls.
The film tries a little too hard, I think, to account for why
newlywed Shane (Vincent Gallo) and his wild-eyed ex-lover Coré (Béatrice
Dalle) both crave human blood when aroused, and its less-is-more approach to
character never goes quite far enough: we learn just enough about Gallo and his
chirpy, pixie-haircut bride June (Tricia Vessey) to want more than we get.
But quibbles aside, Trouble Every Day feels in retrospect like
a necessary step for Denis: the cathartic purge that would
then allow her to indulge in Friday Night’s
vision of sex as a delicate, momentary attunement of sensibilities, interests,
and desires.
It’s the kind of public self-exorcism a director can only get away with once in a career. And even at its most overdetermined, it still reflects its maker’s signature love for intractable contrasts and unresolved ambiguities. It’s hard to forget the way Dalle affectionately nuzzles the cheek of a young man she’s just half-devoured, or the way her stoic scientist husband (Alex Descas) tenderly sponges streaks of blood off her back, shoulders, chest, and lips, or the way Gallo gazes at his young wife with equal parts husbandly affection, feral hunger, and fear of his own power.
Trouble Every Day Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
As elegant and mysterious as Beau Travail, Trouble Every
Day demonstrates director Claire Denis' signature obsession with the human
body, cultural rifts and the permissions of sex. Rarely does skin look as
beautiful, desirable, even delectable, as it does in one of her mystery worlds,
visually rendered by Agnes Godard's expressionistic brush. Trouble Every Day
is a cautionary love story, one that gives new meaning to "eating in"
and "eating out." The film's unnerving use of silence, minimal
dialogue and grotesque close-ups emphasizes junkie vampire Coré's insatiable
need for blood. Standing somewhere in the French countryside, Coré (Béatrice
Dalle) nervously awaits her prey. Never has the hunger of a vampire felt so
alive and so necessary as it does in Denis' contemporary
Coré
is empowered and enraged by sex, rendered helpless once her thirst is quenched.
She's an out of control child who must huddle in the fetal position until her
scientist lover Léo (Alex Descas) can take her home. Locked inside Léo's
bedroom, Coré becomes a mythic creature dangerous to an outside world that
fascinatingly yearns to break in and taste her sexual hunger. Of course, this
world is oblivious to the fact that Coré's sexual release comes with a price:
it must end with what amounts to a vampyric form of sexual asphyxiation. Denis
envisions an urban landscape overrun by diseased monsters incapable of loving
without killing. While Léo's enslavement of Coré showcases Denis' signature
concern for racial rifts, Trouble Every Day works best as an AIDS
metaphor.
Newlyweds
Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June Brown (Tricia Vessey) fly to
Trouble Every Day
features three incredible bloodletting sequences—one is evocatively suggestive
(blades of grass tell the story of the kill), the others unbelievably grueling.
The film's final killing sequence could very well be the most brutal rape ever
put to film, no so much for the graphic nature of the kill but for its many
layers. In a hotel that resembles an immense mousetrap, a nosy cleaning woman
toys with the fetish of being punished for overstepping her bounds. She walks
through cavernous hallways, close-ups of her neck and nervous eyes seemingly implying
her knowledge of the hunt. Permission turns to rape, the cat goes down, a bite
is taken and the little mouse is forced to taste its own blood. Shane and June
can now love again—that is, until frustrated desire beckons the next
extramarital hunt.
Philippe Met, 'Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess (Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, 2001), Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue, 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess
Douglas Morrey, 'Textures of Terror: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day', Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique, Vol. 3, No. 2, April 2004
Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Icon of Fury: Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
Joe Bowman, 'The Decade List: Trouble Every Day', Fin de Cinéma, 3 April 2009
Deus ex Sanguina: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day Jeremiah Kipp from The House Next Door
Trouble Every Day Too Close for Comfort, by Kristi Mitsuda from Reverse Shot
The Conversations: Trouble Every Day Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard from The House Next Door
“Trouble Every Day” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
Severed Cinema Ed Fir
It All Happens In The Dark [Cody Yoder]
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B+]
Film Freak Central - Trouble Every Day (2001) Walter Chaw
CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [4/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4] also seen here: MovieMartyr.com
hybridmagazine.com review Nicholas Schager
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
TROUBLE EVERY DAY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
PopMatters (Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Rob Nelson
Pretty Clever Films [Brandy Dean]
Reel.com review [2.5/4] Pam Grady
Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) review
DVD Times Noel Megahey
indieWIRE review Guy V. Cimbalo
VideoVista review Jeff Young
Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll
filmcritic.com (Frank Ochieng) review [1.5/5] also seen here: Frank Ochieng review [1.5/5]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [2/4]
Boxoffice Magazine review Chris Wiegand
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]
This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea Gronvall about I Can't Sleep and Trouble Every Day, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 20, 2013
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2.5/4]
Entertainment Weekly review [D+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
FRIDAY NIGHT (Vendredi Soir) A- 93
France
nearly wordless, has the feel of an experimental film, it's very sensual, not sexual, with subtle textures of sensuality, realized in large part due to the fabulous overlapping layers of unique imagery and music......peculiarly interesting
Nightfall in wintry
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
On the eve of moving in with her
boyfriend, Laure (Valérie Lemercier) gets stuck in the traffic jam to end all
traffic jams. Over the radio, a traffic commentator encourages Parisians to
carpool. Though seemingly afraid of the people around her, the lonely Laure
begins to look for someone to ride shotgun. It's easier to walk but the
enigmatic Jean (Vincent Lindon) gets in nonetheless. The sound of car horns,
irate commuters and Dickon Hinchliffe's remarkable score work as aphrodisiacs
and incite a lovely chain of events: Jean smokes, Laure plays music, they
bicker and he runs off. She follows him through side streets and together they
rent a room for the night at a local hotel. Think of Claire Denis's
mini-masterpiece Vendredi soir (Friday Night) as Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love by way of
Chantal Akerman, whose All Night Long and Night and Day similarly
examined the possibilities of last-chance love affairs. Friday Night is
an evocation of one woman's uncertainties, flights of fancy and elusive joys.
The film, based on an Emmanuelle Bernheim novel, brings to mind another
startling life-in-miniature: Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour."
Agnes Godard's tight framing and ethereal compositions contemplate Laure's
sense of claustrophobia, not to mention her fear of becoming unavailable. This
magical realist, near-silent translation of Parisian love is at once
devastating and ravishingly full of joy.
Vendredi
Soir | | guardian.co.uk Arts
Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian
After the silliness that was Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis has returned to form with this outstanding film: a swooningly erotic, beguilingly romantic adventure. It is a rapturous transcription of an evening in one woman's life, paced out almost in real time and mostly wordless.
Laure, played by Valérie Lemercier, is marooned in a traffic jam and impulsively picks up a stranger, Jean (Vincent Lindon). This is the prelude to an encounter which over just a few hours miraculously assumes the lineaments of a glorious affair in miniature.
Denis focuses on surfaces, textures, details; these are minutely observed and transformed, given life. Laure and Jean's meeting has a piercingly intense, yet gentle quality which was absent from, say, Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy.
One of the most subversive things about it is Denis's refusal to pay the debt to pleasure with a finger-wagging moral: that bogus idea that the lovers must be scared and sobered by some assumed dark side to their experience.
Date movies rarely come sexier or smarter than this.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
"Friday Night," Claire Denis' adaptation of
Emmanuele Bernheim's novel, feels its way through the fleeting emotions,
excited anticipation and tingling thrill of a one-night stand.
Laure
(Valerie Lemercier) is in the midst of moving out of her apartment and in with
her lover (who's nothing more than a voice on an answering machine). She's
apprehensive about the decision.
There
is no voiceover to tell us, only Denis' acute, empathetic observations of
Lemercier distractedly packing the last of her belongings, flustered and
nervous as she flits back and forth while deciding to keep some item, no, get
rid of it, no, wait, I'll keep it.
Laure's
slow transition stalls when a transportation strike grinds the city to a halt.
Comforted by the gridlock, as if the city's fingers won't allow her to leave
just yet, she surveys her fellow vehicular prisoners like one of the angels in
Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" (which Denis also worked on), settling
on faces for brief imagined connections.
A
handsome pedestrian, Jean (Vincent Lindon), asks for a ride. "Leave me
anywhere," he says, but his gentle eyes and seductive smile tell the
restless Laure something else. She cancels her dinner and, nervous with
anticipation, joins him for a drink.
Where
American films are so often self-conscious about physical love and one-night
stands, Denis celebrates the tender awkwardness of Laure's brief encounter. We
know little of their lives outside of this night, only the sensations of the
now: short, excited breaths, the ruffle of fresh sheets, the glow of the
morning after.
Denis'
camera, always in motion, hovers intimately around Lemercier to drink in the
symphony of emotions that play across her anxious, excited face. You can almost
feel the textures through the light and shadow and symphony of sounds.
"Friday
Night" is the most sensuous and intimate work of cinema of the past few
years, a film that luxuriates in the immediacy of the moment. There is no guilt
to the act, only exhilaration, joy and freedom. At least for the moment.
Senses of Cinema – Travellin' Light: Vendredi soir Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, April 2004
Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012
Senses of Cinema – Making Contact: Claire Denis' Vendredi soir Aimé Ancian from Senses of Cinema, December 2002
Friday Night - Reverse Shot Matthew Plouffe, July/August 2003
Friday Night | Reverse Shot The Eyes Have It, by Eric Hynes from Reverse Shot
Friday Night (Vendredi Soir) Henry Sheehan
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [4/5]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [4/5]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]
DVD Times Noel Magahey
Film Monthly (Jerome de Groot) review
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [2/4]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Reverse Shot review Matthew Plouffe, January/February 2004 (short review)
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review
DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [3/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Rich Cline
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann
CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum) review
CineScene.com (Josh Timmermann) review
Boxoffice Magazine review Kevin Courrier
Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis: An Interview Aimé Ancian interview from Senses of Cinema, December 2002
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Life in the slow lane Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, August 31, 2003
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Carla Meyer) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
THE INTRUDER (L’intrus) A 97
France
Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows, in
your heart.
—The young Russian girl (Katia
Golubeva)
Receiving
the stranger must then also necessarily entail experiencing his intrusion.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, L’intrus
An example of utterly fearless filmmaking, Claire Denis has crafted a masterwork that is unlike any other, perhaps recalling the probing, atmospheric density of Wim Wenders UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991), an ultimate road movie that was filmed in 15 cities in seven countries across four continents, while here a similar epic reach may all be taking place inside someone’s head, yet is expressed through external visualization that couldn’t be more ravishingly beautiful, shot by Agnès Godard at her masterful best, where no single shot approaches visual cliché, just as no single edit fails to surprise, where this film rivals and may even top Beau Travail (1999) for sheer originality. What everyone can agree upon afterwards is that this is a headscratcher, as few can follow a near incoherent storyline, yet that is the mastery of the film, leaving out gaping holes in the storyline, where the filmmaker provocatively challenges the viewer to connect the dots on their own. What little we do know is established at the outset, taking place in the deep woods of the Jura mountains along the French-Swiss border, where Louis Trebor (Michel Subor in perhaps his greatest role) lives with his dogs, who offer an enthralling presence in the film, often seen in a heightened state of alert where they live in harmony with the natural world. Louis loves his dogs more than his own estranged family, never seeing his own grown son Sidney (Grégoire Colin) who lives nearby, and is himself a proud new father. According to Denis in an interview with Gavin Smith, Claire Denis interview | Film Comment, she initially intended to open the film with the son’s monologue offering a critique about his absent father, where the focus would quickly shift to being about the father, ending the film in an empty forest, with no people and no snow, with a resumption of the monologue, so the entire film was contained in that monologue. But the actor Grégoire Colin had to leave to work on another film, so they were never able to make that happen. Instead the film opens on Sidney’s wife Antoinette (Florence Loiret-Caille), who works as a border guard, where her drug sniffing dogs successfully find some smuggled contraband, returning home to a husband who has spent the day with two infants, happy to see his wife, becoming sexually aroused by her presence. The film then quickly shifts to the older father living like a recluse in the woods.
The border region is seen as an open frontier where intruders continually attempt to sneak across under cover of the forest, where occasionally we’ll hear shots fired, but the storyline quickly cuts ahead without revealing any outcome, where Denis paints a picture of Louis as a vigorously healthy man in his seventies, seen swimming naked in the lake, biking the mountain roadways, or making love to a much younger woman in town, yet the discovery that he has a diseased heart radically alters his future, changing the entire dynamic of the film. Initially envisioned as a three-part structure, the northern hemisphere, limbo, and the southern hemisphere, with each hemisphere a mirror image of the other, but Denis changed her mind when she realized Jean-Luc Godard’s latest effort NOTRE MUSIQUE (2004) used a similar format, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. As a result, Denis collapsed her three-part structure into one extended dream sequence, where only the existing family seen in the opening, Louis and his son’s family, are real, while all others are a manifestation of his imagination, where people he had previously known in his life reoccur in his thoughts. The idea behind the film is Jean-Luc Nancy's novel L'Intrus (2000), which was inspired by the author’s own experience recovering from a heart transplant operation. Denis became fascinated by the idea of introducing a foreign “intrusion” into the body forced to fend for its own survival, oftentimes rejected by the host, even though the body needs it for its own survival, finding parallels with illegal immigrants crossing the border, as well as the mistreatment of foreigners, migrant workers, racial minorities, and those leading marginalized lives on the edge of society. In Denis’s assured hands, this becomes a life and death issue, where survival depends upon a variety of complex conditions, creating the internalized conditions of reflecting back upon one’s life, even as one hopes to move forward. Recollections are not necessarily in any order, as thoughts and time periods overlap, where one’s hopes and dreams often replace reality.
While this is easily Denis’s most extended vision, the only film to go past the two-hour mark, the path she takes is simply remarkable. And while many will be confused by a lack of coherent narrative, many artists have used this exact same device, including Edward Yang in THE TERRORIZERS (1986), the third part of his urban trilogy, each one more increasingly experimental in form, reducing the narrative as much as possible, or Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR (1975), which is autobiographical, told as an abstract, impressionistic memory piece, ultimately becoming a defiantly personal film. Artists invent new forms of expression which are meant to challenge existing conventions, like Stravinsky, or Picasso, or atonalism, where Denis takes a Proustian plunge, utilizing a literary stream-of-conscious device to explore memory and consciousness, reflecting upon themes of guilt and moral transgressions, but also personal reconciliation and redemption, where one can be both haunted and inspired by dwelling on the past, creating a hauntingly beautiful dreamscape that plays out like an epic Icelandic saga, told as an extended series of elongated poems that in this director’s hands retain elements of extreme realism, though lushly visualized as an abstract, near wordless tone poem. The film is largely an articulation of man’s alienated existence as viewed through a deeply tormented subconscious. Unable to reconcile the inescapable mistakes of the past, Louis remains deeply haunted by them, revisiting the places of his life, hoping for a different outcome, but plagued by the inevitable results. Since Michel Subor’s original involvement with Godard’s essay on the Algerian War in LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963), he has been portraying the sort of intellectual and moral confusion that individuals have when confronting anguishing events in their lives, where the grizzled expression on his face couldn’t be more eloquently poignant. The film also curiously stars nearby neighbor Béatrice Dalle as the Queen of the North Hemisphere,
Given an epic structure like Homer’s Odyssey, Louis begins his otherworldly journey by attacking an intruder trying to break into his cabin in the middle of the night, a metaphor for the metaphysical adventure he is about to embark upon, starting with a large payment for a black market donor heart to a young Russian girl (Katia Golubeva), who actually provides the opening narration, and with connections, one assumes, to the Russian mafia, asking for a “young man’s heart,” no questions asked, where some have called her “The Angel of Death,” as she actually shadows his movements for the rest of the film, and even comments upon his progress. Perhaps the most startling transitions are scenes in the snow, much of which have a mythological resemblance to an illusory world. A film defined by visual textures, Denis has called it “my vision of a dead man,” where during the shoot she asked Michel Subor to listen to the final recordings of Johnny Cash, which themselves resemble a harrowing near death experience. When Denis wrote the script, she called him A Man With No Heart, a heartless man, stashing his fortune in secret Swiss bank accounts covering up his shady past, disassociating himself from his family, and becoming something of an eccentric Howard Hughes recluse. The unseen operation moves the film to the Southern Hemisphere, drawing inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin’s trip to the South Seas, presented as an idyllic landscape in the Polynesian island of Tahiti in search for a new life where he might recover from his operation, yet his condition takes a turn for the worse and he’s forced to return to the hospital. Complaining of his sick heart, it is the Russian girl who reminds him there’s nothing wrong with his heart except that it’s empty. Including clips of Tahiti from Paul Gégauff’s unfinished film LE REFLUX (1965), starring Michel Subor four decades ago, the film is seen as an endless voyage of a man slowly dying, much like Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN (1995), where one of the more memorable shots is an Antonioni Zabriskie Point (1970) style explosion of colorful streamers jettisoned off the bow of a newly christened ship in South Korea, which he buys for his voyage to Tahiti. The endless sea odyssey provides an ocean vista featuring a horizon without borders, a pathway venturing into a world of multiple possibilities, yet eventually it’s accompanied by the apocalyptic music of Tendersticks that jars our senses awake with a hypnotic guitar loop as the camera simply drifts endlessly at sea. Boldly mystifying and brilliant throughout, this is arguably the most lyrically sensuous film Denis has ever made, a film that traffics in the subconscious, taking us on an ominous journey exploring the mysteries in the heart of the unknown.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Yekaterina Golubeva obituary David Thompson obituary from BFI Sight & Sound, August 14, 2011, a horrific tagline to the story, as Golubeva provided a lyrical and almost angelic “presence” to Denis films.
L'intrus (The Intruder) Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge (short review)
Shady millionaire Louis (Subor) lives in reclusive retirement on the mountainous Swiss/French border. Suffering from coronary problems, he pays for a heart transplant before embarking on a journey halfway round the world in search of the son he's never seen. Or does he..?
Ambiguous and elliptical, the latest from Denis (after Beau Travail and Vendredi Soir) is arthouse cinema with a capital A: challenging and often baffling, it certainly won't be to all tastes. But audiences in search of something different, and willing to go with Denis's flow, may find themselves rewarded with a very special moviegoing experience.
This kind of dream-logic puzzle is very difficult to pull off on screen - David Lynch's Mulholland Dr was perhaps the last successful example. The trump-card, however, is veteran Subor - his wonderfully gritty performance keeps any hint of pretentiousness or self-indulgence firmly at bay, and helps Denis achieve what may turn out to be her masterpiece.
Time Out London review Geoff Andrew
Louis Trebor (Michel Subor)
lives with his dogs in the forest, deep in the Jura mountains close to the
Swiss border. A recluse, he seldom sees his grown son (Grégoire
Colin), sleeps – occasionally – with a pharmacist from a nearby town, and
lusts without success after a local dog-breeder (Béatrice
Dalle). That he’s not the warmest of men is clear from how he treats an
unwelcome visitor to his home. Still, in his own self-centred way this
sexagenarian loves life – so much so that after a minor heart attack, he uses
his (possibly ill-gotten) savings to fly to Korea for a somewhat shady
transplant: the start of an odyssey of sorts. Be advised that this partial
synopsis of Denis’ latest impressionist cinepoem is tentative indeed. Little is
spelled out in the elliptical, taciturn narrative; mostly we see faces in
wordless close-up, long shots of land- and seascapes and obscure figures
flitting through trees in the dark, all rapturously shot by Agnès Godard
and mesmerically cut to a meticulous track that includes minimalist music by
the Tindersticks’ Stuart A Staples. The ‘story’ is evanescent to the point of
becoming a pipe-dream, albeit one grounded in corporeal matter; it’s also
remarkably rich in resonance. That’s due to Denis’ unusually open-minded
approach to inspiration and creation. Initially working loosely from Jean-Luc
Nancy’s eponymous essay on his heart transplant (hence the themes of invasion,
rejection and solitude) but also conceiving the movie as a ‘portrait’ of Subor
(which in turn, through a few clips from the 1960s film ‘Le Reflux’, ties in
with a decision to have Trebor sail to a South Seas paradise), she also inserts
a purgatorial Pusan into his journey, presumably to facilitate the film’s
funding. Potentially chaotic, this method somehow results in a haunting,
enigmatic meditation on life, death, our fragile sense of identity and the wages
of solipsism.
Distributor
Wanted: The Intruder - Film Comment Amy Taubin from Film Comment, May/June 2005
A man of a certain age is dying.
The problem is his heart. Not only does it no longer pump as it should, but it
has proven itself a failure in matters of love. Because the man still hungers
for love, he decides to buy himself a new heart on the black market. Not just
any heart but one that belonged to a young man - as young as the son he refuses
to care for. But just as his old heart rejected his son, his body rejects this
new heart. And since he was so heedless about how his new heart was obtained -
that someone might have been murdered to give him a second chance at life - he
will be punished by something worse than his own death. Claire Denis's The
Intruder (L'Intrus) is a film as primal and resonant as the myths and fairy
tales one reads as a child or the dreams that psychoanalysts call
"autobiographical" in that they replay the major events and turning
points of one's life in a way that, despite the jumble of time and space, is
exceptionally vivid and realistic in its detail. Some viewers seem bothered
that they can't sort out the real from the delirium and the memories from the
prophecies in The Intruder. But would anyone demand that of an epic
poem? Denis is one of cinema's greatest narrative poets, and The Intruder,
the story of an adventurer, is her most adventurous cinematic poem. As in Beau
travail, dialogue is minimal, but three or four metaphors carry us inward
to the associative regions of the psyche and outward from the dense frozen
forests of the
The Intruder Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
I had been warned by several sharp critic-friends going into this
one that it doesn't make a lick of sense. So, settling in for a semi-coherent
collection of striking images, I was quite surprised to discover that it's just
an art-damaged genre flick, albeit an incredibly accomplished one. In fact, the
preceding description fails to convey just how compelled I was in the midst of
the film, from image to image and scene to scene. It's just that it all adds up
to a little less than the sum of its parts. Basically [SPOILERS BEGIN HERE]
what we have is a "spy who came in from the cold" narrative, quite
linear in its organization albeit with the occasional dream sequence. What it doesn't
do is engage in any real exposition. We get a lot of moments in between events,
a series of actions whose meaning isn't available until much later. However,
that meaning isn't doled out in a plant-and-payoff fashion. It's more like
poetry, where we're seeing all the negative space around a problem or an event.
This is most notable with respect to the Michel Subor character's son and
daughter-in-law. Their sole function is to register their disengagement from
his life, and to come into harm's way despite their blatant rejection of Subor
from their lives. We don't get a narrative explanation, and I think this is
because Denis trusts that the story she's telling, in its broadest strokes, is
familiar enough to cinema audiences. (It's like how in Intolerance
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
L'Intrus opens to a shot of the Franco-Swiss border as a border guard performs a customs check and inspection of a random vehicle with the aid of a contraband-sniffing dog. The seemingly mundane image of frontier, wilderness, and deception provides a curiously appropriate introduction into the Claire Denis' impenetrably fractured, enigmatically allusive, otherworldy, and indelible metaphysical exposition into the mind of an emotionally severe, morally bankrupt, and profoundly isolated heart transplant patient named Louis (Michel Subor). Idiosyncratically unfolding in elliptical, often reverse chronology (with respect to the heart surgery) through the lugubriously fluid intertwining of Louis' alienated existence and deeply tormented subconscious, the film is a fragmented and maddeningly opaque daydream (or perhaps more appropriately, a haunted nightmare) of the price exacted by his disreputable past, estranged relationships, hedonism, and instinctual quest for survival: his inability to reconcile with his only son and his family; his sexually motivated, yet emotionally distant relationship with a materialistic pharmacist; his dubious, transcontinental past (a suppressed history that may have included murder). Perpetually followed by a beautiful, enigmatic sentinel (Katia Golubeva) - or conscience - who seems to have been instrumental in obtaining his new heart, what emerges is an indelible, elegiac, and poetically abstract dreamscape through the wondrous, alien terrain of unreconciled (and irreconcilable) personal history, unrequited longing, and haunted memory.
Transcribed notes from the Q&A with Claire Denis:
• Denis initially envisioned L'Intrus to be three distinct parts: northern hemisphere, limbo, and southern hemisphere. She then found out that Jean-Luc Godard had conceived of a three part structure to Notre Musique (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) at Cannes and consequently, collapsed the three parts into one fluid, hyperextended dream sequence to avoid incidental comparison (or implications of creative appropriation). She envisioned the southern hemisphere to be a kind of parallel (or existential) universe of the northern hemisphere, and therefore, images in the two hemispheres become mirrored converses of each other and together create a closed cyclicality to the film.
• Denis proposes that the only two instances of "real" people in the film are Louis and his estranged son (Grégoire Colin) (and by extension, his son's family). The other characters are manifestations of Louis' imagination, but like all mental constructions, are not purely fictional but rather, based on varying levels of an underlying reality: a "real" person whom Louis has encountered or interacted with sometime during his life.
• Denis describes the film as an adoption rather than an adaptation of Jean-Luc Nancy's novel L'Intrus which, in turn, was inspired by Nancy's own experience after undergoing a heart transplant operation. Denis was equally haunted and fascinated by the idea of a foreign body's "intrusion" into another body, and how that organ(ism) is rejected by its "new" body even as it needs it for survival and viability (Note: This metaphor can also be applied to the image of illegal immigrants crossing the border: a broader social commentary on the pervasive mistreatment (and marginalization) of migrant workers and immigrants in "civilized" countries). Also, intrinsic in this idea of transplantation and rejection is the paradoxical coexistence of life and death that a heart transplant patient's post-surgery life represents (Note: I had also thought that perhaps this coexistence extended to the merging and coalescing of life experiences as well within Louis' subconscious, who begins to daydream seemingly abstract, fragments of personal histories that are not always his own. This may also be an extension of the earlier note on the "variable" degrees of reality, although Denis doesn't mention this idea of "collective" memory/dream).
The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]
Claire Denis's tactile tone poems are premised on the primacy of sensory experience. Beau Travail (1999), her ecstatic Billy Budd distillation, pushed her pictographic style in the direction of a new language, a nonverbal mode that she continued to toy with in films as disparate as the vampire gorefest Trouble Every Day and the hookup reverie Friday Night. Allergic to the dictates of linear storytelling, her movies have grown increasingly convulsive in their ellipses and associations—more than any other narrative filmmaker working, Denis chases the rapture of rupture. Her latest feature, The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough—her most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling.
It's clear enough that The Intruder is a dying man's long goodbye; whether it's a final accounting of a guilty conscience, a premonition of the hereafter, or a little of both is harder to say. There's a fair chance at least half the movie takes place in the protagonist's head. But Denis declines to distinguish between planes of reality: Fluidly merging an interior and an exterior journey, the film establishes a dreamy parity between memory and anticipation, fact and hallucination. Denis claims as inspiration French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'Intrus," an account of his heart transplant that ponders the existential implications of this corporeal intrusion. Denis, more intuitive than analytical, applies the text's pungent sense of internal foreignness—along with its push-pull of encroachment and rejection—not just to the human body but also to the natural world, border crossings, post-colonial dynamics, fathers and sons.
For what is essentially an adaptation of a metaphor, The Intruder is almost shockingly concrete. Its intractable physicality owes much to Michel Subor, a man's-man presence in the lead role, and the imposing landscapes in which he's often framed. A weathered re- cluse, Subor's Louis lives with his beloved huskies in a mountain cabin near the Franco- Swiss border. Peripheral characters are glimpsed: an estranged son (Grégoire Colin), a dog breeder (Béatrice Dalle), a pharmacist fuck buddy (Bambou). At one point, Louis arranges for a heart transplant, negotiating with a black-market trader (Katia Golubeva), who later assumes the role of his stalking conscience–cum–angel of death.
Nancy terms his transplant a "metaphysical adventure"—and the phrase perfectly describes Denis's film as well. With a new ticker, Louis escapes to the other side of the world, in search of a new life—or a place to die. The Intruderimagines the post-transplant condition as a simultaneous rebirth and afterlife. As the languorous last rites for a man slowly expiring (or already dead), The Intruder at times suggests Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man; echoing Neil Young's ominous score, Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples fashions a hypnotic guitar loop on the soundtrack, an invitation to submit to the film's churning eddies.
Louis has a shady past, lots of money, and blood on his hands. Stopping off in Geneva and Pusan, he ends up in Tahiti, looking for a son he says he once fathered; in a discordantly light and funny sequence, the indulgent islanders hold an audition for suitable candidates. There's a coldness—one might say heartlessness—to Louis's quest, reducible as it is to a series of monetary transactions. He buys a new vital organ, a new ship, and even a new son (though he can't quite shake off the old one).
Intrusion is the theme—as well as the organizing principle—of this subliminally violent film. The identity of the intruder and the nature of the incursion are continually shifting. The title most obviously refers to Louis's grafted organ, a stranger within, but also to the dreams that come with it—hauntings that invade his consciousness so completely that we and he can no longer tell the difference. The second half's hemispheric inversion positions Louis himself as the intruder. In the most astonishing of the formal intrusions, Denis splices in Subor-in- Tahiti from four decades ago, using clips from Le Reflux, Paul Gégauff's unfinished adaptation of Stevenson's The Ebb Tide.
Cinematographer Agnés Godard ensures that almost every image leaves a retinal imprint, even more so the less explicable ones: a heart palpitating in the snow, a sunbathing Louis spooning with his dogs, an infant in a sling beaming up at his father, rainbow streamers billowing off a newly christened ship, two men in knee-deep water hoisting a mattress ashore, a cloth-covered coffin on a forklift. In a shot that lasts nearly two minutes (and feels longer), we see the immense ocean from a bobbing ship deck. The finale, as orgasmic as Beau Travail's Eurodisco exclamation, is a delirious blur of motion, Dalle and her huskies sledding into the snowy wilds. This mysterious object may be Denis's most gorgeous film (which is saying something), but more than that, it's a fearless filmmaker's boldest experiment yet, a direct line from her unconscious to yours.
Interview: Claire Denis - Film Comment Gavin Smith interview from Film Comment, January/February 2006
Just as Claire Denis has staked out a position on the fringes of cinema, so her heroes and heroines are outsiders and outcasts, consigned to displacement, marginalization, and exile, be it literal or figurative. This is a cinema of radical estrangement and obliquity, encompassing extremes of lyrical impressionism in Friday Night (01) and stark brutality in Trouble Every Day (01). From Chocolat (88) to I Can't Sleep (94) to Beau travail (99) and beyond, Denis has steered storytelling into increasingly more abstract, dreamlike, and elliptical realms. Hers has been a sustained—and, from this viewer's perspective, extremely rewarding—effort to explore the tensions between the tenuous interior states of her characters and the sensual external world that encloses and often overwhelms them.
With its cryptic gaps, unpredictable shifts, and daring conjunction of minimal exposition and maximal audiovisual impact, Denis’s latest and most geographically far-flung film, The Intruder (L’Intrus), feels like the culmination of her intuitive aesthetic enterprise. All of her familiar preoccupations are present: the residues of post-colonialism, the imperatives of carnality and the yearning for sensual release, the pervasive sense of temporal suspension. The film’s ostensible narrative is simple enough: a man with a failing heart abandons his reclusive life and estranged son in rural France and arranges for a black-market transplant in Korea; after the operation he travels to Tahiti, attempting to locate another abandoned son and reinvent his life of solitude—until his actions catch up with him, fulfilling the cautionary message contained in the first line in this film of few words: “Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows hidden in your heart.” It goes without saying that the story is not the main event. The Intruder is far and away Denis’s most enigmatic film, an oneiric narrative filled with baffling, seemingly metaphoric incidents and non sequiturs—visions, encounters, and apparitions that stubbornly refuse to add up, but can only be understood, finally, as the projections of the self-mythologizing protagonist’s own psyche.
The Intruder’s impassive, self-contained main character is played by 70-year-old Michel Subor, rescued from near-obscurity by Denis for his small but indelible role as a Foreign Legion commandant in Beau travail. With his massive, weathered frame and casual, near-reptilian sensuality, Subor is like a Lucian Freud portrait come to life—indeed his commanding yet inscrutable presence is the film’s virtual raison d’être. Denis counters the eroticized topography of Subor’s physique with a poetic progression through a series of similarly eroticized landscapes: the impossibly lush yet brooding forests and hills of the French-Swiss border, the bustling modernity of Pusan in South Korea, the dazzling and humbling ocean expanses and tropical jungles of Tahiti and French Polynesia. The contrast between these dramatically opposed landscapes is simply breathtaking.
Alternately mystifying and deeply moving—and unbelievably vivid from the first frame to the last—The Intruder is cinema at its most wondrously exhilarating.
In your 30s you were an assistant director. What were you doing before that? You were 20 in May 68—what were you up to?
I was already married to a photographer. He worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in England. I met him when I was 15. He asked me to model for him, and finally we got married. He gave me a Leica and I worked as his assistant. It was a strange situation: he was my husband and he was teaching me things. It was no fun to have a private life together and to also be his apprentice. I was on the side, on my own, doing my own things, meandering, but it was leading me to cinema indirectly. He was very much a cinephile. It was great for me, really. I had not been to the movies very much when I was a kid. I decided to try to enter film school and was selected in 1971.
How many years were you there?
A couple. IDHEC almost closed. After ’68, the school had been taken over by the students. The school’s director was a French filmmaker, Louis Daquin. He was great, maybe not perfect in terms of tuition and organization, but he had a great spirit. He was a member of the Communist party and his films were very political, about things like the coal miners in the north of France. He started making films rather young, but he was well known, well respected, and very militant. And he was sort of blacklisted. He couldn’t find money to make films. He brought in people like [cinematographers] Henri Alekan and Sacha Vierny. Peter Brook would teach us about directing actors. It was very alive.
A few years ago I spotted your name in the credits of Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie. Was that your first job?
First job on the payroll. I had worked as an extra on Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer. You can see me walking by the Seine in a night scene. One of my teachers was Pierre Lhomme. He was the DP and he recruited students to be extras. One day, I don’t know why, someone told Dusan Makavejev that I could speak a little English. He did not want to speak French and he wanted a go-between for him and the crew, a sort of second assistant. He told production that he didn’t want a professional assistant, he wanted someone who knew nothing about the set. I met him and he really liked my total inexperience. I was his assistant on the film but the production also hired a real first assistant, a tough guy who made all the call sheets and stuff, but who had to hide from Dusan.
It must have been a very unconventional production…
After two years in school working with Peter Brook and Louis Daquin, it seemed normal to me, believe it or not. All these dramatic episodes seem completely normal to me. Pierre Lhomme, who was the DP again and who hated Dusan, told me, “This isn’t how things are supposed to go, this is crazy.” I felt fine. Dusan was a little bit afraid of the Otto Mühl community. They refused to stay in a hotel, so they lived on the set, which was built in a garage. Dusan was tempted to sleep there and have a meal with them, but he was afraid, so he had me try it. It was terrifying.
Their performance in the movie is unbelievable.
But it wasn’t only in the film. They staged everything. And because I was their only audience, they did terrible things. They wanted me to shave my head, drink my blood, eat my shit, things like that. But, in a way, I was not afraid. Maybe because I was smoking pot. I was Dusan’s assistant so I had to be there and I took it seriously. Otto Mühl didn’t impress me at all. Some of the cast and crew were impressed. For me it was a great experience. What I liked was the way Dusan put people together who would probably not meet in normal life. It was like a chemical reaction. And he experienced it with great delight. That kind of fear and delight was an interesting way of making films. I never thought we were making an experimental film.
The Seventies was a time for experiences like that, I thought it was completely normal. What seemed strange to me was that people were still making films like nothing had changed. Sixty-eight was such a big change in France, like an electroshock, but it didn’t immediately affect filmmaking. The directors of the Nouvelle Vague were still young. Of course Godard made that move into militant filmmaking, but he had completely disappeared. The others were just making films. No—I’m being unfair to Jacques Rivette. When I was working with Dusan, I told someone that the only person I wanted to work with was Jacques Rivette. A week later, thanks to Louis Daquin, I was taken to the set of Out One. The DP, Pierre-William Glenn, was teaching at IDHEC. When I became a professional assistant, it didn’t seem so real to me, having worked with Jacques, Dusan-and Fernand Deligny, who I assisted on Ce Gamin là (75) a film about a guy who teaches autistic kids. (Deligny was a sort of French Bruno Bettelheim but with different ideas about how to raise children. He made a few films, he is famous in France. Truffaut secretly gave him a little money because he needed his advice for The Wild Child.)
I didn’t see filmmaking as leading me to a professional life-it became a profession for me because I could pay my rent. But it was always in my mind that if I was going to direct a film, it would not be experimental but… Making a film had to be, not a personal experience, but an experience for the crew and the actors, something we would go through together.
As a director, do you see yourself as kind of a misfit?
I fit in my idea of cinema, sometimes there are connections. I know some people like me, and they help me to produce my films or distribute them, but I never ask them what they think about me. But me, I feel unfit. I don’t like to think I am violent and sometimes bad-tempered. I hate my day when I cannot share it with the crew and the actors, and I hate a situation where I am the only one to believe in a scene. I have to convince everyone. When I cannot, I feel very bad.
Are you conscious of making films about outsiders?
But when people ask me why are they about outsiders, I cannot answer the question because it seems like a political attitude. I told you when I was working with Makavejev, I was always ready to be inside, because I never felt inside. Makavejev told me to sleep with Otto Mühl and I wasn’t afraid because I was unreachable, not because I am a pretentious person but because I have a dreamy distance with reality, which is not a really good thing.
I think it’s very good for films.
But for life it is not.
Maybe not. I have always felt that your films were very difficult for me, maybe because I tend to be rational despite being drawn to the poetic or imaginative work. I look at a film and try to understand its mathematics. But that doesn’t work with your film.
As an audience, I do not ask any questions of the film. The film can lead me anywhere. I can go and see any film, a good or a bad one. In Saraband, when the young girl speaks for the first time about her father and there is this flash image of the father grabbing her. It’s a vision, probably not the vision of the girl, but it blew me away. I say this is the greatest thing I have seen this year. A real vision, a vision of violence, but something that doesn’t tell the exact truth, because it’s kind of hard to speak about the relations you have with your father. It feels like a kind of hidden consciousness. I am not able to do that. But I understand logic. I have been educated to be logical, so I know what logic is.
But you don’t choose it?
No, but I don’t reject it as something I don’t like. I’m the opposite: if I have a discussion with someone, I would not be very tolerant with someone who has no logic.
But when you watch a film?
I ask for nothing.
Do you feel torn between the need to tell a story and the desire to go for something more abstract? It seems anything you can do on a visual level to make the film abstract like a painting, you do.
But I do it in a very honest gesture. I think when the location is right for the story in a very logical way, it’s easy to film. If the location is beautiful but wrong, it doesn’t work. It is very painful to choose a location because it seems good-looking during pre-production then to realize it’s only good-looking. It is completely unfair to the story. Djibouti is very beautiful, but I would have never used Djibouti if it were not a territory chosen by the real Foreign Legion. It is very hot, very dry, and very spiritual place to train their guys. And I told the crew that the beauty is not the purpose for the film. You really have to forget this beauty. The work is elsewhere. When I shoot or choose a frame with Agnès, it’s never aesthetic, it’s always logical.
There is a very unusual shot in Beau travail, which must have been done with a very long lens, where you have the soldiers digging in the foreground and in the middle distance is the sea and then on the horizon there is sky and it’s all one plane. It’s like a Rothko painting.
The sound of the digging is mute because the wind blows it away. But it’s not a long lens. It’s a 50mm, but the heat and the dust makes a lot of smoke. The cliff and sea are in the distance, but with heat waves that kill the perspective.
That’s an example of what I meant about abstraction overwhelming narrative.
Well, I have to tell you, I could have made that shot last 30 minutes. For me it is the most comical shot in the movie. You see that landscape, those stones that are lava from the volcano. It’s 50 degrees [Celsius] and those 15 guys are digging solid rock. I did the film before 9/11, so at that moment I thought the Foreign Legion was of no use anymore. For me it was like Beckett. No, really. It had absolutely no aesthetic purpose. Of course when I got to the editing room, only then did I realize all the variations of blue and the mist, the waves, the heat waves, and the dust. It was staged almost.
Is abstraction in your films a device for getting us inside somebody’s head? I’m thinking of the traffic jam and driving scenes in Friday Night—it all becomes a kind of a blur and it’s there to keep us inside [Laure’s] mind.
It’s like a warning signal for her: maybe this guy is wrong for me.
And perhaps from the moment she falls asleep in the car, nothing we see really takes place. It’s all a fantasy or a dream.
Maybe, yes.
He gets of the car, he walks away, she drives around for a while, then she sees him in a café. It’s unbelievable except in terms of dream logic.
I would say there is something, for someone who experienced the strike of ’95- Emmanuèle was inspired by those long strikes-a very strange thing happened. People meeting, falling in love, changing life. So, yes, it is the language of dream. And yet a moment like a strike creates a suspended moment. The reality suddenly changes. There was a subway strike 10 days ago in Paris. It was the end of winter and was suddenly very warm. Paris changed. People were not going to work, they were in cafés. It was something completely non-aggressive. People were smiling. But it only existed because of the strike, no subway, no buses. I was walking home and I felt something different, like something could happen. Emmanuèle was trying to convey that feeling. I play my part in it. I accentuate it even.
It’s interesting that you bring up suspension because that’s a consistent quality in your films—certainly from Beau travail on. This feeling of being outside time. Where that comes from and is it something you’re conscious of?
I am conscious of it in my real life also. For me a good day is when I dictate time and a bad day is when time dictates me. Days when I have to do something according to time are not very creative and generate a lot of anxiety. But when I can check the time—oh, I still have one hour to do this—it’s always perfect. I think I kind of give that to the characters in the films. They want be free of order. Logic is like a watch. It doesn’t work so much with me. I try to free characters from that. Like the young man in Nénette et Boni works, but the dead of night belongs to him, and when Nénette intrudes on his life, the time becomes different. Because she is pregnant, she has her own time. It completely interrupts his dreamtime.
Why do you begin The Intruder with the main character’s son? Actually, not even his son, but the son’s wife?
[Originally] the first scene in the script was like a monologue of a son who was unemployed, as if he was writing to his father, complaining about his lack of love and his selfishness and pleading with him to be a father. It also explained a little bit about his father’s strange past. We had no time to shoot that scene because Grégoire had to accept another a film and was never able to come back. So it was supposed to begin with the son.
And then shift very radically to be being about the father.
And then the forest. Instead I put in the scene at the border with his wife. And in the original script, it did not end with Beatrice, it ended in the forest—with no people and no snow. As if it was the monologue of the son finishing. As if the whole film was contained in that monologue.
It must have been hard coping after your producer, Humbert Balsan, committed suicide before The Intruder was released in France.
It’d never happened to me that a producer, and a friend, hung himself in his office a month and half before a film is released. I never experienced that before, and I wish I hadn’t. The bank stopped everything. I couldn’t get any more prints made. I had to solve everything. It was an ordeal. But it’s more than that: it’s a pessimistic conclusion to all those years when Humbert surfed on the wave of difficulties. He was so brave, he liked adventure. I knew him from the time when he worked with Bresson [as an actor on Lancelot du Lac], and it was always a running joke—when are we going to work together?
The Hither Side of Solutions: Bodies and Landscape in L'intrus R. Emmet Sweeney from Senses of Cinema, July 2005
Joe Bowman, '[on L'Intrus]', Fin de Cinéma, 28 April 2006
Lisa Downing, Re-viewing the Sexual Relation: Levinas and Film', Film-Philosophy, 11.2, August 2007 (pdf format)
Rosalind Galt, “The Obviousness of Cinema,” World Picture 2 (Autumn 2008).
Douglas Morrey, “Introduction: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
Martine Beugnet, 'The Practice of Strangeness: L'Intrus - Claire Denis (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)', Film-Philosophy, Volume 12, Issue No.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
Anja Streiter, 'The Community According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis,' Film-Philosophy, 11.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)
The
Other's Intrusion: Claire Denis' L'intrus
Wim Staat, Thamyris/Intersecting
No. 19 April
2008 (195–208) (pdf format)
Best of the Decade Derby: Video Essay on L’Intrus for the Reverse Shot Claire Denis Symposium Kevin B. Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, August 17, 2009
Senses of Cinema – The Intruder Kath Dooley from Senses of Cinema, June 2012
6 - Reverse Shot #6 Best Film of the Year, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot
L'Intrus | Reverse Shot Phantom Heart, by Genevieve Yue from Reverse Shot
Best of the Decade #7: L'Intrus | Reverse Shot Second Helpings, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot
Bright Lights Film Journal :: The 9th Annual European Union Film ... Robert Keser, May 2006
Errata [Robert Davis] including an interview with the director
Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
“The Intruder” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The Intruder Gerald Peary
Jigsaw
Lounge [Neil Young] (long review)
stylusmagazine.com (Josh Timmermann) review
Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]
DVD
Times Noel Magahey
DVD
Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review
[3/5] also seen
here: The Intruder : DVD
Talk Review of the DVD Video
Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Zachary Jones
Offoffoff
-- The Guide to Alternative New York
Joshua
Tanzer
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Shadows on the Wall [Rich Cline]
intruder - review at videovista Andrew Hook
Epinions
DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Jigsaw
Lounge [Neil Young] capsule review
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[2.5/5] also
seen here: EyeForFilm.co.uk
Boxoffice
Magazine review
Shlomo Schwartzberg
This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with Melika Bass and Lori Felker about The Intruder and Bastards, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, December 4, 2013
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[3.5/4]
BBCi
- Films Tom Dawson
Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review also seen here: New York Times
VERS MATHILDE
France (84 mi) 2005
Towards Mathilde (Vers Mathilde) | Reviews | Screen
Claire Denis' career as director has seen her bounce back and forth between challenging but well-crafted feature films (Beau Travail, Vendredi Soir) and other, less accessible stories that seem wilfully abstruse (Trouble EveryDay, L'Intrus).
Vers Mathilde suggests that the more experimental, conceptual sideof the director's character may eventually find its true metier in the documentary format. Though it is unlikely to get anything but the mostultra-niche arthouse distribution - in addition to the TV and cable airing already guaranteed by backer Arte - this portrait of French dancer and choreographer Mathilde Monnier is an intelligent enquiry into the dynamics of dance, and the way that a contemporary dance piece evolves from conception to realisation.
But it's also - and this is easily the most interesting thing about the film - a dialogue between two artforms, cinema and dance, and between two women who like to push back the boundaries of their chosen disciplines.
Monnier is the director ofthe Centre Choreographique National de Montpelier, France's leading dance training and research centre. Denis filmed Monnier and her troupe at their Montepelier base during rehearsals for what eventually turn into a series of distinct dance pieces.
An ultra-light crew (consisting of Denis, her camera operator and her brother, Brice Leboucq, who was in charge of the sound) allowed the director to capture the nuances of the dancers' movements or what Monnier refers to as "marks in space".
Purist that she is, Denis refused to shoot on DV, beginning on Super 8 and then - when Arte boarded theproject - switching to an Aaton 16mm camera. Her use of two cinematographers was, apparently, determined by the economics of the exercise, which was filmed in gaps between other projects; but both Denis regular Agnes Godard and newbie Helene Louvart adopt an agile, probing style that interacts with the dancer, sometimes focussing on flailing limbs, sometimes stepping back to chart the interrelations of the troupe members in the large rehearsal space.
The audible whirring of the camera motor is not so much a distraction as a reminder of the filmic artifice: in coming between the audience and the subject, it helps to divide out attention equally between the choreographer whose work we are watching, and the director-choreographer behind the lens.
The rehearsal sequences are interspersed with passages of Monnier talking and theorising her creations. Not always accessible to the layman, these post-modern discourses are saved from pretension by Monnier's obvious devotion to her art, and the way she feels her way towards what she wants to say. But far more effective are the scenes in which Monnier dances, rather than speaks, especially a long, uncut sequence towards the end when she writhes and jerks like a possessed thing. It is the one point where the ascetic, deliberately unadorned style of this rather hard, unforgiving documentary gives way to something like passion.
Vers Mathilde Moving Through Space, by Sarah Silver from Reverse Shot
So much of Vers Mathilde, Claire Denis’s exploration of the work of Modern dance choreographer Mathilde Monnier, can be appreciated by considering what is not there, what was left out. There is no introductory prologue, no “Hello my name is…” exposition or text appearing on screen to tell us a brief history of the person whose voice will dominate the film, a woman we can only assume to be Mathilde. There is certainly no cutaway to a photo of Mathilde as a young girl in pink tights and princess crown with voice over explaining how she “always knew she wanted to be a dancer.”
Instead, the film begins with a female voice waxing poetic on the notion of movement as her disembodied arm cuts through the air. “The movement leaves a mark,” the voice says, and during the course of the film we are given ample opportunity to observe the precise, complex hieroglyphs carved into space by Monnier and her ilk, a diverse group of dancers assembled for her 2004 piece, Déroutes, all of whom move very much like her. Monnier continues explaining her philosophy of dance: “Something clear isn’t always interesting,” comes in the middle of a string of vague references to her methodology. We get the feeling she is grappling with Denis’s desire to document her creative process on film, and in her reticence is something akin to the sentiment often credited to Frank Zappa: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
The interpretation of one art form through another does require a certain amount of translation, and if ever a director was suited to translate Monnier’s aesthetic to film, it’s Denis (whose often abstruse filmmaking proves her unwavering belief that “Something clear isn’t always interesting”). Denis is so attuned to Monnier’s sensibilities that one can’t help but notice that, by observing this avant-garde female artist on the cusp of fifty, Denis, an avant-garde female artist on the cusp of sixty, is simultaneously observing herself. After all, Denis’s is a kinetic cinema, with mise-en-scène and editing invariably evoking their own, distinct rhythms. In fact, her films are almost more choreographed than directed, so frequently is emphasis placed on movement over dialogue. If the studied, repeated gesture of Protée (Isaach De Bankolé) strutting across the porch and slinging his white towel over his left shoulder in Chocolat is too subtle a ritual, consider the series of balletic field drills that take up the vast majority of screen time in Beau travail. By juxtaposing the nightlife of the Foreign Legion soldiers (spent in a dance club, grooving with North African girls) with the disciplined routine of their daily regimen, Denis suggests that their exquisite movements, whether at work or at play, sing the body electric with equal gusto.
Vers Mathilde (meaning Towards Mathilde, for, although we can approach our subject, we will never quite reach her) interweaves logistical scenes (obtaining, building, and testing sets and props) with rehearsals and, eventually, a final performance. As is the case in Beau travail, the training process is just as important, and just as beautiful, as the end result; only the context is different. A distinguished female set designer (echoing the artisanal personas of Monnier and Denis) discusses with Monnier the details of color and fabric choices. We observe the test run of a fabric-covered box upon which the dancers move like collapsible push-up toys, rigid when strung together tightly, and limp when the string is loosened. The box has a second function: a slit in its side allows the dancers to emerge from within, a metaphorical birth. All the while we are reminded of Denis’s off-screen process as we hear the camera rolling and see huge grains of film engage in a gavotte all their own. As Monnier’s team moves closer and closer to the finished product, Denis’s team is analyzing the nuts and bolts of their progress. This creates a tension that runs throughout the film as Denis attempts to deconstruct a constructive process.
Monnier is a rugged sophisticate, all ropey arms and sinewy back in the cotton tank top and khaki pedal pushers that are the uniform for the National Choreographic Center of Montpellier, where she serves as director. Her every posture, even while engaging in simple conversation, evokes a lifetime of study and devotion to the art of movement. During several sequences when we watch her in her element, no longer instructing or directing, but just dancing, she moves like a marionette pulled by invisible strands of taffy, jerked one way, then bouncing back the other. Her body contorts, a human Tetris fitting into precut shapes in space visible only to her. She is a pleasure to watch.
There are moments of self-doubt providing the film with minimal conflict when Monnier despairs mid-rehearsal, “It’s lumbering. It’s shitty . . . I’ve shown them a system and they’re imitating me.” Indeed, her disciples, executing the tai chi and yoga-influenced postures that punctuate the wayward marionette routines, are quite obviously under Monnier’s influence. It is difficult to grasp the abstract direction she gives the dancers: “Let it unfurl from inside . . . Find it in your body.” How does one take what a teacher has taught her, internalize it, and make it her own? The process is so mysterious, it feels impossible to discuss, yet once the dancers respond to her direction, a viewer can instinctually feel the difference, even if the change remains intellectually elusive. The sensation, one of being lost in a sea of intangible concepts, yet somehow subconsciously understanding, or at least accepting, is one that arises during all Denis’s films.
While Denis busies herself translating the choreographer’s process to film, Monnier is, herself, adapting “Lenz,” an unfinished short story by Büchner, into the wordless dance piece that will become Déroutes. In a sense, Denis performed a similar feat when she loosely adapted Melville’s Billy Budd into Beau travail, with its mesmerizing coda, a solo dance number that reads as the total physical unleashing of a glorious soul into the ether, as if any division between body and spirit were illusory.
Vers Mathilde also ends with a solo dance and, although we never quite see the dancer’s face (a white wig obscures it), we have come to recognize by now the signature movements of our main subject. As Monnier performs an otherworldly space glide across a white dance floor, she is moving across a film projection of the very dance she is performing. The effect is disorienting, and there are moments when it’s hard to tell if she is spinning or sitting still. The dance will mean something different to everyone who sees it, but following the film we have just seen, it seems to me to tell the story of confusion alternating with elation, and frustration interspersed with satisfaction; in other words, the gamut of emotions that one encounters when undertaking a creative endeavor.
In The Realm of Work and Play: Claire Denis's Vers Mathilde | The ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, January 16, 2007
The Cinema of Claire Denis Review: Vers Mathilde ... - Next Projection Matthew Blevins
Claire Denis' Vers Mathilde | The Dance Current Kathleen Smith
Claire Denis – Vers Mathilde @wshed | - The 24th Frame
Towards Mathilde - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
Vers
Mathilde [Claire Denis, 2005] - YouTube (
35 SHOTS OF RUM (35 Rhums) A 95
We
could stay like this forever. —Joséphine
(Mati Diop)
An affectionate and affirming work. Most great works of literature and cinema
seem to be tragedies that continually explore a dark edge of the human
soul. What’s so unique about this film
is the life affirming warmth expressed from the outset and the positive feeling
of optimism, where love is explored with an amazing tenderness and poetic
grace. The daughter of a civil servant,
Denis spent much of her childhood in different African countries before
returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev,
Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her
first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature, she brings
an unconventional maturity into her works.
She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who moves
between an experimental, avant garde style with slight to nonexisting
narratives to more conventional narratives fairly easily, usually focusing on
the personal lives of marginalized working class characters whose very
ordinariness separates them from mainstream movie viewing. This film is a wonderful expository essay on
the nature of living, shown from the outset as a series of passing trains,
sometimes meeting, sometimes simply traveling in opposite directions, but
always running on the same track. In
what appears to be an Ozu homage of life in transition, the train montage 35 Rhums.Tindersticks. Train Montage. YouTube
(3:43) in the opening set to the music by Tendersticks is a clear sign of
moving from one place to another, where nothing remains static, where lives are
in constant motion. Alex Descas is
Lionel (as in the model trains), a train conductor whose vantage point from the
lead car we follow from time to time, a man of few words, but always serious
and direct, even as he wordlessly steers his train. He and his fellow workers meet to celebrate
the retirement of one of Lionel’s old friends, Réne (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a man who plainly feels
uncomfortable about his impending future and the loss of his working
friendships. The easygoing nature of
this mostly black working class environment is conveyed in the sharing of
drinks, where it’s customary at retirements to swig down shots of rum.
Without revealing any background story, Lionel is a widower living in close quarters with his beautiful daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), a student who also works nights in a record store, where one of their special moments together is her dad picking her up on his motorbike after work, or enjoying a home cooked meal together where their intimacy is beautifully expressed in their eyes as well as their accustomed routines. Added to this triangle are two neighbors, Noé (Grégoire Colin), who openly shows his affection for Joséphine, and Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), equally enthralled with her father, an old flame of Lionel’s who still carries a torch while assuming the surrogate role of step-mother. Without ever actually telling the story, instead it unravels in lyrical images detailing the rhythms of life, beautifully shot by Agnès Godard who captures gestures, facial expressions, body language, or silent actions showing the distances between people, but rarely in speech. The film evolves through various vignettes beautifully edited together and in the near perfect music selections by Tindersticks, which includes Basehead’s “Home” (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/basehead) (4:30) which plays in the music store, or Sophia George’s “Can’t Live Without You” Sophia George- Can't live without you- 198X - YouTube (4:01), a reggae song that plays in the car on the way to a concert. But the scene of the film is after their car breaks down in the rain and they ask the proprietor of a small restaurant and bar to stay open after closing hours, where we hear the smooth musical refrains from Ralph Thamar’s “Siboney” and the Commodores “Nightshift” 35 Shots of Rum - Dance Scene.avi YouTube (5:56), where a nice soulful groove takes a wrong turn somewhere, prompted by the music and the open expression of intimacy, where jealousy and body language reveal it all, leaving feelings abandoned and hurt, turning the night sour. The subtleties of this scene typify the fragility of relationships, which seem so solid at one moment, only to discover the moment lasts just an instant.
Despite the various stops along the way, this is really a different kind of love story and is largely a father and daughter journey, as they take a camper to Germany to visit Joséphine’s aunt, who is none other than Ingrid Caven, a scene stealer from Fassbinder films of old, like MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975), where they had to tag on three different endings to that film, but she’s in fine form here as well, allowed to wallow in her eccentricities in an extended scene much like Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BLVD. (1950). But this visit also reveals some of the most tender images in the film as well, the two of them visiting her mother’s grave, sleeping under the stars overlooking the sea, observing a strange procession of children carrying lanterns at night, all understated expressions of various stages of life poetically rendered with the most detached reverence. But the ultimate gift a loving father can give his daughter is setting her free, allowing her to move on with her life, which includes a moment unlike any other in their lifetimes, which is shown with exquisite grace and an economy of means, as the film just briefly touches on what the future holds. Denis really gets inside the lives of her characters and is one of the more distinctive filmmakers on the planet. She is a constant reminder that cinema is still an art form, a contemplative study of humanity observing the way we treat one another through rhythm and texture, music, image, and tone. The film couldn’t be more effortless, yet it paints a contemporary face on the modern world by simply focusing on the lives of a few people living in it, all done with an undeniable love and lyrical charm.
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Claire Denis’s (Beau travail) portrait of the
affectionate relationship between a father and daughter living in an apartment
in the
In 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums), one character informs another that the university is closing the anthropology department. Because it doesn’t see the value in it. Director Denis thinks differently, and her film serves as a testament to value of studying the everyday lives of a peoples: in this case, the mostly black working-class in a Paris suburb. While some drama seeps into the film—jealous lovers, even a suicide—for the most part, nothing happens: cab drivers gripe, a man broods over his retirement, a family cooks dinner, students debate third-world debt, friends go out for beers, a man shops for a CD, another goes for a run, and everybody rides the trains. Every scene is acted with warmth and humanity, filmed coolly yet sympathetically by Denis; it adds up to a seemingly authentic portrait of the immigrant and children-of-immigrants experience in contemporary France that puts to shame Cederic Klapisch’s recent Paris, with its melodramatic, self-pitying and predominantly white bourgeoisie.
Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [5/6]
French director Claire Denis’s
marvellous latest feature is a portrait of the close relationship between
widowed Parisian train driver Lionel (Alex Descas)
and his affectionate student daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop).
Critics have welcomed it as both her warmest movie and, with its quiet
observation of small ritual, her most affirmative and Ozu-esque. But though
it’s true that ‘35 Shots’ demonstrates an extraordinary reflective ease and
contains possibly more hugs and smiles than Denis’s entire oeuvre to date, that
is not to say it is a film free of tribulations, tensions and taboos.
The story is simple, a collection of scenes from the life of this small family
who live in a flat in the Rue de la Guadeloupe, a little nest where Lionel
escapes from the loneliness of his cab and the memory of his losses, and from
which Joséphine, inhibited from fullly developing her relationships with her
neighbours, surrogate ‘mother’ Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and ‘suitor’ Noé
(Grégoire Colin), must soon fly.
From this, Denis magically evokes a liberal meditation on family, harmony,
loyalty and belonging and their corollaries – loss, transgression, loneliness
and separation – and achieves a sweet unity, not least through a beautifully
discreet use of symbols, motifs and metaphors. Thus as cinematographer Agnès
Godard’s artful visual correspondences (an RER train and a block of flats
shot at night) deepen an understanding of social context, the film’s various
vehicles – Lionel’s train thundering into north Paris, his motorbike, the
bicycle blocking the hallway – suggest not only specifics of occupation or
class, but also journeys of different speeds. The film’s extraordinary economy
is typified by a lovely, spontaneous café scene where the principles dance to
the Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’, a mini-ballet touchingly evocative of their
separate feelings, relationships and destinies.
Mike D’Angelo Wednesday the 10th at Toronto
[Claire Denis movies tend to be glancing, allusive affairs, and there are moments here -- most notably the titular ritual and the nature of the celebration taking place in the final scene -- that strike me as more willfully obscure than productively ambiguous. All in all, however, 35 Shots of Rum is easily the most direct and transparent film she's made in ages, Victor's cranky confusion notwithstanding. (Apparently Theo didn't get it either.) It must be the way Denis declines to fully define certain key relationships, asking us to infer their history, that's causing the interpretive logjam, because to me the film's theme seemed almost shockingly blunt, albeit kaleidoscopically so: It's about the necessity, and the painful difficulty, of achieving closure and moving on. The grown daughter still living with her dad; the ex-girlfriend and surrogate mom who clearly can't accept that her presence in their lives is now vestigial; the co-worker depressed about what I gather was forced retirement; the ex-lover -- again, you have to infer a lot of this -- who also still lives in the same building and carries the world's most blatantly unextinguished torch (think about how unnatural this whole situation is given the old saw about how nobody in big cities knows their neighbors anymore); the goddamn cat's fate serving as almost comically callous counterpoint (and inspiring its owner's sudden decision, which in turn implicitly inspires the daughter's)...seriously, how many more variations do people require? It's a lyrical mood piece in a very minor key, exemplified by a moment so real and touching and true it nearly wrecked me: ex-couple dancing in a bar after being stranded during a rainstorm; he impulsively kisses her; she briefly responds but then pulls away; he starts to walk off, crestfallen; and she grabs him by the hand and pulls him over to sit beside her -- not intending to renew their passion, or even really to comfort him, but simply because she still wants him near her. It's a movie about irresolution, of knowing what you need to do but lacking the strength to actually do it. And as I write this, I'm starting to think I may have underrated it.]
The Onion A.V. Club review [A] Scott Tobias
French director Claire Denis is one of the most magical filmmakers in the world, a moody, intuitive artist whose best movies—Beau Travail and Friday Night among them—have a pure, elliptical quality that transcends the page, as if she’s flying without a screenplay. Denis’ last feature, The Intruder, pushed that elliptical style into out-and-out incoherence, but she finds her footing beautifully with 35 Shots Of Rum, a film grounded a bit more in nuts-and-bolts character work than usual. It’s a story still told in pieces, without the narrative spoon-feeding that generally carries an audience through a movie. But once all those pieces fall into place, the film evolves into a simple, intimate, acutely emotional portrait of a family reaching a painful crossroads.
Taking a page from Yasujiro Ozu, 35 Shots Of Rum concerns the relationship between a middle-aged widower and a lovely, devoted daughter who’s starting to inch past the age where she can enjoy a life of her own. For the father, played with great reserve by Alex Descas, the catalyst comes when a fellow train conductor is forced into retirement, but with nothing to retire to; his friends and his identity are tied entirely to the workplace. Though Descas has the good fortune of having daughter Mati Diop at home to look after him, he resolves that she find her own life and love independent of him. It’s a difficult prospect for them both, because they’re happy together; as with Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara in Ozu’s films, their bond transcends mere familial obligation. But Diop clearly has feelings for their upstairs neighbor, a wayward young traveler played by Denis favorite Grégoire Colin, and the time might be right for moving on.
Though 35 Shots Of Rum is suffused with emotion, Denis avoids the broad strokes of explicit conflict, instead establishing the father-daughter relationship through small kindnesses and the subtle pleasures of their domestic routine. She also conveys the tenderness of the people in orbit, including Descas’ ex-girlfriend (Nicole Dogué), a cab driver coping with her own loneliness and longing. Other Denis films have more overt artistic flourishes—though a bar sequence here, set to a Commodores single, is Denis at her lyrical best—but 35 Shots Of Rum has an enormous depth of feeling, underlined by a gorgeous Tindersticks score that tells the story without words. It pays tribute to Ozu while transcending homage.
Review:
35 Shots of Rum | Claire Denis - Film Comment Dave Kehr, September/October 2009
As many critics have noted, Claire Denis’s work has been drifting
toward a “musical” abstraction for some time now. Kent Jones has compared her
to Ornette Coleman, and Jonathan Rosenbaum to Charlie Parker, though I don’t
find much in her films as deliberately disruptive and dissonant as the work of
those two great jazz innovators. Her films seem more in tune (literally) with
the smooth, seductive pop jazz sensibilities of the group Tindersticks, which
has scored her Nénette and Boni (96), Trouble Every Day (01), and
now 35 Shots of Rum.
But Denis has also made films that draw on dance: Beau Travail
(99) in collaboration with the choreographer Bernardo Montet (and featuring a
bravura dance performance by Leos Carax’s personal Gene Kelly, Denis Lavant),
and the documentary Vers Mathilde, about the choreographer Mathilde
Monnier (05, and so far unreleased in the U.S.). And Friday Night (02)
can be looked at as an extended tango of seduction between two strangers (Valérie
Lemercier and Vincent Lindon) played out in the course of a single Paris night.
35 Shots could also be seen as a film about bodies in
motion, and more particularly, the impossibility of standing still. The film
opens with a lovely, magic-hour montage set to a Tindersticks tune and offering
undulating visions of railroad tracks, coming together and moving apart, as
seen from the point of view of Lionel (Alex Descas, an axiom of Denis’s cinema
since S’en fout la mort in 1990), an engineer for the RER, the rail
system that links Paris to its suburbs. Interspersed with shots of the
crisscrossing rails (a conventional image, perhaps, but one that Denis and her
cinematographer, Agnès Godard, shoot with unusual grace) are close-ups of the
middle-aged Lionel; a co-worker, René (Julieth Mars Toussaint); and a beautiful
young woman, Joséphine (played by Mati Diop, a niece of the late Senegalese
director Djibril Diop Mambety).
Denis and her scenarist (Jean-Pol Fargeau, another regular in the
Denis universe) delay spelling out the relationship between these characters as
long as possible. The scene shifts to a cozy apartment beside the railroad
tracks where Joséphine is beginning to prepare dinner; when Lionel arrives with
a gift for her—a shiny new rice cooker—we’re uncertain whether she’s his wife,
his lover, or his daughter. Eventually, an insert shot showing a photograph of
a young girl with an older woman efficiently informs us that Lionel is a
widower and Joséphine is his child, but the initial ambiguity continues to cast
a spell over the rest of the film, binding Lionel and Joséphine together in a
special, undefined intimacy (like the brother and sister in Nénette and Boni).
But as they sit down to eat, Denis cuts away to two other characters, both
neighbors in the same apartment building: Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), an
open-hearted taxi driver who seems to have romantic designs on Lionel, and Noé
(Grégoire Colin, another member of the Denis stock company), a loner whose
interest in Joséphine is awakened over the course of the movie.
Denis has eliminated most of the expository material that would
tie together the story in a conventional film, but we hardly miss it: the basic
plotline—a dutiful daughter must learn to break away from her loving father,
and find a life of her own—is familiar from countless Ozu films, and we hardly
need to see it spelled out again. Instead, Denis moves her four characters into
a choreographic abstraction of coming together and moving apart (most
beautifully in a long scene set in a café, where the characters take refuge
from a rainstorm when Gabrielle’s taxi breaks down on the way to a concert). As
in a dance, gesture and movement subsume dialogue; we know what the characters
are thinking and feeling through the ways they approach (and avoid) each other.
This technique allows Denis to soften and blur the turning points of the narrative (a suicide, a trip to Germany, a wedding); things happen, but without dramatic punctuation. Moving with a sense of continuous flow rather than bumping through a series of climaxes, 35 Shots becomes a sort of ballet of emotions, executed with weightless grace and poise.
The Rumpus Review Of 35 Shots Of Rum - The Rumpus.net Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy
Possibly the most humanistic character study from director Claire Denis: thoughtful, endearing, and rendered with exemplary tact. There is no absolute way to observe a Claire Denis film. In form and theme, her work possesses an openness uncommon in even the hallowed realm of “art” cinema. With 35 Shots of Rum — Denis’ most straightforward and narratively lucid film since Nenette et Boni — this openness is used to render the complexities of family.
Lionel and Josephine are a French-African father and daughter living together in a working class suburb of Paris. When we first view them, it is through the coy gaze of cinematographer Agnes Godard’s 50mm lens. Lionel (a handsome and greying Alex Descas), having just arrived home from work, steps into the foyer and calls to Josephine (Mati Diop as a beautiful grad student of mixed race). Preparing dinner in the kitchen, Josephine rounds the corner, buries her face in Lionel’s chest, kisses him twice and rests her head on his shoulder. As he sits to remove his shoes, she retrieves his slippers and stands against the facing wall, palms down, curls her mouth slightly and waits. They are beautiful together, a perfect couple and then, just as the two sit down to dinner and the thought solidifies, Josephine speaks: “merci, Papa.”
And it’s here that Denis’ intentions begin to focus. The film, though simple as a narrative, is a study of two people alone comprising an entire family, performing all possible roles with their accompanying dynamics. It’s unknown how long Lionel and Josephine have lived this way, but from the confident manner in which they navigate these roles, the only plausible conclusion is, quite some time — likely, the entirety of Josephine’s life. It’s in this way that, Ms. Denis has reasoned, over time, these people have learned to be both father and daughter, brother and sister, and, as undeniably stated in the opening sequence as thesis, husband and wife.
The ambiguity between them is not slight of hand on Denis’ part, but rather the ambiguity which exists between men and women. Flowing from their first encounter, Lionel and Josephine’s relationship is emphatically posited as that of father and daughter. Yet viewed absent context (as in the opening scene), the familial relation of the two is overwhelmed by the implicit sensuality of a beautiful woman greeting a beautiful man just come home from work. These two love each other absolutely. Living together in this flat as they have for some time, the physical boundaries between them have eroded. Josephine touches her father to communicate her love to him. It is at once unsettling and, in the same moment, completely natural, a thing that happens less as fathers and daughters age. For Ms. Denis’ characters here, it has remained constant.
In much more simple measures, the film is just as curious about the joys and sorrows of work. Set out to study a side of French citizenry little explored in cinema, Denis does her best to root the film in the everyday lives of these people. Lionel is a train operator in the Parisian rail system, his closest friends are French-African train operators, the route he services is filled to standing with people of French-African heritage, and over the film’s opening titles — an extended glide along the rails from the vantage of the operators’ booth — the image winds through neighborhoods most view only on the gray journey from the Charles de Gaulle airport to the City of Lights.
One of Lionel’s closest friends, who has run the rails for the better part of his life, finds himself faced with forced retirement. In a fitting coda, the two men share an exchange that leads to one of the film’s great visual images. Says the friend: “Surrendering … surrendering to this condition is what’s so hard.” Much later, Lionel finally replies: “When I get dark thoughts … I think of my daughter.”
35 Shots of Rum is possibly Denis’ most humanistic character study, thoughtful, endearing, and rendered with exemplary tact, as through it all, there is never any doubt that the two people at the center of this film are a loving and complete family — no more, no less.
The New Republic (Stanley Kauffmann) review
The French director Claire Denis has written, with Jean-Pol Fargeau, a screenplay about Parisians that is different. 35 Shots of Rum concerns a fortyish railway driver, his twentyish student daughter, his ex-girlfriend, and the daughter’s boyfriend, all of whom live in the same apartment house in three apartments. (Father and daughter live together.) The difference is that all these Parisians are black.
Denis began her career in 1988 with Chocolat, which dealt with a French girl and a black man in Cameroon. I haven’t seen all of Denis’s films since then and don’t know how often she has returned to the subject of race, but she does so here, winningly and well, merely by (except for one sequence) paying no attention to it. These people simply are black, living their lives. Even in a sequence with two white women, race is not mentioned. Apparently all these people were originally from the Caribbean, live in a district centered on the Rue de la Guadeloupe, and thrive in their society.
Lionel, widowed a long time ago, and his daughter Josephine love each other and enjoy that love by doing everyday things every day. Their quiet pleasure in each other’s company suffuses the screen. She is a student with a job in a record shop. One of her classes, with a black teacher and all-black students, is charged with racial anger. (Frantz Fanon is inevitably mentioned.) But though the paper being discussed that day is by Josephine, she never utters a word on a related subject outside the class. She, her father, and friends obviously expect their lives to go on like any others.
In a rueful way, this becomes too true--at least for Lionel. The time comes for change. Josephine is to leave, presumably with her boyfriend, who is off to somewhere in Africa. The film assumes a likeness to several Japanese films that are about the particular poignancy in a father whose care and nurture lead, inevitably, to loneliness (even though Lionel has previously asked her to feel free to leave). Woven through the central story is a minatory counterpoint about a colleague of Lionel’s who retired and who finds that the job that filled his life was his life. We don’t see Lionel taking any preparatory steps for himself, but we do see him discovering his colleague’s fate.
Before Josephine leaves, he evidently wants her to be reminded of her mother. They drive to Lübeck in northern Germany and visit her mother’s sister, white, affectionate, very German. Over coffee, race is never mentioned. Father and daughter visit the mother’s grave. Then, back in Paris, comes their own parting.
The story is not exciting, but it is irresistible--because the people are endearing. We keep feeling not only that it is all credible but that we want the company of these two characters, and we wriggle a bit at the thought of their separation.
The title of the film is ungainly but not irrelevant. To drink thirty-five shots of rum in one sitting is a goal that apparently Lionel has set for some reason and has failed to reach. Nineteen is the max so far, done by one of his friends. (When Lionel comes home after one attempt, Jo kisses him and says--matter-of-factly, not reprovingly--"You smell sloshed." It’s simply what Lionel does once in a while.) At the end, when she leaves, he makes it to thirty-five--and apparently holds them. We draw our own conclusions about the relation between that goal, Jo’s leaving, and Lionel’s future.
A cinematic reason for the film’s pleasures is the way it looks. Denis quite clearly envisioned it before she shot a foot of it; and with the aid of her cinematographer, Agnes Godard, she has clothed the picture in mellow tones--nothing bright or cheery to underscore the congenial mood, blues and shadows for the most part, to convince that this good feeling occurs in reality, not a movie. Alex Descas is staunch yet vulnerable as Lionel, Mati Diop is a zephyr as Jo, Nicole Dogué is amiable as the ex-girlfriend, and Grégoire Colin burns appropriately as Jo’s swain. Those who treasure Fassbinder films will be glad to see Ingrid Caven, one of his favorites, as the German aunt.
Along with the post-film glow, however, I’m still wondering about those thirty-five shots.
Ryland Walker Knight, '35 Rhums on The Night Shift', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 March 2009
Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013
Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review
Little White Lies magazine Jason Wood
REVIEW – 35 Shots of Rum (2008) « Ruthless Culture Chris Pearson from Ruthless Culture, July 13, 2009
35 Shots of Rum (2009) Directed by Claire Denis Sam C. Mac from In Review Online
DVD
Times Noel Megahey, also seen
here: DVD
Times - 35 Shots of Rum
35 Shots of Rum Goes Straight to Your Head | Film Reviews | The L ... Nicolas Rapold from L magazine, September 16, 2009
/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » 35 SHOTS OF RUM - The Letting Go Michael Tully, September 18, 2009
Ruminative '35 Shots of Rum' by Claire Denis Features Wordless ... Sam Juliano from Wonders in the Dark, December 10, 2009
REVIEW | Object Desire: Claire Denis's “35 Shots of Rum” - indieWIRE Michael Koresky from indieWIRE, September 16, 2009
The Auteurs Ryland Walker Knight
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ignatius Vishnevetsky
theartsdesk.com [Sheila Johnston]
Slant Magazine review Bill Weber
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from
Berkeley, California
Film Friday: Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum and White Material ... Rob Davis from Paste magazine, November 20, 2009
Cinema Without Borders (Ed Yealu) review
35 Shots of Rum | Reverse Shot The Major and the Minor, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot, also including: Read Adam Nayman's interview with Claire Denis
The Best Films Of The Decade (2000-2009) | #9 Beau Travail/ 35 Shots Of Rum Tom Hall from The Back Room Manifesto at indieWIRE
Dossier Journal » Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum Jeff Lanza from Dossier Journal, September 15, 2009
35 Shots of Rum – A Film Review « No Ordinary Fool Longman Oz, August 4, 2009
35 Shots of Rum Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]
The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Daily Plastic - Festival Report [Robert Davis]
YEAR IN REVIEW: 2009 #4 Film of the Year, by A.A. Dowd from Wild Lines
Screen International [Dan Fainaru]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5] also seen here: Jay's Movie Blog [Jason Seaver]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [4/4]
Twitch (Michael Guillen) review also seen here: The Evening Class
Moving Pictures magazine [Mike D'Angelo]
35 Shots of Rum : The New Yorker Richard Brody
35 Shots of Rum Cliff Doerksen from The Reader
35 Shots of Rum (2008) The Auteurs
35 SHOTS OF RUM at Film Forum in New York City Film Forum
Robert Davis, 'Interview: Claire Denis on 35 Shots of Rum', Daily Plastic, March 10, 2009
Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis Darren Hughes from Senses of Cinema, April 2009
An Interview with Claire Denis | Reverse Shot On the Nightshift, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot, 2009
35
Shots of Rum': Claire Denis steps into the spotlight Sheila Johnston interview from The Telegraph,
The Auteurs [interview
with Daniel Kasman] Kasman interviews Claire Denis from The
Auteurs,
This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia professor Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (and others) about No Fear, No Die and 35 Shots of Rum, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 27, 2013
The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young at
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/6]
Film review: 35 Shots of Rum | Film | The Observer Philip French
The Irish Times (Donald Clarke) review [3/5]
The Daily Telegraph (David Gritten) review [5/5]
35
Shots of Rum, DVD of the week - Telegraph
Philip Horne from The Telegraph,
35
Shots of Rum, Claire Denis, 100 mins, (12A) - Reviews, Films ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent,
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [3.5/4]
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Nashville Movies - 35 Shots of Rum may be all mood, but what a ... Phil Nugent from Nashville Scene, November 11, 2009
SF360:
Soulful "35 Shots of Rum" is gently intoxicating Dennis Harvey from SF360,
San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [2/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
35 Shots of Rum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
claire
denis, 35 shots of rum, 2008. (trailer) - artforum.com / video Trailer from ArtForum on YouTube (
WHITE MATERIAL B 89
At least partially inspired by the heroine in Doris Lessing’s 1950 novel The Grass Is Singing, this is a film with Denis’ imprint all over it, but also one that struggles to emotionally grab hold of the audience, as much of it has the illusionary appearance of a nightmarish bad dream, perhaps a hallucination, as Denis accentuates the lush, dreamy landscape for an interior story of madness in the midst. Set in an unnamed former French colonial African country that is going through extreme political turmoil with rebel African forces mounting attacks forcing the whites out of the country, demanding that what possessions they leave behind, which they contemptuously call “white material,” rightly belongs to them. Shown in a fractured flashback style that makes free association use of time, jumping back and forth between events, and told from the ever more precariously dangerous point of view of a righteously stubborn and seriously delusional white family that runs a coffee plantation and refuses to be scared off their land, despite signs of vicious brutality all around them. Isabelle Huppert, in her pretty pink dresses, runs the coffee plantation, where even after all her black workers escape in mass to safety routinely hires more workers, claiming they only need 5 days to harvest this year’s crop or all will be lost. Her husband, Christopher Lambert, sees the writing on the wall and recommends they heed the French helicopter that urges them to escape while they can, as the French government is pulling out of the country in advance of a bloody civil war, but Huppert scoffs at the idea of returning to France, which she sees as regimented and overly conventional, mediocre even, preferring the open freedom they have here, even as it is disappearing before her eyes.
Because of the altered time structure, the audience is intentionally bewildered by the disorienting sequence of events, never knowing what actually precedes what is shown onscreen, which adds to the confusion that already exists from the escalating violence. While the family may be blind to events around them, the audience witnesses signs of danger everywhere, much like a ghost story, as armed elementary-aged children enter their house at will, but may as well be invisible to Huppert. Similarly, advancing rebel forces are little more than abandoned or orphaned children carrying automatic weapons and oftentimes fueled by unnamed pharmaceutical drugs which they take by the handful. More telling is the relationship Huppert has with her son (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a lazy, sit-on-his-ass, overly indulged grown kid who refuses to offer any help whatsoever to the growing family crisis, yet Huppert refuses to allow anyone to criticize his overt weaknesses. Instead he is humiliated by well-armed kids who leave him stripped naked on his own property, which sends him into a rage of senseless psychotic behavior, crossing the line with some of the domestics, finding himself without a home or a country that wants him, a metaphor for the whites losing their purpose for being there, especially with roaming gangs in the vicinity so willing to slit their throats, as they have nothing, while the whites have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
This is not an easy story to tell as African civil wars turning into a bloodbath are an all too familiar pattern that western audiences are familiar with, leaving behind images of hands cut off and mutilated limbs, not to mention tribal vengeance that is among the most vicious on the planet. But in Denis’s hands, much like the shirtless imagery of young men in BEAU TRAVAIL (1999), she focuses on the shirtless young boys carrying machetes or the young girls with pistols or machine guns in their hands. These haunting images of children really drive this film, as despite Huppert’s presence in nearly every scene, she’s running around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off, while these lost and abandoned children are supposed to be the nation’s future. Both are equally dysfunctional and have little use for the other, understanding nothing at all about each other’s worlds. The languid pace and dreamlike imagery creeps up on the viewer, where by the end it resembles the French plantation sequence in APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX (2001), where an apocalypse is brought upon by governments or people within an existing society that fail to heed the warning signs, as one can imagine the Vietnamese closing in on them very much like the children coming over the hills in this film, where the horror and bloody aftermath resembles the insanity sequence featuring the murder of Kurtz (Brando), where the only way to combat a growing nightmare is to enter the nightmare itself. Here much of the threat of violence is shown with meticulous detail while the actual murders themselves remain shrouded in allegorical offscreen mystery where the viewer only sees the aftermath. In this film, set to the mournful music of the Tendersticks, sounding much like early Pink Floyd creating a pervasive feeling of everpresent doom, they eerily blend into the same nightmare, losing all touch with reality at some point, becoming more abstract and metaphorical, where the funereal reality is lost in a hallucination of senseless and horrific violence.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
After the elliptical Intruder and 35 Shots of Rum, Claire Denis plays it relatively straight with the story of African plantation owner Isabelle Huppert, who clings to her land despite the imminent native revolt. Those who prize Denis' more abstruse efforts might grumble at the movie's relative lucidity, but there's still plenty left unsaid, not least the story's particular time and place. Denis, the daughter of a French civil servant, was raised in several African countries, and she knows the texture of the land, as well as the stubbornness of colonial holdouts. As the movie takes increasingly bloody turns, it verges on allegory, but Denis never loses her grip on the tactile.
Review: White Material Ray Pride from New City
Claire Denis’ splintered, impressionistic style, leaving much to be fathomed by the viewer, sometimes sparks critical ire. David Denby, for one, writing of “White Material” in the New Yorker, grows bilious at the thought of anyone who might find grace there: “Dreadful, in an aimless, intentionally disjointed way that some people have mistaken for art.” Oh dear. “Some people.” The unbelievable uncouth! Returning to her roots in Cameroon, as well as to her first, French Colonial Africa-set feature, “Chocolate” (1988), Denis’ latest rests on the small yet sturdy shoulders of Isabelle Huppert, as a colonial plantation owner who insists on riding out a revolution as she awaits her family’s coffee-bean harvest. Confusion reigns and the camerawork reflects that, less pointed than the critique of masculinity in “Beau Travail,” less pointillist than the haunting yet near-indecipherable “Intruder,” Denis still works with the suggestiveness of sound and image rather than the flat sum of plot and sociology. Huppert’s character thinks of herself as part of the landscape, unmovable, and Denis photographs her as such: a fact, a feature, and not an interloper—arms stretched to the sky, feet on the dusty red earth. Racial tension seethes, revolution arrives. Some people find it hypnotic. With Isaach de Bankole, Christophe Lambert. 106m.
The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Scott Tobias
The chief pleasure of Claire Denis’ work is that it’s incomplete,
at least in the sense that the audience has to be engaged in completing it.
Films like Friday Night, Beau Travail, and 35 Shots Of Rum
unfold in glancing, elliptical strands that need some connecting, but the
experience is uniquely alluring and intuitive, and only feels like work if you
resist it. Denis’ latest, White Material, isn’t one of her best, but her
style is exceptionally well-suited to a story about a stubborn woman trying to
make sense of the chaos that’s slowly consuming her world. Returning Denis to
her childhood roots in colonial
Though just as beautiful as in Denis’ other African adventures, the continent here is a more hostile place, swept up by a civil war that spreads not only violence, but madness to the populace. Set in an unspecified country, the film stars the great Isabelle Huppert as a coffee-grower whose determination to stay through the harvest, in spite of signs of imminent danger to herself and her family, is less courageous than stubborn and foolhardy. Meanwhile, Denis follows a charismatic rebel icon, played by Isaach De Bankolé, whose fate intertwines with Huppert’s.
As usual, Denis assembles the big picture from a series of tiny moments—some involve the striking landscape, others the child-warriors recruited into war, while still more hint at Huppert’s psychosis and countless other ideas and images at play. And characteristically, Huppert doesn’t reveal anything obvious about herself, allowing the audience to guess about her decisions, motives, and fundamental decency. The middle section of White Material could stand to be more purposeful—though Denis likely wants us to feel the character in limbo—and Huppert’s son’s radical transformation in response to personal violence seems too abrupt. But Denis brings it all together for a genuinely shocking finale, unexpected, yet in keeping with the film’s consuming madness.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [4/4] also seen here: Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
At a glance, Claire Denis' White Material is probably one of her most accessible movies. It has an actual plot, and a big star in the lead role, Isabelle Huppert, here looking bright and tough, her freckles and blue eyes glinting and gleaming in the African heat. Even the Highlander himself, Christopher Lambert, is here, as well as cult actor Isaach De Bankolé (Casino Royale, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). But it's also one of Denis' grimmest and most pessimistic films, although that doesn't stop me from wanting to see it again.
Denis was born in
But Maria still clings to a sense of entitlement. It's her land, and she's going to harvest the coffee crop. She has lived there for years, and she knows the locals. All she needs is five days. What could go wrong? Her husband, Andre (Lambert), believes differently and tries to make arrangements to get the family out of the country, meeting with a rebel leader and trying to sell the plantation. Meanwhile, all of Maria's workers leave and she stubbornly goes out to hire more. Things start to get tense, as the rebel army demands payment to use the road to and from town, and as subtle hints are sent, such as the head of a dead cow appearing in a basket of picked coffee beans.
Things grow worse with Maria's grown son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a pathetic layabout who spends most of his days in bed. He won't even help his mother with her last-minute harvesting frenzy. Instead he goes swimming and nearly gets attacked by two angry kids, armed with knives and spears. He follows them, and they catch him and humiliate him by chopping off a lock of his blond hair and stealing his clothes. Later, he snaps, shaves his head, grabs a shotgun and sets out with a haphazard, pathological plan.
But perhaps worst of all is the appearance of a character called "The Boxer" (De Bankolé), who has become a kind of symbol in the ongoing battle. Gut-shot, he crawls into a hut on the coffee plantation to grimly wait, or perhaps to die. He draws yet more unwanted attention to the French plantation. Denis frames all this action in flashback, as Maria vainly attempts to get back home after a terrible incident in town. She hides in the tall grass from some soldiers, can't catch a ride, and winds up clinging from a ladder on the side of a bus; there are no more seats for her inside. The flashbacks provide a sense of inevitability to the proceedings, and they also loosen up what, for Denis, is a fairly straightforward narrative.
The ongoing question is: who lives here? Whose place is this? When some native kids find a gold lighter belonging to Andre, it winds up in the hands of a rebel soldier, who simply dismisses it as the "white material" of the title. Later, Maria's new hired workers ask about her connection to the plantation. She explains that she doesn't own it, but she's still in charge. "If nothing is yours, then it's all just hot air," one worker replies. But if Maria doesn't belong here, then Denis doesn't side with anyone else, either. She repeatedly shows a rebel-supporting radio DJ who plays reggae music and broadcasts messages to the rebels, but then later shows the military taking over the same station; neither broadcaster carries any more weight than the other.
The thing that sets Denis' films apart from ordinary films is their sense of
texture. She incorporates the feel of a place and time into her films, and
often these sensations can even overwhelm the plot. Here,
All of these elements contribute to a certain feel and mood in the film;
they give it a pure, physical, bodily quality. Denis never films in front of a
place; she films inside it. In Friday Night,
a chilly
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Early in Claire Denis’s powerful, agonized film “White Material,” you see a woman in a short pink dress, Maria — played by a sublime Isabelle Huppert — hanging off the back of a bus. The setting is a contemporary unnamed African country being torn to pieces by government troops, marauding rebels and the enduring ravages of European colonialism. As she holds on tight, her short-sleeved dress fluttering, the camera moves in close enough for you to see the muscles in Ms. Huppert’s thin arms popping, straining with the terrific effort that encapsulates the will to survive.
Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste. At her best, as in “Beau Travail” (1999), her radiant retelling of Melville’s “Billy Budd,” the images convey her ideas with more precision than reams of scripted dialogue could. The same holds true of “White Material,” a striking film filled with images that sometimes reveal their full meaning only when their beauty curdles in the chain of signification, as in the seemingly inconsequential shot of Maria’s light hair that inexorably leads to a scene of a man shaving his head and violently stuffing his blond hair into the mouth of a protesting black woman.
But before that horror there is the nightmarish image of running dogs and the unnerving scene of a man caught in an inferno, an opening vision to which the film later returns. When Maria first enters the film, she’s walking in a dusty rural landscape and vainly trying to wave down a fast-moving car. The expression on her face is both terrifying and terrified, and her features look harshly arranged — lips pursed into a lopsided oval, brow bunched, red-lined eyes fixed — as if she had been broken by some unspoken anguish and hastily glued together. Soon after, she hitches a ride on the bus and begins her journey toward the coffee plantation she calls home, a passage Ms. Denis interweaves with flashbacks to the recent past.
It takes a little time to adjust to this dual movement forward (toward home) and back (into the past), if only because it makes it tricky to get a firm footing in the story. Yet this form works because Maria initially appears as unmoored by what is happening as you are. In this sense, the flashbacks, most of which are from her point of view, serve as fragments of a puzzle that you slowly piece together, at least in part. You discover her fierce dedication to the plantation, and you become acquainted with her former husband, André (Christophe Lambert); her adored grown son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle); and the plantation patriarch, Henri (Michel Subor). In time, both you and Maria learn the costs of her ferocious loves.
The price proves lethally high. In some crucial respects, “White
Material” is a specific film about white Europeans who, being fully integrated
into their African home, insist on the privileges of patrimony, including the
right to exploit the land and its people. Though pale as milk, Maria
contemptuously refers to “dirty whites,” and her son, now perhaps in his early
20s, was born in
“White Material” is very much a companion piece to “Chocolat,” Ms. Denis’s 1988 directorial debut. That lush, more straightforward film is set in Cameroon in the 1950s, during the waning years of French colonial rule, a subject Ms. Denis, the daughter of a French official, knows intimately, having grown up in Francophone African countries. “Chocolat” centers on the relationship between the young white daughter of a French district officer and the African man, Protée (Isaach De Bankolé), who works as the family’s house “boy.” Ms. Denis doesn’t pretend to speak for the African servant, who remains opaque, but she does insist on showing his point of view — we watch him watching the whites — because she knows that this story isn’t hers alone.
Mr. De Bankolé has a small role in the new film as a wounded, romanticized rebel soldier called the Boxer who takes refuge at the coffee plantation. Maria offers him help, but she barely talks to him, so preoccupied is she with getting her crop of beans harvested. Most of the plantation’s workers have understandably fled (and Maria’s ex wants to do the same), and both the army and the rebels, including a ragtag band of child soldiers, are fast approaching from different angles. The utopian promise of African liberation that reverberated throughout “Chocolat” has been replaced by the devastations of postcolonialism. Power has partly moved from white hands to black, yet much remains the same, including terror.
For the most part, terror creeps through this film quietly, sneaking through tall grass, slipping into buildings and moving with increasing tension among the characters. Eventually, Ms. Denis brings the whole thing to a shocking end with a death blow that is as blunt in its execution as it is in its larger historical meaning. But before then, she shows you an image of such astonishing poignancy and moral clarity that it will haunt you long after the film ends: a handful of child soldiers sleeping in a rumpled bed among scattered stuffed animals. With grave tenderness, Ms. Denis reminds us that these murderous, tragically lost boys and girls are still children, a gesture that doesn’t restore their humanity — which she has no right to restore — so much as remind you of the humanity that’s so easily forgotten.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the month: White Material (2009)
Adrian Martin, July 2010
Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013
Review:
White Material Jason Solomons from The Observer,
White Material Your Friends and Neighbors, by Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot, Fall 2009
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
NYFF09: Claire
Denis' White Material Puts the Cycle of African ... Wayne Titus from FilmLinc Blog,
REVIEW
| Running Scared: Claire Deniss White Material Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot at
indieWIRE,
Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce
The
Auteurs [Daniel Kasman]
The
Auteurs [Johnny Levant]
Claire Denis: White Material (2009) Chris Knipp from Filmleaf
Claire
Denis: Shooting Africa in 'White Material' - indieWIRE Bryce J. Renninger from indiWIRE,
REVIEW: Isabelle Huppert Stares Down a Revolution in Claire Denis ... Michelle Orange from Movieline
The King's Speech, Tangled, Tiny Furniture, White Material ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal
Eye for Film (Ali Hazzah) review [2.5/5]
floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]
Filmcritic.com Rachel Gordon
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
Shadow And Act
» Reviews – White Material Tambay,
Shadow And
Act » Thoughts On Claire Denis' White Material ... Tambay,
White Material | Review | Screen Mike Goodridge from Screendaily
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review
Richard Schickel: 'White Material': Portrait of the Colonist in a ... Richard Schickel from Truthdig
Armond White reviews Claire Denis' African fetish in White ... NY Press
Movie Review - White Material - eFilmCritic Jay Seaver
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Critic's Notebook [Sarah Manvel]
ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
WHITE MATERIAL Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion
San Francisco International Film Festival 2010: Dispatch One Joseph Jon Lanthier from The House Next Door capsule review
Daily Film Dose (Blair Stewart) review
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
User reviews from imdb Author: trpuk1968 from United Kingdom
User reviews from imdb Author: Framescourer from London, UK
User reviews from imdb Author: scrumptiously from United Kingdom
ViewLondon (Matthew Turner) review [4/5]
Boxoffice Magazine (Richard Mowe) review
Shoot him again Nick James at Toronto, 2009
White Material J.R. Jones from The Reader
cinemadaily | A Double Dose of Denis Andy Lauer links various reviews of Denis’s last 2 films from indieWIRE, September 16, 2009
Shadow And Act » Reviews – White Material Tambay links to other reviews, September 8, 2009
Back to Africa: An Interview with Claire Denis Daniel Kasman interviews Claire Denis from The Auteurs, October 7, 2009
Q&A: CLAIRE DENIS, Director of White Material :: Stop Smiling Magazine José Teodoro interview, October 8, 2009
Claire Denis on Isabelle
Huppert: 'She doesn't want to be nice or compassionate' Video interview by Andrew Pulver and Henry
Barnes from The Guardian,
Claire Denis: 'For me, film-making is a journey into the impossible' Andrew Hussey feature and interview from The Observer, July 4, 2010
This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic Marilyn Ferdinand about Chocolat and White Material, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 6, 2013
Entertainment Weekly review Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Hollywood Reporter review Sura Wood
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
Time Out Online (David Jenkins) review [4/5] Dave Calhoun
Independent.co.uk
[Jonathan Romney]
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]
The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev Sandhu
Review: White Material - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
'White Material' tells a woman's horrifying story in postcolonial ... Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer
Review: Danger and dread will dig into your gut - TwinCities.com Chris Hewitt from St. Paul Pioneer Press
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
White Material - Movie review: 'White Material' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version] Gary W. Tooze
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
2011
JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT
An Heir (Un héritier) (22
mi) 2011
To the Devil (42 mi) 2011 d:
Claire Denis
Memories of a Morning (Recuerdos de una mañana) (47 mi) 2011
d: José Luis Guerín
France/Spain (112 mi) 2012
I’ve
seen great films by each of the three filmmakers, and this was not that. —Patrick Friel, alternative film festival
director and programmer
For the past 11 years, this was originally conceived as an experimental
collective work, initially featuring Asian film directors, but eventually
opening up to Europe, Africa, and the United States where now three different
challenging and cutting edge directors are given the green light to contribute
short films to the Asian Jeonju Film Festival in what was considered at the
time an up and coming new medium. As the
world has caught up to the digital age, with Hollywood abandoning actual film
by the end of this year, shooting and preserving films only in digital from now
on, perhaps this experiment should re-institute the use of 35 mm, which will
eventually become the ultimate rarity in cinema.
Jean-Marie Straub worked initially with Renoir, Bresson, and Rivette
before meeting student Danièle Huillet in the early 50’s, becoming his
collaborative and married partner until she died in 2006. Known for adapting the works of others, they
re-worked novels, operas, and plays, but also other original texts, usually
with political overtones, stressing intellectual content through an austere and
unvarnished style of filmmaking.
Claire Denis is the daughter of a civil servant, spending much of her
childhood in different African countries before returning to France where she
assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques
Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at
the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature, she brings an
unconventional maturity into her works.
She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who fairly
easily moves between an experimental, avant garde style with slight to nonexisting
narratives to more conventional narratives, usually focusing on the personal
lives of marginalized working class characters whose very ordinariness
separates them from mainstream movie viewing.
José Luis Guerín is a professor of film studies in Barcelona, beginning
his career in experimental films, becoming something of a natural observer,
offering meditative, visual essays on ideas that emerge from a given situation,
allowing a constantly inventive slow process of discovery to develop what’s
interesting and unique. Working without
any set screenplay, showing little interest in plot or narrative, Guerín
purposefully extends the boundaries of narrative and documentary forms, often
reveling in visual and sensory beauty, showing a curious and creative
imagination at work.
An Heir (Un Héritier) B- 81
Perhaps a companion piece to an earlier short
While acknowledging he is the heir of an aristocratic landowner known
throughout the region, it’s interesting and somewhat amusing that he suggests
this gives his cause greater weight, since he can walk through the region from
top to bottom and be recognized and respected by the people in the territory,
believing he has the skills to communicate effectively with all walks of life
who inhabit the region. With this in
mind, he then launches into his angry personal diatribe against the atrocities
he experienced at the hand of German authorities, where the French were
continually singled out for greater punishments. As his family had the economic means to
leave, they instead chose to stay, where he rather amusingly portrays himself
as a kind of Resistance fighter, an Alsatian patriot. Leave it to the aristocracy to assume credit
for all that’s good, aligning their fellow French together against a common
enemy, while easily castigating others for their diabolic treatment of the
French. While this sends a sympathetic
nationalistic message of liberation veiled in the archives of history, one can
only think that it would do the French aristocracy a world of good to be
reminded of their former subservience, as it duplicates just exactly how they
behave when they historically exploit and mistreat their fellow working
class.
To the Devil C 74
Using a Jean Rouch style interviewing technique in the wild, Claire
Denis flies to French Guyana and Surinam in northeast South America just north
of the Amazon region in search of a Rastafari rebel outlaw known as Jean Béna,
bringing along a young actor hoping he can learn to emulate him in an upcoming
film. The region has a historical
significance, as African slaves broke away from the governmental authorities
and have remained unshackled ever since, known as the Aluku, an isolated tribe
that fled down the Lawa River into the jungle, remaining self-sufficient for
several hundred years. Béna is a noted
figure from this tribe, one of the more enterprising, as he apparently runs a
gold mine operation. Denis interviews a
few people in the region who are quick to point out Béna never killed anybody,
that the underlying motive is a land grab, as the tribe is slowly being pushed
off their land, so his reputation as a wanted outlaw is being exaggerated by
the government who want to get their hands on the gold. Denis then finds the man in a backwoods
region, visiting the mining operation as Béna explains his life and how he
makes a living. Unfortunately, Béna
himself is not a particularly charismatic figure, though his defiance of the
government’s campaign to oust him and his people is evident, painting a
contemporary portrait of colonialism and its aftereffects in an obscure part of
the world. Supposedly a small piece of a
planned larger work, this section rambles and feels a bit aimless after awhile. Given free reign to say whatever he pleases,
Béna never generates much interest or enthusiasm, overshadowed by the unique
texture of the region’s history.
Memories of a Morning (Recuerdos de una mañana) B+ 90
Easily the most visually intoxicating of the three, the film opens with
shots of leaves continually seen out the window of Guerín’s own Barcelona
apartment, moving through various changes in the seasons, through wind, rain,
and snow, where the last leaves hold on until they eventually disappear,
forming an exquisite montage of time passing, of the leaves dying and falling
off the branches, only to be reborn in the spring when they come back again in
full force. What emerges afterwards are
views from out the window to the apartment building across the street, briefly
hinting at REAR WINDOW (1954), where the compartmentalized units are divided
and separated from one another, but seen in its entirety from the view across
the way, where we see a naked man playing a violin, though his body is
digitally covered, also a woman tending to her potted plants, a man playing
saxophone, another dancing, where there is a myriad of different activities
coming from the outdoor balconies.
Through a collection of impromptu street interviews, the viewer is told
of how the naked violinist named Manel jumped off the balcony to his death,
where each individually recalls the moment.
Many offer testimonials to a private but unhappy man, a friend to few,
becoming an essay on loneliness, the neighborhood itself, and the tragic
consequences of suicide.
Guerín provides a well rounded view of a deteriorating sense of
community by the collective voices of the people who live there, including
small children who bluntly indicate Manel didn’t play that well, only so-so,
and he never said hello to them in the hallway.
This sense of disconnect is as much a part of the tragedy as the death
itself, as both are revealed through a memory play of human recollections. All the people exhibit a warm and personable
flair before the cameras, where one wonders if this isn’t a smiling and
idealized view, if once they’re off camera they don’t become lost in the
business of their own affairs, basically covering up their own frail
insecurities. What distinguishes this
film is how the director incorporates a growing sense of inevitability and a
natural rhythm of life (and death) into the overall concept, shooting and
editing his own film, giving it a distinct shape. There’s an interesting sound design where we
hear various people in the building play musical instruments, from a young
female violin player who plays furiously on her balcony to a saxophone player
who sits on the window ledge and offers jazz riffs to the movement of the
pedestrians seen below. These musical
backdrops offer a parallel line of reflection, as does the haunting rhythm of
Guerín’s editing. While this never
unearths anything earthshakingly original about the living or the dead, it
instead captures a distinct flavor of the loneliness of modern life through a
uniquely impressionistic tone poem.
Jeonju Digital
Project 2011: Straub/Denis/Guerín | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubin
Each year the Jeonju International Film Festival commissions three short works by leading world filmmakers. The 2011 selection features contributions by three masters of modern European cinema.
Jean-Marie Straub’s personal and pastoral AN HEIR (UN HÉRITIER, France, 22
min., in French with English subtitles) uses excerpts from a novel by Maurice
Barrès to revisit his own painful memories of growing up in German-occupied
In TO THE DEVIL (France, 45 min., in French with English subtitles), Claire Denis takes the leading actor of her next film to meet the real-life model for his character, a renegade living on a remote stretch of the Lawa River between Surinam and French Guyana.
The highlight of the triptych is José Luis Guerín’s MEMORIES OF A MORNING
(RECUERDOS DE UNA MAÑANA,
EXIT
ART - Upcoming Screenings | Jeonju Digital Project 2011
Since its launch in 2000, the Jeonju Internaional Film Festival in
To the Devil – NYC Premiere!
“Denis’ latest work is a digital short that combines documentary,
autobiography and essay film. As research for an upcoming feature, Denis
travels to
(dir. Claire Denis, 45 min, 2011,
Memories of a Morning – NYC Premiere!
“The most successful of the 2011 project is by the least well-known of the
three directors. Jose Luis Guerin produced a very personal film about a tragic
suicide in his own neighborhood that also works beautifully as a portrait of
these people. The result is a moving work, both in its sadness and also in the
joy found in the lives of the local residents. What emerges is a portrait of a
cold neighborhood where no one says hello to each other that is, Guerin
discovers, full of warm relationships and people. Nevertheless, they couldn’t
alleviate the loneliness that drove the man to take his life, and in fact may
be part of the alienated modern world that caused the man’s death, since we
learn there have been many other suicides in recent years. The only small
weakness is that Guerin seems to have too many endings, unable to choose one
effective note to conclude and instead throwing everything in. But this film
certainly makes me curious to see more of his films.” — Marc Raymond, The
One One Four
(dir. José Luis Guerín, 45 min, 2011,
An Heir
“Un Héritier (An Heir) compresses Barrès’s 1905 novel In Germany’s
Service to profoundly moving effect. An account of an Alsatian’s life under
German occupation, it begins with two men walking through a wood. The older
(played by Straub), from
(dir. Jean-Marie Straub, 22 min, 2011,
Jeonju
Journal Pt. 1: In a Young Festival, Old Masters Go Digital ... Kevin B. Lee from Fandor
The Jeonju International Film Festival may not be the
biggest film event in
Championing the cause of digital filmmaking, the Festival has made a name for itself with its annual centerpiece, the Jeonju Digital Project, where it commissions three filmmakers to produce digital shorts to premiere at the festival. It’s proven to be a brilliant means to bring respected auteurs under the Jeonju tent: James Benning, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Denis Cote all count as JDP “alumni.” This year’s triumvirate – Claire Denis, Jean-Marie Straub, and Jose Luis Guerin – may have been the most prestigious to date.
The three directors also have the greatest median age of any JDP class: 62, well above the thirty- to forty-something profile typical of past participants – and certainly well above the overwhelmingly collegiate demographic of the Jeonju film crowd. From what I was told, the Festival is timed to the end of spring term so as to attract thousands of movie-loving students to serve as volunteers or audience members (not both, however; volunteers get free room and board, but aren’t allowed to watch the films). Not only is this the youngest film festival audience I’ve ever seen, but also the most well-behaved. At every screening I attend, there are virtually no walk-outs; the kids sit through the credits and applaud when the lights go up.
I had to wonder what these kids thought of the JDP projects, since to appreciate them (with the possible exception of Guerin’s short, the most fully realized of the three) likely requires considerable familiarity with these established directors’ previous work. And yet, there is a spirit of romantic defiance against oppressive forces in each of the three films that might readily appeal to these youths, say, if it was expressed by Leonardo di Caprio aboard an ocean liner.
Straub’s 22 minute short An Heir is a brief adaptation of a
novel by the early 20th century writer Maurice Barres, about a young
French doctor in German-occupied
Some expressed disappointment with Claire Denis’ To the Devil
as less a stand-alone work as a DVD extra for a project yet to go into
production. But as a hardline Denis fan, I was glad to get a significant
glimpse of what her next project might look like – provided its sensitive
subject matter passes muster with French government purse holders. The 44
minute short follows Denis and an actor to the border of French Guyana and
But the unanimous favorite of the JDP shorts was Guerin’s Memories of a Morning. Those who have seen In the City of Sylvia know that few filmmakers today can work their camera through public spaces with as much live-wire energy as Guerin. Here, the space is both public and deeply personal: the street outside his apartment window, where a musician neighbor fell to his death from the opposite building. Guerin opens with archival video he had taken of the man practicing violin at his window. It was a sound that connected everyone on the block, as Guerin proves through interviews with dozens of neighbors that ring with warmth and intimacy, even in sorrowful reflection.
Guerin weaves their testimonials – heartbroken, perplexed, and somewhat fatalistic – with shots of the spot where the violinist’s body landed, returning again and again to the stark mark of absence in his community. He ultimately ends up in the man’s apartment, where traces of his depressed life remain – a volume of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, sketches, a lonely, half-finished wine glass. But these phantom artifacts are cast in an afternoon glow of otherworldly beauty, as if light itself were the last word in the sum effects of our lives. Guerin’s camera is unabashedly romantic, and with it he tries to fathom a darker, deadlier strain of the same yearning impulse. He may not get to the bottom of his neighbor’s fatal mystery, but his attempt is a gesture of near-perfect grace.
Locarno
2011. Old and New Straub Robert
Koehler from Mubi,
In
Review: Jeonju International Film Festival (Part Two) at The One ... Marc Raymond from The One One Four
15th
EU Film Festival: JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT 2011 Kevin B. Lee, also seen here: cine-file.info/forum
Straub,
Denis, Guerin line up for Jeonju Digital Project | News | Screen Jean Noh from Screendaily
Variety Reviews -
Jeonju Digital Project 2011 - Film Reviews ...
BASTARDS (Les Salauds) A 95
France Germany (97 mi) 2013
One of the mysteries at Cannes this year was leaving this film out of competition, where easily one of the best films of the year was relegated to the second tier of Un Certain Regard films, especially since Claire Denis is one of the great artists working today, where you’d think France would want to showcase her unique talent. The director herself may have been too modest about drawing attention to herself, which competition films tend to do, at least for the first screening anyway where it’s like the creator is the very center of the universe, as all eyes are on the film while enthusiasts around the word await the critical results. For most, it’s an enviable position, as cinema’s most prestigious festival provides so much free publicity, but Denis shirks the limelight and retains a more private profile, allowing each one of her films to speak for themselves. Due to the narrative ambiguities in nearly all her films, they’re often misunderstood initially and gain more of a critical following only much later. The reasons for this are the inherent complexities of her films, which often take some time to digest, and aren’t suited for one time only, knee-jerk reactions. Nonetheless, the announcement of a new Claire Denis film is always a major cinematic “event,” as the director has simply never made a bad film and continues to make challenging works that are both intelligent and adult in nature. Loosely drawing upon William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931), Denis raises similar unspeakably dark themes of rampant drug use, corruption, family betrayal, infidelity, incest, lurid sexual crimes, as well as corncob rape sequences, all of which leads the viewer into a downward spiraling cesspool of utterly despicable human behavior. As bleak and downbeat a film as you will see all year, it continually surprises, however, with fractured narrative ambiguity, visual mastery from cinematographer Agnès Godard, and superb leading performances from Vincent Lindon and Chiara Mastroianni.
Working for the first time with a digital camera, the director’s usual methodical long takes, including static wide shots of landscapes mixed with tight close ups are replaced here by the suffocating intimacy of a handheld camera, giving the film a jagged, deeply fragmented syle, shot mostly using claustrophobic interior locations, creating a deeply unsettling, psychologically disturbing look at French sex trafficking and prostitution scandals involving powerful men of great wealth. Denis indicated the film started with an idea she had after watching several Kurosawa films from the 50’s and 60’s starring Toshirô Mifune, which made her think of Vincent Lindon’s body, solid, sexy, “a body you can trust, a solid body you can lean on. In Kurosawa’s films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end. My film started with that body.” Denis also read a news story about a young woman found drugged and naked next to a garbage dumpster. In this film, set in the unrelenting bleakness of a noirish nightmare, she imagines a backdrop to her story. Opening in a torrent of rain that obscures our view out the window, while inside a man is seen through a doorway staring at the image in the shower, creating a sense of intimacy and voyeurism. Then, an intrusion, as if from another world, where a young girl (Lola Créton) in heels is seen dazed and naked wandering down an empty Parisian street at night, stumbling out of the house where her father has committed suicide (never explained), and her mother (Julie Bataille) is being led away by the police, blaming everyone in sight, It happens so quickly we’re not sure of the relationships, only that it takes place in the flicker of a murky gloom, becoming the darkest movie Denis has ever made, where characters are literally submerged in the incessant foul play.
Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon) is a ship captain that receives news of the suicide while at sea, where he’s dropped off to come to the aid of his sister Sandra (Bataille) and niece Justine (Créton), who ends up in a psychiatric hospital. The family business of women’s shoes has gone belly up with bills it can’t hope to pay, where his sister blames it all on the actions of wealthy international financier Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor) who has bankrupted her husband’s business. Marco rents a flat in the same building as Laporte, where he’s immediately intrigued by his sexually attractive partner, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni). The building itself becomes a centerpiece of the film, where the massive interiors are barely lit, suggesting an unfillable emptiness, and an insatiable desire, where Marco and Raphaëlle, who is almost always left alone, begin a torrid affair, with Godard illuminating the faces in close up shots that appear like lurking shadows. While the erotic moments become the most stable aspects of his multi-layered life, Marco becomes the moral center of the film, symbolized as the virtuous, male protective body, taking care of Raphaëlle’s restless insecurities while looking after Sandra and Justine as well. Denis clearly sympathizes with the caged-like plight of the femme fatale character of Raphaëlle, making great efforts for the audience to identify with her complications and moral ambiguity, where she could just as easily be the protagonist of the film, which is why the finale is so shockingly effective.
In someone else’s hands, it would never have the unmistakable poetry, where Denis’s approach is more delicate, subtle, and nuanced. The film is a The Intruder (L’intrus)-like trip into the heart of darkness, where the dysfunctional family element provides a theme of contamination and infection reminiscent of Trouble Every Day (2001), an immaculate noir in the classical sense, dark and convoluted, where Denis offers empathy for her characters throughout.
The voyeuristic aspect of the film intrudes into the audience as well, as we clearly get inside the head of characters who are both being watched and those doing the watching, with both forces eventually brought together in an erotic embrace, where we again project ourselves into the drama without actually leaving our seats. Of interest is the way Denis holds the audience in rapt attention by the way she films the seduction scene. Typically in film noir the femme fatale lures the hero into a compromising position, but here Marco is actively seducing Raphaëlle, shown with his back to the camera, where the audience sees the effects of her sexual longing, often changing the focus and perspective between them, continually sucking the audience into this lurid world of sexual intrigue. But Marco hasn’t a clue what kind of world he’s returning to, having been away at sea, avoiding all family ties and responsibilities, where his family dysfunction, like that of Raphaëlle’s world, is clouded in a maze of secrets and deception, the kind that only money can protect, not best intentions, where he couldn’t possibly understand the deep-seeded ramifications of just how far his sister and her husband would abdicate their parental responsibilities, allowing the film to touch upon issues of sexual exploitation that open doors into horror and terror. By the time the audience gets wind of just how prevalent the danger is surrounding this man, with people driven by base impulses, where particularly odious is a skin-crawling incest subplot, with literally everyone around him synonymous with the film’s title, we realize that he’s doomed, unable to extract himself from this sinking quicksand that is the moral abyss he’s found himself in, which only makes the enveloping dread and anguish more devastating. Played out like a fever dream where love is nonexistent but delusion is everpresent, we watch the slow, poisoned, self-inflicted destruction of two family units, one irreparably shattered, the other hanging by a thread, where the exposure of their secrets rises like a dark shadow out of the ashes of doom.
In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]
The plot of Claire Denis’s latest film is familiar noir material: A ship captain named Marco (Vincent Lindon) is asked by her desperate sister, Sandra (Julie Bataille), to investigate the disappearance of her daughter (Lola Créton) after the death of her husband and the collapse of the family business. His snooping becomes complicated as he develops a romantic involvement with Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), the wife of the elderly businessman whom Sandra suspects of being involved in the disappearance. As ever with Denis, however, the devil is in the details—in the impressionistic sequences and montages that suggest emotional lives beyond the dictates of the screenplay. Marco, for instance, feels a certain kinship with Raphaëlle as someone else who is part of a rich family but who has no interest in money; their love scenes together are some of the most tender ever filmed, in which one can sense the tingling physical and emotional connection between them without words. In a world where money talks the loudest, though, is such a connection enough to keep them together as the plot thickens? Denis adds to all this a jigsaw-puzzle narrative structure that keeps the audience on its toes. The result could be considered the harshly bleak flip side to the family warmth on display in Denis's 2008 film 35 Shots of Rum—a portrait of the suffocating stranglehold of the ties that bind.
This
is noir: The Bastards | Cannes 2013 | Sight & Sound | BFI Amy Taubin from BFI Sight and Sound, May 23, 2013
William Faulkner, always a French favourite, has had a work-out in the past two days, first with James Franco’s dense evocation of the backwoods of mythical Yoknapatawpha County in As I Lay Dying, and then with Claire Denis’s The Bastards (Les Salauds), in which a shack done up as a rudimentary sex dungeon features a bunch of bloody corn cobs straight out of Sanctuary, probably the only Faulkner novel to function as an S&M jerk-off aid for American Lit majors. (It was published in paperback with a particularly lurid pulp-fiction cover.) The novel was the basis for the 1933, pre-Code Hollywood movie The Story of Temple Drake, with Miriam Hopkins as the rich southern belle who becomes a ‘nympho’ after she’s gang-raped.
The Bastards has a more obvious source of inspiration – the ubiquitous French sex-trafficking and prostitution scandals involving men of wealth and power. Denis said she took note of a news article about a young woman found drugged and naked next to a garbage dumpster. The fragmented opening sequence includes just such a naked women (Lola Créton) tottering on five-inch heels out of the darkness near a house where her father has just committed suicide and her distraught mother (Julie Bataille) is being led away by the cops.
Those relationships may not become clear for quite a while. The Bastards trades in obscurity. It is the darkest movie – visually, psychologically and spiritually – that Denis has made. It’s also one of the rarest of cinematic objects – a completely contemporary, disturbingly relevant film noir.
The mother has a brother, a naval captain (Vincent Lindon), who jumps ship to come to the aid of his sister and niece, and get to the bottom of his sister’s story that an international financier (Michel Subor) is responsible for bankrupting her husband’s business. The naval captain rents an apartment in a building owned by the financier, and soon he and the financier’s mistress (Chiara Mastroianni) are going at it hot and heavy. It is a rare actor who can be both the moral and the erotic center of a movie, but Lindon more than fits the bill, which makes it doubly devastating when he’s outmatched by the titular Bastards – being just about everyone else in the movie except a psychiatrist (Alex Descas), some children and their smiling school teachers.
Most of Denis’s usual creative team is in place: cinematographer Agnes Godard, co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau and Stuart Staples, who composed a particularly ominous and sparse Tindersticks score. The new element is the digital camera (the RED Epic) from which Denis and Godard manage to wrest the tactility that is their trademark. Close-ups of faces (incredible faces in this movie) and of bodies nearly submerged in darkness, and not a tortured pixel or any other kind of digital noise in sight.
When Bastards opens, a steady stream of rain obscures our
vision. The rain itself is the intended image, but it's consistency and
persistence, removed from the associated sound, transforms into other possible
interpretations, such as the rapid traversing of a weathered road. A
minimalist, synthesized, emotionally conscious score draws us into a room,
where we see a man through a doorway, staring at the shower, appreciating the
image that precedes him and our awareness of his presence and shared gaze.
There's both intimacy and voyeurism in this composition, inviting the audience
to see through the eyes of a stranger while being reminded that we are, in
fact, watching someone through a doorway. It's a visual trajectory of character
introduction throughout that reiterates the notion of form and perspective
framing the often sensual and occasionally horrific imagery about to unfold.
Other snippets of narrative information begin to unravel: an ambulance
approaches a dead body; a woman wanders through the streets in nothing but high
heels; and another mourns the death of her husband. It all floats by with ease,
having a lulling, strangely comforting montage effect despite touching upon
distressing subject matter and lacking context.
Eventually, the focus settles upon Marco (Vincent Lindon), a sailor that
returns home after his brother-in-law commits suicide. In trying to play hero
to grieving sister Sandra (Julie Bataille), he learns that the economy has
decimated the business she inherited and that she's borrowed money from a
notable affluent businessman, Edouard (Michel Subor). He's also thrown into the
middle of an underground prostitution ring, where his niece, Justine (Lola
Créton), has presumably been raped repeatedly, needing surgery to repair her vagina.
Oddly, these storylines are mostly eschewed in favour of the love affair that
Marco has with Edouard's wife, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni). He sells
everything he owns and cashes in retirement savings to move into an apartment
adjacent this woman, where his calloused, blue-collar sexuality intrigues her,
compared to her seemingly sexless life with a much older man.
Though the title Bastards cheekily implies female subjugation as its
thematic trajectory, reiterating this by depicting each female as victim of
financial, sexual or otherwise abject manipulation, Denis presents Marco as the
subject of the gaze. It's his sexuality and movement that are objectified,
though carefully not gratuitously exploited, through the series of encounters
between him and Raphaëlle. We're forced into an intimate space with this
outsider, watching him try to help, and fix, the lives of the women around him,
while his wealth and gruff masculinity are ultimately objectified by the text
and dominant eye.
The dreamlike nature of it all evades facile interpretations of gender reversal
and money as singular motivators, however. The desire at hand is the focus,
just as the deliberate shot composition blended with an increasingly intense
soundtrack mask the telling verbal exchanges, where Marco endlessly asserts the
loveless nature and impossible passion of Raphaëlle's marriage despite her
casual response that it's far more complicated than he might think.
Even more intriguing is the overt, yet still ambiguous, presentation of Edouard
as an impotent villain. While his financial stature and role suggest
traditional menace, Bastards is careful to reiterate that no one forced
Sandra to borrow money from him, just as no one forced Raphaëlle to marry him.
How victimhood is dictated by economy and gender is just one of the intriguing
puzzles and dichotomies looming throughout this darkly sensual ride.
Though the intermingling of thematic elements is a tad messy, Denis's ability
to capture intimacy and tell a story beyond the superficiality of the narrative
gives her latest work a galvanic sensibility. How Bastards feels is, in
a way, more important than what it specifically says.
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema--an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis's stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man's body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L'Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we're simply not allowed to know until we've arrived through the movie's own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis's eleven features--a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.
Vincent Lindon, the sad-eyed, almost absurdly masculine half of the couple in Vendredi soir, plays Marco, a tanker captain whose gilded watch and tailored dress shirts betray a man born into wealth. His days at sea numbered, Marco is drawn into the disturbing world of the family he'd left behind, prompted by the sudden death of a brother-in-law whose debt-ridden final days put him in the pocket of sleazy financier Eduard Laport (Michel Stubor). In exchange for his company's bailout, it's suggested, Laport brought Marco's niece (Lola Creton, the woman we see wandering in the opening montage) into an underground sex syndicate, seriously abusing and brainwashing her in the process. Enter Marco as the disgraced, bankrupted family's official sin eater: Summoned back to Paris, he hocks his Alfa Romero for liquid cash and settles into the same posh building as Laport, hoping to insinuate himself in the bastard's life by striking up an affair with the man's neglected, much younger wife, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni).
Despite its elliptical presentation, which has us holding most of the major narrative blocks in the air until we know where to sequence them, this is a surprisingly linear story for a filmmaker prone to fruitful asides--the young lovers indulging in a long kiss over the opening credits of Trouble Every Day, for example, held and then discarded; or the spectral appearances of Yekaterina Golubeva in L'Intrus. Here, even the initially opaque details--a family heirloom in a pawn-shop window, the body in the street--all have a teleological function in the grand design. Indeed, Denis seems more interested this time in playing with our desire--born of and indulged by the revenge-thriller genre--to see an ostensibly free agent like Marco become a power player, avenging his family against a corrupt man and scoring a point for justice in the process. That desire, the picture suggests, is a fruitless one when the pieces are ultimately all there regardless of the precise order in which they'll fall. Marco, then, is simply playing out his family script, his actions and their ultimate success or failure directed by an indifferent air-traffic controller.
Bleak as that may sound, not even this fatalistic progression (the ominous sense, throughout, that things are winding down to a bad end) prepares us for the dire coda, a sign-off that outdoes the finales of both Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and David Cronenberg's Videodrome, each of which Bastards resembles, for pure, radioactive cynicism. Closing with the video evidence we've long been promised, Denis lands on not justice but its demonic parody, as blurry images of the family's grotesque home movies, in a manner of speaking, play out against the arpeggiated synths of Tindersticks' "Put Your Love in Me," a kind of nightclub anthem for the undead. The most corrosive work of a master filmmaker, Bastards lingers in the mind for days after you've see it, though you wish it wouldn't.
Review:
Bastards - Film Comment Max Nelson,
September/October 2013
Like the shadows blocking out key areas of the frame in a Val Lewton film, or the requisite locked attic door in a haunted-house story, the narrative ellipses that open Claire Denis’s murky, rain-soaked, profoundly upsetting film noir could be concealing anything—but it’s hard to imagine they’re hiding anything you’d want to see for yourself. Bastards is Denis’s tightest narrative in decades, but that’s not immediately apparent from the film’s opening series of shard-like vignettes: a well-dressed man straightens his tie in a dark, deserted office; a woman is led slowly away from a crime scene; a teenage girl stumbles home through the lamp-lit streets of Paris wearing only a pair of five-inch heels.
As the film continues, little details, shreds of context, facts, clues, and connections start to accumulate at painfully spaced-out intervals. The story, when it eventually emerges, concerns ship’s captain Marco (Vincent Lindon), who goes AWOL and rushes home following his brother-in-law’s suicide and the hospitalization of his young niece Justine (Lola Créton, she of the high heels), only to get caught up in the machinations of a depraved, sunken-eyed financier (Michel Subor). It’s not totally obvious what makes Denis’s trail of bread crumbs so thrilling to follow. Certainly there’s an element of morbid curiosity, but there’s also the urge not to leave any shadows unexplored or any doors unopened.
More to the point: is there, as a handful of critics have suggested, something questionable about Denis’s choice to make a film about victimhood that refrains from exploring the psychology of the victims? For all Créton’s natural, almond-eyed soulfulness, Justine remains an opaque enigma, while Chiara Mastroianni, playing Subor’s mistress, radiates loneliness and desperation but rarely seems to have a will of her own (that is, until she finally lashes out in a last-ditch act). Marco is our entry point into their sufferings, and he’s as much an outsider as we are: a passive, world-weary onlooker who’d rather be floating out at sea; the quintessential noir protagonist in over his own head. But all this, I think, serves to justify the supposed lack of empathy in Bastards. It suggests the extent to which the film’s shadowy corporate Paris is of a piece with Chinatown’s rotten-to-the-core Los Angeles, or the Chicago that told Tony Camonte in Scarface that the world was his: within a thoroughly amoral universe in which women are bought and bartered by men of absolute power, victimhood consists precisely in being commodified, flattened out, reduced to a cipher.
It’s fascinating to watch a filmmaker so sensitive to the expressive potential of faces, bodies, and surfaces working in a genre that denies its characters the freedom to show what they’re feeling (and in some cases, the freedom to feel, period). You can sense Denis straining to read something behind Créton’s classical-statue gaze or Subor’s drowsy movements, or the way the dim hall-light reflects off Mastroianni’s exposed back during a staircase love scene (one of the film’s few moments of genuine tenderness), or above all in the film’s parade of weathered, bleary-eyed faces. But the surfaces, for the first time in any recent Denis film, remain surfaces: closed off, impassive, tight-lipped.
What the film amounts to, then, is an admission of failure—even, perhaps, of guilt. The crudely shot video footage that gives Bastards its final, stomach-churning twist is the piece of evidence the rest of the film has been apprehensively circling, or possibly spiraling helplessly into, and it couldn’t possibly have come from a fixed, ceiling-mounted camera as the film suggests. It’s shot, after all, in Denis’s unmistakable roving handheld style, and from that footage we might infer that there’s still one more bastard to account for in the film’s lineup of victims and abusers: the director, whose camera can’t help but reduce its subjects to manipulable collections of pixels.
Film of the Week: Bastards - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, October 25, 2013
Claire Denis’s films tend to be atmospheric, and Bastards is no exception. In its opening, a torrential rain cascades at night under yellow lighting, like a Biblical plague of piss visited on the world.
With their astonishing density of mood, Denis’s films often register less as narratives per se than as richly realized environments. They are like dramatic aquariums—with all the enclosure that suggests—in which her characters move, although we can’t always quite tell which direction they’re moving in, or why.
Although it’s one of her most atmospherically rich works yet, Bastards initially comes across as a minor or marginal Denis film—not a resounding statement like Beau Travail (99) or The Intruder (04), and hard to know quite where to place in her oeuvre. As a film noir of sorts, it’s akin to her other genre exercise to date, the sort-of horror film Trouble Every Day (01)—the film of hers I like least, but hotly defended by many, not least by people who love the very idea of Denis playing with genre.
Bastards also has the looseness of Denis’s balmily romantic family drama 35 Shots of Rum (08) and her erotic vignette Friday Night (02), although here the dreamy mood turns baleful and subtly toxic. And in its fragmentation, Bastards is akin to The Intruder, Denis’s great jigsaw movie, although it’s nowhere near as extreme and inscrutable. In the end, Bastards may even be her simplest film, almost to the point of narrative banality. But even if it is merely a sketch or fragment, an elegant offhand gesture, this film is pure Denis and richly unsettling.
There’s certainly a streak of casualness about Bastards, in that Denis more or less came up with it from scratch: production company Wild Bunch thought it was time she made a new film and challenged her and co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau to deliver a synopsis in a week. Fueling themselves with some recent headline anecdotes and an idea about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the sexual abuse of power, they responded with something that feels like a pulp readymade. A man kills himself one rainy night, and a young woman is found wandering the nocturnal streets, brutalized and naked except for a pair of high heels. The man is Jacques Silvestri (Laurent Grévill), head of a company that makes just such shoes, and the woman is his daughter Justine (Lola Créton, whose eerie, gazelle-like beauty you’ll recognize from Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air).
Jacques leaves a note for his brother Marco (Vincent Lindon), a tanker captain. Marco comes ashore and dedicates himself to finding out what’s gone wrong in his family—whose ruin appears to be the doing of an intensely nasty business mogul, Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor). Laporte seems as ancient, and as powerful, as the dinosaurs, Subor’s basilisk features suggestive of a malign moral petrification. He has a younger trophy wife, Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni), in whose bleakly furnished apartment he only occasionally spends nights: slipping into bed on one visit, Laporte gruffly commands, “Branle-moi” (“Jerk me off”)—so you know that Raphaelle is likely to be open to a bit of relative subtlety from Marco, who’s moved into the flat upstairs.
The slowly unfolding detective plot isn’t much of one—not by Raymond Chandler standards, at least. The main momentum is provided by Marco’s gradual detachment from his own life—his career and his daughters—while pursuing the case. He also becomes progressively less mobile: he first rolls up in Paris in a gorgeous mint-green car, but soon sells it to a friend, and before long is seen waiting at a bus stop at night. That’s nothing short of castration for a hard-boiled investigator.
Also involved in the intrigue are a sinister, arrogant young man (Denis’s young acteur-fétiche Grégoire Colin) and a blowsy, pregnant young woman (Florence Loiret-Caille) who seem to be the proprietors of a secluded orgy room with camera facilities in the ceiling and discarded corncobs littering the floor. If you get the reference to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, you’ll instantly guess what kind of nastiness is at stake.
The loaded title tells you how thin the basic conception is: in a world of bastards like Laporte, a good man like Marco ends up a bastard too, and it’s precisely by trying to do good that he’ll be tarnished. The film’s payoff, in a final sequence using surveillance footage, provides a morbidly nasty frisson, but it’s not as if we don’t see it coming. But together with the climactic twist which precedes it—and which does, in fact, come as a shock—this ending marks Bastards as something like Denis’s own Chinatown.
The readymade genre aspects of Bastards made me think on a first viewing that this was less than prime Denis, but on a revisit, it really got under my skin. Moderate touches of fragmentation (Denis is working with a new editor, Annette Dutertre) add to the overall unease—the repetition of Créton’s wounded, elegant nightwalk, and a hard-to-place sequence (dream? flash forward?) in which militia search the woods at night. Denis has been compared in the past to various jazz musicians, and Bastards certainly shows her as a director who makes cinematic music—the slender plot, like a well-known tune, serves as basis for a densely colored tone poem. Look at the morbid miasma of the opening rain scenes, the brief precarious clarity of a white sea glimpsed early on, the nightscapes throughout that are all the thicker for the sparse, brooding score by Denis’s faithful soundtrackers Tindersticks. This is, incidentally, Denis’s first digital film, with Agnès Godard shooting on the RED Epic.
Among what you might call her musical motifs, Denis uses faces. Some people that she’s partial to as presences drop in briefly, barely registering as characters proper but making striking impressions, sometimes in close-ups that seem incongruously out of proportion to their part in the narrative. Singer Christophe Miossec has a non-role as a friend of Marco, but you’re mesmerized by his gaunt, eroded features, almost as lived-in as Lindon’s. Also glimpsed are the underrated Hélène Fillières as a bank manager, old regular Alex Descas as a doctor, and Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas, who drops by to offer Marco dire warnings about his career prospects.
Among long-term members of the Denis repertory family, there’s hawk-faced Colin, whose presence, since his former ingénu days in Beau Travail, seems more and more to imply the promise of violence; and Loiret-Caille, peerless in France for embodying faintly deranged, oversexed tackiness. When these two and Créton are seen entangled on in a nocturnal car sequence, the sheerly unsavory sensuality is something that even the David Lynch of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive would envy.
Central to the film is the brooding presence of Vincent Lindon, working with Denis for the first time since he simmered as a muscular romancer in Friday Night. Denis has often celebrated tough men as troubled embodiments of sexuality—most famously in the austere muscle beach party that was Beau Travail—and Lindon’s hard-bitten, proletarian heaviness fits perfectly here. He’s a bit Bogart, a lot Jean Gabin or Lino Ventura, with a hangdog face and an air of having knocked about a bit, and of having been knocked about. There’s a great moody shot of him and Mastroianni early on—profiled in close-up, riding an elevator in the dark—that prefigures their later closeness. Mastroianni—a newcomer to Denis—is terrific too, her Raphaelle elegantly nervy with an edge of jaded perversity (it’s partly in that beauty mark, partly that troubling facial echo of the actress’s dad Marcello). She has a quizzical alertness, as if she’s partly sensing trouble, partly eager for it to kick in. When Raphaelle and Marco finally get it on—after some great tight-lipped flirting over Marco’s white shirt—you feel you’re seeing two mature, don’t-give-a-damn sexualities casting niceties aside and getting down to the rough nitty-gritty.
The film teasingly circles around its dark and ultimately depressing sexual revelations, but there’s something about these two cutting through the sleaze with an animality that’s reassuringly pure—or at least, sweatily, hungrily no-nonsense.
No Sanctuary: Claire Denis on Bastards - Cinema Scope Jose Teodoro interview from Cinema Scope, Fall 2013
The first image of Bastards, a gauzy curtain of nocturnal drizzle, falls on us like a heavy dream—or rather, it drags us under. The rain raineth on a whole lot of eerily beautiful gloom during the wordless, disorienting opening sequence: a solitary older man gazes out a window, seemingly resigned to some nameless despair; a young woman, naked but for a pair of heels, walks carefully along vacant Paris backstreets, as if in a trance. Who are these haunted people? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Nothing is contextualized, yet everything bespeaks some kind of dreadfully premonitory logic—a logic soon realized when we see a body lying in the street, discreetly covered by a white cloth, as police lead a solemn middle-aged woman away from the scene.
Tight close-ups and un-emphatic light; piles of unsold shoes and bloodied ears of corn; flashlights revealing a child’s bicycle deserted in tall grass. This is Claire Denis’ characteristically oneiric, elliptical take on the revenge drama, incorporating elements of Greek tragedy and the western, William Faulkner’s brutal, sordid 1931 novel Sanctuary, and Akira Kurosawa’s claustrophobic corporate thriller The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Written by Denis and her longtime collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau, Bastards is that rare thing: a true modern noir, doomy and deterministic, though far from heartless. The film radiates deep affection for its hapless hero Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon), a divorced, middle-aged oil-tanker captain whose sturdy reliability (“[He’s] a guy you can lean on,” says Denis) ultimately proves not enough to withstand the terrible weight placed upon him. As Denis expressed it during our conversation, “Sometimes fate is falling on your back and crushing you.”
Though partaking somewhat of Denis’ habitual spatial and temporal shifts, the scenes that follow that oblique opening sequence provide shards of exposition that cohere gradually into a surprisingly straightforward narrative. Abandoning his naval career, selling his vintage Alfa Romeo, pawning his watch and cashing in his life insurance, Marco gives up his peripatetic existence to rent a spacious apartment in a tony Parisian neighbourhood which he doesn’t even bother to furnish, inhabiting it like a detective on a stakeout. His radical change in lifestyle is prompted by the hospitalization of his niece, Justine (Lola Créton)—the naked nightwalker of the first sequence—the apparent suicide of his brother-in-law—the opening’s solitary starer, then corpse—and the collapse of his family’s shoe manufacturing business, all of which has left his sister Sandra (Julie Bataille) in emotional and financial chaos. Sandra holds one man responsible for all these tragedies: Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), a wealthy, elderly industrialist to whom her husband was in debt, and whom Sandra accuses of both precipitating her husband’s suicide and sexually abusing her daughter.
Upon moving into his new digs, Marco purposefully begins to move in on Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), his downstairs neighbour—and, not at all coincidentally, Laporte’s much younger mistress. Gorgeous, extremely desirable, and devoted to her young son, Raphaëlle is perhaps pitiable as an apparent “kept woman”—though she insists to Marco that Laporte “gave me a confidence I never had”—but above all she is an asset Marco seeks to either appropriate or despoil in his reckless attempt at retribution. Fixing Raphaëlle’s son’s bike, wrapping packs of smokes in a dress shirt and tossing it down to her from his terrace as she returns empty-handed from a just-closed corner store, coolly and methodically working his way into her life, her thoughts, her pants, Marco is Bastards’ most proactive character, but—as gradual revelations regarding the Silvestris’ catastrophe will prove—he is also its most naïve.
The film’s title evokes fatherlessness, illegitimacy, rot. Indeed, every family in Bastards is broken by male maleficence. Marco himself is a flawed father, generally absent, frequently late for meetings with his daughter—a bastard by someone’s measure. Yet while the men of Bastards, whether sympathetic or nefarious, act in ways that are finally all too comprehensible, the film’s women—Justine, Sandra, Raphaëlle—remain enigmatic, their degree of complicity in the bad business buried in Bastards’ battered heart never made entirely clear. However, a sudden, desperate action performed by Raphaëlle in the film’s closing moments—reminiscent of a similar gesture carried out by plantation matriarch Maria (Isabelle Huppert) at the conclusion of Denis’ White Material (2009)—speaks volumes about where she stands when push comes to shove. While Raphaëlle’s final gesture, like Maria’s, might be read as too much of a reverse deus ex machina for some, the more I reflect on it, the more it rings true. It might seem facile to defer to the Chester Himes quote Denis uses as the opening epigram for No Fear, No Die (1989)—“All men, whatever their race, colour or origins, are capable of anything and everything”—but such an assertion underlies Denis’ entire oeuvre. Murder, exploitation, cannibalism, tenderness, forgiveness: her characters, bastards or no, really are capable of anything.
Bastards opens in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox on October 11, beginning TIFF Cinematheque’s full Denis retrospective. Denis will be present for a Q&A at the October 18 evening screening of the film, and also appears on October 17 with Mati Diop to present her Carte Blanche selection of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973), followed by Diop’s Mille soleils (2013). The following conversation took place in September, when Bastards had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Cinema Scope: Do you still like to travel? I can only imagine how much of the last 25 years you’ve spent in airports, in taxicabs, in hotel lobbies, at film festivals.
Claire Denis: Of course I like to travel. But a film festival is not travelling. It’s very strange: a bed in a hotel room, breakfast, plane. You see nothing. Except when I was in India this summer for a retrospective—I spent almost a month there. Still, that was not travelling, because everything was organized. No, travelling is something I did when I was a child with my family. I was very used to it. Packing and unpacking. Location scouting I like. But festivals are a fake way of travelling.
Scope: Does travel inspire your work?
Denis: Travel is not inspiring. What is inspiring are moments of laziness. Daydreaming. Book-reading. Walking. Listening to music. Going to a concert. Travelling is a job. You can’t be daydreaming while travelling. Even on the plane I can’t daydream. I can read, I can drink too much champagne, I can sleep. But you have only nightmares on planes, because you’re trapped. The best time for imagination is when I have nothing to do, or when I decide not to do anything. To be loose.
Scope: It’s difficult to talk about where work comes from, to trace the origins of the first spark. Bastards has a strong, coherent narrative through-line and well-developed characters. And yet, after seeing Bastards—after seeing any of your films—the thing I walk away with above all is a sense of being transported. Of patterns, impressions, layers of things, the cadences of memories. As time passes I can completely forget the stories in your films, but those other elements remain very clear.
Denis: That’s my way. What I mean is that scriptwriting is one thing, but before that there must have been a sort of transportation to, not a story, but a mood, where I can see people, free or trapped, but in a space, in a mood. It’s not a spark, but rather a moody time. It’s very full of anxiety because I always dream that I will be lucky enough to have a story, fully shaped, come down on me, like the table of the law sent by God. In French we use “transport” to talk of transportation, like in English, but we also use the term to talk of falling on love: transport amoureux. It’s this movement that brings you beyond your will.
Scope: I’m going to appropriate that. Sometimes “falling in love” feels too doomed.
Denis: Ooh, yes, falling in love. [Makes the sound of something crashing] Of course, to be doomed is also part of some mood.
Scope: Perhaps as you get older, as you become more familiar with doom, falling in love feels more like a choice you can make. You’re not as deprived of your will. Sometimes you can see where things are going, how they’re going to go very badly, and choose to decline. Which is similar to making a film, no? An idea or a mood captivates you, sweeps you away, but it could be a dead end.
Denis: Mm. It’s true.
Scope: There were four years between White Material and Bastards. Was it difficult to conceive of or decide on Bastards as your next project?
Denis: Yes. But I want to say something first. You speak about transport amoureux, of falling in love. A few weeks ago I was in Berlin for a Stuart Staples and Tindersticks concert. The concert was in a gallery that held a painting of his wife. He dedicated a lot of songs to her. They met a long time ago. They have children. The music was conveying transport amoureux. It’s not a fall. After years of being together, raising children, not every day is an easy day. But suddenly during this concert I felt myself transported to love. That’s the same with film, you know? You decide on something hoping that it will transport you.
So, Bastards. My life was sad, in a way. My father died, which I expected. He died after five and a half years. He had a very long dying. But suddenly he was dead, and I myself had some little troubles. It’s easy to believe in fate sometimes. Sometimes fate is falling on your back and crushing you. I decided maybe it could be great to go back to Faulkner and fate. And film noir. The future as something you are trapped in. I was transported to a guy, Marco, that had everything: strength, charm, family, education, a good job. Everything is his future looks good. Suddenly, because he believed in his destiny, he comes back to help his sister and he’s trapped. He becomes the victim.
Scope: Doubling back once more to this idea of falling in love, I felt that the storyteller of Bastards is in love with Marco. The storyteller has a love for everything he represents.
Denis: Absolutely. I think I more or less fell in love with most of the characters. It’s hard to maintain a partnership otherwise. You can’t cheat on them. It has to be like that, you know? I know that Marco’s sister and Chiara’s character, Raphaëlle, are hard to love, in a way. Yet I had to be on their side. In the case of Marco, yes, it was very important to me that he was loved until the end. I wanted to be with him all the time.
Scope: The world of Bastards is cruel, but the film doesn’t feel like it’s being cruel to its characters.
Denis: It’s like Denis Levant in Beau travail (1999). When he kills himself at the end, I thought I was going to die.
Scope: The noir elements are rich and deep in Bastards. Lindon’s Marco feels like a Robert Ryan character. But Bastards also plays as a western—so Marco could also be a Ryan character in a western. What I mean is that Marco is an anachronism: he represents an ideal from the past. He’s a man’s man.
Denis: You’re right, but those men still exist, eh? I’ve been on those boats. I’ve been on oil tankers. Those guys have a great life. They have a lot of freedom. They go home three times a year. They make a decent living.
Scope: My father, who’s from Spain, joined the navy at 14, then worked for the German merchant marines. He was married and had a family very, very young, but one day at sea something snapped and he completely changed his life, abandoned everything and started anew in a different country. I’m certain he would never have been able to do that were he not working at sea.
Denis: When I was in Tahiti I remember meeting so many French men from the navy who, like your father, quit everything to start a second life with a Haitian woman. I realized they were not even sad, because they’d seen so little of their families in France. They send them money. Of course they love them, but they were not ever completely a part of their life.
Scope: Tell me about Raphaëlle, about Mastroianni. She’s very fascinating to me for different reasons.
Denis: She’s fascinating to me too!
Scope: As an actress, you mean.
Denis: And as a woman. It’s not easy to be a normal woman when you’re the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. It’s a hard job, because everyone is always reminding her of this. Catherine Deneuve is the iconic figure of the French woman, and Marcello Mastroianni is an iconic figure of the Mediterranean man. In a way, Chiara’s life is great. She’s received so much. And yet she had to fight to be someone.
Scope: I wonder if we see that fight onscreen in Bastards. “Cagey” is the wrong word; what’s compelling about Raphaëlle to me is that she’s constantly conflicted and contained. It’s only at the very end that, in a flash, she becomes decisive and violent. It seems, in retrospect, like she was hedging her bets. In the end she’s very mercenary, but leading up to this I really felt for her.
Denis: Me too. She accepted to be that beautiful woman with that old guy in a very feminine way. Some people say she’s too passive. But hey, come on! What leads a woman to become trapped in that life? Probably the child, you know? I hate it when perceived passivity in female characters is deemed anti-feminist. I think most women, especially in the past, learn very young that a certain veneer of passivity is a great way to conceal things. To hide, to accept, to not show too much hope in the future. To resign a little bit, without complaining. Passivity in a case like hers is brave, to me.
Scope: Is her character drawn from Sanctuary?
Denis: No. It’s more the doom that’s taken from Sanctuary. That and the fact that the young girl is used as a sexual object. There is something very strange in that character of the young girl. At the end of Sanctuary the father takes her to Paris, as if taking a young girl to Paris will dissolve the scars of what she’s been through, the rape and everything. They are in a garden, in the middle of Paris, and the way Faulkner puts it you understand that the father doesn’t dare to speak a word to her, but the hope is that maybe she’ll feel better. And her way to tell him that he cannot give her this relief, because now she is completely alone, is she takes a little powder box and she powders her nose. And that’s it.
Scope: Something that always interested me about your process is the way that you seem to begin with a set of ideas and then, at some point, with certain films, you might turn to literature for help with story. But based on what you’re telling me now I gather that you’re not even looking for story. You’re looking for gesture. You’re looking for something else in the literature to help you.
Denis: A mood, I would say. There is something in Faulkner that is so human. He had a way to write that makes you feel everything carnally. He brings you into the world of his characters physically and emotionally. It’s very damaging, I guess. I started reading him when I was very young, and for the worst reason. A famous writer of roman noir copied Sanctuary to make his own novel. James Hadley Chase. The novel was No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I was not allowed to read crime novels, but I read it anyway, and it had this rape in it. Shocking. And it led me to Faulkner. I’m not sure I understood everything in Faulkner, but the sense of losing control of your own life was something I immediately understood. As I Lay Dying I read in the college, and, oh, my god. You can feel the nails of the coffin inside your flesh, you know? I guess he’s a very special writer.
Scope: There’s something about the structural device, the narrative disorientation of The Wild Palms that also reminds me of your work.
Denis: Yeah. I think both of Wild Palms’ stories together create, whew, I don’t know, a failure. Both stories. You understand the failure, because they don’t believe, really. The couple falls in love, but the guiltiness is there. The same happens with the prisoner. He feels guilty to have escaped from jail. It’s so rich and brilliant. I think Faulkner is like a painter and a musician and a writer altogether.
Scope: Sometimes people have this idea that in order for a film to be truly cinematic it has to somehow employ effects that are pure to that form. I love that your work is able to draw so much of its cinematic power from music, and also from literature. Literature is, to some thinkers, anathema to cinema.
Denis: This is a joke. Literature is still a model. Literature invented flashbacks and flashforwards. Homer is the master of fiction filmmaking. I really think literature is still the pinnacle of modernity. People refuse to acknowledge this, maybe because they are afraid of the word “intellectual.” But literature and intellectualism have nothing to do with each other.
Scope: Tell me about your collaboration with Jean-Pol Fargeau. Do you discuss and then one of you writes? Are you both doing the actual writing? Do you pass material back and forth?
Denis: We have to be together, in the same room. In the kitchen. We write together, all the time.
Scope: Did you discuss, in this case, what you might want to draw from Faulkner or The Bad Sleep Well?
Denis: It’s not necessary immediately. I describe the mood and how it came to me. I don’t hide anything, but you cannot throw everything you have in mind at the head of someone you’re working with. It’s better to have lunch. Drink coffee. Smoke a cigarette. Walk. Listen to music.
Scope: The plot of Bastards seems airtight, but when you watch the film for the first time the opposite seems true. For a while it gives the illusion of being loose, wayward. It can take a long time to comprehend how the plot is working, yet by the end the film feels very grounded in plot. Does this effect of atmosphere and elision obscuring plot develop in the script or in the editing room?
Denis: In the script. We made the decision that the story will be revealed to the audience as it is revealed to Marco. We know nothing that he doesn’t know.
Scope: The visual refrain of Lola Créton walking naked in the streets could be an image Marco forms in his mind, perhaps an invention, the image he constructs in his mind when he tries to fathom what happened to her.
Denis: It was the leitmotif of the film. Maybe it’s my own image of that girl who comes from Faulkner. She’s young. She’s beautiful. She’s terribly wounded. And yet she seems solid. She’s walking with her head high. In those moments, she’s not a victim. She’s something else. Maybe she’s transporting us somewhere.
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
Cannes Review: Bastards (2013) - Essential Viewing - Next Projection Rowena Santos Aquino
Jessica Kiang at Cannes from The Playlist
The House Next Door [Elise Naknikian]
Wesley Morris at Cannes from Grantland
TIFF 2013: 'Bastards' (dir. Claire Denis, 2013) | PopMatters Alex Ramon
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
Párrafo 451 (Film 451: Bastards (2013)) Zeke Trautenberg
In Review Online [Francisco Lo]
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
Cannes 2013: Bastards – First Look Review Lee Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies
Cannes 2013. The Gloaming: Claire Denis' "Bastards" Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi
Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE
Pretty Clever Films [Brandy Dean]
TIFF 2013 | Bastards (Claire Denis, France)—Masters Robert Koehler from Cinema Scope, September 2013
NYFF51 Live: Claire Denis (Bastards) - The 51st New York Film ... Film Comment (capsule review)
Domenico La Porta at Cannes from Cineuropa
Cannes, Day Seven: J.C. Chandor makes good, Nicolas Winding Refn goes bad, and Claire Denis gets ugly Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club
New York : Bastards (Les salauds) - Village Voice Nick Schager (capsule review)
Movie Mezzanine [Jake Cole] (capsule review)
BASTARDS | siskelfilmcenter.org (capsule review)
Daily | Cannes 2013 | Claire Denis’s BASTARDS David Hudson at Fandor
MUBI [Daniel Kasman] Kasman interview from Mubi, October 4, 2013
Claire Denis on Bastards and tough women / The Dissolve Sam Adams interview, October 24, 2013
This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with Melika Bass and Lori Felker about The Intruder and Bastards, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, December 4, 2013
Cannes Review: Claire Denis' 'Bastards' - Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
'Bastards' Review: Claire Denis' Hypnotic Nocturnal Thriller | Variety Scott Foundas
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
Cannes 2013: Les Salauds (Bastards) – first look review Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian
Bastards: Powerful currents of dread run through this new film-noir ... Adam Nayman from the Globe and the Mail
'Bastards' showcases Claire Denis's depth and breadth as a ... Christina Strynatka from The Toronto Examiner
Claire Denis' French drama 'Bastards' closes French Cinema Now ... Moira Sullivan from The San Francisco Examiner
Glamour Boys: Cannes Report, May 21, 2013 | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres
'Bastards': Claire Denis film easier to feel than to grasp - Chicago ... Bill Stamets from the Chicago Sun-Times
Tindersticks - Les Salauds [Soundtrack] (2013) download by IsraBox
Denis, Jean-Pierre
MURDEROUS MAIDS (Les
blessures assassins)
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
The crazed, homeless man who keeps constant
guard at the
Murderous
Maids Gerald Peary
It was 1933, too early for the
Hitchcockian warning about danger at the dark top of the stairs, when, in the
French town of Le Man, a bourgeois housewife, Mme. Lancin, and her adult
daughter, Genevieve, ascended to the attic quarters to check on what their
servants, the Papin sisters, were up to. What did they peep at that day? Something
sordid, carnal, unimaginable? Whatever, the invaded siblings, Christine and
Lea, turned on their masters like frenzied Furies, hacking them to death,
mutilating the beet-red bodies.
Just your typical lesbian incest
murder mystery, with Marxist/Freudian overtones? Murderous Maids is the latest
in an exhaustive run of takes on this infamous case, from Jean Genet's ritual
drama, The Maids, through impassioned essays by Sartre and De Beauvoir, from
Margaret Atwood's novel, Captive, through movie variants. One film is based
directly on the story, Nancy Meckler's Sister My Sister (1994). Three others
seem inspired by it with their symbiotic two-girl psycho killers: Rafael
Zielinsky's Fun (1993), Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994), Claude
Chabrol's La Ceremonie (1995).
Alone among the film dramas,
Murderous Maids, directed by France's Jean-Pierre Denis, has an allegiance to
the actual facts of the case. It's based on a 1996 book reconstructing the
crime, L'affaire Papin by Paulette Houdyer. Characters in this movie, including
the murderers and murdered, carry the names of the real-life people. The film
also goes back in time, starting with the unhappy, have-not childhood of the
Papins. Christine, the older, and Lea are forced by their indifferent mother
into servitude, farmed out at her convenience from one stultefying hiring to
another. Employment by the ill-fated Lancin family is their last dead-end job.
Murderous Maids leaps ahead of
other versions of the story with the explicitness of the sex: bold, hot, two
barebreasted sisters lying atop each other in their hellpit of a tiny room,
adorned only with a cross on the wall. "Jesus, you forgave Mary
Magdalene," Christine prays at church. Despite being made in the most
skillful, proficient way, Murderous Maids is a film difficult to really like: a
cold story told coolly, with a heroine, Christine (Sylvie Testud), who is hard,
humorless, pathological, a walking cherry bomb.
Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]
Lead by the media, the world grows progressively more fascinated with what drives humans to kill. This film attempts to give the famous, often depicted, Papin sisters brutal murders of their masters a balanced treatment by piecing together an analysis of the sisters that was absent at the time of their rushed trial (which led to the introduction of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the courtroom).
Murderous Maids is a model of restraint where nothing is forced on the audience. There's no manipulative music and no scenes there simply to advance the plot. The story just unfolds as a series of scenes from their life. They are ordered, but you fill in the gaps yourself, figure out what's changed with each the new scene. This style creates a great deal of anticipation, allowing the murders to be something of a surprise even though they are a given coming in. The film only shows you that Christine will act out in some way in response to whatever she doesn't like, which is everything that degrades her or keeps her from her sister.
There are no heroes or villians here, and no easy scapegoats. You want to like the sisters, but it does not hide or excuse their dark side. You want to dislike their masters, but none of them are any worse than normal and the ones they kill are the best of them all.
There's no easy person or class to blame for what the sisters went through and the horrible outcome of them becoming murderers. You can blame the bourgeoisie because, though they didn't abuse the sisters, they provide a dehumanizing environment that offers no freedom whatsoever where people are turned into as Christine says, "a dormat for others, without a name." You can blame their mother, who abandoned them early in life then sent them off to work later so she could use their wages to make her life easier. There's also Christine's mental illness, or religious repression that took away the older sister and won't condone Christine sleeping with the younger one Lea (Julie-Marie Parmentier).
Sylvie Testud, an actress worthy of far more attention than she gets, gives an exceptional restrained multi dimensional performance as Christine, her work really allowing for so many interpretations. She's intelligent but she may be a multiple personality and her lot in life combined with an incestuous relationship prevents her from showing her true feelings except in a few private moments. Her dominance over her naïve follower sister, her verbal violence with her mother who also vies for control of the sister, and her subjugation at work, amongst other things all come across without the usual help and gimmicks. Her character slowly boils over with repressed desire and rage until the inevitable lashing out. Though she impulsively explodes from time to time it's more a quietly simmering that only cools when she's alone with her beloved sister and can play around a little. She can be the perfect maid, but she quickly grows obstinate at any dehumanizing element, which makes her the champion of class struggle Jean-Paul Sartre tried to portray her as. She can be perfectly sane, but her paranoia builds up, sometimes rightfully and other times not.
The film is not even in the league with Claude Chabrol's brilliant La Ceremonie, also inspired by the Papin sisters, but I'd rate that among the top 5 films of the 90's. Murderous Maids tries to do different things and is certainly a worthy investigation.
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Dennis, Danfung
HELL AND BACK AGAIN B 86
The timing of the release of this film is not nearly as
impactive historically as another previously released Oscar nominated film
RESTREPO (2010), shot by photojournalist Tim Hetherington who was recently
killed
Shot using an unvarnished cinéma vérité style, where the camera moves when the troops on the ground move, hearing everything that they hear, which includes the confusion of trying to identify the direction of incoming fire, as they are once again surrounded on all sides. Almost immediately they lose a fallen soldier, once again questioning the wisdom of implementing such a mission. What happens unexpectedly is that the leader on the ground, U.S. Marines Echo Company sergeant Nathan Harris, who commands the unit in the early footage, gets shot in the hip just a day before he is expected to return home from his third tour of duty. The injury blows away part of his hip and leg, where he is seen afterwards back in North Carolina with his wife Ashley, where he has to adjust to the mindblowing ordinariness and mediocrity of regular life, which can’t compare to the intensity that he’s used to. While his injury is not life threatening, he will likely have difficulty walking and leading any kind of normal life, where his adjustment is enormously difficult, especially since his pain medication often leaves him confused and bewildered, where he can be seen waving guns around in the house or in the car, several times pointed directly at his wife. He appears to be an unexploded time bomb just waiting to go off and never once do we see any evidence of psychological counseling being offered, nor do we see the intervention of other family members. It appears this soldier is left largely on his own to deal with such an immense, life-altering injury which carries with it as much emotional as physical damage.
The film moves back and forth between the front lines and
Harris’s life on the homefront, where the certainty in his mind of leading the
mission, despite losing fellow soldiers and taking incoming fire, makes more
sense to him than adapting to life back home under his current situation. In Afghanistan, he’s in control, gladly
assuming responsibility for others, but in North Carolina he doesn’t have the
clue to recovery, which is filled with uncertainty, as neither he nor his wife
have any answers for what the future holds.
In the meantime, he can make life miserable for her, where the title
refers to his frame of mind after returning home, often becoming a bullying
husband who flies off the handle over petty issues, which largely covers up
just how weak and insecure he feels inside, something Marines aren’t trained to
feel. None of his buddies are with him
now, he has little use for a rifle, and he’s completely unsure what the future
holds for the both of them, uncertain if they will even stay together. While this film follows a severely wounded
soldier back home, a story replicated thousands of times around the country, it
also is being released at a time when the U.S. is making preparations to pull
its forces out of Afghanistan, having already pulled troops out of Iraq, where
the public has grown tired of a lingering war and wants to move on, as the
economic climate is threatening everyone, literally kicking us all in the face,
changing how people live their lives, where sympathy is not at a premium. We all have to face the facts and make
whatever adjustments are necessary to build a new life, one fraught with still
more difficulties down the road, without the certainty of financial stability. There is a real question to be asked whether
this decade-long war on terror has made
Hell
and Back Again – review Peter
Bradshaw from The Guardian, also seen
in photos here: On
location in Afghanistan for Hell and Back Again - in pictures
Ten years of military involvement in Afghanistan is a grim
anniversary. We have seen two reportage movies about this: Janus
Hell And Back Again Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tom Huddleston
It’s an indictment of American news
journalism that so many documentary filmmakers feel it’s their job to tell the
stories of soldiers both in and returning from the
TimeOut NY Keith Uhlich
Plenty of documentaries have been termed fly-on-the-wall;
Danfung Dennis’s terrific nonfiction feature about U.S. Marines Echo Company
sergeant Nathan Harris takes that step-back-and-observe ethos to spectacularly
agile extremes. The director’s imagery (he shot the movie himself) is
ceaselessly mobile, floating with hypnotic grandeur through both of the film’s
interwoven sections: a 2009 mission where the Marine and his fellow soldiers
seek out Taliban strongholds in
There’s a hint of Kubrick in the vérité cinematography,
especially in the way the camera sweeps through the Afghani landscape whenever
gunfire erupts (practically a DIY Paths of Glory) or how a Walmart is
made to look like a glinting, Shining-like labyrinth. The visuals are
consistently bleak, but the film’s engagement with Harris and the often-harsh
world around him is clear-eyed and empathetic. Save for a cringingly wet-eyed
song at the end credits, any glib partisan sympathies are eschewed for an
illuminating on-the-ground approach: Several scenes involving
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride
Photojournalist-filmmaker Danfung Dennis’ Oscar-nominated
documentary, “Hell And Back Again” is a bracing astonishment, even if it were
not opening in a week that’s seen the deaths of three major international
correspondents in
Film Monthly.com – HELL AND BACK AGAIN (2011) Sanela Djokovic
Skillfully and fluently, photojournalist and director Danfung Dennis
presents us with a poignant panorama capturing the phantoms of the battlefields
in rural Afghanistan and those facing a young wounded Marine at home in North
Carolina. With polished imagery, unmuddled matter and harsh truths, Hell
and Back Again is a salient composition on the war in
Marine Seargent Nathan Harris is part of a small group of top-notch soldiers
(US Marines Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment) anchored in a
farming community and Taliban stronghold in southern
25-year-old Seargent Harris goes from flying bullets on all sides to intense
physical therapy and a growing dependency on pain medication, trying to find a
sense of normalcy with the help of his young, patient, and loving wife Ashley.
The simple life of small-town
Dennis, an acclaimed photojournalist who has covered both the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan since 2006, brilliantly entwines the two worlds, transitioning from
war coverage—bullets, limbs and refugees—to a deeply personal battle of a
soldier returned home to his wife. Without infusing any facts, figures or
political rhetoric into the film, we feel we understand the essentials. Scenes
where soldiers engage in discussion with the locals of the villages they are
breaching are so important in exhibiting the humanity and the efforts that most
people do not think about, and never get to see. We see the hardships of
hard-working farmers forced to leave their homes for long periods of time and
the way that American soldiers stumble between understanding and helping and
still doing their jobs.
Items of Harris’ home life are equally telling as he tries to live his life in
a fog constituted by the memories of war, the desire to fight and be with his
brothers again, and the physical pain that consumes most of his day. Especially
moving is the relationship with his wife, a young woman entirely devoted and in
love with a man she barely recognizes anymore.
Hell and Back Again is a striking visual experience (winner at the
2011 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Cinematography category, as
well as Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Award in the Documentary
category) that reminds us in real-life, gritty terms what war really is, what
it really means for everyone.
EdinburghGuide.com [Dylan Matthew]
Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti
Hell and Back Again - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Merin
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Scott Macdonald]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Slant Magazine [Lauren Wissot]
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Erich Asperschlager]
Hell and Back Again (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Ryan Keefer
Onion AV Club Alison Willmore
Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]
The Daily Rotation [Sean Canfield]
Village Voice Michelle Orange
Hell and Back Again - BOXOFFICE Magazine Steve Ramos
Chicago Reader Ben Sachs
HELL AND BACK AGAIN Facets Multi Media
MediaMikes.com - Blu-ray [Mike Gencarelli]
NPR Renee Montagne interview with filmmaker Danfung Dennis from NPR, October 18, 2011
Danfung
Dennis on Hell and Back Again: 'The experience of war is not simply on the
battlefield' - video Video interview
by Laurence Topham and Elliot Smith from The
Guardian,
NYT: director interview
Michael Kamber interview from The
New York Times,
TimeOut Chicago
Matt Singer
Hell
and Back Again – review Philp French
from The Observer
Hell
and Back Again - Featured Articles From Boston.com Wesley Morris from The
Review: Hell and Back Again - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary
Critic Review for Hell and Back Again on washingtonpost.com Michael O’Sullivan
Battles
continue on home front for young Marine in - Las Vegas ... Carol Cling from The Las Vegas Review,
'Hell and Back Again' review: war's 2 front lines Walter Addiego from The SF Chronicle
Los Angeles Times Robert Abele
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] also seen here: Roger Ebert
Depardon, Raymond
Depardon,
Raymond World Cinema
Raymond Depardon has helped revolutionize photojournalism in
Lumière, Astruc, Bazin: The Cinema of Raymond Depardon - CineAction