Shot entirely in Tel Aviv and
Both men regularly attend the study groups, but they draw the ire of the
community’s Decency Police, a morals committee usually led by the rabbi and
several respected members of the community when they believe someone is no
longer in adherence to God’s law, where they take all necessary steps to
eradicate any departures from the norm.
Aaron even participates in a visit when the group is forced to intervene
with a man who is romancing a young girl who is engaged to another. In this case, it was the girl’s father who
initiated the action by pleading to the rabbi for some relief. But when this same group without the rabbi
starts making intimidating visits to Aaron, threatening to close down his shop,
starting rumors his meat is not kosher, the two become ostracized. This couldn’t be more underplayed, as the
rhythm of the film is established through daily routines that become more
familiar over time, where the interaction between people is quiet and
soft-spoken, where even the husband and wife sleep in separate beds which are
joined together for conjugal intimacy.
This film doesn’t fully address the subject of gay love within the
Orthodox community, as Aaron is by no means gay, he’s simply found someone he
loves who makes him feel “alive,” but it certainly paints a witchhunt mentality
of righteousness and moral indignation, casting out those who dare to defy the
norm, leaving the ending a bit ambiguous, but certainly the painful struggle
within Aaron’s family and his own internal conflicts of unending self
incriminations are evident. The musical
score by Nathaniel Mechaly has the classical feel of an organ and violin
concerto that offers a wall to wall sound design that borders on the mournful
and the sacred.
Historically, the Torah does not consider homosexual attraction sinful,
only acting upon it through intercourse is forbidden according to Levicticus 18:22, calling it an
abomination, a deviation from the natural way.
Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits in the original release of the Encyclopedia Judaica writes:
Jewish law [...]
rejects the view that homosexuality is to be regarded merely as a disease or as
morally neutral.... Jewish law holds that no hedonistic ethic, even if called
"love", can justify the morality of homosexuality any more than it
can legitimize adultery or incest, however genuinely such acts may be performed
out of love and by mutual consent.
However, these views are currently undergoing a more modern revision, where
at least a small number of modern Orthodox rabbi’s have viewed homosexuality as
an accident beyond one’s control, therefore not subject to prosecution. Though largely rejected by the majority, it’s
important to consider that essential elements of Judaism include compassion,
sympathy, empathy, and understanding, all of which are forgotten by the
so-called Decency Police, whose actions themselves are called into
question.
I made an inquiry to my Jewish nephew whose relatives all live in
As to the status of
homosexuality in Jewish law and in the Jewish community, it's important to
remember that there are many such laws and communities. There is no Jewish pope
and no central authority for deciding things, so every community pretty much
does its own thing. The Reform Jews don't even formally accept the legitimacy
of Jewish law, they have a thoroughly modern and democratic (you might say
secular) concept of ethics. The Conservative movement pays lip service to
Jewish law, but in general they are able to reinterpret most anything to make
it fit a modern worldview. 2 or 3 years ago they began accepting openly gay
rabbinical students.
The Orthodox are divided into modern and traditional. Many modern Orthodox have
no problem with homosexuality, though they are probably still a minority. There
are some gay Orthodox rabbis on the liberal wing. Many would say that
homosexuality is officially a sin, but that it's a minor matter and they don't
have anything personally against it. The ultra-Orthodox are sticklers for the
traditional interpretation of Jewish law and they take homosexuality very
seriously. But they don't hack off hands or physically punish people - they
just ostracize. As long as gay people keep their habit quiet, just as men
visiting prostitutes or other nefarious dealings, most are willing to look the
other way
At least that's my take on it.
Alec Burko
--
לייזער
User comments from imdb Author: larry-411 from
I attended the North American Premiere of "Eyes Wide Open"
at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. This is a somewhat provocative
yet understated examination of what it's like to be gay in the Orthodox Jewish
world. In his first feature, director Haim Tabakman, working from a Merav
Doster script, introduces us to Aaron (Zohar Shtrauss) and Ezri (Ran Danker).
Aaron runs a Kosher butcher shop that's been in the family for generations.
Ezri is an outsider, already under suspicion for questionable behavior, who
enters Aaron's world with possible intentions beyond purchasing a hunk of meat.
There's a joke there but I'll resist. The cultural constraints placed upon
gays, or anyone who is different, are painfully drawn out as the neighbors
decide what actions to take. The Orthodox Jewish community sends in its own
goons (enforcers of God?).
This character-driven film is haunting and poignant. Like many foreign films,
natural lighting is predominant. The cinema verité style, without regard to
shadows, is much more powerful than images in traditional
The collision of religion and sexuality is a common theme at every film
festival. What is the meaning of restraint? Are we really being true to God if
we destroy ourselves in the process?
Eyes
Wide Open (Eynaim Pekukhot) Dan
Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily, also here:
Screen International (Dan Fainaru) review
A highly controversial theme, homosexuality
in the Jewish Orthodox world, gets an earnest but strangely tame, still-life
treatment in Haim Tabakman’s debut feature about a Jerusalem butcher (Strauss)
who falls for his new hired hand (Danker), scandalising the entire community
around him. Originally intended as a 50-minute TV drama, this is neither the
passionate male love story it purports to be nor the portrait of a serious
moral and religious dilemma it could have been. Still it may well generate
interest due to its controversial subject matter.
Homeless Ezri
(played by Israeli teen idol Ran Danker), wanders through the alleys of
Jerusalem’s ultra-religious quarter in the pouring rain, ultimately washing up
in butcher Aaron’s (Zohar Strauss) shop, asking for a job. A phone call he
makes to a former lover clearly establishes Ezri as being gay, but Aaron,
married with kids and a highly respected member of the community, has no
inkling of that. He hires Ezri as his assistant, lets him sleep in the shop’s
back room, invites him to join the family’s Friday night dinner and even
attends religious lessons at the nearby yeshiva with him.
But Ezri,
abandoned by his previous partner, wants more. He tempts Aaron into joining him
for a traditional naked dip in a freshwater pool. And instead of cleansing him,
it corrupts the butcher’s already dissatisfied soul and lights a fire that he
will not be able to extinguish.
The rest is
painfully predictable. Since Aaron doesn’t make much of an attempt to hide
their affair, the result is inevitable. First in a friendly manner, than
threateningly, he is told to get rid of Ezri. Aaron takes the abuse on board
but does not respond, even when his shop is stoned, and he is visited by the
Decency Police, real-life squad of thugs which tries to keep Orthodox problems
out of the eyes of the world and the secular police. Aaron’s wife never
reproaches him but her suffering is more eloquent than any protest.
Tabakman never
attempts to tackle front-on the moral, religious and social problems generated
by the gay central relationship, focusing first and foremost on the personal
drama. But since what really draws his two characters together is lust -
love is not in evidence here – and as they are never too concerned with the
clash between their faith and their actions, interest in these two individuals
sadly runs aground. Aaron’s pangs of conscience, at least concerning his
family, are visible, but Ezri seems immune to any internal conflicts.
Tabakman, who
edited David Volach’s much awarded My Father My Lord takes on a
similar downbeat, minimalist approach. For large parts of the film, however, no
clients enter Aaron’s shop; his children rarely feature; the streets are empty
and deserted. It all seems unreal, a feeling which is strongly reinforced by
the two protagonists, who seem often at loss navigating their parts. Strauss,
whose role is more complex, should be able to convey more, but leaving the audience
to provide the answers isn’t enough here.
Matt Bochenski Little White Lies
Cannes.
"Eyes Wide Open" David
Hudson at
Variety (Alissa Simon) review at Cannes, May 20, 2009
A Festival of Auteurs Manohla Dargis at
LGBT topics and
Judaism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Homosexuality
and Judaism - ReligionFacts
My
Jewish Learning: Homosexuality
and Halakhah Rabbi Michael Gold
Homosexuality: Is There a Unique Torah Perspective Rabbi Benjamin Hecht
Initial
Religious Counseling for a Male Orthodox Adolescent ... Initial Religious Counseling for a Male Orthodox Adolescent
Homosexual, by Joel B. Wolowelsky and
Bernard L. Weinstein
Homosexuality and Lesbianism
Kosher Sex
aka: Plaff! or Too Afraid of Life
Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule review
Who's been throwing eggs at Concha? That's the central
mystery in this goofy 1988 social comedy from
Tabio's screwball soap opera takes us into the lives and
loves of a family in the middle-class suburbs of
From Soy Cuba to Soy
Turista: the 7 Days In Havana portmanteau project
features seven directors who have more in common with the Cannes Film Festival,
where the film premiered, than the Caribbean political hotspot where it is set.
The result is a bouncy and uneven bop through this most seductive of cities,
which should attract the curious but won’t rehabilitate the somewhat bruised
reputation of the film anthology. It’s also arguable how well
But Havana, capital of the self-described Socialist Republic of
Cuba and now run by Fidel Castro’s brother Raul, is a survivor; a city with an
enduring global cachet, a magnetic fascination which should exert a pull on
audiences which have already responded to the Paris and New York anthologies.
Running at 128 minutes, 7 Days In
With each piece set on a consecutive day of the week, some, in particular Cuban native Juan Carlos Tabio’s Bittersweet and The Fountain by Laurent Cantet, successfully dig under the surface to convey a little of what it means to be Cuban today. Gaspar Noe’s contribution is the most contemporary and cinematic. Elia Suleiman’s schtick may be as deceptively simple as ever, but his warmly familiar routine helps underscore some of the film’s more perceptive points. The longest, Julio Medem’s Celia’s Temptation, adopts a bafflingly cheesy tone, however, which sets it at jarring odds with its colleagues.
El Yuma, which is slang for yankee, casts Hutcherson as a visiting actor caught up in a drunken night in the city with taxi driver Angelito (Vladimir Cruz). Del Toro’s opener sets the look of the film, all brashly jeweled tones and smoky orange interiors, and cinematographer Daniel Aranyo takes credit here and on the shorts made by Medem, Suleiman and Tabio. Diego Bussel took over on Cantet’s and Trapero’s films while Noe memorably works his own camera.
Trapero’s Tuesday film, Jam Session, stars Emir Kusturica
as himself, a drunken Serbian film director arriving in
Medem’s Cecilia’s Temptation, meanwhile, with its lounge-lizard
soundtrack and overdone soft-focus colours, tells the story of a chanteuse torn
between the
Tabio and Cantet finish the piece with their closely-linked
domestic dramas, pulling 7 Days In
Cuban writer Leonardo Padura and his wife Lucia Lopez Coll are
credited with co-coordinating the screenplay for the entire piece, and he
collaborated on most of the shorts (except for Suleiman, Noe, and Cantet, who
wrote their own). Viewers looking for a hard political view on
7
Days in Havana: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter
Josh Hutcherson stars in the Cuban film directed by Croisette alumni including Laurent Cantet, Gaspard Noe and Elia Suleiman, as well as Benicio Del Toro.
Like a mojito that overdoes it on the lime juice, the omnibus
film 7 Days in
Oscillating between a sightseer’s tour of the island (now in its
53rd year of Castro rule, with Raul having officially replaced Fidel
as of 2008) and a more intimate portrait of some of its denizens, the ensemble
of short films are structured to fit in a single week, with one movie per day
and a handful of characters who reappear in several of them. If the patchwork
of stories captures the many layers of life in
The more touristy fare kicks off with Del Toro’s El Yuma, which follows a young American actor, Teddy (Hutcherson), during a wild and crazy night that includes plenty of beer, rum, girls, hookers and eventually a transvestite that he unwittingly takes back to his room. If there are no major surprises in the short – whose title is Cuban slang for “American” – the long and drunken trip is an easy enough ride, especially since Teddy seems to remain fairly aloof to all the poverty and prostitution around him.
A similar premise is proffered in Pablo Trapero’s Jam Session, which follows two-time Palme d’Or winner Emir Kusturica as he accepts an honorary prize from the Havana Film Festival in between bouts of drinking and schmoozing with local musicians. While nothing really special happens throughout the romp, it features some catchy handheld footage, including an extended sequence-shot that follows the Serbian director from the pits of a down and dirty nightclub to the city’s breathtaking shores.
Of all the Lonely Planet-esque works, the strongest one is Elia Sulieman’s Diary of a Beginner, in which the Palestinian filmmaker applies his trademark combination of Keaton and Tati-style humor to explore the world in and around his upscale hotel. There’s plenty of irony and some powerful compositions in these telling vignettes, and the one where the director watches tourists and prostitutes mingle beside a life-size bronze of Hemingway is perhaps the most memorable in the whole series.
As for the more socially conscious fare, things initially take a turn towards pure kitsch in The Temptation of Cecilia, where Spanish director Julio Medem (Sex and Lucia) tackles the dilemma of a local singer (Cristela de la Caridad Herrera) with all the subtlety of a Telemundo series. A decent cameo by Daniel Bruhl can only partially redeem the only short to specifically deal with Cubans trying to flee their homeland, but the overlit photography, slow-motion sex scenes and weepy ballades don’t do the story any service.
Native Cuban Jean Carlos Tabio (Guantanamera) fairs better with Bittersweet, in which his favored actress Mirta Ibarra plays a mom working overtime as both a baker and a shrink, trying to make ends meet during one disastrous afternoon. Likewise, French director Laurence Cantet (The Class) offers up a more realistic view of local life in The Fountain, a very documentary-style portrait of the residents in a ramshackle Havana building who team up to build an altar to the Virgin Mary.
Never afraid to raise eyebrows, Gallic bad boy Gasper Noe dishes out the most edgy entry with Ritual, where a teenage girl is subjected to the freaky mojos of a local witch doctor after she’s caught in bed with a girlfriend. Featuring an opening sequence that depicts the sort of booty-bopping usually seen in a Sean Paul video, and an extended voodoo scene where the underage victim is stripped down in a swamp, this provocative exercise provides minor aesthetic thrills.
Songs and on-screen performances by talented local musicians, including Kelvis Ochoa (Habana Blues) and trumpet player Alexander Abreu, supply a welcome musical backdrop to what’s ultimately a pleasant but somewhat forgettable Havana holiday.
Tahimik,
Kidlat
WHY
IS YELLOW THE MIDDLE OF THE RAINBOW? (Bakit dilaw aug gitna ng bahag-hari?) A 99
aka: I Am Furious…Yellow
Philippines (175 mi) 1981 – 1993
How
are we going to finish this film? We
could just wait for the spaghetti to run out.
—Kidlat Tahimik
This rare film was originally scheduled to be screened at the downtown
Drake Hotel in Chicago as part of the Prak-sis
New Media Art Festival, a three-day conference offering artistic
responses to the legacy of Cold War-era social upheaval in southeast Asia, but
the 16 mm print, the only surviving copy in the world, repeatedly stuck in the
projector, inflicting severe print damage causing the celluloid to burn, so the
screening was re-scheduled a week later to the School of the Art Institute,
where only a handful of people were fortunate enough to see this remarkable
film. Kidlat Tahimik, a Tagalog
translation of “silent lightning,” remains an obscure underground filmmaker,
considered the “Father of Philippine Independent Cinema,” but is also a writer,
artist and actor who was born Eric de Guia in Baguio City, Philippines, who
grew up in a life of privilege in a summer resort community located in the
presence of several U.S. Military bases, an experience that heavily influenced
his films, which tend to be scathing critiques of the aftereffects of
colonialism. Graduating from the
University of the Philippines in Speech and Drama, Tahimik studied at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, earning a Masters
degree in Business Administration, working as a researcher for the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris from 1968 to 1972, an
organization committed to spreading Western technology to lesser-developed countries,
where he wrote fertilizer distribution reports while working on a farm in
Norway before returning home to become a filmmaker. Tearing up his diploma and changing his name,
Tahimik lived in various artist communes, including one in
Bryan L. Yeatter describes Tahimik’s life during the 70’s in his book Cinema of the Philippines:
Tahimik traveled to
Europe where he was going to try to make a living selling trinkets, but somehow
along the way he managed to make contact with Werner Herzog, and using borrowed
equipment, outdated film stock, and stock footage, he put together his first
film [in 1977], Mababangong Bangungot
(Perfumed Nightmare) for a mere $10,000—a remarkably low cost even in its
time. The film mirrored his own experience as Tahimik played the lead, a young
man who dreams of escaping the stifling existence of his isolated rural
community and seeing the modern world. Through an American acquaintance, he
travels to Paris to run a gumball concession, and later ventures to Germany,
ultimately concluding that the modern world may have much to offer, but has
also sacrificed much of importance in the process of its development.
Under Herzog’s tutelage, he took up filmmaking, making his
first film, PERFUMED NIGHTMARE (1977), a mixture of documentary, diary film,
fictionalized autobiography, cinematic essay and ethnography, and winner of
three awards at the Berlin Film Festival, where Tahimik is appalled by the massive
expansion and pervasive influence of Western technology while raging against
the colonialist impulses that led France and then the United States to make the
Philippines their own exclusive property, where the economic model was much
like the slave trade, using cheap exploited labor to ravage the nation’s
resources in order to enhance the quality of living in America while leaving
the Philippines in dire economic straits.
Screened by Tom Luddy (Telluride Film Festival co-founder) at the
Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, Tahimik met American director Francis Ford
Coppola (who distributed the film in the United States) just about the time he
was envisioning shooting his film APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) in the Philippines. Commonly associated with the Third
Cinema movement that rejects the
More than a decade in the making, this is nothing less than revolutionary filmmaking, where the film “defies summary simply because of the sheer volume of ground it covers,” according to author and professor Christopher Pavsek, becoming a magnum opus that questions what it means to be a post-colonial Filipino, where the director had to wait until his oldest son was old enough to narrate a large portion of the film, creating an epic film diary spanning the decade of the 1980’s as seen through the eyes of Tahimik and his family. What is singularly unique about this film is the pervasive use of children, whose point of view is the focal point of the picture, as the film is a coming-of-age essay that coincides with a child growing up, curious and inquisitive, asking questions about the world around him, where the director acts as a father-figure narrator, where the film is largely a dialogue between father and oldest son, Kidlat de Guia (now a talented filmmaker in his own right), who ages noticeably as the film progresses leading up to his entrance into high school. Tahimik met his wife Katrin de Guia, who is also an artist and writer, while in Germany, seen throughout making stained glass artworks, where they also have two younger children, Kawayan and Kabunyan de Guia, where art defines how this family expresses itself. Calling the film a “celluloid collage,” we watch the family on overseas vacations, participate in school projects, and capture a child’s first steps, while also using a series of newspaper headlines and archival television reports to delve into national stories. Tahimik seamlessly blends the two together, where the personal becomes the political, all corresponding to a progression of the director’s life as a Filipino father. Using surreal imagery that often challenges the logic of the narrative, this three-hour diary incorporates contemporary history of the Philippines, Tahimik’s own family, found footage, newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts, home movies, travel footage, and documentation of public events and political demonstrations, where documentary footage is mixed with scripted performances. The film begins in Monument Valley, the site of many John Ford westerns beginning with STAGECOACH (1939), where the family is seen posing for pictures at John Ford's Point while rousing Hollywood music plays for what the director calls spaghetti movies, as the filmmaker and his son hitch a ride with (the unidentified) Dennis Hopper in his old Cadillac, which raises the question of how Indians were portrayed in the movies, continually shown in stereotype as the archenemy of the original American settlers in the West, where Indians were portrayed as savage creatures who were less than human, yet this was their land that was being trampled upon and stolen from them, where they had to be pushed aside by force to make way for the advancement of the “white man.” Following a similar theme, Tahimik identifies the Philippines as a Third World country (Third World definition - Third World Traveler) that was formerly colonized by First World nations, where the differentiation between the two can be expressed in their use of machines, as First World nations use machines to perform much of the work that in the Philippines is still performed by human labor, what Tahimik proudly tells his son is “people power.”
"Towards a Third Cinema" Towards a Third Cinema, by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino:
The anti-imperialist
struggle of the peoples of the
Tahimik is an unusual sort of film pioneer, relying upon
gentle humor and a sharp wit, not to mention spashes of avant garde,
experimental cinema used in a playful
manner, with inspired musical choices like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana Carl
Orff - O Fortuna ~ Carmina Burana - YouTube (4:51) and surprise appearances
from unidentified film artists like Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, and
Andrei Tarkovsky (the only time he came to America in 1983 for the Telluride
Film Festival), as Tahimik points out the vast economic divide between the rich
and the poor, offering a sharp critique of capitalism and Western technology
that refuses to recognize the human value contributed by each individual, where
society becomes slaves to technology and machines, including industrial
advancement that exploits the poor with low wages and poor working conditions. In the mountainous region of Baguio City
where this family lives, the indigenous community co-exists with the locals,
even though their ways and understanding of their own history may be different,
where the director seems to take great pleasure profiling local craftsmen and
women, offering images where people power is seen moving massive rocks and
boulders into a line to build a bridge across the river. Expanding on the historical confusion, the
local community is seen embracing the colonial influence of the United States,
where the presence of American military camps are scattered everywhere,
including nearby Camp John Hay which always celebrates the 4th
of July with fireworks and family games while distributing ice cream for all
the kids, where Filipino’s also grew up thinking this was the Philippine
Independence Day as well, as it was one of the few holidays everyone celebrated
together and overshadowed their own country’s national holiday (Araw ng Kalayaan).
Like John Ford and his movies, this is the
According to Raya Martin, arguably Philippine’s greatest
filmmaker, he calls this film the best Filipino movie ever made in an
Kidlat Tahimik’s cinema
is best summarized by a scene in the film. Footage from his infamous
unfinished-to-date Magellan project, an epic retelling of the explorer’s
expedition to the Philippines, narrates: “Magellan taught his valet the
rudiments of chess. Not only does he carve his own pieces and learns their
movements, he picks up easily the thinking patterns of being a winner. The
master realizes, for the first time, the slave is a thinking animal capable of
plotting his own moves.” “Checkmate,” says Kidlat Tahimik, who acts as the
indio slave in the film.
And as the whole film
is a constant self-referential to Kidlat, the filmmaker, trying to make sense
of his footage on the editing table, the celluloid on a flatbed spills all over
a printed text by the Spanish scholar Antonio de Nebrija: Language is the
perfect instrument of Empire.
“Is it any wonder that
the indio now behaves like his master?”
One of the abrupt shifts of the film is newsreel footage reporting the assassination of Presidential candidate Benigno Aquino (assassination of Ninoy Aquino) as he arrives at the Manila airport, reportedly shot by “communists” say the initial reports, though more likely the murder was carried out by the bodyguards assigned to protect him by the Marcos government. Sitting President Ferdinand Marcos, closely aligned with American President Ronald Reagan, ruled as a dictator for over twenty years, the last ten under a declared martial law, where he is believed to have looted billions of dollars from the Filipino treasury. The outrage surrounding the Aquino murder catapulted his widow Corazon Aquino into the political spotlight, leading her to run for President under the banner of the People Power Revolution, which eventually led to the common perception that Marcos stole the election, declaring himself the winner, where as many as two million Filipinos fled into the streets wearing the color “yellow,” sustaining a campaign of civil disobedience, which eventually turned the military against Marcos, leading to his exile to Hawaii where he died soon afterwards while “Corrie” Aquino was proclaimed the legitimate President of the Philippines. There is a tone of true elation as Tahimik, along with all the local parents, teachers, and school kids, design yellow signs and posters for the street demonstrations, where a sea of yellow captures the mood of a nation, where Tahimik’s own 1986 footage is reminiscent of Oratorio for Prague (1968), Jan Nĕmec’s street footage of an equally euphoric Eastern European nation that believed they were on the verge of democracy before Soviet tanks started occupying the streets of Czechoslovakia. But people power prevailed, where this film is an outgrowth of the artistic freedom associated with that lifting of a blanket of corruption and the repressive measures of living under a military dictatorship. The feeling is similar to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), which also reflected an exuberant artistic expression that was suddenly free to explore its own nation’s history after the lifting of the ruling party’s martial law that had been in effect for forty years. It is probably no accident that this sudden artistic surge of the first liberating signs of freedom reveal these directors at the height of their powers. Little did the director know that this euphoria would be followed by the startling revelation that the late dictator Marcos built the Philippine Nuclear Power Plant directly on an earthquake fault line, where it had to be disassembled, which was followed by a series of military officials on trial for corruption, the devastating impact of the 7.8 magnitude Luzon earthquake of 1990, Luzon on July 16, 1990, killing over 1600 people, causing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in damages, an event that caused massive crippling of the economy and may actually have precipitated the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo Mount Pinatubo Eruption (June 1991) covering the region in ash, leading to devastating floods, where it seemed the country was besieged by an apocalyptic fury of nature. The uniqueness of the film is experiencing it all through the personalized vantage point of a father teaching his son, widened to include literally hundreds of school children as well, where Tahimik distinctively captures them all singing Whitney Houston - Greatest Love Of All - YouTube (4:50) while exploring the local community as well as his nation’s history. According to Tahimik:
[the filmmaker can
either follow] the dictum “time is money,”…or allow time to be his ally and
open up to cosmic inspirations provided by a relatively free time frame.
My footages are like
tiles in a mosaic…You shuffle them, change them around. In my process, nothing
is permanent.
Making a film is like
taking a long trip. The film voyager can load up with a full tank and bring a
credit card along to insure completion of the voyage in as short a time as
possible. The voyager can also load up with a few cups of gasoline and drive
until he runs out and scrounge around for subsequent cups of gas to get to his
destination, without worrying about how long it takes to complete his voyage…
The length of the trip […] is a matter of choice depending on the combination
of ingredients – inspiration, resources, tools, working materials available,
personal circumstances like family or emotional disturbances, etc.
According to Christopher Pavsek, associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC and author of The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik, Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? - BAM/PFA - Film ...:
It is impossible to describe
Kidlat Tahimik’s virtually unknown masterpiece, the diary film I Am Furious Yellow (or Why Is Yellow Middle of Rainbow?), that
chronicles Tahimik and his young son’s lives as they traverse the tumultuous
decade of the 1980’s in the Philippines, so let’s just list a few of the things
you’ll see in the course of its three hours (which go by far too quickly): a
great democratic revolution deposes a dictator; a massive volcanic eruption
covers the world in ash; a huge earthquake levels a whole city and social class
distinctions as well; Magellan’s slave Enrique circumnavigates the globe (and
wins a princess’s heart); storms rage over the gorgeous landscapes of the
Philippine cordillera and Monument Valley in the U.S. Southwest; the filmmaker
and his son hitch a ride with Dennis Hopper in his old Cadillac; and a tooth is
pulled out of little boy’s mouth by a very big toe. That doesn’t even scratch
the surface of this vastly rich film, which at once demonstrates just how vital
and compelling cinema can be as well as how vital and compelling our very
existences can be despite all the disasters and catastrophes—both human-made
and natural—that loom from every angle. In an age of rising seas and collapsing
economies, [the film] shows us how to be furious at all the injustice in the
world but also how to face that injustice with the utmost joy. There are indeed
few, if any, films like this in the world.
Sunday
27 th May 2012 - Le peuple qui manque
Kidlat Tahimik is the filmmaker who has developped the diary film most extensively within a discourse of postcolonial cultural critique. His distinctive filmmaking technique pries apart the various levels of self-representation so that the primitive, the native, and the premoderne are ironically constructed within a discursive bricolage centered on his own subjectivity. (…) Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? (1981-1993), three-hours diary, incorporates history of Philippines, Tahimik’s own family, found footage, newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts, home movies, travel footage, and documentation of public event and political demonstrations. Documentary footage is mixed with scripted perfomances, and he continually reverses expectations of First and Thirld World cultural scenes. His movement between cultures casts him as an exemplary Inappropriate Other. (Catherine Russell, Experimental ethnography, 1999)
Lessons from the School of Inattention [Oggs Cruz]
Perhaps because of its length, which is an hour more than the
typical Hollywood fare that Filipinos have gotten chronically used to seeing,
Kidlat Tahimik’s Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? (Why is Yellow
the Middle of the Rainbow?, 1994) is criminally under-seen, and is
therefore severely underrated. The film, which is effectively Kidlat Tahimik’s
account of his personal life from 1981 to 1993, is perhaps the most personal
work of the director whose films are intimately intertwined with him, his
history, and his beliefs.
Because the film is essentially a collection of footage from various points of
Kidlat Tahimik’s life during the timeline, the audience becomes openly familiar
with the director’s private life: learning of the intricacies of his family,
joining him in his creative and social endeavours, and reflecting with him on
the political events that have been unfolding alongside his personal growth. It
is perhaps the multitude of facets of an artist, all portrayed with the
distinct generosity and modesty that Kidlat Tahimik is most famous for, that
makes Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? such an invaluable and special
film.
With the film, Kidlat Tahimik discusses alongside the difficulties of
fatherhood, the birth pangs of the newly founded artists’ community he helped
form in Baguio City, and the initial highs and impending disappointments of
post-Ferdinand Marcos democracy. Considering the ostensible epic scope and
ambition of the film, Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? never feels
burdened with self-importance.
The film moves and feels like a diary that he selflessly opens to his viewers,
and in that sense, it never overreaches but instead comfortably sits in the
midst of what Kidlat Tahimik is most knowledgeable of. Moreover, the film is
laced with tangible authenticity. Shot and presumably made sans any script or
creative intervention, the film evokes a sense personal, cultural and national
histories unfold through the eyes of an active participant. In a sense, the
film shows history as it is being made, raw but never confrontational, tender
but never cowardly.
Afterimage: The Films of Kidlat Tahimik, Indigenius - BAM ... Jason Sanders
Kidlat Tahimik (Philippines, 1980–94). Filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik and author Christopher Pavsek in conversation. Tahimik's virtually unknown masterpiece chronicles Tahimik and his young son's lives as they traverse the tumultuous 1980s and early 1990s in the Philippines—a great democratic revolution deposes a dictator; a massive volcanic eruption covers the world in ash—and asks how one might build a new and better future out of the disasters. (174 mins)
- - - -
An idol of iconoclasts worldwide, a pioneer of the postcolonial
essay film, and the grandfather of the Philippine New Wave, Kidlat Tahimik has
made a career of—as he puts it—“straying on track.” Born Eric de Guia and
educated at the Wharton School of Business, Tahimik renounced both career and
name to become Kidlat Tahimik (roughly translated as “Quiet Lighting”) and
embrace a filmmaking aesthetic unabashedly personal and defiantly political,
filled with both warmth and fire.
Tahimik’s postcollege sojourn in Germany resulted in a friendship with Werner
Herzog (who cast him in The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser), a marriage, and a
deceptively ramshackle debut film, Perfumed Nightmare (1977), whose
easygoing interrogation of neocolonial identity, Philippine culture, and global
economies turned it into a surprise international “hit.” Praised as “the joyful
discovery of blasé film buffs from Berlin to Belgrade and beyond” (SF
Chronicle, 1980) and “likely to become some sort of classic” (Village
Voice, 1980), the film is now heralded as a key text of both Third World
Cinema and the personal essay film, offering a pairing of politics and pleasure
that has continued throughout Tahimik’s oeuvre. Never shying away from
embracing a proud, postcolonial identity, yet always grounded in personal
observation and a quiet, understated humor, Tahimik’s works take special joy in
highlighting the indigenous cultures and history of the Philippines and beyond,
whether honoring Tahimik’s beloved bahag loincloth, profiling local
craftsmen and women, or recounting tales of Magellan’s Filipino
navigator/slave. Assembled from countless hours of filming, drawn from months
and years worth of work, “my footages are like tiles in a mosaic,” he writes.
“You shuffle them, change them around. In my process, nothing is permanent.”
“My best friend always mispronounced the word ‘indigenous,’” Tahimik noted in
an interview in the book Philippine New Wave. He’ll say ‘indigenius.’ I
would always call it cosmic mispronunciation. . . . The genius of the
indigenous culture is still within us. We just have to recognize it, and let it
flow out.” Committed to documenting the “indigenius,” yet always iconoclastic
enough to “stray on track” to capture the wonder of life around him, Kidlat Tahimik
is one of cinema’s true originals.
Behind the Bamboo Camera with Kidlat Tahimik - Harvard ... November 2 – 4, 2012
A sui generis mixture of documentary, diary film, fictionalized autobiography, cinematic essay and ethnography, Kidlat Tahimik’s 1977 debut, The Perfumed Nightmare, became an instant classic of sorts, announcing the arrival of a pioneering filmmaker. But Tahimik remains a very unusual sort of pioneer. His cinema’s sharp critique of the divides between rich and poor, capitalism and community, developed nations and the developing world relies on gentle humor, everyday experiences and childlike play. Weaving this material into knowing and heartfelt looks at life in the Philippines, Tahimik uncovers the ways in which the country’s postcolonial status places it at the center of contemporary concerns about the retreat of tradition in the face of a global marketplace dominated by an all-encompassing, ever-growing technology.
There is little in Tahimik’s early biography to indicate the career he would eventually choose. He was born Eric de Guia in Baguio in 1942 to an engineer and a woman who would be the first female mayor in the Philippines. After receiving a master’s degree from the business school at Wharton, he worked for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris in 1968. Uninspired by the research he was called upon to perform, he left his job to sell memorabilia at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Afterwards, rather than returning home, he joined an artists’ commune in Munich and eventually attracted the attention of Werner Herzog, who cast him in a small part in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). Under Herzog’s tutelage, he took up filmmaking and premiered The Perfumed Nightmare at the 1977 Berlin film festival. The film quickly traveled the world, championed in the US by Francis Ford Coppola and Susan Sontag.
Since then, Tahimik has created a string of documentaries and one fiction feature film, all of which demonstrate his love of wordplay both silly and sophisticated and his ability to blend politics and the imagination in surprising and revealing ways.
Why Is Yellow the
Middle of the Rainbow?
(Bakit Dilaw Ang Kulay ng Bahaghari, AKA I am Furious… Yellow)
Directed by Kidlat Tahimik
Philippines 1980-94, digital video, color, 175 min. English and Tagalog with
English subtitles
Tahimik’s magnum opus, Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? is an epic film diary spanning the 1980s. Though each of Tahimik’s films is unique, this one defies summary simply because of the sheer volume of ground it covers. While telling the story of a family –overseas vacations, school projects, children’s first steps – it also serves as an introduction to Filipino history and geography. Yet most arresting is the way the film moves seamlessly from the personal to the political as Tahimik’s camera documents the events leading from the assassination of Benigno Acquino to the fall of the Marcoses and progresses to hurricanes and earthquakes. “In an age of rising seas and collapsing economies, [the film] shows us how to be furious at all the injustice in the world but also how to face that injustice with the utmost joy. There are indeed few, if any, films like this….” (Christopher Pavsek)
We Are Colonial by Raya Martin - Moving Image Source Raya Martin, October 26, 2012
This essay was originally
written for the book Kidlat Tahimik, published by the Jeonju International Film
Festival in 2011 for their Tahimik retrospective.
"How are we going to finish this film? We could just wait for the spaghetti to run out.”
To call Kidlat Tahimik’s Why is Yellow the Middle of Rainbow? (Bakit Dilaw Ang Kulay ng Bahaghari) (1994) the best Filipino film ever made is severely contentious. For one, Kidlat has remained an underground filmmaker throughout his entire career, in a country where the basis of significance is mirrored in the recall of a mass audience. Rather than an "other," he is understood as “that” person in the local arts world. The identity of Kidlat is similar to what his name alludes to: an impermanent flash of performances, mostly of himself dancing in only a G-string, an image of the national native that represents both pride and ridicule to the perception of arts in the Philippines. Everyone remains glued, in striking awe, to the show, but almost quickly dismisses and forgets.
In the span of a decade, from 1981 to 1991, Kidlat put together a "celluloid collage" mostly inspired by and made with his eldest son and namesake, Kidlat de Guia, now a talented filmmaker in his own right. Alternatively known as I Am Furious Yellow, an early incarnation of this epic project, it transformed into a collection of other “colored” episodes, each corresponding to a progression of his life as a Filipino father. Finished in laboratories between New York and Manila, the film is a concise pronouncement of the Philippines' historical romanticized image as a colony of multiple masters.
The film is a showcase of artists: co-cameraman Boy Yniguez, best known as the cinematographer of Jeffrey Jeturian’s Kubrador (2006); the late Santiago Bose, one of the most important Filipino contemporary artists, whose collective works are representative of the post-colonial consciousness characteristic of artists from the mountain province of Baguio. Some footage was shot by Trinh T. Minh-ha, and there are cameos from the late Andrei Tarkovsky, on the way to the Telluride Film Festival in 1983, and even Kidlat’s close friend Werner Herzog. This is the world of Kidlat Tahimik.
That world is born out of a smaller bubble: Baguio, home to a wilder, label-resisting community where both the indigenous ease and artistic complexity harmoniously co-exist. This is where a naiveté is created. The isolation forces its inhabitants to embrace their city’s colonial origins as the American’s summer capital in the Philippines, with their camps scattered almost everywhere. The memory of childhood on this Disneyland of sorts is far removed from the usual Filipino's—celebrating Fourth of July as the real Independence Day, lining up for ice cream on the occasion. Kidlat, the father, is adamant about symbols in his household. Violence is taboo, and the kids are not allowed to play with guns. When they go through the newspaper to check out which movies to see, his son points to front-page images of the military’s war on rebels. That’s not a movie, he’s told.
It’s all Hollywood, anyway. Even when Kidlat pieces home movies together with his more fictional footage and movie shots from elsewhere, there's a struggle against moviemaking as we are watching. We partake in the struggle to make sense of our identity determined by our screen image as a minority. We are celluloid existential, (re)visiting John Ford's Point on a snowy day while Hollywood music escalates our self-analysis. The journey is all euphemized, Filipinized. We are good Indians and we are better off dead.
The film could not be timelier. The political situation in it, spanning from right after the Marcoses’ overthrow to the late Corazon Aquino’s regime, to the attempted coup d’etat during her time, parallels that of the new presidency of her son, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, and the reversal/return to power of the Marcoses with ex-first lady Imelda having been elected as congresswoman in her late husband’s province, as well as her two children, Senator Bong-Bong Marcos and Governor Imee Marcos. More disturbing parallels are the Philippine Nuclear Power Plant that had been erected and left directly on a fault line by the late dictator, and the recent earthquakes threatening the region; the celebration of new graduates from the Philippine Military Academy (where the best leaders emerge, as Kidlat’s mother points out), and the current investigations of military officials involved in corruption; the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo and the unforgettable earthquake in the early '90s that left most of the country’s economy crippled, and the recent devastating floods in Manila that highlighted controversies in the government’s distribution of relief funds. The Filipino reality becomes an endless litany of pleas, a curse that seems impossible to lift.
And yet Kidlat proposes “that,” coming directly from a nativistic proposal. Artists are moved to be like shamans in keeping touch with the old ways. In the bubble of it all, the artists are not constrained to museums or theaters. They exist where nature exists. Even when the absurd seems a contradiction, there is an unpronounced nationalism in the post-television aesthetic with which Kidlat presents the episodes of his film. It is told like any imaginary tale of the pre-colonial: from wondrous to disastrous, to tragic, and finally a rebirth. Until then, we are left to deal with the realities of our national mirage. It will be the same story decades later anyhow.
Why is Yellow the Middle of Rainbow? is a curious story of colors. One is reminded of a folktale for children written by Mexican Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos, La Historia de los Colores, inspired by his encounters with the Mayans, whom had tried to convince of a proletarian uprising. It tells the story of the origins of race, through a toucan, who narrates about the gods’ wishes to deliver more color to the world. Subcomandante Marcos was then left with another perspective on struggle and diversity. We are all cultural minorities fighting to protect our differences. History is determinedly human.
Kidlat Tahimik’s cinema is best summarized by a scene in the film. Footage from his infamous unfinished-to-date Magellan project, an epic retelling of the explorer’s expedition to the Philippines, narrates: "Magellan taught his valet the rudiments of chess. Not only does he carve his own pieces and learns their movements, he picks up easily the thinking patterns of being a winner. The master realizes, for the first time, the slave is a thinking animal capable of plotting his own moves." "Checkmate," says Kidlat Tahimik, who acts as the indio slave in the film.
And as the whole film is a constant self-referential to Kidlat, the filmmaker, trying to make sense of his footage on the editing table, the celluloid on a flatbed spills all over a printed text by the Spanish scholar Antonio de Nebrija: Language is the perfect instrument of Empire.
"Is it any wonder that the indio now behaves like his master?"
The film ends twice. Kidlat’s son massages his father’s back, who has now fallen asleep while editing on the flatbed. The startled father rouses from his sleep, saying he had imagined making a film about his son, but the images had just taken over. An epilogue follows where a devastating earthquake has claimed the joyousness of Baguio, which was the hardest hit. The earthquake had destroyed the editing room, and in the dark the kids try to look for their father. They call out to him. Moments later, he appears from the celluloid rubble and enthusiastically says, I've found the ending.
Epilogue
After writing this essay, I go outside of my air-conditioned room. The housemaid is silently cleaning the corners of a house built from the marriage of my father’s activism and my mother’s corporate hard work. I smoke a pack of imported cigarettes in the garden, contemplating my tepid petty bourgeois existence. I notice the efforts of my father’s gardening, arising from his frustrations in farming. It is half-finished. Wild grass has taken over most of it, and he is in the computer room, “working” and practically retired to playing Farmville online. There seems so much work to be done, and yet...
It’s the age of disillusionment. The naiveté of Kidlat Tahimik has never resounded more profoundly.
The Manila Review | Cinema Moralia Robert Nery
<em>The Utopia of Film: Cinema and its Futures in Godard ... Patrick Reagan from Screening the Past
Chicago's crash course in Filipino art cinema continues this ... Ben Sachs from The Reader, September 17, 2014
กิดลัต ตาฮิมิก (Kidlat Tahimik): ภาพยนตร์ฟิลิปปินส์และการจาริก ...
Documenting his own reality: The films of Kidlat Tahimik Conor Stuart from Erenlei magazine, November 2, 2010
Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? - BAM/PFA - Film ...
KIDLAT TAHIMIK: Tagahawan ng landas ng Philippine ...
CINEMALAYA HONORS KIDLAT TAHIMIK - SSSIP's
Parallax ViewThe View Beyond Parallax… more reads for ... Bruce Reid from Parallax View
Kidlat Tahimik - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kidlat Tahimik Retrospective at UP Film Institute | PinoyFilm ... biography
Kidlat Tahimik | Online references | cyclopaedia.net
An award winning
director of the documentary film, KOCHIYAMA:
PASSION FOR JUSTICE, this is her first feature, a sweet but raw-edged
look at a young woman growing up in Chicago in the early 1970’s, experimenting
with sex and drugs in search of her self-identity, which leads to the Arizona
desert where she comes face to face with her own past, in the shape of her dead
sister and the tortured past of her parents, who once lived on this same plot
of land in a Japanese internment camp.
This is a truly moving work with a strong sense of history, memory, and
the inherent power of stark imagery, in this case, forbidden photographs taken
by her parents in the camps, which they never wanted their children to see,
repeatedly going up in flames on screen until one gets the message that so did
many Japanese at the hands of the atomic bomb and their memories were equally
obliterated.
Asian American Film
Festival: schedule--Saturday
Rice University Media Center
User
reviews at imdb Author: Casey Machula from Flagstaff, AZ
Strawberry
Fields (1997 film) - Alchetron, the free social ...
Strawberry
Fields (1997 film) - Wikipedia, the free ...
Rea Tajiri –
Producer, Writer, Director (pdf)
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee. —Emily Dickenson
Unlike Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT
LILY CHOU CHOU (2001) where there was little distinction between the blurry secondary
nature of the brooding high school characters due to the overpowering stylistic
flourish which drew all the attention to itself, and not nearly as inventive as
Katsuhito Ishii’s brilliant film THE TASTE OF TEA (2004), another
off-the-charts charmer that dazzled the heart along with the senses, this film
is much less ambitious yet ultimately proves to be surprisingly successful as
it actually does a superb job showcasing the diversive nature of each of the
characters. While hardly a profound
film, based on a Chica Umino manga comic
strip from 2000 that has fed multiple TV variations in Japan, from animation to
the immensely popular live action episodes that continue to this day, the
simplicity of the form is deceptive, all wrapped up in what resembles another
one of a seemingly endless line of Japanese teen alienation movies, this
features instead a comically alluring, sweet-natured charm where there’s a deep
seeded concern for others that is the heart of this film. While each of the main characters goes
through a series of personal dilemmas, it’s not ultimately about them, as they
each discover a larger world around them that takes on greater
significance.
Set in a university art school, we are soon privy to familiar self-centered college habits where kids are uniformly trying to stand out but failing miserably, both in class and with the opposite sex. Takemoto (Sho Sakurai) is a young architecture student, a friendly sort who also works dressed up in a giant cat outfit for a local supermarket, who along with his somewhat morbid, bespectacled friend Mayama (Ryo Kase) are sent upstairs from a communal class party in search of more beer when Takemoto’s eyes fall upon another young art student, the gorgeously delicate Hagu (Yû Aoi from LILY CHOU CHOU) who is completely immersed in her work, where Mayama sees his friend fall in love right before his eyes, surrealistically expressed by a stream of colorful flower petals that gently flow from her canvas. She turns out to be the Professor’s niece, a gifted student who specializes in brilliantly colorful abstract paintings that breathe a special air of radiance. But this revery is interrupted by the crashing, disruptive entrance of an older student Morita, Yusuke Iseye from Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s AFTER LIFE (1998), who is immediately impressed with her work. Morita always seems to be the center of attention, no matter the occasion, always bragging about his own considerable talent above all others, so it comes as quite a shock that he paid anyone a compliment. Mayama meanwhile, a promising design student, has his own obsession, falling hopelessly in love with his boss Rika (Naomi Nishida), while failing to notice he’s become the object of another strikingly beautiful student’s affections, Ayumi (Megumi Seki), whose look resembles that of a classic Japanese doll.
Once the characters have all been introduced, there’s a
wonderfully gentle interplay between them, not the least of which includes fascination
and rejection in love, where their moods rise and fall with each passing day,
but there’s always someone there to listen to them. While Professor Hanamoto (Masato Sakai) asks
Takemoto to look after his niece, she in turn is more impressed with Morita’s prowess
as a sculptor. When he decides to paint
a giant canvas outdoors, she joins him, and together they are an utter joy to
watch, eliciting applause from bystanders.
While
discussing Hagu’s apparent lack of discipline, a fellow professor seems
disappointed by her unwillingness to conform to the requirements of specific
art competitions, but Professor Hanamoto has the last word, suggesting
sometimes professors need to let some students do the dreaming for all of us. These intimate moments are held
together by a soft, inventive musical soundtrack by Yôko Kanno, also exquisite art direction from
Momoko Nakamura that prominently accentuates architecture and painting, and an inventive
trip to the ocean, which for Hagu seems to be for the very first time. Their enthusiasm on the trip is infectious, their
genuine camaraderie is highly appealing, and it is here that Morita begins
calling Takemoto by the knickname Mr. Youth, as he speaks so earnestly about
the significance of youth. Everyone
stumbles along the way, but the development of relationships is effortless,
always underplayed, occasionally utilizing an interior narration to accentuate
innermost thoughts. There’s nothing
showy about this film, which also features the continuing presence of a
computer generated black cat, which playfully enters and exits the screen, even
over the end credits. Perhaps it feels a
bit contrived by the ending, as it doesn’t measure up to the rest of the film’s
promise where a novelistic brush heightens our appreciation for all five of the
central characters, but the tone of this film is set at the beginning, where
there may not be any rhyme or reason for why things happen the way they do and what
lies beneath the surface cannot always be expressed, but the journey, the
search itself, not necessarily the answers we find, may become more meaningful
in the end simply because of the elevated impact of sharing it with others
around us.
Honey
and Clover Andrea Gronvall from the Reader
Based on Chica Umino's best-selling manga and hit anime TV
series, this 2006 teen romance from
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg)
Adapted from a popular manga
series—which also has been reworked into both anime and live-action TV shows—Honey
and Clover is another Japanese coming-of-age drama that goes heavy on
whimsy. (See also 2006’s The Taste of Tea and the festival mainstay A
Gentle Breeze in the Village.) Set in and around an art school, the movie
is the antithesis of Art School Confidential; the title is derived
from Emily Dickinson: “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.”
Although the film has its share of funny-true moments—as when a student imagines
himself arrested for stalking his crush—the mawkishness grows tiresome over the
long haul.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Five college-age students in art school fumble
through life lessons in Masahiro Takada's gently meandering adaptation of Chica
Umino's manga romance. Sho Sakurai centers the film as "the least arty art
student at the school," a genial young man who becomes the hub of a
loose-knit fellowship of friends and artists (including rising Japanese star Yu
Aoi of "Hula Girls" as the object of his affections). The gentle
conflicts and easy rhythms and small triumphs over personal adversity are
low-key almost to a fault, and the smitten stares and unrequited crushes and
creative crises suggest high school melodrama as much as young-adult drama, but
that restraint also is part of its comfortable charm. It's cute and sweet
without getting saccharine and avoids the contrived complications of American
stories of students charging the emotional and sexual minefields of adult
relationships and responsibilities (no one here even makes out, let alone
sleeps together). That in itself is a minor triumph in a generally contrived
and sentimental genre.
Honey and Clover
Facets Multi-Media
Takemoto (Sho Sakurai of boy band Arashi) is an art student
under the tutelage of Professor Hanamoto, whose parties brings him and art
students Mayama and Yamada together. At a party in the opening scene, Takemoto
is introduced to Hagu, Hanamoto's cousin's daughter, who recently entered the
school on a scholarship, whereupon Takemoto falls instantly in love. However,
trouble occurs in the form of Takemoto's neighbor Morita, a popular, talented,
and temperamental older student who has just returned from a long trip. Morita
is instantly impressed by Hagu's abstract paintings, and Hagu, in turn, begins
to admire Morita's sculpting skills. Meanwhile, Yamada has become infatuated with
Mayama, who is hopelessly in love with his boss Rika, even to the point of
stalking her and collecting her personal possessions. Even when Mayama rejects
Yamada, she remains in love with him for some inexplicable reason. The five
come together for Morita's gallery opening, but an impulsive trip to the beach
threatens to change a few things about their lives... Based on the hit Japanese
comic, Honey and Clover is a romantic comedy that is the latest entry in
a long line of Japanese manga adaptations. The lives of these five art
university students and their romantic complications is their rite of passage
to make sense of the relationship between life and art, in this bittersweet
love story of young love. Directed by
Anime News Network Carlo Santos
Second-year art student Yuuta Takemoto lives the typical
college life: sleeping, eating, and dealing with troublesome apartment mates
like eccentric Morita and ladies' man Mayama. Life gets interesting when Hagumi
Hanamoto, the gifted niece of Professor Shuuji Hanamoto, comes to school and
surprises everyone with her talents (and unusually young appearance). Takemoto
wants to make friends with her, but Morita always seems to make the first move;
Hagu-chan, meanwhile, is afraid of the boys and prefers the company of pottery
student Ayumi Yamada. Gradually they all warm up to each other, learning the
ups and downs of college life and beyond.
Was it ever supposed to get this good? Honey and
Clover began life as the debut series for Fuji TV's
"Noitamina"
(read it backwards) lineup, a new anime block aimed at older female audiences.
The simple but daring plan worked—young women who would never normally watch
anime got into it, and the manga now breaks the Top 10 sales list regularly,
sitting alongside blockbuster titles like Prince of
Tennis or Bleach.
But even viewers outside the target demographic attest to its greatness,
pointing out its heartfelt storytelling and unique visual style. It was
supposed to be just good enough for sophisticated female viewers—and it ended
up being good enough for everyone. Funnier than most comedies and more touching
than most dramas (even the live-action ones), Honey and Clover has
emerged as one of the best shows of 2005.
Like a true slice-of-life series, it begins right in the middle of
things—Takemoto in his second year of college, Mayama nearing graduation, and
Morita stuck in seventh-year hell. When Hagu-chan shows up, there's hardly any
"please welcome the new student" pomp; she simply joins the cast, and
the drama-go-round begins. There is no epic quest to fulfill, no convoluted
conspiracy to unlock, no childhood friend to win over—it's just a bunch of college
kids figuring out what to do with their lives, and it is fascinating. Every
character gets a moment in the spotlight, with story arcs transiting flawlessly
between each other. Even Takemoto, who spends most of the series as a neutral
observer, closes things out with an inspiring personal triumph. The mood of the
show switches effortlessly from madcap comedy to utter heartbreak and
everything in between, yet nothing feels out of place. Within a single episode,
a game of Art School Twister takes humor to new heights, and yet minutes later,
Takemoto muses upon the meaning of friendship.
Like all good shoujo,
Honey and Clover succeeds because of its characters' complex
personalities. Morita emerges as a quick fan favorite with his bizarre antics
and affinity for money, but to focus on him is to miss out on the intricate
relationships between everyone else. In particular, Ayumi's unrequited
attachment to Mayama is sure to arouse plenty of indignation about the
portrayal of women in Japanese entertainment. But maybe that anger is because Ayumi
openly reveals everything we hate about themselves: weakness, insecurity, and
the tendency to do really stupid things in the name of love. She is the most
human character in a cast of incredibly human characters.
Despite this realism on the emotional level, however, the artwork in the show
is decidedly surreal and dreamlike. The character designs match the manga
almost perfectly with big, expressive eyes, ultrathin lines, and characteristic
hatch marks. Even the coloring style adheres to the comic; you may never again
see an anime that looks like it was watercolored (there are a few exceptions,
like SaiKano).
The animation is equally adept, with moments of broad physical comedy being
rendered just as smoothly as subtle scenes of close-up dialogue. And of course,
no discussion of Honey and Clover is complete without the infamous
"food" opening, where spinning plates of food behave in very
un-foodlike ways. This 90-second homage to stop-motion auteur Jan Svankmajer is
just the first of many artistic touches, proving that the animators—like the
art students depicted in the series—treasure creativity above all else.
If music is the language of emotion,
then few shows speak it as eloquently as this one. With just a few studio
instruments, the soundtrack is able to express the gamut of emotions that
each character runs through. The energetic opening theme by YUKI converts into
a gentle piano solo, and even Morita's bouts of insanity are accented by
charming comedic themes. The most effective emotional tools, however, are the
insert songs by singer-songwriter Suga Shikao and rock group SPITZ.
Playing a poignant song over internal monologue is hardly a new thing,
especially in angsty teen dramas, but to hear it used in an anime makes the
technique fresh once more.
If Honey and Clover has any faults, it's that you want it to keep
going after it's over. It ends just like it begins—right in the middle of
things, with so much more yet to be experienced. Without realizing it, you've
become part of that circle of friends: you've shared their heartbreaks and
triumphs, walked alongside them as they poured out their feelings, and watched
each one of them learn a little bit more about themselves. Whether in school or
not, who hasn't asked themselves at some point: "What do I want to do? Who
do I want to be?" Honey and Clover may not have the answers,
but it's all about trying to find them.
DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Cinema-Repose M. Douglas
Lunapark6 flawed but enjoyable film
The Seattle Times (Jeff Shannon)
Taking the
Japanese spot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterfully understated TOKYO SONATA (2008)
at the Academy Awards this year for Best Foreign Film, which was not only the
best Japanese film of the year but among the best released anywhere in the
world, this film continues the Japanese obsession with death, much like Israeli
films deal with the Holocaust, though if I had to pick a film, IKIRU (1952),
MABOROSI (1995) or SUZAKU (1997) would certainly come to mind. The subject here is the work of a nokanshi,
who performs a highly ritualized
sacred family ceremony by preparing the bodies of the deceased for their
departures into the next realm, as the bodies are cleaned and dressed
discreetly in front of the family, the bare skin never exposed, all done with
the utmost care and precision showing a kind of quiet reverance and tranquility
in the performance of the job which requires meticulous attention to
detail. In America, the job is done by
the funeral home behind closed doors before the body is available for
viewing. Not so with this custom, which
even in Japan may be somewhat rare and old fashioned, becoming outdated, like
many ancient Japanese rituals. This film
suggests it’s a way of paying one’s last respects, recognizing the finality of
life by honoring the dead, which oftentimes evokes painful memories that might
otherwise have long been suppressed.
Though the film is dramatically affecting, featuring some excellent
secondary characters, it’s also something of a weeper, a highly idealized
portrait of grief, always showing a family that is greatly moved by the
experience and extremely thankful and appreciative afterwards, oftentimes
offering special gifts (though one ceremony amusingly ends in a near riot). With young and old sitting on the floor in
close proximity, this becomes an extremely personal family memory.
Masahiro Motoki plays Daigo, a young cellist in the Tokyo Orchestra that announces it cannot continue due to financial obligations, leaving him and his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) in a state of limbo, eventually deciding to sell his valued cello and move back to his deceased mother’s home in the village where he grew up. Responding to a want-ad on “departures” where he thinks he’s entering the travel agency business, he is surprised to discover things are not as they seem, especially when he’s hired on the spot after a single question (“Are you willing to work hard?”) as the apprentice to his new boss, the stone faced Tsutomu Yamazaki as Sasaki, where he’s both revolted and awed by his ability to strike such a special connection with the dead. Initially the job is horrifying, where he’s too embarrassed to even reveal it to his wife, shown rather humorously where he can’t stop cleaning what he perceives as the smell of death from all but encircling him wherever he goes. In this manner, he reconnects to a piece of his past, where he’s welcomed back to the local bathhouse where he used to come as a boy, still run by the same woman who remembers him, now getting older, having lost her own husband. Once Mika discovers the truth, she can’t accept that line of work, believing working with the dead is unclean and undignified, as do many friends in the community. But they don’t see what we see, which is a profound contemplation and near surgical precision needed to perform this work, much like the artistry of playing the cello. In fact, there is a similar mindset used in each to reach a state of grace.
What’s
interesting is the instrinsically Japanese and highly personal nature of this
ritual, which is shown alongside another custom of public bathhouses, both of
which still exist in Japanese culture but may be losing their significance in a
faster paced modern society. This
metaphor of death is equivalent to the idea that life changes, where the idea
of leaving things behind takes on a special significance as the film develops,
from leaving the body behind as the spirit ascends, to leaving certain stages
of one’s life behind, such as childhood or adolescence which we outgrow, or physically
living in different towns and locations in the course of one’s life, to
thoughts or recollections that we once felt we knew or understood, yet our
opinion changes or evolves over time, which includes the shifting perceptions
of our own memories. Much of this film touches on memory, showing how
seemingly insignificant details become magnified over time, or grow clearer,
where instead of a flood of experiences to choose from all of which ends up in
a blur, this becomes whittled down to where only a precious few stand out.
Despite the
evocative nature of the film, which clearly reaches emotional heights, there’s
also a kind of Disney-ized simplicity to it as well, where any and all
obstacles can be overcome, and where there’s an extreme degree of repetition,
especially the Joe Hisaishi musical
themes that just play over and over again, as do fleeting birds in flight
imagery, or a man and his cello playing by a riverbank in front of a giant
mountain, where the salmon swimming upsteam section is simply a case for
cloying sentiment. Everything becomes
homogonized building to this perceived ideal of death as a gate of ascension to
a new life, always suggesting a peaceful passing. Never do they encounter car wrecks with
mangled, deformed, disfigured, or burned bodies. Never is one of them suspected of indecent
advances or accused of rape, as is the case in Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER (2002), a much more artistically
adventurous film that features the loving care provided to a corpse-like woman
in a lengthy coma. Instead the film
builds to a neatly packaged, Hallmark card harmonious picture of bliss and
contentment, perhaps similar to Buddhist priests who still practice purifying
rituals, but they are subject to harrassment or even political exile by the Chinese
government in Tibet. While the ritual
itself is impresive to see, the exclusively fictionalized aspect shown here is
missing the documentary authenticity or historical perspective needed to
immerse this custom within a living society that is also shown in great
detail. Instead it depicts an idealized
relationship with the dead that is glorified not by its acceptance within
society, as it seems to remain a specialized, somewhat outsider custom, but by
its depiction of tearful family close ups, intense glances, and somewhat sappy
piano and cello music that continually surges to new heights before the same
themes are recycled again and again.
DEPARTURES (Okuribito) (d. Yojiro Takita; Japan) *** 3/4 Ken Rudolph
Two years in a row, the Japanese have sent
wonderful, challenging films which arrive under the radar and absolutely
amaze. Masahiro Motoki is a revelation, playing a cellist in a
Time Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]
Raised in a broken family, Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) is a
disillusioned cellist who has recently lost his job in a
With his camera lingering at length on Daigo’s elegant ‘performances’ at a series of funerals, and with Joe Hisaishi’s gently affectionate score pulling on audience’s heartstrings, Yojiro Takita’s deeply affecting Oscar winner gets its viewers into mourning mode, and never lets go. Admittedly, fate does show its flair for tear-jerking drama here; fortuitously-timed deaths provide Daigo with the opportunity to win over his wife and childhood friend – who both disapprove of his new trade – once they witness the respect and tenderness he shows the departed. That said, the emotional resonance triggered by this unflinching study of grief (and grieving) goes way deeper than its borderline manipulative tactics hint at. Departures’ belief in love and forgiveness is lyrical, and hauntingly moving.
The Hollywood Reporter review Maggie Lee
HONOLULU, Hawaii
-- An out-of-work cellist finds a new lease of life as a corpse cosmetician
when he develops professional pride and respect for the dead in the
heartwarming and humorous "Departures." Yojiro Takita, who directed
enduring commercial hits like "The Ying Yang Master" and "The
Yen Family," has made a popular gem -- thematically respectable,
technically hard to fault, artfully scripted to entertain and touch.
This Oscar-entry from Japan won the Grand Prix at Montreal World Film Festival
and has made several festival rounds. Cinemas catering to semi-mainstream,
artistically-inclined audiences would be a likelier overseas outlet than elite
arthouse.
Following his orchestra's disbanding, Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) resettles in his
deep north hometown with his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue). He responds to an ad
for "Journey Assistant" thinking it's for a travel agency. After some
droll beating around the bush by boss Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), he finds out
that they are in the "encoffinment" business. "Departures"
invokes the quintessentially Japanese "artisan's soul" -- a work
ethic of utmost devotion to any profession. The attentive and ceremonious
manner in which makeovers is performed before bodies are placed in their
coffins is eye-opening. The film gently satirizes modern society's denial of
the physical aspect of death through Daigo's initial shame and squeamishness
about his job, and the social disdain he experiences. The scene of him wolfing
down fried chicken suggests his appetite for life is eventually whetted by
confronting mortality daily -- a reconnection with nature's cycle.
The film can be taxed with being a little too long and too sentimental. Joe
Hisaishi's score is unabashedly romantic and the cinematography is ravishing,
but there are few moments of inner contemplation. Even when Daigo is alone
playing the cello, the scenes are heavily embellished with swooping shots, a
heavenly countryside backdrop and rhapsodic strings.
This is compensated for by some skillful comic relief and warm rapport among
the cast, especially the filial relationship Daigo develops for Sasaki who
stands-in for his absent father. Motoki's performance is rich with nuance, but
Yamazaki takes expressiveness to a new level, remaining unperturbed,
inscrutable and affectionately condescending at all times.
Departures Tony Rayns from Film Comment, May/June 2009
The
members of the Academy who gave Departures its Oscar must be feeling
their mortality. The movie tells the story of a second-rate cellist who loses
his job when an orchestra is disbanded but finds inner peace and fulfillment
working as a nokanshi, ceremonially preparing the bodies of the newly
deceased before they are placed in coffins for cremation. Maybe the Academy’s
elderly voters appreciated the way that the man’s newfound serenity guides him
to an emotional rapprochement with his hated father, who abandoned him with the
gift of a pebble when he was a small child. But it seems more likely that their
enthusiasm was triggered by the lengthy demonstrations of the nokan ceremonies
themselves: the discreet sanitizing of the dead body, the arrangement of limbs,
and, especially, the dressing and application of makeup. The movie is a paean
to the good-looking corpse.
The scripting of Departures (by Kundo Koyama, the one-man TV-drama
writing factory who nurtured such delights as Iron Chef) is
embarrassingly clunky and obvious: the movie’s essential hollowness reveals
itself with unusual starkness. Protagonist Daigo Kobayashi is maneuvered into
the undertaking profession through a series of feeble narrative contrivances.
He conceals the true nature of his job from his young wife (the script has
laboriously established that he’s done such things before), and so she walks
out when she discovers what he actually does after discovering an instructional
video in which he plays a corpse and has gauze stuffed up his anus to prevent
seepage. However, women being the simple creatures that they are, she returns
as soon as she discovers that she’s pregnant, and it takes only one attendance
at a nokan ceremony to reconcile her to hubby’s line of work and then to
take the initiative in helping Daigo overcome his hatred of his absent father.
All of this takes place against a backdrop shift from the bustle and glitz of
metropolitan Tokyo to the rural tranquility of Yamagata Prefecture,
conveniently home to the wild geese whose migratory patterns so poetically
symbolize the departing soul.
Daigo is played, quite adequately, by Masahiro Motoki, who has trodden these
paths before. His claim to stardom dates from the early Nineties, when he not
only posed for a volume of nude photographs by Kishin Shinoyama but also
starred in two movies by Masayuki Suo, Fancy Dance (89) and Sumo Do,
Sumo Don’t (92), in both of which he played hip young slackers discovering
their inner maturity through immersion in Japan’s ancient traditions, Buddhism
and sumo wrestling respectively. Departures is a virtual rerun of the
same scenario, and so Shochiku didn’t need to scratch their corporate heads
long over the casting. They didn’t have much trouble with Daigo’s mentor figure
Sasaki either; the eccentric but kind-hearted old man, who started a nokan
company after the death of his wife, is played by the grizzled Tsutomu
Yamazaki, who has been trading in characters like this at least since Tampopo
(86). Choosing the director must have been a cinch too. Over a long career
which started in soft porn in the early Eighties, Yojiro Takita has
distinguished himself by never imposing any ideas of his own on the scripts
that companies have thrown at him; Shochiku evidently turned to him again
because the lumbering samurai movie he made for them in 2003, When the Last
Sword Is Drawn, sold relatively well overseas. None of this matters, of
course, and Departures will be forgotten tomorrow. Ironically, though,
two of 2008’s best films were made in Japan: Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s All Around
Us and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking. They, however, remain
unreleased outside Japan.
“Departures”
is the rare film that successfully combines aspects of a commercial film, art
house film, light comedy & heavy drama (pertaining to family & death).
The film recently received a surprise boost in recognition by winning the “Best
Foreign Language Film” at this year’s Academy Awards. The film already achieved
stellar box office results when it first screened in
Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is an aspiring cellist
newly hired by a symphony in
After the couple settles into their new home, Daigo looks for
a job. He finds a listing in the newspaper advertising a position that requires
little hours, no experience, and centers around helping out others on their
journeys. Daigo assumes the position is for a travel agent, but when he arrives
at the office, he realizes the job is for an “encoffineer” (Nokanshi) - similar
to an embalmer in the
“Departures” isn’t a heavy film per se, but it does eloquently examine the effects of death as it relates to those closest to the deceased. The film also respectfully showcases the art found in the encoffineer’s work. This is particularly important to the Japanese, as the movie portrays the common perception of these workers as people who are reviled. Masahiro Motoki always uses his hands as gracefully applying make-up on the deceased as he does when playing the cello. The message that comes out loud and clear is that the work performed by encoffineers are as artful as classical music. Departures also brings to light the importance of living life to the fullest as well as the importance of forgiveness. In one particularly moving scene, Daigo Kobayashi and his wife watches from the distance as a lady he has known all his life ends her journey, while a worker at the funeral home remarks that it feels like her journey is about to begin.
Performances all around are excellent, with nary a single
shabby performance found in the movie. Masahiro Motoki obviously takes center
stage and impresses throughout the movie (especially so when you compare his
brilliant performance in “Departures” with his lifeless turn in last year’s
“The Longest Night in
Although it would have been so easy for “Departures” to lay on the sappiness, the picture always opts for the graceful route as it tells its powerful tale about life, death, and awakening. A large cross-generational group of viewers will likely find the movie inspirational. Although I don’t feel “Departures” is even the best Japanese film of the year (my vote would go to Tokyo Sonata), it’s still nice to find the Academy Awards bring to light such a strong Japanese film for the masses.
Asia Pacific Arts [Bryan Hartzheim]
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Slant Magazine review [3/4] Joseph Jon Lanthier
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [2/5]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]
Critic's Notebook [Robyn Citizen]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Film School Rejects [Robert Levin]
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [C+]
Variety (Eddie Cockrell) review
The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]
San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
An emotionally raw, visually stylish
first feature, with the intensity of the best social melodrama, about the
indomitable spirit of battered Maori wife Beth Heke (Owen) as she struggles to
hold together her disintegrating family. Husband Jake (Morrison) is a violent
yet charismatic bully, the sullen eldest son is already a gang member, the
youngest is in care, and only gifted daughter Grace (Kerr-Bell) offers hope for
the future. A gritty human drama evoking the residual vibrancy of a threatened
culture.
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
"Once Were Warriors" is an uncompromising, emotionally draining
drama that presents the urbanization of
Warriors deprived of societal and spiritual guidance all too often wind up like Jake Heke (Temuera Morrison), an unemployed bruiser who spends most of his time drinking with his cronies at the neighborhood pub. If his wife, Beth (Rena Owen), questions his wasting money on booze, Jake answers with his fists.
The morning after, he rubs salt in her terrible wounds by complaining of her ugliness. But in time the bruises fade, the swelling subsides and Jake seduces her all over again. The Hekes would know all the stops of "A Streetcar Named Desire," though Jake's volatility and boxer's build also recall another cinematic Jake, in "Raging Bull."
The hard-drinking Beth is no angel herself. Indeed, she puts spin on the ugly cycle in one of the movie's most brutal scenes. When Jake orders her to make an omelet for a drinking buddy, the tipsy Beth literally eggs him on by smashing the carton. Jake retaliates violently as the kids cower in their beds upstairs.
In spite of everything, Beth is still sexually attracted to her husband, but she is beginning to realize what drink and violence are doing to her children. Although one son joins a gang and another is taken to a state home for delinquent boys, there is still hope for her three youngest children, especially the luminous and vulnerable 13-year-old Grace (Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell). As Beth's nurturing instincts grow and her lust wanes, Jake becomes threatened and drives the family nearer the edge of destruction.
The actors, many of them of European-Maori descent, are wonderful to look at. They also deliver authoritative yet sympathetic performances that get at the roots, or rootlessness, of their characters. Owens is a Carmen of the kitchen sink as Beth -- as destructive in her way as Morrison's Jake, a warrior who cannot recognize, much less defeat, the enemy all around him.
Adapted from Alan Duff's gritty bestseller, Maori writer Riwia Brown's
screenplay does not flinch from the ugliness of the Hekes' home life. It does,
however, hold out some hope for Beth's future and her children's, but only if
they return to their Maori homeland. The lesson, as in
Critics are often heard complaining about the lack of originality
in American filmmaking, about remakes, TV-retreads and tired concepts
dominating the multiplexes. When
ONCE WERE WARRIORS is the story of the Heke family, people of
Maori descent living in present day
The first image in ONCE WERE WARRIORS is an idyllic landscape, which is quickly revealed to be a billboard over a busy highway and a Maori "ghetto." Director Lee Tamahori sets up his story as one far removed from a perhaps-mythic past, and defined by a warrior culture in a land where the war for survival is fought against less tangible enemies. Often poor and treated with disdain by white authority figures, the Maori turn their aggression inward, in pointless and explosive barroom brawls and domestic violence. ONCE WERE WARRIORS has become a massive box office success in New Zealand for addressing this culture which accounts for almost 10% of its population, but it doesn't require a stretch to recognize that it is a story which translates all too well to stories of America's economically disadvantaged minority cultures. It is a specific story, but in many ways it is also a universal one.
The specific story is most effective thanks to several powerful performances. Rena Owen's Beth is a proud woman whose beauty still appears in a bright smile on her weathered face, though nearly twenty years of marriage have beaten her down. Her love for Jake is as genuine as her frequent fear and hatred of him, and that conflict drives the film. Temuera Morrison is even more complex as Jake, because he makes a violent drunk appealing enough during his good moments to make the relationship convincing; he is Fred Flintstone with a serious attitude. Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell, as the ever-more- pessimistic Grace, is also good, as is Taungaroa Emile as the troubled Boogie.
While it is frighteningly real violence which drives ONCE WERE
WARRIORS for much of its running time, pathos unfortunately takes over in the
third act. There is a drawn-out sequence which gives everyone a chance to cry
and make a speech, and characters start to speak in platitudes like,
"You're still a slave, Jake ... a slave to your fists" and "I'll
wear my (tatoos) on the inside." By the end, I was wondering whether
Tamahori was taking his cue from
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon
Cynthia Fuchs (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Sarah Chauncey
The Book-Lover's Guide
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(Dan Heaton) dvd review
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DVD
Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review
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[4/5]
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filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
review
A
Nutshell Review Stefan S
DVD
Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review
[3/5]
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Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
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Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Examiner (David Armstrong) review
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Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Tanne,
Richard
SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU B 87
USA (84 mi) 2016 ‘Scope
Acknowledging the paucity of black filmmakers coming out of
Hollywood today, perhaps it’s only natural that the writer and director behind
this project is a white Jewish guy from New Jersey who has the audacity to make
a fictionalized film about the first date of the sitting President of the
United States and the First Lady while they are still in office. If the film came out of Hollywood, it would
be announced with plenty of fanfare and hoopla, perhaps playing to a political
base or a targeted demographic. Instead
this came out of Sundance nearly unannounced, without a major ad campaign. As is, it’s actually a quiet and remarkably
understated character piece that focuses on the intelligence of both
characters, who are perhaps blown away at meeting someone of the opposite sex
that is as smart, ambitious, and deliciously charming as they are, both black
overachievers. It’s not often we see
that in the movies, so audiences may be mixed on this one, as the world of film
doesn’t often get to tell these kinds of stories, real or imagined. Perhaps the best of its kind is Barry Jenkins’ Medicine
for Melancholy (2008), an unassuming
first date picture between two highly intelligent black independents in their
20’s from San Francisco, where the film spends 24 hours with them, much of it
in real time, as they feel each other out discussing race and the low
percentage (just 7%) of blacks living in San Francisco, spending the day
visiting the Museum of the African Diaspora, an affordable housing coalition
meeting, before watching a concert. It’s
a surprisingly similar scenario to the Obama first date, visiting an Afro
exhibit at an art museum, having lunch in a nearby park, visiting a community
meeting at a local church, before heading off to see Spike Lee’s Do the
Right Thing (1989), where in
each the evolving personalities take center stage. No one writes naturalistic dialogue as well
as Richard Linklater, whose conversational trilogy Before
Sunrise (1995), Before
Sunset (2004) and Before
Midnight (2013) documenting the personal exploration of two characters over
time stands near the apex of his artistic achievement, all perhaps drawn from
Rossellini’s Journey
to Italy (1954). While those may be
masterworks, this, by comparison, is a small but unpretentious film that just
happens to tell a real story about one day in the life of Barack and Michelle
Obama when they were just ordinary people, before they were a couple or really
knew one another, and before the spotlight of their lives became scrutinized as
public figures.
To its credit, the film is not a biographical account of what happened, where they are impersonating existing lives, but is instead an imaginary journey of what might have happened, including invented conversations of what they may have said, grounded in a reality of events that took place in Chicago, gathered from what we already know from two books written by Obama, all envisioned through the eyes of a first-time director. Surprisingly, he does not embarrass himself, which could permanently derail his career, and instead presents an impressionistic mosaic of shifting mood swings, where much of their dialogue is a battle of wits, with the more reserved Michelle (Tika Sumpter, who is also an executive producer) continually deflecting Barack’s (Parker Sawyers) openly expressed interest. Both were employed by the same corporate law firm, Sidley & Austin, the only two black people in the firm, where in 1989 he is a summer associate, having just completed his first year at Harvard Law School, while she is a second year associate, having already graduated from Harvard Law School, making her Barack’s advisor at the time. To her, their friendship is strictly a professional relationship, not wishing to blemish her reputation at the firm, while the seemingly more relaxed Barack, cigarette always in hand in those days, seems to have other inclinations. Both are from starkly different backgrounds, where she comes from a solidly South side, working-class background, still living at home with her parents, with her father developing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, while Barack has traveled the globe, living for a time in Indonesia, raised by white grandparents in Hawaii, presumably for a better education, where he’s largely been absent from his own parents. As a result, there’s some emotional distance to cover, where the other provides something uniquely different for each of them to understand. Initially, however, it’s Michelle who is caught off-guard, thinking this young upstart might be trying something slick, Southside with You Movie CLIP - This is Not a Date (2016) - Tika Sumpter Movie YouTube (1:06). Both exhibit a fiery spirit, where their eloquence with words gives the other pause, with both playing a kind of cat and mouse game, each taking personal jabs at the other, reaching into one another’s private inner sactum, where thankfully there are plenty of silences to allow the changing moods to sink in. As the day progresses, they still remain together, though there are ample opportunities to cut it short, yet to their credit, they maintain the intensity levels, keeping their charm and wits about them, even as this is perceived as something of a marathon date. While the director acknowledges it all happened, it’s likely that the visit to a community meeting may have taken place on another day, with the director claiming poetic license.
The film opens with
a certain apprehension and anxiety in the air felt by both before what is
obviously a significant event, with Michelle downplaying it in front of her
parents, but fooling neither one, while Barack fends off a phone call from his
grandmother informing her this is a girl with a darker complexion, suggesting
prior white girl issues. Arriving in his
beat-up yellow Datsun with a rusted-out hole on the floorboard of the
passenger’s side, with the music blaring Janet Jackson, Janet Jackson - Miss You
Much - YouTube (4:20), the chain-smoking Barack is customarily late, which
she takes issue with, visiting an exhibition at the Art Institute, which was
off limits for shooting, so instead it was shot down the street at the Chicago
Cultural Center (http://stagmedia.architecturaldigest.com/photos/57b78ce4c7a54e3f0c1178f0/master/pass/southside-with-you-003.jpg),
featuring a vibrantly colorful Afrocentric art exhibit by Ernie Barnes, having
a discussion standing in front of the painting Room Ful’A Sistahs, Southside
With You "Not As They Appear" Featurette - Now Playing in Select
Cities! YouTube (1:13). Barack
points out his artwork was featured on the television show Good Times (1974 – 79) as well as Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album cover of
“I Want You.” Stick around for the
duration of the end credits, as his work is gorgeously featured there as
well. While it’s a beautiful setting, so
is the walk in the park afterwards, actually filmed in the lush greenery of
Douglas Park on the city’s West side, offering her a slice of pie (“Who doesn’t
like pie?”), but she prefers ice cream, where they actually start to open up to
each other, Southside
With You "Grade School" Featurette [HD] Tika Sumpter, Parker Sawyers
YouTube (1:27), hearing the music of a conga circle nearby, where a young black
girl picks Michelle to come dance with her, easily the most exquisitely
liberating moments of the film, before finally heading to the community meeting
at the Altgeld Gardens public housing project on the far south side, one of the
city’s oldest housing projects, isolated from the rest of the city and nearly 5
miles to the closest police station. The
scenes were actually shot at the historic Quinn Chapel (Original file), one of the
oldest black churches in the country sitting atop one of the freedom stops on
the Underground Railway, a site where speeches have been made by Frederick
Douglass, W.E. Dubois, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Susan
Anthony, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, along with noted preachers Martin
Luther King, Jr., Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Jesse Jackson, as well as
President Barack Obama. The walkway to
the meeting site is through a yellow brick tunnel where the names of gunshot
victims are written on the walls, a relic from the past that is as pertinent
today as it was when it happened, where the couple moves through this walkway
in total silence, as if observing a shrine to the past. Once inside, the meeting has the ring of a
lovefest for the young Obama, having worked as a community organizer in Altgeld
Gardens before entering law school, where women can’t wait to share feel-good
stories about him to Michelle, where he’s treated like a returning hero.
The meeting holds a
central place in the film, as it’s the first time Michelle is completely taken
aback by the startling power of his innate qualities, where she gets a chance
to see him in his own element, holding court in a room full of angered low
income housing residents who are used to being frustrated by an apathetic
system that perpetually denies their funding requests and leaves them completely
out of the process. Billboards and
pamphlets that advertise the city’s prowess as a “city that works” do not
include these residents, who are often viewed by the rest of the city as a
dumping ground of discontent, a jobless community so depressed that whatever
money flows through their coffers appears to go down the drain, as every year
it remains a major crime area filled with out-of-control gangs. It’s hard to get your hopes up when
everyone’s dreams are dashed. Like a
scene out of John Ford’s YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939), Barack has an inspiring
nobility about him, refusing to be deterred by constant setbacks, offering his
view that they’re actually in a better position than they’ve ever been,
pointing out the nature of how difficult it is in a democracy to change the
minds and hearts of those sitting in power, who have to continually be reminded
of the resourcefulness coming from dispossessed communities. He gives a great speech, literally changing
the mindset of those in the room, deflecting the fury, offering the prospect
that they can ultimately succeed if they refuse to back down, reassess their
interests, and perhaps utilize a less confrontational, more inclusive strategy
that suggests what’s best for them is actually better for the city overall. It’s an impressive display of Obama’s
grassroots organizing skills, where he is asking residents to withhold their
judgments (a lesson he attributes to his newfound friend) about what seems like
a corrupt and contaminated system until they have a chance to see it through,
as the building blocks of progress are made in a series of achievable
accomplishments that others around them eventually come to recognize and
respect. While Michelle is not exactly
blown off her feet, she finds it suspiciously clever that he invited her to a
community meeting where he happened to be the central speaker. Not yet ready to call it a day, they have
drinks in Hyde Park, though it’s actually a bar near Douglas Park called The
Water Hole Lounge, Southside
with You Movie CLIP - Make A Difference (2016) - Tika Sumpter Movie YouTube (1:19), where the two spar over a
beer about which is the best Stevie Wonder album, with Michelle making the case
for Talking Book while Barack is an Innervisions kind of guy, before heading
out to watch the controversial Spike Lee film where brutally excessive police
tactics cause an innocent death, leading to a furious state of rage on the
street that is broken by an incendiary turn of events that has divided
audiences for decades, a literal standoff between the non-violent teachings of
Martin Luther King and the “any means necessary” of Malcolm X. Most black audiences instinctively understand
the ending, while whites inevitably tend to question the use of violence to
fight violence, having never endured the same oppressive conditions. Bumping into a senior partner from their law
firm after the film, both employees act embarrassed and defensive in his
presence, as the film perhaps unnecessarily strives to make that same
point. By the end of the night, a visit
to the neighborhood Baskin-Robbins shop for ice cream seems to seal the deal,
creating a well-earned truce between their harboring doubts about one another,
nothing that a brief kiss can’t overcome in a nanosecond. It would be three years before they’d marry,
but this little indie film sets the tone for a romantic spark.
Review:
Southside with You - Film Comment
Jeff Reichert, July 5, 2016
Prior to his election as America’s 44th President, we the people learned a great deal about Barack Obama: of his troubled mixed-race parentage, the exotic locales of his youth, his chain smoking, his powers of verbal persuasion. These factoids are dutifully trotted out in writer/director Richard Tanne’s Southside with You with a clockwork regularity that suggests a faithful screenwriter blissfully untouched by inspiration.
The framework for Tanne’s feature-length information dump is Barack’s storied 1989 first date with Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter), in which the pair took in an African art exhibit, went on a long walk, caught a late show of Do the Right Thing and managed a chaste first kiss over ice cream. The meet-cute romantic framework allows Michelle to act as audience surrogate and gradually coax the life history from her loquacious suitor.
As Barack, Parker Sawyers knows to keep one hand tucked comfortably in his chinos at nearly all times, so that the other can move freely through space, and occasionally come to rest behind an earlobe, as he talks and talks in that familiar rhythmic cadence. Yet as a director, Tanne’s feel for the Southside is as bird’s-eye pedestrian as a satellite image. His needless use of a ’scope frame only serves to highlight the film’s paucity of any real ideas.
One wishes for any glimpse of a raison d’être for the film, even a hint of hoary, patriotic sturdiness that would mark this as something like Barack Obama in Illinois. It sadly never arrives.
Building the Obamas in Southside with You | Chicago magazine ... Novid Parsi from Chicago magazine, August 2016
For Richard Tanne, it began with a silent exchange. As Barack and Michelle Obama rose to national prominence, the filmmaker became fascinated with “that look they give each other,” he says. “It’s a look of love and longing, and it’s rare—and even rarer in public figures.”
Intrigued, Tanne began researching the couple and found himself drawn to one particular moment in the Obamas’ lives: their first date. “What struck me about it was Michelle was not interested at first and Barack had to prove himself over the course of one day,” says Tanne. “It had the makings of a movie.”
So in 2013, Tanne decided to take a stab at a script. He spent months culling material from interviews, articles, and videos to create a fictional account of the 1989 date between 28-year-old Barack Obama and 25-year-old Michelle Robinson. The result is Southside with You, Tanne’s feature directorial debut, which opens nationally on August 26. “It’s almost like a superhero origins film about how they became this great American couple,” says one of its producers, Robert Teitel, a Chicago native whose Chicago-set films include Barbershop and Soul Food.
Though just 85 minutes, Southside leisurely presents a credible portrait of two people learning about each other, both pulling away and drawing closer as they exchange personal disclosures: Michelle living with her parents to help care for her father, who has multiple sclerosis; Barack still grappling with his resentment toward an absentee dad. If it’s unusual for a movie to follow two people just talking, it’s even more so when they’re African American. “There are far too few black romances onscreen,” says Tanne, who’s white.
Southside incorporates real-life details from that first date (Barack and Michelle catch a screening of Do the Right Thing and kiss for the first time in front of a Baskin-Robbins in Hyde Park) while taking plenty of creative liberties. Tanne couldn’t find out what the couple viewed while visiting the Art Institute, for example, so he came up with an artist he admires, Ernie Barnes, known for the paintings which appeared in the Chicago-set ’70s sitcom Good Times. And although Barack took Michelle to a community meeting during their courtship, Tanne thinks that probably didn’t happen on the first date. “But it made sense dramatically, so I put it in the movie,” says Tanne, who shot Southside last summer in just over 15 days on a budget of about $1.5 million.
It’s in that community meeting scene where the film most clearly shows the makings of Barack the politician. He entreats residents frustrated by a drawn-out battle to build a community center to set aside judgment and instead embrace empathy. “It’s an attempt at what a younger, less formed Obama might have sounded like,” says Tanne. Indeed, the united-we-stand message could have come from speeches President Obama has delivered this year.
But Tanne says any partisan reading of his film is one that viewers project onto it. “You’re going to have your own politics, and you’ll bring to the movie whatever relationship you have to the president or the first lady. Whatever you take away from it says a lot about you—it tells you what you think about the Obamas’ time in the White House,” says Tanne. “First and foremost, I wanted to tell a love story. This movie is a completely apolitical animal.”
Though Tanne insists he “really tried to stay away from any foreshadowing and any linkage to President Obama’s ideals,” the film still reads like the creation myth of the world’s most powerful political couple. And given the timing of its release during the twilight of Obama’s presidency, it’s impossible not to see the film as more than a love story. It’s also a love letter—one written to a president who promotes compassion and unity during an election cycle marked by malice and divisiveness.
Tanne thinks that reading will shift with time. “If I had sat down to write it in 2008, when I first had the idea, it would’ve been perceived as propaganda for the 2012 election,” he says. “And that leaves me with a question: Will people’s reactions to this movie change over time according to their perceptions of the president?”
Review:
Southside With You's Presidential Spark -- Vulture David Edelstein
Southside With You is a dramatization of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date, in 1989, during which the Kenyan-born pretender took his future bride to a mosque and the two bonded over plans to make Whitey suffer — either by establishing sharia, legalizing gay marriage, or doing both at the same time, however contradictory that might be.
I kid. This movie actually peddles the version concocted by Bill Ayers for his second “Obama” book, The Audacity of Hope. In this version, Obama (who has just finished his first year at Harvard Law School) is a summer associate at a Chicago corporate law firm, where he’s advised by a second-year associate, Michelle Robinson. He really likes her, but, because of their professional relationship, she’s reluctant to go on an official “date.” He asks her out so many times, though, that he wears her down.
It’s weird to watch a biopic in which the subjects aren’t just alive but in the White House, and in which everything they say and do is freighted with politics. There might even be people out there who think the first paragraph of this review isn’t sarcasm — Donald Trump’s definition of sarcasm having turned out to be rather elastic. Other people might wonder at the possible political ramifications of having Obama admit onscreen (as opposed to in elitist print) to spending high school in a “cloud” of weed.
Southside With You plays as if the young writer-director Richard Tanne felt compelled to parse every word his characters say, which means they don’t cut loose the way the characters do in fictional date movies like Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight. It’s all a little wholesome for my taste. But that might well be how it was. And the movie’s mix of romance and politics — both African-American and feminist politics — has a naïve kind of charm. The movie is charming even when it’s stilted, and it’s often stilted.
The dramatic hook is that Barack (Parker Sawyers) and Michelle (Tika Sumpter) are from very different worlds. He’d spent much of his childhood with his white grandparents in Hawaii, while she’s from a tight, working-class South Side black family, with whom she still lives. So what does he propose for a first date? They go to an Afrocentric art exhibit, a meeting in a local church where he’d spent time as a community organizer, and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. That’s quite an Afro slate!
It’s too bad that director Tanne dances around the idea that this intensely African-American date is Barack’s attempt to prove to Michelle that he’s not some white-bred, Harvard-educated, corporate lawyer-type — that his identity and his future rest with the black side of his heritage, and that pursuing her after a life of dating mostly white women is a sign of where his true heart is.
You can infer that from some of the stories the movie’s Barack tells, but it’s fuzzy. To understand the seesaw of his life — Indonesia, Hawaii, Columbia, three years as a Chicago community organizer, a trip to Africa to meet his late father’s relatives, and Harvard Law School — you’d be better off reading Obama’s painstaking dissections of his own motives in his (or Bill Ayers’s) first book, Dreams From My Father.
Southside With You is not quite a hagiography. For one thing, you see that the young Obama smoked like a chimney. He lights up in the first and last scenes and in nearly every scene in between. I hate that, frankly — I’m with the people who say that when glamorous characters smoke in movies it can’t help but glamorize the poison itself, and that’s a terrible message. But the truth is the truth. (Obama has allegedly quit, although some people suspect he’s still a closet smoker. Some people also suspect he founded ISIS. I don’t know — it’s what some people say.)
At least Parker Sawyers makes that smoking a character point: It’s how this Barack steadies himself, chills himself out. There’s a lot of smart thinking in Sawyers’s impersonation. He captures Obama’s odd rhythms, especially those confident stammers, during which we wait for him to craft the exact right phrases and marvel at how sexy self-restraint and logic can be. I’m sure that’s Obama’s hope anyway — that he’s the sexy Mr. Spock. Michelle does everything she can to appear skeptical or at least unmoved. Sumpter seems arch in some of her early scenes, but she gives the movie its fiercely honest center: We see Obama through her appraising eyes. And we know that she’ll have battles of her own to come, in a profession where she first has to prove herself as a woman and then has to start all over as an African-American.
My only problem with Parker Sawyers is cosmetic. He’s dark-skinned, the same as Sumpter’s Michelle, and so he doesn’t visually evoke a man who comes from two worlds. Since so much has been made about Obama’s race and ethnicity, I’m curious to see if Sawyers’s complexion is distracting to anyone else. Let me burn my boats and say I wish Sumpter had been taller, too. Michelle is nearly six feet tall; in heels, she is eye-level with her spouse. Throughout her life, her tallness made her stick out. (And while we’re at it, I still can’t accept the diminutive Tom Cruise as the six-foot-six-inch Jack Reacher.)
In the movie’s central sequence in the church/community center, Michelle is surrounded by middle-aged women who tell her how great Barack is and, in one case, how he mentored and inspired a woman’s young son to escape the violent streets and join the military. It’s a borderline campaign commercial when Obama gets up to speak and makes the case — when confronted by the anger of residents over lack of funding — for a non-confrontational approach, for putting oneself in one’s opponents shoes. Then again, that really was the place where Obama honed his considerable political and rhetorical skills. And the scene is somewhat lightened by Michelle’s realization that it’s a setup to win her over. She thinks he’s too smooth by half — but the half, at least, is on the side of the angels.
The last part of Southside With You is a botched opportunity. Barack and Michelle are blown away by the cops’ murder of Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing, but outside the theater there’s a poorly written scene in which they bump into a senior partner at the firm and Barack eases the clueless white man’s discomfort over the climactic riot with a bit of flimflam. (He lies that Mookie’s throwing the barrel through the window was an attempt to save Sal and Sal’s sons from the mob’s inevitable wrath.) What we don’t see is Barack and Michelle engage with Spike Lee’s central conflict, between the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King (which we’ve heard espoused by Obama at that community meeting) and the angry militancy of Malcolm X, which Lee implicitly endorses. This isn’t just a quibble: The movie seems to be leading up to that discussion. Instead there’s a fight over the senior partner’s unconscious sexism and then, finally, a kiss.
Is that a spoiler — that they kiss? For all its many clunks and wobbles, something comes through vividly in Southside With You: These two kids have terrific chemistry. Michelle for Senate in 2018?
Barack and Michelle Obama first date movie Southside with You ... Dana Stevens from Slate
The biggest question raised by the release of Southside With You, writer-director Richard Tanne’s debut feature about the 1989 first date between young Chicago attorney Michelle Robinson and a summer associate at her corporate firm by the name of Barack Obama, is: Are you just trying to rub salt in the wound, Richard Tanne? In the final months of the second term of this country’s first black president, we’re careening toward an election that’s proving to be, in ways unforeseeable by this film’s producers when they undertook the project years ago, a painful referendum on our country’s lingering divides over race and gender. What are we supposed to do with a tender, intelligent microbiopic about a single afternoon and evening in the life of the president and first lady, years before they ever conceived of the notion that they might be anything of the kind? How is this going to help us with our sorrow about the imminent departure of the first family from the public eye?
We don’t need an origin story to remind us of why Barack and Michelle (again, placing politics aside for a moment) have been the premier first couple of our lifetimes. In addition to their being handsome and funny and well-dressed and truly, unfakeably fond of each other, there was the simple and merciful fact that no whiff of intra-Obama scandal occurred during his eight years in office. No interns to depose, no first-daughterly misbehavior to cluck over. (OK, there was the alleged incident of Malia taking a puff of weed at a concert this summer, but that was an after-school-special script of a scandal in comparison with the partying of some White House teenagers. And anyway, it’s basically senior week of the Obama presidency.) Nor has there been any diva-esque behavior on the part of the first lady, who despite her avowed distaste for life in the spotlight has stood squarely under its white-hot glow for eight years—doing the Dougie; entertaining foreign dignitaries; serving as a forceful advocate for underrepresented populations; and as if ‘twere nothing, embodying the nation’s new, more muscular idea of feminine good arms.
You get the picture. Some of us already ’ship FLOTUS and POTUS enough to have read up a bit on their first date. Why would we require a fan-fic re-enactment, faithful but for one important scene that in fact happened a bit later in their relationship, to appreciate what we had while we still have it? Isn’t it too early for this kind of nostalgia?
But Tanne’s achievement is that he neither wreathes his famous characters in the rosy haze of hagiography nor attempts to paint them in dark, sordid tones simply for the sake of making his story more dramatic. Southside With You is fan fiction of the least invasive, most psychologically astute variety. Though it’s barely 84 minutes long, this buoyant yet reflective movie captures the ever-shifting mood of a daylong encounter that changed both its protagonists’ lives.
Not every moment of the day that the ambitious, slightly prim Michelle (Tika Sumpter, who co-produced in addition to playing essentially the film’s main character) spends in the company of Barack (Parker Sawyers) is romantic, fun, or even especially pleasant. Twice over the course of their time together, one confronts the other with an important truth that he or she has been unwilling to face. (When that happens two times on a first date, you know you’re either made for each other or you’d better run as fast as possible in opposite directions.)
In addition to making each other laugh and think and swoon, the young Barack and Michelle occasionally make each other suspicious, or judgmental, or annoyed. When he shows up a few minutes late to pick her up (in the beat-up yellow Nissan with a rusted-through hole in the floor the first lady has affectionately described in speeches), Michelle crisply reminds her temporary colleague that, after all, it’s her job to notice if he arrives late—the way he did his first day of work. Ouch! But movie Barack, played with confidence and grace by the lanky Sawyers, soon makes clear that, like the real-life dude in the Oval Office, he’s not all that easy to ruffle. He performs a sneaky bait-and-switch as to the nature of their outing: The community meeting she’d agreed to attend at a South Side church won’t actually be starting until a bit later in the afternoon. Wouldn’t Michelle be willing to see a nearby art exhibit, grab lunch, and then attend the community event?
Michelle’s initial resistance to identifying this collegial meetup as a “date” gives rise to one of the movie’s best speeches: As the firm’s only black female associate, she reminds her laid-back colleague that she can’t afford to take any chances with her reputation. Later that same resistance becomes a running joke between the two of them, with her never-say-never suitor finally agreeing to call it a date when and only when she thinks it is.
After that exhibit of Afrocentric art (featuring the vibrant paintings of Ernie Barnes, which also figure in the gorgeous closing credits), there’s still time for sandwiches, sodas, and self-revelatory conversation in the park, followed by that long-promised community meeting where—to no one’s surprise except Michelle’s—her not-date gives an impromptu speech that turns a disgruntled roomful of residents from a nearby housing project into the kind of politically energized crowd we know Obama to be capable of inspiring. It’s all very grassroots and sexy. Michelle is duly impressed at his off-the-cuff eloquence, but she also calls him out on his vanity in bringing her to an event at which he knew he was likely to get a chance to shine. From there they go on to share beers and favorite Stevie Wonder albums at a local bar (she’s a passionate advocate for Talking Book; he’s more of an Innervisions guy), then see perhaps the best-ever first-date movie for a pair of future White House integrators, Do the Right Thing.
One of the pleasures of the gentle and unpretentious Southside With You, along with its sprightly pacing and nicely evoked Chicago locations, is the film’s near-complete lack of traditional suspense. Knowing as we do how Michelle and Barack’s story turns out, we can be sure the developments in this mild-mannered romance will be small-scale and intersubjective, the kinds of shifts in perception of self and other that happen every day in real life and, on occasion, have the capacity to change us.
Over the course of one long summer afternoon, the outwardly swaggering, inwardly insecure Barack begins to suspect he’s found a woman who’s not only his intellectual equal but who sees parts of his character no one else yet has. Even more gradually, Michelle comes to realize that she is not only on an official date but in the presence of a man who may become the first great love of her life.
Sumpter and Sawyers are remarkably playful and loose in their evocations of figures so well-known it would be difficult to render them as anything but stiff impersonations. Creating an individual character is an especially tough job for Sawyers, given how familiar Obama’s speech patterns are to us and how closely the actor physically resembles a younger version of the president, right down to the small, round, prominent ears. Sumpter is much less physically similar to Michelle Obama—though like the first lady, she can pull together a look like nobody’s business. Michelle, on whom the movie both opens and closes, is first seen dressing and primping with a valedictorian’s attention to detail: peach blouse, tight white skirt, high platform wedges, not a hair out of place. Sumpter nails the first lady’s air of warm but reserved composure and the slow, careful way she enunciates her words, as if putting an extra measure of thought into choosing each phrase.
Even so, at times Michelle seems to be arriving at her future husband’s thoughts before he does. As Barack struggles over a stein of beer to put into words the exact shape of his still-formless ambitions, he talks about maybe wanting to write books or go back to community organizing when he completes his law degree. “Politics?” she asks, and he shrugs, answers “Maybe,” and quickly changes the subject. It’s those offhanded moments of understatement that make Southside With You feel less like salt in the wound of the Obamas’ looming departure than a welcome homeopathic balm.
The Authentic Joy of “Southside with You” - The New Yorker Richard Brody
Southside with You: Race, Class, and the Obamas | National Review Armond White
How
True Is 'Southside with You?': Fact-Checking Barack and ... Jen Yamato from The Daily Beast
Review:
'Southside With You' turns the Obamas' first date into something larger Drew McWeeny from Hit Fix
In
'Southside With You,' Barack Obama Is a Young, Smooth-Talking ... Zach Schonfeld from Newsweek
Review: Great Casting and an Emphasis on ... - Shadow and Act Nella Fitzgerald
'Southside With You': Sundance Review | Reviews ... - ScreenDaily Tim Grierson
Southside
With You · Film Review The Obamas get their own Before ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
“SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU” Donald Shanahan from Every Movie Has
a Lesson
Southside
With You - IndieWire Eric Kohn
Southside With You Review: Before Sunrise via the Obamas - Film Angie Han from Slash Film
Slant Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]
Southside with You Review - Den of Geek Don Kaye
Movie Review: 'Southside With You' Tells the Story of Barack and ... David Sims from The Atlantic
Review: Barack and Michelle's First Date, Imagined, in Southside with You Stephanie Zacharek from Time magazine
The Audacity of Love: 'Southside With You' Imagines ... - Village Voice April Wolfe
Southside with You's Filming Locations Explore the Hidden Sides of Chi Elizabeth Stamp from Architectural Digest, August 19, 2016
'Southside With You': The True Story Of The Obamas's First Date ... Genevieve Van Voorhis from Movie Pilot
'Southside
With You' Chronicles Barack and Michelle Obama's Steamy ... Lorraine Swanson from Patch Media
'Southside
With You,' About The Obamas, Has Us Asking: Where Is ... Leah Donnella from NPR
MovieswithMae.com [Mae Abdulbaki]
'Southside
With You' Movie True Story: Facts About Barack And ... Julia Glum from International Business Times
What
Barack and Michelle Obama Think About Southside with You ... Julie Miller from Vanity Fair, Janury 25, 2016
Meet the Proxy Obamas of Southside With You -- Vulture Stacie Wilson Hunt interview, August 26, 2016
'Southside With You' director Richard Tanne, on breaking the rules on ... Lisa Bonos interview from The Chicago Tribune, August 26, 2016
Black Movie, White Director: Richard Tanne on the Obamas First-Date Movie, Southside With You Rich Juzwlak interview from Jezebel, August 26, 2016
'Southside With You': Sundance Review | Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
'Southside
With You' Review: Barack and Michelle Obama's First Date ... Justin Chang from Variety
Southside
with You review: Obamas' first date is ... - The Guardian Jordan Hoffman
Southside With You, review: Politics, race and ... - The Independent Emma Jones
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
When Barack met Michelle - The Boston Globe Peter Keough
Does 'Southside With You' get Michelle Obama right? Bethanie Butler from The Washington Post, August 26, 2016
Meet
Barack meeting Michelle: The Obamas' first-date biopic opens ... Fred Barbash from The Washington Post, August 24, 2016
The movie about Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date is actually pretty good Stephanie Merry from The Washington Post, January 27, 2016
When
Michelle met Barack Liza Mundy from The Washington Post, October 5, 2008
Movie review: 'Southside With You': Date with Obamas doubly romantic Mick LaSalle from The Columbus Dispatch
Austin
Chronicle [Steve Davis]
'Southside
With You' drops in on the cute beginning of a beautiful Obama partnership Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
How the love African Americans have for the Obamas emboldens
'Southside With You' The LA Times
Southside With
You Movie Review (2016) | Roger Ebert
Odie Henderson
Review: In an Obama Biopic, the Audacity of Hagiography? Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
Watching
the Obamas' First Date, and Feeling a Little Uncomfortable ... The
New York Times
Southside with You - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Southside with You full movie Watch Full HD Movie here
Alain
Tanner - Director - Films as Director:, Publications Dennis Nastav from Film Reference
Alain Tanner's involvement with film began during his college years. While attending Geneva's Calvin College, he and Claude Goretta formed Geneva's first film society. It was during this time that Tanner developed an admiration for the ethnographic documentaries of Jean Rouch and fellow Swiss Henry Brandt, an influence that continued throughout his career. After a brief stint with the Swiss merchant marine, Tanner spent a year in London as an apprentice at the BFI, where, with Goretta, he completed an experimental documentary, Nice Time , which chronicled the night life of Piccadilly Circus. While in London he participated in the Free Cinema Movement, along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lindsay Anderson. Through Anderson, Tanner made the acquaintance of novelist and art critic John Berger, who would later write the scenarios for Le Salamandre, Middle of the World , Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 , and Le Retour d'Afrique. Upon returning to Switzerland in 1960, Tanner completed some forty documentaries for television. Among these were: Les Apprentis , which concerned the lives of teenagers (and created using the methods of Rouch's direct cinema); Une Ville à Chandigarh , on the architecture designed by Le Corbusier for the Punjab capital (the narration for this film was assembled by John Berger); and newsreel coverage of the events of May 1968 in Paris. This last project provided the ammunition for Tanner (once again with Goretta) to form Groupe 5, a collective of Swiss filmmakers. They proposed an idea to Swiss TV for the funding of full-length narrative features to be shot in 16-millimeter and then blown-up to 35-millimeter for release. The plan enabled Tanner to make his first feature, Charles, Dead or Alive , which won first prize at Locarno in 1969.
The film tells of a middle-aged industrialist who, on the eve of receiving an award as the foremost business personality of the year, discovers his disaffection for the institution-laden society in which he finds himself. Following an innate sense of anarchism that Tanner posits as universal, he attempts to reject this lifestyle. His retreat into madness is blocked by his family and friends, who compel him, by appealing to his sense of duty, to resume his responsibilities.
All Tanner's films follow a similar scenario: individuals or a group become alienated from society; rejecting it, they try to forge a new society answerable to themselves alone, only to be defeated by the relentless pressures of traditional society's institutions, whose commerce they never cease to require. This theme receives its fullest and most moving expression in Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. Here the failure of the collective and the survivors of 1968, who come together at Marguerite's farm outside Geneva, is not viewed as a defeat so much as one generation's attempt to keep the hope of radical social change alive by passing on the fruits of its mistakes, that is, its education or its lore, to the succeeding generation.
Tanner's style is a blend of documentary and fable. He uses techniques such as one scene/one shot, a staple of cinéma-vérité documentary, to portray a fable or folk-story. This tension between fact and fiction, documentary and fable, receives its most exacting treatment in Le Salamandre. Rosemonde's indomitable, rebellious vitality repeatedly defeats the efforts of the two journalists to harness it in a pliable narrative form. After Jonah , Tanner introduces a darker vision in Messidor, Light Years Away , and Dans la ville blanche. The possibility of escaping society by returning to nature is explored and shown to be equally provisional. The tyranny of physical need is portrayed as being just as oppressive and compromising as that of the social world.
Director's
Portrait Alain Tanner - Swiss Films The
subtle subversion of Alain Tanner (pdf)
Alain Tanner -
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Alain
Tanner - Movies, Bio and Lists on MUBI
Alain
Tanner: a film poet between utopia and realism Christian Dimitriu, 1991 (pdf)
Michael Rowin on Alain Tanner -
artforum.com / film Michael Rowin
from Artforum, April 12, 2010
Film,
Marxism: Tanner, Berger, Jonas | Z e t e o
William Eaton from Zeteo Journal,
October 13, 2015
Videos about “alain tanner” on Vimeo
Alain Tanner - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
THE
SALAMANDER (La Salamandre)
A journalist recruits a novelist friend to help him rustle up a quick TV script based on a news item in a local paper about a man who accused his niece of shooting and wounding him. She claimed the gun went off while he was cleaning it; eventually dropped for lack of evidence, the case was never resolved. The novelist (Denis) sets out to create the script from imagination, while the journalist (Bideau) goes after the facts. But dedicated to a celebration of instinctive revolt, the film is less concerned with what happened than with the girl herself; and Bulle Ogier conveys volumes in the part as the film counterpoints her view of society with its varying view of her. There is, for instance, a scene where she has a job as sales-girl in a shoe shop, and without warning begins to caress the legs the customers present to her: it's a gesture that's at once funny, profoundly erotic, incongruous, and deeply shocking, and one that places both Rosemonde and the world she finds herself living in. A rare treat, infused with a rich and unforced vein of quiet humour.
Movie Poster of the Week: "La Salamandre" on ... - Mubi Adrian Curry
Swiss director Alain Tanner, who turned 80 last December, is one of the forgotten men of European art cinema. Though his films were regularly distributed in the US in the 1970s and ’80s, Tanner has not had a film released here since 1987’s A Flame in My Heart, though he's made 10 films since (his last, Paul s'en va, was made in 2004) and not a single one of his films is available on Region 1 DVD. But, in a nice piece of serendipity, Anthology Film Archives in New York is hosting a Tanner retrospective this week, the same week that his longtime distributor, New Yorker Films, is opening for business once again. A double cause for celebration.
La salamandre (which plays on Sunday evening and I urge all New York film lovers to see it) was Tanner’s breakthrough hit in 1971. Written with English art critic and novelist John Berger (the first of three collaborations), it is the story of two men, a journalist and a fiction writer, investigating a young woman (Bulle Ogier, stunning) charged in a shooting incident. Ogier’s character, who drifts from job to job, finds work in a shoe store (where she fondles the feet of her customers), hence this wonderful British poster designed by the great woodcut artist Peter Strausfeld.
I was hard pressed to find many other particularly striking Tanner posters, though I like the cut-and-paste, two-color, no-expense-spared simplicity of New Yorker’s poster for his biggest hit, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000; and the Middle of the World (Le Milieu du Monde) poster is suitably Godardian, with a splendid ’70s typeface.
The first screening of La Salamandre last night clashed with Film Forum’s delightful evening with Scottish director Bill Forsyth (another somewhat forgotten man and another great humanist filmmaker). In another piece of serendipity I just discovered that, in the same year, 1999, both directors made sequels to their best loved films: Forsyth with Gregory’s Two Girls (“He’s back—and he’s got some serious explaining to do”) and Tanner with Jonas et Lila a demain, which indeed found Jonah aged 25 in the year 2000. Neither film was ever released in the US or, as far as I know, even screened at festivals here. Sometimes you shouldn’t mess with a good thing. (David Lynch and Nikita Mikhalkov take note).
La
Salamandre (1971) James Travers from
Le Film Guide
Pierre, a writer, enlists the help of a friend, Paul, to investigate a real-life story in which a young woman, Rosmonde, was tried for the attempted murder of her uncle. The courts accepted Rosmonde claim that her uncle accidentally wounded himself whilst cleaning his rifle and she was acquitted of the alleged crime. Intrigued by the rebellious young woman, Pierre and Paul gain her confidence and try to discover whether she did indeed try to kill her uncle.
Review
Despite being made on a modern budget and with what was, even at
that time, pretty crude technology, La
Salamandre stands as a landmark European film. It comes from a time when
the Swiss film industry was beginning to gain international interest for the
first time, thanks to the emergence of a wave of talented young directors. The
film is both a wondrously tongue-in-cheek assault against the staid phoney
morality of the Swiss bourgeoisie and a timely ironic riposte to the well-meant
offerings from the politically minded French New Wave film-makers of the time.
The events of May 1968 was still fresh in most people's minds when this film
was made, with most of Western Europe experiencing a dramatic cultural and
political transformation. Whilst some European directors (most notably Jean-Luc
Godard) were actively promoting the cause of left-wing politics in their films,
others - such as Alain Tanner - were more preoccupied with loss of
individuality as society became increasingly homogeneous and regimented, helped
by American-led consumerism and the power of big business.
In this, the second of his full-length films, Tanner shows how rebels are
regarded in his native Switzerland. In that most conformist of states, where
everyone is expected to conform to the letter, there is no place for
eccentricity or a rebellious temperament. The film implies that anyone who
fails to toe the line in this most ordered of countries is either mad or a
criminal. Tanner is of course being provocative, but his observations are not
too far removed from reality, and the film offers an insight into Swiss society
in the early 1970s as well as being an entertaining piece of satire.
In what is very probably her most memorable film role, the incomparable Bulle
Ogier skilfully portrays Tanner's vision of a free-spirited rebel who is
constantly abused and taunted by a mindlessly ordered society. Her commanding
performance - pitched somewhere between Nikita and Eliza Doolittle - allows us
to sympathise with the plight of her character, even if she appears flighty and
dangerously unpredictable. Along with her two exemplary co-stars, Jean-Luc
Bideau and Jacques Denis, Bulle Ogier is clearly having a great deal of fun,
something which gives the film a feeling of warmth and light-heartedness which
is noticeably lacking in Tanner's subsequent work.
The search for individual freedom and the need to rebel against a cold
mechanistic world are themes which Alain Tanner returns to again and again,
with increasing pessimism, in his later films, but never as playfully and obliquely
as in La Salamandre.
Alain
Tanner: a film poet between utopia and realism Christian Dimitriu, 1991 (pdf)
Return from Africa The Long Way Home, by Bernard Weiner
from Jump Cut, 1974
The Middle of the World The Long Road to Liberation, by Ying
Ying Wu from Jump Cut, 1975
Ways Of Seeing Against
Kenneth Clark, for John Berger, by Peter
Steven from Jump Cut, May 1979
“The
Salamander” (1971) by Alain Tanner - Acting-Out Politics Victor Enyutin
• View topic -
La Salamandre (Tanner, 1971) - CriterionForum.org
La Salamandre Clarke Fountain from All Movie Guide
New
York Times Vincent Canby
The
Salamander (1971 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
RETURN
FROM
Le retour d'Afrique | Chicago Reader Don Druker
Charming and perceptive—not a bad combination for a film with a rather direct political position as its operative mechanism. Alain Tanner's witty 1973 study of what it really means to be disengaged, isolated, and unmindful of the third- world problems that can easily crop up in one's own backyard moves with the same narrative grace as La salamandre. Despite a tendency toward polemic near the end, this tale of two would-be Swiss emigrants to Africa (who “return” without ever having left) ably demonstrates the truth of the narrator's observation: “Words can be an act in themselves, or they can be a substitute for action.”
Le Retour d'Afrique, directed by Alain Tanner ... - Time Out
Stifled by the alienating dead weight of Genevan conventions, a young Swiss couple hatch heady plans to move to Africa and 'work for the Third World'. A last-minute hitch, however, leaves them stuck in their own stripped flat, to come to terms with their own world. Their articulate self-awareness precludes the sort of instinctive, freewheeling revolt of Tanner's La Salamandre, but never leads them into the mere cypher roles of Godard's analogous couple in Le Gai Savoir. Instead, they explore a claustrophobic environment of ideas which is the landscape of Messidor in miniature, and emerge with an optimistic vision of personal politics of the sort worked through later in Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. Surprisingly warm didacticism.
Alain
Tanner: a film poet between utopia and realism Christian Dimitriu, 1991 (pdf)
Return from Africa The Long Way Home, by Bernard Weiner
from Jump Cut, 1974
The Middle of the World The Long Road to Liberation, by Ying
Ying Wu from Jump Cut, 1975
Film:
'Retour d'Afrique' - The New York Times Vincent Canby
THE
MIDDLE OF THE WORLD (Le milieu du monde)
The
Middle of the World, directed by Alain Tanner ... - Time Out
Tanner's most achieved film to date is also his most apparently conventional, the story of a love affair between a café waitress and an ambitious (married) local politician which comes to a catastrophic end. But the subject matter (a woman struggling for independence) and formal structure (including 'empty' shots of a bleak winter landscape) come together with breathtaking lucidity. The tone is compassionate, and for a truly '70s tragedy the ending is curiously upbeat.
Le
Milieu du monde (1974) - Alain Tanner - film review James Travers
Paul, a high-flying engineer, is proud to have been born in a Swiss town the locals refer to as the Centre of the World. He is running for a local election when he meets Adriana, a young Italian waitress in a café. Although he is married, Paul starts to have a passionate love affair with Adriana, and is soon prepared to give up everything for her. However, the young waitress realises that it is not she that Paul loves but a self-made fantasy...
Review
The bleak unpopulated landscapes of Alain Tanner's films express the emptiness of his protagonists' inner lives but never more so than in Le Milieu du monde, a grimly realist character study centred on a man slowly waking up to the futilty of the delusions on which he has built his life and career.
Portrayed with extraordinary conviction by Philippe Léotard, the
hero (if we can call him that) believes he has found his perfect soul mate in
an Italian waitress. But as he imagines a new future for himself with his belle
idéale (who is, ironically, one of the foreigners that his political party
desires to oust from the country), he is merely constructing a fantasy which,
if it were to come about, would be no more satisfying than his present life, a
heap of burned out illusions that add to up to precisely nothing.
By denying the possibility that dreams can ever bring happiness but are merely
egoistical fantasies that will inevitably crumble to dust Tanner leaves us with
his most pessimistic assessment of life so far, one that he would solemnly
reiterate in his later film La Vallée fantôme (1987). Even love is shown to be a
delusion, perhaps the biggest delusion of them all - a fiction we create for
ourselves to satisfy our obsessive craving for acceptance and which will
inevitably burst like a balloon once the ugly realities it tries to conceal
have hit home. And if love is inherently delusional, what else is left?
Tanner's answer is pretty clear-cut: precious little. Without dreams we are
nothing.
Alain
Tanner: a film poet between utopia and realism Christian Dimitriu, 1991 (pdf)
The Village Voice [Molly Haskell] October 17, 1974 (pdf)
The Middle of the World The Long Road to Liberation, by Ying
Ying Wu from Jump Cut, 1975
Alain
Tanner's "Le Milieu Du Monde" [1974] | Thirstyrabbit
Le
Milieu du monde AKA The Middle of the World (1974)
World Cinema
Jupiter
Films - Middle of the World
Le-Milieu-du-Monde
- The New York Times Vincent Canby, also seen here: Movie
Review - - At the Film Festival:'Ali':Fassbinder Explore ...
Dave
Kehr's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006 - Caltech
listed as #2 in 1975
JONAH
WHO WILL BE 25 IN THE YEAR 2000 (Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000)
Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)
Alain Tanner's affectionate study of a group of 60s radicals trying to make the transition to the 70s. Tanner combines Godard's intellectual responsibility with Renoir's faith in the resiliency of the human spirit, resulting in a film that is both enlightening and encouraging. Funny, moving, and instructive, Jonah is that rare thing: a political film that speaks to the heart as well as the mind. Recommended (1976).
Through circumstance, coincidence and necessity, eight characters find themselves drawn together. In various ways they're all irrevocably marked by the spirit of May '68, individually representative of the diverse political utopianism operating in the annus mirabilis of which Mailer wrote, 'One had the thought that the gods were back in human affairs'. Tanner gives us a Trotskyist journalist, an anarchic shopgirl who steals food, a transcendental mysticist, an educationalist; and labourer Mathieu Vernier (Rufus), who accommodates his friends' philosophies but realises that their enduringly optimistic visions can only be achieved through class struggle. Mathilde (Boyer), his wife, is pregnant with the Jonah of the title. Tanner again collaborated with John Berger, and the script is didactic and compact, though Jonah has a lighter and more humorous touch than The Middle of the World. It's a heady experience following their agile ruminations on time, language and perception, deftly superimposed on a film that pleases visually and formally.
Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (1976) - Alain Tanner James Travers from Le Film Guide
An unemployed labourer, Mathieu, gets a job on a small farm run by Marcel and his wife Marguerite. His wife Mathilde is pregnant, and they intend to call the new-born baby Jonas. They become friends with a disillusion political activist, Max, and a history teacher, Marco, who uses the most bizarre teaching methods. Marco befriends Marie, a supermarket cashier, who steals from her shop to help out an old friend. Meanwhile Max is seduced by the passionate Madeleine, who works for he firm that intends to exploit farmers like Marcel.
Review
The events on May 1968 were but a dim echo by 1976, by some clung
to the ideals which this period threw up. This film is a fascinating study of
eight such individuals who try to find an alternative to the trashy corrupt
materialistic world. Although their struggle is largely in vain, they each seem
to gain from their attempts to follow an alternative life style and the film's
theme is as relevant today as it was in 1976.
When it was released, Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 as the most
successful Swiss film ever made, with over two million viewers world wide. It
is certainly one of Alain Tanner's most memorable films and is has strong
similarities with the works of another well-known Swiss director, Jean-Luc
Godard. Although the message is similar, with typically Godardesque Maoist
references (is it a coincidence that the eight principle characters each has a
name starting Ma…?), Tanner's style is much less aggressive than Godard's. As a
result, his film is more accessible, focusing more on the human side of the
equation than the underlying politics.
Jonas himself only gets to appear right at the end of the film. This provided
Tanner with the incentive to make a sequel for the year 2000, Jonas et Lila,
à demain , in which he tackles similar themes.
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell]
The third collaboration between the Swiss director Tanner and the English writer John Berger follows a group of young people in Geneva who are searching for new directions in their lives after the failure of the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s. A former labor activist takes a job as a gardener and handyman with some free-spirited farmers, setting up a school in a greenhouse for the neighborhood kids, while his wife continues to work in a factory. A disillusioned radical turns to gambling, while having interesting conversations with his girlfriend, an adventurous student of Tantrism. A history teacher uses radical methods in the classroom to foster socialist ideas in his students. He hooks up with a grocery store cashier who undercharges poor people and steals food from the store to help her aging friend, a veteran of the Resistance.
The interweaving stories are presented in an elliptical style that gradually creates a gently humorous image of youthful idealism in confrontation with difficult realities. Interspersed throughout the film are brief Brechtian interludes in black-and-white that offer what appear to be subjective moments of truth, with cryptic dialogue or narration. The film's unconventional approach requires the viewer's close attention, but one's patience is well rewarded. This little world of individual resistance to the status quo is portrayed with lightness, compassion, and clarity.
Best among the performances are Jean-Luc Bideau and Myriam Mézière as the cynical gambler Max and his endearingly off-the-wall Tantric partner Madeleine, and Jacques Denis as Marco, the mischievous teacher. (For some reason, all the major characters' names begin with the letter M: a reference to Marx?) The film doesn't shirk from depicting its characters' political ideas and dimensions, and it's one of the decisive differences between this excellent movie and the later American film (and overrated mush) The Big Chill. There is no condescension here, no simplification. Looking at the 60s generation with humor does not mean indulging in mockery. Jonah (the title refers to the newborn son of one of the characters) feels remarkably true to life. And although some of the narrative strategies seem a bit sketchy, this only serves to make the picture's humanistic outlook more satisfying.
Film,
Marxism: Tanner, Berger, Jonas | Z e t e o
William Eaton from Zeteo Journal,
October 13, 2015
Alain
Tanner: a film poet between utopia and realism Christian Dimitriu, 1991 (pdf)
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in
the Year 2000 The subversive charm of Alain Tanner, by
Robert Stam from Jump Cut, 1977
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in
the Year 2000 Subversive charm indeed! by Linda Green, John Hess, and Robin Lakes from Jump Cut, 1977
Dialogue
on Jonah Critical dialogue, by Richard Kazis and John Hess from Jump Cut, 1978
Cinema
Pantheon [Christopher Kaiser]
Strictly
Film School [Swiss Cinema notes]
Acquarello
Jonah,
Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000
Clarke Fountain from All Movie Guide
Channel
4 Film [capsule review]
New
York Times Vincent Canby
Dave
Kehr's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006 - Caltech
listed as #4 in 1976
An insightful look
at the absurdities of the 1993 Serbian-Bosnian conflict. In the middle of the night, a Bosnian relief
party gets lost in the fog, only to awake in morning’s light right outside the
Serbian line and they are immediately fired upon where all are lost except two
who land in a trench, one is presumed dead. The Serbs send two soldiers to
investigate, one is instantly killed, and the rest of the film focuses on the
military stand-off between each of the remaining Serb and Bosnian soldiers, who
are at each other’s throats in the same trench, caught in a “no man’s land”
between the two lines. The Serbs placed
a land mine under the soldier presumed dead, which detonates only when he moves
off the mine. There is a cat and mouse
game between the two soldiers, who at first befriend one another, but then they
each conspire to get revenge on the other, both remaining loyal to their
respective allegiances, at first one has the gun, then the other, all this
while the soldier on the land mine awakes and is unable to move, yet he becomes
the mediator trying to keep the peace before the other two lose their
heads. To add to this confusion, UN
peacekeepers are called, over-eager journalists intervene, politicians
pontificate, all of which adds up to an absurdist look at this war, but always
at the center of the picture is this fallen soldier lying in a trench, only he
seems to realize the dire nature of the predicament, and he’s lying helplessly
on top of a sitting time bomb with no hope for a solution. The characters in the trenches are quite good
and the humorous dialogue is filled with witty sarcasm and rancor, while the
interventionists are not so good, as none of them quite have a grasp of the
situation. This film makes that point perfectly clear.
Tarantino,
Quentin
Quentin Tarantino - Director - Films as Director ... - Film Reference R. Barton Palmer
Quentin Tarantino's meteoric rise to fame with the phenomenal
critical and popular success of Pulp Fiction , his second feature, is
not only the result of his considerable talent but of two forces operating
within contemporary Hollywood: first, an economic mini-crisis brought on by the
box-office and critical failures of many recent high-budget blockbuster
productions ( Waterworld is perhaps the most remarkable example) that
has opened the door, as in the past, for young directors who are able to make
successful films on small budgets (made for $8 million, Pulp Fiction earned
almost $64 million at the box office, not counting video sales and rentals);
second, the continuing popularity of neo-noir films, a popularity not limited
to its most thriving subgenre, the erotic thriller. If
The widely read and very cineliterate Tarantino has an obvious liking for classic hard-boiled pulp fiction (evidently Jim Thompson and W. R. Burnett in particular) and classic film noir (Huston's Asphalt Jungle probably served as a model for Reservoir Dogs ). But like several of the prominent directors of the Hollywood Renaissance in the middle 1970s (especially Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader), Tarantino also owes a substantial debt to French film noir, especially the work of Jean Pierre Melville and Jean Luc Godard. Godard's modernist refiguration of noir themes and conventions ( Alphaville is the classic example), however, would hardly please the mass audience Tarantino has in mind. The most substantial contribution of nouvelle vague anti-realism in Tarantino's films can be seen in their creative use of achronicities, disorderings in the storytelling process that make the narratives intriguing puzzles even as they uncover interesting ironies for the spectator, who must take an active role in the deciphering of the plot. The anti-Aristotelianism of this procedure, its disruption of emotional identification with the characters' plight, allows Tarantino to concentrate on thematic elements, especially the role violence plays in American culture.
Like the gang in Asphalt Jungle , the crooks in Reservoir Dogs assembled to pull a heist (itself never represented) are shown participating in what is simply a "left-handed form of endeavor." If Huston endeavors to demonstrate that criminals too have an ordinary life (households to run, relationships to pursue, bills to pay), Tarantino, in contrast, is more interested in moral dilemmas and conflict, especially as these are brought to life by situations of extraordinary danger and threat. In fact, the central conflicts of Reservoir Dogs carry a substantial moral charge and significance, even if, in the end, as the allknowing spectator alone recognizes, the characters are destroyed no matter if they are sociopaths with a yen for torture or men of good will who stand by their friends even at the cost of their own lives. And yet Tarantino obviously sympathizes with those who despise mauvaise foi and make the difficult choices that confront them. A Sartrean and Camusian moralism pervades this film.
Much the same can be said of the similar characters in Pulp Fiction , whose existential plights and difficult choices are here examined from a serio-comic perspective. A torpedo working for a drug dealer is given the assignment of looking after the boss's flirtatious wife. He tries to resist her various come-ons, only to be faced with a sudden, more demanding test: she overdoses on heroin, goes into a near-fatal coma from which he can arouse her only by jabbing a harpoon-sized needle into her heart. Amazingly, she recovers, and Tarantino finishes this sequence with a comic leave-taking scene that ends their "date". Once again, in Pulp Fiction difficult moral questions are raised. A boxer in the same drug dealer's pay refuses out of personal integrity to throw a fight as ordered. Fleeing town, he meets his boss by accident on a city street. Their confrontation, however, opens unexpectedly onto another moral plane. Both men wind up the prisoners of local sadists, who plan to sodomize, torture, and kill them. The boxer escapes, and, feeling the pang of conscience, goes back to free his erstwhile boss, who forgives the man's earlier betrayal before exacting a terrible vengeance on his torturers, one of whom is a policeman.
With their philosophical dimensions, unremitting representations
of venality and depravity among the criminal under and over class, art cinema
narrational complexities, and black humor, Tarantino's first two films are
strikingly original contributions to an American cinema struggling to rebound
from the artistic doldrums of the 1980s. As a screenwriter, he has been no less
successful. Written for former video shop co-worker Roger Avary, Killing Zoe
offers a romantic twist on the themes examined in Tarantino's own
directorial efforts. In this case, a somewhat naive and easily swayed young
criminal must make a moral stand against his lifelong friend to save the life
of a prostitute he has come to care for; the gesture is reciprocated, and the
two rescue themselves from a nightmarish world of self-destructive violence and
addiction. Similarly, True Romance and Natural Born Killers offer
outlaw couples on the run whose loyalty to each other is rewarded in the end by
their escape from a corrupt and disfiguring
Tarantino's third film as a director, Jackie Brown ,
proved less successful with audiences, though it shares much in common with his
earlier work. Though at times almost sedate, Jackie Brown also offers a
nuanced meditation on the
The Quentin Tarantino Archives
Quentin Tarantino - Biography IMDb
Quentin Tarantino | Movies and Biography - Yahoo! Movies
Quentin Tarantino: Information from Answers.com
Quentin
Tarantino • Senses of Cinema
Jeremy Carr, December 9, 2015
Quentin
Tarantino Mick Sleeper looks at his
debt to the French New Wave, from Images
Cult, Culture, and Quentin's New Art of Violence Stefan Herrmann, also seen here: Q. Tarantino (Undated)
Jet
- Mar 9, 1998 - Page 36 - Google Books Result Jet magazine,
Metroactive
News & Issues | The Word 'Nigger'
J. Douglas Allen-Taylor from Metroactive,
Dogs in Hell: No
Exit Revisited • Senses of Cinema Thomas
Beltzer from Senses of Cinema, May 3,
2000
Catch Me If You Can: The Tarantino Legacy - Bright Lights Film Journal Jane Mills, April 1, 2002
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Day Of The Woman B. Ruby Rich from Sight and Sound, June 2004
Tarantino
and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain, July 26, 2004
The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and ... The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion
in the Works of Quentin Tarantino, by Dror Poleg from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31, 2004
Mindful violence: the visibility of power and inner life in Kill Bill Aaron Anderson from Jump Cut, Winter 2005
"Quentin
Tarantino talks Vega Brothers, the Pulp Fiction & Reservoir Dogs
sequel/prequel" Petr Sciretta
from Slash Film,
Critique. Death Proof, a Grindhouse film by Quentin Tarantino ... Emmanuel Burdeau from Cahiers du Cinéma, June 2007
BFI | Sight & Sound | Death Proof (2007) Tony Rayns from Sight and Sound, October 2007
Death
Proof - Bright Lights Film Journal
Erich Kuersten, January 31, 2008
The
11 Most Bizarre Tarantino Moments
Max Powers from ScreenJunkies, August 6, 2008
The Tarantino Problem Ray DeRousse from What Culture, May 20, 2009
Quentin
Tarantino's 20 Favorite Flicks of the Last 17 Years
Quentin Tarantino from LA Weekly,
Is
Inglourious Basterds director Quentin Tarantino all washed up—or ... Has one of the most overrated directors of
the '90s become one of the most underrated of the aughts? Dennis Lim
from Slate, August 20, 2009
Top 100 Directors: #17 - Quentin Tarantino Erik Nighthawk, September 17, 2009
The Deep Morals of Inglourious Basterds • Senses of Cinema Joseph Natoli, September 29, 2009
Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: Film Kills - Bright Lights Film Journal Vlad Dima, October 31, 2009
Debating
Inglourious Basterds | Film Quarterly
Ben Walter, Winter 2009/10
Tarantino to pen ‘The Shadow’? Tom Powers from Cinefantastique Online,
Tarantino
Takes on Slavery Debra J. Dickerson
at Slate, May 27, 2011, also seen
here: Debra
Dickerson - Slate Magazine
On
the Big Screen: DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)
Samuel Wilson from Mondo 70: A
Wild World of Cinema, December 2012
How
“Django” gets slavery wrong Tarantino Unchained, by Jelani Cobb from
The New Yorker,
In
Defense of Django Adam Serwer from Mother Jones, January 7, 2013
Death Proof: Deconstructing The Slasher Film - The Quentin ... September 5, 2015
Death Tarantino style: counting the bodies in Quentin ... - BFI Kevin B. Lee from Sight and Sound, October 5, 2015
Quentin Tarantino, the Most Overrated Director in Hollywood David French from The National Review, November 5, 2015
10
great films that influenced Quentin Tarantino | BFI Paul O’Callahan from Sight and Sound, January 7, 2016
Familiar
Refrains and Minor Variations: Quentin ... - Senses of Cinema Familiar
Refrains and Minor Variations: Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eighth, by Jeremy Carr, March 2016
"Adults
Only" cinema Eddie Muller, the author of Grindhouse,
talks about the origins in an interview by Gary Johnson from Images
Quentin
Tarantino: Interviews - A Brief Talk With Quentin Tarantino by Gerald Peary, August 1992
"Charlie
Rose – An Interview with Quentin Tarantino"
"Quentin
Tarantino defends himself against Spike Lee for criticizing him in using the
'n-word'." Charlie Rose,
Quentin Tarantino:
Interviews - Introduction from the
book edited by Gerald Peary, November 1, 1997
Tarantino
defends slavery theme in Django
Andrew Pulver interview from The
Guardian, December 7, 2012
Quentin Tarantino - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
RESERVOIR DOGS C+ 79
I don't give a good fuck what you know, or don't
know, but I'm gonna torture you anyway, regardless.
—Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen)
Quentin Tarantino came out of nowhere with
this astonishing film debut, playing mostly to arthouse crowds, but exhibiting
an unusual command of David Mamet-style profanity-laden dialogue, camera
placement, complex storytelling, period music, and terrific performances, all
evident from the start. Something of a
horrific, one-act, modernist play, a revisit of Sartre’s No Exit, a heist gone wrong story told out of sequence, where it’s
an action flick without the action, never showing the actual robbery, becoming
instead a psychological examination of the male participants, all cast in their
own conflicting moral dilemmas, where these guys are seen leading dead-end
lives, so used to staring death in the eye that they become nihilistic,
hardened cynics where life itself has little meaning. It’s an ultra violent, excessively bloody but
uncompromising work, a kind of pathetic existentialist reflection on the state
of masculinity, as seen through the eyes of a gang of outlaws. Opening with a big dick joke, veering into
“nigger” jokes, a work where women are discussed almost exclusively as sex
objects, the film is an impressionistic portrait of criminal outsiders living
in a heavily stylized, artificial world where male tastelessness abounds. While disguised within the context of male
criminal mentality, much of these offensive views appear throughout the work of
Tarantino, where for whatever reason, he’s deluded to think a white guy can
tell “nigger stories” without evoking an offensive racial response. Tarantino goes further and uses the same
obnoxious tastelessness with stories about Jews, Asians, blacks, and women, all
meant for laughs, where in his mind cleverness rises above the derogatory
nature of his commentary. Nonetheless, the
offense is still there onscreen. It’s
not much different than doing a scene in blackface, claiming it was meant for
cultural sarcasm, which Spike Lee did in his own film BAMBOOZLED (2000), but
even from a black director it’s still abhorrently tasteless. Some may think the laugh overrides the
offense, which is easy to think, so long as the noxious joke is not on
you. The director’s self-indulgent
insistence, however, to inflict his own brand of adolescent callousness upon
the public only undermines the overall significance of his work.
The film challenges the pervasive view that
there is a code of honor among thieves, as personified by mythical outlaws like
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), who captured the
nation’s attention during the Depression by becoming identified with American
folklore, or a bond of loyalty owed to seemingly invincible outlaws like James
Cagney’s iconic gangster Cody Jarrett in White Heat
(1949). Instead this film suggests every
man is not a superhero, but simply a man, where if pushed far enough, they’re
subject to a psychological meltdown. In
the manner of John Huston’s ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), a film noir written by crime
novelist W.R. Burnett, the story concerns a group of men planning a jewel
robbery, becoming a study in crime.
While Huston’s film is hyper-realistic, reflecting the mindset of a near
perfect crime that quickly unravels at the last moment leaving every man paying
the ultimate price, Tarantino creates a vacuous netherworld that takes place
nearly entirely inside an empty warehouse.
More importantly, one of the gang takes a bullet in the gut and can be
seen slowly bleeding to death, laid out alone on a ramp receiving no medical
attention, a reflection of the fate that awaits each and every one of
them. This fatalistic exercise goes
through various stages, introducing in segments each of the main characters,
developing introductory insight into each man, bringing a unique kind of
insight into their master plan, where the audience only sees the aftermath,
where information spills out little by little.
The characters themselves are memorable, headed by Joe (
What’s unique about the film is how different
each character is, though all are unlikable, where there’s no real emotional
connection to any one of them, mostly seen only after the failed robbery is
over, where the mystery is observing how they each react to the ultimate
failure of their mission. Perhaps the
most inventive aspect is Tarantino’s imaginative use of flashbacks, gaining
insight into the principal characters, where especially intriguing is an extended
men’s room joke that is completely made up, that is part of an original
flashback scene with Tim Roth, but is then used again as a fictitious personal
anecdote told as if it actually happened in another sequence. Tarantino brings a great deal of sympathy to
each character, all brilliantly realized by the cast, but the film itself is a
slow burn of increasing anxiety, where initially only three characters (one of
them bleeding to death, Mr. Orange) make it to the warehouse, the supposed
meeting place, though others eventually arrive, where both Mr. Pink and White
are positive they were set up, that one of the insiders is a rat. Both are amazed at the crude, Neanderthal
behavior of Mr. Blonde, who they claim is a psychopath that just went berserk
during the heist, causing the whole thing to blow up in their faces, with some
killed and others lucky to make it out alive.
The audience gets to observe the personal workmanship of Mr. Blonde
firsthand in the most horrifically gruesome sequence of the film, where he is
seen sadistically enjoying the torture of a captured police officer, all set to
the Bubblegum pop music of The Jeff Healey Band’s “Stuck in the Middle With
You.” Certainly an essential difference
between this film and Pulp
Fiction is contrasted by the two torture scenes, one raw and graphically
appalling, completely uncompromising, while the other is staged with a humorous
turn of events, becoming part of the overall audience pleasing entertainment. References to both Lee Marvin and Pam Grier
appear here, as they do in later Tarantino films, becoming part of the
ingrained interior mindset of the film’s cultural landscape, perhaps a response
to the threat of feminism, nearly banishing women from the screen, becoming
instead a distorted exaggeration of masculinity, perhaps leading to the satiric
nightmarish delusions of David Fincher’s Fight Club
(1999), where Tarantino builds a mythical male refiguration through sick humor,
contemporary tastelessness, outright cynicism, and an utter disdain for the
responsibilities of the modern world.
Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough film, is a
simple but effective tale of a heist gone wrong. A group of criminals carry out
robbery at a diamond warehouse but things don’t go as planned and they end up
on the run from the police after the alarm is set off.
Four of the original gang survive, and once they’re safely hidden away at their
hideout, they start to wonder just how the cops knew what they knew and why
things went wrong. This leads them to assume that they might just have a snitch
among them. Giving away any more information about the plot would be spoiling
it for those who haven’t seen it, and would be redundant for those who have.
While the film pulls together a lot of different ideas and themes from a lot of
different films, it’s most obvious influence is Ringo Lam’s Chow Yun Fat
vehicle, ‘City on Fire’ from 1987. The influence of Lam’s film on Tarantino’s
effort is undeniable and the similarities uncanny.
But influences and originality aside, Reservoir Dogs is a great movie pulled
together by razor sharp dialogue and memorable characters. The performances in
the film as well are all top notch, Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink, Harvey Keitel as
Mr. White, Tim Roth as Mr. Orange, Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde and especially
the late, great
Highlighted by memorable scenes of intense violence and black humor, Reservoir
Dogs remains one of the best crime movies of the 90s, if hardly the most
original. But hey, if you're going to steal, steal from the best.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Gary Duncan
Quentin Tarantino wrote, directed and starred in this ultra-cool heist story that achieved instant cult status and spawned a million poor imitations. He plays Mr Brown, a two-bit con, hired by crime boss Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney) to carry out a jewellery store robbery with five other usual suspects: Mr White (Harvey Keitel), Mr Orange (Tim Roth), Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr Blue (Eddie Bunker) and Mr Pink (Steve Buscemi).
They're a motley crew of small-time losers and it's no surprise
when things go wrong. White,
The heist-gone-wrong story is nothing new, but this is a heist movie with a difference. We don't see the robbery. We see the build up - Joe putting his team together, giving them their "cover" names - and we see the fallout, after it all goes wrong, but not the job itself. It's like a whodunnit without the murder, but who needs a heist when you've got a razor-sharp script and a red hot cast?
Madsen, in particular, stands out as the sadistic Mr Blonde, who has just served a four-year stretch for Joe and he didn't squeal. Joe rewards him with a place on the crew, but when the heist is ambushed, a trigger-happy Blonde loses it and starts shooting innocent bystanders. Pink gets his hands on the diamonds, but it's Blonde who really hits pay dirt when he snags himself a hostage. Not just any old hostage, however. A cop. So when Blonde takes him back to the warehouse, you suspect it's not to share a few beers and watch Kojak reruns till the wee hours.
Instead, he ties his victim to a chair and uses him as a punch bag. He makes a half-hearted attempt at pretending he's trying to punch some information out of the sap, but soon gives up all pretence and carries on hitting him just for the fun of it.
"I don't really give a good fuck what you know, or don't know," he says, matter of fact, "but I'm going to torture you, anyway."
What follows is "that" scene. If you've already seen it, you'll know what I mean. If not, suffice to say it involves Blonde's switchblade and the cop's ear. You can probably guess the rest.
Tarantino's talent for dialogue, however, is what catapults Dogs into instant-classic status. Dogs is a heist film without a heist and an action film without much action. Instead, Tarantino lets his characters talk. And, boy, do they talk - bullshitting, wisecracking, seeing how far they can push each other. Brown pontificates on the underlying meaning of Madonna's Like A Virgin. Pink explains at great length why he doesn't tip. They're regular guys, talking about regular-guy things. Only they're not regular guys, they're cold-blooded killers who shoot first and ask questions later.
Thanks to some inspired casting, this air of danger is never far away. Tarantino, despite his bravado, has probably never picked up anything more serious than a parking ticket, but real-life "dogs," Tierney and Bunker, both did time, with Bunker holding the dubious distinction of being the youngest ever inmate of San Quentin, before making it onto the FBI's Most Wanted list.
If Quentin Tarantino's gritty, bone-chilling, powerfully violent
new film, "Reservoir Dogs," doesn't pin your ears back, nothing ever
will. The movie, which zeros in on the anatomy of a diamond heist, and, beyond
that, the flimsy notion of honor among a temporarily assembled gang of
The temporary nature of the team is important. Joe (Lawrence Tierney), the sting's boss, has made a special point to hire each member of this urban wild bunch for a one-shot deal. One job, and they scatter to the winds, knowing each other only by their gang code names. This way, Joe figures, nobody can rat out nobody else.
His plan is supposed to encourage trust, but in fact it has the opposite effect. Nobody knows anybody, so nobody trusts anybody. That way, when the job goes sour -- as it does when the cops, as if on schedule, show up and Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), who's fresh out of the slammer, starts blasting away -- any one of them could have turned Judas.
With the exception of a masterfully rambling opening gabfest, in which Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) expounds for the benefit of Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn) and the others on his theory of why not to tip a waitress, the movie takes place in the panic that sets in after the heist goes belly up.
Mr. Orange, who's drenched in blood from a shot to the gut, and Mr. Pink set the paranoid mood of the film when they slink back to their meeting place and start speculating on what went wrong. Soon, Mr. White arrives and offers his ideas, while, as they jaw and recomb their hair, Mr. Orange lies bleeding to death on the floor.
This is part of the film's dark, deadpan sense of humor. Mr. Orange never does make it up off that cold cement floor, but the debate over who's the rat and what the hell they're going to do next never flags. Clearly, they can't take Orange to a hospital; he might be traced back to the job and to them. And, hey, what's the rush? Nobody ever dies of a belly wound anyway.
Tarantino, who's a product of the Sundance Institute's Director's Workshop, does a righteous job for a first-time director of sketching in the atmospherics of this small-time desperado universe. Like David Mamet, whose comic-book street-talk Tarantino's most resembles, he's got a keen sense of the rhythms of the lingo, the BS, role-playing and poker-faced bravado. One of the writer-director's main comparisons is the difference between a crime movie and real crime, and how the movie reality begins to take over. They're each actors, with stage names and everything, playing out their fantasy of what their favorite movie hero -- Dirty Harry, Jimmy Cagney, Lee Marvin -- might do under similar circumstances.
Naturally, what this guarantees is that a bunch of people die. And they don't die nice, either. Because everybody's so tough, nobody can afford to back down. (Would Cagney ever back down?) The one exception is Mr. Pink, who, as he demonstrated with his waitress spiel, is the ultimate realist, and who isn't the least bit muddled about whether he is or is not in a movie. Mr. Pink knows that if he dies, he dies for real, and he's doing his best to make sure that doesn't happen.
The others aren't so sure. Suddenly, everything is way out of control, words are exchanged, tempers flare, guns are pulled, and, as often happens with guns, they go off. It's nothing new, but because of the purity of Tarantino's stripped-down style and the director's desire to deglamorize his characters, we're able to see the genre from a fresher, harsher angle. (Peckinpah inspected this terrain in "The Killer Elite" -- and, for that matter, pretty much every film he ever made -- but Bloody Sam was a poet and a romantic and Tarantino isn't.)
Another aspect that distinguishes "Reservoir Dogs" is its cast, which is like some kind of Cooperstown for character actors. As Mr. Pink, Buscemi (as with all these guys, you'll know the face, if not the name) is like an anxiety-seeking missile; the man is wired so tight that his flesh has been burned away, leaving only a set of bones and a pair of pinned eyeballs. As the psychotic Mr. Blonde, Madsen has some of Elvis Presley's lazy insouciance; when he smiles that foxy smile, you're not sure if you want to kiss him or duck for cover.
Maybe Harvey Keitel's presence -- he's the best-known actor in the cast -- is a tip of the hat to directors Martin Scorsese and James Toback who, along with Peckinpah, are Tarantino's spiritual godfathers. Whatever the case, Keitel downs the role in a single gulp. And so do Roth and Penn and Tarantino himself (who plays Mr. Brown).
Beyond everything, though, "Reservoir Dogs" is a testosterone meltdown; in its energy and aggressiveness, it's 100 percent male. (There's not a single female speaking part.) Still, I have to admit that I loved it. I do have one question, though: Is this what the men's movement was all about?
Dogs in Hell: No
Exit Revisited • Senses of Cinema Thomas
Beltzer from Senses of Cinema, May 3,
2000
Catch Me If You
Can: The Tarantino Legacy - Bright Lights Film Journal Jane Mills, April 1, 2002
The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and ... The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion
in the Works of Quentin Tarantino, by Dror Poleg from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31, 2004
Reservoir Dogs - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Robin Wood
eFilmCritic Reviews Rob Gonsalves
reservoir dogs - review at videovista.net Christopher Geary
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Reservoir Dogs - Culture Court Lawrence Russell
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
George Chabot's Review of Reservoir Dogs
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Movie Cynics [The Vocabulariast]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Reservoir Dogs - Home Theater Info Doug McLaren
DVD Verdict Norman Short
DVD Verdict - 10th Anniversary Special Edition Kevin Lee, 2-discs
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2-discs
DVDAnswers.com - region 1 review Chris Gould, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2-discs
DVD Movie Guide (10th Anniversary Special Edition) Colin Jacobson, 2-discs
RESERVOIR DOGS - DVD review | Movie Metropolis Dean Winkelspecht, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2-discs
Reservoir Dogs: SE : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video D.K. Holm, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2-discs
DVD Talk - 15th Anniversary Edition [Preston Jones] 2-discs
DVD Verdict -15th Anniversary Edition [Ryan Keefer] 2-discs
Reservoir Dogs (15th Anniversary Edition) - digitallyOBSESSED! Jon Danziger, 2-discs
Currentfilm.com DVD Review (15th Anniversary Edition) 2-discs
RESERVOIR DOGS - Blu-ray review | Movie Metropolis Dean Winkelspecht
Big Picture Big Sound - Blu-ray Review [Brandon A. DuHamel]
DoBlu.com Blu-ray Review [Matt Paprocki]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review -15th Ann. Ed. [Jeff Swindoll]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]
Movie Vault [Arturo Garcia Lasca]
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
BBCi - Films Almar Haflidason
Reservoir Dogs Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
Reservoir Dogs - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Reservoir-Dogs - Movies - The New York Times Vincent Canby
DVDBeaver Blu-ray review [Gary W. Tooze]
PULP FICTION B+ 92
PULP FICTION remains Tarantino’s best film, immensely
popular, currently listed #5 on Highest
Rated IMDb viewer rankings and the place to start
in evaluating his work, awarded the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1994, over films
like Kiarostami’s final installment of his Earthquake Trilogy, THROUGH THE
OLIVE TREES, Kielsowski’s THREE COLORS:
RED, Atom Egoyan’s EXOTICA, or Zhang Yimou’s TO LIVE, with Clint
Eastwood as the Cannes Jury President, and went on to win the Academy Award for
Best Original Screenplay, losing Best Picture to FORREST GUMP (1994) - - talk
about irony. While not sharing all the
platitudes for Tarantino, finding him something of an adolescent schlockmeister
who’s often more interested in provoking controversy and drawing attention to
himself, since he remains attracted to super heroes thrust into lurid
melodramas not far removed from a fantasy, comic book universe, creating
endless dialogue about nothing in particular that some go gaga about, but
really, they seem more like undeveloped sketches, especially since he tends to
interrupt them midstream, jump into another lengthy dialogue sequence before
resuming the story later. That he
occasionally dips into realism is no substitute, however, for the real thing,
as he can’t stop himself from indulging in Hollywood kitsch pieces, losing
himself in his own childlike wonder and expanding his sequences as violently or
as grotesquely as he pleases, though in this film most of the violence is
offscreen. It’s unclear how serious he
takes his responsibilities, as down deep, he’s just a boy that wants to have fun
at the movies, constantly using movie references throughout his works as a way
of communicating with his audience. Seen
as a whole, his films are not life altering, do not make you see the world any
differently, and are for the most part a superficial alteration of
reality. Despite supposed subversive
evidence to the contrary, Tarantino is not John Waters and instead adheres to
the Harvey Weinstein method of making
Especially early in his career when he made
relatively low budget movies, he both revived actors stalled careers and
discovered fresh faces, while also becoming enamored with the idea of putting
himself in his own movies. While he’s
hardly a groundbreaker, especially since he relishes a sense of honoring and
reviving the past, he’s developed a near cult following that would beg to
differ, including director Peter Bogdanovich who has called him “the single most
influential director of his generation.”
Between his quirky dialogue and his brilliant use of period music, he has articulated
the art of cool on the set, where his energized and often youth oriented
filmmaking is always distinguished by the creation of uniquely inventive
sequences that many would claim are among the best they’ve seen. Tarantino has also maintained an avid
interest in hard-boiled pulp novels, like Jim Thompson and W. R.
Burnett in particular, but also classic film noir, where it’s impossible not to
see evidence of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly
(1955) in the contents inside the briefcase Samuel L. Jackson carries around
the whole movie, or traces of 40’s and 50’s hit men, but instead of faceless
creatures hiding in the shadows barely uttering a word, he brings them front and
center as his leading star characters. As the title suggests, this film is filled with chapter sequences, told
out of time, but all somehow pulled together by the end with the use of
recurring characters.
Tarantino pulled John Travolta out of mothballs and teamed him up with a relatively unknown at the time Samuel L. Jackson as a couple of low level hit men who are occasionally hired to do some dirty work. Their appeal lies in their hilarious comic repartee, an explicative-laced, running dialogue between the two continually engaged in random conversation filled with pop culture references, blending comedy with violence, where they rarely shut up and instead talk their way through every situation. Basically, these are a couple of smart asses with hair-trigger tempers carrying loaded guns and a penchant for using them. Jackson comes off as the smarter of the two, a guy who carries around a wallet with “Bad Mother Fucker” inscribed, but the more reckless Travolta has a special charm about him that is perfectly exposed in a series of lowbrow questions asked by Uma Thurman, the boss’s wife, who is sizing him up before they go out on the town together Son of a Preacher Man from Pulp Fiction YouTube (2:01), as ordered by his drug dealing gangland boss, Ving Rhames, an enormous guy with a violent reputation who is challenging Travolta’s loyalty by dangling his attractive wife at him. Their scenes together may be the most memorable, especially when Uma urges him to help win a twist dance contest and Travolta happily obliges Twist Contest Dance Scene (Pulp Fiction) - YouTube (3:19). But Uma Thurman is the film noir, dark-edged, femme fatale who does not appear out of place anywhere in Tarantino films, as she perfectly fits his fantasy profile, laying the groundwork for her tough-as-nails character in the upcoming KILL BILL Pt’s I and II (2003 – 04).
Characters are introduced, disappear, or are
killed off and later return as the film's narrative structure jumps back and
forth throughout, where there’s an extended sequence with Bruce Willis that
doesn’t quite work because he plays the exact same one-note macho character
that we see in all his other Hollywood films, playing a boxer ordered to take a
dive by the same gangland boss, Ving Rhames, but instead skips town after
literally killing his surprised opponent in the ring. Out of sheer bad fortune, he meets his boss,
the one guy he’s running away from, by accident on a city street, and the scene
descends into a completely different moral plane, where after a mano a mano
confrontation we enter a world of utter depravity, where Redneck underground
sadists sodomize and torture their victims before killing them. This entire torture porn sequence grows
endlessly more gruesome and revoltingly hideous, but suggests there are layers
of morality even among thieves. At least when Travolta and Jackson return
again, opening and closing the film, they retain their unpredictable gift for
gab, where their time onscreen immediately uplifts the material, unexpectedly
ending up in the home of Tarantino himself who uses some questionable “nigger”
humor. Samuel L.
While he may have
intended to extend black culture into a white world or character, Mark Twain
already did that in Huckleberry Finn, circa 1884, and more than 100
years later it remains a controversial decision, but artistically it’s
considered the accepted language of the historical era. Not so here, where Tarantino is unfortunately
suggesting that in the 1990’s in
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A]
Forget Oscar®-nominees Travolta and Thurman. And forget the
rancorous claims that Tarantino stole his best ideas from the last
quarter-century of action moviemaking in
[Note to anyone who's never seen a Hong Kong movie: watch Pulp Fiction one more time, and then rent John Woo's The Killer and turn your world inside out all over again.]
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A sprawling, discursive fresco: three stories bookended by a prologue and epilogue. In the first story, a mobster (Travolta) is charged with looking after the irresponsible wife (Thurman) of his vengeful boss. In the second, a washed-up boxer (Willis) tries to trick the Mob by failing to throw a fight. And in the third, two hitmen (Travolta and Jackson) carry out a job, only to call on the services of a 'cleaner' (Keitel) when it gets messier than planned. It's the way Tarantino embellishes and, finally, interlinks these old chestnuts that makes the film alternately exhilarating and frustrating. There's plenty of sharp, sassy, profane dialogue, and there are plenty of acute, funny references to pop culture, though the talk sometimes delays the action, and the references sometimes seem self-consciously arch. And there are, too, the sudden lurches between humour and violence - shocking, but without moral depth. What writer/director Tarantino lacks, as yet, is the maturity to invest his work with anything that might provoke a heartfelt emotional response to his characters. Very entertaining, none the less.
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Quentin Tarantino's second feature, Pulp Fiction, is at once ridiculously entertaining and remarkably weightless. Its quintessential scene takes place outside the Jack Rabbit Slim's restaurant when Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) tells Vincent Vega (John Travolta) not to be a "square." Forget the irony (after a 10-year acting rut that included three Look Who's Talking films, Pulp Fiction's success made Travolta reputable again), Mia's line could be the film's mantra. Tarantino giddily incorporates countless texts (Kiss Me Deadly, Saturday Night Fever, and so on) into this farcical noir Frankenstein that, not unlike Shelly's legendary monster, eventually turns on itself. More important than the film's elegant structure is what the creation represents: Jonathan Rosenbaum summed Pulp Fiction up quite nicely as "a couch potato's paradise"; no one here can access reality unless they are summoning the many ghosts of noir's past. (Tarantino's most fascinating creation, Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield is more than a repository of disposable trivia and smart-alecky responses, embodying the film's surface concern with righteousness and redemption.) Godard and countless others did this kind of thing way before Tarantino, but Pulp Fiction had such a profound effect on older Gen Xers because it spoke to a newer generation's shared consciousness, which includes an infatuation with movies and, apparently, a fear of penetration. (What is the film's infamous rape sequence but a projection of Tarantino and his heterosexual, largely white male fanbase's deepest fears and prejudices?) When the Wolf (Harvey Keitel) makes Vincent and Jules change clothes, Jimmie (Tarantino) calls them dorks for wearing lame sports T-shirts. By pointing out the articles belong to Jimmie, Tarantino acknowledges his own dorkdom. In turn, it makes him "cool" (not enough though to permit his liberal use of the word "nigger") and a hero to his media-savvy generation. In the end, it's not that Tarantino has no life, it's that his life is the movies. Much like his characters, the director can only live by engaging cinema.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
In the minds of most people, Pulp Fiction is a collection of recycled movie scenes, punctuated by extreme violence, 70's music, and pop culture references. That's supposedly all it takes to make a Quentin Tarantino movie. Yet, how many movies have there been since which have copied this "formula" that are as fresh, energetic, alive and exciting? None. Pulp Fiction remains the best movie of the 90's.
First, to address the detractors. Yes, Pulp Fiction is an extraordinary catalog of movie references. The glowing suitcase is a reference to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. Harvey Keitel's "cleaner" character is a reference to Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita and its American remake, Point of No Return. Uma Thurman's haircut is a reference to silent actress Louise Brooks. The hypodermic scene (with Eric Stoltz and Rosanna Arquette) was lifted from Martin Scorsese's American Boy. The Ricky Nelson singer in the diner is a reference to Tarantino's favorite movie, Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Other scenes and lines of dialogue were lifted from Don Siegel's Charley Varrick, Jean-Luc Godard movies, Brian De Palma movies, John Woo movies, Jack Hill movies, and an entire video store more. Tarantino's passion is not a snobbish one. He reserves the same enthusiasm for both respected movies and trash movies. He is smart enough, though, to escape doing simple homages or remakes. He takes the scraps from these old movies and weaves an extraordinary new cloak out of them.
As for the violence, most of it, in fact, takes place off-screen. Tarantino expertly toys with us in a way that only Hitchcock did before him--letting the scene play drag on, slowly, making us believe that we have experienced more violence than we actually have. Vincent Vega (John Travolta) shooting Marvin's head off in the back of the car is played out to the point of gruesome comedy, but very little is actually shown. Likewise Butch's (Bruce Willis) run-in with the sodomizing rednecks. There is more violence in any summer explosion blockbuster you could name. It's just that you're pummeled with it instead of being tingled, and your senses are less aware of it.
As for the pop culture references, some of it is relevant; Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent discuss hamburgers just before going into the hotel room in which the three clean-cut youths are eating hamburgers (at 7 AM), which lends a strange mystical property to the scene. Likewise, the "foot massage" talk is meant to emotionally heighten the power of Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) without actually showing any violence. Some of the talk is designed to throw you; the character of Tony "Rocky Horror" is brought up several times, and he becomes a character to us, even though he is never shown on screen. Butch and Esmerelda Villalobos talk about death during their cab ride. Isn't Butch about to face certain death several times? Butch and his girlfriend (Maria De Medeiros) talk about various things; potbellies, Spanish, etc. All of it is designed to relax you more and more until the point when Butch realizes his watch is missing. It would be one thing to keep us in suspense during this whole time, but it takes a great artist to make us relax totally before building us back up again. The dialogue itself is brilliant stuff. It's not that it sounds like the way people actually talk, but it has a movie-rhythm that just sounds good. It may be Tarantino's greatest gift.
The actors love it, too. Every actor in Pulp Fiction gives a career-topping performance in every role (has Bruce Willis ever been better? Uma Thurman?). Travolta especially shines, back in top form after years of bad movies. His smooth, underconfident junkie Vincent Vega is our link to all three stories. He "plays" a different character depending on who he's on screen with. He talks jivey when on screen with Jules, cool when with Mia Wallace, and tough in his brief scene with Butch. He doesn't have the confidence to be himself at any time. It's a great performance. When Vincent and Jules begin the movie by hassling the three young cons, they "get into character" before entering the room. Jackson is mesmerizing as Jules, fearsome and religious. Frank Whaley, Steve Buscemi, Peter Green, and Christopher Walken also appear in bit parts.
The main thing about Pulp Fiction that people miss is its theme of redemption. Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plumme) are redeemed because they call off their restaurant holdup. Jules is redeemed after he believes he has seen the miracle of the bullets missing him. Vincent witnesses the same "miracle", refuses to believe it, and is dead the next day (in Butch's apartment). Butch is redeemed by going back to help Marcellus against the greater evil (of the rednecks). Marcellus lives because he sends Jules and Vincent after his "soul" (the contents of the briefcase). He is redeemed when he decides he needs his soul back. It is also a movie about pairs. Every scene is about the give-and-take of two people. There is also a running theme of men losing power to women. Jules mentions that he's a vegetarian because his girlfriend is. Jimmy (Tarantino) is afraid of what his wife will do if she catches him helping criminals in their house. Even when Butch goes back alone for his watch, he is "with" his father.
Yet another trick is that the movie contains no musical score, only carefully selected pop songs. A good deal of the songs are instrumentals and work very well to convey mood. And the songs are all over the map--funk music and surf music are fully integrated. We even have white soul (Dusty Springfield) and black surf (Chuck Berry). So many filmmakers need to learn the value of a quiet scene rather than drenching them in drippy music.
Pulp Fiction is a movie about the in-between spaces that Hollywood movies don't show. in a normal movie, every gesture, every prop, every line of dialogue is related somehow to the final outcome of the story. "Pulp Fiction" shows us people sleeping, taking showers, going to the bathroom, the scenes where characters get ready for scenes, and the scenes afterwards. The boldest move is not showing Butch's big fight in which he supposedly kills his opponent. Instead, we see the cab ride afterward. This is really quite a dangerous move giving us talk instead of action. But, after Raging Bull, how good could this fight scene have really been? And isn't it interesting how the background out the window of the cab is unrealistic black and white footage? Somehow, this ploy works.
I could go on and on. Pulp Fiction has endless puzzles and pleasures that are still to be discovered. It's a movie that says more about the nature of film and the thrill of making movies than any other film in the 90's. It's a movie that is truly alive, made with spirit and energy; intelligence, and gamesmanship. I don't expect any movie in the remaining months of the millennium to top it.
Catch Me If You
Can: The Tarantino Legacy - Bright Lights Film Journal Jane Mills, April 1, 2002
The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and ... The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion
in the Works of Quentin Tarantino, by Dror Poleg from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31, 2004
Pulp Fiction - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference John McCarty
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
Boston Review (Alan A. Stone) review Boston Review, April/May 1995
The New
Republic (Stanley Kauffmann) review Shooting Up,
Rise
of the antihero: Is Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' at root of paradigm ... Jonathan Comey from South Coast Today,
SydField.com - Featured - Pulp Fiction
Jason Overbeck retrospective [A+]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Movieline Magazine dvd review Christopher Geitz
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Movie-only review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4.5/5]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4]
DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review
DVD Clinic (Scott Weinberg) dvd review [5/5] [Special Edition]
MovieFreak.com (Chris Pilch) dvd review [10/10] [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Collector's Edition] 2-discs
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review [Collector's Edition] 2-discs
DVD Times Richard Booth, Collector’s Edition, 2-discs
The Digital Bits dvd review [Collector's Edition] 2-discs
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson, 2-discs
DVDActive (David Beamish) dvd review [8/10] [Collector's Edition] 2-discs
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review [Collector's Edition] 2-discs
Jason Wallis retrospective [4/4]
The Tech (MIT) (Rob Marcato) review
Movie-Vault.com (Arturo García Lasca) review [10/10]
AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [A+] #6 Film of the 1990’s
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [5/5]
Urban Cinefile dvd review [10th Anniversary Edition] Craig Miller
Mark R. Leeper review [high +2 out of -4..+4]
The Film Journal (Rick Curnutte) review
Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In (Joe Bob Briggs) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [5/5]
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte
Brad Laidman: Elvis Needs Boats review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Matthew Bull) review
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
Newsweek (David
Ansen) review Trolling for Talent at Sundance,
Entertainment Weekly review [A]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mike LaSalle) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
JACKIE BROWN
USA
(154 mi) 1997
Jackie
Brown | Chicago Reader Jonathan
Rosenbaum
Adapting Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch for his third feature (1997), Quentin Tarantino puts together a fairly intricate and relatively uninvolving money-smuggling plot, but his cast is so good that you probably won't feel cheated unless you're hoping for something as show-offy as Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. A flight attendant (70s blaxploitation queen Pam Grier, agreeably treated here like a goddess) gets caught smuggling gun money for an arms dealer (Samuel L. Jackson in his prime) and has to work out her loyalties to him, her bail bondsman (Robert Forster, agreeably treated like a noir axiom), the law (including Michael Keaton), and her own interests. Robert De Niro does a fine character part, and Bridget Fonda is very sexy.
Jackie Brown, directed
by Quentin Tarantino | Film review
Geoff Andrew
A pretty faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, Tarantino's finest, most mature movie to date centres on airline steward Jackie (Grier), picked up by the Feds at LAX with cash and drugs destined for gun trader Ordell (Jackson). Reluctant to do time and aware that Ordell tends to murder anyone he suspects might turn informer, she decides to play cops and criminals - not only Ordell, but his former cellmate Louis (De Niro) and pothead girlfriend Melanie (Fonda) - against each other, confiding only in Max (Forster), the world-weary bail bondsman Ordell hired to get her out of jail in the first place. What's immediately rewarding is that Tarantino forgoes flash patter, stand-offs and stylistic flourishes in favour of a closer focus on character (women included), relationships, motives and mood. Also crucial to our actually coming to care about these people is the terrific acting (Grier and Forster make you wonder where they've been all these years). But perhaps most surprising and welcome is that this is a subtle poignant account of middle-aged people trying to come to terms with failing faculties, fading looks, diminishing options and a need to make their lives count somehow.
Cineaste Selects: Forty Years of Favorite Films — Cineaste Magazine Thomas Doherty
Before Quentin Tarantino went for baroque, he was classical. In the 1990s, the geek-savant of independent cinema romanced three gems of the urban crime genre: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Jackie Brown (1997), ADHD-addled updates besotted with Hollywood craft and New Wave flash, a l’amour fou the likes of which had not been seen since Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol squabbled over Howard Hawks in the lobby of Cinematheque Francaise. A second generation auteurist, Tarantino was lucky enough to hit filmic puberty during the literate peak of the second Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1970s, promiscuous enough to stalk the drive in as well as the art house, and diligent enough to vacuum up what he missed on video. More than the avatar of the indie breakthrough into the corporate big time, he embodied a one man renaissance.
Of the trilogy, Jackie Brown gets the heaviest rotation on my personal DVD playlist. Like the job-of-work professional who is its moral center, Tarantino seems unhassled and unhurried, almost serene, relaxed at the plate and graceful on the field, no longer fearful about getting tossed out of the line up or obliged to blast one out of the park, just a reliable clean up hitter who can deliver a stand-up double on demand. It is a batting stance he has yet to recapture.
Elmore Leonard, the gold standard for pulp fiction, blueprinted the plot that even by the standards of noirish heist double crossing crime mellers is seriously convoluted. When the well-preserved flight attendant Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) gets busted at LAX for smuggling cash and coke for the gunrunning Machiavellian Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), she knows that the lethal occupational hazard will not be the eager-beaver ATF agents rifling through her carry-on. (Michael Keaton later reprised his role as hyperkinetic treasury agent Ray Nicolette in Steven Soderberg’s Out of Sight (1997), another Elmore Leonard adaptation, an absolutely delightful intertextual cross pollination.)
Ordell is a verbally deft, utterly merciless sociopath whose posse includes taciturn ex-con Louis (Robert DeNiro), leggy surfer girl Melanie (Bridget Fonda), and ratchet jawed gunsel Beaumont (Chris Tucker), a liability with a short life expectancy. To maneuver Jackie into target range, Ordell hires the world-weary bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Foster) to spring her from jail. No sojourn in an LA lock-up can make Jackie look un-Foxy: one spellbound look and Max sees if not a love connection than at least a kindred spirit. In the elaborate bait and switch Jackie concocts to out-fox both Ordell and the ATF, Max knows she’s playing him, but he’s bemused and enchanted rather than resentful, and we know just how he feels.
Throughout the serpentine shenanigans, the then-thirty something Tarantino shows an unexpected affinity for the hard-won self knowledge, limited options, and sheer calloused competence that comes with late middle age: Max owning up to his hairpiece without shame, Jackie knowing she’s bottomed out, a prospect “that scares me more than Ordell,” and even the cagey psych-out artist Ordell, who is very good at looking out for Ordell. No punk himself, the allegedly young Turk director pays due homage to his elders by resurrecting two faded actors from the 1970s, Grier and Foster, as the late-blooming nearly-lovers.
Of course, Samuel L. Jackson is a hoot to harken to, slinging the n-word and his trademark twelve-letter benediction like Olivier wrapping his tongue around a Shakespearean soliloquy. “The AK-47—when you absolutely, positively have to kill every motherfucker in the room,” he brays during a promo video for automatic weapons (“Chicks with Guns”—available in its bikini-clad entirety as a DVD extra). When Max asks Ordell if his place of residence is a house or an apartment, he savors the comeback. “It’s a house,” he says, the slick gangsta from the hood suddenly the proud bourgeois home owner. In outrageously matching attire, menacing and magnetic, he is a slithery charmer who does not need a wallet saying “Bad Motherfucker” to know he is one.
For the soundtrack, QT the deejay racks up a mix tape from a dream jukebox: Bobby Womack’s majestic “Across 110th Street,” from the eponymous 1972 blaxploitation flick; the syrupy Philly soul of the Delfonics, which Jackie plays for Max on her symbolically retro vinyl collection; and, unforgettably, the eerie, echo-chamber strains of “Strawberry Letter 23” by the Brothers Johnson as Ordell drives Beaumont on a long-take dead end. (What is it with Tarantino car trunks?)
In a commentary clip on the DVD release, Tarantino likens Jackie Brown to Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959). “A hang out movie,” he calls it, meaning that the intricately layered plot is a distraction the first time around, that one comes back to the film to hang out with the characters and drink in their personalities—to share a quiet cup of coffee with Jackie and Max, sip drinks with Ordell and Louis, smoke a bowl with beach bunny Melanie, and, not least, to bathe in the creative glow of a white hot talent at the top of his game.
'Jackie Brown' And Other Counterculture Heroes Revived At ... Sean Burns from WBUR, June 4, 2015
The Brattle Theatre’s cleverly curated “Sunshine Noir” series — culling the best of crime dramas transplanted out of the shadows into the warm California sun — is a gift to local moviegoers for many reasons. For starters the programming provides context, and if so inclined you can spend this coming weekend tracing the cinematic DNA of addled, counterculture gumshoe heroes from Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc Sportello in last year’s “Inherent Vice,” to Jeff Bridges’ immortal “Big Lebowski” Dude, all the way back to the great granddaddy of them all: Elliott Gould’s anachronistic hepcat Phillip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.”
Another thing a series like this can do is prime a picture for rediscovery, allowing you to see an older movie with new eyes, free from preconceived notions that may have dogged it during the original release. This is helpful, as I must admit I was a little perplexed the first time I saw Thursday’s closing night attraction, “Jackie Brown.”
See, I was sophomore at NYU Film School when “Pulp Fiction” had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, an event that famously caused fainting spells, and for movie nerds of that era was roughly akin to Elvis shaking his hips on the Ed Sullivan show. Quentin Tarantino, like so many of us at the time, was a video store clerk who gorged on cinema culture both high and low, holding Jean Luc-Godard and Sonny Chiba in equal regard. The grindhouse met the art-house in Tarantino’s cheerfully democratic universe; rotgut exploitation movie tropes served up with elegant, French New Wave flourishes. “Pulp Fiction” played in first-run theaters for seven months. It was all we talked about for a year.
To call Tarantino’s follow-up, “Jackie Brown,” hotly anticipated would be a ridiculous understatement. (Remember that antediluvian pre-Internet movie hype cycle, when you’d have to pore over magazines on newsstands searching for snippets of information, keeping your fingers crossed at theaters hoping you might see a trailer? That was me.) So on opening day, Christmas 1997, I patiently waited for the family festivities to subside to a point where I could quietly sneak out for a late show of “Jackie Brown,” scoring some well-deserved side-eye in the process. (My priorities have never been great.)
But then instead of the smirky, ultraviolent adrenaline-shot-to-the-heart “Pulp” euphoria I’d so feverishly anticipated, here was a melancholy ramble about small-time sad-sacks talking in circles while sitting around crappy apartments and malls for more than two and a half hours. I didn’t know what to make of it, and mine wasn’t an unpopular opinion.
“Jackie Brown” opened to lukewarm critical reception. (Siskel and Ebert were big boosters, but most everybody else just complained about the length.) It earned under $40 million at the U.S. box office — a respectable number, given the $12 million budget, but a fraction of “Pulp Fiction’s” blockbuster grosses. “Jackie Brown” was gone from theaters in a few weeks instead of months, and then everybody went right back to talking about Paul Thomas Anderson, who’d just swiped Tarantino’s hotshot wunderkind throne after “Boogie Nights” had followed in “Pulp Fiction’s” footsteps and blown the doors off 1997’s New York Film Festival.
Tarantino, who’d been a ubiquitous and rather annoying fixture on the talk-show and celebrity cameo circuit, abruptly disappeared from the public eye. He didn’t make another movie for six years. There were rumors of depression and drugs. “Jackie Brown’s” DVD release was delayed half-a-decade until 2002, for reasons never properly explained. In the meantime, the movie’s reputation became something of a write-off. Though technically not a failure, it was perceived as one. Critic Stanley Kauffman brutally wrote in The New Republic: “It’s the flat, self-exposing dud that fate often keeps in store for the initially overpraised.”
I had a different experience, heading back to the theater about a week after it had opened, I think because my dad wanted to see it. Freed from my expectations of the Tarantino roller-coaster everybody was expecting, on second viewing I was able to see “Jackie Brown” for the movie it is, instead of the movie I’d wanted it to be. It’s slow, it’s sad and it’s very funny in ways that don’t really revolve around punchlines. This is the oldest movie ever made by a 34-year-old man, but I don’t mean that as a pejorative. It’s about characters who have been around the block one too many times and they’re exhausted, full of dreams deferred, just trying to scrape by.
Tarantino actually teaches you how to watch “Jackie Brown” during the opening credits, which are initially content to regard former Blaxploitation movie goddess Pam Grier as the title character, gliding along the LAX people-mover made famous by “The Graduate” (and recently on “Mad Men”) to the tune of Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street.” A national treasure, Grier still looks amazing, and the movie invites you to just sit there and drink in her regal visage with Womack’s slow groove — biorhythmically chilling out the audience into the proper mood. Then Jackie realizes she’s late for work, and the song climaxes with Grier scrambling to check boarding passes at the gate of the most low-rent airline at the far end of the airport. He’s just put an icon on a pedestal, and then dragged her back down to Earth.
Jackie’s in trouble. She’s been supplementing her minuscule stewardess salary smuggling cash for small-time gun-runner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Now she’s being badgered by two hilariously alpha-male Feds (Michaels Bowen and Keaton, all swagger) who are trying to put the squeeze on Jackie, forcing her to set up her employer in a money-grab sting operation.
But anybody who has ever seen a Pam Grier movie knows that nobody pushes Pam Grier around. So with the help of her rumpled, lovesick, seen-it-all bail-bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster, in a performance so far beyond great it approaches Zen), Jackie Brown fashions a way to play all of the players and walk away with a shopping bag full of hundred dollar bills. This takes some time, and a lot of talking.
Despite changing the name and the race of our main character, “Jackie Brown” is otherwise a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel, “Rum Punch.” The collaboration is simpatico on a molecular level, as both writers are madly in love with the sound of their characters’ voices, allowing these folks great expanses in which to talk themselves into doing dastardly deeds, and it’s tough sometimes to tell who wrote which line. I’d wager the only significant difference between them is that Leonard always had a deep well of empathy for his doomed losers, making “Jackie Brown” the most soulful, least flippant Quentin Tarantino movie by several measures of order. (Really, who do you care about more: the Vega brothers or Jackie and Max?)
For once not shooting in widescreen, Tarantino typically keeps the frame tight on his character’s faces. Ordell’s gang, which includes washed-up surfer gal Melanie (Bridget Fonda) and addled ex-con Louis (Robert De Niro) are never photographed as a unified team. Everybody’s got their own agenda, each trying to find an out, and they’re all filmed like stars of their own movies.
Fonda is fairly heartbreaking as an over-the-hill trophy gal who never learned how to support herself beyond cozying up to the right rich guy. But it’s De Niro’s work here, so stunningly precise, that continues to amaze. Truly institutionalized after too many years in prison and usually stoned, he can’t ever seem to focus on what’s going on in any given scene, getting all tangled up with the complexities of newfangled car keys and phone cords. He’s a pathetic mess, but also deadly if you catch him in the wrong mood.
Elmore Leonard novels read like screenplays, but they’re notoriously tricky to adapt for the screen because his criminals are (like most criminals) stupid dumbbells that he plays as figures of fun, until the time comes when they aren’t anymore. You can count on one hand the Leonard adaptations (like “Jackie,” “Out Of Sight” or TV’s dearly departed “Justified”) that got this particular formula right.
In keeping with the minor-league nature of these particular criminals, “Jackie Brown” was reportedly all shot within 20 minutes of LAX, in the lower-class South Bay area of Los Angeles where Tarantino grew up. It’s a tacky L.A. we never get to see in movies, all crummy apartments, faulty door-buzzers and sparse storefronts between parking lots, where the Del Amo Mall feels like an oasis. It’s grubby-looking for a Hollywood movie — everybody’s car is old, the fashions are off-the-rack and most of these folks are overdue for a haircut.
The plot hinges upon missed calls from landlines, long-winded answering machine messages and beepers, plus it’s chock-full of indoor cigarette smoking. Characters spend so much time listening to cassette tapes in their cars, it becomes a running gag when songs pick up right where they left off after turning the ignition key.
Quentin Tarantino’s reputation is for narrative audacity and outrageous violence, but I’ve always felt his strongest suit is social observation, picking away at weird customs of human behavior. (Think of the tipping discussion in “Reservoir Dogs,” or “Pulp Fiction’s” great foot massage debate.) “Jackie Brown” is all behavior, with the exceedingly generous running time allowing us to live with these characters in ways that make them feel more real than any others in his oeuvre. “You can’t trust Melanie,” Jackson’s Ordell says with a sly smile late in the film, “but you can always trust Melanie to be Melanie.” By then we know her well enough to understand exactly what he means.
On my way out of the theater after that fateful second viewing, I was gobsmacked by just how mature the movie felt, and I rather foolishly predicted that Tarantino’s next film wouldn’t contain any violence at all. (Yeah, I was a little off on that one.) Maybe because of the movie’s mixed reception, the filmmaker has since retreated entirely into a cartoon world of his own imagination. “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained” have their moments, I’m a little queasy about his attempts to wring juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasies out of historical atrocity. As I get older, Tarantino’s bratty effrontery has begun to grate on my nerves and I don’t find myself re-watching even his early films all that often anymore.
But I keep coming back to “Jackie Brown” once a year or so, looking forward to spending time with these characters again as I would a reunion with old friends. As the director’s work become more outrageously gross and stylized, it stands out as the gentle, humanist anomaly in his filmography — the kind of movie he never tried making again, much to our loss. “Jackie Brown” is Tarantino’s “American Graffiti.”
Metroactive
News & Issues | The Word 'Nigger'
J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, April 9 – 15, 1998
The
N Word: Who Can Say It, who Shouldn't, and why book by Jabari Asam, 2007 (pdf)
Why 'Jackie Brown' is Quentin Tarantino's Best Film ... Bill Gibron from Pop Matters, October 13, 2011
Radiator
Heaven [J.D.] JD Lafrance
Pulped Fiction - New York
Magazine David Denby
Jackie Brown
Review - Pajiba Drew Morton
Jackie Brown - Salon.com Charles Taylor, December 24, 1997
Wise
man Quentin Tarantino brings jolly Jackie Brown ; Day ... Andrew Sarris from The New York Observer
Jackie Brown - Culture
Court Lawrence Russell
Jackie Brown: The
question remains: something or nothing?
David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site
Film
Noir of the Week Gary Deane
Nitrate
Online Eddie Cockrell
Images
Movie Journal Gary Johnson
Jackie Brown - Deep Focus Bryant Frazer
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Holding
Their Fire David Edelstein, December
26, 1997
JamesBowman.net |
Jackie Brown
Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997) | Forrest In Focus ... Forrest Cardamenis
Nick's Flick Picks (Capsule Review) Nick Davis
Pam Grier is FOXY! [Jerry Saravia]
Who Won the Scene? Samuel L. Jackson vs. Everyone Else ... Jason Concepcion from Grantland, March 31, 2015
Jackie Brown review | GamesRadar Total Film
Jackie Brown | Reelviews
Movie Reviews James
Berardinelli
Tarantino's
Unique Jackie Brown - The Gemsbok
Daniel Podgorski
Talking Pictures [Steven Russell]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Jackie Brown · Dvd Review Jackie Brown · DVD Review ... Keith Phipps from The Onion A.V. Club
The DVD Journal |
Reviews : Jackie Brown: Collector's Edition
Dawn Taylor
DVD Verdict [Ryan Keefer]-Collector's Edition
DVD Movie Guide Colin Jacobson, Collector’s Edition
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Jackie Brown
Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Nate Boss
DVDActive.com
[Gabriel Powers] Blu-Ray
DVD
Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]
Film
Freak Central - Pulp Fiction (1994) + Jackie Brown ... Walter Chaw, Blu-Ray
411mania.com
- Blu-Ray [Chad Webb]
Jackie Brown
(Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray
Glenn Erickson
Jackie Brown | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Glenn Heath Jr.
Parallax View [Sean Axmaker] Blu-Ray
Jackie
Brown Blu-ray Review - IGN - IGN.com
R.L. Shaffer
Blu-ray Review: JACKIE BROWN - Great Transfer Of A Great ... Adam Whyte from What Culture
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw] Blu-Ray, Tarantino XX, 8-film compilation
DVD Talk - Tarantino XX Blu-ray [Tyler Foster]
The
Man Who Viewed Too Much [Mike D'Angelo]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Film Scouts
Reviews: Jackie Brown Karen
Jaehne
Napierslogs' Movie Expositions [Anne Campbell]
Quentin
Tarantino's 'Jackie Brown' Soundtrack Getting Vin ... Kevin Jagernauth on the soundtrack from The
Playlist
12 Fascinating Facts About 'Jackie Brown' | Mental Floss James L. Menzies
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Scott C
Pam Grier On Jackie Brown, In Her Own Words Interview excerpts from Empire magazine, October 2011
Is this it? Pam Grier, blaxploitation star | Film | The Guardian Damon Wise interview with Pam Grier, October 3, 2008
Read our review of Jackie
Brown - Film4
Review: 'Jackie Brown' - Variety Todd McCarthy
BBCi
- Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidson
Pam Grier's Jackie Brown snub proves Oscars have always ... Pam Grier’s Jackie Brown snub proves Oscars have always been #SoWhite, by Noah Berlatsky from The Guardian, January 26, 2016
Peter
Keough - Boston Phoenix Quentin
Tarantino gets off color in Jackie
Brown
Jackie
Brown - Philadelphia City Paper
Cindy Fuchs
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Albuquerque Alibi [Devin D. O'Leary]
FILM
REVIEW -- Tarantino's Latest Caper / Funky `Jackie ... Mick LaSalle from The San Francisco Chronicle
From San Francisco With Love [Oktay Ege Kozak]
Jackie Brown Movie
Review & Film Summary (1997) | Roger ... Roger Ebert
Jackie Brown - The New York Times Janet Maslin
Jackie Brown (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jackie
Brown: Music from the Miramax Motion Picture ...
KILL BILL, VOL.1 B 86
Revenge
is a dish best served cold. —Old Klingon Proverb
Listening to Nancy Sinatra's hauntingly slow and eerily quiet rendition
of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" in the opening moments was the
high point of the film for me, for as a prelude, it exquisitely foreshadows an
ominous nature of what we are about to see. The Sonny
Kill
Bill: Vol. 1 | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Quentin Tarantino's lively and show-offy 2003 tribute to the Asian martial-arts flicks, bloody anime, and spaghetti westerns he soaked up as a teenager is even more gory and adolescent than its models, which explains both the fun and the unpleasantness of this globe-trotting romp. It's split into two parts, and I assume the idea of "volumes" reflects the mind-set of a former video-store clerk who thinks in terms of shelf life. This is essentially 111 minutes of mayhem, with hyperbolic revenge plots and phallic Amazonian women behaving like nine-year-old boys; the dialogue, less spiky than usual, uses bitch as often as his earlier films used nigger, and most of the stereotypes are now Asian rather than black. If Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog was a response of sorts to Tarantino, then Tarantino returns the compliment here with RZA's music and the mixture of Japanese and Italian genre elements. With Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Sonny Chiba, Daryl Hannah, Julie Dreyfuss, and Chiaki Kuriyama.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Resounding proof that aesthetic decisions should never be left to the marketing department, Quentin Tarantino's genre-jumping opus Kill Bill has been cut into two bite-size chunks, presumably to maximize admissions over a six-month haul. Since the film unfolds in non-sequential "chapters" like Pulp Fiction, perhaps Miramax and Tarantino felt that it could take the form of a trashy serial novel, with one installment teasing audiences just enough to get them salivating over the next. But unlike the recent Lord Of The Rings adaptations, Kill Bill wasn't planned as a multi-part project, which explains why it ends on such a distinctly unsatisfying note, in spite of the magnificent spectacle that has already unspooled. A bloody revenge epic severed at the torso, Kill Bill: Volume 1 opens with a "Feature Presentation" logo from the '70s, the first sign that Tarantino is returning to his past as a budding cineaste, paying grand homage to the sensationalist genre pictures that continue to inform his work. In that sense, he's created the infectious, movie-movie fantasy world that he might have dreamt of as a viewer: a Frankenstein monster composed of Shaw Brothers martial-arts films, Japanese yakuza and samurai movies (new- and old-school), Italian spaghetti Westerns, and even a playful experiment in anime. It remains to be seen whether Kill Bill is merely a skilled slice of juvenilia or a pastiche with real emotional and thematic underpinnings, but based on Tarantino's storytelling command in the first half, it's worth giving him the benefit of the doubt. A lithe, imposing Uma Thurman plays "The Bride," a.k.a. Black Mamba, a former member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad who was left for dead when the other members turned on her and slaughtered her entire wedding party. Four years later, Thurman awakes from a coma with a powerful thirst for revenge on her cohorts, including Vivica A. Fox ("Copperhead"), Lucy Liu ("Cottonmouth"), Daryl Hannah ("California Mountain Snake"), Michael Madsen ("Sidewinder"), and the sinister ringleader, a thus-far-unseen David Carradine. As usual, Tarantino scrambles the chronology to great effect, patiently doling out pieces of backstory while leaving other major revelations for the back half. Jet-setting from Pasadena to Okinawa to Tokyo, Volume 1 mirrors Thurman's single-minded focus on confrontation, moving purposefully through grisly, multi-textured showdowns with two assassins, broken up by a welcome pit stop with Street Fighter legend Sonny Chiba. Though each setpiece has been meticulously orchestrated–with balletic Yuen Wo-Ping wire-fu choreography, deliciously eclectic music selection, and references by the barrelful–the cumulative effect is strangely wearying, perhaps because the carnage has yet to be relieved by other material. Based on Tarantino's other work, Kill Bill: Volume 2 will likely balance out his masterful grindhouse theatrics with a redemptive bit of heart. But for now, that's only speculation. To be continued...
Kill
Bill is bloody, empty bliss. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein, October 8, 2009
When he's told in one of his movies that sex without love is an empty experience, Woody Allen says, "Yes, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best." That's how I feel about Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature, Kill Bill, Volume 1 (Miramax). I don't think the movie is totally empty—it's just, well, on the elemental end of the dramatic spectrum. It's about as thematically complex as its title. The story revolves around a woman, played by Uma Thurman, whose entire wedding party is slain by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or DiVAS, which is commanded by a guy called Bill (David Carradine—or, rather, his voice and feet). We don't know what the pregnant bride did to merit execution, but we see enough shrieking flashbacks to know that the assault on her was bloody, protracted, and excruciating. We know why, once the Bride (that's what she's called) awakens from a 4-year coma, she wants to hack her way through all the DiVAS on her way to the title character, whom she once worked for (under the nom de guerre Black Mamba) and who once put a bullet in her head.
She doesn't make it to Bill in this volume, since Kill Bill was itself hacked into two parts when Tarantino and Miramax's Harvey Weinstein thought a 3-hour-plus gutbucket revenge flick was a contradiction in terms. I agree; but it's important to say that, for all its invocation of Hong Kong martial-arts and Japanese shogun-assassin pictures, Kill Bill doesn't replicate the '70s cum-stained grind-house experience. It's too playful in its form, too artfully scrambled in its narrative syntax, too visually resourceful, too beautiful. (The velvety cinematography is by Robert Richardson, the ecstatic choreography by Yuen Wo-Ping, the shrieking '70s trumpets by the RZA.) But what truly distances the movie from its models is the fan-boy giddiness that Tarantino brings to the party. He has never done pure action before: He kept the violence off-screen or at a distance in his last film, the funky and vastly underrated Jackie Brown (1997). This time, he throws himself whole-hog into the carnage. When a man's head is severed and his blood shoots up like the water from an opened fire hydrant, you can almost hear him cackle, "This is so cool."
Thurman isn't a typical martial-arts heroine, either. She's a tall woman, and she doesn't have the superhuman nimbleness of Beijing Opera trained fighters. But I loved watching her heft that Japanese steel: She's enough of an actress to merge her own exertions with the character's. The Bride kills scores—maybe hundreds—of people, but none of them casually. And despite the campy dialogue, there's a current of emotion that runs through the action. In an early scene, the Bride inadvertently kills one of her adversaries in front of the woman's very young daughter, and the moment hangs, ugly and unresolved. The Bride tells the little girl that if she's still feeling raw in a few years, she can come for her. A short time later, there's a flashback—marvelously animated by the Japanese outfit Production I.G., in the style of an anime like Ghost in the Shell (1998)—in which we learn that the Bride's principaladversary, the yakuza boss O-Ren (Lucy Liu), became an assassin after avenging her murdered parents. Kill Bill is like a revenger's-tragedy hall of mirrors: The heroine of one vigilante saga becomes the villain of the next.
The movie will not be to everyone's taste; I've already read some tut-tut reviews, like the one by David Denby in The New Yorker that ends, "I felt nothing. Not despair. Not dismay. Not amusement. Nothing." (Like many of my friend Denby's weary plaints, this sounds better when you read it with a French accent: "Ah felt … nossing. Not ze despair … Not ze dismay … Not z'amuse-mon. Nossing.") For my part, I felt glee. I felt the way I sometimes do at a Mark Morris dance piece that reshuffles familiar, showbizzy moves into something new and funny and unexpectedly lyrical. Kill Bill literally becomes a dance movie in the course of the final battle. The lights go out and the Bride and a horde of masked assassins are suddenly blue silhouettes gyrating against a great grid: It's like An American in Paris with arterial spray.
OK, Kill Bill is a lot less radical or memorable than either Pulp Fiction (1994) or Jackie Brown (which plays even better when you settle into the Barcalounger and watch it again on video with a couple of beers and a joint). But it's in a different universe than Tarantino's pal Robert Rodriguez's recent Once Upon a Time in Mexico, which is the same sort of high-body-count, straight-to-video material staged and shot by someone with no eye, no ear, and no sensibility. Kill Bill is about nothing more (or less) than its director's passion for the mindless action pictures that got him through adolescence. It isn't sex without love: It's an orgy with just enough love.
Tarantino
and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain, July 26, 2004
Mindful violence: the visibility of power and inner life in
Kill Bill Aaron Anderson from Jump Cut, Winter 2005
The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and ... The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion
in the Works of Quentin Tarantino, by Dror Poleg from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31, 2004
“Kill Bill: Vol. 1″ -
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek from Salon, October 10, 2003
World
Socialist Web Site Marty Jonas
Nitrate
Online - Feature KJ Doughton and
Cynthia Fuchs reviews of Volumes 1 and 2, interview with David Carradine
Kill Bill:
Vol. 1 - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff
Reichert
Enter the
Dragon Lady | Village Voice J.
Hoberman, October 7, 2003
Raging
Bull [Matt White & Mike Lorefice]
film discussion, September 8, 2004
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Images
Movie Journal Gary Johnson
Kill
Bill Vol. 1 Henry Sheehan
Blooming
Lotus: Redemption and Spiritual Transformation ... Michael K. Crowley from Slant magazine, originally published on 24 Lies per Second
Sergio
Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: WISE GUYS: 24 LIES ... Dennis Cozzalio
Kill Bill Vol. 1
(2003) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Kill Bill: Vol.
1 | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed
Gonzalez
Kill
Bill, Vol. 1 / **** (2003) - Cinemaphile
David Keyes, listed as #1 film of 2003
Shameless
Self Expression [Ryan McDonald]
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Matt Cale
A
Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam
Lippe
Ain't
It Cool News [Harry Knowles]
[ DreamLogic | Kill Bill
Vol. 1 Review ] - DreamLogic.net
Chris Nelson and Kris Kobayashi
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
Cinema365
[Carlos deVillalvilla]
Jigsaw
Lounge [Neil Young] also more notes on second
viewing
Kill Bill Volume
1 - Movie-Vault.com Avril Carruthers
The
Lumière Reader Tim Wong
Flipside
Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
Kill Bill Vol. 1 | Film Blather Eugene Novikov
Mercy,
compassion I lack [Jerry Saravia]
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
Kill Bill - CultureVulture.net Scott von Doviak
Kill Bill, Vol. 1 - Cinescene Ed Owens
Kill Bill -
hybridmagazine.com :: indie counter-culture daily ... Cole Sowell
The Digital Fix [Colin Polonowski]
DVD
Review - Kill Bill, Volume 1 - The Digital Bits Todd Doogan
DVD Movie Central [Michael Jacobson]
Home Theater Info [Doug MacLean]
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
The Digital Fix - Japanese version [Michael Mackenzie]
High-Def Digest - Blu-ray [Joshua Zyber]
Big Picture Big Sound - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
DVD Verdict - Blu-Ray [Dan Mancini]
DVDcompare.net - Blu-ray [Pat Pilon and Noor Razzak]
DVDActive - Blu-ray [Gabriel Powers]
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [John Sinnott]
10,000 Bullets - Blu-ray [Michael Den Boer]
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw] Tarantino XX, 8-film collection
DVD Talk - Tarantino XX Blu-ray [Tyler Foster]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Offoffoff -The Guide to Alternative New York Joshua Tanzer
The Spinning Image [Daniel Auty]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Jennie Kermode
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Kamera Paul Clarke
Film
Monthly.com – Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003) Del Harvey
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Rupert Good]
Kill Bill: Movie Review Jim Schembri from The Age
Faster,
Pussy Wagon! Kill! Kill! | Village Voice J.
Hoberman interviews, September 30, 2003
Kill Bill is feminist statement, says Tarantino | BreakingNews.ie Tarantino interview, February 10, 2003
Kill
Bill Vol. 1 | Variety Todd
McCarthy
BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael
Kill Bill: Vol. 1,
directed by Quentin Tarantino ... - Time Out
The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]
Stephen Hunter - Washington Post
Stephen
Hunter's and Ann Hornaday's Top 10 Films of 2003 listed on Stephen Hunter as #2
Desson
Thomson's Top 10 Films (washingtonpost.com) listed as #5
St. Petersburg Times [Steve Persall]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Charles Cassady, Jr.]
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
' - Kill Bill' -
Soundtrack - The New York Times
Elvis Mitchell
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray [Leonard Norwitz]
Kill Bill: Volume 1 -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
KILL BILL, Vol. 2 B 84
While this segment
lacks the non-stop blur of action sequences of Vol. 1, instead it gets lost in
its own pretentiousness. A copycat style
works for awhile, even when it’s as well done as this, but eventually it wears
thin when that’s “all” it is. From the
opening moments, the film is so incredibly exaggerated, so in love with the
genres that it’s crying out to imitate, that it loses its ability to rise above
mere copycat entertainment. Largely
because so much time has passed since the opening of Vol.1, and so much has
been written by now, the outcome feels pre-determined. There was zero suspense in this segment, as
all that remained was what would happen to who and how – as if that really mattered. The film never makes it matter. The opening flashes back to the wedding
sequence where it all began, beautifully shot in black and white, where Bill is
lurking outside the chapel door meditatively playing his flute, like the
opening sequences of David Carradine’s “Kung-Fu” television series, the opening
calm before the storm. But as we already
know what happens from Vol. 1, the wedding violence plays off screen. The film then moves back into its realm of
sadistic exaggeration, which continues throughout.
With musical
variations of “Bang Bang” or the Zombies “She’s Not There,” the film weaves in
and out of the psychological states of mind of the characters, and from my
view, with so much previous action set up, the slowness of the pace just drifts
along, and the mindlessness of listening to Bill yap over and over again gets
so repetitious that you just can’t wait for her to shut him up and end it. When it comes, it’s something of a
disappointment, actually turning into a chamber drama at the end. I felt there was a good hour of excess in the
two parts that was needless, that could have been trimmed to one film, but this
director is so much in love with his own work that he wouldn’t dare do that,
which works to the film’s detriment. Uma
Thurman was outstanding throughout, and David Carradine, while interesting at
first, wears out his welcome. He was
better when he wasn’t there. Nice scene with the snake in the trailer though, especially Elle reading
the effects of the black mamba that she laboriously hand-copied off the
Internet. The mental image of the one-eyed femme fatale typing poisonous snakes
into Google and scribbling results was drop dead hilarious. And while the
ensuing fight sequence was excellent, the film never rose to any new heights.
Kill
Bill: Vol. 2 | Chicago Reader JR Jones
In contrast to Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), which wasn't much
more than a series of fight scenes, the second half of Quentin Tarantino's
martial arts epic (2004) delivers more of the pleasures that made him the
wunderkind of 90s cinema: offbeat scumbag characters, narrative sleight of
hand, an extraordinary visual sense, and affectionate genre pillaging. But with
its half-baked maternal themes, the completed work is the first instance of
Tarantino's prodigious sizzle being distinguishable from steak. With David
Carradine, Michael Madsen, Michael Parks, and an extraordinary lead performance
by Uma Thurman.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
One of the reasons Quentin Tarantino is such a revered figure for people who'd never think of renting a Jean-Luc Godard film is that his career and personal mythology underline just how permeable the line separating fans from filmmakers can be. Tarantino's work as a writer-director often feels like an extension of his role as a movie lover—especially in last year's Kill Bill: Volume 1, his first film in six years, and a genre-mixing dream come true for cinephiles and trash-culture lovers alike.
The chronologically scrambled tale of an unnamed wedding-dress-clad woman (Uma Thurman) who seeks bloody revenge on David Carradine, who sent his hired goons to kill her, Volume 1 marked both a progression and regression from Tarantino's previous work. Gone for the most part were the showy monologues, pop-culture references, leisurely pace, and hang-out-movie vibe of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. But there was plenty of new stuff to take its place, most notably an endless string of brilliantly staged, heavily stylized fight scenes involving Thurman's ass-kicking anti-heroine, who was a little like '70s-era Pam Grier reborn in the body of a skinny white girl.
Kill Bill: Volume 2 has a lot to live up to. It needs to meet the lofty expectations awaiting any new Tarantino film, but it also has to deliver the emotionally satisfying ending that its predecessor by definition couldn't. The film succeeds by expertly melding the two stages of Tarantino's career. The rambling Tarantino of Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction is evident in every lovingly crafted and delivered monologue, each leisurely paced scene and long take. The more action-oriented, fight-intensive Tarantino reappears in the viscerally exciting bursts of ultra-violence that punctuate the stretches of dialogue. At the film's emotional core is the complicated relationship between Thurman and her mentor/lover/father-figure Carradine, which is as tender as any relationship can be between two people who go to great lengths to try to kill each other.
Actors, especially B-movie actors, never seem more like larger-than-life figures than when they're reflected in Tarantino's adoring eyes. Where others might look at a Carradine or Daryl Hannah—who gives a revelatory performance as an eye-patch sporting assassin—and see a pair of washed-up actors whose latest films tend to surface only on TV or at Blockbuster, Tarantino sees a pair of icons just waiting for that crucial role that will remind the youth-obsessed culture how great they can be. And, because Tarantino is such a gifted director of actors, his faith in the performers he salvages becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If Mel Gibson hadn't been so intent on torturing Jesus for two hours, Thurman's preternaturally resilient bride would walk away with the title of Most Abused Movie Character Of 2004, though she gives as good as she gets. Like Gibson, Tarantino believes strongly and sincerely in redemption, but in his B-movie gospel, that redemption has a funny way of leading to David Carradine rather than Jesus Christ.
The
Bride brings the pain in Kill Bill, Vol. 2. - Slate Magazine
David Edelstein, April 15, 2004
Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) left me firmly of two minds: philosophically troubled by yet another bloodthirsty saga of insult and retribution, of the kind that has come to dominate world cinema; and grooving like hell on that particular specimen, as egregious an example of violence with zero redeeming social value as any ever made.
It helped that Tarantino didn't pretend that Kill Bill had any intent besides getting people off. It wasn't yoked to some Death Wish template featuring liberal judges and courts that can't protect the law-abiding citizen. And it didn't swaddle itself in Gladiator-like righteousness, its hero slaughtering everyone who needs slaughtering while remaining morally unsullied. Kill Bill,Vol. 1 was disconnected from everything but its own gleeful kineticism: Tarantino's joy in distilling the hundreds of grind-house pictures and chopsocky videos on which he'd been weaned into one fat, beautiful, frankly masturbatory epic in which a sexy chick fights other sexy chicks with a humongous Japanese samurai sword. What was not to love?
A lot, I guess. An irresistible target because the gore was both over-the-top and 100 percent gratuitous, the movie became a litmus test on the subject of violence in movies. It will be interesting to gauge the response on that score to Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (Miramax), in which the splatter has been stanched, the body count reduced (two dead, one severely maimed), and the quotient of chatter ratcheted way, way up. I won't be surprised to hear praise for Tarantino's mature restraint; but I think the second part is, if anything, more perverse, the emotions heightened and the narrative tricks more shocking. Tarantino is a sadistic freak—but, unlike some other filmmakers I can think of, he wears it proudly.
There's a magnificent perversity in the tender first encounter between the Bride (Uma Thurman) and Bill (David Carradine), whose face was never seen in Volume One. It's a flashback set in that El Paso, Texas, church in which we know the wedding party is about to be massacred. During a pause in the rehearsal, the Bride hears a familiar pan pipe and moves—lightly, with a mixture of dread and hope—through the doorway, in a shot that echos the famous final image of The Searchers (1956). Bill has come for the woman he calls Kiddo—we now know because her name is "Beatrix Kiddo." Beatrix was Bill's No. 1 assassin until she fled, pregnant with his baby, in search of a quieter life. But she's still mad about Bill: Their rapport is silly, joshing, sweet; she is even persuaded that he has come to bid her a loving goodbye. And, in a way, he has.
Tarantino famously courted Warren Beatty for Bill, which would have been a heavenly piece of casting because of the childlike narcissism under Beatty's womanizing that you just know could spill over into monstrousness. But Carradine is wonderful, too: intense but soft-spoken and preternaturally cool, his weathered face held aloft by that triumphant Carradine-family bone structure. His Bill is a more credible version of Charlie in Charlie's Angels—the man who beds women, trains women to fight, sends women out to do battle, and regards women as his property. In a male revenge movie, the man avenges his feminization by "nailing" his adversaries; in a chick revenge movie like Kill Bill, the woman avenges pretty much the same thing, but the feminist thrust can make the scenario feel a lot less Neanderthal—and misogynistic—than it really is. That strikes me as a good reason to seek out chick revenge movies.
For all its relative subtlety, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 remains a cartoon: Its wit is broadsword rather than rapier, and its motives are elemental. The banter is second-tier Tarantino: a cut above his imitators, but below the standard set by Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. There's a speech of Bill's about Superman comics that strikes me as distinctly sub par (it has to do with Clark Kent representing Superman's contemptuous view of humanity), and the best line in the movie is probably, "Bitch, you have no future." But Tarantino is in peak form at playing with your expectations: setting you up for one thing and blindsiding you with something else. I loved Michael Madsen's ex-assassin, Budd, a drunk who seems to have grown passive and fatalistic and to have lost his taste for killing. He has some surprising moments. Daryl Hannah's one-eyed hellion has a comeuppance that's worthy of her—if not quite as classic as her death scene in Blade Runner (1982). And Beatrix's 4-year-old daughter is neither angel nor devil but something tantalizingly in between. Tarantino serves up a parody of '70s Hong Kong martial-arts training flicks that had me howling at its tacky zoom-ins and zoom-outs, and at Gordon Liu's huffily sadistic master, with flyaway eyebrows and a long white beard he whips over his shoulder like a scarf.
Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is in a different league than The Punisher (Warner Bros.), also opening this week: a sickeningly manipulative, by-the-numbers revenge movie in which the presumed-dead hero (Thomas Jane) comes back to get the people who wiped out his father, mother, wife, and little son. It's a bloodbath with one thing on its mind: Making you go, "Yeah! Punish 'em! Make 'em die slowly!" and then, "Yeah! He nailed 'em! He nailed 'em all." It's a thuggish Steven Seagal movie with the Marvel Comics imprimatur—shameful.
Neither of these pictures, though, has the moral horror of The Limey (1999), directed by Steven Soderbergh, in which a father's quest for revenge on the man who killed his daughter ends up leading straight back to him. And neither, needless to say, is a patch on the greatest of our revenge dramas, Hamlet, the story of a first-rate intellectual who finds himself trapped in a third-rate revenge play and can't quite get in sync with it: Hamlet is an attempt to dramatize the conflict between our primitive urge for vengeance—sometimes adaptive, more often grotesquely self-perpetuating, and poisonous to the social order—and our more evolved "modern" consciousness. Four hundred years later, we're still trying to equal it. Kill Bill,Volumes 1 and 2 are great fun, but when they're over there's nothing to make us question our addiction to violent fantasies of retribution. The whole is a little less than the sum of its volumes.
Tarantino
and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain, July 26, 2004
Chopping
Block - The New Yorker David
Denby from The New Yorker, April 19,
2004
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Day Of The Woman B. Ruby Rich from Sight and Sound, June 2004
World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and ... The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion
in the Works of Quentin Tarantino, by Dror Poleg from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31, 2004
“Kill Bill, Vol. 2″ - Salon.com Charles Taylor, April 16, 2004
Kung
Fu Catfights-The Bride Returns in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 - New ... Andrew Sarris from The Observer, April 19, 2004
Vengeance Is Hers | Village Voice J. Hoberman
See Quentin Kill |
Alternet Armond White, October 14,
2003
Kill Bill: Vol.
2 - Reviews - Reverse Shot Suzanne
Scott, April 13, 2004
Images
Movie Journal Gary Johnson
Cinepassion
[Fernando F. Croce]
[ DreamLogic | Kill
Bill vol. 2 Guest Review ] - DreamLogic.net
Fernando F. Croce
Kill
Bill Vol. 2 Henry Sheehan
Shameless
Self Expression [Ryan McDonald]
Kill Bill Vol. 2 - Deep
Focus Bryant Frazer
Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath] Volumes 1 and 2
Nitrate
Online - Feature KJ Doughton and
Cynthia Fuchs reviews of Volumes 1 and 2, interview with David Carradine
Shelf
Life: Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2 | Moviefone.com Todd Gilchrist
A
Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam
Lippe, Volumes 1 and 2
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores] Volumes 1 and 2
THE IMPORTANCE OF
KILLING BILL - Newsweek.com Volume 2, David Ansen from Newsweek,
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 | Film Review | Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich
Kill
Bill, Vol. 2 / **** (2004) David
Keyes from Cinemaphile
moviefreak [Sara Michelle Fetters]
Ain't It Cool News [Harry Knowles]
Kill Bill – Volume 2 Review | CultureVulture Chris Pepus
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
That
sword was priceless [Jerry Saravia]
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
JamesBowman.net |
Kill Bill: Volume 2
The Digital Fix [Michael Mackenzie]
The Digital Bits [Todd Doogan]
Digitally Obsessed! [Rich Rosell]
Home Theater Info [Doug MacLean]
DVD Movie Central [Michael Jacobson]
High-Def Digest - Blu-ray [Joshua Zyber]
Big Picture Big Sound - Blu-ray Review [Brandon A. DuHamel]
DVD Verdict - Blu-ray [Dan Mancini]
10,000 Bullets - Blu-ray [Michael Den Boer]
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [John Sinnott]
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] Blu-Ray, Volumes 1 and 2
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw] Tarantino XX, 8-film collection
DVD Talk - Tarantino XX Blu-ray [Tyler Foster]
Quentin Tarantino and Kill Bill Mark Harris on Volumes 1 and 2 from Patrick Murtha’s Diary, May 27, 2009
Kill Bill Vol. 2 | Film Blather Eugene Novikov
Georgia
Straight [Janet Smith]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Kill Bill Volume 2
- Movie-Vault.com Scott
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus] Volumes 1 and 2
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown
The Spinning Image [Daniel Auty]
hybridmagazine.com :: indie counter-culture daily, no secret ... Woodrow Bogucki
Qwipster's
Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Offoffoff
-- The Guide to Alternative New York
David N. Butterworth
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Kamera Andy Murray
Film Monthly.com – Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) Del Harvey
Edinburgh U Film Society [Rupert Good]
Kill Bill Vol. 2 | Variety Todd McCarthy
Kill Bill Vol. 2, directed by Quentin Tarantino ... - Time Out
BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael
The
London Times [James Christopher]
The
Japan Times [Mark Thompson]
Movies
| Bloody mama - Boston Phoenix Peter
Keough
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington
Post [Ann Hornaday]
Tarantino's
'Vol. 2': Moving In for the Kill - Washington Post Michael O’Sullivan
St.
Petersburg Times [Steve Persall]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Kill Bill Vol. 2 - The New York Times Elvis Mitchell, also seen here: New York Times [Elvis Mitchell]
DVDBeaver.com
- Blu-ray-DVD Review [Leonard Norwitz]
Kill Bill: Volume 2 -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GRINDHOUSE B 89
I’ve never been a particularly avid fan of
Tarantino’s brand of death and mayhem, but acknowledge the exhilaration that
exists in his work, even as it ventures into retreaded territory with a
fun-filled adolescent male-indulgent fervor, creating fearless comic
book-style, ultra-sexed Amazon women for every young male’s viewing pleasure,
along with other titillating action sequences that pay homage to films of
yesteryear, upping the ante by creating even greater cinematic spectacle than
anything produced from that era, which, by the way, was oftentimes laced with
political satire barely touched upon here.
Something of a double-feature laugh riot, as you really get two 90 minute
films, starting with a few fictitious eye-opening trailers from other
directors, with everything strung together by many of the early film
introductory filler materials that used to grace the movie screens thirty or so
years ago. Intentionally scratching the
film stock to make it look old, there’s a kind of quaint familiarity with the
nostalgic feeling these directors were working with, the disastrous toxic spill
B-movie world leading to a military cover up as the nation is invaded by an
increasingly rabid form of flesh-eating zombies who would just as soon rip your
arms and head off style that Rodriguez created, using hilariously conceived
characters to heighten the interest, or Tarantino’s world of bad-assed women in
the Russ
Meyer / Tura Satana mold, such as
FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! where the testosterone-laced girl power reaches
new heights, as we listen in on their intimate thoughts on sex and sleaze while
adding to the mix the thrill of some terrific car chase scenes, including a
great performance turned in by a demented stunt man, Kurt Russell. Interestingly, both directors filmed their
own movies, Tarantino is prominately featured as a lousy actor in both
segments, while Rodriguez, a la John Carpenter, wrote the music for his film as
well, which for the most part is laced in heavy funk. While some may not take to the
Rodriguez/Tarantino split, preferring one to the other, believing it is too
long to sustain the audience’s interest, my view was that the unique,
off-kilter mood was set from the outset with exaggerated, over-the-top trailers
that led to a brilliant opening credit sequence in PLANET TERROR, featuring the
strip club dance of lead actress Rose McGowen, who in a role reminiscent of Uma
Thurman in KILL BILL is nothing less than phenomenal in the film.
Rose McGowen is unforgettable, both in her
lurid, exaggerated, cleavage-revealing presence, and in the ballsy manner that
she carries out her role as woman/earth mother.
Freddy Rodriguez as the notorious El Wray is like a leftover from the
Sergio Leone films, a man on a bike with gun prowess second to none (“I never
miss.”) who must blow away about a hundred zombies in the film, while his
broken-hearted, always downbeat love interest McGowen resembles sultry Mexical
soap opera stars. There’s always an
eerie presence at a Texas Barbeque House which stands alone in the middle of
nowhere, along with a zombie infected military squad led by Bruce Willis, and a
deranged husband and wife doctor team working at a grotesque hospital nearby
that keeps collecting patients infected by zombies, but disregards the
implications until pandemonium breaks out.
Some of the most beautiful use of the word “Fuck” is featured in this
film along with Michael Parks, from THEN CAME BRONSON, who makes a double bill
appearance. Eventually Freddy and Rose,
who loses one leg just below the knee but absurdly implants a hyper active
machine gun, take over and bust their way to freedom, saving the world in the
process, or do they? The film is filled
with one bad joke after another, exaggerated caricatures, vulgarities of all
kinds, ever more gross and horrid depictions of the effects of zombie
infestation, including blood splurting decapitations and the chilling effects
of Texas-style gun mania mixed with poor parenting skills. But we somehow overlook the violent reality
of the bloody mayhem depicted and revel instead in the looney tunes mix of
Southern regional cornball comedy, zombies, and free-wheeling action sequences,
all of which are so over the top that its subversive intent is expertly
submerged in the atmospheric melee.
Kurt Russell is equally spectacular in
Tarantino’s feature, starring as Stunt Man Mike, a famed stunt double with a
giant scar running down the length of his face who worked in legendary TV
westerns and other shows that no one from the current generation has ever heard
of, but drives a death proof car specifically designed to protect the life of
the driver even under the most disastrous circumstances. He has a run in with two sets of gorgeous hot
babes stemming
from some kind of mysterious never-explained secret vendetta, with a decidedly different outcome in each, the first featuring Sidney
Poitier’s daughter, Sydney Tamiia Poitier as Jungle Julia, a local DJ, who is
celebrating a visit from her out of town friend, Butterfly, Vanessa Ferlito,
two vivacious women who get down and dirty stoned happy with a few friends at a
local dive along with what appears to be the world’s greatest jukebox before
tangling later on the road with Stunt Man Mike and his infamous
deathmobile. Interspered in both films
is the famous still “Reel Missing,” amusingly jumping ahead in the action
whenever anything approaches X-Rated material.
In another group of women on overdrive which includes Rosario Dawson,
the group seemingly stalked by Stunt Man Mike, he decides to mess with what
turns out to be a couple of famed stunt women, Tracie Thoms, the loose-lipped,
wisecracking driver, and also pays what amounts to a loving tribute to Zoe
Bell, who performs some aerodynamic feats on the hood of a car along with some
complementary work with a lead pipe during an infamous car chase scene with
Stunt Man Mike, a guy who eventually gets his comeuppance, whittled down to
size in an emotionally exposed moment for the suddenly vulnerable ruthless
killer Russell who hilariously milks it for all it’s worth in one of the stand
out moments of the year before the inflicted punishment resumes, in what is
basically a hyper-kinetic reenactment of the exploits of a 1970 Dodge Charger
from Vanishing
Point (1971). The film leaves plenty of
space for the obligatory Director’s Cut soon to appear at
the worst movies by the best directors Anthony Burch from Filmwad (link lost), also
seen here: The Worst Movies by the
Best Directors [Archive] - DVD Talk For
First things first: if you’re one of those people who’s going to defend Death Proof by saying “you just didn’t get it, you’re a mongoloid who needs to be entertained by explosions every three seconds, you can’t appreciate simple dialogue,” then shut up. I love Tarantino dialogue, I don’t mind slow films, and I’m okay with plots that go nowhere (I own and enjoy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, for Christ’s sake).
The real problem with Death Proof is that it has its priorities seriously confused. For a grindhouse-style film, it’s remarkably modern: while I’m not the connoisseur of sleaze cinema that Tarantino fancies himself, I do know that grindhouse films never spent the majority of their running time filled with pointless, superficial dialogue that served only to stroke the director’s ego. If there’s one thing a grindhouse film should never, ever do, it’s bore the audience. And Death Proof does exactly that.
And yeah, I get what the point of the dialogue was. By hearing the girls talk about regular, everyday bullshit, we’ll connect with them emotionally and it’ll be a much bigger deal when Stuntman Mike wrecks their shit. Just one problem, though: the girls have almost totally interchangeable personalities, and are more or less impossible to care for. Yeah, Zoe Bell and the Angry Black Chick stand out from the other characters, but they only stand out in that they’re really fucking annoying. Could Zoe possibly squint more in order to accentuate her bad girl dialogue, or could Angry Black Chick be any more stereotypically Angry or Black?
Not to mention that the single coolest and most interesting character in the entire film, Stuntman Mike, is only in about a fourth of the entire movie. Stuntman Mike is so cool that it’s really hard not to root for him, thus making all the bullshit dialogue with the women totally pointless. Mike’s too awesome: just let him kill these bitches and we’ll be on our way.
While the car scenes are probably the best ever put on film, you have to wonder: why on Earth didn’t Angry Black Chick just slow down when Stuntman Mike started chasing them? Or at the moment when the car actually comes to an almost-complete stop, why the hell didn’t Zoe just get off the hood and run into the car? I’m willing to suspend my disbelief pretty far in a movie called Grindhouse, but not enough to believe that an assumedly intelligent woman didn’t have the common sense to get off the hood of a friggin’ moving car when she had the chance.
I wish I could have enjoyed Death Proof more than I did, but considering it was preceded by the hilariously action-packed Planet Terror, there was no way for Death Proof to seem anything other than ploddingly slow and, overall, disappointing. The films could have probably been switched in order and Grindhouse would have worked better as a whole – not to mention that chronologically, the events of Death Proof take place before Planet Terror.
PS: Mary Elizabeth Winstead was the single hottest girl in either movie, and she did absolutely nothing. Unfortunate.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Take a trip downtown
or out along the nearest two-lane highway in the '60s, '70s, or early '80s, and
you wouldn't have to wander far to find a crumbling movie palace or drive-in
playing lurid B-movies, rushed productions shot on tiny budgets and with little
to no studio oversight. They promised, and delivered, an abundance of sex and
violence, but some of them kept on delivering beyond that: The best ones
preserved a given moment's hang-ups, turn-ons, anxieties, and hopes in the form
of lurid, blood-and-skin-filled melodramas. To see what was on the mind of an
America still coming to terms with women's lib, for instance, check out Caged
Heat. And you can hear the echoes of Black Power more clearly in Truck
Turner than in the mainstream political talk of the day.
Born in 1963 and 1968,
respectively, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were just old enough to
catch the tail end of the grindhouse era, and the right age to catch what they
missed in the VHS era. Grindhouse is their attempt to pay tribute to
their B-movie influences by re-creating a double feature. Rodriguez takes the
first shift with Planet Terror, a zombie movie in which a small Texas
town becomes the site of a military experiment gone awry, and maybe ground zero
for the apocalypse. Tarantino follows him with Death Proof, a
slasher/gearhead movie starring Kurt Russell as a stuntman with a uniquely
outfitted car. And don't be slow coming back from the intermission, or you'll
miss trailers by Rob Zombie, Shaun Of The Dead's Edgar Wright, and Hostel
director Eli Roth.
Of the two films,
Rodriguez's entry could more easily pass as the genuine article. The vehicles
and cell phones all say 2007, but every other aspect suggests what might have
happened if John Carpenter had worked for Cannon Films in 1981. Rose McGowan
stars as a heartbroken go-go dancer unwittingly at the heart of a zombie
invasion that leaves her transformed in ways beyond that machine gun-leg she
sports on the film's poster. It's an unrelenting, blood-drenched action film
that with a single scene illustrates how test-marketing and bigger budgets
removed the danger of today's action films: Here, a cute kid left alone with a
gun might just blow his face off.
While Tarantino's Death
Proof is just as steeped in homage, there's no mistaking it for anyone
else's work, from the moment the "A Film By" credit appears,
superimposed over a woman's shapely feet. Initially set in Austin, Texas, it
begins as a pop-culture-obsessed talkfest of the kind that made Tarantino's
name. Even when nothing much is happening, it's a pleasure to watch the leads'
boozy interaction as Tarantino's camera fetishizes an old jukebox stocked with
45s bearing classic labels like Dial and Scepter. Then the film starts changing
shape in ways that would be unfair to reveal, but that should leave most
viewers unable to believe their eyes by the film's end.
Grindhouse is a generous package of movie love, from
the "missing reels" to the scratched film surfaces, and the
highlights are so unforgettable that it's easy to overlook the shortcomings.
Exhaustion comes programmed into the three-plus hours, and so does some tedium.
Rodriguez's entry is such a canny simulation that, like so many B-movies, it
occasionally plays like something better reduced to a trailer. Losing some of
the easy interaction that usually characterizes his work, Tarantino's
characters speak his unmistakable dialogue with a practiced awkwardness that
makes sense in this context, but can still be kind of frustrating to watch.
Nonetheless, the film
has a Russian-nesting-doll quality: Unpacking it steadily reveals more, both in
the ways the two halves tie together, and in the substance beyond the scratchy
surfaces. Rodriguez's film offers some too-faint whiffs of timeliness with its
Iraq references, and both directors turn the grindhouse's traditional
victimization of women on its head, with Tarantino going so far as to risk
making several decades of macho iconography look ridiculous from now on. Like
the best of its forebears, Grindhouse contains thrills to keep viewers
in their seats, plus moments to think about on the ride home, which will
probably seem unusually fraught with peril.
Zombie Slasher Love | Village Voice Nathan Lee
I've got a theory about Grindhouse, and it goes like this: At some point during the brainstorming/beer-bonging process by which Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino developed their multimillion-dollar ersatz-exploitation double feature, the boys finished off the super nachos, sparked up a spliff, and said "Dude, let's just motherfucking bring it." From whence proceeded a checklist of must-haves: zombie hordes and one-legged go-go dancers, hot rods and hot pants, evil doctors and exploding pustules, trash-talking identical-twin babysitters, castration, decapitation, dismemberment, diminutive Mexican badasses, customized motorcycles, Kurt Russell, Osama bin Laden, Fu Manchu, tasty sausage, jive-ass stuntwomen, outrageous car wrecks, buckets of blood, geysers of gore, mountains of weaponry, explosions bigger than God (Tarantino: "How big?" Rodriguez: "Retarded big")—and of course titties, lots and lots of titties.
From first rude frame to lascivious last, Grindhouse guns to be the last word in fanboy fetishism. Not only does it monkey around with degenerate genres (splatter films, bad-girl flicks, John Carpenter cheapies, car-chase extravaganzas), it apes the condition of crummy old prints. Convulsed in phony glitches—scratches, scuffs, projector hiccups, soured film stock, missing reels—it's a digitally enhanced homage to analogue grime that unspools like a Guy Maddin spectacular supercharged to the Weinstein account. There may not be any house left to grind in New York, skuzzy little theaters having gone the way of subway tokens, smoking in bars, and, you know, fun. But as nostalgia trips go, at least this one goes all the way. You can practically taste the mold and smell the celluloid.
The house that Rodriguez and Tarantino built is constructed on two levels. In Planet Terror, a deliciously repellent zombie apocalypse (of love), Rodriguez busts his nut in every direction, showering the screen with icky globs of glorious nonsense. The convenient thing about riffing on grindhouse is that it gives you a license to thrill at will; casual plotting, randomly generated protagonists, spectacle for its own sake, and questionable ethics come with the territory. That plays well to Rodriguez's strengths (sight gags, Grand Guignol) and weaknesses (patience, coherence) as he mounts a hilariously haphazard scenario pitting a clutch of the non-infected (Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Marley Shelton, Michael Biehn) against the peckish undead (makeup effects by Greg Nicotero).
Where Rodriguez does grindhouse more or less straight up, Tarantino takes greater license with Death Proof—which is to say the tradition he's elaborating on is the Tarantino Movie. Only tangentially related to the vehicular-mayhem genre (Vanishing Point is name-checked repeatedly), this sneaky contraption is booby-trapped with twisty talk, structural shocks, berserkoid set pieces, and unabashed foot fetishism. Kurt Russell plays Stuntman Mike, a genial psychopath with a thing for running down babes in his customized Dodge Charger. His targets include Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poitier), Zoë (Uma's Kill Bill stunt double, Zoë Bell), Abernathy (radiant Rosario Dawson), and the inevitable Tough Black Chick (Tracie Thoms as Kim). Her incurable case of Tarantino-style Tourette's—"bitch" this, "mothafucka" that, nonstop "nigga pleez"—strikes what may be the only truly gratuitous note in this ostensible exploitation epic.
Given a climate where major studios cash in on the most fucked-up shit imaginable (a remake of The Last House on the Left is in the works), there's not much ante for Grindhouse to up. The vibe, in any event, is more convivial than confrontational—the blockbuster as block party. Tarantino is a big supporter of the neo-exploitation crowd (two of whose luminaries, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, contribute ingenious trailers for imaginary films alongside Edgar Wright and Rodriguez), but his own sensibility is sweeter. Death Proof expends most of its energy on boozy barroom camaraderie and baroque restaurant chitchat. Even the villain is rather a dear; Tarantino clearly relishes his rehabilitation of Russell (here giving a charmed, witty performance), on whom he lavishes as much affection as his girls gone wild. And wild they go, pedal to the metal, brandishing iron poles, turning the tables on Stuntman Mike in a giddy automotive assault that climaxes with the finest syncopation since Before Sunset.
So yeah, it's a gas, from first frame to last —and by the time you exit this slobbering behemoth, you'll have taken in a quarter-million of them. This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about goddamn time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.
eFilmCritic.com
[Erik Childress] alse seen here: eFilmCritic
Reviews
After explaining to radio hosts who claimed to be big fans of
Tarantino that the Grindhouse experience recreated by Robert Rodriguez and
Quentin for this double feature experiment was not at all like the Ed Wood
films of the ‘60s, it dawned on me that I was going to still have to offer a
little explanation as to what this geeked-out horror fest was rooted in.
Grindhouses were theaters in the ‘60s and ‘70s famous for playing double
features of B-movies known for their exploitation of extreme violence, sex and
taboo subject matter. Since many of them also offered burlesque shows as
additional entertainment, the “grind” in the terminology was born. While many
theaters and conventions such as
Things kick off in true grindhouse fashion with Rose McGowan
go-go dancing her way over the opening credits to Rodriguez’s Planet Terror.
She plays Cherry, a dancer prone to ending her routines with tears rather than
fully exposed flesh. (After From Dusk ‘Til Dawn and Sin City,
Rodriguez is officially the king of creating strip clubs where nothing gets
stripped.) In a chance encounters she comes across her ex-lover, “El” Wray
(Freddy Rodriguez, kicking a whole lot of ass in this part), a
mysterious drifter whose nickname gives him the respect he normally wouldn’t
receive from the local sheriff (Michael Biehn). This isn’t a story about lost
love though. There are ZOMBIES on the loose!
A toxic gas from the nearby military base is infecting the town of Austin and
it doesn’t help that two of their doctors, Dakota & William Block (Marley
Shelton & Josh Brolin), are in the middle of a brooding marital dispute.
Those immune to the outbreak join forces and ammunition to horde off the bitey
invaders which will take them from the off-highway BBQ shack run by Jeff Fahey
to the base itself overseen by one of several surprise cameos. Cherry’s fate is
redefined by a nasty encounter with the puss-filled munchers, leaving her half
a right leg and an opportunity for Wray to turn her into a destruction
instrument of superheroic proportions.
Rodriguez has always been a filmmaker less concerned with expensive budgets and
more with how much he can get out of the new toys he has to play with – and
that makes this goofily entertaining piece a perfect fit. As he works in a new
idea or gross-out gag in seemingly every scene, Rodriguez also plays with the
grindhouse aesthetic to a literal extreme. There are lottery tickets with less
scratches then on the print of Planet Terror and he’s made good on his
promise to add large, gaping splices during moments the MPAA poo-poo’ed as too
much to stomach. Zombies explode, abcesses are popped and gun safety advocates
have a new PSA that could start running immediately. It’s all part of the
frenetically funny opener that’s a perfect warm-up for Tarantino’s unpredictable
contribution to the dance card.
But first, the intermission. Not an actual one mind you as there’s still plenty
to see, but if the urge for a bladder break hits you, use the two minutes
during Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S. trailer. Aside from the
hilarious cameo at the end, here is further proof that Zombie can’t even make a
worthwhile film using nothing but money shots and exaggeration. It’s a wasted
idea that’s just a fantasy excuse to put his wife (Sheri Moon Zombie) in a Nazi
costume instead of utilizing Sybil Danning’s Howling II connection. On
the other hand, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is his best work to date. As a
filmmaker whose horror/comedy aspirations (Cabin Fever & Hostel)
translate uneasily to feature-length narratives, Roth beheads enough people in
less than three minutes to push the Legend of Sleepy Hollow to a page 12
footnote and the result is a lot of fun. Robert Rodriguez’s Machete
precedes his own feature as the kick-off, but it’s Edgar Wright’s Don’t
that wins the grand prize for perfecting the mock-up of the classic British
horror films warning and (at the same time) daring its audience to
attend it’s macabre promise of doom. Wright has already blown the lids off the
zombie flick (Shaun of the Dead) and the cop genre (the impending
brilliance of Hot Fuzz) and if Grindhouse 2 is eventually greenlit,
here’s hoping that Wright is the first one chosen to follow in these film geek
footsteps.
Big shoes to fill coming from the feet of Tarantino whose second feature of the
evening, Death Proof, is going to be remembered on a lot of Nick
Hornby-esque lists for years to come. Number one with a bullet is the amount of
gabby setups for the big punchline to the guts, but we’re nitpicking ahead of
ourselves. When three girls (Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney Poitier, Jordan Ladd) make
their way to a local Austin watering hole, they didn’t expect more than a few
drinks, avoiding bad pick-up lines and some good tunes. Ferlito’s Arlene has
seen that dark, skull-painted car around town a little too often today and
tonight they will meet the owner. Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), who goes under
that full name and boasts an occupational hazard scar across his face, appears
harmless enough unless you’re a plate of nachos. Get him behind the wheel of
his stunt-enforced auto though and there’s little insurance can do for you.
Mike loves getting more bang for his buck and tracks down another foursome on
break from shooting a Hollywood movie including Rosario Dawson’s Abernathy and
Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Lee whose I.Q. seems to have come with her
cheerleading costume. Two of them are stunt women themselves (Tracie Thoms and
real-life stunter Zoe Bell as “herself”) and their gab shifts frequently to
famous car chase films in the light that a local is selling the exact model
Dodge Challenger featured in 1971’s Vanishing Point. When they (again)
talk their way into a test drive, how can Stuntman Mike resist the opportunity
to go wheel-to-wheel with one of the legendary cinematic automobiles?
At an equal 85 minutes to Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Tarantino’s Death
Proof takes its sweet ol’ time getting to its two sequences of Mike’s
autoerotic destruction. No less than an hour of it is dedicated to the slow
build (and, at least, half of that is Mike-free.) It’s part Tarantino’s
gift for nonsensical gab and part frustration in wanting Mike and his car to
have more than just a supporting role. You can guarantee some restlessness in
the audience since the first payoff could easily have come 10-15 minutes
earlier (beginning by chopping out Eli Roth and the other men, including
Tarantino, from the bar scene) and we’re already into the third hour of the
experience. But all is forgiven when Quentin gets his big shot to make cinema
history.
The first of his car crashes is an exercise in shocking the audience
piece-by-limb over and over again, but itself is merely a trailer of things to
come as the final 20 minutes make up one of the most impressively staged and
performed car chases you’ve ever seen. And I use the word “performed” in
order to give due credit to stuntwoman Zoe Bell making her acting debut. Bell,
who was Uma Thurman’s double in Kill Bill (and was one-half the subject
of a marvelously entertaining documentary about stuntwomen called Double
Dare), is completely charming in the role but its what she does on the hood
of a Dodge Challenger that will be remembered long after you’ve left the
theater.
This is where Tarantino’s build-up pays off in spades. It’s more than just
caring for these women during the terror they are put through, but also to
establish them as tough enough to take a few sideswipes and then look for
payback. Rent-haters may enjoy Stuntman Mike bumpin’-n’-grindin’ a
quarter of the film’s cast around a bit, but Tracie Thoms isn’t bursting into
song to deal with it. Her performance as a tough-as-balls (but 100% feminine)
stunt chick will elicit more applause and appreciation than a hundred
female-empowerment action flicks (another list that Death Proof belongs
high up on.) But if Kurt Russell, one of the most underappreciated actors we’ve
ever had, doesn’t get his just due as Stuntman Mike then people aren’t paying
attention to how truly brilliant his work is. Imagine his best roles with John
Carpenter (and notice the shirt hanging in that Austin bar) mixed into a
blender and served into an unending portion of tough-guy cool, creepy misogyny
and macho bravura turned on its ear. Russell’s last few scenes are
unquestionably the most hilarious work of his entire career and adds a
dimension to the character that you couldn’t see being pulled off by Mickey
Rourke (who was originally cast and dropped out over differences with
Tarantino.) Russell owns this role and audiences couldn’t hope to leave the
Grindhouse experience with a greater final payoff.
Rodriguez’s film certainly moves at breakneck speed compared to the majority of Tarantino’s, which may lead some to thoughts I originally had in that the order of the films be switched. By the end I would disagree and not just because Tarantino’s final moment is more satisfying or the backwards order allows for Quentin’s time-shift continuum. With all the inventiveness Rodriguez has brought to the screen with digital filmmaking, there’s an interesting progression considering his segment is purposefully more retro and Tarantino’s has the classical look of old-fashioned cinema while far more skillful than the works they are both homaging. If there’s a battle for cinema’s soul, Tarantino wins it hands down despite both of them pussying out on the sex element and turning it into a running joke that will get a huge groan the second time around. Rob Zombie and lack of nudity aside, Grindhouse is a theatrical experience that I’d love to see more of provided it doesn’t turn into a second-rate Masters of Horror (which would still be a step-up.) But for now, bargains don’t get much better than this.
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Grindhouse - Jack Smith and the
Destruction of Atlantis ...
David Edelstein from New York
magazine
David Denby: “Grindhouse” and “The TV Set.” David Denby from The New Yorker
'Grindhouse': Pistol-Packing VFX | Animation World Network Adam Bielek, April 6 2007
Grindhouse
and theatrical nostalgia - Jump Cut
Kevin Esch, Fall 2012, also seen
here: "Grindhouse"
text version - Jump Cut
Short Cuts - In Theaters: Grindhouse | PopMatters Bill Gibron
Cinefantastique Steve Biodrowski
“Grindhouse” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, April 6, 2007
Grindhouse
- Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeannette
Catsoulis
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale] (Potentially Offensive) Matt Cale
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Grindhouse: Planet Terror (2007). Director - Robert ... Richard Sheib from Moria
Grindhouse:
Death Proof (2007). Director - Quentin ... Richard Scheib from Moria
Grindhouse Robert Brodmerkel from The Horror Reviews
Grindhouse: Planet
Terror Robert Brodmerkel from
The Horror Reviews
Grindhouse: Death Proof Robert Brodmerkel from The Horror Reviews
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Grindhouse
REVIEW - ScreenAnarchy Jim
Tudor
How
and where the Grindhouse spirit survives (and whether ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club, October 31, 2012
Movies don't always have to be picture perfect to gain our ... Duane Dudek from Pop Matters, April 9, 2007
Grindhouse
is bloody good. - Slate Dana
Stevens
The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick] (Grindhouse revisited)
Tracking Shots: Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin ... Larry McGillicuddy
Grindhouse | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah
Kipp
Grindhouse Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Film Freak Central - Grindhouse (2007) Walter Chaw
Between Productions [Robert Cashill]
Film School Rejects [Clayton L. White]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Oggs' Movie Thoughts [Planet Terror]
Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
CineScene--By and For Movie Lovers Ed Owens
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
FulvueDrive-in.com [Chuck O'Leary]
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] 2-disc collection
The Sci-Fi Movie Page (Planet Terror 2-disc special edition DVD) James O’Ehley
Limited
Edition, Six Disc, Complete GRINDHOUSE DVD Release ... Ard Vijn on Japanese DVD Review from Screen
Anarchy
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
High-Def Digest [Joshua Zyber] Blu-Ray 2-disc Collector’s Edition
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Adam Tyner] 2-disc Collector’s Edition
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan] 2-disc Collector’s Edition
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Jackass Critics [Grim Ringler]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]
The Armchair Critic James Lynch
Georgia Straight [Mike Usinger]
Film School Rejects [Kevin Carr]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Review: Grindhouse | HorrorsNotDead.com -- A Favorite ... Peter Hall
Grindhouse :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Tim Basham
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
eFilmCritic Reviews Rob Gonsalves
Joey's Film Blog Joey Laura
Quentin Tarantino's Top 20 Grindhouse Classics - The Deuce
BFI | Sight & Sound | 10 Picks from the Grindhouse Tim Lucas from Sight and Sound, June 2007
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez Talk Grindhouse ... Steven Rea interview from Pop Matters, April 5, 2007
Quentin Tarantino: a B-movie badass | The Japan Times Giovanni Fazio interview from Japan Times Online, August 6 2007
Grindhouse | Variety Todd McCarthy
Why did 'Grindhouse' misfire at the box office? | Variety
Grindhouse (2007), directed by Quentin ... - Time Out
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Stephen Hunter - Washington Post
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Las Vegas Weekly [Mike D'Angelo]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
New York Times A.O. Scott, also seen here: Grindhouse - Review - Movies - The New York Times
Grindhouse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DEATH PROOF
Death Proof (2007), directed by Quentin ... - Time Out Ben Walters
The connections between Quentin Tarantino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are not, it must be said, extensive. Still, it’s striking that, like Apichatpong’s ‘Syndromes and a Century’ (also out this week), ‘Death Proof’ offers two incarnations of the same story and, in its own way, is concerned with seeking meaning through iteration and the practice of cinema. Still, we aren’t likely to see Apichatpong making a film about a former stuntman who gets his kicks by offing honeys with a weaponised sedan any time soon.
The first time we meet Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, he cosies up to a group of chicks in a Texas roadhouse; next time round, he takes on another three in Tennessee. Despite its double structure, ‘Death Proof’ is something of a spare limb, made as part of ‘Grindhouse’, the high-concept retro genre pastiche double bill that tanked at the US box office. It was always going to be an action-heavy, plot-light exercise in fan-boy indulgence, an essentially masturbatory fantasy project (almost literally when it comes to foot fetishisation), and being extended by 25 minutes only serves to exacerbate these tendencies.
So, yes, the characters talk in Tarantino-speak-squared, the violence is hand-rubbingly sadistic and the whole thing is swathed in several layers of quotation marks. But smart attention is also paid to some interesting tensions between old and new in areas as varied as pop culture, photography, effects work, automobile construction, telephony and audio recording technology. And if you have an inner (or outer) fan-boy to indulge, the climactic extended car chase is a bona fide old-school tour de force.
Death Proof |
Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Lee Marshall at
Quentin Tarantino should go back to making films that matter. If
the shorter, Grindhouse version of Death Proof, his hybrid
slasher meets car chase homage to early 1970s B-movies, hinted that everyone's
favourite cult director was running out of creative gas, the full-length
This "director's
cut" may run 27 minutes longer than the US-released version, but the extra
footage just makes this stylised genre exercise seem even more pointless. The
main problem with Death Proof is not the authenticity of cine-geek
Tarantino's heartfelt and occasionally quite funny tribute to movies like Dirty
Mary Crazy Larry or Vanishing Point, but his failure to go beyond
winks and references to craft a film that works, even on a genre-based,
non-festival, real-audience level. Any car-chase film in which the final,
climactic pursuit gets boring around three minutes in clearly has some knots to
iron out.
Of course, this will mean
little to Tarantino's core fanbase, which will lap the film up in cinemas and
on DVD. But with the two features on the US Grindhouse double-bill (the
other being Robert Rodriguez' zombie-flick Planet Terror) now likely to
be released as two stand-alone titles in most overseas territories,
distributors will be looking beyond the hardcore faithful to recoup their
outlay. And its here that Death Proof runs the risk of coming off the
road: in attempting to mix sassy-chick-flick, exploitative slasher movie and
crunching-metal stuntcar feature, it risks fully pleasing nobody. Just as well
it has a tasty soundtrack.
Death Proof is really two films that mirror each other –
except in the first the bad guy wins, and in the second he loses. The bad guy
is Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a grizzly, scarred, gravel-voiced loner who
drives a mean black car. When he sees a group of badass girlfriends (played by
Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Jordan Ladd and Vanessa Ferlito) out on the prowl in
downtown Austin, Mike follows them, all the way to a bar that's all nostalgic
neon with a jukebox loaded with Staxx funk-soul classics on real vinyl.
(Tarantino himself plays Warren, the bar owner; another cameo as a dorky guy on
the make is taken by Eli Roth, director of Hostel). Here the girls
jive-talk, flirt and end up smoking weed on the porch while Mike bides his time
– meaning that we have to wait the best part of an hour for the death-crazed
hotrod killer finale.
In part two – which
unspools 14 months later in Lebanon, Tennessee – another group of four
girlfriends has stopped outside a convenience store. Abernathy the make-up girl
(Rosario Dawson), Lee the naive actress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and two
stuntgirls, played by Tracie Thoms and real-life New Zealand stuntgirl Zoe Bell
– who was Uma Thurman's stunt double in Kill Bill – are in town on a
movie shoot (cue a series of cinema in-jokes – from sideswipes at Angelina
Jolie to the copy of Film Comment in the gas station magazine rack).
Also parked in the forecourt in his good-as-new death machine, Stuntman Mike
marks this gaggle out as his next victims. But beneath that rough exterior,
Tarantino is a politically-correct modern man, and in this girlpower reprise on
the slasher genre, things don't go exactly as the evil car-killer would like.
Plenty of fun is had in
the attempt to make Death Proof look like a real early 1970s B-movie:
scratches, abrupt cuts, inept splices and lines running down the film surface
contribute with garish lighting and warped theme-tune playback to give a sense
of weathered authenticity. Costumes and production design are also spot-on. But
two things rub against this effect. Tarantino here acts for the first time as
DoP on one of his films, and while some of the chase scenes and
exterior-interior rig-mounted car shots do mimic the style of the grindhouse
genre flick, plenty of others are far more contemporary in style; there's even
a short reprise of the famous circling shot from the beginning of Reservoir
Dogs.
Even more jarring is the
interminable dialogue these two sets of gurlzz indulge in during the long, long
run-up to the dual action explosions. If you thought from the posters that Death
Proof was mostly tyre-smoking racer action, think again. It's mostly
girl-talk – though these girls talk about sex and cars in a suspiciously
male-oriented way. Not only are these huge swathes of dialogue mostly flat and
inert in terms of both story and character, but with the exception of a few
inspired riffs, they fail to reach the comic-ironic peaks we know (mostly from Pulp
Fiction) that the director is capable of.
Kurt Russell inhabits his
role with relish, and his character is the only really interesting one in the
film – he plays Stuntman Mike as an articulate, weary lone wolf, who in the
final reel exhibits a comic vulnerability and lack of courage under fire.
Stuntwoman Zoe Bell seizes her hour under the arclights with great gusto, and
there are some nice turns from some of her professional actress colleagues –
notably Vanessa Ferlito as a sassy but grounded good-time girl in part one.
But fruity character parts
don't add up to a great film. Dramatically limp, even as a genre piece, Death
Proof provokes a rate of distracted watch-glancing never before experienced
in a Tarantino movie.
Death Proof Patrick Z. McGavin
The French have a
description for the cursed film-—film maudit. So it is probably disappointingly
fitting that Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” was unveiled in the Cannes
competition in the longer form European cut, issued with the delicious subtitle
“Boulevard of Death,” as part of the festival’s official competition.
Liberated from its unfortunate attachment to “Planet Terror,” Rodriguez’s
reductive and mediocre contribution to the two-part “Grindhouse,” Tarantino’s
effort suggests a movie without a fixed or final shape. It was unfortunately
denied its proper artistic and critical analysis because of the
disproportionate emphasis on the movie’s commercial flop upon its release in
April.
Even more problematic, the new material substantially weakens rather than
improves the 87-minute cut that concluded the original release version. Many
American critics were also angry and some felt duped by the 16-minute
discrepancy in running times posted by the festival and distributor Weinstein
Company. For the record, the actual running time is 111 minutes, not 127
minutes. The new material adds ideological and sexual connotations the director
is unable to satisfy.
Tarantino said in the press conference that, rather than focus on the running
time, the attention should be on the structural and formal changes of the new
version, and on what he called a 180-degree shift from the “Grindhouse”
version.
The original cut found a perfect balance between Tarantino’s discursive and
idiosyncratic feel for character and his colorful, commanding and visceral play
of action, suspense and movement.
The original’s two-part structure is maintained here, split between two charged
encounters involving the malevolent loner, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) who
terrorizes two separate groups of women. Like before, the action shifts between
two extremes, a cruel angel of death whose unexplained pathology is turned
against him when three bad ass chicks prove far more daring, resourceful and
tough than he could ever have imagined.
It is instructive to look at the new material, and explore how it alters and
changes the expanded version. Three major changes in the first half are: an
earlier appearance of Stuntman Mike’s car ominously viewed from a high angle
shot trailing the car driven by the three girls; an off-screen sexual foreplay
in the rain involving Butterfly’s Vanessa Ferlito; the excised lap dance
involving Stuntman Mike and Butterfly.
The first moment makes explicit a feeling easily inferred, that Stuntman Mike
was stalking the girls (a point already made by the surveillance photographs he
maintained on his visor). The second added movement disrupts the flow and
imagery, slowing and distracting any possibility of a visceral edge.
The lap dance sequence is provocatively shot and staged though it adds a
somewhat uncomfortable and reactionary sexual tone to the first part,
suggesting an extreme brand of punishment for their sexuality, and it
underlines a recurring weakness of Tarantino’s work, an inability to articulate
expressions of female sexuality.
The location moves from Austin, Texas to Lebanon, Tennessee. The most elaborate
stylistic change from the two versions is an extended sequence shot in black
and white unfolding in the parking lot convenience store the second group of
girls repair to just before they pick up the stunt specialist Zoë Bell.
One prominent weakness of both versions is that Tarantino inexplicably chose to
shoot the movie himself since he is not a skillful cinematographer and too much
of the imagery lacks precision and edge. The black and white photography is
inexpressively dull and the images denied any pop, looking rather cheap and
unformed.
It seriously harms the power and quality of the material, which is pretty
interesting if creepy as Stuntman Mike disturbingly locates the means to
insinuate himself against Rosario Dawson’s Abernathy. Again the scene also
underscores the director’s lack of comfort and spontaneity involving female
sexuality. They talk a great game, but there appears a fundamental unease and
contradictory ideas about women, their bodies and what they represent.
The half hour car chase that concludes the film is still as exhilarating,
inventive and satisfying as any moment in Tarantino’s previous films. Bell is
absolutely astonishing, and the characterization and progressive these women
undertake is glorious and beguiling, earning the highest compliment—they become
Hawksian, making them as tough, skilled and adventurous as the men.
On a formal level, the power of the pursuit and chase material is not just the
electric contrast of the two cars--it becomes a meditation on Bell and her
body. The sight of her strapped to the front of the car, her shirt rising
exposing her taut, muscle bound stomach is one of the most provocative and
empowering images of recent movies.
It remains a movie of moments, like a beautifully designed tracking shot that
begins at the feet of Sydney Poitier and climbs up her long and alluring leg,
the astonishingly lyrical moment when Bell leaps in one balletic movement into
the open window of the car. The back and forth choreography of the chase
sequence is certainly something to behold, creating a sense of anticipation and
expectation.
“Death Proof” needed greater precision and dexterity. Now, it is longer but not
better version, the movie that needs a propulsive, lean and stripping away.
Instead it is inflated and at once self-involved and self-important.
Tarantino’s connection to the period, the movies and the directors of the
grindhouse era is unassailable. He needed stronger producers to rein some of
his inchoate ideas. That would have lifted “Death Proof” into elite status, a
genre B-movie that satisfies as both cinema and deep and lascivious
entertainment. It is still caught on a precipice between form and content,
stranded and trapped and somewhat fatally at odds with itself. It is the film
that never resolves itself.
Death
Proof - Bright Lights Film Journal
Erich Kuersten, January 31, 2008
Death Proof: Deconstructing The Slasher Film - The Quentin ... September 5, 2015
Critic After Dark Noel Vera, August 17, 2007
Critic After Dark Noel Vera, December 28, 2007
BFI | Sight & Sound | Death Proof (2007) Tony Rayns from Sight and Sound, October 2007
Critique.
Death Proof, a Grindhouse film by Quentin Tarantino ... Emmanuel Burdeau from Cahiers du Cinéma, June 2007
Death Proof - Archive - Reverse Shot Michael Koresky
Andrew O'Hehir - Salon.com May 22, 2007
In
Praise of 'Death Proof,' One of Quentin Tarantino's Be ... In Praise of ‘Death Proof,’ One of Quentin
Tarantino's Best Movies, by Matt
Singer from indieWIRE, December 28, 2012
Rio Rancho Film Reviews *potentially offensive*
Grindhouse: Death Proof (2007). Director - Quentin ... Richard Scheib from Moria
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
Vern Reviews The DEATH PROOF DVD! - Vern's Reviews ...
Death Proof Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]
Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
Death Proof Reviews & Ratings - IMDb Graham Greene
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Stuntman Mike has such Twisted Nerve [Jerry Saravia]
Sound On Sight Gregory Day
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Scott Macdonald
Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
Death Proof Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
DVD Talk [Ian Jane] Extended and Unrated
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus] Extended and Unrated
Home Theater Info DVD Review Doug MacLean
PopMatters [Bill Gibron] Special Edition, 2-disc
High-Def Digest - Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]
Big Picture Big Sound - Blu-ray Review [Brandon A. DuHamel] Extended and Unrated
DVDcompare.net (Blu-ray Disc review) Extended and Unrated
DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Ryan Keefer]
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw] Tarantino XX, 8-film collection
DVD Talk - Tarantino XX Blu-ray [Tyler Foster]
The Projection Booth Rob Humanick, the Extended version
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe] - the extended version
Classic-Horror Timothy J. Rush
Popcorn Pictures [Andrew Smith]
Den
of Geek [Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy]
deathproof - review
at videovista Mark West
Grindhouse: Death
Proof - Plume Noire Adam Balz
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
New DVDs: Death Proof Dave Kehr, also seen here: 'Death Proof' on DVD - The New York Times
BFI | Sight & Sound | Tarantino Bites Back Nick James interview with Sight and Sound, February 2008
Death
Proof | Variety Todd McCarthy
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael
Death
Proof is silly but wildly enjoyable | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The
Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Good
ol' gore fest - latimes Dennis Lim
DVDBeaver.com
[Yunda Eddie Feng]
DVDBeaver.com
- Blu-ray- Review by Leonard Norwitz
Death Proof - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
INGLOURIOUS
BASTERDS C- 68
The film is skillfully made, but it’s too silly to be
enjoyed, even as a joke. Tarantino may think that he is doing Jews a favor by
launching this revenge fantasy (in the burning theatre, working-class Jewish
boys get to pump Hitler and Göring full of lead), but somehow I doubt that the
gesture will be appreciated. Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his
virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot
de la cinémathèque. “Inglourious Basterds” is a hundred and fifty-two
minutes long, but Tarantino’s fans will wait for the director’s cut, which no
doubt shows Shirley Temple arriving at Treblinka with the Glenn Miller band and
performing a special rendition of “Baby Take a Bow,” from the immortal 1934
movie of the same name, before she fetchingly leads the S.S. guards to the gas
chamber.
—David Denby from The
New Yorker
While this isn’t
totally worthless, it comes pretty close, despite well made sequences that
resemble the grand tradition of filmmaking and the incessant clues that
Tarantino places throughout the entire film of tributes to other films and
filmmakers. What really ruins this movie
is the juvenile and somewhat snarky tone that simply doesn’t lead anywhere. Usually, especially in revenge fantasies, there are characters that the
audience can get behind before the thrills begin, but not so here, as it’s
divided into different chapter headings where only a few characters extend into
additional chapters, and one never gets much of a feel for any of them. Christopher Waltz relishes his role as an
infamous Nazi interrogator who hunts down Jews, a guy who is all manner and
etiquette before he moves in for the kill.
His notorious villainy is at the heart of the picture, as he’s the guy
you root against. Brad Pitt plays a
slightly deranged Dirty Dozen
American mercenary commander who leads his rat Basterd troops into Europe to
wipe out as many Nazi’s as possible, considering all Nazi’s as less than human,
whose goal is to be as ruthless, or even more so, than the Nazi’s themselves. How do you root for Americans who are as
amoral or even more evil than the Nazi’s?
So really, you get a movie filled with nothing but grotesque characters,
none of whom have any redeeming value whatsoever. Well, c’est la vie - - that’s war. Perhaps so, but you don’t get a glimpse of it
in this movie, which isn’t really about war at all, but instead hides in the
underbelly of human vindictiveness, displaying a form a sadism like those
business cards displayed in AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000), where it’s all about competetive
one-upmanship. In different hands, it’s
possible this might have worked on some other level, perhaps even a
breathlessly exaggerated color saturated DICK TRACY (1990) style musical for
each explosion of violence, but with Tarantino, it turns into the childish fun
equal to a visit to the local video arcade.
Except for the opening shot in Chapter 5, which was mind boggling
perfection, set to David Bowie's CAT PEOPLE (1982) theme song, “Putting Out the Fire with
Gasoline,” there’s really nothing I’ll remember about this
film.
I can see how this giddy tone of jingoism
could really bring out the worst in people, as it seems to appeal to their
ugliest nature, as the racism or prejudices that usually remain deep
seeded may rise to the surface and happily exhibit signs of hate bashing,
as was witnessed in the theater today, as the crowd cheered in moments of a guy
getting his skull bashed in or, of course, his face turned into a bloody pulp,
not to mention several outbreaks where people's otherwise reserved nature felt
more inclined to yell expletives at the screen. It was a chatty
crowd where people remained talking throughout the entire picture
and after the President got yelled at by a House member this week (YouTube - You lie! to
President Obama. Rep. Joe Wilson R-(SC)), I guess every Tom, Dick, and Harry feels
vindicated enough to yell incessantly at a movie screen—at least in this
movie. Other films with similar
influence might have been SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG
(1971), the only film where I’ve ever witnessed full blown, pants down
intercourse in the theater along with several patrons openly shooting up hard
narcotics, or perhaps the initial influence of John Singleton’s BOYZ IN THE HOOD
(1991), an anti-gang movie that was initially appreciated by hard core gang
members for its authenticity, causing flare ups of violence in the movie
screenings. But despite their impact,
those were adult movies with a significant message about the social ills of the
nation. This film, on the other hand,
displays a near lascivious interest in self-gratification, as if by going
off on this comic book fantasia that the movie will, at least perception-wise,
right some wrongs in this world. I
believe Tarantino is badly mistaken, at least judging by this film, as it
appears all he’s really interested in is pleasing himself. Certainly movies all too often portray Nazi’s
with such seriousness and gravity, as if the subject is exclusively sacred
territory, and no doubt it is, but it’s not like Nazi’s couldn’t use a healthy
dose of tasteless Mad magazine
sarcastic lampooning every once in awhile, but this is not the film that does
it. It’s more like a bad caricature
filled with B-movie and Hogan’s Heroes
TV references.
Most of this film,
which takes place in Nazi occupied France, is all talk leading up to brief
moments of senseless violence, where the elongated sequences seem to go on
forever due to the neverending verbiage and hospitality of characters that are
too kind to show undesired elements to the door. So the chattiness, especially evident in
Christopher Waltz, who sees every discussion as a battle of the wills, grates
on the nerves after awhile, even as his giggles resemble Monty Python stalwart
John Cleese. Brad Pitt is all caricature
as a good old Rebel boy, one of the last vestiges of the South, who’s dead set
on rewriting history by showing an ornerier side than your enemy, which means
you have to be more treacherous than they are.
It’s all about playing games with stereotypes, almost as if history
itself is irrelevant, that only the symbols matter. When the director takes control of the
symbols, it’s clear he has the power to determine any outcome. Much of this, however, is all too predictable,
especially the boy meets girl story, where the boy turns out to be a Nazi war
hero who’s too big for his britches, who can’t even stand the sight of watching
himself in his own movie, or the Basterds meet the French underground in the
discreet hideaway of a basement bar filled with nothing but Nazi’s in a barroom
scene that goes on forever until all Hell breaks loose. Tarantino features an essential film noir
girl in a red dress, which sets up the exquisite Chapter 5 opening, but even
that scene dovetails into a marathon talkfest.
The intermittent violence is overwhelmingly nihilistic, as rarely does
anyone survive, which leaves the impression of a Macbethian universe where life
doesn’t matter and only evil triumphs.
The idea that anyone would wish to aspire to be as wretched as the
Nazi's is simply beyond stupid, it's ridiculous. Does anyone aspire to be like Jeffrey Dahmer
or Charles Manson? In the end, I didn’t
feel like returning to the sandbox and having Nazi fun playing infantile war
games with Quintin. There’s little left to
the imagination, as everything is thoroughly analyzed and spelled out
completely, leaving the audience in something of a brain dead haze afterwards,
as morality doesn’t even exist, because it’s been tossed aside by the unconscionable ease at the number of people who were killed in this film,
all supposedly for the benefit of cinema.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE
Chicago Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
You can take PULP FICTION and KILL BILL, but please leave
Christoph Waltz talking to the French dairy farmer, the guessing games at La
Louisiane, Daniel Brühl's awkward courtship of Mélanie Laurent. That is, leave
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. It's juvenile, wrongheaded, self-aggrandizing, stupid,
completely spot-on, probably Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece, maybe the only
moral film anyone has made about "the war" since THE BIG RED ONE. A
great big caricature of a movie, gentle in tone and abrasive in structure.
Here's a so-called war film with war nowhere to be found: just people sitting
and speaking the most beautiful dialogue Quentin Tarantino has ever written.
Apparently, when you strip his characters of recognizable pop culture
references, they become human beings (references abound, but to a popular
culture most audience members won't be familiar with, and more so in the
mise-en-scene than the dialogue). They cry, they whimper, they become tense,
they act stupidly. They're set up as gags (the multi-lingual "Jew
hunter," the film-critic-turned-officer, the intrusive SS officer), but
they feel real, all of them, except maybe Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine: chin and
chest puffed out like Desperate Dan, he carries himself like Robin Williams'
Popeye. He's the punchline to the film; the issue is that film itself isn't a
joke. In fact, it's dead serious: maybe you need a full and rowdy theater to
catch it, but the Nazi audience at the film premiere sounds the same as the
audience cheering the rare violence in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Tarantino knows
this.
Time
Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [4/6]
Spelling may not be Quentin
Tarantino’s forte, but his grasp of language (both verbal and visual) is
peerless. Yet though the writer-director was once widely imitated, he has now
settled into an idiosyncratic groove that puts off more people than it
attracts, and it’s doubtful Inglourious Basterds
will redress the imbalance. Detractors and proponents alike will see what they
want to see in this two-and-a-half-hour World War II fable, which hits all the
beats of a retribution-laden genre piece without ever entirely satiating
character or audience bloodlust.
Tarantino’s violence,
however, has gained resonance and horror. That’s evident from the slow-burn
opening sequence, in which Nazi colonel Hans Landa (Waltz) uses snake-oil
floridness to make a farmer (Denis
Menochet) confess that he’s hiding a Jewish family under his floorboards.
Waltz has the showier role, but Tarantino makes sure to juxtapose the SS
agent’s verbose charms with close-ups of Menochet’s gradually crumbling
features. It’s devastating in ways that only movies allow, and also lays down
the tonally twisted groundwork for the film’s apocalyptic finale, which
rewrites history with ambiguous aplomb.
In between are more
Pabst and Piz Palü references than an UFA-loving cinephile can shake an ice
pick at. Brad
Pitt goes Burn After Reading
broad, with Southern twang instead of frosted tips, as the leader of the
eponymous American mercenaries. Meanwhile, the great Michael
Fassbender plays his cultivated opposite: a British secret-service agent
who knows his Riefenstahl better than his regional accents. But it’s a
stand-alone moment during Basterds’ hellfire
climax that lingers most in the mind. That would be the fleetingly projected
face of the vengeful Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent), floating and cackling in smoky
space—an evanescent image gloating in what is revealed to be a fruitless
comeuppance.
Plume Noire review Moland Fengkov
Following famous figures like Stanley Kubrick or Francis Ford
Coppola, Quentin Tarantino delivers his war film, which is undoubtedly his most
ambitious, but also his laziest — of course, he's bring his personal touch. But
here, after a long, rather promising opening sequence, showing the massacre of
a Jewish family hidden under the floor of French farm, at the conclusion of an
interminable interrogation where the tension settles progressively and the
verbal exchanges get more nervous, Inglorious Basterds loses itself in a vast
caricature. Witness the representation of Adolf Hitler, physically closer in
resemblance to Sadam Hussein than to the historical figure, showing all of his
destructive madness, but without subtlety.
With its international casting and ambitious subject, a lot was expected from
this much-anticipated film, which could have been used as a playing field for
Tarantino's art. As the title implies, the story simply follows a troop of
particularly sanguinary American soldiers, chasing Nazis and scalping their
victims. One won't know much else about these basterds, since the film will not
go into character development and does not give them any scene of anthology
except for this sequence where a German officer undergoes a muscular
interrogation which ends in a smashed cranium by blows of a baseball bat. Even
the famous scene known as the
More must be demanded of Tarantino. Admittedly, his spaghetti
western way of filming a father observing the arrival of the Nazis
from a distance at the top of a hill, fatally anticipating the drama to come, or
his way of stretching the scenes by filling them with truculent dialogue before
letting violence emerge, and his pleasure in mixing humor and dramatic tension
in the same scene, save the film from boredom. One could have had a good time.
But the film doesn't abandon its entertaining function, never attempting to
pursue any reflection, whether it's on the genre to which it claims to belong
(Tarantino does not make use of the WWII framework solely as a context), or on
the themes recurrent in the director's work such as revenge.
At first glance seductive, given that the Tarantinian touch is recognizable in
each scene, Inglorious Basterds allows itself to be viewed as an object of pure
entertainment, but leaves an after-taste of frustration as a big schoolboy
prank. Unfortunate.
Christian
Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B-]
Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" – his
misspellings, not mine – is a self-described fairy tale. Being that this is a
Tarantino film, you can be sure it's closer to one of Grimm's more ghastly
escapades than to "Sleeping Beauty." In this World War II fantasy,
top Nazis get obliterated by Jewish avengers.
The film is divided into five chapters, each given its own heading. The first chapter, which is shot in the slow-burn, panoramic style of a spaghetti western, is titled "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France." Subsequent chapters likewise have the look and feel of different moviemaking genres, although 1960s "Dirty Dozen"-ish stylistics predominate.
What does this filmic fandango add up to? Tarantino, who looks at life through a viewfinder, sees film as the ultimate righter of wrongs. Through the magic of movies he overturns the Holocaust. Who needs bummers like "Schindler's List" and "The Diary of Anne Frank," or even the historically based "Defiance," which featured Jews killing Nazis but was mucked up by all those pesky debates about morality? In a recent interview in The Atlantic, Tarantino says, "Holocaust movies are always having Jews as victims.... We've seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let's see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let's not have everything build up to a big misery, let's actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation."
His "fun" here involves a band of Jewish American revengers, headed up by Brad Pitt's perpetually chin-jutting, non-Jewish Lt. Aldo Raine, who specialize in scalping Nazis and carving swastikas into their foreheads. The most intimidating of the Basterds is a baseball-bat-wielding hulk known as "Bear Jew" (played by Eli Roth, the sicko-horror film director).
A parallel story line has Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who alone escaped the massacre of her family in the opening chapter, plotting her payback three years later as the owner, under an assumed identity, of a movie theater in occupied Paris. It seems the Nazi high command wants her theater to première a new German movie, "A Nation's Pride," starring war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a sort of Teutonic Audie Murphy who is smitten by Shosanna. Since the nitrate film housed in the theater is highly flammable, she sees a way to turn the event into a caldron of retribution.
There's lots more plot in this 2-1/2-hour fantasia, and, despite its action-movie origins, lots of talk. It's the least virtuosic movie Tarantino has ever made. Many of the sequences drag on unduly, especially an early scalping scene, which could have been scalped by at least 10 minutes, and several set pieces involving a German glamour queen and Allied secret agent (Diane Kruger). As is standard with Tarantino, the baddest of the bad guys get the best dialogue – in this case, the dreaded Nazi "Jew Hunter" Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who first decimates Shosanna's family and then carries on from there.
Landa is such a wily and despicable concoction that, in movie terms, he's almost impossible not to like. And therein lies part of my problem with this movie. Tarantino may have set out to make a World War II film where the Jews come out on top, but he can't resist indulging in the same old penny dreadful shenanigans as all the other pulpmeisters who feature villains you love to hate. No one else in "Inglourious Basterds" comes close to Landa for sheer charisma.
Tarantino, who is not Jewish, may be genuine in his desire to make the un-"Schindler's List" but there's absolutely no irony, no pathos, in his game plan. Doesn't he realize that making a righteous fantasy about the Jewish incineration of the Nazi brass only reinforces the sad reality that, tragically, this never happened? Knowing what we know, how can we look at this film and cheer?
I have another large difficulty with this film. Tarantino's fantasy implies that if only there had been Jews like the Basterds, there would not have been an Auschwitz. This ahistoric revisionism is pure malarkey, but it may seep into the moviegoing consciousness of audiences, including young Jewish audiences, who might come to believe that a few roving bands of renegade Jewish scalpers might have terminated this whole Holocaust thing.
That's the trouble with filmmakers like Tarantino. Their heads are so crammed with old movies that they confuse movies with real life. And what may have been intended as a screw-loose tribute to Jewish gumption ends up its opposite.
Time
Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [2/6]
You’ve got to admire the sheer, infectious force of Quentin Tarantino’s personality. Is there any
other popular American director, who, like Tarantino, is constantly ranting and
raving about cinema’s glorious past and giving young filmgoers reason to extend
their DVD library back beyond ‘Star Wars’? Even the name of his new film is
fondly stolen from a little known Italian movie of the 1970s. It’s only when
you turn to Tarantino’s own films that things get more tricky. For the sad
truth is that Tarantino, like cheap wine, just isn’t improving with age.
Which is an awkward reality because Tarantino obviously wants to put away
childish things with this new film. Not only does Brad Pitt close the film with the
self-regarding line ‘This may well be my masterpiece’, but ‘Inglourious
Basterds’ is a little more restrained and a little more quiet than films like
‘Death Proof’ and ‘Kill Bill’.
I say ‘a little’ because much of the film is not quiet at all: when the music
comes, it’s loud; when the deaths occur, they’re gruesome, even sadistic; and
when the plot kicks in, it’s pure, wild fantasy.
The film moves liberally between French, German and English dialogue and takes
us through five chapters. First, in 1941, we see a Nazi, Colonel Hans Landa
(played by Austrian Christoph Waltz), known as ‘The Jew Hunter’,
discover and kill a Jewish family in
Then we’re introduced to the ‘basterds’, a gang of eight Jewish-American
soldiers who, while deep undercover, roam Nazi-occupied France, murdering
German soldiers and collecting their scalps. They’re led by a
For the film’s final chapters, we leap to
This might be a period movie, but still we clock Tarantino’s signature style –
the extended, know-it-all dialogue, the tricky gunplay, the pop-cultural nods.
There’s even a Mexican stand-off à la ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and the obligatory
‘nigger’ reference, this time in French. But this lacks the stylistic pizzazz
of Tarantino’s best, and by putting more emphasis than usual on the chatter it
makes it more obvious that the talk often lacks wit and verve.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tarantino takes the history of cinema more seriously
than the history of
What’s not clear is what Tarantino wants to achieve: ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is
an immature work that doesn’t know whether it’s a pastiche, a spoof, a
counterfactual drama, a revenge tragedy or a character comedy. How can we,
within a space of minutes, feel adult sympathy for a hunted Jewish family and
then childish glee when a Nazi’s skull is crushed with a baseball bat? The one
cancels out the other.
But perhaps the biggest faux pas is introducing real historical characters.
Tarantino’s inventions are big enough – not least Waltz’s terrific ‘movie’ Nazi
– so why does he have to court implausibility by dragging in a loony Hitler
(Martin Wuttke, nothing special) and introducing Goebbels? You might imagine,
too, that this film was written in the ’60s: Tarantino seems blithely
uninterested in more than 60 years of slow reconciliation between
‘Subtle’ is not a word in Tarantino's lexicon. At the film’s heart is a fatal
attempt to conflate fact with fiction and a celebration of vengeance that’s
misplaced and embarrassing. Loyal fans expecting a familiar patchwork of
Tarantino tics and quirks – ‘Pulp History’ or ‘Kill Hitler’ – might not be
disappointed. Those expecting anything approaching progress, cinematically or
ideologically, probably will be.
Tarantino Rewrites the Holocaust |
Newsweek Movies | Newsweek.com
When Jews Attack, by Daniel
Mendelsohn from Newsweek
At the climax of
Quentin Tarantino's latest movie, Inglourious Basterds, which is set
during World War II and which is concerned, at least superficially, with Jews,
you get to witness a horribly familiar Holocaust atrocity—with a deeply
unfamiliar twist. A group of unsuspecting people is tricked into entering a
large building; the doors of the building are locked and bolted from the
outside; then the building is set on fire. The twist here is not that
Tarantino, a director with a notorious penchant for explicit violence, shows
you in loving detail what happens inside the burning building—the desperate
banging on the doors, the bodies alight, the screams, confusion, the flames.
The twist is that this time the people inside the building are Nazis and the
people who are killing them are Jews. What you make of the movie—and what it
says about contemporary culture—depends on whether that inversion will leave
audiences cheering or horrified.
"Inversion"
is the name of the game here. Tarantino, who began his career as a video-store
clerk, has created a body of work consisting of elaborate riffs on second-tier
genre films (blaxploitation, gangster, martial arts), every detail of which he
seems to have seen and memorized. In Inglourious Basterds (the dimwitted
misspelling is never explained), he's after bigger game and a more
consequential subject: those gritty World War II epics in which an unlikely,
ill-shaven group of hard-boiled recruits must perform some impossible mission (The
Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, The Naked and the Dead, and, of course, Enzo
Castellari's Inglorious Bastards, to which Tarantino's title pays
homage). Here, the ill-shaven GIs belong to a group that the movies used to
represent as soft-boiled—they're all Jewish—and their mission, under the
leadership of a blond, cigar-chomping, decidedly un-Jewish lieutenant named
Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, playing what you might call the Lee Marvin role), is
simply to ambush and kill as many Nazis as they can—and then bring back their
scalps as trophies.
The scalping—which,
this being a Tarantino movie, leaves nothing to the imagination—is a clue to
the kind of post-modern fun that the director wants to have here, as he throws
elements of both the war movie and the Western into his directorial blender and
hits "purée" (and, more seriously, reveals how much the two genres
overlap). A second, parallel storyline about Jews who fight back, involving not
one but two plans to assassinate the high Nazi brass at a film premiere, invokes
the cinema with even more elaborate playfulness. (One thread includes both a
film critic and a German movie star, the latter played by a spot-on Diana
Kruger, for whom Hildegard Knef is clearly a more comfortable fit than was
Helen of Troy.) If Inglourious Basterds represents an evolution for the
director, it's that in this new movie, the movies aren't just a subtle (or not
so subtle) element in an allusive esthetic game; they are, at last, front and
center. One plot depends on the flammability of 35mm nitrate film stock, while
another crucial incident hangs on a character's apparent dismay at the way that
film gets history wrong. It's a movie whose life depends on movies. Tarantino
himself summed up his feelings about the role of cinema in Basterds.
"I like that it's the power of the cinema that fights the Nazis," he
has said. "But not just as a metaphor, as a literal reality."
The problem is that
the movies aren't real life, and this is where Tarantino, with his video-store
vision of the world, gets into trouble. Controversies about the uses of Jewish
suffering in World War II in popular entertainment—no matter how innocently
such entertainment may be intended—go back at least as far as Mel Brooks's The
Producers in 1968, and exploded once again in 1997 when Roberto Benigni's
concentration-camp comedy, Life Is Beautiful, came out. It's possible
that at least some of the discussion of Inglourious Basterds will focus
on the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of using the Holocaust, even
tangentially, as a vehicle for a playful, postmodern movie that so feverishly
celebrates little more than film itself.
But the real problem
here is the message, not the medium. If you strip away the amusing,
self-referential gamesmanship that makes up Tarantino's style, Inglourious
Basterds, like many of his other films, is in fact about something real and
deeply felt: the visceral pleasure of revenge. Vengeance seems to be a subject
about which Tarantino the person, as well as Tarantino the filmmaker, has
strong feelings; his onscreen treatment of it as something both necessary and
satisfying are reflected offscreen as well. "If I had a gun and a
12-year-old kid broke into this house," he told the critic J. Hoberman in
a 1996 interview, "I would kill him. You have no right to come into my
house…I would empty the gun until you were dead."
In Inglourious
Basterds, Tarantino indulges this taste for vengeful violence by—well, by
turning Jews into Nazis. In history, Jews were repeatedly herded into buildings
and burned alive (a barbarism on which the plot of another recent film, The
Reader, hangs); in Inglourious Basterds, it's the Jews who
orchestrate this horror. In history, the Nazis and their local collaborators
made sport of human suffering; here, it's the Jews who take whacks at Nazi
skulls with baseball bats, complete with mock sports-announcer commentary,
turning murder into a parodic "game." And in history, Nazis carved
Stars of David into the chests of rabbis before killing them; here, the
"basterds" carve swastikas into the foreheads of those victims whom
they leave alive.
Tarantino, the master
of the obsessively paced revenge flick, invites his audiences to applaud this
odd inversion—to take, as his films often invite them to take, a deep,
emotional satisfaction in turning the tables on the bad guys. ("The
Germans will be sickened by us," Raine tells his corps of Jewish savages
early on.) But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the
feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world
consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a
revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into
"sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure. An alternative, and
morally superior, form of "revenge" for Jews would be to do precisely
what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and
perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely
in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future.
Never again, the refrain goes. The emotions that Tarantino's new film evokes
are precisely what lurk beneath the possibility that "again" will
happen.
Tarantino's movie may
be the latest, if the most extreme, example of a trend that shows just how fragile
memory can be—a series of popular World War II films that disproportionately
emphasize armed Jewish heroism (Defiance) and German resistance (Valkyrie,
White Rose), or elicit sympathy for German moral confusion (The Reader).
If so, it may be that our present-day taste for "empowerment," our
anxious horror of being represented as "victims"—nowadays there are
no victims, only "survivors"—has begun to distort the representation
of the past, one in which passive victims, alas, vastly outnumbered those who were
able to fight back. "Facts can be so misleading," Hans Landa, the
evil SS man, murmurs at one point in Inglourious Basterds. Perhaps, but
fantasies are even more misleading. To indulge them at the expense of the truth
of history would be the most inglorious bastardization of all.
Debating
Inglourious Basterds | Film Quarterly
Ben Walter, Winter 2009/10
Tarantino's
Inglourious Basterds: Film Kills - Bright Lights Film Journal Vlad Dima, October 31, 2009
The Deep Morals of Inglourious Basterds • Senses of Cinema Joseph Natoli, September 29, 2009
Prologue to that I.B. post, on Star Wars and WWII film zunguzungu, September 3, 2009
Inglourious Basterds zunguzungu, November 5, 2009
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
Slant Magazine review [3/4] Ed Gonzalez
Inglourious Basterds; Jackboot Mutiny « Louis Proyect: The ... Finding Pabst in Tarantino, Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist, October 25, 2009
Quentin
Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Makes Holocaust Revisionism Fun J. Hoberman from The Village Voice
Is
Inglourious Basterds director Quentin Tarantino all washed up—or ... Has one of the most overrated directors of
the '90s become one of the most underrated of the aughts? Dennis Lim
from Slate, August 20, 2009
Inglourious Basterds - The Time
Traveler's Wife - Passing Strange ... David Edelstein from NY magazine
Tolerable Cruelty Zach Ralston from Elusive Lucidity, September 10, 2009
The Movie Review: 'Inglourious Basterds' Christopher Orr from The New Republic
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Is Tarantino good for the
Jews? - Salon.com Andrew
O’Hehir, August 13, 2009
“Inglourious
Basterds” - Salon.com
Steohanie Zacharek, August 21, 2009
Inglourious
Basterds - Reviews - Reverse Shot
Michael Koresky
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
Quentin
Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
The Good, The Bad, and the Nazis,
by Dana Stevens from Slate
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Jigsaw Lounge/ Tribune [Neil Young]
DVD Talk - Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
Inglourious Basterds Katarina Glogorijevic from They Shoot
Actors, Don’t They?, May 28, 2009:
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Review - ScreenAnarchy Kurt Halfyard
A
Second INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Review
Travis Stevens from Screen Anarchy
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review
filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Recommended Reading: Daniel Mendelsohn on the New Tarantino Jonathan Rosenbaum
DVD Town (Tim David Raynor & John J. Puccio) dvd review [Theatrical Version]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Dreamlogic.net [Kris Kobayashi-Nelson and Chris Nelson]
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [B+]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B+]
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [B+]
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review
James Rocchi MSN Summer Movie Guide
Twitch (Todd Brown) review Travis Stevens at Cannes, May 29, 2009
Eric Kohn Falling Short of Tarantino’s Own High Bar, “Inglourious” Goes Bubblegum, at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 20, 2009
Cannes '09: Inglourious Basterds Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 20, 2009, with a follow up here: Cannes '09: Day Eight
Inglourious Basterds Review. Cannes 2009. Karina Longworth at Cannes from SpoutBlog, May 21, 2009
Patrick Z McGavin at Cannes from Stop Smiling magazine, May 21, 2009
FirstShowing.net (Alex Billington) review [8.5/10] May 20, 2009
Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review at Cannes
Matt Dentler Ain’t It Cool News
Tim Hayes Critics Notebook
The Cinephile's Guide to Inglourious Basterds: Cinematic ... Cinematic References in Quentin Tarantino's War Film, by Kevin Sturton from Suite 101
An Analysis of Quentin Tarantino and His Films Michael Peters from Suite 101
Alison Willmore at Cannes from The IFC Independent Eye, May 20, 2009
David Bourgeois at Cannes from Movieline, May 20, 2009
Tom Carson GQ magazine at Cannes, May 20. 2009
Melissa Anderson at Cannes from Artforum, May 20, 2009
Cannes 2009: Inglourious Basterds Is Amoral, Crude, Juvenile--In Other Words, Quintessential Tarantino J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, May 20, 2009
Inglourious Basterds David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 20, 2009
INGLOURIOUS
BASTERDS--Q&A With Quentin Tarantino Michael Guillen from Screen Anarchy, August 24, 2009
Tarantino: “I am God…” Eugene Hernandez covering the Tarantino press conference, May 20, 2009
Julian Sancton interviews actor Samm Levine at Cannes from Vanity Fair, May 15, 2009
Michael Fleming interviews Tarantino at Cannes from Variety, May 17, 2009
Kristin Hohenadel interviews Tarantino at Cannes from The Scotsman, May 17, 2009
Hollywood Reporter Steven Zeitchik interviews Tarantino, May 18, 2009
Anne Thompson interviews Tarantino at Cannes from The Daily Beast, May 23, 2009
Interview: Quentin Tarantino Interview by Sean O’Hagan from The Observer, August 9, 2009
CBC.ca Arts review Greig Dymond interviews Eli Roth, August 14, 2009
Entertainment Weekly review [B] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes, May 20, 2009
Todd McCarthy at Cannes from Variety, May 20, 2009
Anne Thompson at Cannes for Thompson on Hollywood from Variety, May 20, 2009
Emma Jones BBC News at Cannes, May 20, 2009
Tarantino film the talk of Cannes BBC News at Cannes, May 20, 2009
Cannes 2009: 'Inglourious Basterds' review Dave Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [5/6]
The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Sukhdev Sandhu at Cannes, May 20, 2009
James Christopher Inglourious Basterds at the Cannes Film Festival, at Cannes from The London Times Online, May 21, 2009
Tarantino's nastiest Basterd Guy Dixon from The Globe and the Mail, August 19, 2009
The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [2/4] Pulp Fiction Set in a Era of Tragic Fact, August 25, 2009
Jonathan Owen Inglorious? No. Bastards? Never. Meet the real Tarantino war heroes, from The Independent, May 17, 2009
Geoffrey Macnab First Night: Inglourious Basterds, Cannes Film Festival, from The Independent, May 21, 2009
The Independent review [3/5] Dog Soldiers, by Anthony Quinn from The Independent, August 21, 2009
Tarantino's Basterds is a Cannes turkey Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 20, 2009
Cannes film festival: Only one winner when Tarantino takes on Hitler Mark Brown at Cannes from The Guardian, May 20, 2009
Going Cap in Cannes Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 20, 2009
Blog: Why Tarantino is a real enfant terrible at Cannes Catherine Shoard at Cannes from The Guardian, May 20, 2009
Damon Wise introduces Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Damon Wise from The Guardian, August 15, 2009
Quentin Tarantino: champion of trash cinema John Patterson from The Guardian, August 17, 2009
Inglourious Basterds: one star from Peter Bradshaw Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, August 19, 2009
Inglourious Basterds is cinema's revenge on life David Cox from The Guardian, August 20, 2009
Cannes '09 Day 8: Basterds for breakfast Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 20, 2009
The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]
Quentin Tarantino's 'Basterds' is a glorious mash-up - Los Angeles ... Glenn Whipp from The LA Times, August 16, 2009
What do Jewish film critics have against 'Basterds' avenging Jews? Patrick Goldstein from The LA Times, August 28, 2009
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The Call Back Lynn Hirschberg looks at Tarantino’s audition of Diane Kruger from The New York Times, May 3, 2009
‘Bunch of Guys on a Mission Movie’ Kristen Hohenadel interviews Tarantino from The New York Times, May 6, 2009
After Days of Cringing at the Screen, a Reason to Smile Sweetly Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 21, 2009
‘Inglourious’ Actor Tastes the Glory Dennis Lim from The New York Times, August 12, 2009
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review August 21, 2009
At Slow TV, a terrific debate on the new Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds featuring Adrian Martin and three other critics/scholars. Inglourious Basterds, Can Hollywood Rewrite History? Hosted by Age critic Philippa Hawker, the speakers are (in order): Mark Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization, Adrian Martin, film critic and co-director of the Research Unit in Film and Cultural Theory, Jan Epstein, film critic and broadcaster, and Nathan Wolski, lecturer in Jewish Studies. This event was presented by the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization in association with the Research Unit in Film and Cultural Theory at Monash University, from Slow TV on YouTube, Part 1 (29:01), Part 2 (27:12), and Part 3 (22:09)
Inglourious Basterds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lilian Harvey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lilian Harvey - Bibliography, Photographs, Postcards and Tobacco cards Virtual Film History
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Lilian Harvey Silent Ladies
DJANGO
UNCHAINED D 58
Slavery
was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. —Spike
Lee
Slavery as entertainment?—It is in Quentin Tarantino’s world, where next to nothing about slavery is learned by watching this film.
In matters of racial understanding, historical or otherwise,
it’s a curious thing about fantasy, as it doesn’t really fit anywhere, but
exists in a netherworld all its own.
Some may take delight in the imaginings of male revenge fantasies where
women are mere afterthoughts, while others will wonder what’s the point of
bringing a comic book, super hero sensibility to matters of actual American
history? Do we really need, as an
example, a heroic Abraham Lincoln riding a thunderous horse through the rebel
lines killing Confederates at
While the film plays out like an irreverent spaghetti
western, using stereotype and exaggeration, what’s missing is the everpresent
tone of danger and suspense in Sergio Leone movies, where the bad guys (Lee Van
Cleef, Eli Wallach) are often as cunning and conniving as the hero, where
extreme character ingenuity places the outcome in doubt. In this film, like blaxploitation movies, the
outcome is never in doubt, as the world is broken down into good and evil, and
evil gets a taste of its own medicine.
The problem here is not the revenge fantasy itself, such as the bumbling
Klu Klux Klan raid that amusingly gets hung up on the pettiness of seemingly
insignificant details, but the loathsome degree of wretched sadism that goes
along with it, which brings a repellant nature to the film. Outside of two central characters, Christoph
Waltz as Dr. King Schultz, a highly successful bounty hunter, and Foxx as
Django, a young apprentice in the trade, who operate as a professionally
trained team throughout, and an always convincing appearance from Samuel L.
Jackson as an ever faithful yet uppity house “nigger,” there is no character
development whatsoever. If this were a
rollicking screwball comedy where people were continually being made fun of,
perhaps exaggeration and excess would be relevant to the style of humor, but
much of this is no laughing matter, and is instead simply endless talking
waiting around for something vile to happen, where the foul and tasteless use
of the n-word passes for the otherwise missing drama, where the South is
continually reduced to typical ROOTS (1977) style set pieces and sadistic white
stereotypes, people with a salacious appetite for the most gruesome aspects of
slavery. For a near 3-hour film, this
can only be described as excessive, especially when it’s being passed off as
Foxx is a bit preposterous in the role, as he quickly shifts from a nearly inaudible chained slave huddled together with other similarly shackled men to a highly skilled black cowboy with excellent horsemanship and near perfect shooting skills, where the audacity of what comes out of his mouth would no doubt have gotten him shot in real life, but in this version people somehow avoid the temptation, perhaps enthralled by the prospective financial incentives offered by Dr. King, a method used to lure out his targets. Waltz’s introductory gift for gab is charming, where his flowery elucidation of the English language in the remote, uneducated frontier of the American West has an element of the patently absurd about it, where most of the humor is in the earlier stages of their friendship. By the time they get to a slave plantation in Mississippi, where the continuously smug Leonardo DiCaprio continually overacts as the smarmy plantation owner who happens to be in possession of Django’s wife, a slave supposedly given the mythical name of Brünnhilde (Kerry Washington) by her white German mistress, the bounty hunters are knee deep in Southern Gothic plantation lore, expressed through a series of ever increasing levels of sadistic horror viewed with varying degrees of pleasure, such as witnessing a slave get eaten alive by a pack of wild dogs, or casually watching, over cocktails, Mandingo fighters battle to the death. Why this needs to be exhibited as entertainment fodder in the film is an open question, as in SHOAH (1985), Claude Lanzmann makes a 9 and ½ hour Holocaust documentary without ever showing the death camps, and Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002) reveals the wisdom and cultural insight of a chained black Aboriginal in the Australian outback, continually differentiating between the brutal racism of his white captors and the sly intelligence of his own character. Rather than escalate these cultural differences in a journey of mounting psychological dread, Tarantino simply leads us where he predictably always leads his audience, into a nihilistic, apocalyptic hellfire of explosions and gunfire, where bodies are strewn across the screen in a landscape of the collected dead, where it may as well be zombies getting blown away. This is a sorry excuse for a movie turning the wretchedness of slavery into sports bar entertainment.
Any way you slice it, B-movie maestro Quentin Tarantino's
blaxploitation/spaghetti western hybrid can cozy up to Death Proof as
one of his slightest efforts. That's not to say that there isn't plenty of fun
to be had, if you're in the mood for a well-shot, ultra-bloody action comedy
packed with Tarantino's distinct wordplay — there is. However, Django
Unchained feels more like the work of a man getting his ya-yas out than a
purposeful look at the horrors of slavery.
As Dr. King Shultz (a former dentist turned bounty hunter), Christoph Waltz
proves that a great deal of the appeal of his Oscar-winning turn as Hans Landa
in Inglourious Basterds came from how he sounds reciting Tarantino's
dialogue. Shultz shares Landa's general zeal for conversation and picking at
verbal smokescreens. This is a good thing for the film's entertainment value,
but further evidence of Tarantino's difficulty creating distinct voices for his
characters.
This is something he does a far better job of achieving with Django. After
being freed by Shultz — to help him identify a trio of criminals carrying a
hefty bounty — Django Freeman signs on as a deputy bounty hunter. Initially
there's little more than a cheap recurring joke based upon the surprise of
townspeople seeing a black man proudly astride a horse and the good doctor's
polite and professional handling of violent conflict, but when Shultz agrees to
help Django rescue his wife from cotton magnate Calvin Candie (a scenery
nibbling Leonardo DiCaprio), a plot is set into motion that's pure Tarantino.
Shultz encourages Django to adopt the character of a black slaver — the lowest
form of scum in Django's books — to deflect the potential suspicions of Mr.
Candie and his associates while the two infiltrators negotiate the purchase of
a fine Nubian specimen to compete in a despicable underground fight circuit as
a cover for their real object of desire.
Foxx does a tremendous job imbedding his character's seething rage within the
confines of a different variety of hate: self. How people hide themselves in
roles is amongst Tarantino's chief concerns once again, but aside from the
subtle barbed exchanges between Django and head house slave Stephen (Samuel L.
Jackson), this theme isn't particularly well fleshed-out.
The sheer demands of gleeful violent revenge win out at the end of the day,
with the picture devolving into the same "burn it all down" mentality
displayed in Inglourious Basterds, but without that film's mechanism of
being part of a scenario that had a greater influence on the larger problem of
persecution.
As fun as it can be to see a bunch of racists get brutally slaughtered, Django
Unchained doesn't leave much of an impression to chew over, and it's hard
to ignore that this basic plot was already addressed much more efficiently and
comically in the final season of Chappelle's Show.
Opinion: Quentin Tarantino creates an exceptional slave Salamishah Tillet from In America from CNN, December 25, 2012, also seen here: Salamishah Tillet
Quentin Tarantino set out to make his newest film, “Django
Unchained,” to avenge
“How can you ignore such a huge part of
American history?” the
director recently told Newsweek magazine. “Hollywood didn’t want to deal
with it because it was too ugly and too messy.”
On this point, he is right.
Unlike the preponderance of movies on
other historical atrocities –
including the Holocaust, which Tarantino
tackled in "Inglorious Basterds" – there have only been a handful of Hollywood films made on
American slavery. And none were directed by an African-American.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of
those movies were racist.
Dating back to D.W. Griffin’s “The
Birth of a Nation” in 1915, white slave masters were heroes and formerly
enslaved African-Americans were villains.
“Gone With the Wind,” the 1939
box-office smash, did no better as slave characters like Prissy, Mammy and
Uncle Peter appeared as docile and happy servants.
These two films alone dominated all subsequent
Hollywood representations of slavery until late 20th-century movies such as
“Glory,” “Amistad” and “Beloved” depicted African-Americans as resistors.
But films on slavery have never been
about the past alone.
They are influenced by the way we see
our racial selves in the moment and also help shape those images. More often
than not, slavery is the historical backdrop against which filmmakers and
audiences can gauge their own racial problems or progress.
“Django Unchained” is no different.
Though set two years before the Civil War, the movie is very much Tarantino’s
21st-century racial fantasy.
There is much to criticize in this
film: the excessive use of the N-word, gratuitous
gun violence and its male dominance. Women are objects of apathy or
sympathy and are not as nearly as complex or charismatic as any of the male characters.
This is very much a movie about how men, white and black, navigate America’s
racial maze.
And there is much to defend.
The slave-turned-bounty hunter Django,
who rescues his wife from slavery, is an African-American hero never seen
before on the big screen. He alone is capable of the brilliance, moral courage
and swagger needed to resist slavery.
And yet his exceptionality comes at a
price: Unlike "Amistad’s" Cinque or "Beloved’s" Sethe, he
seems to exist in a vacuum. Most of the slave characters he meets are not his
equals; they are flat, naive, and as in awe of him as the audience. And
they barely dent racial stereotypes.
The emphasis on black exceptionalism is
not just in Tarantino’s film. It has been a problem in the post-civil rights
era, one that should be defined as much by the everyday killings of youths such
as Trayvon Martin as much the re-election of the first African-American
president.
Instead, racial progress is too often
determined by the exceptional success of people such as Barack Obama and Oprah
Winfrey.
It is true, as Princeton professor Imani
Perry writes in her book “More Beautiful and More Terrible,” that “the
African-American figure of note and achievement is evidence for, and in some
instances a sign of, the chipping away at the infrastructure of white
supremacy.”
But our constant celebration of their
individual success as the only proof of racial progress is too risky.
Perry warns: “Either the person or
people are seen as role models and lauded for their attainments and
transcendence of the 'bear' of race, or they are viewed as inauthentic,
illegitimate, and threatening.”
Conservatives tout “exceptional
African-Americans” to deny contemporary structures of racism, and liberals
applaud them for transcending race. In both cases, the ongoing racial
inequities that affect the majority of African-Americans today are seen as a
thing of the past, as a bygone of the era of slavery.
Clearly, most Americans, much less
African-Americans, will ever be able to become Obama or Oprah. But in our
modern era, their achievements become a stand-in for all African-Americans.
They prove how easy it is for all people to attain the American dream or how
deficient African-Americans are when they don’t.
We should be aware that “Django
Unchained” is a film that could not have been made at any other racial
moment. But by privileging the few, we do not have to deal with the severe
racial inequalities that most African-Americans confront in education,
employment, health care and the criminal justice system.
As we cheer Django on in his revenge,
we ought to ask ourselves: What happened to all the other slaves in America?
Those who had neither Django’s guile nor guns? If we are serious about avenging
the past, we must deal with the legacy of their lives in our present.
Black
and white and read all over Tal
Rosenberg from The Chicago Reader
The line on Django Unchained, the latest from Quentin Tarantino, is that it's a companion piece to his previous feature, Inglourious Basterds. Both are genre pieces that function as racial revenge fantasies: the war movie Inglourious Basterds shows Jewish-American soldiers slaughtering Nazis in occupied France, and the western Django Unchained follows a freed slave in the antebellum south as he guns down hillbillies, plantation owners, and Klansmen. Both movies play fast and loose with history: Inglourious Basterds ends with Hitler being assassinated, and Django Unchained, set in 1858, is filled with implausible characters and events. Tarantino may be a stickler for period details—most of the rooms are candlelit, most of the characters have terrible teeth, and excess beer foam is wiped off with a stick—but his vision of the south also includes rap tunes, a German bounty hunter, and Australian bad guys who seem to have stepped out of Crocodile Dundee.
Despite this questionable history,
though, Django Unchained has deep roots in the American literature of
the 1850s. The most popular book of that era—aside from the Bible, of
course—was Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in
1852, it had sold a half million copies by 1857, when it was flying off shelves
at the rate of 1,000 a week. Today most people are less familiar with the book
than with the racial epithet it spawned: in the 50s and 60s especially,
"Uncle Tom" became synonymous with blacks who changed their behavior
or appearance to ingratiate themselves with whites. Oddly, this epithet is far
removed from Stowe's conception of the character as a Christ figure, which was
a radical notion in antebellum times. Django (Jamie Foxx) is more like the
Count of Monte Cristo, to name another character from 19th-century literature,
but the history of Uncle Tom's Cabin can tell us a lot about Django
Unchained.
In the book Uncle Tom is a middle-aged
slave sold downriver again and again until finally he ends up the property of
Simon Legree, a monstrous plantation owner who forbids him from reading the
Bible and commands him to thrash other slaves. When Tom refuses, he's beaten to
death by his overseers but expresses his forgiveness just before he expires,
which moves them so powerfully that they convert to Christianity. The character
turned out to be remarkably elastic: as Linda Williams reports in her book Playing the Race Card,
traveling theater companies created their own dramatizations of the novel, know
as "Tom shows," and each subsequent version strayed farther from the
book. By the turn of the century, there were versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin
that had hardly anything to do with Stowe's story; some portrayed Tom as a
foolish, old minstrel-show character, and others ended happily, with Tom
surviving.
These distortions only continued when Uncle
Tom's Cabin hit the big screen. In the first known movie version, from 1903, the
aging, potbellied Tom is played by a white actor in blackface, and black actors
playing slaves dance merrily at the beginning of each scene. A later version, from 1914,
departs radically from the novel when another slave, whose life Tom has spared
earlier, returns the favor by stalking and killing Simon Legree. So Tarantino's
great innovation—creating a tale of black vengeance in the antebellum
south—hasn't only been done before, it was done nearly a hundred years ago, and
under the aegis of Uncle Tom's Cabin, no less.
The other major American literary trend
of the 1850s was the growing popularity of dime novels: cheap, throwaway
stories that favored action over introspection, fantasy over reality, and
directness over metaphor or symbolism. The pulp fiction of their day, dime
novels were responsible for many of the western archetypes that filtered into
the movies, including the spaghetti westerns that inspired Django Unchained.
Django escapes from slavery after his owners are killed in a bloody shootout
with Dr. King Schultz (Dr. King—get it?), a German dentist turned bounty hunter
who's played by Christoph Waltz. The doctor wants Django to lead him to a gang
of killers he's pursuing, and after hearing the story of Django's lost love,
Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), he offers to help rescue her from Candieland, a
notorious plantation run by the brutal Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a
lover of Mandingo fighting.
Django Unchained may be entertaining and occasionally funny, but its ideas
don't really hold up. The characters' racism is supposed to be shocking, but
we've all seen this sort of stuff in countless dramas and historical
documentaries. Strip away all the hip music and spaghetti-western set pieces
and you're left with True Romance (1993), which Tony Scott directed from
a Tarantino script. When Candie compares the skull of a black man to that of a
white man, his monologue is nearly identical in content, tone, and delivery to
a conversation between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken in True Romance.
Django's frequent visions of Broomhilda are reminiscent of Christian Slater's
fantastical conversations with Elvis in the earlier movie, and the penultimate
shootout in Django Unchained recalls the bullet-riddled finale of True
Romance. The opening credits of Django Unchained are virtually
identical to those of Jackie Brown, with the protagonist walking in
profile to bombastic, orchestral soul music.
Jackie Brown is Tarantino's best and most lasting film; its characters
are the richest and most fully formed, and their motives grow deeper and more
nuanced with each viewing. But since that movie Tarantino has largely abandoned
character development and introspection; the people in his more recent movies
often register as props or caricatures, which can make their motivation seem
sketchy. Schultz is presented as a mercenary, yet he agrees to undertake the
likely suicide mission of freeing Broomhilda because she speaks beautiful
German. The supposedly formidable Candie fails to grasp that Broomhilda and
Django know each other despite the fact that they both have the letter R
branded on their faces. Yet Tarantino doesn't seem to care; the whole story is
absurd anyway, so who needs rounded characters?
The only complex character in Django
Unchained turns out to be Stephen, Candie's trusted old slave hand, played
by Samuel L. Jackson. Ironically, Stephen is a classic Uncle Tom—the
stereotype, not the actual character—and whether or not Tarantino understands
the implications of this, Jackson obviously does. Balding and white-haired,
shaking uncontrollably and hobbling around on a cane, Stephen epitomizes the
way blacks were portrayed in the early days of cinema. But appearances are
deceiving, and the revelation of Stephen's true self is the biggest surprise in
an otherwise unsurprising film. The only other actor who acquits himself
admirably here is DiCaprio, who seems to revel in the film's silliness, donning
eyeliner, sipping strange cocktails out of coconut goblets, and growing giddy
over white cake.
When Inglourious Basterds was
released, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote a
scathing Newsweek essay in which he argued that Tarantino, by
creating a film in which Jews exact revenge on Nazis, was equating the victim
with the victimizer. No one should be surprised that the director would
construct another movie on this cracked ethical foundation, but that doesn't
mean Django Unchained has anything important to say about race, or that
anyone should use race to attack or defend it. The real problem with Django
Unchained is not race hatred but Tarantino's predictable and uninspired
treatment of it.
How
“Django” gets slavery wrong Tarantino Unchained, by Jelani Cobb from
The New Yorker,
On
the Big Screen: DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)
Samuel Wilson from Mondo 70: A
Wild World of Cinema, December 2012
In
Defense of Django Adam Serwer from Mother Jones,
World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
Keli
Goff: The Racial Slurs in 'Django' Aren't Racist, But the Racial ... The
Racial Slurs in 'Django' Aren't Racist, But the Racial Violence May Be, by Keli Goff from The Huffington Post,
Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, reviewed by Richard Brody ... The Riddle of Tarantino, by Richard Brody from The New Yorker, December 28, 2012
Django
Unchained Reviewed: Tarantino's Crap Masterpiece : The ... David Denby from The New Yorker,
Press
Play [Steven Boone] Quentin Tarantino's DJANGO UNCHAINED and the
Many Spike Lees,
Unchained
Melody: Two Troublemakin' Bruvas Take on Tarantino's ... Steven Boone and Odie Henderson from Big Media Vandalism,
Quentin
Tarantino, Slave To His Habits: Django Unchained, Reviewed Will Leitch from Deadspin,
Django
Unchained Upends the Western | Village Voice Scott Foundas, December 19, 2012
PopcornReel.com
[Omar P.L. Moore] Django Kinda Sorta On A Short Leash, Via
Tarantino,
Django Unchained: What Kind of Fantasy Is This? Annalee Newitz from io9, December 28, 2013
Critic
After Dark [Noel Vera]
Critic After Dark part 2 [Noel Vera] February 3, 2013
Tarantino's
incoherent three-hour bloodbath - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, December 26, 2012
David Thomson reviews Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained ... Django Unchained Is All Talk With Nothing to Say, by David Thomson from The New Republic, January 5, 2013
Jonathan
Romney on Django Unchained: It's good, then it's bad ... Jonathan
Romney on Django Unchained: It's good, then it's bad. Well, it is Tarantino,
by Jonathan Romney from The Independent,
Sight & Sound [Nick Pinkerton] January 2013
Daily Kos: The Truth About 'Django Unchained' Ryan Brooke
Review: 3 Different Opinions On The Good & The Bad Of Quentin ... The indieWIRE Playlist
The Atlantic Wire [Richard Lawson]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Conservatives
Freak Out About Django Unchained
Aisha Harris from Slate,
Django Unchained: I Laughed, I Was Bored. I Pumped My Fist, I
Felt Nauseated. Dana Stevens from
Slate, December 24, 2012, also seen here:
Slate
[Dana Stevens]
When Blaxploitation Went West: Django Unchained Seems Tame by Comparison Aisha Harris from Slate,
Was There Really “Mandingo Fighting,” Like in Django Unchained? Aisha
Harris from Slate,
Tarantino is the baddest black filmmaker working today Eric Deggans from Slate, December 27, 2012
What
Django Unchained and Lincoln Have in Common: A Woman Problem Allyssa Rosenberg from Slate,
Could
a black director have made “Django”?
David Sirota from Slate,
Why
Samuel L. Jackson’s “Uncle Tom” Is Tarantino’s Best Character Yet Aisha Harris from Slate,
Tarantino flunks American history Kimberly Ellis from Salon, January 13, 2012
Tarantino
drops the N-bomb Mary Elizabeth
Williams from Salon,
Tarantino gives the NRA ammo Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, January 14, 2013
Quentin Tarantino talks to himself Brian Gresko from Salon, January 14, 2013
REVIEW: Tarantino's 'Django Unchained' A Bloated Bloody Affair ... Alison Willmore from Movieline, also seen here: Movieline [Alison Willmore]
Quentin
Tarantino Says Slavery Still Exists Via 'Mass Incarcerations' & The 'War
On Drugs' Frank DiGiacomo from Movieline,
Quentin
Tarantino's 'Django' Klansmen Inspired By John Ford: 'To Say The Least, I
Hate Him' Jen Yamato from
Movieline,
Spike
Lee Criticizes 'Django Unchained' — Antoine Fuqua Defends ... Antoine
What-The-Fuqua? Spike Lee Should Debate Tarantino On 'Django Unchained' by
Frank DiGiacomo from Movieline,
Heart of Dixie | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center Geoffrey O’Brien from Film Comment, January/February
Critical
Dialogue: Django Unchained | Film Comment | Film Society ... Max Nelson from Film Comment,
TheDivaReview.com [The Lady Miz Diva Vélez]
Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained': The Good, the Bad - Alternet Jazmyne Z. Young and Asani Shakur from Alternet
Django Unchained (2012) Jeffrey Overstreet from Patheos
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Morad Moazami]
JamesBowman.net | Django Unchained also seen here: The American Spectator : Django Unchained
Django Unchained Review- The Good, Bad and ... - Ruthless Reviews L. Ron Mexico from Ruthless Reviews
Eye for Film [Anne-Katrin Titze]
KPBS Cinema Junkie [Beth Accomando]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Boxoffice Magazine [James Rocchi]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
The Digital Fix [Gavin Midgley]
Home Theater Info DVD [Douglas MacLean]
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Screen International [Tim Grierson]
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
California Literary [Matthew Newlin]
theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
Afro
Punk [Zeba Blay]
thesubstream.com [Mike Cameron]
Movie Cynics [The Vocabulariast]
Combustible Celluloid Review - Django Unchained (2012), Quentin ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Blackflix.com [Laurence Washington]
Georgia Straight [Mike Usinger]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
The Huffington Post [Mike Ryan]
'Django Unchained': Quentin Tarantino’s Answer to Spielberg’s
'Lincoln' Joe Weiner from The Nation,
Spike
Lee Calls 'Django Unchained' 'Disrespectful' Rolling
Stone,
Quentin Tarantino, Postmodern Racist - Film Forum on mubi.com Mubi Forum, January 2013
Quentin Tarantino on Django Unchained and the Problem with ... Allison Samuels interview from The Daily Beast, December 10, 2012
Quentin Tarantino unchained - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis - City ... Karina Longworth interview from Minneapolis City Pages, December 19, 2012
Tarantino 'Unchained,' Part 1: 'Django' Trilogy? Henry Louis Gates, Jr. from The Root, Pt. 1, December 23, 2012, also seen here: Tarantino 'Unchained,' Part 1
Tarantino
'Unchained,' Part 2: On the N-Word
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. from The Root, Pt. 2,
Tarantino
'Unchained,' Part 3: White Saviors
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. from The Root, Pt. 3,
Tarantino:
“I find the criticism ridiculous”
excerpts from Henry Louis Gates interview with Tarantino at Salon,
Quentin Tarantino: my inspiration for Django Unchained Gavin Edwards interview from The Observer, December 29, 2012
Tarantino, DiCaprio, Foxx Say 'Django Unchained' Plot Was 'Tough' Alex Waterfield and Lauren Effron report on Nightline anchor Cynthia McFadden’s interview from ABC News, January 8, 2013
'I'm
Not Your Slave': Quentin Tarantino Slams Interviewer Christopher Rosen from The Huffington Post,
How
Quentin Tarantino Got Those Crazy Blood Spurts in ... - Vulture Kyle Buchanan interview from The Vulture,
Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Time Out London [Tom Huddleston]
Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]
Quentin
Tarantino defends depiction of slavery in Django Unchained Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, December 7, 2012
Django Unchained wins over black audience despite Spike Lee
criticism Ben Child from The Guardian, January 3, 2013
Django
Unchained: is its portrayal of slavery too flippant? Candace Allen from The Guardian,
Has
Django defused the 'n-bomb'? David
Cox from The Guardian,
Django,
Lincoln and America Adam Mars-Jones
from The Guardian,
Quentin Tarantino not 'wasting time' over Spike Lee The
Telegraph,
Quentin Tarantino in furious rant over Django Unchained violence questions Andrew Hough from The Telegraph, January 11, 2013
The Star-Ledger [Stephen Whitty]
Philadelphia Inquirer [Steven Rea]
KUHNER: Jamie Foxx and the rise of black bigotry Jeffrey T. Kuhner from The Washington Times, December 13, 2012
Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]
Cleveland Plain Dealer [Clint O'Connor]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Marcie Gainer]
Laramie Movie Scope [Robert Roten]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Oregon Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Los Angeles Times [Erin Aubry Kaplan]
'Django' an unsettling experience for many blacks - Los Angeles Times Erin Aubry Kaplan
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
THE
HATEFUL EIGHT B+ 90
USA (168 mi, 70mm version 187
mi) 2015
‘Scope
It’s
less inspired by one Western movie than by Bonanza, The Virginian, High Chaparral,” Tarantino said. “Twice
per season, those shows would have an episode where a bunch of outlaws would
take the lead characters hostage. They would come to the Ponderosa and hold
everybody hostage, or to go Judge Garth’s place — Lee J. Cobb played him — in The Virginian and take hostages.
There would be a guest star like David Carradine, Darren McGavin, Claude Akins,
Robert Culp, Charles Bronson or James Coburn. I don’t like that storyline in a
modern context, but I love it in a Western, where you would pass halfway
through the show to find out if they were good or bad guys, and they all had a
past that was revealed. “I thought, ‘What if I did a movie starring nothing but
those characters? No heroes, no Michael Landons. Just a bunch of nefarious guys
in a room, all telling backstories that may or may not be true. Trap those guys
together in a room with a blizzard outside, give them guns, and see what happens.’”
—Tarantino quote by Mike Fleming Jr. from Deadline, November 10, 2014, "Quentin
Tarantino On Retirement, Grand 70 MM Intl Plans For ‘The Hateful Eight"
Outside of
Pulp
Fiction (1994), this is easily the most fun film in Tarantino’s career, and the reason
is largely the towering performance from Samuel L. Jackson, where this is
something that only he could have pulled off, a perfect mix of intelligence and
outlandish humor, where he’s like an eloquent spokesperson for the times who
literally grabs our attention before he walks us through this movie like our
own personal guide. While he’s only one
of several well-defined characters, curiously he’s not even the man in charge,
as that would be Kurt Russell’s John “The Hangman” Ruth, doing his very best
John Wayne imitation as a notorious rifle-toting bounty hunter who always
brings his wanted outlaws in alive so they can have a proper hanging, which in
the era of the American West is the closest thing to defining justice. Part of the attraction to the film is that it
was released in two versions, one a 187-minute “roadshow” that includes an
opening overture and intermission, shot on 70mm which can only play in selected
theaters equipped with appropriate reel projectors, where this resembles the
glorious spectacle of the golden age of Hollywood, while an alternate digital
cut will be shown in regular theaters without an overture and intermission,
where the film itself is about 6-minutes shorter, using alternate takes of
earlier scenes shot on 70 mm that might look distorted on smaller screens. Of note, this is the first western scored by
Ennio Morricone, the music behind the Sergio Leone westerns, in 40 years, the 6th
collaboration between Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson, while it is the third
film in a row where someone is shot in the testicles. Imagine an entire movie resembling the
extraordinary opening sequence from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009), one of the
most unique examples of protracted storytelling, where the extensive lead-up to
whatever happens next is a film in itself, filled with its own plot twists and
dramatic crescendos, where the audience is drawn into a different time frame,
as patience is a virtue. Tarantino seems
to be saying “Stick with me, and I won’t let you down.” The resolution of these scenes, at least to
some, have always been a disappointment, as a fury of violence always prevails,
where it just becomes a bit too predictable.
But no one can deny the power of Tarantino’s theatrically-inclined,
dramatic construction of a scene, building tension throughout, with peaks and
valleys, where he slowly and patiently builds up to that momentous edge that he
eventually crosses.
Opening on a lone stagecoach led by a six-horse team driving its way
through a snowy blizzard in Wyoming, set sometime after the end of the Civil
War, the nation has not exactly mended its wounds, as a good deal of lingering
resentment hovers over the country like a festering wound, but all that is kept
tightly under the vest as a wicked storm approaches. The mountainous landscapes are put to good
use as the audience gets a whiff of the widescreen Ultra Panavision 70 format, where the last
Cinerama film to be shot in a similar format was KHARTOUM (1966) a half century
ago. But as Tarantino is one of the last
remaining holdouts insisting upon shooting his movies on celluloid, compared to
everything else that we see in theaters today, the look is spectacularly vivid
and crisp. John Ruth is transporting his
prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to Red Rock in order to watch
her hang, while also collecting the $10,000 reward, but he picks up two
stragglers along the way, Samuel L. Jackson as Major Marquis Warren, a
particularly successful black military leader in the Civil War, whose claim to
fame is carrying around with him at all times a genuine letter written by
Abraham Lincoln, while also transporting 3 dead bodies worth an $8000 bounty,
but also Walton Goggins as Sheriff Chris Mannix, the newly appointed sheriff of
Red Rock who once rode with his notoriously racist father‘s Confederate
renegades, developing a reputation as a degenerate killer. The political divide between these two
decorated war veterans on opposite sides increases the racial tensions,
creating immediate antagonism, with John Ruth ready to bust heads if there’s
any trouble, though Mannix warns them both they’ll have a difficult time
collecting their bounties if something happens to him, as the sheriff pays out
the reward money. The worsening weather
forces them to stop at Minnie’s Haberdashery to wait out the storm, though
Minnie and her loyal sidekick Sweet Dave are both mysteriously missing, with
Cowboy Bob (Demián Bichir) supposedly left in charge, along with a motley group
of criminally inclined outcasts sidelined by the raging blizzard outside. Sizing up the situation, including a broken
front door that needs to be hammered shut after each opening, the two bounty
hunters suspect something is up and form a pact protecting their property from
the others, as each one of the guests looks eminently suspicious.
Divided by chapter headings, we are slowly introduced to the twisted
group of unsavory characters trapped inside a single room with no way out,
where their pasts and secret motives are revealed, while their notorious
reputations curiously precede them, as they all get acquainted waiting for the
first one to blink before they make their move.
Spanning around the room, along with the stagecoach driver, O.B.
(James Parks), we meet Tim Roth in a bowler hat as Oswaldo Mobray, who contends he’s
the hangman at Red Rock, Michael Madsen as Joe Cage, an irritant and lowlife,
and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern), an unrepentant racist
idolized by Mannix, but despised by Major Warren, particularly for his gruesome
treatment of black Union soldiers during the war. While John Ruth and Major Warren suspect
there is someone working against them in the room, perhaps more than one
aligned with the prisoner, they maintain their pact of working together as they
don’t know who it is, but taking no chances, they do disarm all the suspects,
creating an uneasy tension that suffocatingly chokes on its own inherent, claustrophobic
cabin fever atmosphere. As prejudices and resentments are revealed, it’s
surprising how these few men coincidentally brought together by a storm have
already heard of all the others and developed opinions about what kind of men
they are, with all manner of trash talking taking place, but none more venomous
than Major Warren’s contempt for General Smithers, which leads to the most
grandiose and extraordinary story of the film, an extended soliloquy by
Jackson, whose performance dominates the film, none more memorable than his
provocative comments and personal insults reserved for the General, taking
great pleasure in cornering the man into a position of weakness and
disadvantage, then slowly tightening the screws, literally stripping away any
pretense of manhood, leaving him disarmed and completely exposed, offering him
a firearm within an arm’s reach, goading the man, literally toying with him
until he has no other alternative but to reach for the gun, only to be shot
down in cold blood, yet presumably deemed self-defense under the circumstances. This theatrical display reveals Tarantino at
his best, as it’s an extremely well-written scene, set up by such antagonistic
character extremes, embellished by the most vulgar and detestable humor
imaginable, yet somehow it’s an exceptional and memorable moment leading into
the intermission, where viewers will have plenty to talk about.
On the other side of the intermission, Tarantino himself indulges in a
little narration, offering unseen clues the audience may have missed, turning
this into a variation on Agatha Christie’s best-selling 1939 novel And Then There Were None, a murderous
chamber drama where ten people have been invited to a remote location by a
mysterious stranger, where each of the guests holds a secret leading to someone
else’s innocent death, and then one-by-one, the guests themselves start
dying. First published under the name Ten Little Niggers, the book went
through a series of title changes, including Ten Little Indians (The
History of 'Ten Little Indians' - ICTMN.com) before settling on the words drawn from a
nursery rhyme. While it’s not nearly as
simplistic as that, the film instead moves in a more circuitous path, where
each of the characters has a major scene, with each one revealing themselves to
be abhorrent and revolting, with Daisy Domergue, the object throughout of
nonstop abuse, outshining all the other men for the dubious honors of the most
vile character of them all, where Major Warren is the closest thing to a
protagonist. As they weave their way to
unraveling the underlying mystery, complete with a flashback sequence with the
delightfully plump Dana Gourrier as Minnie, Zoë Bell as Six-Horse Judy, and
Gene Jones as Sweet Dave, the stage is reset with different implications, yet a
good deal of the film is an appropriate commentary on xenophobia and the racial
divide in America, exposing the roots of the race hatred, and showing how
little progress has been made in the last 150 years, as we are still dealing with
the same visceral anger that has plagued America throughout its contentious
history, perhaps best expressed by the seemingly neverending sentiments from
the Civil War. When Major Warren
suggests, “Let’s slow it down. Let’s
slow it way down,” it allows the audience to reevaluate our own history
but also enjoy the art of storytelling, where Tarantino is simply having a
blast with this film, returning to his own roots, as the one-room structure
certainly resembles his own existential Reservoir
Dogs (1992), which recalls the hopeless futility of Sartre’s No Exit, a portrait of eternal
damnation, where the ultimate realization is “Hell is other people.” While it’s often brutal and excessively
violent, and once more there are grotesque uses of the n-word, this is the one
Tarantino film that seems designed for a theatrical stage, as even the
flashback sequences are set in the same location, so expect to see possible
variations in the future, yet this original casting is sublime, as the fun on
the set cannot be denied, as they are all in complete synch with the director’s
sick humor and tendency for tastelessness, where it’s not lost on the viewer
that the director ironically heralds this spectacular 70mm widescreen “Ultra
Panavision,” and then sets a 3-hour film in the suffocating confines of a
single room. Nonetheless, through a
witty structure of endless dialogue, politics makes strange bedfellows, and the
final alliance in the film is perhaps the strangest of them all, where the
Lincoln letter, in all its ambiguous implications, figures prominently.
Cine-List
- CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle Cubr
The eighth feature by Quentin Tarantino is the first film to be released in Ultra Panavision since the 1960's. Including both an overture and intermission, the roadshow edition of THE HATEFUL EIGHT is the director's homage to great American epics like BEN-HUR and IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. The film is set shortly after the Civil War in the mountains of Wyoming during a blizzard. John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting his prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to Red Rock in order to watch her hang and to collect the $10,000 bounty on her head. Along the way, he rescues two men (Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins) from the elements and eventually they are all forced to stop at Minnie's Haberdashery to wait out the storm. There they meet four strangers, and the eight's dubious pasts and secret motives are revealed in typical Tarantino fashion. EIGHT is Tarantino's most political film to date. Racial tensions and the strained relations post-Civil War between the North and the South are unearthed through intense dialogue and shocking flashbacks. Jackson's role as Northern Major Marquis Warren is the lynchpin that allows these topics to be explored. The cinematography is grandiose and vivid--not a micro fraction of celluloid is wasted and the attention to detail is exquisite. The most striking feature of this film is Ennio Morricone's dynamic score. From the first chime of bells during the overture to the last string hit of the final credits, Morricone takes the viewer on an aural journey that punctuates the stunning visuals on screen. The score is haunting, alluring, and disarming all at once. It wouldn't be a Tarantino film without gratuitous violence, blood, or cussing, and EIGHT is no exception. Tarantino expands upon these familiar controversial aspects of his filmmaking to include some disturbing physical violence against women. Leigh is used as a literal and morbid punchline; she is struck whenever she speaks out of line. Her performance is volatile and she plays the kind of character people love to hate, further complicating the violence directed towards her as she is not a sympathetic character." The second half of the film can be described as a cross between 12 ANGRY MEN and THE THING, juxtaposed with the director's trademark aesthetics. Is this the film that will bring celluloid back from the fringes of modern filmmaking? Probably not, but it does strengthen the cause, much like Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan have recently. THE HATEFUL EIGHT successfully brings back a sense of spectacle in going to the movies. The roadshow version is an impressive achievement that should not be missed.
Review: The Hateful Eight | Quentin Tarantino - Film Comment Steven Mears, January/February 2016
Posters for The Hateful Eight proclaim it “the 8th film by Quentin Tarantino.” This calculation appears to omit Death Proof, his segment of Grindhouse, which is something of a missed opportunity because including it would make the new work Tarantino’s 8½. In a sense, that’s what it is anyway—not because the film, set in post-Civil War Wyoming, is his most dazzling or soul-baring creation, but because it’s the grandest monument to his style and all the indulgence and chutzpah it connotes. If you dig Tarantino, you’ll be in 70mm heaven; if “dig” has no place in your vocabulary, you’re in for a long three hours.
Like the characters on screen, I found my convictions shaken by each new plot development. I thrill to the robust strains of Ennio Morricone’s first original Western score in over three decades (which also samples his themes from The Thing and Exorcist II: The Heretic). I’m in awe of Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson for reviving the Ultra Panavision 70 process used on Ben-Hur in 1959 and defunct since Khartoum in 1966—curiously dispatched in service of what is essentially a filmed play, most of which takes place indoors. I marvel at what is likely the most formidable cast the director has assembled since the Nineties, though some members are distinctly underutilized. And as much as anyone, I enjoy his dialogue, even as it exists strictly to ratchet up tension between bursts of apocalyptic violence.
But the first act (or two chapters, as is Tarantino’s presentational wont) gives way to tedium, as a muttonchopped bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) and his feral quarry (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are induced to share their stagecoach with a fellow fugitive-hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) and a Southerner (Walton Goggins) claiming to be the new sheriff of the town waiting to hang Leigh’s prisoner. It’s as if Tarantino, believing the interrogation prologue to Inglourious Basterds to be the best-written scene of his career, undertook to redraft the sequence at nearly feature length. If nothing else, the first hour of The Hateful Eight concludes the director’s quarter-century experiment in how long characters can jovially threaten one another while waxing baroque before the audience retreats.
Investment picks up considerably when the Hateful Four are compelled to wait out a blizzard at a trading post already occupied by a quartet of dubious characters (played by Demian Bichir and Tarantino alumni Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, and Bruce Dern). Before the first pot of coffee is brewed, it has become clear that intrigue is afoot. The director’s penchant for exploitation puts an ultraviolent spin on a classically genteel Agatha Christie locked-room mystery. No one has to tell Tarantino that his script borrows freely and lovingly from staples like André De Toth’s wintry 1959 classic Day of the Outlaw, though someone might have reminded him that De Toth’s film clocked in at 92 minutes.
Just as Donald Sutherland attributed his lesser character to “the back half” of The Dirty Dozen, not all of the Hateful Eight are created equal. Bichir and Madsen are most underserved by the screenplay; the latter, in particular, is saddled with a one-note gorilla role. Jackson and Justified’s Goggins know their way around an elaborate soliloquy, even if they’ve done it all before and better. The undeniable standout here is Leigh—one eye blackened, dried blood coating her muzzle, the ferocious engine driving the many plots. Tarantino even allows her an improbably lovely musical interlude before the shooting resumes.
Roth’s executioner speaks of frontier justice as “apt as not to be wrong but always thirst-quenching” (literally so in a revolting flashback involving Jackson, which offers a puerile “corrective” to racism typical of the director). After eight and a half films it’s clear this is the director’s philosophy, too. He deserves credit for devising a narrative—his first since 1997’s Jackie Brown—that isn’t explicitly revenge-driven from the outset. But one longs for interstitial moments like when a smitten Robert Forster sheepishly buys a Delfonics album after hearing it played in Jackie Brown’s apartment. Thirsts can be quenched in many other ways.
You’ve Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me: Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight Adam Nayman from Cinema Scope
If we can begin with a parlour game—and on the evidence of The Hateful Eight, our American Psycho laureate Quentin Tarantino is lately beloved of such Funny Games—let’s play Six (not Eight) Degrees of Separation. The score for QT’s al dente spaghetti western was originally written in 1982 by Sergio Leone’s house composer Ennio Morricone for John Carpenter’s The Thing, which was a remake of a 1951 movie directed (in all but name) by Howard Hawks, whose John Wayne-starring westerns—the pinnacle of which, Rio Bravo (1959), was semi-remade by Carpenter as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)—had set the Hollywood standard against which Leone contrasted his nasty, brutish and increasingly distended oaters.
What makes Carpenter’s version of The Thing so fascinating is how it schizophrenically splits the difference between its official source material and the template of the Hawksian western. With its all-male ensemble fending off a deadly interloper from inside a remote facility in the Arctic, it doubles down on Assault by once again evoking the basic siege scenario of Rio Bravo (minus the Angie Dickinson analogue Carpenter had included the first time out), but inverts it: instead of battering against the walls from outside, here the threat hides in plain sight by burrowing within a succession of human hosts. Once again casting his perpetual muse Kurt Russell as a swinging-dick Wayne/Eastwood manqué (following his sneering turn as Snake Plissken in Escape from New York [1981]), Carpenter paid homage to his Old Hollywood godhead Hawks even as he followed his own nihilistic voice by having the besieged defenders tear each other apart (literally) rather than band together. It’s an act of simultaneous veneration and mutilation that turns The Thing—a film that is already richly suggestive of an era’s encroaching social and biological perils—into a commentary on itself.
To circle back to the matter at hand after this very Tarantinian digression: one possible way to approach the pachydermous beast that is The Hateful Eight is as a hybrid tribute to/remake of Carpenter’s The Thing, complete with Kurt Russell doing his Duke act once again in his role as a grizzled bounty hunter. Which, by the logic of assimilation, means that Tarantino’s film contains the same basic DNA as its primary host, as well as the assorted inspirations that that host had imbibed in its turn—not to mention a whole other raft of references, homages and imitations that Tarantino has harvested from scores of other literary and filmic sources, the listing of which could well take three hours and seven minutes, which is how long Tarantino’s film runs (overture and intermission included). And one possible way to look at Tarantino at this point is as the artistic equivalent of Carpenter’s parasite: an unscrupulous shape-shifter who will throw on any disguise that suits his purposes before moving on, leaving the host party hollowed out as he proceeds on his relentless mission of conquest.
Twenty years after Pulp Fiction (1994) won plaudits for its supposed deviance from Hollywood business as usual, Tarantino stands as perhaps the most powerful—and, in a heavily qualified way, the most free—studio-backed filmmaker in Hollywood. He’s the new Spielberg (or at least his lantern-jawed, Gen-X doppelgänger), and ever since his counterfactual Holocaust corrective Inglourious Basterds (2009), he’s made a comparable bid for “seriousness.” If The Hateful Eight is in many ways the exact opposite of the sort of film Steven Spielberg would make, it is, paradoxically, precisely the sort of movie that only a Spielberg-sized titan could ever get made in the first place. The money men behind it clearly trust QT’s track record—which might be foolish, since, leaving the question of the film’s overall quality aside (and perhaps open forever, like an uncauterized wound), this is Tarantino’s most audience-alienating film to date. A line from The Thing springs to mind: “I don’t know what the hell’s in there… but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.”
The Hateful Eight’s three-minute overture (surely it could have been eight, but who’s counting) holds on a slightly abstract, hand-drawn image of (eight) snowy mountain peaks underneath Morricone’s creepy, repeating (count ’em) eight-note piano figure—a defiantly old-school manoeuvre that is clearly intended as an invitation for the initiated and, perhaps, a screw-you to those ignorant of the history of exhibition. The first live-action images are scarcely less languorous: widescreen landscape shots of Wyoming (courtesy of Robert Richardson) cut in a magisterial rhythm by Fred Raskin until settling on a carved stone figure of Jesus on the cross, a lonely marker on the side of the mountain road travelled by Russell’s bounty hunter John Ruth and his captive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) en route to the town of Red Rock, where the latter will be hanged for murder. In their path stands Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), who is looking to hitch a ride on their stagecoach—a transaction that, naturally, requires extensive discussion. When the newly formed trio picks up another straggler—Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), an ex-marauder turned aspiring small-town sheriff—further long, drawn-out negotiations are elicited, to the point that the stagecoach driver, O.B. (James Parks), has to insist that they pick up the pace before the whole party is engulfed by a blizzard.
This is surely a knowing joke on Tarantino’s part: whatever else he may be lacking in, he is certainly not bereft of self-awareness. In Basterds, Tarantino’s verbal over-indulgence was nicely tied to the story’s emphasis on masquerade and linguistic deception; in Django Unchained (2012), the form/content equation was similar but the language was baggier and more florid, perhaps to make up for the comparative lack of compelling narrative complication. The twin revenge plots of Basterds, elegantly paralleled for two-plus hours before converging, for maximum self-reflexive impact, in a cinema on fire, represented Tarantino’s best-ever storytelling, whereas Django’s slow, processional structure felt a bit like goldbricking. For The Hateful Eight, Tarantino adopts the form of a chamber piece: after Ruth and his passengers reach a humble haberdashery on the edge of Red Rock to wait out the storm with a quartet of guests already ensconced there, the film stays in one place for two hours. This leaves the characters with precious little else to do but talk, and, trapped along with them, the viewer is compelled to listen to their chatter to such an extent that the stir-craziness onscreen starts to become contagious.
Said talk is, of course, on the hostile side, as Tarantino has divided his dramatis personae so that they represent a duly contextualized cross-section of 19th-century western types. Jackson’s Warren fought with the Union against the South and made a habit of killing good ol’ boys even after the surrender, which irritates Goggins’ goofy hick and infuriates the physically frail, retired Confederate general (Bruce Dern) who’s plunked down by the fireplace like an old piece of furniture. “Bob the Mexican” (Demián Bichir) is communally shunned (by Warren as well) on account of his south-of-the-border background, while Ruth’s comparatively enlightened racial attitudes are undermined by his vicious treatment of multiple murderess and wanted gang member Daisy, who is first glimpsed sporting a black eye and takes no end of physical (even more than verbal) abuse from her captor during the journey and for most of their stay—an extended Punch-and-Judy routine that feels as if Tarantino designed it as a test of his audience’s delicate modern sensibilities.
I suppose that one of the big questions about The Hateful Eight is whether Tarantino is exploiting his retrograde period setting as an excuse to indulge in more multi-directional political incorrectness than ever before, or if he’s seriously trying to comment on the iniquities of American history—or, in a reading even more attractive for the sympathetically minded critic, he might be projecting a vision of our own regressive present through the lens of the past. A case can be made for all sides, and that strategic ambiguity gives Tarantino licence to draw out and amp up the unpleasantness like never before. As in Django, Tarantino seems to revel in having a costumed cast of movie stars hurl the N-word around willy-nilly, with Jackson once again on hand as a kind of walking get-out-of-jail-free card; Leigh, meanwhile, is so relentlessly tortured and terrorized that viewers of any gender could be forgiven for bailing even before the various plot turns confirm that, in the pitiless, kill-or-be-killed universe being conjured up here, her Daisy is hardly an innocent. And yet when the toothy Brit Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth) suggests reducing the tension by dividing the space into locations representing different areas of the country (i.e., the bar is Philadelphia), the microcosmic implications are immediately resonant, and hardly because they seem to belong to some safely stowed-away past.
On the contrary: The Hateful Eight is a film about what its maker sees as eternal verities of division and disagreement. And if, in the absence of profundity, QT offers up only heaping portions of provocation, it’s also possible that these two items can become one if mashed together hard enough—or else form some sort of flailing, half-ingenious, half-ludicrous monstrosity (some thing). Suffice it to say that Spike Lee might actually explode, John Cassavetes-in-The Fury-style, if he were to watch the last scene of Act One, an extended monologue by Jackson directed at Dern that mobilizes racial and sexual paranoia in a baldly confrontational way. The bullseye of this precisely targeted tactical strike, by the way, lies offscreen, and it’s as big as Tarantino’s fan base. It’s a moment as discomfiting (and brilliantly acted) as Jackson’s Uncle Tom turn in Django, but, seemingly emboldened by that film’s success, Tarantino goes even farther here, to the point that some will have to laugh it off while others will insist that that’s impossible. (Another line from The Thing, for when things really start to go crazy in the snow: “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”)
So this is the other big question of The Hateful Eight: Is Quentin Tarantino fucking kidding us with this thing? This hugely scaled 70mm roadshow presentation that’s mostly close-ups of people sitting indoors? This showboating cavalcade of callousness that actually pauses at one point—long after the nasty talk has been replaced by actual physical violence, but still with plenty of time to go until the final curtain—to introduce a whole new set of characters whose status as slaughter fodder is sickly apparent from the word go? This inventory of appalling actions and notions in which the dramatically legible motivations of the blackguards and brigands in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Jackie Brown (1997) are twisted into misanthropic abstractions? There are no entry points here for the audience; these people (including Michael Madsen, QT’s original, ear-slicing inquisitor, and as such a terrifying presence in Hateful despite his character’s apparent passivity) are all unrelievedly, implacably awful. It’s like Carpenter’s The Thing except here, everyone is already infected, and as such expendable—though their gradual whittling down doesn’t even elicit the nasty satisfaction of seeing them what deserves it get theirs.
If there is an ultimate boogeyperson here, though, it’s Daisy—and I suspect that whereas Warren’s speech at the end of Act One is an example of Tarantino’s mastery of shaggy-dog jokes that bite, the increasing emphasis on Leigh’s (amazing) performance, in which lyrical longeurs (she sings a song like Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo) coexist with a fury barely contained inside the character’s increasingly flayed, stained and disfigured skin, is where Tarantino’s real anger (or is it derangement?) lurks. It’s truly ugly, and it demands explication. And if Tarantino is not a moron—which he almost definitely is not—then it’s curious and crucial to consider why he pins this entire teetering edifice on the (frankly unforgettable) image of a broken but ferocious woman facing down two men who must literally pull together in order to withstand her assault.
The reference points for this final act are endless and probably intentional: at different moments, Leigh-as-Daisy could be Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973) or even poor, scapegoated Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1976), to name two other terrifying, bloody avatars of feminine power. Like Carpenter, Tarantino brings the horror movie into the terrain of the western as a means of re-landscaping genre cinema, but he also sticks closely to The Thing by faithfully reproducing Carpenter’s and-then-there-were-two climax with a white guy and (spoiler, I guess) black guy as the last ones standing (or staggering)—except that he also actually gives us a stand-in for the great, insidious, unknowable threat that the earlier film could only embody as a Lovecraftian FX obscenity.
It’s hard to say if The Hateful Eight would be a better or a lesser film if it deigned to clarify the meaning of this substitution, or of having this unfathomable tableaux (which rhymes with that early shot of Christ) followed by the reading aloud of a letter first referenced in the early stages of the film—originally attributed to Abraham Lincoln—describing the sacrifices, compromises, and promises of America at the end of the Civil War. It’s hard to say if this scene, and the film itself, is more offensive and/or politically astute if that letter (which keeps having its veracity challenged) is authentic—thus rendering the Great Emancipator retrospectively short-sighted in his optimism—or a forgery, which lets Honest Abe off the hook while showing how easily his legacy can be twisted by opportunists. Either way: screw you, Steven Spielberg.
It’s also hard to say if I really truly believe any of the above, or if Tarantino the alien finally operates, like the Thing, by turning critics into his gibbering mirror images, passing on grandiloquence that makes us talk around what we really think. Which, in this case, is that The Hateful Eight may really be sort of terrible. But here’s the thing: I’m also thinking that the only thing harder than enjoying or even respecting this grotesque, disturbing, potently affective and probably commercially unviable endurance test of a movie is dismissing it out of hand. So I defer, one last time, to The Thing, specifically its final lines: “Why don’t we just wait here a while, and see what happens.”
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Tardieu,
Carine
IN
MOM’S HEAD (La Tête de Maman) B+ 92
A film that exists
almost entirely through the interior narrative of a somewhat insolent but
free-spirited 15-year old tomboy Lulu, Chloé Coulloud, who in another movie
might be featured as jailbait, but here obsesses over what her lethargic and
occasionally eccentric mother (Karin Viard) must be thinking, as she almost
never smiles and remains aloof and detached in a permanent state of
depression. Usually this style of film
can be wretchedly overwritten and self-absorbed, but written by the director
and co-writer Michel Leclerc, this is an imaginative spin on a coming of age
story filled with curious fantasy sequences, only it’s not so much about Lulu,
but her mother’s mysterious past which slowly unravels before her eyes, much of
it to Lulu’s utter amazement. What
sparks her interest is a single photograph found hidden in the cellar of her
mother dressed as a hula dancer at an earlier stage in her life when she
obviously appeared much happier, wearing a big smile on her face. This thought plagues Lulu as she can’t stop
imagining what her mother’s life must have been like and that she’s been
carrying around a secret life all these years, much like the revelations
unearthed in THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995). Her own father who is attentive and patient
with his reticent wife remains clueless about what happened before they met,
while her grandmother (Suzy Falk), an ornery, opinionated woman who grows tired
of incessant questions about the past, only adds to the hidden intrigue. Lulu begins to think her mother never really
had a choice in her life, or if she did, it was stolen from her, perhaps by her
own over-controlling mother, leaving her in a state of exasperated
despair.
The film is cleverly
told, leaving much of the backstory untold, beautifully shot by Aurélien
Devaux, carefully balancing the real life adolescent world of a strong-willed
teenager who refuses to be pushed around with an unusually healthy fantasy
world of her own, speaking regularly to the ghost of actress Jane Birken,
perhaps the mother she wishes she had, who sings several of the songs on the
soundtrack, like Marianne Faithfull, many of them 30 or 40 years old featured
in other films, but also a new song that they sing together in a joyous bond of
sisterhood. Lulu’s delirious rendition
of Birken’s giddy song “Di Doo Dah” from 1973 is one of the high points of the
film. But certainly the heart and soul
of the film is Viard’s coming to life through her past, as she delicately
bridges both worlds and appears perfectly natural in both, while duplicate
actors are used to bridge the time gaps for other characters. Lulu, of course, once she sees evidence of
her mother’s smile is busy trying to connect the dots and sew the two worlds
together from both her past and her present.
It’s a heartfelt
attempt filled with dreamlike rhapsodic flights of the imagination oftentimes
substituting for reality, all seamlessly blended together, guided by Lulu’s
inner desires. She connects with her own
young lover, Simon, Arthur Ligerot, a schoolyard fighting partner who bears a
strange resemblance to Michael Cera from JUNO (2007), at the same time
flashback sequences reveal her mother indulging in youthful indiscretions from
her distant past. The music by Éric
Neveux adds a graceful touch of solemnity, especially as the subject matter
slowly grows more complex. This is a
unique way of looking back at one’s life, where we discover how easy it is to
lose track of ourselves, how we evolve into different beings that may have
little relation to who we once were.
While somewhat capricious in nature, this film doesn’t want us to let go
of our romantic inclinations, suggesting through the fierce independence of
Lulu’s character that we’re in a different age today, that the societal needs
of jobs and financial security oftentimes take precedence over our own needs,
where it’s easy to get sidetracked along the way. This unusual film takes a circuitous path,
but eventually it leads us back home.
Festival
of New French Cinema Andrea
Gronvall from The Reader
Uncommonly wise about filial bonds, this offbeat charmer
(2007) follows teenage tomboy Lucille (Chloe Coulloud) as she tries to free her
mother (Karin Viard of Time Out) from a long
depression. Lucille is angry about everything—her name, a boy she fights at
school, even her birthday—but mostly she’s frustrated by her mother’s
hypochondria and backyard trances (cleverly rendered by director Carine Tardieu
as faux home movies). After discovering some keepsakes from the mother’s
happier bohemian days, Lucille decides to reunite mom with her former Romeo,
who’s grown almost as eccentric. To accent Lucille’s naive fantasies,
cinematographer Aurelien Devaux uses framing and low-key lighting to evoke an
illustrated fairy tale. 95 min.
User comments from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England
Carine Tardieu has turned out a gently enigmatic film of the kind that used to be called a 'woman's picture'. The protagonist Lucille, known as Lulu is first seen in a pre-credit sequence fighting in a school playground and looking about ten or twelve whilst a short time later she is seen at the wheel of the family car with her parents as passengers. Half the time she is fairly plain with slightly crooked teeth and at others she is radiant with perfect teeth. Her mother, Karin Viard, is loaded with inertia and permanently depressed and has been so for most of Lulu's life so when Lulu stumbles on a set of photos and a home movie showing a radiant Viard in love - but not with her husband - Lulu decides to track down the lover and bring him back into her mother's life. As another person has noted there are several questions that could use answers but on the whole it's a charming little film very much in the French style.
12th Annual Festival of New
French Cinema
Facets Multi-Media
Fifteen
year-old Lulu (Chloé Coulloud), a combative, precocious tomboy with a wicked
sense of humor and a propensity for temper tantrums, longs to make her mother
Juliette (Karin Viard, Le Rôle de sa vie, True Enough) laugh
again. Juliette suffers from severe depression, spends much of her time
entertaining morbid thoughts about her dead husband and her dead ancestors, and
has a complicated relationship with her daughter in which the roles of child
and adult are often reversed. When Lulu learns of her mother's first love, a
man named Jacques (Kad Merad, Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis) who made her
happy twenty years ago, she sets out to search for him and summons him to her
mother's side, hoping he will work his magic again. Director Tardieu combines
reality with fantasy sequences (where Jane Birkin appears as herself and as
Lulu's imaginary substitute mother), adolescent angst with a decidedly adult
feel, and dark humor with moments of poignancy and emotional candor in a film
about adolescence that is in a whole different ballpark than most. Directed by
User comments from imdb Author: Nicholas Rhodes from Ile-de-France / Paris Region, France
A young 15 year old girl seeks to find out why her mother is so sullen and eventually discovers via an old photo and ciné film that since a failed love of her youth, she has never been the same. The young lady manages to find the mother's ex boyfriend, who is a vet in a zoo, and subtly arranges for the two to meet. Of course the ex boyfriend has aged somewhat and lost the central part of his hair, nevertheless she recognizes him though he does not recognize her. Parallel to this, they mother discovers that she is seriously ill. The story is quite original, though implausible. The lady's relationship with her husband ( who is the father of her child ) is not clear and not studied in enough depth. We don't learn why she is not happy with him, indeed whether she is really unhappy with him or just indifferent. The young lady also has a peculiar relationship with the actress Jane Birkin who serves as a model and spiritual guide for her and does actually appear in the film but there is some conjecture as to whether she is really there or a mere figment of the young lady's imagination. The relationship between the mother and her husband, when the latter discovers that she has met up again with her first love is unclear and ill defined. He does not seem to react at all and this is not plausible. The mother's illness intervenes and becomes important towards the end of the film. The ex boyfriend decides it is time for him to leave her and pursue his life. What becomes of the mother we don't know. Basically, the ending is left hanging in the air and is a disappointment and there is a distinct impression that the director was at loss how to terminate her film, even though the whole affair had started out on a good and original idea. Worth watching then for the performances, some of the humour is distinctly dubious and scatological, something probably designed for the French market, but don't expect a coherent and nicely sealed ending.
User
comments from imdb Author: incitatus-org from
La Tête de Maman Carine Tardieu ::
European-Films.net
Boyd Van Hoeij
A tomboy daughter looks for her suffering mother’s former
lover in order to get a smile back on her face in Carine Tardieu’s La tête
de maman (In Mom’s Head). Clearly about an adolescent girl but not only
aimed at girls or even adolescents, the film seduces with a surprisingly dense
narrative and a decidedly French take on the role of extramarital affairs and
everyone’s undeniable right to happiness. Despite some moments of magical
realism and its occasionally child-like vision of the world, La tête de
maman comes off as a more than grown-up debut feature for Tardieu and
offers another showcase for the talents of Karin Viard as the mother.
The film’s strong opening sequence introduces 15-year-old
Lucille (Chloé Coulloud), who explains she only wants to be called Lulu or --
even better – be left alone an not called anything at all. A cute classmate
(Arthur Ligerot) rises to the occasion and promptly finds himself on the
schoolyard floor with a nose bleed and Lulu all over him, punching him wherever
she can. When a schoolmaster finally pulls her off, the boy calls out with
self-satisfied smile: "Lucille!" The girl then returns home and
explains in voice-over what she thinks is happening in her depressed mother’s
head; Juliette (Viard, Le couperet / The Ax)
has been obsessed with her dead fire fighter father whose body was never found,
and with all the other dead relatives stretching back for centuries.
These introductory minutes immediately paint a picture of
Lulu as a combative and curious kid who tries to understand the world around
her with whatever limited means she has available. Though Tardieu, who co-wrote
the film with screenwriter Michel Leclerc, indulges in some richly detailed
fantasy sequences -- for example showing all the dead relatives in period garb
in a long row that ends with Lulu and her mother – the kernel of the narrative
is more real than many films about adolescents. This is not a rose-coloured
version of the world in which minor teenage issues the size of pimples are
ironed out during a couple of montage pieces set to easily digestible pop
music.
There are moments Lulu wishes her mother was dead, though
as soon as she discovers that "Juju" knew happiness before her birth
with Jacques (Alexandre Fogelmann in flashbacks, Kad Merad in the here and
now), a man who is not her supportive and caring father (Pascal Elbé), she
decides she must find that man and see if he can still work his magic with her
mother twenty years later.
The semi-autobiographical film is anything if not a product
of a liberal upbringing. Parents and children smoke pot, swear frequently,
drink alcohol, walk around naked, have sex and illegally drive cars -- all
without repercussions. Though conservative audiences might frown at all this
behaviour as one might do at the weird behaviour of primates in a zoo, Lulu’s
insistence on bringing her mother together with a man that is not her father
does make sense in the context of the film.
Tardieu makes it perfectly clear that what drives Lulu is
not a wish to destruct her parents’ marriage but simply to do what is the best
thing for her ill mother. A very short scene in which father and daughter share
a beer in a bar is really all the explanation that is needed, while careful
plotting in the latter half of the film finds the perfect resolution and offers
a strong sense of closure. (The reason for the break-up between Jacques and
Juliette has a facile explanation that is all but glossed over, but from Lulu’s
point of view this makes sense – this is not what interests her.)
Coulloud is fine but lacks that spark that might one day
make her a star, while Merad, Elbé and Jane Birkin (as herself and Lulu’s
imaginary substitute mother) offer fine supporting turns. It is Viard, however,
who attracts attention with her layered performance as the ill mother who once
knew happiness and might find it again… over a shared passion for animal
droppings.
Tariq, Bassam
and Omar Mullick
THESE BIRDS
WALK A- 93
This film is an eye opening and transcendent experience,
reminiscent of Kiarostami’s magnificent film LIFE, AND NOTHING MORE…(1992),
part of his Kokar Earthquake Trilogy that was shot in the ruins of a deadly
earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people.
What attracted first time filmmaker Bassam Tariq and longtime
photographer Omar Mullick to Pakistan was the benevolent work of Abdus Sattar
Edhi, now in his mid 80’s, considered one of the great humanitarians of the
world who is often mentioned when speaking of laudable candidates for the Nobel
Prize. In 1951, with 5000 rupees (about
$81 dollars), he formed the Bilqis Edhi Foundation, a nonprofit social-welfare program named
after his wife, dedicated to serving Pakistan's abandoned and abused women and
children, mostly devoted to helping runaway youths, where today the foundation
runs over 300 centers. Edhi discovered
that many Pakistani women were killing their babies at birth, often because
they were born outside marriage, where one newborn child was stoned to death
outside a mosque on the orders of religious leaders. So he placed a little cradle outside every
Edhi centre along with a sign that reads:
“Do not commit another sin: leave
your baby in our care.” Edhi has so far
saved 35,000 babies and found families for approximately half of them. Regarded as a guardian of the poor, to this
day he owns two pairs of clothes, has never taken a salary from his
organization, and lives in a small apartment over an overcrowded
What we see are hordes of young children, some beaten, neglected
or outright abandoned, all mostly under 12, with a large group of
half-starved babies that have been left on their doorstep, where Edhi himself
sits on the floor and bathes each and every one of them, where every week in
Karachi the Edhi center feeds over 10,000 people, rarely turning anyone away, providing a safety
net for the country with an extensive network of orphanages, women's shelters,
welfare assistance and hospitals.
Early on we hear the voice of twenty-year old Asad, with no knowledge of
his own parents, whose dire situation living on the streets was so desperate
that he was ready to take his own life, but he saw a “Help Wanted” sign when
passing by the Edhi center and decided to work just for a few days caring for
others. Several years later, he’s been
able to move beyond his original trauma by splitting his time between
retrieving the dead bodies piled up by ethnic fighting, street crime, and gang
warfare, and returning the runaways to their families, by now claiming he’s seen it all, murders
on the street, suicides, and horrible accidents. But lost children have become his teachers,
where learning from their circumstances has helped distance him from his own
pain, becoming one of the empathetic faces of the institution as he’s able to
identify with each child. Far from being
an exclusively harrowing experience, however, the filmmakers do an excellent
job of mixing raw footage with often poetic cinematography by Mullick, and a
simply awe-inspiring electronic, violin-centered musical score by Todd
Reynolds, which adds a touch of experimental films, where an exposé on the
human condition becomes artfully presented, often illuminating the overriding
feeling of loneliness with solitary images that have a painterly feel. This juxtaposition of momentary beauty is
interspersed throughout with Asad’s steam-of-conscious observations, offering a
contrast to the rough edges of the story.
Most of the subsequent footage focuses on a few of the older kids assigned to the Karachi home, as the center is overrun by kids and there’s little recreational activity for them to do, where the children are fed, with medical care provided, but they’re not comfortable with the idea of calling this place their home, as many remember their families, where most of the children feel abandoned, longing to return home, often seen praying for this salvation. One of the more agitated kids is Omar, who couldn’t be any more than 10, but he’s often seen bullying others or showing a surprising degree of aggression, using in-your-face profanity, where he brags how his parents beat him (wearing the scars on his face), but he refused to shed more than a single tear. When picking on others doesn’t work, as there are bigger and older kids at the center who intervene, he’s often left alone, seen crying afterwards, literally overcome by his own misery. While the Edhi centers can protect these kids from the harsh reality of the outside world, many continue to have suicide tendencies or believe God has abandoned them as well. One of the most heartbreaking moments is witnessing Asad returning one of these kids back to his family, where the boy is shivering in fright and in tears at the thought of having to be returned to the family that continuously beat him, where the family is not happy about his return either, uttering “I’d have been happier if you’d brought me his corpse,” where as impossible as it seems, home life may actually cause greater grief and sorrow than the solitary isolation of the shelter. Here it appears there are 20 or 30 people to a one-roomed house in an overpopulated slum, obviously too many mouths to feed, where the boy running away was no accident, but something he was driven to do by an uncaring and hostile family, which, when confronted with Asad’s allegations of beatings and abuse, quickly denies before the cameras that they ever laid a hand on the boy.
Asad’s final delivery is Omar, who lives deep into Taliban territory, offering a uniquely human and sympathetic face never before associated with that of “the enemy,” where the circuitous journey into the heart of darkness includes an elusive race by Omar disappearing into a massive crowd at the Mazar shrine, which he insists on visiting, eluding authorities to be able to pray next to a shrine before they continue their long and arduous journey through the night and into the next morning before arriving at one of the most desolate places on the planet, where there are no houses or standing structures, only the flattened, bombed-out ruins of a destroyed village, likely from a drone attack or a long forgotten battle scene, where one instantly mourns for any signs of humanity forced to live in these ghastly conditions. Omar points out his home, where there is no water, gas, electricity, or even a roof, just half destroyed, ramble shack huts where his family suggests he’s actually safer and better off in the shelter than living here, acknowledging they have many more children who remain under the protection of other Edhi shelters, where the family has no intention of looking for them. It’s only here that one gets the fuller picture of what these kids are running away from, where as painful as it is to admit, life in the overcrowded Edhi shelters may actually bring these children closer to God’s grace, where they are fed and clothed and protected from the appalling conditions of utter destruction, famine, and brutal poverty. Deeply moving and void of any pretense, these are graphic depictions of a life unimaginable just about anyplace else in the world today, evidence of a kind of prehistoric dawn of man, even worse than the devastating, war ravaged rubble of GERMANY YEAR ZERO (1948), more reminiscent of Hiroshima, as everything is flattened, where no buildings survive. Out of the calamitous ruins of destruction new life forms may thrive, where one can only hope and pray that one of them is human. After driving in a car all night and much of the day just to find this place, it’s nearly unfathomable to imagine how Omar and his siblings are actually making the dangerous trek back across the country on foot to find their way back into the protection of the Ebhi shelters so many miles and miles away, where they may as well be lone survivors of the apocalypse, but as the film suggests, they must learn to walk before they can fly.
New Yorker Richard
Brody (capsule review)
Beginning
with a look at a living saint—the octogenarian Abdul Sattar Edhi, whose
foundation provides a refuge for runaways and abandoned children in Karachi,
Pakistan—the documentary filmmakers Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq turn their
attention to the young residents of Edhi’s group home as well as to Asad, a
once desperate orphan who has remade his life as a driver for the organization
and functions as the chidren’s unofficial advocate. They certainly need one;
the boys whom Mullick and Tariq follow most closely, Omar and Rafiullah, have
grown up with terrifying violence at home. The smart and unsentimental Omar, a
tough customer who is also a sensitive and vulnerable friend, displays scars
from cuts inflicted by his father. The quiet Rafiullah, who cries on his way
home in fear of beatings, is greeted by members of his extended family with the
wish that his dead body had shown up instead, and Asad negotiates with them to
spare him from punishment. The filmmakers capture extraordinary adventure on
the wing, as when they enter Taliban territory to bring Omar home; along the
way, the boy visits a shrine against Asad’s wishes, resulting in one of the
most exciting and daringly filmed chase scenes in the recent cinema. In Urdu.
User Reviews from imdb Author: JustCuriosity from United States
These Birds Walk was very well-received at
Film Comment Eric
Hynes
The subjects of Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s exquisite
documentary may not be able to fly, but they’re hardly just walking. Street
kids who’ve been swept into an orphanage in
Long-take, Lord of the Flies–like sequences following the kids within the Edhi center—a sanctuary founded by aging humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi—alternate with scenes of former street refugee Asad, whose job as an ambulance driver consists of returning runaways and transporting the dead. The filmmakers never underscore this irony, yet it haunts everyone from Asad, who’s offered higher commissions for dead bodies than live ones, to boys who’d rather die than return to an abusive household, to impoverished families unable to feed their children.
Such callousness is refuted by Asad’s battle-scarred empathy, old man Edhi’s endurance, and the poetry of the film itself, which finds beauty not in poverty but in glimpses and gestures that transcend it. “What’s up with your running?” Asad asks the silent Omar, but no explanation is necessary.
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Jennie Kermode]
There are lost children in every country, no matter how advanced it thinks itself; children who are beaten, neglected or outright abandoned. Children who run away. The only thing that varies is the level of resources that strangers can gather to bring to their aid. Abdus Sattar Edhi has dedicated his life to helping children like this. He is now at the end of his life, sitting on the floor washing babies, quietly taking joy in their smiles. The children's home that he founded will go on without him. He will be remembered by thousands.
Inside the children's home, we meet some of the kids. There are a
lot of them. The place is full of constant movement and noise, its few staff
struggling to keep up. Many of the kids miss their homes and families, many are
lonely, but it is also a place of joy, full of the energy generated by having
so many people to play with. The kids squabble in the corridors, declare
eternal friendship, swat each other on the head during prayers. They discuss
religion, politics and their undying love for
One kid stands out. This is Omar. He's a bully, but he's also plainly very fond of some of his companions. He won't back down from anything, including fights with much bigger kids over petty things like the loss of a sandal. His determination to live on his own terms is a bold act of defiance in a county battered by poverty and war. But he misses home, misses sleeping curled up with his brothers and sisters. As kids are returned to their families, he keeps getting bumped to the end of the list, because his home is in Taliban country.
Taking the kids home, where possible, is Asad. He's an ambulance driver, an orphan himself, once suicidal, now finding a reason to live through helping others. Not that it's an easy job. Petrol is scarce and he has to fit in enough paid trips - helping sick people and transporting corpses - to make ends meet. Can't he just carry a kid and a corpse at the same time? he is asked, and he has to try and explain why this would be a problem.
Sometimes when Asad takes the kids home, their families are delighted to see them. Sometimes they tell him it would be better if the kids were dead. With resources at the home stretched, he has to make difficult decisions.
Simple, observational, this documentary lets is subjects speak for themselves. Through its focus on children it presents a much wider-reaching portrait of a society trying to hold onto its values in the face of chaos and economic hardship. Amid the squalor, there are scenes of great beauty. Some of the snatches of conversation we hear are like found art, poetic in what they capture and convey. From fragments, the filmmakers have assembled something remarkable. Catch it if you can.
Slant
Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]
The opening of Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq's These Birds Walk pulsates with youthful energy, as the camera follows a child running across a field and into the ocean, where he splashes around freely, seemingly without a care in the world. These images encapsulate the kind of freedom implied by the film's title, and it's one that, for reasons that have to do with the chaotic environment the boy is in, will mostly be denied to him and the rest of the Pakistanis featured in the film—except in stray moments that are given expressive emphasis under the filmmakers' strikingly cinematic sensibility.
At first, These Birds Walk seems as if it will be a
tribute to the laudable humanitarian efforts of the Edhi Foundation, a
nonprofit social-welfare program, founded by celebrated philanthropist Abdul
Sattar Edhi, devoted to helping runaway youths in
Mullick and Tariq use a wide range of cinematic techniques to convey the tenuous environment in which their subjects find themselves: the uneasy sense of oasis the runaways feel at one of the Edhi Foundation's clinics and those occasional moments where youths such as Omar lash out, puncturing the establishment's haven-like feeling. Many of the scenes within the clinic are captured in long takes and fixed-camera shots, but with certain images beginning out of focus before slowly becoming clearer—a clever way to suggest undertones of doom-laden tension amid the outward calm. Within such a context, one can't help but notice those isolated moments of explosive energy that erupt within the foundation, perhaps most memorably in an extended handheld tracking shot that follows Omar going up and down a hallway picking fights with other runaways as he struggles to find a missing slipper.
But far from being just shallow gambits to make the film seem spuriously "cinematic," such visual tropes serve to highlight a sense of rootless dislocation among runaways like Omar, one borne out of a profound lack of a sense of "home." The final 10 minutes of These Birds Walk crystallizes this feeling, as Asad drives Omar back to a dangerous and desolate Taliban-controlled village that doesn't appear to even have any houses to speak of. And when Asad discovers that Omar's family members didn't necessarily mind that he ran away in the first place (because anywhere is safer than his particular village), one begins to get a fuller sense of the kind of deeply human emotional complexities that underpin even the most well-meaning of philanthropic efforts in such a troubled milieu. Edhi may admit to feeling "closer to God" when he helps children, but the truth on the ground, as ever, is painfully complicated—though that, of course, hardly means that the fight isn't worth keeping up in the first place.
NewCity Chicago
Ray Pride
These Birds Walk /
The Dissolve Scott Tobias
Review:
THESE BIRDS WALK Delivers Emotional ... - Twitch Kathie Smith
These Birds
Walk - The Playlist|Indiewire Diana
Drumm from The Playlist
The
House Next Door [Gabrielle Lipton]
Village Voice John Oursler
Nonfics
[Christopher Campbell]
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
These Birds Walk Tyler Foster from DVD Talk
Roboapocalypse
[Joshua Handler]
Film Journal Intl
David Noh
The
Film Reel [Will Brownridge]
Krell
Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Sound
On Sight Simon Opitz
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
THESE
BIRDS WALK Facets Multi Media
Chicago Reader
Ben Sachs
'These Birds Walk' takes an intimate look
at the lives of Pakistan's runaway children Noreen Nasir interview from PBS,
BOMBLOG: These Birds Walk
by Anya Jaremko-Greenwold Anya Jaremko-Greenwold interviews the
director from Bomblog, November 4, 2013
Interview with Omar Mullick Nick Dawson interview from Filmmaker magazine,
These
Birds Walk: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
SXSW
Review: 'These Birds Walk' | Variety
Peter Debruge
The
good man of Karachi: In Pakistan, and especially in Karachi ... Tim McGirk extensive article from The Independent,
The
day I met Abdul Sattar Edhi, a living saint - Telegraph Peter Oborne extensive article from The Telegraph,
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Los Angeles Times
Betsy Sharkey
RogerEbert.com Omer M. Mozaffar
New York Times
Nicolas Rapold
Abdul Sattar Edhi -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tarkovsky,
Andrei
DVDBeaver Director’s
Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/masterlist.htm
Andrei Tarkovsky is considered one of the most significant filmmakers of the 20th century and the most notable Soviet film-maker of the modern era. Although his appeal often extends to scholars and academia, his popularity, fueled by his commitment to cinema expressed as poetry and art, has risen extensively in the past few years allowing his small oeuvre of only 7 feature films to be exposed to a much wider audience. Flexing from dense, personal memories (Mirror) to episodic articulations on art's relevant survival (Andrei Rublev) - Tarkovsky's films mark themselves with grand depth of construction, a bold visual expression of thematic time and space and an often inaccessible transcendent spirituality of faith and the unconquerable human spirit. His keen interpretation of the responsibility of the artist strike uncompromisingly bold and unique themes within the ambiguous nature of his narrative structure. The profound magnitude of the 'metaphysical' and inter-personal interpretations resonate most prominently upon re-visitation of his complex films.
Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online | Open Culture
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the
finest Soviet director of the post-War period. But his influence extended well
beyond the
Shot between 1962 and 1986, Tarkovsky’s seven feature films often grapple with metaphysical and spiritual themes, using a distinctive cinematic style. Long takes, slow pacing and metaphorical imagery – they all figure into the archetypical Tarkovsky film.
Tarkovsky, Andrei Art and Culture (link lost)
Tarkovsky's poetic films, interwoven with loose narrative threads and strikingly sublime images, demand a lot from the viewer, but return much more. In his signature piece "Andrei Rublev" (1969), a three-hour exposition on the fifteenth-century painter, Tarkovsky takes the viewer through series of scenes that jump one to the next with no seeming coherence or linear structure. Shots of everyday life in the countryside are interspliced with recurring symbolic imagery such as a jug of milk shattering on the floor, lovers levitating in ecstasy, and characters struck by an invisible hand; each image transitions to the next until the gaze is gradually arrested by the whole of this meticulously crafted cinematic experience. Each scene, quietly lensed, not obtrusively explained, leaves a stark impression; the kinetic thought process can then synthesize these into its own meanings. Tarkovsky's belief in the visual is thus clear: "The image is an impression of the truth, a glimpse of the truth permitted to us in our blindness."
Noted as the most famous Soviet filmmaker since Sergei Eisenstein, Tarkovsky was heavily influenced by the classical education provided by his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, a well-known poet. To a certain extent, Tarkovsky was able to evade Marxist restrictions on art and his government's emphasis on Social Realism. (He defected to the West just prior to his death from cancer.) His films have religious subtexts, as in his debut, "Ivan's Childhood" (1962), and often focus on spiritual battles. Tarkovsky's artistic motivation also seems to have been spiritually borne: "The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by miracle." Although Tarkovksy's dream-like cinema compiles shards of inner lucidity that initially seem incoherent, the overall effect of his films is both haunting and elegiac when consumed as a subconscious whole.
Andrei
Tarkovsky - Director - Films as Director:, Publications G.C. Macnab from Film Reference
"Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow?" Thus Ingmar Bergman, in his autobiography The Magic Lantern , bows down before the Russian director while also hinting at what makes Tarkovsky's work so awkward to critics: it can verge on the inscrutable. Too opaque to yield concrete meaning, it offers itself as sacral art, demanding a rapt, and even religious, response from its audiences. His 1979 film Stalker, for instance, features a place called the Zone where all "desires come true." Rather like the land of Oz, this mysterious outland promises to reveal the secret of things to any intrepid travellers who prospect it to its core. But there are no cowardly lions or tin men to ease the journey, no yellow brick road to follow. The Zone is an austere realm—typical Tarkovsky territory—of bleak landscapes populated by characters laden with a peculiarly Russian gloom.
Watching Tarkovsky's films, his "sculptures in time," spectators can find themselves on a journey every bit as arduous as that undertaken by the pilgrims who headed toward the Zone. The son of a poet, the director treated film as a medium in which he could express himself in the first person. His six years at the Moscow State Film School, during which he received a thorough grounding in film technique from such Soviet luminaries as Mikhail Romm, did nothing to disabuse him of the notion that cinema was a "high art." He felt he could tap the same vein of poetic intimacy that his father sought in lyric verse. The necessary intrusion of camera crews and actors, and the logistical problems of exhibition and distribution, worried him not a jot. Although all his films are self-reflexive, he does not draw attention to the camera for radical Brechtian reasons. He is not trying to subvert bourgeois narrative codes. He is not even assaulting the tenets of Socialist Realism, a doctrine he found every bit as unappealing as Western mass culture aimed at the "consumer" (although his ex-partner, Konchalovsky, ended up in Hollywood directing Sylvester Stallone vehicles). What his constant use of tracking shots, slow motion, and never-ending pans—indeed his entire visual rhetoric—seems to emphasize is that he is moulding the images. He is a virtuoso, and he wants us to be aware of the fact.
Tarkovsky's first two feature length projects, Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev, mark a curious collision between the personal and the political. On one level, the former is a propaganda piece, telling yet again the great Soviet story of the defeat of the Nazi scourge during World War II. But Tarkovsky destabilizes the film with dream sequences. The "big questions" that are ostensibly being addressed turn out to be peripheral: the director is more concerned with the poetic rekindling of childhood than with a triumphal narrative of Russian resilience. Similarly, Rublev , an epic three-hour biography of a medieval icon painter, is, in spite of the specificity and grandeur of its locations, a rigorous account of the role of the artist in society, as applicable to the 1960s as to the 1300s.
As if to display his versatility, Tarkovsky skipped genres, moving from the distant past to the distant future for his third feature, Solaris , a rather ponderous sci-fi movie taken from a novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. The harsh, Kubrick-like spaceship interiors suit the director far less than his customary wet and muddy landscapes. The musings on love and immortality engaged in by the cosmonauts as they hover above a sea of liquid gas—for a filmmaker with such a flair for images, Tarkovsky resorts to portentous dialogue with surprising frequency—weigh the story down. Still, Solaris works on a more intimate level when it explores a man's attempts to come to terms with the death of his wife.
Mirror is quintessential Tarkovsky; ravishing to look at, full of classical music, and so narratively dense as to be almost unfathomable on a first viewing. There are only 200 or so shots in it, and it is a film that fell into shape, almost by accident, late in the editing stage, but it is Tarkovsky's richest and most resonant work. The narrative flits between the present and the past, between the "adult" mentality of the narrator and the memory of his childhood. Moreover, the wide open spaces of the countryside where Tarkovsky spent his earliest years are contrasted with the constricting rooms of city apartments. Poems by the director's father, Arseny, appear on the soundtrack. Complementing these, Tarkovsky is at his most elemental in this film: the wind rustling the trees, fire, and water are constant motifs.
Tarkovsky went to enormous lengths to recreate the landscape of his infancy, planting buckwheat a year before shooting started, and constructing, from memory and old photographs, the bungalow where he had lived. There is a humour and warmth in Mirror sometimes absent in his work as a whole. (This may have something to do with the fact that it is his only film to have a woman protagonist. Margarita Terekova, who ranks with Anatoli Solonitzine as Tarkovsky's favourite actor, plays both the narrator's wife and his mother.) Generally, Tarkovsky terrain is desolate, ravaged by war, or threatened with catastrophe, as in The Sacrifice. In Mirror , however, the forests and rivers and fields are nurturing and colourful. Accused by the authorities of being narratively obscure, Tarkovsky testified that he received many letters from viewers who had seen their own childhoods miraculously crystallize as they watched the film.
Nostalgia was his first film in exile after his defection to the West. Shot in Italy, it showed the Russian pining for his homeland. He wouldn't live to see it again.
The Sacrifice is a typically saturnine final testament from a filmmaker overly aware of his own reputation. Tarkovsky believed that "modern mass culture, aimed at the consumer . . . is crippling people's souls." A self-conscious exercise in spiritual plumbing, his last work before his premature death from cancer in 1987 is weighed down by its own gravitas. Shot by Sven Nykvist, who used natural light for the interior scenes, and full of intricate pans, the film has the formal beauty that one has come to associate with the director. But its endless and wordy metaphysical surmising stops it from tugging at memory and emotion in the way of the best of his work, most notably Mirror.
Andrei Tarkovsky tribute site
Nostalghia.com - An Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site
[ Nostalghia.com | The Links ]
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky Facts - Biography
Andrei Tarkovsky - New World Encyclopedia biography
Andrei Tarkovsky, Russian Film Director, Introduction ... Ian Mackean from Literature Study Online
Andrei Tarkovsky Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain director profile from Senses of Cinema, May 2002
Andrei Tarkovsky | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos ... Sandra Brennan from All Movie
Tarkovsky at Film-North - Tripod profile
BrothersJudd.com - Review of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei ... web links
Full text of "Andrei Tarkovsky - Sculpting In Time"
ANDREI TARKOVSKY'S CINEMA OF SPIRITUALITY Gregory and Maria Pearse at Cinema Seekers
Tarkovsky Quartet - ECM Records | Catalogue
Tarkovsky Quartet - Anja Lechner
Arseny Tarkovsky - Poetry &
Biography of the Famous poet ... poems
by the director’s father
Arseny Tarkovsky : The Poetry Foundation poems by the director’s father
The Wasteland:
Andrei Tarkovsky Maryam Ghodrati
Andrei
Tarkovsky - Strictly Film School
film reviews from Acquarello
The Genius of Andrei
Tarkovsky - Talking Pictures Alan
Pavelin
CINEPHILIA
and FILMMAKING • Andrei Tarkovsky — the ... Cinephilia & Beyond (Undated)
‘The
Exile and Death of Andrei Tarkovsky’: A Priceless Contribution to the Body of
Work on One of Cinema’s Greatest Poets
Cinephilia & Beyond (Undated)
‘Sacrifices
of Andrei Tarkovsky’: A Precious Insight into the Life of the Man to Whom We
Owe So Damn Much Cinephilia &
Beyond (Undated)
Masterclass with Andrei Tarkovsky: Cinema Is a Mosaic Made of Time Andrei Tarkovsky held a speech at a special event called ‘Thieves of Cinema’ (Ladri di cinema) on September 9, 1982, from Cinephilia & Beyond (Undated)
Andrei Tarkovsky: The essential documentaries on Russian Master Cinephilia & Beyond (Undated)
A documentary about Sven Nykvist’s lighting process on ‘The Sacrifice’ excerpts from the book In Reverence of Light by Sven Nykvist and Bengt Forslund, from Cinephilia & Beyond (Undated)
The Cinematic Influence of Andrei Tarkovsky Ayse Cihanyandi from The Culture Trip (Undated)
Kurosawa/Tarkovsky Timeline notes on Kurosawa’s first meeting with Andrei Tarkovsky in Moscow in July 1971
Akira Kurosawa on watching 'Solaris' with Andrei Tarkovsky ... TARKOVSKY AND SOLARIS BY AKIRA KUROSAWA, from The Asahi Shinbun Newspaper, May 13, 1977, also seen here: Kurosawa on the set of Solaris
ANDREI TARKOVSKY, DIRECTOR AND SOVIET EMIGRE ... The New York Times obituary, December 30, 1986
PDF: Time and the Film Aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky Donato Totaro from Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Spring 1992 (pdf)
Andrei Tarkovsky Master of the Cinematic Image, by Stuart C. Hancock from the Mars Hill Review, Winter/Spring 1996
Andrei Rublev,
Stalker & Social Realism - The Light ... Bircan Unver, Part 1 from the Light Millennium, Spring 1998
Andrei Rublev,
Stalker & Social Realism - The Light ... Bircan Unver, Part 2 from the Light Millennium, Spring 1998
Kurosawa
on Tarkovsky excerpts from Akira
Kurosawa’s book A Dream is a Genius, 1999
Donato Totaro, 'Art
For All 'Time' - Film-Philosophy
February 2000
Sculpting in Time (1987) Darren Hughes from Long Pauses, February 7,
2000
Solaris: Exploring the
Frontier of the Subconscious • Senses ...
Acquarello from Senses of Cinema,
March 5, 2000
Zooming
through Space Chris Fujiwara
from Hermenaut, July 22, 2000
Central Europe Review - Tarkovsky: The Long Take That Kills Benjamin Halligan from Central Europe Review, November 13, 2000
Zarathustra's gift in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice - Screening ... Gino Moliterno from Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
Ivan's Childhood •
Senses of Cinema Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh from Senses
of Cinema, July 18, 2001
The Passion According to Andrei: Andrei Rublev • Senses of ... Anna Dzenis from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
Nostalghia • Senses of
Cinema Acquarello from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
The Sacrifice • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
"Tarkovsky's Trinity...," by D. P. Armstrong. Tarkovsky’s Trinity, and the Room which Fulfils one’s Innermost Desire, lecture by D.P Armstrong at the University of Essex, July 19, 2001 (pdf)
"Non-diegetic sound and aural imagery in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky," by Rob Bridgett from Sound Design of the Moving Image, February 1, 2002
Stalker: DVD Review – Offscreen Donato Totaro, September 2002
THE BIRTH OF ART AND GENIUS IN ANDREI ... THE BIRTH OF ART AND GENIUS IN ANDREI TARKOVSKY’S ANDREI RUBLYOV, 178 page doctoral thesis by Nataliya B. Brant, 2003 (pdf)
"Mirror, Mirror," by Chris Fujiwara a Tarkovsky retrospective review from the Boston Phoenix, February 20 – 27, 2003
A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky's Theory of Time ... A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of Time-Pressure, Part 1: Tarkovsky’s Theory of time-pressure as ‘cine-physics, by David George Menard from Offscreen, August 2003
A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky's Theory of Time ... A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of Time-Pressure, Part 2: A Textual Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, by David George Menard from Offscreen, August 2003
Various Artists: Andrei Tarkovsky - Another Kind Of Language and/OAR, February 2004
Spurious: Tarkovsky Lars Iyer, February 2, 2004
Realism,
Dream, and 'Strangeness' in Andrei Tarkovsky Thorsten Botz-Bornstein from Film-Philosophy,
November 2004
VERTIGO | The Andrei Tarkovsky Companion - Close-Up Gareth Evans from Vertigo magazine, Summer 2007
Andrei
Tarkovsky - 'a mystic and a fighter' - Telegraph Peter Culshaw from The Telegraph, December 1, 2007
Andrei Tarkovsky: Film and Painting – Creative Review Mark Sinclair from Creative Review, March 13, 2008
Nathan Dunne, ed.
(2008) Tarkovsky - Film-Philosophy
Brian Faucette’s review of Nathan Dunne’s book Tarkovsky (464 pages) from Film-Philosophy,
September 2008 (pdf)
Tarkovsky
and boredom Julian Richards, January
22, 2009
Andrei
Tarkovsky: Truth Endorsed by Life • Senses of Cinema Pedro Blas Gonzalez from Senses of Cinema,
Febuary 2009, republished in P.U.L.S.E. World, October 27, 2014, here: Andrei
Tarkovsky: Truth Endorsed by Life | P.U.L.S.E
Existence is Song: The
Dream-like Aesthetics of Duration in ... Existence is Song: The Dream-like Aesthetics
of Duration in Mirror, by Michael Bloom from Offscreen, July
2009
Cinemapathic Science Fiction Mark Cole from The Internet Review of Science
Fiction, July 2009
Stalking Tarkovsky at the
Sheffield Doc/Fest David Cox
from The Guardian,
Films Admired by
Tarkovsky Kenji from Mubi,
Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei
Tarkovsky: Horrormeister? by Adam Groves, February 3, 2010
Tarkovsky’s Legacy Kenji from Mubi, March 16, 2010
Nature as “Comfort
Zone” in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky ... Donato Totaro from Offscreen, December 2010
The Spiritual Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky – Offscreen Prakash Kona from Offscreen, December 2010
The Natural and Modern
Worlds in Solaris – Offscreen David
Hanley from Offscreen, January 2011, again republished from P.U.L.S.E. World, October 27, 2014,
here: The
Natural and Modern Worlds in Solaris | P.U.L.S.E
Offscreen.com :: Temporal Defamiliarization and Mise-en-Scène in ... Temporal Defamiliarization and Mise-en-Scène in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, by Zoë Heyn-Jones from Offscreen, January 31, 2011, also seen at P.U.L.S.E. World, October 27, 2014: Temporal Defamiliarization and Mise-en-Scène in ... - PULSE
Tarkovsky’s Solaris Revisited Dan Colman includes A.O. Scott video review (2:56) of Solaris from Open Culture, February 2, 2011
Andrei
Tarkovsky 1932 - 1986 | Jack L. film reviews March 13, 2011
Andrei Tarkovsky - Top 10 Persecuted Artists - TIME Alexandra Silva from Time magazine, April 5, 2011
Tarkovsky:
An Introduction - Next Projection
Matthew Blevins, May 8, 2011
Andrei Tarkovsky's Long, Confusing, Wonderful Films Hit ... John Hendel from The Atlantic, May 24, 2011
The
Films Of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Retrospective | The Playlist July 6, 2011
Tarkovsky and the World of Documentary – Offscreen Donato Totaro from Offscreen, August 2011
Andrei Tarkovsky
Achieved Sublimity Through 'The Sacrifice ... Jose Solis from Pop Matters, September 1,
2011
House Museum of Tarkovsky Family to
be Reconstructed in ... House Museum of Tarkovsky Family to be
Reconstructed in Moscow, September 13, 2011
MIRROR
BY MIRROR, Homage to Andrei Tarkovsky ...
Sergei Sviatchenko Homage to
Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivanovo Art Museum, Russia, 2012
Connection between
Different Realities through Video ...
Analysis of the “Berton’s Report” film sequence from “Solaris”
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), by
Elena El Earthbourne from Offscreen,
March 2012, republished in P.U.L.S.E.
World, October 27, 2014: Connection
between Different Realities through Video ...
The
Detours of Art by Tom McCormack - Moving Image Source book review of Geoff Dyer's Zona, a
retelling of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 arthouse sci-fi classic Stalker, March
8, 2012
David Thomson
Reviews Geoff Dyer's "Zona" | New Republic March 12, 2012
“Andrei Tarkovsky's Poetic Cinema” by Matt Turner - Big Other April 3, 2012
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 Mike Springer from Open Culture, June 7, 2012
Sculpting
in Time: Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky - Los Angeles Review of ... Sculpting
in Time: Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky, by Jacob Mikanowski from The LA Review of Books, July 12, 2012
Arsenal:
Retrospective Andrei Tarkovsky
August 2012
Tarkovsky’s
Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema Colin Marshall from Open Culture, January 2, 2013, also posted at No Film School, January 3, 2013: Andrei
Tarkovsky on Directing: 'Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema'
Best
Movie Ever: Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Mirror'
Landon Palmer and Scott Beggs
discussion from Film School Rejects, April 15, 2013
BAM
blog: The Way We Are/Were: Andrei Tarkovsky's ... The Way
We Are/Were: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, by Keith Uhlich from BAM Blog,
June 6, 2013
Reflected
glory: the spirit of Tarkovsky lives on at the Mirror ... Anton Sazonov from The Calvert Journal, June 17, 2013
In
the Zone: An Excursion into Andrei Tarkovsky's Film ... Matthew Pridham from Weird Fiction Review, July 24, 2013
Compositions
of crisis: Sound and silence in the films of ... Compositions
of Crisis: Sound and Silence in the Films of Bergman and Tarkovsky, 140
page Master’s thesis by Phoebe Pua,
August 2013 (pdf)
RIP:
Vadim Yusov, Tarkovsky and the Cinematographer Donato Totaro from Offscreen, August 2013
The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky Colin Marshall from Open Culture, August 1, 2013
Andrei
Tarkovsky's Polaroids | AnOther
Tish Wrigley from AnOther,
August 20, 2013
A Poet in Cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Filmmaking and Life Colin Marshall from Open Culture, August 15, 2013
Time Within
Time - The Complete Andrei Tarkovsky ... Tarkovsky retrospective from the Harvard Film
Archive, January 17 – February 2, 2014
Studies
in Cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia'
Jeremy Carr from Studies in Cinema, February 2014, also seen here: Andrei
Tarkovsky’s ‘Nostalghia’
Elemental Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 1 (Introduction) Adam Scovell from Celluloid Wicker Man, February 13, 2014, also seen here: Andrei Tarkovsky | Celluloid Wicker Man
My
Journey Through Film - The Complete Works of Andrei ... Benjamin Ramkissoon from We Do All Things
Cinematic, February 16, 2014
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 2 (Chaos) Adam Scovell from Celluloid Wicker Man, March
6, 2014
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 3 (Natural and
Cyclic Rejuvenation) Adam Scovell
from Celluloid Wicker Man, March 20, 2014
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 4
(Zarathustra). Adam Scovell from
Celluloid Wicker Man, April 3, 2014
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 5 (ANS
Synthesiser + Conclusions). Adam
Scovell from Celluloid Wicker Man, March 31, 2014
Studying Andrei Tarkovsky's Use of Water & Fire in His Films ... V. Renée from No Film School, May 18, 2014
Cinema as Art: The Philosophy of Andrei Tarkovsky V. Renée from No Film School, July 11, 2014
Andrei Tarkovsky Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972) Colin Marshall from Open Culture, August 11, 2014
The
Top 10 Favorite Films of Legendary Director Andrei ... V. Renée from No Film School, August 12, 2014
The Poetic Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky | P.U.L.S.E Sam Perduta from P.U.L.S.E. World, November 11, 2014, also seen at Taste of Cinema here: Filmmaker Retrospective: The Poetic Cinema of Andrei ...
Andrei
Tarkovsky, Solaris and Stalker The
making of two inner-space odysseys, by Stephen Dalton from Sight
and Sound, December 2014
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Breakdown of the Director’s Filmmaking Jonathan Crow from Open Culture, June 30, 2015
Free
Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably ... Colin Marshall from Open Culture, November 12, 2015
The
Tarkovsky legacy: Andrei Tarkovsky and his arthouse ... Nick James from BFI Sight and Sound, December 1, 2015
Stalker – Andrei
Tarkovsky | P.U.L.S.E Boban Savković from P.U.L.S.E. World, October 13, 2014
On
Elements of Traditionalist Symbolism in Tarkovsky ... Vadim
Mikhailin from P.U.L.S.E. World,
October 22, 2014
Ivan's
Childhood: The Tree of Life | P.U.L.S.E
Donato Totaro from P.U.L.S.E.
World, October 27, 2014
Auteur
in Space: Enter the World of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris Micah van Hove from No Film School, January
16, 2015
The
Conscience Of Andrei Tarkovsky - Jamuura Blog Yash Thakur, June 6, 2015
Full
Cinematic Retrospective of Director Andrei Tarkovsky ... New York Museum of Arts and Design, June 8,
2015, including program description: Andrei
Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time | The Museum of Arts ...
'Andrei
Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time' at the Museum of Arts ... The
Wild magazine, June 11, 2015
Watch:
Who Is Andrei Tarkovsky? | Press Play - Indiewire Tyler Knudsen, June 26, 2015
Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Phony” Film “With Only Pretensions to Truth” Colin Marshall from P.U.L.S.E. World, July 15, 2015, also seen at Open Culture here: Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey a ...
“Auteur
in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Transcends Science
Fiction Colin Marshall from Open Culture, August 14, 2015
Among the Tarkovsky
Fanatics at an Underground ... - Vice
Ben Mauk from Vice, August 18,
2015
Andrei
Tarkovsky: Cinematic Genius - The Culturium - Paula Marvelly from The Culturium, September 25, 2015
10
great films that inspired Andrei Tarkovsky | BFI Patrick Gamble from BFI Sight and Sound, October 27, 2015
The
Tarkovsky legacy: Andrei Tarkovsky and his arthouse impact - BFI Nick James from Sight and Sound, November 2015
The Philosophy of Andrei Tarkovsky
Films - moviepilot.com Andres
Salazar, February 9, 2016
PROJECTIONS: Andrei Tarkovsky's metaphysical dream zone January 11, 2016 – February 22, 2016, also seen here: Cygnnet Publishing — Main menu
Where
to begin with Andrei Tarkovsky | BFI
Carmen Gray from Sight and Sound,
February 22, 2016
Vlad's Top 5
Russian Movies - Queen Mob's Tea House
Vlad Savich, March 22, 2016
“Roadside
Picnic”: The Insignificance Of Man | Quintus Curtius Quintus Curtius, April 15, 2016
Yamada interviews Tarkovsky Yamada Kazuo interview from The Japanese Weekly Sunday Mainichi,
September 15, 1963
‘The
Exile and Death of Andrei Tarkovsky’: A Priceless Contribution to the Body of
Work on One of Cinema’s Greatest Poets
Maria Ghugunova interview from To
the Screen, December 12, 1966.
‘Sacrifices
of Andrei Tarkovsky’: A Precious Insight into the Life of the Man to Whom We
Owe So Damn Much Aleksandr Lipkov
interview on February 1, 1967
Diary
Of A Screenwriter: Andrei Tarkovsky: Dialogue on ... Naum Abramov interview with Andrei Tarkovsky
while working on Solaris, 1970
Andrei Tarkovsky
on Filmmaking | Filmslie.com brief
excerpt from 1983 interview
Kurosawa
remembers Tarkovsky Mayuzumi Tetsuro
interviews Akira Kurosawa on the death of Tarkovsky from The Asahi Shimbun Newspaper, April 15, 1987
ANDREI TARKOVSKY:
PROFOUND, MAJESTIC AND MYSTERIOUS: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAYLA ALEXANDER GARRETT Jaap Mees interview with Layla Alexander
Garrett, an interpreter and personal assistant on Tarkovsky’s last film, from
Talking Pictures
Part 1 Tarkovsky on Art, from YouTube (
Part 2 (
Andrei Tarkovsky
Pictures And Photos | Getty Images
TARKOVSKY
Andrei - Magnum Photos
Andrei
Tarkovsky (1932 - 1986) - Find A Grave Memorial
Watch
the films directed by Andrei Tarkovsky on Fandor
Andrei Tarkovsky -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE
KILLERS (Ubiytsy)
This is Tarkovsky’s first student film while he was studying at the VGIK
(Russian State Institute of Cinema).
UBIYTSY (Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Gordon, 1956) Dennis Grunes
Andrei Tarkovsky was a 24-year-old film student when he co-wrote and co-directed, along with fellow student Aleksandr Gordon, this gripping, suspenseful, philosophical version of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 “The Killers,” a short story that consists almost entirely of dialogue—dialogue so craftily repetitious and, given the deadly situation in which it arises, piercingly comical that one wonders about Hemingway’s influence on the postwar tragicomedies of Beckett and Ionesco. Regardless, Tarkovsky’s film seems less absurdist than the story, which is perhaps the finest thing that Hemingway wrote; it is more attuned to the story’s sense of imprisonment, people’s solemn incapacity to escape the confines of dead-ended lives. Tarkovsky directed the long first scene in the diner and the brief concluding one there; the scene in between, in Ole Andreson’s threadbare hotel room, was directed by Gordon. In this trapped middle, Andreson is lying in bed, his face up against a wall; his back is to the camera as the door closes on him. Nick Adams, his friend, had come to warn Ole that two hit men are looking for him; but Ole is tired of running. He will wait for the strangers to execute his fate. The room he is in is indeed one to die in.
In the closing scene Nick and George, the counter person, talk. Nick has just returned from warning Ole. “I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick announces. George encourages him to do just that; and George’s tone of voice, his depleted spirit, suggests that he once, and often, encouraged himself to do the same. But he is still stuck in the same place; and his example helps us to realize, shatteringly, that Nick isn’t going anywhere either.
For Tarkovsky, one must wait for death to “leave” Soviet Russia.
User Reviews from imbd Author: Jack Gattanella (filmflamjack@aol.com) from Teaneck. New Jersey, USA
Although I did like the 1946 adaptation of the Killers, I wasn't
sure how a Russian, let alone someone who is usually much more into the visual
prowess of things like Andrei Tarkovsky, would tackle Ernest Hemingway's brief,
pulpy story of men on a mission and a man in hiding from those men. Turns out
it's one of the best short films I've seen from a soon-to-be world renown
European auteur, because of it's emphasis on the simplicity of suspense, of
human action in desperate circumstances and how it's filmed with a mix of the
noir style and with Tarkovsky's dependence on figures in curiously exciting
compositions. He isn't alone on the film, however, as the middle scene at the
apartment was directed by friend Alexander Gordon, with Tarkovsky directing the
bigger chunks at the diner, and another guy Marika Beiku co-directing overall.
Since the apartment scene is so short though, and accounts for just three
shots, one being most elaborate as it goes in and out, tight and wide, on the
morose Swede in hiding and his friend at the diner filling him in on what
happened, it's mostly Tarkovsky's game here.
Part of the skill, and curiosity, in how tense the long first scene at the
diner is that music is completely absent, with the only tone coming from
Tarkovsky himself as a whistling customer. Meanwhile, Tarkovsky uses
Hemingway's dialog in a very realistic manner, even when he goes deliberate
angles, like when George goes into the back with the sandwiches and we see his
feet in the same tilted frame as an empty can on the floor, or with the usage
of the mirror on the wall. There's also the suddenness of seeing a machine gun
that strikes things up in the room, and just the general attitude of Al and
Max, the hit men, as they keep calling George "bright boy" in a way
that reminds me of the curious double-talk in a self-consciously bad-ass movie
like Pulp Fiction (not to mention the near casual usage of the 'N' bomb). While
it ends sort of on a screeching halt, the sense of ambiguity as to the fate of
the Swede as well as everyone else in the diner who hid the secret is
worthwhile for the material, as it's perfectly anti-climactic. It's not
entirely a simple experiment, as it's too polished for that, but I couldn't see
how it could be made any longer either. It's perfectly paced and acted nearly
as well, and it's a fitting pre-cursor to the un-prolific but remarkable career
of one of
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 Mike Springer from Open Culture, June 7, 2012
Tarkovsky was fortunate to enter the VGIK when he did. As he arrived at the school in 1954 (after first spending a year at the Institute of Eastern Studies and another year on a geological expedition in Siberia) the Soviet Union was entering a period of liberalization known as the “Krushchev Thaw.” Joseph Stalin had died in 1953, and the new Communist Party First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the dead dictator and instituted a series of reforms. As a result the Soviet film industry was entering a boom period, and there was a huge influx of previously banned foreign movies, books and other cultural works to draw inspiration from. One of those newly accessible works was the 1927 Ernest Hemingway short story, “The Killers.”
Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Hemingway’s story (see above) was a project for Mikhail Romm’s directing class. Romm was a famous figure in Soviet cinema. There were some 500 applicants for his directing program at the VGIK in 1954, but only 15 were admitted, including Tarkovsky. In The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie describe the environment in Romm’s class:
Romm’s most important lesson was that it is, in fact, impossible to teach someone to become a director. Tarkovsky’s fellow students–his first wife [Irma Rausch] and his friend, Alexander Gordon–remember that Romm, unlike most other VGIK master teachers, encouraged his students to think for themselves, to develop their individual talents, and even to criticize his work. Tarkovsky flourished in this unconstrained environment, so unusual for the normally stodgy and conservative VGIK.
Tarkovsky worked with a pair of co-directors on The Killers, but by all accounts he was the dominant creative force. There are three scenes in the movie. Scenes one and three, which take place in a diner, were directed by Tarkovsky. Scene two, set in a boarding house, was directed by Gordon. Ostensibly there was another co-director, Marika Beiku, working with Tarkovsky on the diner scenes, but according to Gordon “Andrei was definitely in charge.” In a 1990 essay, Gordon writes:
The story of how we shot Hemingway’s The Killers is a simple one. In the spring Romm told us what we would have to do–shoot only indoors, use just a small group of actors and base the story on some dramatic event. It was Tarkovsky’s idea to produce The Killers. The parts were to be played by fellow students–Nick Adams by Yuli Fait, Ole Andreson the former boxer, of course, by Vasily Shukshin. The murderers were Valentin Vinogradov, a directing student, and Boris Novikov, an acting student. I played the cafe owner.
The filmmakers scavenged various props from the homes of friends and family, collecting bottles with foreign labels for the cafe scenes. The script follows Hemingway’s story very closely. While two short transitional passages are omitted, the film otherwise matches the text almost word-for-word. In the story, two wise-cracking gangsters, Al and Max, show up in a small-town eating house and briefly take several people (including Hemingway’s recurring protagonist Nick Adams) hostage as they set up a trap to ambush a regular customer named Ole Andreson. One notable departure from the source material occurs in a scene were the owner George, played by Gordon, nervously goes to the kitchen to make sandwiches for a customer while the gangsters keep their fingers on the triggers. In the story, Hemingway’s description is matter-of-fact:
Inside the kitchen he saw Al, his derby cap tipped back, sitting on a stool beside the wicket with the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun resting on the ledge. Nick and the cook were back to back in the corner, a towel tied in each of their mouths. George had cooked the sandwich, wrapped it up in oiled paper, put it in a bag, brought it in, and the man had paid for it and gone out.
In Tarkovsky’s hands the scene becomes a cinematic set piece of heightened suspense, as the customer waiting at the counter (played by Tarkovsky himself) whistles a popular American tune, “Lullaby of Birdland,” while the nervous cafe owner makes his sandwiches. Our point of view shifts from that of George, who glances around the kitchen to see what is going on, to that of Nick, who lies on the floor unable to see much of anything. “Tarkovsky was serious about his work,” writes Gordon, “but jolly at the same time. He gave the camera students, Alvarez and Rybin, plenty of time to do the lighting well. He created long pauses, generated lots of tension in those pauses, and demanded that the actors be natural.”
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
The Killers Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver
THERE
WILL BE NO LEAVE TODAY
This is Tarkovsky’s second student film while he was studying at the
VGIK.
User reviews from imdb Author: rael from Russian Federation
I never much liked the poor visual style of the most soviet films
I've seen. But this one caught my attention, for that it's very stylishly done.
The short film tells a story of a little soviet town where during roadworks a
stockpile of WWII bombshells was discovered buried under the ground. The town
gets evacuated & the army men have to remove the discovery accurately so
that it doesn't blow away the buildings nearby. Tarkovsky even threw in some
subplots. One being a man who was in the army during WWII and offered his help.
The other - a surgeon, operating a wounded person in the evacuated town's
hospital.
The film is fast paced and very well done. It holds an atmosphere of tension,
makes the viewer fear that the shells will explode any second. Scenes are
cleverly composed and memorable with first time appearances by famous Russian
actors Leonid Kuravlyov and Stas Liubshin. The film's title comes from
Kuravlyov character's line: "Yes, bro, seems like there will be no leave
today". Probably the best short I've ever seen.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 Mike Springer from Open Culture, June 7, 2012
Tarkovsky and Gordon again collaborated on There Will Be No Leave Today, which was a joint venture between the VGIK and Soviet Central Television. “The film was no more than a propaganda film, intended to be aired on television on the anniversary day of the World War II victory over the Germans,” said Gordon in a 2003 interview. “At the time, there was only one TV station and it would often screen propaganda material on the greatnesses of the USSR. This particular film was broadcast on TV for at least three consecutive years. But this did not make the film particularly famous, because you could see films like that on TV all day, at the time.”
There Will Be No Leave Today is based on a true story about an incident in a small town where a cache of unexploded shells, left over from the German occupation, was discovered and–after some drama–removed. The production was far more ambitious than that of The Killers, involving a combination of professional and amateur actors, hundreds of extras, and various shooting locations. It was filmed in Kursk over a period of three months, and took another three months to edit. Gordon provided more details:
With respect to the contribution done by the two directors–I and Andrei–I believe that Andrei contributed the majority. We wrote the script together right at the start. There was an additional scriptwriter, who was subsequently replaced by another group of scriptwriters. Collaboration was very good during this first stage. During the second stage, Andrei finished up the script, with the scenes in the hospital and the story of the volunteer who detonates the bomb–these ideas were Andrei’s. It was a jovial atmosphere, we discussed the scenes in the evening. The main storyline was created in the beginning, when we wrote the script, and no great changes were made to it. It was very easy work.
Despite the scope of the story, and occasional comparisons to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear, it’s clear that neither Gordon nor Tarkovsky took the film very seriously. It was simply a learning exercise. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that Tarkovsky, who would later struggle bitterly with Soviet bureaucrats over the artistic integrity of his work, would submit so readily to making a propaganda film. “VGIK proposed that we make a practice film intended for TV audiences, a propaganda piece on the victory of the USSR over the Germans,” said Gordon, “and we just chose an easy, uncomplicated script. We did not set out to do a masterpiece. Our focus was on learning the elementaries of filmmaking, through making a film that was relatively uncomplicated and also easy for the people to consume. Andrei was happy with this. He had no problems with this approach.”
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
THE
STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN
1960's The Steamroller and the Violin
was Andrei Tarkovsky's thesis film at the
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 Mike Springer from Open Culture, June 7, 2012
Watch the full film here.
Tarkovsky’s first work as sole director, The Steamroller and the Violin, is an artistically ambitious film, one that in many ways foreshadows what was later to come. As Robert Bird writes in Andrei Tarkowski: Elements of Cinema:
When the door opens in the first shot of Steamroller and Violin one senses the curtain going up on Andrei Tarkovsky’s career in cinema. Out of this door will proceed an entire line of characters, from the medieval icon-painter Andrei Rublëv to the post-apocalyptic visionaries Domenico and Alexander. It will open onto native landscapes and alien words, onto scenes of medieval desolation and post-historical apocalypse, and onto the innermost recesses of conscience. Yet, for the moment, the open door reveals only a chubby little schoolboy named Sasha with a violin case and music folder, who awkwardly and tentatively emerges into the familiar, if hostile courtyard of a Stalin-era block of flats.
The young director expressed his plan for The Steamroller and the Violin in an interview with a polish journalist, later translated into English by Trond S. Trondsen and Jan Bielawski at Nostalghia.com:
Although it’s dangerous to admit–because one doesn’t know whether the film will be successful–the intent is to make a poetic film. We are basing practically everything on mood, on atmosphere. In my film there has to be a dramaturgy of image, not of literature.
The project was Tarkovsky’s “diploma film,” a requirement for graduation. He wrote the script with fellow student Andrei Konchalovsky over a period of more than six months. It tells the story of a friendship between a sensitive little boy, who is bullied by other children and stifled by his music teacher, and a man who operates a steamroller at a road construction site near the child’s home. The boy needs a father figure. The man is emotionally troubled by his wartime experiences and finds solace in work. He resists the flirtations of women. When he sees a group of children bullying the boy on his way to a violin lesson, he comes to the child’s aid and they become friends. “Those two people, so different in every respect,” said Tarkovsky, “complement and need one another.”
The film marks the beginning of Tarkovsky’s cinematic obsession with metaphysics. According to Trondsen and Bielawski, “VGIK archive documents reveal that the director’s intention with The Steamroller and the Violin was to chart the attempts at contact between two very different worlds, that of art and labor, or, as he referred to it as, ‘the spiritual and the material.'” The inner world of the boy is suggested in prismatic effects of light sparkling through water and glass and images split into multiples. The worker’s world, by contrast, is concrete and earth.
When Tarkovsky finished his film, not everyone at Mosfilm, the government agency that funded the project, liked what they saw. “Surprisingly,” writes Bird, “it was Tarkovsky’s subtle innovation in this seemingly harmless short film that inaugurated the adversarial tone that subsequently came to dominate his relationship with the Soviet cinema authorities. Unlikely as it seems, Steamroller and Violin was hounded from pillar to post by vigilant aesthetic watchdogs and was lucky to have been released at all.” As part of the process of earning his degree, Tarkovsky had to defend his film during a meeting of the artistic council of the Fourth Creative Unit of Mosfilm on January 6, 1961. The criticisms were varied, according to Bird, but much of it came down to resentment over the portrayal of a socially elite rich boy in contrast to a poor worker. Tarkovsky’s response to his critics was captured by a stenographer:
I don’t understand how the idea arose that we see here a rich little violinist and a poor worker. I don’t understand this, and I probably never will be able to in my entire life. If it is based on the fact that everything is rooted in the contrast in the interrelations between the boy and the worker, then the point here is the contrast between art and labor, because these are different things and only at the stage of communism will man find it possible to be spiritually and physically organic. But this is a problem of the future and I will not allow this to be confused. This is what the picture is dedicated to.
Despite the backlash at Mosfilm, the authorities at the VGIK were impressed. Tarkovsky graduated with high marks, and over time the film has acquired the respect and appreciation its maker desired. “The Steamroller and the Violin,” write Trondsen and Bielawski, “must be regarded as an integral part of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, as it is indeed ‘Tarkovskian’ in every sense of the word.”
NOTE: All three student films will now be included in our
popular collection of Free Tarkovsky Films
Online.
PopMatters Jocelyn Szczepaniak
-Gillece
I was 18 years old when I stumbled into a double bill of La Jetée and The Mirror. Up until that point, my knowledge of surrealism and metaphor in the cinema was largely culled from Terry Gilliam and Fantastic Planet. I had no idea what poetry could be created with a camera.
Needless to say, I was blown away by my introduction to the directors Chris Marker (La Jetée) and, most importantly, the famed Russian surrealist Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror). Both directors deployed such mysterious floating narratives -- every time I thought I knew exactly what was going on, the metaphors twisted and pulled their narrative into new oceans of meaning.
These magnificent creations were film at its most intangible. I learned that evening that the most concrete, life- reflecting form of art is not far from the most abstract, ineffable means of storytelling. From the most realistic comes the most surrealistic. The abstract image may be confusing, but even if we know nothing else, we know it is not reality, and thus we have a grounding point. Our perspective remains uncluttered and clear. The more realistic image, on the other hand, that possesses some element of the unknown is much more disorienting. A painting by Magritte -- where normal components make up a bizarre whole (a train, for example, hurtling not out of a tunnel but out of a domestic fireplace) -- upsets our perspective because the distinction between the real and the surreal are blurred.
This confusion of the real and the surreal was what I felt at the end of The Mirror. I felt as if I might drown in this utterly different method of storytelling, but I didn't want to come up for air. I still don't.
Tarkovsky's thesis film, The Steamroller and the Violin, made in 1960, is now being distributed on VHS and DVD by Facets Multimedia. Made when Tarkovsky was only 28 years old, the film is an accomplished work by a burgeoning genius. The narrative could be construed by those hungry for detailed plotlines as weak and simplistic, but Tarkovsky's signature use of water and mirrors as metaphor for self-reflection and the beauty in the everyday, and his reliance on moments of quiet rather than dialogue to tell his story, are in full, glorious effect.
The Steamroller and the Violin is, really, a children's film, a popular genre under the Soviet regime. Detailing the unusual relationship between Sasha (Igor Fomchenko), a seven year old boy harassed by his peers for playing the violin, and Sergey (Vladimir Zamansky), an adult steamroller operator, The Steamroller and the Violin is a moving but peculiarly distancing film. Although the bond central to the narrative is as sweet as a Peter Rabbit book, Tarkovsky's hints of alienation, determinism, and irony transform the film into a meaningful, unsentimental account of childhood and the memories that color it. More than merely a children's film, The Steamroller and the Violin feels like the memory of a story heard years before, now influenced by adult stimuli like romance films and war. It's a fable for adults, told with the quiet modesty of a children's story.
The storyline is not what is so amazing about the film, although it includes some delightful, subtly ironic play. Sergey and Sasha meet, share experiences and talents, and, eventually, lose each other. It is an obvious pattern, but one that is usually used in romance films. Tarkovsky gently calls attention to the parallels between the friendship and an adult romance (after Sasha has seen Sergey for the last time, he dreams of running up to the steamroller and driving into the distance with him; they may as well be on a white horse, riding into the sunset), and thus makes what could be a tearfully melodramatic and overly sugary story into a dreamily, slightly humorous commentary on childhood relationships and memories. And just as objects may take on intensely sentimental value in a relationship between lovers, objects take on great importance for Sasha, representing a new way of understanding one's physical world, one that Sergey and Sasha discover together.
Tarkovsky's focus on objects, however, shows that, in this film, the process of digesting visual information is just as important as storyline. Sasha, at one point, looks in a store window and sees the street reflected in broken mirrors and puddles on the ground. This sequence is the most mystical, poetic, and beautiful in the film; it brings to mind filmmakers like Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera) as well as the later accomplishments of Tarkovsky himself. As Sasha looks, the pendulum-like camera movement, paired with the mirrors' kaleidoscopic effects, turns daily images like a flock of pigeons, apples spilled on the ground, and balloons in mid-flight into a whirling panoply of visual music. The audience is held as captive as Sasha as Tarkovsky allows us to pause and just look at the surreal -- and the beautiful -- in the everyday. The effect is, in a way, disorienting, but most importantly, wondrous; Tarkovsky, in effect, makes his audience into enraptured children.
Later, Sasha plays a private concert for Sergey as they stand in a condemned building dappled with late afternoon light. Watery reflections play on the walls, creating a visual accompaniment to the soothing, mournful music Sasha plays. The image is nothing short of hallucinatory and transcendent, and feels as ethereal as a half-familiar childhood memory. It is as though the audience were Sasha, years later, remembering this moment as a hazy, fading silhouette of the past. That is the brilliance of this quiet little film; before you know it, you're caught up in the glow of memory. Tarkovsky leads us like children through the hallways of his poetics, and we cannot help but follow his wanderings, taking time to gaze along the way.
Perhaps the most wonderful aspect of The Steamroller and the Violin is the exciting feeling of a genius on the brink of realizing his full potential. Water imagery abounds, as it does in later Tarkovsky films, here serving as metaphors for personal reflection and memory. The almost reverential silences, also signature Tarkovsky devices, crop up constantly in The Steamroller and the Violin; often, meaning is conveyed through glances rather than words. Truly, a genius on his way to being discovered lies within this sweet film. Finding him present in every corner of every frame is a joy, a triumph, and a celebration of the tremendous talent he would eventually become.
The Steamroller and the Violin - TCM.com James Steffen from Turner Classic Movies
KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
DVD Talk Review Matt Langdon
DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
IVAN’S
CHILDHOOD (Ivanovo detstvo) A 99
aka: My Name Is Ivan
My
discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found
myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never
been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was
moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was
expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.Tarkovsky is for
me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of
film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
—Ingmar Bergman
Working
on Ivan's Childhood we encountered protests from the film authorities every
time we tried to replace narrative causality with poetic articulations...There
was no question of revising the basic working principles of film-making. But
whenever the dramatic structure showed the slightest sign of something new—of
treating the rationale of everyday life relatively freely—it was met with cries
of protest and incomprehension. These mostly cited the audience: they had to
have a plot that unfolded without a break, they were not capable of watching a
screen if the film did not have a strong story-line. The contrasts in the
film—cuts from dreams to reality, or, conversely, from the last scene in the
crypt to victory day in
—Andrei Tarkovsky, from Sculpting
in Time: Reflections on the Cinema
Andrei Tarkovsky not only established himself as the finest Soviet
director of the post-War period, but is considered one of the most significant
filmmakers of the 20th century.
Working between 1962 and 1986, he only completed seven feature films,
five in the
At 29, Tarkovsky had just graduated from VGIK
(the Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography) when his first film was inherited from director Eduard Abalov, who had to abort the project, and is based on
Vladimir Bogomolov’s novella The Ivan, and is now considered one of the boldest, artistically daring
directorial film debuts in history, and one of the greatest post-Stalin era
Russian films, winning immediate recognition, including the Golden Lion 1st
Place Prize at Venice, calling Tarkovsky the Bergman from the East. Bergman responded by calling Tarkovsky “the
greatest, the one who invented new language, reflections of life as a dream.” Tarkovsky treated his profession as a high
calling, a devotion, a special cause, claiming film is the high art of opening
up the human soul to an artistic image, claiming “Art can lead a man to the
depth of the human soul and leave man defenseless to good.” The film was introduced at the Moscow Institute of
Cinema with the following comments, “The film we are about to see is something
extraordinary, never been seen on our screens before, a really great
talent.” Tarkovsky was born in 1932 and
would be 13 when the war ended. “I was
his age when the war began. His
situation was that of my generation.”
The film is a very personal statement which introduces poetic cinema,
moving from a terrifying realism to a poetic fantasy, revealing a mastery at
incorporating surrealist elements into his cinematic world, which included his
cameraman Vadim Yusov, a very strong presence of an artist behind the camera,
creating a certain texture of images. He
and Tarkovsky establish very personal imprints.
“I’m sculpting in time,” imposing rhythm, time, duration, giving the
film a language outside the regular dimensions of human existence.
Called by Jean-Paul Sartre a work of “Socialist surrealism,” the film is
far from a conventional war drama, set during WWII over the course of just two
days, where war is shown without bombs or battle scenes, as the past and present are woven into a psychological state of emotional
turmoil, as Tarkovsky creates a uniquely personal stream-of-conscious narrative
that blends reality with dreams and childhood memories to capture the portrait
of an anguished soul of a young 12-year old orphan Ivan, in an unusually
sensitive and affecting performance by Kolya Burlaiev. Opening in a dream, flying through the air
among the trees, leading to piles of dead bodies around the devastated ruins of
a burned-out mill, Ivan is seen wading through some swamp water, crawling under
barbed wire, and the reality of war is revealed instantly. A flashback sets Ivan and his mother standing
above a well looking down into it. She
points out a star at the bottom of the well, stating our day is its night. Ivan can then be seen at the bottom of the
well trying to scoop up the star in his hands, looking up at his mother who is
then shot and killed. From such tenderness,
death, that introduces Ivan’s overriding sense of melancholy throughout the
film, a poetic moment where the dead return to console the living, where his
main solace becomes his dream-memory world, a return to a time and place of
childhood innocence.
Attempting to avenge his parent’s death, Ivan performs reconnaissance
missions for the Soviet Army and is immediately told “War is for grown men,”
ordering him to the rear where he can attend military school. But instead, he hangs around headquarters and
volunteers for some of the most dangerous missions behind enemy lines, where
his shy, childlike behavior is a stark contrast to the battle-hardened courage
displayed during combat. He’s attracted
to the character of Masha (Valentina Malyavina), an attractive nurse to
Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), who is then aggressively courted in the
birch woods by Captain Kholin (Valentin Zibkov), swinging her effortlessly over
a dug ravine, giving her a long kiss.
She then has a long shot walking on a tree trunk, beautifully extended
in time, eventually running away into the birch trees. In another sequence, Masha is told “War is a
man’s business, it’s not for girls.” She
has a fantasy in the trees with swelling music, but this becomes a fantasy of
death, revealing Ivan in the present as a young boy wearing big boots, flipping
through pages of an art book depicting Germans trampling on people, commenting
“They poured petrol over people,” asking the two officers “Will you take me
along to the other side?” But they
respond “War isn’t for children...We mustn’t let him cross to the other bank,”
claiming Ivan lost his mother, father, and sister, all killed by Nazi’s,
followed by a play sequence of Ivan playing out a war game, like a dream,
hearing voices, ringing a bell, a child alone, drawn into the shadows of
darkness and light.
As a result of the post-Stalinist thaw in Soviet film construction,
Tarkovsky’s highly personalized film deglamorizes war and instead focuses on
the horribly anguishing internalized consequences, which often find expression
on the surface, blurring the lines between dreams and reality, as Ivan joins a
team assigned to retrieve the bodies of two other boys hung from a tree,
previous scouts executed by the Germans.
Like a mythical journey across the River Styx, Ivan and the two officers
set out for the other shore, quietly in a boat, with hauntingly serene and
still images, with a sign “Welcome,” which reveals the entry into enemy
territory, where Ivan sees a wall with the words “Avenge our death. There are 8 of us, all under 19,” where
flares light up the night sky over a tranquil lake which is at peace. Ivan’s inner thoughts suggest a dream where
he is with another girl riding a cart filled with apples, initially in the
rain, then the trees in the background become negative images, arriving at a
peaceful shore where several horses are eating the apples on the ground, with a
burning fire followed by the image “Avenge our death.” As they pass a downed plane in a mist and
arrive in perfect stillness on the other side, Ivan separates from the men,
preferring to go alone, where eventually the two officers are able to return
without Ivan. It is the first snow and
all is quiet. There is a long extended
scene of the two men sitting at a table, motionless, where nothing is
happening. “It’s so quiet—the war.” One hears the dripping of water, a true
Tarkovsky moment, followed by the playing of a Russian bass, Chaliapin, on a
phonograph, where the haunting quiet feels like the granting of a final wish
before death.
The extreme hush is followed by thunderous newsreel footage of a Soviet
victory with soldiers marching down the streets of Berlin, with the ringing of
church bells, where soldiers examine what was a Nazi headquarters in ruins,
revealing what appears to be identified as the charred body of Goebbels, who
poisoned his wife and family, then committed suicide. We hear random thoughts out loud, “Will this
be the last war on earth?” “I survived,
and I must work for peace.” The soldiers
find picture after picture of dead Nazi victims, shot, shot, hanged, hanged,
shot, where they find Ivan’s photo where he is seen hanging upside down from a
meat hook, dead. The camera pans the
death rooms where the Nazi’s killed their victims, followed by a dream fantasia
expressing the absolute tenderness of Ivan and his mother on a peaceful shore,
collecting and drinking water, where Ivan plays with other children, chasing
after a little girl, the one with the apples, running along the shore, running,
running, running right past. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more a reflection of Ivan’s
interior landscape, where by the end of his spiritual journey, Ivan is finally
free from the brutality and madness of war and this hollow victory of man, and
has finally crossed over to the other shore and found peace at the end, the
peace of the dead. A transforming work,
where certainly one of the essential themes of the film, and what likely
attracted Tarkovsky to the material in the first place, was downplaying the
military heroism and instead focusing on how someone’s rational interior world
could be fractured and shattered by traumatizing war experiences, a symbol for the many Russian lives shattered by the war, using haunting
imagery to show how war alters human perception
to the point where people can no longer distinguish between reality and
illusion.
Ivan's Childhood,
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky ... - Time Out Tony Rayns
Tarkovsky's first feature is in many ways an orthodox Russian film of its period. Ivan is a teenage Soviet spy on the German front in World War II who undertakes dangerous missions behind enemy lines, until the inevitable mission from which there is no return. Many of Tarkovsky's later images and themes are already present and correct: Ivan silently wading through still water, eerily immanent forestscapes, the poetry of forbidden zones, and life-and-death struggles played out in slow motion. But the glittering black-and-white camerawork has a florid, bravura quality that Tarkovsky later rejected, as if determined to invest this more or less familiar material with touches of 'visionary' beauty. The irony is that the generic storyline provides a much stronger foundation for his visual ambitions than do the religiose and feebly philosophical abstractions that ostensibly underpin the films from Solaris onwards. Tha aura of holiness around Ivan registers neither as religious bombast nor as patriotic myth-making, but rather as an awed respect for childhood mysteries. This is Tarkovsky before his peasant sentimentality and sense of self-importance got the better of him, and it still looks hugely impressive.
Ivan's
Childhood Pacific
Cinematheque
Enthusiastically praised by
Jean-Paul Sartre as a work of "Socialist surrealism", Tarkovsky's
lyrical debut feature won the Golden Lion at
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Harrison Sherrod
One of the most bold, idiosyncratic directorial debuts in the
history of cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky's IVAN'S CHILDHOOD centers on a young
orphan who attempts to avenge his parents' deaths by performing reconnaissance
operations for the Soviet army. Though he is ordered to return to the rear and
attend military school, Ivan manages to hang around headquarters and volunteer
for a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Ivan's behavior oscillates between
being that of a callow child and a battle-hardened boy soldier with more valor
and grit than most of his older comrades, and although we see him playact a knife
fight, this is no game. As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD is
one in a series of late 50s Soviet films that eschews a typical propagandistic
gung-ho outlook and deglamorizes the war by focusing on individual suffering.
Though Mosfilm originally intended the film to be directed by Edward Gaikovich
Abalyan, Tarkovsky makes it his own by imbuing it with fragments of his
personal wartime experience. Indeed, the metaphysical forces prominently
featured in his later work are already in play here. Similar to THE MIRROR, the
film blurs the line between reality, memory, and the dream world. Tarkovsky
incorporates a mélange of stylistic techniques that may or may not reflect the
varying layers of reality, including negative images, documentary footage,
dizzying point of view shots, and canted camera angles reminiscent of German
Expressionist filmmaking. A third of the way through the film, Ivan encounters
a distraught, shell-shocked old man whose house is largely in ruins; however,
the man proceeds to hang a picture on what's left of a brick wall. With this
image, Tarkovsky is suggesting that war obscures one's perception to the point
that they are unable to delineate between the boundaries of reality and
illusion. The film is playing as part of a Tarkovsky/Malick program titled
"The Sacred and the Dasein" at Doc Films, and beyond the oft
mentioned similarities between the two directors, there is a haunting likeness
between the final scenes of IVAN'S CHILDHOOD and THE TREE OF LIFE, both of
which take place on a beach and function as a dreamlike comment on the
afterlife. Perhaps Ingmar Bergman said it best: "My discovery of
Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at
the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to
me." (1962, 95 min, 35mm)
My Name is
Ivan - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
A harrowing yet poetic account of war seen through the eyes of a twelve year old boy, My Name is Ivan (1962) was Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature film and one that had a major impact on Russian cinema and the international film world (It won the Golden Lion at the 1962 Venice International Film Festival). The film, based on a novella by Vladimir Bogomolov, traces the brief life of a young concentration camp escapee, working as a spy for the Russian army during World War II. Recently orphaned - his mother and father were murdered, his sister killed by a bomb - Ivan dedicates himself to revenge against the Germans and willingly accompanies two Russian soldiers into a 'No Man's Land' between the two armies where they hope to retrieve the bodies of some dead comrades.
The ironic Russian title, Ivan's Childhood, is actually the more appropriate one since Ivan has already lost his innocence when the film opens. Here is a young boy who has had his childhood stolen from him by a man-made calamity. In the title role, Nikolai Burlyayev gives a remarkable performance, his expressive features allowing him to appear as a hungry, wide-eyed waif one moment and as a confident, expert assassin in the next. Equally unique is Andrei Tarkovsky's direction, which resembles a stream of consciousness narrative, blending realistic action sequences with the visions, dreams, and memories of the title character. There are also numerous cultural references to art, religion, music, and poetry and the visual compositions of the film are often haunting and unconventional: a light above a table swings back and forth to the sound of shellfire, reflections of leafless trees in a lake resemble crosses, a sudden explosion destroys a wall to reveal an icon of the Madonna and child, tilted over at an oblique angle.
When Tarkovsky began work on My Name is Ivan, he was actually replacing another director - E. Abalov - on the project. While it was a difficult production for him - much of the production money had already been spent when he started - Tarkovsky was attracted to Bogomolov's atypical war story that concentrated on the warped personality of the young military scout and downplayed the heroic military exploits. The original screenplay, co-scripted by Mikhail Papava, gave Ivan a happy ending, allowing him to survive the war, marry, and raise a family. But Bogomolov protested this departure from his novella and Tarkovsky remained faithful to the author's vision that Ivan remain a tragic hero who met the fate of most young Soviet scouts during the war. Unlike the original story, however, Tarkovsky added four dream sequences and other visual touches to illustrate Ivan's psychological state in the film which did not please the novella's author. Some of his creative decisions were challenged by the studio which reviewed his work in a strict, bureaucratic matter, subjecting him to thirteen 'editorial' sessions, presided over by respected Russian artists from the literary and film community. At these, major and minor changes were requested such as the removal of the love scene or the graphic documentary footage featuring charred Nazi corpses (excised from the U.S. release) but Mikhail Romm, Tarkovsky's mentor, effectively argued against cutting any footage.
When My Name is Ivan was released in 1962, it brought Tarkovsky international fame almost immediately. At numerous film festivals from San Francisco to Acapulco, Tarkovsky was recognized as an emerging poet of the medium and even many Russian critics saw the film as a major leap forward in contemporary Soviet cinema. But he still had to contend with some critical backlash from Soviet authorities who found the film too stylistically complex or overtly pessimistic. In his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, Tarkovsky wrote: "Working on Ivan's Childhood we encountered protests from the film authorities every time we tried to replace narrative causality with poetic articulations...There was no question of revising the basic working principles of film-making. But whenever the dramatic structure showed the slightest sign of something new - of treating the rationale of everyday life relatively freely - it was met with cries of protest and incomprehension. These mostly cited the audience: they had to have a plot that unfolded without a break, they were not capable of watching a screen if the film did not have a strong story-line. The contrasts in the film - cuts from dreams to reality, or, conversely, from the last scene in the crypt to victory day in Berlin - seemed to many to be inadmissible. I was delighted to learn that audiences thought differently."
Ivan's Childhood: Dream Come True - The Criterion Collection also seen here: Criterion Collection film essay [Dina Iordanova]
Kirsten Everberg and Ivan's Childhood - The Criterion Collection April 6, 2012
Ivan's Childhood (1962) - The Criterion Collection
The Film Sufi: “Ivan's Childhood” - Andrei Tarkovsky (1962)
Ivan's Childhood • Senses of Cinema Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
Ivan's
Childhood: The Tree of Life | P.U.L.S.E
Donato Totaro from P.U.L.S.E.
World, October 27, 2014
Film
Freak Central - Ivan's Childhood (1962) [The Criterion ... Bryant Frazer, Criterion Blu-Ray
Ivan's Childhood (1962)
– Long Pauses Darren Hughes
Criterion
Reflections [David Blakeslee]
Ivan's
Childhood - TCM.com Nathaniel
Thompson
My
Name Is Ivan (1963) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Michael Atkinson
Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young
Electric Sheep Magazine [John Bleasdale]
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
The Kids Stay in the Picture: Ivan's Childhood, by Aaron ... Aaron Pinkston from Battleship Pretension
Ivan's
Childhood (1962) | Motion State Review
Evan Jones
World
Cinema Review: Andrei Tarkovsky | Ivan's Childhood ... Four
Films by Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, and The
Sacrifice, by Douglas Messerli, October 30, 2011
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
Andrei Tarkovsky: The Logic of Poetry Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA
The Nighthawk Awards: 1963 [Erik Beck]
DVD Verdict [Bill Gibron] Criterion Collection
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Budd Wilkins] Criterion Collection
The Digital Fix [Noel Megahey] Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk James Kendrick, Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com Dan Heaton, Criterion Collection
Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp] Criterion Collection
DVD Talk Christopher McQuain, Criterion Collection
Ivan's Childhood: Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the DVD ... Randy Miller III
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson] Criterion Blu-Ray
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw] Criterion Blu-Ray
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay] Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Lawrence Devoe] Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Christopher McQuain] Criterion Blu-Ray
Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan's Childhood, 1962)* * * *... EEH from Sunnyside Kitchen
Review:
Ivan's Childhood - Next Projection
Matthew Blevins
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Battleship Pretension [Tyler Smith]
Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell]
Daily Film Dose Alan Bacchus
CineScene.com Howard Schumann
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Charles Cassady, Jr.]
New York Times [Bosley Crowther], also seen here: The New York Times
Ivan's Childhood
Blu-ray - Andrei Tarkovsky - DVDBeaver.com
Ivan's Childhood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ANDREI RUBLEV (Andrey
Rublyov) A+ 100+
I was also blown away by ANDREI RUBLEV. Think of the film imagery of, say, Terrence
Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN, and one wonders, can a film be any more beautiful?
Then one
sees this film, which, above all others I’ve ever seen, defines what it is to be an epic
masterpiece, filled with Tarkovsky's nobility of spirit, his personal
imprint, where the camera perfectly captures series after series of absolutely,
incredibly powerful images, some serenely beautiful, others terrifying, but all filled
with thought, purpose, imagination, and power.
Interestingly, ANDREI RUBLEV was released the same year as
Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966), as both are among the finest films ever
released expressing the cruelty of man through animals, specifically horses by
Tarkovsky and a donkey by Bresson. Also
in each film, after being viewed as a victim of man’s cruelty, the animal
achieves an image of heavenly transcendence, representing the highest spiritual
attainment of man.
Andrei Rublev | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Andrei Tarkovsky's first major film (1966, though banned and unseen until 1971), cowritten by Andrei Konchalovsky, about a 15th-century icon painter. This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we've come to expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a stirring climax in color. Not to be missed. In Russian and Italian with subtitles.
Andrei Rublev, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky | Film review Tony Rayns
The complete version (39 minutes longer than the print originally released) 'explains' no more than the cut version, but at least Tarkovsky's mysteries and enigmas are now intact. Rublev was a minor icon-painter of the early 1400s. Tarkovsky re-imagines him as a Christ-like cypher for the sufferings of a divided Russia under the Tartar invaders: a troubled visionary reduced to years of silence by the horrors that he witnesses, who finally rediscovers the will to speak - and to paint. The film offers eight imaginary episodes from Rublev's life: the most brilliant coup is the story of a beardless boy saving his own life by pretending that he knows how to cast a giant bell - and finding that he can do it. This boy's blind faith rekindles Rublev's confidence in himself and his people, leading the film into its blazing climax: a montage of details from Rublev's surviving icons.
Andrei Rublev Pacific Cinematheque, also seen here: Andrei Rublev - U.S. Indie News, Filmmaker Interviews, Film ...
Widely recognized as a masterpiece, Andrei Tarkovsky's 205-minute medieval epic, based on the life of the Russian monk and icon painter, was not seen as the director intended it until its re-release over twenty years after its completion. The film was not screened publicly in its own country (and then only in an abridged form) until 1972, three years after winning the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Calling the film frightening, obscure, and unhistorical, Soviet authorities edited the picture on several occasions, removing as much as an entire hour from the original. Presented as a tableaux of seven sections in black & white, with a final montage of Rublev's painted icons in color, the film takes an unflinching gaze at medieval Russia during the first quarter of the 15th century, a period of Mongol-Tartar invasion and growing Christian influence. Commissioned to paint the interior of the Vladimir cathedral, Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsin) leaves the Andronnikov monastery with an entourage of monks and assistants, witnessing in his travels the degradations befalling his fellow Russians, including pillage, oppression from tyrants and Mongols, torture, rape, and plague. Faced with the brutalities of the world outside the religious enclave, Rublev's faith is shaken, prompting him to question the uses or even possibility of art in a degraded world. After Mongols sack the city of Vladimir, burning the very cathedral that he has been commissioned to paint, Rublev takes a vow of silence and withdraws completely, removing himself to the hermetic confines of the monastery. Rising quickly out of this mire, the film's final section (a short story in its own right) concerns a boy named Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev) who convinces a group of travelling bell-makers that his father passed on to him the secret of bell-making. The men take Boriska along, mostly because they pity and are amused by him, but they are quickly enthralled by the boy's ambition, determination, and confidence that he alone knows how to build the perfect bell. Boriska is soon commanding an army of assistants and peasant workers, and, indeed, his fierce temperament and refusal to accept anything but the best possible work and materials from the men fools the viewer -- possibly Boriska himself is fooled -- into thinking that he does in fact possess the secret, and that on the appointed day when the silver bell is lifted from the ground and its mallet set in place, it will ring. Amid this maelstrom of activity and confusion, Rublev appears; at first standoffish and mistrustful of the boy, he finds himself drawn to Boriska's courage and unselfconscious desire to create. Moved to put aside his vow of silence, Rublev serves finally as the boy's confessor, and he finds that, through Boriska, his faith, and art, have been renewed. -- Anthony Reed, All Movie Guide
Tarkovsky's monumental second feature -- presented here in a fully- restored, full-length, 35mm CinemaScope print -- is considered by many to be the finest Soviet film of the postwar era. Andrei Rublev presents eight imaginary episodes in the life of its title character, a 15th century Russian Orthodox monk who won renown as an icon painter. Little is known about the historical Rublev; Tarkovsky renders him as a man clinging desperately to his faith in God and art in a world of overwhelming cruelty and barbarism. The allegorical significance of the film was not lost on the commissars -- Rublev's plight could stand for that of any number of modern artists under Soviet rule -- and, after stunning Moscow audiences at the end of 1966, the film was promptly banned for five years (on the grounds of "historical inaccuracy"). An edited version won the International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1969. "Andrei Rublev announced the arrival, in indisputable terms, of the most original Russian director since the enforced demise of Eisenstein and the formalists. It remains a shattering and wholly original work. . . [a] plea for the liberation of art from the perversions of doctrine" (Toronto I.F.F.). "Imperative viewing. It is a film of spiritual power and epic grandeur, re-creating fifteenth-century Russia with a vividness unmatched by any historical film I can think of. It may be Tarkovsky's greatest work" (Philip French). "Towering. . . one of world cinema's most enthralling films" (Geoff Brown, London Times). USSR 1966.
Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz] (link lost)
With some of the most stunning cinematography this side of Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is one of the finest films ever made. Andrei Rublev was a medieval Russian painter of religious frescoes and icons, summoned to Moscow by master painter/philosopher Theophanes the Greek. Rublev travels across the Russian countryside witnessing the sack of Vladimir by the Tatars, and pagans practicing ritual lovemaking on St. John's Eve. These events, amongst others, tweak Rublev's Christian convictions and challenge him to understand God and reach the Russian people through his art and spiritual struggles.
Tarkovsky and Transcendental Style
For those new to the cinema of Tarkovsky, this is the best film to begin with.
His direction is never more solid, and the subject matter and pacing are more
accessible to viewers more accustomed to commercial Hollywood cinema.
Regardless, it is the transcendental style of filmmaking that requires
more patience from the audience than many are willing to invest.
The transcendental style emphases
"the shot" over montage and mise en scene over editing, to
invoke meaning in the cinema. "The camera should preserve the unity of
space and time," as Harvard Film Professor Vlada Petric puts it in his
audio commentary. The transcendental method is an acquired taste and can be
boring for those who do not understand cinematic metaphor. But if you stick
with it, you'll be rewarded.
Rublev Restored
Criterion restores Rublev to its full running time of 205 minutes and
Petric's audio commentary outlines Tarkovsky's thematic imperatives. Seven
sequences are sifted out for analyses: the ntroduction, the crucifixion, the
Hhliday pagan ritual, the Chapel of the Ascension, the raid, the bell, and
Rublev's paintings. It would have been useful for professor Petric to clarify
the philosophy used by the characters and to explain what all the horses in the
film represent. Alas, his commentary requires that his listeners be well versed
in art history in order to understand some of his stylistic juxtapositions,
which can be obscure.
Tarkovsky himself shows up in excerpts
of "Poet of the Cinema" commenting vaguely on broad questions such as
"What is Art?" When asked what he would like to tell young people,
his answer inspired unanticipated laughter: "Learn to love solitude, to be
more alone with yourselves." So very Russian.
The disc also includes a great
historical timeline that presents the major events in the lives of both Rublev
and Tarkovsky. However, the sharp images of the non-anamorphic widescreen
(2.35:1) presentation are lessened by the slightly muddy quality of the digital
mono soundtrack, a victim of the limited technology and recording technique
available to Tarkovsky.
Film @
The Digital Fix - Andrei Rublev
Michael Brooke
Andrei Tarkovsky's second feature has had an immensely chequered
career. Shot over a two-year period, it was completed in 1966, and promptly
banned by the authorities (the then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev pointedly
walked out during an official screening). After a print found its way to the
1969 Cannes Film Festival, it finally got a release on both sides of the Iron
Curtain in the early 1970s, but in a severely truncated 145-minute version.
Re-releases pushed the running time up to 186 minutes (the version shown on
BBC2 and released on DVD by Artificial Eye and the Russian Cinema Council), but
the Criterion DVD is effectively the Western premiere of Tarkovsky's original
205-minute cut, The Passion of Andrei.
Whatever the problems faced by filmmakers working in the former Soviet Union,
one thing they didn't have to worry about once their script was approved was whether
or not their films would get sufficient funding. Andrei Rublev is an
epic on a colossal David Lean-like scale (adjusted for inflation, the budget
would be right up there with Hollywood's nine-figure blockbusters) - and all
the more remarkable because it's also a profoundly complex, philosophically
intricate meditation on what it means to be an artist: the kind of script that,
if made in the West, would either have to be considerably dumbed down or shot
on a hopelessly inadequate budget.
The sheer scale of the film is seen right from the opening sequence, an
anachronistic but compelling allegorical tale of an over-ambitious balloon
flight - which before its passenger plunges to his death gives us an
extraordinary God's eye view of medieval Russia. The remainder of the film is
divided into seven sections, spanning the years 1400 to 1424, during which
Andrei Rublev (Russia's greatest icon painter) is stunned into creative silence
by the violence and cruelty that he witnesses - some of which is as graphic and
shocking as anything to emerge from Western cinema over the following decades.
Finally, in the film's most memorable sequence, Rublev witnesses a young boy
achieve the apparently impossible when he casts a giant bell - which inspires
him to paint again.
Absolutely nothing like Andrei Rublev had ever been seen before, and the
Soviet authorities made sure that nothing like it would be seen again: it's a
complete one-off. Tarkovsky was a perfectionist on a Kubrick-like scale, and
his formidable attention to detail makes his vision of medieval Russia seem
utterly convincing, not to mention authentically tactile: the constant focus on
surfaces and textures mean you can feel the period almost as much as you can
see and hear it. The compositions recall great paintings rather than other
films: Tarkovsky's images have been compared with Breughel, and with good
reason.
Andrei Rublev - Deep Focus Bryant Frazer
Among the greatest of all historical epics is Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, a 15th Century biopic that's hardly an epic at all in the conventional sense. It may be more descriptive to call Rublev an elliptical masterpiece, a narrative whose elisions offer new perspectives on the events it chooses to depict.
The film's mysterious prologue sets the tone for what is to follow. A group of peasants struggles with the moorings of a hot-air balloon tethered outside a church. Before they let it loose, one man climbs aboard from the top of the church tower. As the balloon sails free, the camera itself suddenly becomes airborne, floating above the earth to show us what he sees. The exhilarating sequence is, of course, fraught with danger, and the experiment ends badly.
We never learn any more about that man or his ill-fated flight. Instead, we're introduced to a group of three monks leaving Moscow. One remarks that the city will have enough painters without them, and thus we may speculate that one of the three is the title character, a renowned Russian icon painter. If one of these men is Rublev, he's not immediately identified, leaving us uncertain about whose story this is, anyway.
That's the condition under which we'll view the rest of the film -- as each of its seven segments begins, the viewer is again thrown off-balance. Rublev's presence isn't even a constant, as some sequences unfold without him. We expect him to show up eventually, as a bit player or even a spectator, but each vignette is absorbing in its own right. The key is that the events in the film illuminate Rublev's state of mind -- or rather they show what Tarkovsky imagines to be Rublev's state of mind, since few facts are known about the painter's actual life story. In that way, Rublev's character here is emblematic of The Artist, particularly one torn between a devotion to the spiritual and the nagging sensation that, perhaps, there is a great hypocrisy behind much of what masquerades as spirituality.
One such scene has Rublev stumbling across a pagan ritual charged with carnality. His curiosity is overwhelming -- as he observes one couple making love, he momentarily forgets where he's standing and his robes literally catch on fire. He's eventually captured and tied to a cross, a literal echo of his earlier imagining of a passion play, despite his protest that the sinners will burn in hell for their transgression. Later, he'll refuse to paint the Last Judgment, despite a colleague's matter-of-fact enthusiasm over a particularly threatening manifestation of Satan.
The final crisis comes when Rublev kills a man during the pillage of the town of Vladimir by Tatar invaders. As penance, Rublev befriends the girl whose would-be rapist he slew, ceases painting and vows silence. The question of how Rublev will gain the werewithal to work again hangs over the film's final segment, in which a young man is recruited to cast a huge bell for the Prince.
As a Soviet filmmaker, Tarkovsky works in the shadow of Eisenstein, but his shooting style seems influenced less by Eisensteinian montage and more by the fluid camerawork and careful choreography favored by Murnau and Dreyer. The most obvious reference point for Tarkovsky's mise en scène is Ingmar Bergman, whose somber medieval tableaux for The Seventh Seal are reflected in Tarkovsky's vision. But because Bergman never shot in widescreen, Tarkovsky's use of the Cinemascope frame even more closely resembles the early work of Sacha Vierny, particularly Last Year at Marienbad. The key motif here is stately tracking shots that transform Tarkovsky's compositions, emphasizing the nature of architecture and landscape.
Tarkovsky's keen sense of spatial dynamics make Andrei Rublev a film of unerring beauty, one that would be remembered as some kind of masterwork on the strength of its photography alone. It's the impeccable marriage of nearly impressionistic content to impressive formalism that imbues Rublev with the power of great cinema. Here is that cinematic incongruity -- an epic art film.
Criterion
Collection Film Essay [J. Hoberman]
January 11, 1999, also seen here:
Andrei Rublev
The
Film Sufi: “Andrei Rublev” - Andrei Tarkovsky (1966)
Andrei Rublev | Criterion Collection | Foreign Film | Movie ... Matthew from Classic Art Films
Andrei Roublev • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford, December 2009
Cinematic
gold: Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev | BFI Theodora Clarke from Sight and Sound, November 9, 2015
The
Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]
Criterion
Reflections [David Blakeslee]
The Criterion Contraption: #34: Andrei Rublev Matthew Dessem, which features a beautiful Rublev icon painting
Andrei Rublev : Sonic Cinema Brian Skutle
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
Antagony
& Ecstasy: ICONS OF CINEMA Tim
Andrei Tarkovsky Stuart C. Hancock from Mars Hill Review, Winter/Spring 1996
World
Cinema Review: Andrei Tarkovsky | Ivan's Childhood ... Four
Films by Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, and The
Sacrifice, by Douglas Messerli, October 30, 2011
The Passion According to Andrei: Andrei Rublev • Senses of ... Anna Dzenis from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
Andrei Rublev: Religious Epiphany in Art by Nigel Savio D'Sa Journal of Religion and Film, October 1999
Andrei
Rublev | Electric Sheep Virginie Sélavy
Žeksov Kulturni Centar Yossarian, July 15, 2007
REVIEW Andrei Rublev (1969) - Decent Films Steven D. Greydanus
2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 (Voted #8)
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Columbia Spectator [Paul Fileri]
Andrei
Rublev - TCM.com Felicia
Feaster
Robert Bird
(2004) Andrei Rublev - Film-Philosophy Julia Kristanciuk’s review of Robert Bird’s
book, Andrei Rublev, 2006 (pdf)
Andrei Rublev: The study of a visually stunning movie ... Jennifer Carnig discussing Slavic Language and Literature Professor Robert Bird’s book on the film from The University of Chicago Chronicle, March 3, 2005
Tarkovsky's
Andrei Rublev - OrthodoxChristianity.net
October 31, 2005
DVD Movie Central [Michael Jacobson] Criterion Collection
CriterionForum.org:
Andrei Rublev DVD Review
Chris Galloway, Criterion Collection
albertnet: Chasing “Andrei Rublev” Dana Albert
MichaelVox
[Michael W. Cummins]
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Andrei
Rublev (1966): Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky's ... Murtaza Ali Khan from A Potpourri of Vestiges, May 22,
2012
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Andrei Tarkovsky - Strictly Film School Acquarello
Andrei
Rublev: The Passion According To Andrei (Andrei ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal
Wellington
Film Society - ANDREI RUBLEV
Andrei Tarkovsky: The Logic of Poetry Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA
A Guide to Fifty Minutes' Worth of Andrei Rublev including an amazing collection of historical photos
Top 50 films for architects: Andrei Rublev | Review | Building ... listed as #17, Robert Harbison from BD Online, July 16, 2013
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
A
Yellow Barrel: Thoughts on Film [Jon Cvack]
20/20
Movie Reviews [Richard Cross]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The film that changed my life: Joanna Hogg Interview of filmmaker Joanna Hogg by Tom Lamont from The Observer, April 24, 2011
BBCi
- Films Jamie Russell
Andrei
Rublev: the best arthouse film of all time
Steve Rose from The Guardian,
October 20, 2010, also seen here: Andrei
Rublev: the best arthouse film of all time | Film | The ...
Movie
Review - - Film Fete: Andrei Rublev' From Russia Is ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also seen here New
York Times
DVDBeaver - Full Graphic Review [Dev Ramcharan]
Andrei Rublev
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alexander Solzhenitsin's article about Andrei Rublov [Russian]
Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev Film ending, Video (13:07)
SOLARIS (Solyaris) A 98
I am aware of the controversy, as the writer completely disowned the
Tarkovsky film. Stanislaw Lem's
book takes place solely in space and renders humans, and all of their human values and understandings, frail and inept, mankind is merely a "speck of
dust" within the cosmos, a world completely beyond all human
understanding. Certainly love is
a useless commodity, dwarfed by the
immenseness of what we can't comprehend.
Tarkovsky's film, by contrast, completely re-writes Lem's story and focuses on the glory
of human values that we take with
us wherever we go, values that, in
fact, comprise the essence of our humanity, represented by the recurring themes of the music of Bach, the paintings of Brueghel, a Greek bust, Cervantes' Don Quixote, all representations of our past. There is a
wonderful scene in the space station library, complete with these earth references, as the men are challenged by the spirit of Kris's wife, she identifies the visitors
as mirrors of their own consciousness, and she appears more human than any of them. Also, what Tarkovsky and his musical
director Eduard Artemiev do with music is
magnificent, literally
transforming the Bach Prelude with the
electronic music associated with Solaris, they are blended into one
as
the wife and mother and the childhood
home and the space station all meld into one. By the time Kris
returns to earth, this same theme
has been transformed into something
still recognizable, yet completely
original, a musical
reflection of Kris's own transformation. I felt the Tarkovsky film challenged the
audience with the power of
memory and history with the power of
our modern day perspective and let the
audience be the judge of what they felt
was a more powerful force. Tarkovsky's ending is also completely ambiguous and can be interpreted with multiple
possibilities. In fact, I was talking about this film for days
after I saw it.
In my view, Tarkovsky is arguably the greatest filmmaker ever, perhaps alongside Dreyer, and the argument is simple. While they both
made few films, each is an
undisputed masterpiece, every one a
brilliant work of art. Not even an A- in the group, all solid A's. Now that doesn't mean each of us can't
dispute it, but that's how the
argument goes. SOLARIS may be among his lesser works, (according to me, all are 4 Stars, on a 10
point scale, all are 10's, on a 100 point
scale, all are between 97 to 100)
but
not because of any lack of creative input on Tarkovsky's part, his force is dominating and overwhelming in
every film, all deal with the
transformation of the human soul,
but
instead is based on the wooden acting performance of the lead character of
Kris. The female lead,
on the other hand, Natalia Bondarchuk, is among Tarkovsky's most memorable.
Solaris
| The Cinematheque Pacific Cinematheque
Based on a novel by the noted Polish writer Stanislaw Lem,
Tarkovsky's Solaris is often described as the Soviet 2001; Jay Scott once
called it "Star Trek as written by Dostoevsky." The film concerns a
troubled, guilt-ridden scientist sent to investigate strange occurrences on a
space station orbiting Solaris, a mysterious planet with an intelligent Ocean capable
of penetrating the deepest recesses of the subconscious. Confronted on his
arrival by the incarnation of a long-dead lover, the protagonist is forced to
relive the greatest moral failures of his past. The film is magnificently
mounted in widescreen and colour, and offers a fascinating, felicitous marriage
between Tarkovsky's characteristic moral/metaphysical concerns and the popular
format of science fiction, a genre for which the director expressed no
particular affection, but to which he would return again -- more obliquely,
just as cerebrally -- in Stalker and The Sacrifice. Winner of a Special Jury
Prize at Cannes in 1972, "Solaris ranks with the best of Tarkovsky's work,
which is to say it ranks with the best movies produced at any time"
(Scott, Globe & Mail).
Solaris | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Although Andrei Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 SF spectacle in 'Scope as the weakest of his films, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, concentrating on the limits of man's imagination in relation to memory and conscience. Sent to a remote space station poised over the mysterious planet Solaris in order to investigate the puzzling data sent back by an earlier mission, a psychologist (Donatas Banionis) discovers that the planet materializes human forms based on the troubled memories of the space explorers—including the psychologist's own wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who'd killed herself many years before but is repeatedly resurrected before his eyes. More an exploration of inner than of outer space, Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals. In Russian with subtitles. 165 min.
Shock
Cinema [Steven Puchalski]
Tired of renting a film from your local video store's science fiction bin, only to discover yet another chunk of mindless American pabulum? Well, take a turn into the foreign film section next time and try out the Russian-made SOLARIS, a rare example of Thinking Man's/Woman's Science Fiction from the labyrinthine genius of the late Andrei Tarkovsky. Though not as hypnotic and maddening as his later STALKER (imagine 2001 as rewritten by Samuel Beckett), both films capture a texture for nature and complexity of themes which are rarely attempted in modern-day celluloid sci-fi. Based on Stanislaw Lem's celebrated novel, the story involves a psychologist named Kelvin who's assigned to check on some funny business at a space station circling Solaris---a mysterious planet comprised of a swirling ocean of fog and matter. He arrives to discover the living quarters are nasty, grimy and unkept; the pair of remaining residents are half-nuts and unusually secretive; and the corridors echo with foreboding (not to mention dirty laundry). All the characters remain solemn and passive throughout (typical for Russian cinema), even as absurd, unexplainable occurrences transpire, such as some mysterious new additions to the ship's population. Soon Kelvin himself is pulled into the station's spell, and he must contend with the sudden appearance of his deceased wife, while trying to unravel who---or what---is causing these "guests" to form from the crew's subconscious desires. This a dense tale, as visionary as it is enigmatic, and though the special effects aren't going to give I.L.M. any worries, they're effective in a highly stylized way. But what makes it truly different is that instead of relying on cold technology and gimmicks, Tarkovsky builds his foundation on the all-too-human conditions of Loss and Longing. Who hasn't dreamt of reliving the past? Or seeing the person we once loved, one final time? Heavy themes to be found in a sci-fi flick, and though Tarkovsky is never subtle in his intentions, the entire enterprise is forged in personal pain...Be prepared to slow down your rhythms a bit though. Several long, pretentious sequences may tax your patience (such as a tour along an urban highway, symbolizing Kelvin's journey through space), but there's beauty to be found in every shot. And at nearly three hours long, this epic-length tale is certain to infuriate short-attention-span viewers, even as it dazzles those with an eye toward the more intellectually courageous. Though not for all tastes, SOLARIS is an uncompromising masterpiece of despair and romance, poured within the trappings of traditional science fiction.
Reel.com
DVD review [Mary Kalin-Casey] (link lost)
Now available in a terrific double-disc special edition from Criterion, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 sci-fi classic, Solaris, arrives just a day ahead of Steven Soderbergh's pared-down remake. Though definitely not a film for all tastes, the Russian master's multilayered, cerebral mind-bender offers many rewards to those patient enough to withstand three hours of unremittingly slow, but spellbinding material.
First Contact
Based on the book by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, Solaris charts the
evolution of faithless psychiatrist Kris Kelvin (Donatas
Banionis), who recovers his lost humanity on a space station surrounding
the titular planet. Sent there to investigate some bizarre behavior by the
crew, Kris finds the two remaining scientists, cyberneticist Snaut and astrobiologist
Sartorius (Yüri
Yärvet and Anatoli
Solonitzin), under self-imposed lock and key. In their disheveled quarters,
both men harbor what they call "visitors," entities, manifested by
the planet itself, who embody some form of guilt associated with their
respective hosts — generally a person, but in Snaut's case we never see his
apparently abusive "friend," so it's terrifyingly unclear what
purpose Solaris might have in sending such companions.
Kris himself is quickly drawn into this
surreal and disturbing existence when his dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk),
also appears on-board. The spitting image of his suicidal spouse, she is
undeniably real, yet she is clearly some sort of duplicate whose consciousness
seems connected to her namesake by Kris' memories alone; in other regards, she
is a distinctly different person. As she begins to grow emotionally, she
struggles with the existential dilemma of individuality. And as Kris is forced
to come to terms with, and accept, this doppelgänger, he himself becomes more
human in the process. And, in conclusion, Kris is not only affected by Solaris,
but becomes the reciprocal catalyst for a change in that being's existence, as
well.
Artistic License
Solaris author Lem made no bones about disliking Tarkovsky's take on his
novel. The primary reason was the director's overemphasis on faith vs. science,
and Kris' ties to Earth, both in the half-hour of additional terrestrial scenes
that preceed the Solaris encounter, and in the highly developed — and quite
dysfunctional — family relationships that Kris resolves, one by one, through
his exchange with the cognizant planet.
Lem's intent was more purely
science-fiction-oriented: to explore man's ability to deal with alien
life-forms — a situation he didn't especially think that our egotistical
species would be prepared to handle. Yet despite the two artists' divergent
perspectives, Tarkovsky's film does convey those very things that communicate
Lem's basic theme: interaction with the unknown, and the fear and confusion
such an encounter would cause. Solaris is compelling and chilling from
start to finish because the director offers a committed, intensely atmospheric
vision that is jammed with symbolism and detail — it may be more spiritually
oriented than Lem would have liked, but it is undeniably a commanding piece of filmmaking.
Solaris - Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young
Yes, 165 minutes. 21 minutes longer than 2001 : A Space Odyssey, to which it was intended as a Soviet response. And there are moments when it feels like 165 hours, when it seems to be taking pride in being as aggressively nebulous as possible. But with Tarkovsky, you give the benefit of the doubt. The opening section is stunning. A man stands in a field near a dacha in the Russian countryside, watching the reeds in the water. He’s an astronaut, and this is what it looks like when it’s your last day on Earth. The images are so eerily beautiful, so powerful, you’re hooked - you know you’ll stay the course. You trust this movie.
Soon, the story proper - loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel - starts. The man, Kris Kelvin (solid Donatas Banionis) travels to a space station circling the distant planet Solaris. Only two of the original eighty-five crew survive. It has been established that the vast ocean covering the planet’s surface is a single, sentient creature - a vast, mysterious alien brain, with the power to conjure up simulacra of people from the cosmonauts’ memories. Kelvin is thus “visited” by his wife Hari (top-billed Natalya Bondarchuk) whose suicide 10 years before he never quite managed to get over. Bondarchuk is phenomenal in a uniquely difficult role - she’s heartbreaking in her vulnerability, but as soon as she arrives on the scene things start to get really slow.
At key points in Solaris, just as you start to bog down in the static story and rambling philosophising, Tarkovsky pulls some audacious stunt that keeps you glued to the screen: at the one-hour stage a dwarf suddenly, absurdly, appears in the spaceship, then he’s gone, never to be seen again. An hour later the characters experience an unexplained ‘thirty seconds of weightlessness’ that’s one of the most breathtakingly beautiful scenes ever filmed. Then, just as the pace slows even further, just as you think no ending can possibly be justify trudging through this static swamp, Tarkovsky proves you dead wrong.
Solaris has been attacked for its ‘kindergarten philosophy,’ and that’s fair comment. It’s hard to disagree with the sniffy verdict of the Communist apparatchik at the Mosfilm studio: “ Take-home message: there’s no point in humanity dragging its shit from one end of the galaxy to the other.” And the skimpy English subtitling on some prints doesn’t help. But there is something glorious about the way Tarkovsky steers what the Party obviously intended as a massively big-budget space epic into his own idiosyncratic territory, making it into a crazy rumination on memory, art and family.
Yes, some of the shots and scenes are ridiculously long, but this is a price worth paying for the chance to see things unlike anything else in cinema: a silent ten-minute drive through what looks like Osaka; an intimate inspection of Brueghel’s ‘Return of the Hunters’; a glass doorhandle slowly rocking to a stop on a wooden chair. At one stage David Lynch was being lined up to do Return of the Jedi instead of Dune, and perhaps his take on Star Wars might have turned out like Solaris - nonsensical and borderline unwatchable as a science-fiction movie, but dazzling as a grand, visionary statement of maddening artistic genius.
digitallyOBSESSED!
[Dan Lopez]
Anyone who has seen a film by Andrei Tarkovsky has, in a sense,
been inducted into a special group of people who have been immersed in his
talent for powerful filmmaking. He is also one of the most important directors
in the history of world cinema, in my opinion, and his works have attained a
certain following that approaches religious proportions. Every Tarkovsky film
I've ever seen has simply blown me away. I've felt completely exhausted by not
only the philosophical and dramatic power of the piece, but by the aching
attention to artistic detail that makes his work visually stunning. His 1972
film, Solaris, is no
different, although it is arguably Tarkovsky's most elaborate production in
terms of sets, special effects, and overall design. Based on a novel by Polish
author Stanislaw Lem (upon whose work he would also base Stalker, in 1979), it is perhaps his most
accessible film, but it is also one of his bleakest and most unsettling. It is
an eerie, mysterious, and haunting story that mixes both compelling human drama
with a very heavy underlying sci-fi element.
Set in a nondescript future, the story concerns Kris Kelvin, a psychologist
who, as the film begins, has been asked to travel to a deep space station to
determine whether the last remaining three crew members are stable enough to
continue their mission. What makes the situation strange and difficult is that
the station is a base that orbits a mysterious planet (known as Solaris) that
is composed of nothing but a weird, pulsating ocean. The planet has resisted
any attempts at successful exploration and after a disastrous event in which
several crew members lose their lives, the remaining three scientists are now
out of contact with Earth. A surviving crew member gives his report, but it's a
weird hallucination about varied images and experiences which no one takes
seriously, not even Kelvin. Once on board the station, Kelvin encounters a
disheveled mess of a space craft, and his old friend, Dr. Gibarius, is dead.
The remaining two scientists, Sartorius and Snaut, can only speak in weird
riddles and veiled threats about Kelvin not understanding what he's in for.
Disoriented and disturbed by what he has found on board Solaris station, Kelvin
enters further into pseudo-madness when he awakens one day to discover his late
wife, Hari, now shares his room with him. Where she came from, he has no idea,
but she is flesh and blood. He soon discovers what has happened on board the
station: that the planet Solaris is somehow taking subliminal thoughts from the
astronauts and turning them into reality, thus distorting their mental state
and completely confusing them. What should the men do? Live out their lives
amongst the weird flotsam and jetsam that Solaris continually summons from
their minds? Or should they enter the proposed final phase of the mission and
bombard the surface of Solaris with radiation, in an attempt to find out what
makes it "tick." Kelvin loves his wife, but at the same time, he
understands, to his horror, that the wife he has on board the station is not
real, and not truly the same woman, but rather a copy created by an alien
intelligence beyond understanding.
There are deep themes here, and Tarkovsky manages to balance them quite well
without losing control of the entire project. If anything, Solaris is a disturbing portrait of
"first contact" with an alien intelligence that's neither hostile nor
friendly, it simply is; it does what it apparently deems necessary, but
in the process, who is truly studying whom? The scientists, when it comes down
to it, are not doing the work; the work is being done on them. At least, I feel
that's one of the layers here. The production also accomplishes an amazing
level of immersion into the world of the Solaris station with excellent sets,
strewn with the wreckage of "visitors" from the subconscious. They
also, however, reflect the surrealistic, artistic tone that most of Tarkovsky's
highly-visual films represent. It is ethereal and beautiful, while it is also
extremely dark and disturbing. Solaris
is not a neat, tidy sci-fi story, but rather a deeply morose journey into
psychological oblivion. That might sound extreme, and to an extent it is, but
it's also a highly entertaining. Solaris is, no doubt about it, an
"art" film that burns the brain cells—in a positive way—as it
exercises your imagination and your own philosophical nature, leaving its
viewers with something to discuss for many nights to come. It has stayed with
me since I first saw it back in 1990, and it will undoubtedly stay with you.
Solaris: Inner Space Criterion essay by Phillip Lopate, May 24, 2011
One Scene: Solaris Panos Cosmatos, May 25, 2011 (video)
Friday
Repertory Picks March 09,
2012 (video)
The
Atmospheres of Solaris Photo Gallery, February 16, 2012
12
Great Opening Shots Photo Gallery, May
09, 2013
Solaris (1972) - The Criterion Collection
Cult-Movie
Review: Solaris (1972) - John Kenneth Muir's ... March 7, 2014
Solaris | Criterion
Collection | Foreign Film | Movie Review ... Matthew from Classic Art Films
SOLARIS Andrei Tarkovsky - Alt Film Guide Dan Schneider
Solaris: Exploring the
Frontier of the Subconscious • Senses ...
Acquarello from Senses of Cinema,
March 5, 2000
The Natural and Modern Worlds
in Solaris – Offscreen David Hanley
from Offscreen, January 2011, again republished from P.U.L.S.E. World, October 27, 2014, here: The
Natural and Modern Worlds in Solaris | P.U.L.S.E
Auteur
in Space: Enter the World of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris Micah van Hove from No Film School, January 16, 2015
Connection between
Different Realities through Video ...
Analysis of the “Berton’s Report” film sequence from “Solaris”
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), by
Elena El Earthbourne from Offscreen,
March 2012, republished in P.U.L.S.E.
World, October 27, 2014: Connection
between Different Realities through Video ...
Akira Kurosawa on watching 'Solaris' with Andrei Tarkovsky ... TARKOVSKY AND SOLARIS BY AKIRA KUROSAWA, from The Asahi Shinbun Newspaper, May 13, 1977, also seen here: Kurosawa on the set of Solaris
[ Nostalghia.com | The Topics :: Tarkovsky on Solaris ]
The
Functions of Sound and Music in Tarkovsky's Films ... 8-page essay by Metin Colak (pdf)
Andrei Tarkovsky: Film and Painting – Creative Review Mark Sinclair from Creative Review, March 13, 2008
Review: Solaris by Andrei
Tarkovsky | Film Quarterly Timothy
Hyman, Spring 196, first page only (pdf)
andrey
tarkovsky's solaris Underman
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]
95. SOLARIS [SOLYARIS] (1972) | 366 Weird Movies G. Smalley, September 7, 2011
Solaris - The
Science-Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film ... Richard Scheib
163 Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham] listed as #6 on top 10 films
Žeksov Kulturni Centar Yossarian, July 10, 2007
Images Movie Journal David Gurevich reviews Tarkovsky and Soderbergh
Solaris (1972) Analysis - Cinema Sailor Dave Nostrand
Greg
Gerke | Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris in Mind | The ... The Nervous Breakdown
Solaris
- TCM.com Lang Thompson
Solaris (Solyaris) Jerry Weinsein from Culture Vuture
The
Lucid Nightmare: REVIEW: Solaris (1972) vs. Solaris ... Jay Schatzer reviews Tarkovsky and Soderbergh
'Solaris': Moral
Hazards on a Soviet Space Station ...
John Grassi from Pop Matters,
June 8, 2011
Solaris
(USSR 1972) | The Case for Global Film Ray Stafford
Review for Solyaris (1972) -
IMDb Ted Prigge
Great Films: Solyaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, USSR ... Jonathan Bygraves from Serene Velocity
The Cinema of Eastern Europe: Film Review: Solaris for Rabelais
... Olivia Maria Hărşan,
March 9, 2013, also film stills here: Film Review: Solaris/
Солярис (1972) Andrei Tarkovsky vs.
Solaris ...
Solaris – The film Tarkovsky didn't like. | Lisa Thatcher November 14, 2012
HorrorNews.net [Nigel Honeybone]
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Breakdown of the Director’s Filmmaking Jonathan Crow from Open Culture, June 30, 2015 (video)
Watch:
22-Minute Shot-By-Shot Analysis Of Andrei Tarkovsk ... Ken Guidry from The Playlist, June 9, 2015 (video)
READ MORE: This Video Essay Explores The Audio And Visual
Language Of Andrei Tarkovsky
Nicholas Laskin from The Playlist,
February 19, 2015 (video)
Tarkovsky’s Solaris Revisited Dan Colman includes A.O. Scott video review (2:56) of Solaris from Open Culture, February 2, 2011
Auteur in Space |
BFI kogonada’s video essay of Solaris from BFI Sight and Sound, January 2015 (5 minute video)
“Auteur
in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Transcends Science
Fiction Colin Marshall from Open Culture, August 14, 2015 (video)
Episode 5 - Andrei
Tarkovsky's Solaris - CriterionCast
Ryan Gallagher Podcast from Criterion
Cast, August 31, 2009 (audio)
Listen:
Preview Eduard Artemiev's Score For Andrei Tarkov ... Ben Brock from The Playlist, August 21, 2013 (audio)
Film @ The
Digital Fix - Solaris Michael
Brooke
The DVD Journal | Reviews : Solaris: The Criterion Collection D.K. Holm
DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] Criterion Collection
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores] (DVD)
Criterion Collection
About.com
Home Video/DVD [Ivana Redwine]
Criterion Collection
Review of Solaris (1972) - Challenging Destiny James Schellenberg, Criterion Collection
DVD
Talk [Buzz Burgess] Criterion Collection
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray
High-Def Digest [M. Enois Duarte] Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan] Criterion Blu-Ray
Solaris | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Rob Humanick, Criterion Blu-Ray
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel] Criterion Blu-Ray
Public Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
film
is love.: Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)
RM.
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Andrei
Tarkovsky: Solaris | The Mookse and the Gripes Trevor Berrett, May 1, 2013
Bill's
Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Solaris (1972) - Review |
Sci-Fi Movie Page James
O’Ehley
Scifilm Review Gerry Carpenter
Next Projection [Matthew Blevins]
Solaris (1972): A Cinematic Odyssey – The Ironic Man Prahlad Srihari
Movie Series
Review: Solaris | InSession Film JD
Duran
Andrei Tarkovsky - Strictly Film School Acquarello
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Tony Sullivan]
SOLARIS
(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Dennis Grunes
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
Reviewing Ebert's 'Greatest Films': Solaris (1972) Jaime Lopez from Screen Crave
solaris - film reviews for
zone-sf.com Gary Couzens and Ceri
Jordan reviews
Reviews (Film) -
New Red Archives Nicky Garratt
reviews of Mirror, Stalker, and Solaris
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman] capsule
review
Solaris Review | Top 100 Sci Fi
Movies listed as #21
The
Quietus | Reviews | Eduard Artemiev
Joseph Burnett on the musical composer, January 28, 2014
The Underview on 2001: Solaris
Posters movie posters
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie poster
Diary
Of A Screenwriter: Andrei Tarkovsky: Dialogue on ... Naum Abramov interview with Andrei Tarkovsky
while working on Solaris, 1970
BBCi
- Films Jamie Russell
Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky | Film review - Time Out
Out of this world Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, February 12, 2005
The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009
Solaris: No 6 best sci-fi and fantasy film of all time Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 21, 2010
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1976
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2003
Movie Review - - Film::'Solaris,' Russians in Space A ... Richard Eder from The New York Times, also seen here: New York Times (registration req'd)
DVDBeaver.com
- Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Solaris (1972
film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MIRROR A 99
aka: The
Looking Glass
When thought has been expressed in an artistic image, an
exact form has been found for it.
—Andrei Tarkovsky
Perhaps the ultimate abstract, “metaphysical” experience, extremely
difficult and challenging, to the point of being frustrating. With a book, you can re-read difficult
passages for greater understanding. In a
film, you get one shot at it, so there is more of a rhythmic flow of
events. In this film, Tarkovsky creates
wave after wave of new layers, using dream sequences, memories, and fantasies
intermingled with stark newsreel footage of the Spanish Civil War, the great
Russian retreat in WWII, Maoism in China, eventually arriving back at the
present, but continually looking back to our collective childhood, suggesting
perhaps that all the Russian families destroyed by war are being reconstructed
in the making of this film. After some thought, my take on this film is it's supposed to be
frustrating,
in the same way Picasso and Cubism were frustrating,
or atonalism, all frustrating to the prevailing, accepted standards. MIRROR blows a hole in
those conventional standards and is really an abstract, impressionistic
mosaic very similar to Eisenstein's POTEMKIN, only this comes after
WWII, the horrors of which the world had never seen. How does one comprehend
the insanity of war? Doesn't one have
to reach extremely deep inside and find a language which encompasses
everything, conscious and subconscious? Tarkovsky radically invents artistic poems of fragmented images, deeply felt personal images in what I now believe is a defiantly personal
film, where he takes on this awesome responsibility, suggesting perhaps that all Russian families destroyed by war are being reconstructed in the making of this film. The personal intensity of
someone caught up in near death experiences would probably closely
resemble the construction of thoughts in MIRROR, thoughts racing in all
directions, flashbacks, memories, dreams, attempts to find thoughts that are somehow appealing or comforting in the midst of such
horror. This is the reality of the moment which is
captured throughout this and other Tarkovsky films. Tarkovsky seems to be a man’s man, a
filmmaker’s filmmaker, one that others draw inspiration from due to the
richness of his material.
The film opens with a young man who stutters, while a female therapist is
using what appears to be methods of touching, and perhaps hypnosis to relieve
his anxiety. “I will relieve the tension
and you will speak effortlessly and clearly.”
This suggests relaxing the barriers of comprehension and all
pre-conceived theories and ideas about film language, history, and art. Only then is the viewer prepared for what
follows, much of which appears incomprehensible. Tarkovsky radically invents poems and
fragmented images, deeply felt personal images in a defiantly personal film, a
densely autobiographical study of the artist and his mother, wife, and child,
using a “Proustian plunge” into stream of consciousness and memory, inventing
something truly original and unique, a film with tremendous spiritual
energy. The film was made on a small
budget and went through 20 different editing processes until he settled on a
final cut.
There are 4 poems written by Tarkovsky’s father Arseni Tarkovsky, read, I believe, by the director. Tarkovsky films seem to feature an absent
father, and a beautiful, but cold and distant mother. The old woman is Tarkovsky’s mother, but is
played both young and old, using the same actress to play both the young mother
and the wife, which is deliberately confusing.
There is no grandmother, only a mother and children, the little boy is
the artist as a young boy, featuring a narrator who walks through his
childhood, trying to go through the mirror to reclaim his lost childhood and
the innocence which was once his, featuring music by Bach, Purcell, and
Pergolesi.
We celebrated each
moment of our feelings as
a revelation alone in all the world. You were lighter
and bolder than the wing of a bird
flying down the stairs two at a time
pure giddiness, leading me through moist lilac to
your domain beyond the looking glass.
When night fell I was favored.
The altar gates were opened and in the dark there
gleamed your nudity, and I slowly bowed. Awakening,
“Be blessed,” I said, and knew my blessing
to be bold for you still slept. The lilac
on the table stretched forth to touch your lids with heavenly blue
and your blue-tainted lids
were calm, and your hand was warm. Locked in crystal,
rivers pulsed, mountains smoked, seas glimmered. You held
a sphere of crystal in your hand and slept on a throne. And
— righteous Lord! — you were mine. You awakened
and transformed our mundane, human words. Then did
my throat fill with new power and give new meaning to “you”
which now meant “sovereign.” All was transformed, even such
simple things as basin, pitcher — when, like a sentinel,
layered, solid water lay between us. We were drawn
on and on where cities
built by magic parted
before us like mirages. Mint carpeted our way, birds
escorted us and fish swam upstream while the sky spread
out before us as Fate followed
in our wake like a madman brandishing a razor.
“Why are you so sad? Why are you
so happy? We are filled with doubts and
anxieties because we don’t trust our inner natures.” As one poem opens with an awakening, there
are images of a burning barn, drinking water from a well, then changing from
color to black and white, a child awakens asking for his father, while a mother
is washing her hair in a tub. It’s
raining outside, the woman looks in the mirror and sees an old woman looking
back. “Being silent for awhile is
good. Words can’t really convey emotions
that are inert.”
A woman rushes through a forest into town during a downpour of rain,
entering a newspaper company searching for a mistake she believes she made,
claiming she could see an improper word, eventually getting into an argument
with a coworker who tells her she’s always asking someone else to go “fetch
some water” for her. When she tries to
take a shower, there’s no water in the shower.
The narrator says when he remembers his mother, he sees his wife’s face.
During a marital breakup, we see images of a Spaniard imitating a
toreador killing a bull, a woman in exile claiming she can not return to Spain,
as her husband and children are Russian, which is followed by images of a
bombed city, children running through the streets, a moment of panic and shock,
a line of refugees, followed by a brief glimpse of victory, supported by an
eerie shot of giant balloons inscribed with the letters CCCP. A boy glances for several minutes through an
art book with drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, followed by a
quote from Pushkin: “Not for anything in the world would I change my country.”
We see a child’s memory at a military firing range, newsreel footage of
the WWII Russian retreat, where the soldiers are struggling to transport heavy
artillery across rivers of mud, a voice narrates “We are immortal,” followed by
an image of the atomic bomb, huge throngs of Chinese Maoists raising Red flags,
portraits of Chairman Mao, and carrying the Red book. We hear that the Tartars from the East never
crossed the Western border, preserving Christianity in Russia, though
geographically separated by churches from Europe, we see Christians, many
isolated, more looks at art drawings, reviewing pictures of the wife and the
old woman, then a memory of the old woman as a young woman after Moscow was
bombed. She was evacuated, moved into
the country, actually forced to beg for food for her two children, creating a
sense of guilt in the narrator as he knows his mother has dealt with political
terror and sacrificed everything for him, forcing him now to feel responsible
for all the conditions surrounding his life.
Then a boy looks at himself in the mirror, followed by the image of a woman’s hand, a burning branch behind the
hand makes the finger glow red, like a dim lamp. “Who did the angel appear to at the burning
bush? Moses.”
We see an image of the husband, the sacrifice of a rooster, then an
extraordinary image of a woman laying down, but suspended in air above the bed,
as if levitating, then a Greek poem about the separation of the soul and the
body. There is a light in the mirror, a
fluttering of curtains, a young boy with a giant vase of milk, then the boy is
naked, swimming in the water, the images of the mother turn into an old woman,
a boy on his bed holds a small bird in his hand, then lifts his hand and
releases the bird, followed by a landscape of a green forest across a meadow,
there are lovers in the meadow. “Do You
want a boy or girl?” Birth, a perfect act of creation, film,
thought, artistic expression as creation, life, nature’s way, followed by
mystical and physical images of nature.
The old woman returns, as we see aging wood growing moss, nature’s way
of aging, the old woman is walking in the meadow with two children. The wife looks at her life with tears in her
eyes, remaining behind, standing behind a tall cross, watching the old woman
taking the children further and further away, the camera recedes into a dark
forest, receding further until the trees blot out the meadow, receding still
further, blotting out all life, revealing only darkness.
I trust not premonitions and I fear not omens. I flee
not from slander nor poison. There is no death.
We are all immortal. All is immortal. Fear not
death at seventeen nor at seventy.
There is only reality and light.
There is neither dark nor death
in this, our world.
We have reached the beach and I
am one of those who pull the nets in when
immortality arrives in batches. Live
in a house and it will not crumble. I will summon
a century at will, enter
and build my house in it. That is why
your children and your wives all share my board, the table
serving forefather and grandson: the future is decided now.
*************************
The first time I saw MIRROR, I had no idea what to expect, and I found it damn near incomprehensible, almost to the point of being angry at how
frustrating it was. Then in the lobby after the film, I heard all these
other people whining and
complaining about how difficult this film was, how pretentious and what a piece of crap it was, like who the hell did this person think he
was, etc, what a pompous ass
- thoughts along
these lines, which made me
re-think my entire view of the film, as I, personally, did not wish to be associated with the whiners and the complainers. I wasn't going to
be a film wimp. So this was a transforming film experience, as I had to personally re-invent my take on
this film. Understanding the reality of that moment, transforming a single moment in time
through art, the art of opening
up the human soul to an artistic
image, is present in all
Tarkovsky films.
BAM/PFA - Film Programs Richard Peña
“One of the highpoints in the development of
modern cinema.”—Maximilian Le Cain, Senses of Cinema
For many, The Mirror is simply Tarkovsky’s masterpiece –– his most
ambitious and most emotionally wrenching film. The plot, such as it is,
concerns a dying man who reflects back on his childhood during World War II,
the postwar transformation of Russian society, and his difficult relations with
his wife and his mother. Yet, the film is concerned not with the facts of the
memories than the memory’s textures: the precise feelings experienced at these
moments. A collage of imagery –– including dramatic sequences, personal
memories, newsreels, dreams and purely abstract passages –– the film also
liberally quotes from the poetry of Tarkovsky’s father Arseny. In a double role
as both the narrator’s estranged wife and his mother, Margareta Terekova is
simply amazing.
Mix: Needle Drops – Long
Pauses Darren Hughes
(excerpt)
My all-time favorite needle drop accompanies my favorite sequence
in what also happens to be my favorite film, Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror.
Midway through the film, Tarkovsky interjects a strange sequence in which a
party of Spanish immigrants tell stories of the Civil War and bullfighting.
(It's all part of his on-going meditation on the meanings of nostalgia.)
Tarkovsky augments their stories with found footage of Spaniards fleeing the
war, building his montage to a crescendo with the sounds of frantic crowds and
squealing trains and ending on a shot of a young, frightened girl who stares
directly into the camera. And then silence. And a cut to more found footage --
this time of early Soviet ballooners and a ticker-tape parade. I always cry at
the precise moment Tarkovsky fades in the sound of Pergolesi's "Stabat Mater, No 12:
Quando corpus."
The
Mirror | The Cinematheque Pacific Cinematheque
Andrei Tarkovsky’s visually sumptuous fourth feature is the great director’s most personal and poetic (and Proustian) film. The Mirror offers an idiosyncratic history of twentieth-century Russia, in the form of a poet’s fragmented reflections on three generations of his family. The poems used in the film were written and read by the Tarkovsky’s own father (the poet Arseny Tarkovsky); Tarkovsky’s mother appears in a small role as the protagonist’s elderly mother. In a dual role, actress Margarita Terekhova is both the protagonist’s wife and his mother as a younger woman. “The Mirror is Tarkovsky’s central film, and his most personal one, although it might be better described as a transpersonal autobiography. Dreams and memories of an individual protagonist (who is never seen on screen) blend with dreams and memories of the culture. The generations of one family mingle. The Mirror achieves something which is uniquely possible in cinema but which no other film has even attempted: it expresses the continuity of consciousness across time, in a flow of images of the most profound beauty” (Amnon Buchbinder). “Profoundly intimate ... one of the rare completely achieved films of autobiography” (Mark Le Fanu). “An essential film, an extraordinarily beautiful movie” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice).
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Tristan Johnson
Long before the great TREE OF LIFE euphoria of 2011, another film
(from another director's famously sparse oeuvre) went off uncharted into the
space between memories past and present, mapping onto them a universal
significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical
doors in the desert, but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion
project can be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level.
Long a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that he
was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of film stock, he
began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear, dreamlike progression of
the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend, and they perhaps explain
why this is his most fleeting film outside his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn
across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of
consciousness journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as
father and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's
own father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet, ethereal
imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a hazy dream of
cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early. But lest the length
should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners. No surprise that at his
most personal, he's also at his most esoteric, so an afternoon spent with one
of his aforementioned films would be a good primer. As for those already in his
thrall, this is imperative viewing. (1974, 108 min, 35mm)
Mirror | Neil Young's Film Lounge - Jigsaw Lounge
“Whatever happens, I must make Mirror - that is... a
duty... I think constantly about Mirror. It could make a beautiful
picture. It will actually be an instance of a film based in its entirety on
personal experience. And for that reason, I’m convinced, it will be important
to those who see it.”
(Tarkovsky, 7th Sept, 1970)
Whether or not Mirror is Tarkovsky’s greatest film is a matter for the viewer. It’s undeniably his most accessible. Unlike everything else he produced after his debut, Ivan’s Childhood, Mirror isn’t forbiddingly long, nor does it explore matters of challenging philosophy. Uniquely among his seven pictures, scenes take place in a recognisably modern, urban environment. But Mirror is hardly a straightforward watch. There’s no ‘plot’ as such; single actors take multiple roles; we switch episodically back and forwards through time, switching between colour and tinted monochrome, often within the same scene. But you soon grasp what’s going on. For perhaps the only time, Tarkovsky freed himself from conventional narrative altogether, and instead attempted something different - to recreate his own world of memories on celluloid. And it is a stunning success.
Films can only really be validly compared with other films, but that’s easier said than done with a picture like Mirror. It’s as much a poetic and literary project as a cinematic one - Peter Handke’s 70s diaries and notebooks published as The Weight of the World are a good parallel. Tarkovsky uses extracts from his father’s verse (“I’ll conjure up which century I like...” to stitch together an intricate network of images and scenes, memories and dreams, colours and shapes and sounds. The cumulative effect is overwhelming, such is the director’s absolute control over, and confidence in, his material. What we see may only make total sense to Tarkovsky himself - these are deeply personal shards of autobiography he’s manipulating - but that doesn’t mean his audiences will be in any way baffled or alienated. This is his triumph - to create a valid, personal universe into which others can step, sure of their path through the forest of his subconscious.
It seems perverse to summarise or synopsise the ‘events’ of Mirror, but, roughly speaking, it’s the result of a 40-year-old, lying ill in his Moscow flat, looking back over his life. He narrates the story, but we never see his face. He’s separated from his wife (Margarita Terekhova) and child (Ignat Daniltsev), and, when she pays a visit, admits that their relationship partly broke down because he never sorted out his relationship with his mother. Meanwhile Ignat forms future memories of his own. The past is always protruding, unbidden, into the present, and we flash back to various episodes in the narrator’s childhood in the country, some momentous, some apparently trivial - Daniltsev plays the young narrator, Terekhova the mother - interspersed with newsreel footage of key events in recent Soviet history.
While it’s often tricky to establish exactly what’s going on, you don’t care - Mirror is such a seductively watchable experience. This is partly due Terekhova’s astonishing double performance as the mother/wife, at one point gazing hypnotically, full into the camera, as she’s about to kill a cockerel. It’s also because the film is studded with some of the most astonishing images in all cinema. Fire and rain are everywhere, curtains billow in mysterious darkened rooms, winds gust over fields and through forests (Tarkovsky must have used a windmachine for some of these effects). A man lies on a bed, picks up a wounded bird, cradles it for a moment before throwing it up, and it rises in slow motion through the air. There isn’t a single bad shot in the movie, not a single off-note struck. Apparently Tarkovsky went through 20 cuts before he was happy, and it shows, it was worth it. What he ended up with was perhaps the ultimate example of what a supremely talented individual - an artist - can do with cinema. Compared with this, should we even call these other things films at all?
“I should like to ask you all not to be so demanding, and should not think of Mirror as a difficult film. It is no more than a straightforward, simple story. It doesn’t have to be made any more understandable.” (Tarkovsky, 29th April, 1975)
Zerkalo - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Patrick Heenan from Film Reference
At a press conference in 1975, Andrei Tarkovsky asserted that Mirror "is no more than a straightforward, simple story" which "doesn't have to be made any more understandable"; yet it has acquired an intimidating reputation for inaccessibility and self-indulgence. All the incidents are taken from his own or his relatives' lives, three members of his family can be seen or heard in it and there are several dream sequences; but why should anyone who is not a Tarkovsky be interested in them? As for the occasional extracts from documentary footage, notably of Soviet troops in the Second World War, are they anything more than disconnected bits of history, especially now that the Soviet Union is as dead and gone as the Holy Roman Empire? Yet Mirror does go on impressing those who see it through and can resonate in the mind long afterwards, whether through specific images or as an atmosphere, a sense of dream and memory coming together. Perhaps the best way into it is through another of Tarkovsky's remarks at that press conference, his invitation to "look, learn, use the life shown here as an example." Looking and learning do not require a Ph.D. in Tarkovsky Studies. Even a child can do all three—which is another clue to Tarkovsky, for whom children seem to have represented idealism (as in Ivan's Childhood ), inventiveness (as in Andrei Rublev ), and other qualities which adult life may distort or erode.
Mirror begins with a boy in a city apartment watching a television demonstration of hypnosis; a young woman stands in a field at twilight, smoking a cigarette and waiting for someone, though not for the soldier who passes by; her son plays with a cat while a voice reads a poem which refers to a "domain . . . beyond the mirror" (in Kitty Hunter-Blair's translation). These first few minutes suggest that two separate periods of time are being depicted and that the "mirror" of the title—as in Lewis Carroll's story Through the Looking Glass or Jean Cocteau's film Orphée —is a gateway between two worlds. The suggestion (not so much mysticism as truism) is confirmed later on, when the same woman is reflected in a real mirror that shows her to be much older.
This is in fact Tarkovsky's mother, the boy in what we learn is the 1930s represents Tarkovsky, the voice on the soundtrack is that of his father (the poet Arseny Tarkovsky) and the 1970s boy is his son. But these purely personal facts actually matter much less than they would in a more mainstream, linear narrative, precisely because of the intercutting between story (private memories) and newsreel (public memories), reality and dreams, children and adults. The connections among these elements are made clearer rather than more obscure by Tarkovsky's careful alternation of colour, sepia tinting and black and white, as well as by the slow pace of every scene. Thus the almost always absent father (in the 1930s), seen returning at last in soldier's uniform, is linked to footage of the Soviet army slogging through marshland and to a comic scene of military training disrupted by the instructor's incompetence and the boys' distractedness. The almost always present mother is recalled by her resemblance to a woman in a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, seen in the 1970s. Both of these lonely people are reflected by shots of Spanish refugees living in Moscow and, perhaps, by contrast with the crowds hailing Mao Tse-tung in shots of China. Again, the early log cabin, isolated between fields and woods, is paralleled by the later Moscow apartment, another refuge from human and climatic coldness.
The dissolving of the everyday barriers among these phenomena culminates in the dream sequences, each grounded by being shown to be inside the mind of the boy in the 1930s. He sees water cascading through the room and down the walls after watching his mother wash her hair; the house burns in dreams after burning in reality; he imagines his mother floating away from her bed while he is waiting anxiously for her to emerge from a doctor's surgery; the wind moves across the meadow as his father would if he were to come back.
Tarkovsky's meditative approach, his presentation of a broad range of loosely connected images and events in a variety of cinematic formats, actually frees audiences from the need for too many footnotes or translations. Mirror tells us something of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union in Stalin's 1930s and Brezhnev's 1970s but it also evokes as much recognition as surprise, for even viewers who know nothing of Tarkovsky's life, Soviet history or, for that matter, the paintings which he "quotes" in some scenes, know as much as he did about nostalgia, dreaming and other forms of longing, and about comparing and contrasting what is, and what was, with what might have been.
In Mirror Tarkovsky opens up his world—arguably more successfully than in his later films, which are less autobiographical but also more tightly bound to an increasingly explicit and unsubtle religiosity— just as, in the film, his son opens a book of Leonardo's paintings, inviting readings that will differ from viewer to viewer, and indeed (given the film's main themes) at different times in any viewer's life. Orson Welles, whom Tarkovsky greatly admired, once said that a film is "a ribbon of dreams." Mirror is an example of the many ways in which filmmakers and audiences together can transform private dreams into shared visions.
Interview: Susan
Howe - Film Comment Stefania Heim
interview with poet Susan Howe from Film
Comment, November 24, 2015
By her own admission, acclaimed poet Susan Howe is not a film critic. But boundary-crossing—between genres, disciplines, art forms, and even past and present—is central to all of her work: her dozens of books, her visual art exhibitions, and her collaborative performances. Perhaps her most thrilling commixture, found across all of her artistic modes, is that which adds dream to fact, lyric to document. This interrogation of the real, as well as the haunting connections that grow from it, links her work to that of 20th-century Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose Mirror she will introduce at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on Tuesday, November 24. In Tarkovsky’s films, Howe confronts the “confusion or juxtaposition between living truth or acting life.” But this is not all the poet and the filmmaker share: both create deeply personal works, which, through their intimacy, open up to and become urgent for their audiences. Howe and I caught up over the phone and email this week to talk about, among other things, the paradoxical alchemy of the “poetic documentary form.”
First: Why Andrei
Tarkovsky’s The Mirror?
The Mirror moves me so powerfully it is impossible to express. The experience of viewing the multi-layered visual sequences with their diverse sound effects, the very particular use of music (electronic, classical, and flamenco) and voiceover amounts to an epiphany. Near the beginning, we hear the disembodied voice of the filmmaker’s poet-father Arseniy Tarkovsky reciting his poem “First Meetings.” “Ordinary objects are at once transfigured / Everything—the jug—the basin—when placed between us like a sentinel / Stood water laminary and firm.” In The Mirror nothing is firm, water least of all. Nothing is sure in its endlessly shifting connections, mirrored tracking shots, lens zooms, shots and countershots. Not even color. Dogs bark, coins give off electric shocks, heartbeats become drum-rolls. Margarita Terekhova’s facial expressions enchant and repel, forming a visual synthesis with Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci. Tarkovsky’s real mother acts the part of the dead-narrator-absent-father’s-mother. Or is she Maria (Masha, Marusia) in time’s mirror? Over all—the soughing of wind rushing through a meadow of buckwheat at the edge of the forest suggests a transcendent realm of second-sight. Arseniy Tarkovsky’s poem, which begins as an expression of Edenic parental love, comes to “Fate following in our tracks / Like a madman with a razor in his hand.” Transference. Let’s tell our future together. Nothing is ever firm in dream-logic.
Only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic signals from originary life events. Can da Vinci, Breughel, Bach, and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater hold the representative force of other people’s lives within us? Watching The Mirror, I wonder: what is a birthplace? Can a reconstructed wooden dacha, a table, a loaf of bread, a glass of milk at the edge of the forest, reflect a primal idea of divinity where parents unite in make-believe, beginning over in salvation history? Ring. What is the time of a telephone? Is this the angel of poetry? Pick up the receiver: voiceover narration. Your grandmother who is a stranger stands at the door.
The Mirror opens
with a scene in which a woman cures a young man’s stutter; it’s a scene that
isn’t returned or alluded to again. The stutter is also hugely important to
you—you’ve written: “It’s the stutter in American literature that
interests me.” What is it about the stutter? And what do you think that first
scene is doing?
For Wallace Stevens, “A poem is a meteor.” The Mirror is a meteor, because a film can also transiently dazzle or strike with wonder. In his great essay, “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “Doubt not, O poet, but persist. . . . Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power, which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of a whole river of electricity.” The poet Charles Olson tells us that “the stutter is the plot” in Melville’s Billy Budd.
The Mirror’s documentary Prologue, which comes before the film credits, is a non-acted session between a stutterer and his speech therapist. The English subtitles tell us she is saying: “You will speak loudly and clearly all your life.” “I can speak.” He clearly answers.
In the 19th-century American writers I love, you find the same anxiety about speaking clearly in relation to European predecessors and contemporaries. This sense of geographical separation from European culture is expressed by Tarkovsky in that opening television documentary sequence, and it is repeated at the heart of the film when a mysterious older woman (made up to resemble Anna Akhmatova) tells the protagonist’s adolescent son Ignat to read her a crucial passage from a letter Pushkin wrote to the philosopher Piotr Chaadaev in 1836 about Russia’s geographic isolation from Europe. Interestingly, women in both these separate but connected sequences are the people giving orders. One is a real hypnotist-speech therapist, the other is Other. She returns during the voiceover narrator’s deathbed scene. The synthesis of these outside commanders is supernatural. There is television and there is telepathic vision. Is The Mirror a religious Soviet war poem?
How did you first
encounter the film?
In 1993, because of a book I had written on Emily Dickinson and my interest in documents and manuscripts, I was asked to contribute an essay for a collection Stanley Cavell and Charles Warren were then working on that later became Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. They suggested I write something about a recent PBS series of documentaries on Poets. To me that series was essentially dull. A graduate student of mine at Buffalo who was also a filmmaker suggested I look at Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil because it could be considered a documentary film and a poem at once. Sans Soleil and La Jetée opened a new world to me. It was a world that included the films of Dziga Vertov and above all Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. It took me two years to write “Sorting Facts; or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker.” The section on The Mirror became the heart of the essay and it has changed the way I have written essays which could almost be called poems ever since.
You’ve mentioned to me
some confluences between Tarkovsky’s film and your own work that you find
haunting, chiefly that image of the father on furlough from the war—he is
standing in his uniform and his children clasp him. Both your own poetics and
Tarkovsky’s seem to grow from this intersection of war, childhood, and the
impulse to make art. Can you talk about this?
My husband the sculptor David von Schlegell had died the year before I started work on the Marker essay. I was in a state of shock where one is thrown back or thrown open to dream terrors and involuntary memory. Tarkovsky was born in 1932. I was born five years later. So for me time and memory are also perpetually divided into prewar, war, the atomic bomb, Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq, and on and on. Born in 1920, David was almost old enough to be my father. He had been a bomber pilot in World War II. My own father also left to fight in the war shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Like Tarkovsky, I, too, have prewar memories and repetitive dreams of a prelapsarian world. In my writing I have gone over and over a prewar memory the way Tarkovsky’s dream wouldn’t let him go. We lived in Buffalo then. It was December and I was at the Zoo in Delaware Park with my father. A crowd had gathered around the polar bear enclosure. It consisted of a fake cave and a small waterfall meant to represent the Arctic tundra. The three captive bears were unusually excited: they rushed about in circles, dashing into the water and shaking it off. My father who always loved animals held on tightly to my hand and said: “They must know something tremendous has happened somewhere.” When we got home we heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Or that is what I remember. He enlisted in the Army shortly after that and went off to North Africa and Europe for the war years. The 1940s, even for a child living safely in America, were times of crisis and loss. When you are a child, duration seems to have no end. This was before television. We either listened to disembodied voices on the radio or watched newsreels at the beginning of every Saturday morning children’s film show at our local theatre. Newsreels as violent generating centers and relay points in a “theater of war” framed the feature films. The signals and transmissions, the receivers and senders, the ins and outs, reversals, absences, refugees, children separated from parents, starved bodies, all the mutilations of love in time’s relentless march from war to war. I feel connected to The Mirror to say the very least.
You began to describe the
soundscape of The Mirror in your answer to my first question. Especially
given your own recent experiences with sound work, can you talk about this
aspect of Tarkovsky’s film?
Recent work I have done with the musician and composer David Grubbs has drawn me towards electronic music and field recording. Eduard Artemiev’s score for The Mirror was recorded on a Soviet electronic synthesizer, and the way it mixes the chemical quality of electronic music with natural sounds (rain, wind, dog barking) and silences in nature provides a sense of the “primary notes of the world.” There is no other way to describe this effect than to say it restores a sense of the deep past.
Has The Mirror
changed for you since you first wrote about it almost 20 years ago? Do you
experience it in the same way now?
When I finished “Sorting Facts” I resolved never to write about film again. When I first saw The Mirror, I was innocent. I had never attempted to write film criticism. Then it was the use of documentary newsreel footage that entranced me. Here, while struggling over what to say for this short interview I can identify with Alexi’s mother’s panicked rush to the printer to correct a typographical error she thinks she may have missed. Because now I see it’s impossible to capture that sense of the power of dream projections in time that form the essential mystery of this film. It reminds me of the way I was overwhelmed years and years ago when I first saw Cocteau’s Orpheus in what we then called a movie theater. Eurydice disappears after Orpheus looks back. The beast in Beauty and the Beast loses his charm when he changes from prince to human. And there are certainly echoes of Cocteau’s film throughout The Mirror.
Disembodied linkages create a kind of light in the darkness. There are particular local places where things have happened, places enclosed and ordered in memory. They put us in communication and restore order. In a violent, contemporary possibly Third World War even Chris Marker might never have imagined (although he comes close in La Jetée), the wooden dacha in The Mirror calls my own refugee mother home. She was also an actor and an author. She left her pre- and post-civil war life in Ireland and arrived in Boston in 1935, shortly before all hell broke loose. We are all tossed out into time’s wilderness—life itself. Almost at the end of the film we see Tarkovsky’s own mother Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova acting the part of Maria grown old. She is striding through a meadow at the edge of the forest with her two children (they could be grandchildren). Off-screen voices sing the opening of the St. John Passion. Watching this great film in 2015 I arrive at a sense of the past though art. Selective ordering, luck, research, projection—second-sight.
A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky's Theory of Time ... A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of Time-Pressure, Part 2: A Textual Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, by David George Menard from Offscreen, August 2003
Smith -- on the use of poetry in Tarkovsky's Film Mirror | Dr ... Andrei Tarkovsky as Reader of Arsenii Tarkovsky’s Poetry in the Film Mirror, by Alexander Smith from Russian Studies in Literature (pages 46 – 63), Summer 2004
The Mirror | Kino Lorber
| Foreign Film | Movie Review | 1975
Matthew from Classic Art Films
Mirror Andrei Tarkovsky film
analysis • Senses of Cinema Sam
Ishii-Gonzales from Senses of Cinema,
March 2014
The Mirror - Reverse
Shot Ryland Walker Knight, July 6,
2007
Dan Schneider on The Mirror -
Cosmoetica
Mirror
| Electric Sheep David Cairns
146.
Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky's “Zerkalo” (Mirror ... Jugu Abraham from Movies That Make You Think, June 2, 2013
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rich Watts]
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Žeksov Kulturni Centar Yossarian, July 10, 2008
Best
Movie Ever: Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Mirror'
Landon Palmer and Scott Beggs
discussion from Film School Rejects,
April 15, 2013
The
Art of Film: Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" - the film ... Grant Douglas Bromley from Film Review Realm
Movie Reviews
|| Nick Renkoski || The Mirror (1975 ...
Reflected glory: the spirit of Tarkovsky lives on at the Mirror ... Anton Sazonov from The Calvert Journal, June 17, 2013
World
Cinema Review: Andrei Tarkovsky | Zerkalo (The Mirror) Douglas Messerli
THOUGHTS OF XANADU: Tarkovsky's Mirror Kubla Khan
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell]
MIRROR
(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
Denis Grunes
Images Movie Journal David Gurevich reviews 4 masterworks of Soviet cinema
Film @ The
Digital Fix - The Mirror Michael Brooke
mirror - review at
videovista.net Gary Couzens
The
Andrei Tarkovsky Collection Review | Filmwerk Chris Hick
[
Nostalghia.com | The Topics :: Tarkovsky's Mirror (RusCiCo ... Jan
Bielawski and Trond Trondsen of Nostalghia.com
A Quick Guide to The Mirror, by David Miall
Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) - BlogalongaRusskie #4 ... Simon Kinnear from Kinnemaniac
Mirror (Zerkalo, Tarkovsky, 1975) | Aesthetics Of The Mind Kamran Ahmed
REVIEW:
Зеркало [The Mirror] [1975] |
www.jaredmobarak ... Jared
Mobarek
Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror | AIDY Reviews... Sandy Hoffman
Andrei Tarkovsky: The Mirror (1975) - Can't Stop the Movies Kyle Miner and Andrew Hathaway
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Spurious: Tarkovsky Lars Iyer, February 2, 2004
The Mirror – Andrei Tarkovsky (1975) | Celluloid Wicker Man Adam Scovell
Seeking 'Holy Moments' at the Movies - BreakPoint Darren Hughes from Findings Journal, April 1, 2003
Andrei Tarkovsky - Strictly Film School Acquarello
Andrei Tarkovksy - The Mirror - Strictly Film School Review brief response from Cold Bacon
Classic
Throwback: The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974) Andy Buckle from The Film Emporium
2010
Arts and Faith Top 100 (Voted #16)
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Reviews (Film) -
New Red Archives Nicky Garratt
reviews of Mirror, Stalker, and Solaris
Nitrate
Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
The Line Test Journals: Tarkovsky's Mirror, Beat by Beat ... Josh Wedlake itemizes characters and events in chronological order at The Line Test Journals, September 21, 2012
Mirror (1974) | BFI Sight
and Sound
Mirror ( Andrei
Tarkovsky, 1975) : juan huston : Free ...
The Mirror - Kino Lorber
Theatrical
The Mirror, the Russian Drama by Andrei Tarkovsky | Fandor
Sight
& Sound 2012 Directors' Top 100 - BFI ranked #9 in Director’s Poll
Mirror (1974) | BFI ranked #19th in 2012 Critic’s Poll
Mirror - Film4 John Fortgang
BBCi - Films Jonathan Crocker
Mirror | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
REVIEW: Two films of renowned Russian film director ... Nostalghia and Mirror reviews by Lindsay Waite from The Portland Examiner
Movie Review - - NEW FILM STIRS SOVIET AUDIENCE ... The New York Times
The Mirror - Movie Review and Showtimes - New York ... Tayt Harlin from New York magazine
DVDBeaver.com
- Blu-ray [Gary W. Tooze]
The Mirror (1975 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
STALKER
(Сталкер) A 100
Here we are at the threshold. This is the most important moment of your lives.
You have to know that here your most cherished wish will come true.
The most sincere one. The one reached through suffering.
—Stalker
(Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) from STALKER (1979)
“It
is about the existence of God in man, and about the death of spirituality as a
result of our possessing false knowledge.” —Andrei Tarkovsky
Now
the summer has passed.
It
might never have been.
It
is warm in the sun,
But
it isn’t enough.
All
that might’ve occurred
Like
a five-fingered leaf
Fluttered
into my hands,
But
it isn’t enough.
Neither
evil nor good
Has
yet vanished in vain,
It
all burned and was light,
But
it isn’t enough.
Life
has been as a shield,
And
has offered protection.
I
have been most fortunate,
But
it isn’t enough.
The
leaves were not burned.
The
boughs were not broken,
The
day clear as glass,
But
it isn’t enough.
—But
There Has to be More, by Arseny Tarkovsky, the director’s
father, recited by the Stalker outside The Room
One of the great achievements in cinema history, Tarkovsky unearths new
grounds in this beautifully hypnotic, oddly ambiguous, near complete re-write
of a Russian science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris
Strugatsky, where Tarkovsky eliminates all but the barest traces of science
fiction, turning this instead into a philosophical parable on human
existence. Much like the journey of the three Wise Men seeking spiritual
guidance, yet ironically a film requiring the tacit approval of the Communist
Soviet State, this film incorporates several Scriptural references, including a
strangely unbiblical Revelations
dream sequence and a reference to Emmaus Road where two of Jesus’disciples
failed to recognize the person who (in an atheistic, totalitarian controlled
society) shall not be named—the resurrected Christ, not to mention a character
wearing a crown of thorns, and features a similar quest for knowledge and
insight, but it’s set in an unnamed future evidenced by train whistles and a
corrosive post-industrial world of toxic waste, rot, and decay, where the
interior human component comes to mirror that soulless reflection of destroyed,
meaningless lives.
Beset with difficulties from the outset, Tarkovsky initially shot nearly
half the film before realizing the Kodak film stock, rare in Russia, was
defective, where he immediately petitioned for additional funding, which was
granted only on the condition he’d shoot a 2-part film, and money was forwarded
for the 2nd part. In the second attempt at filming, the crew
experienced equipment problems, shutting down production. Tarkovsky actually suffered a heart attack
after firing his original cinematographer Georgi Rerberg, who filmed MIRROR
(1975), and also his production designer Aleksandr Bojm, claiming artistic
differences, which allowed the director time to change the entire concept of a
film that was initially conceived in 'Scope and ended up in a more tightly
constricted, boxed 1:33 aspect ratio, and where the character of the Stalker
evolved from an arrogantly confident smuggler to a man constantly at odds with
his own fragile human limitations.
Cameraman Leonid Kalashnikov showed up on the set for a few weeks before
being replaced by Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, while Tarkovsky himself assumed the
set designer duties. In addition, the shooting took place near an
abandoned hydroelectric plant in Tallinn, Estonia, where the actors and film
crew may have spent months exposed to chemical poisoning from the toxic white
foam floating down the Jägala River, causing allergic reactions on the set and
where Tarkovsky himself, his wife Larissa, and his favorite leading actor
Anatoli Solonitsyn all died within a decade from similar causes, pulmonary lung
cancer. Due to bureaucratic censor boards and ongoing feuds regarding
artistic integrity and a continuing difficulty obtaining State funding, this is
the final film Tarkovsky shot in
Opening in a Sepia-toned Black and White, Aleksandr Kaidanovsky plays
the Stalker, a painstakingly conscientious guide with the mental capacity to
illegally lead people successfully through a dangerous and forbidden,
unpopulated area known as The Zone, "the quietest place in the world"
where the faint sounds of birds can be heard, the result perhaps of alien
activity or an intelligence greater than our own, and of a meteorite falling
several decades earlier, where in the center is a destination known as The
Room, a place where one’s innermost desire can become true. Soldiers initially entered the swampy region
in tanks with weapons and never returned, now full of syringes, medical waste,
contaminated standing water, and discarded human artifacts and debris,
overgrown with vegetation over time, surrounded by gates and barbed wire while
protected by military personnel. Against the wishes of his distraught
wife and physically deformed daughter, somehow the genetic result of his
activities in The Zone, the Stalker agrees to guide two men into The Zone,
Anatoli Solonitsyn as the cynical Writer and Nikolai Grinko as the science
Professor.
Their harrowing ride into the eerie stillness of The Zone leads to one
of the most brilliantly constructed sequences, a seamlessly envisioned train
ride where the edited images, seemingly captured in one shot (there are 5)
perfectly match the haunting, anticipatory mood and psychology of the men with
the quiet, rhythmic clacking of the train, where once they finally reach their
destination the world around them quickly turns into color. While the two
are contemptibly suspicious of their guide's unerring caution, the Stalker is
wary about proceeding too quickly, never taking a straight line, but zigs and
zags in the direction where they’re going, where the mystery of The Zone
changes with each visit, a maze of constantly shifting traps, where the rules
of entry also seem to change, allowing the passage of some but denying entrance
to others. For the Stalker, he never knows the intentions of his
passengers and can only hope for the best, proceeding as cautiously as
possible. Despite the apparent simplicity of the journey itself,
Tarkovsky creates vivid suspense throughout the entire length of their quest,
making this something of an edge of your seat thriller, as one never knows what
to expect, not even the Stalker himself who recounts some of his earlier
adventures, some not so successful. Notable are the inclusion of unique
dream sequences, some spectacular passageways, a gorgeous electronic
soundtrack from composer Eduard Artemyev, Tarkovsky’s signature interior rain
sequences, and the appearance of a black dog that grows attached to the
Stalker.
STALKER begins a pattern that
continues in Tarkovsky’s final two films, expressing a self-destructive world
of commerce or transitory concerns that has lost touch with its own existence
and all connections with nature, a world where faith and spirituality have also
been lost or discarded, featuring Stalkers, Holy Fools or lost souls who are
treated with scorn and contempt by those they attempt to save. Looked
upon by others as weak, despised, and even a bit mad, Stalker recognizes his
own limited human condition, a rugged but wounded soul most likely damaged from
his exposure to some poisonous chemical or radioactive substance, grown weary from
a world in constant decay, filled with a palpable fear for having to live with
the potential damaging consequences of continuously exposing himself and his
family to the unknown elements of The Zone. Yet it is his awareness of
his human weakness that is the source of a spiritual connection that others
lack. While plainly an attack on the spiritual emptiness of society, in
STALKER, all the initial hopes expressed to alter man’s destiny are dashed by
the complexity and near incomprehensibility of reaching the precipice of The
Room, that moment when all potential solutions vanish from the minds of mortal
beings, described by some as that “poverty of spirit,” perhaps struck by the
all-knowing omniscience and enormity of it all, where at least in one of the
earlier scripts (there were supposedly 10), Writer acknowledges “We haven’t
matured to this place.” One of the most
emotionally compelling moments is when trifling personal motives are exposed
and the painfully disappointed Stalker breaks down to reveal the extent of his
own personal anguish and the heavy toll this journey takes on his wounded
psyche, as he can lead others to the mysteries of The Room, hoping they can
find wisdom and salvation, but cannot receive any personal benefit himself,
claiming “It lets those pass who have lost all hope, not good or bad, but
wretched people.” In the end, The Zone is less a place than each man's
individual reaction to it.
In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky
acknowledges a central theme of “human dignity (and) how a man suffers if he
has no self-respect,” reflected in the Stalker’s draining faith in mankind,
also the redemptive powers of love expressed by Stalker’s wife in her final
monologue, calling it a “final miracle to set against the unbelief, cynicism,
(and) moral vacuum poisoning the modern world…It is about the existence of God
in man, and about the death of spirituality as a result of our possessing false
knowledge.” While the Writer and Professor are ultimately humbled and
rendered human, as if challenged by passing through the rigors of Dante's Inferno,
a kind of Vladimir and Estragon lost in the incomprehensibility of their banal
existence in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,
their arrogance and hubris are reflected in iconic Russian figures,
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor comes to mind from The Brothers Karamazov and the worshipping of false prophets, also
the imposter, the Pretender Tsar from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, both works that also feature a similar witnessing
Holy Fool character that was also present in ANDREI RUBLEV (1966). The false Trinity of Stalker’s
misguided faith, the Professor’s wrongful use of reason, and Writer’s art that
ultimately is expressed in self doubt, fail to produce the expected miracle
that instead appears in Stalker’s own family, combining his own spirituality
and his wife’s steadfast devotion with his daughter’s unexplained mysticism
that is nothing less than transcendence, especially considering the squalor and
industrial ugliness that is everpresent in the polluted landscape of this
world, where the muted sounds of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy can strangely and ironically be heard. Tarkovsky
certainly attempts to draw a distinction between what is human and what is
eternal in his films, where this film shows a myopic tendency for humans to
dwell on phantoms and incidental matter that is purely transitory, failing to
recognize the distinguishing human element that defines our earthly
existence—the selfless capacity to love.
Against
the fractured density of Mirror, Stalker sets a form of absolute
linear simplicity. The Stalker leads two men, the Writer and the Professor,
across the Zone - a forbidden territory deep inside a police state - towards
the Room, which can lay bare the devices and desires of your heart. However,
let no one persuade you that this is sci-fi or common allegory. The ragged,
shaven-headed men are familiar from Solzenitzyn, and the zone may be a sentient
landscape of hallucinatory power, but its deadly litter of industrial detritus
is all too recognisable. The wettest, grimmest trek ever seen on film leads to
nihilistic impasse - huddled in dirt, the discovery of faith seems impossible;
and without faith, life outside the Zone, impossible. But hang on in to the
ending, where a plain declaration of love and a vision of pure magic at least
point the way to redemption. As always, Tarkovsky conjures images like you've
never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal
more persuasive than Coppola's.
Stalker Pacific
Cinematheque (link lost)
Tarkovsky's brilliantly dense,
breathtakingly textured Stalker suggests a fantastical confluence of
in-the-gulag Solzhenitsyn and post-apocalyptic science fiction, and could be an
elaborate, allegorical, otherworldly illustration of that old maxim, "Be
careful what you wish for, you just might get it." In a devastated post-
industrial police state, two men, a writer and a scientist, engage the special
mystic skills of a Stalker to guide them through the forbidden Zone, a damp,
fecund, overgrown wasteland where the rules of nature no longer apply. At the
centre of the Zone, it is reputed, is the Room, a place where the deepest
desires of one's heart are said to come true. The amazing journey there will
test the limits and adequacy of the way each of the three protagonists makes
sense of the world: through art, through science, and through faith.
Distinguished by a remarkable sense of tactility, composed of stunning sepia
images, and offering layer upon layer of meaning, Stalker is a haunting and
unforgettable work from a (late) director whose (too few) films are quite
unlike anything else in world cinema.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Brian Welesko
This week offers a rare opportunity to see a 35mm print (and imported one at that) of Andrei Tarkovsky's sci-fi masterpiece STALKER, a film that is as mesmerizing as it is elusive. Loosely based on the Polish novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky's STALKER creates a decrepit industrial world where a mysterious Zone is sealed off by the government. The Zone, rumored to be of alien origin, is navigable by guides known as Stalkers. The Stalker of the title leads a writer and a scientist through the surrounding detritus into the oneiric Zone—an allegorical stand-in for nothing less than life itself—on a spiritual quest for a room that grants one's deepest subconscious wish. Tarkovsky composes his scenes to obscure the surroundings and tightly controls the audience's view through long, choreographed takes. Shots run long and are cut seamlessly. Coupled with non-localized sounds and a methodical synth score, sequences in the film beckon the audience into its illusion of continuous action while heightening the sense of time passing. The use of nondiegetic sounds subtly reminds us that this may be a subjective world established for the Stalker's mystical purpose. Where sci-fi films tend to overstate humanity's limitless imagination of the universe, Tarkovsky reappropriates the genre's trappings to suggest the cosmos' deepest truths are in one's own mind. STALKER posits—perhaps frighteningly—that, in this exploration of the self, there is something that knows more about us than we know ourselves. The writer and scientist, both at their spiritual and intellectual nadir, hope the room will renew their métier; the Stalker's purpose, as stated by Tarkovsky, is to "impose on them the idea of hope." But STALKER is a rich and continually inspiring work not for this (or any other) fixed meaning but rather for its resistance to any one single interpretation. The Tuesday screening will feature Gregory Verkhovsky, the assistant cameraman on STALKER, who will present his on-set photography of Tarkovsky and answer questions. (1979, 163 min, 35mm)
10 Key Moments in Films (4th Batch) Jonathan Rosenbaum
1979 / Stalker – The miracle in the final shot.
West Germany/U.S.S.R. Director: Andrei Tarkovsky. Actor: Natasha Abramova.
Why it’s Key: After all hope is lost, a moment of ecstatic revelation.
Few films resist synopsis more than Stalker, but the emotions and the decrepit settings are never in doubt. The story concerns the title hero being hired by a writer and scientist to guide them into the supposedly miraculous Zone, where their innermost wishes are supposed to be fulfilled. But an absence of miracles is all they encounter, and the three men come back beaten, the Stalker most of all. Greeted by his wife and crippled daughter, he declares himself a failure, the world a desolate place devoid of faith.
However reluctant Tarkovsky may have been to discuss the story’s allegorical meanings, he was outspoken about its main theme, “human dignity”, and the redemptive power of love shown by the Stalker’s wife –calling it a “final miracle to set against the unbelief, cynicism, moral vacuum poisoning the modern world” as exemplified by the writer and scientist. But in fact the film concludes with another miracle concerning the daughter.
Seated alone — after reading a poem that we hear her recite in voiceover while dandelion fluff drifts around her — she idly, telekinetically, and rather sadly makes two glasses and a jar slide across the table in front of her as the camera moves back. Then, as the camera moves forward again, the loud rattle of an approaching train is briefly accompanied by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” before the image fades out on her placid face. The sounds of the train and Beethoven seem equally matched against this quiet, unseen moment of ecstatic revelation.
Trying to write about a film by Russian auteur Andrei
Tarkovsky is like trying to write about the book of Ecclesiastes, or Shakespeare,
or the new Arcade Fire CD. Sometimes you just have to experience a work in
order to understand its insights, its challenges, its poetic feel. It's
not always easy, and you won't typically get it the first time
around. These are works in which you must immerse yourself in both
the experience and the context in which it was made, and even then
you might need more than one experience with it to latch on to all
the "in-between the lines".
While this is the first time I've sat down with Stalker, I'm familiar
with Tarkovsky, having sat multiple times with several other films: The
Sacrifice, Solaris, Andrei Rublev -- the latter of which
leaves a hum in your system on the second viewing. Tarkovsky lived as a
Christian filmmaker/artist under Soviet rule. His films subtly hold a mirror to
the oppression he lived in, and even more subtly suggest a better way found
through faith. When working under a regime you often find yourself dealing in
subtleties.
His films are highly artistic, almost like wandering into an art gallery
that instantly catches you by surprise, taking your breath away. They're
also profound and poetic, both at the same time -- but sometimes the
films feel numbingly slow.
I can understand it when a person says Tarkovsky's films are not for them, that
the pacing it too great a challenge, that they can't fall into some of the
surrealist acting or spiritual metaphors. But I wouldn't understand if one
couldn't appreciate the political and spiritual search for freedom of
expression that's anchored at the core of his work. A boundary
pusher in a system that needed him, Tarkovsky carried a torch that could
have landed him, like recent Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, in trouble
with the system and in jail.
To not understand at least that much of the context and then to watch any
of Tarkovsky's films would make the experience a real bore.
Education is a must when approaching and trying to understand the mark he left.
On the surface, Stalker is a very simple science fiction story of a man
that takes some visitors into a mysterious post-apocalyptic
land called "The Zone." The Zone seems to strangely affect those
who break through its militarized border to get in. Various
interpretations try and explain the power that's found there. I have my own.
It's different, but I think it's got teeth.
Having been to Russia quite a few times, even before the collapse of communism,
having been in all kinds of churches there and knowing what people of the
Christian faith dealt with in those years, it's really admirable -- of the
highest sort -- to think that Tarkovsky made this particular film in 1979,
almost a decade in front of glasnost and Polish solidarity but twenty years
after Brother Andrew visited Moscow. I don't know what kind of freedom of
speech was available in 1979 in either the church or in art in general,
but consider all of the following elements found in communist-era Stalker:
A telling of the story of the road to Emmaus (without mention of the
identity of the stranger that appeared); a pronouncement of unforgiveness
while a major character is wearing a crown of thorns; the
idea that a violent act will bring an end to the thing that
might liberate someone (a bomb in the zone); and a little girl -- once
called a mutant, born of the "Stalker," a man whose sole life purpose
is to guide visitors through The Zone -- who is more powerful
than anyone thinks, with strange psychic powers in the film's end.
All of this leads me to believe that the Zone is actually a place of peace
and restoration, Garden-like in its state of tranquility, and that
the world outside of the Zone is simply a world afraid of change
and left in its own dismantled state. The little girl is a representative of
the next generation who is going to "feel" the Zone out before she
arrives.
The Zone in the context of Soviet Russia seems to suggest that there are ideas
on the other side of oppression, that there is visible peace in sight. Note how
peaceful the Zone is. Note how when they arrive the Stalker immediately feels a
connection to the land. He feels like he's come home. It is humanity's natural
state to desire freedom from oppression, whether from tyranny or more
suggestive oppression in lack of freedom of speech or political correctness. He
feels at home here, and he feels a peace, yet every step is feared. It's a life
he's not known before. Sure, it's in color, but there are going to be pitfalls
and traps along the way. But it is a place he wants to navigate, because the
human heart longs for liberation.
These are some intense reasons in the narrative structure and mystery of the
Zone to fall incredibly in love with everything Tarkovsky lays out here in
1979. I haven't even gotten to the high-level, immense beauty of the
cinematography, the intensity of the bedroom and the marriage in this context,
the magnetic visuals that also blow the viewer away.
But I'm quite conflicted about Stalker. Actually, I'm more conflicted
about my own experience with it than I am with the film itself. Moments
definitely have a trance-like, hypnotic feel, and after a bit you are
simultaneously enjoying the mesmerizing scenes while wishing for it to move on.
That is why I love a quote I found on the Arts & Faith board, a quote which
pretty well sums up my confliction for Tarkovsky's great film: One of the things I'm trying to unpack is the
possibility that some aesthetic experiments are more likely to evoke widely
varying responses even within the same viewer, precisely because the element
being experimented with is a particularly subjective and changeable one. And
that the experience of time is just such a thing. It tried my patience at
times, to be sure. But in reflecting on it after only one viewing, I have no
doubt I'll be visiting again -- especially after the final scene, where a lot
of the film came together for me.
There is no doubt Tarkovsky is one of the great masters. I'm only learning to
finally catch on.
Stalker
- EarthLink Serge Daney, originally
published in Liberation November
20th, 1981, from Chronicle of a Passion, also here: STALKER Review
Always remember that in "metaphysical," even in
Russian, you have "physical."
STALKER is a Soviet film (it is Tarkovsky's sixth and, in
my opinion, his best) but "to stalk" is an English verb (and a
regular one at that). To be precise, to stalk is to "pursue at close
range," a way of closing in, a walk, almost a dance. In "stalking"
the part of the body which is afraid lags behind and the part which is not
afraid is compelled to move forward. With its pauses and its terrors, the stalk
is the walk of those who make their way through unknown territory. In STALKER
danger is everywhere, but it has no face. The landscape too is without end,
without horizon, without North. There are plenty of tanks, factories, giant
pipes, a railroad, a corpse, a dog, a telephone which still works, but the
whole thing is being overrun by nature. This fossilized industrial landscape,
this corner of the twentieth century which has become a strata (Tarkovsky was a
geologist in Siberia from 1954 to 1956, and it is still a part of him), this is
the Zone. One does not go into the Zone, one has to creep in because it is
guarded by soldiers. One does not walk there, one "stalks."
In the cinema we have seen cowboys who move towards each
other with coquettish steps before they shoot, the stagnation of crowds,
couples dancing and urban motion; we have never seen the stalk.
Tarkovsky's film is first and foremost a documentary about a certain way of
walking, not necessarily the best (especially in the
The film doesn't begin so abruptly. It is a bit more orderly, but not much.
Tarkovsky, in a liberal adaptation of a science fiction novel by the brothers
Strougavski, imagines a world in which a mysterious accident has left part of
the planet alien, dangerous and closed off from access. The Zone is that
forbidden corner, returned to its primitive state. It's a last reserve of
fantasy and a territory of macabre beauty. Shadowy characters, for a little
money, give "tours" of it. These are the Stalkers. These transitory
people live a miserable existence between two worlds. This time, the Stalker
(part sage, part tour guide, very much hoodlum) has brought with him a Writer
and a Professor. The Writer (with his plastic bag) speaks little, but has an
idea in mind. For there is a goal to this trip a trois: In the
middle of the Zone there is a "room" which, they say, fulfills the
wishes of those who enter it. So they say.
At the entrance to the room, the Stalker and his two
clients back down: no one will step inside. First of all out of fear, then out
of wisdom. Out of fear because if the room is a hoax, it would be humiliating
to let on that one had believed in it; and if it really does fulfill all
wishes, nothing will be left to wish for; and if it answers unconscious
desires, one doesn't know what to expect. Out of wisdom because no life is
livable without the absolute, of course, but the absolute is not a place, it is
a movement away: a movement which diverts one, which deports one (in every
sense of the word), which makes one "stalk". It matters little in the
end what's put on the plate, or even that one believes: that one believes in
believing or in others capacity to believe. What matters is one's movement.
As a spectator, one cannot resist "stalking" in the forest of symbols
which the film becomes. Tarkovsky's scenario is such a diabolical machine that
it does not exclude any interpretation a priori. In a kaleidoscope, one
can see what one wants. Perhaps the Zone is planet Earth, the Soviet continent,
our unconscious, or the film itself. The Stalker could easily be a mutant, a
dissident, a crazed psychoanalyst, a preacher looking for a cult or a spectator.
You can "play symbols" with the film, but it's a game you shouldn't
overdo either (no more with Tarkovsky than with Fellini or Buñuel, other great
humorists of interpretation.) Besides, the freshness and the beauty of STALKER
lie elsewhere.
When the film is over, when we are a little tired of interpreting, once we've
eaten everything on the plate, what is left? Exactly the same film. The same
compelling images. The same Zone with the presence of water, with its teasing
lapping, piles of rusted metal, nature at its most voracious, and inescapable
humidity. As with all films that trigger a rush of interpretation in the
viewer, STALKER is a film which is striking for the physical presence of its
elements, their stubborn existence and way of being there, even if there was no
one to see them, to get close to them or to film them. This is not a new
phenomenon: already in ANDREI RUBLEV there was the mud, that primal form. In
STALKER the elements have an organic presence: water, dew and puddles dampen
the soil and eat away at the ruins.
A film can be interpreted. This one in particular lends
itself to it (even if in the end it hides its secrets.) But we are not obliged
to interpret it. A film can be watched too. One can watch for the appearance of
things which one has never seen before in a film. The watcher-viewer sees
things which the interpreter-viewer can no longer make out. The watcher stays
at the surface because he doesn't believe in depth. At the beginning of this
article, I was wondering where the characters had learned the stalk: that
twisted walk of people who are afraid but who have forgotten the source of
their fears. And what of these prematurely aged faces, these mini-Zones where
grimaces have become wrinkles? And the self-effacing violence of those who wait
to receive a beating (or maybe to give a beating if they haven't forgotten
how?) And what of the false calm of the dangerous monomaniac and the empty
reasonings of a man who is too solitary?
These do not come only from Tarkovsky's imagination. They cannot be invented,
they come from elsewhere. But from where? STALKER is a metaphysical fable, a
course in courage, a lesson in faith, a reflection on the end of time, a quest,
whatever one wants. STALKER is also the film in which we come across, for the
first time, bodies and faces which come from a place we know about only through
hear-say. A place whose traces we thought the Soviet cinema had lost
completely. This place is the Gulag. The Zone is also an archipelago. STALKER
is also a realist film.
Is Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Stalker about the gulags? Chernobyl? EU immigration? Reflections on the possible meanings of the
film by novelist Geoff Dyer from The
Guardian,
Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1980) came second, behind Blade Runner, in a recent BFI poll of its members' top movies. In outline, it's one of the simplest films ever made: a guide, or Stalker, takes two people, Writer and Professor, into a forbidden area called the Zone, at the heart of which is the Room, where your deepest wish will come true. It is this simplicity that gives the film its fathomless resonance. If Tarkovsky's previous film, Solaris, seemed like a Soviet 2001, was Stalker Tarkovsky's take on The Wizard of Oz?
The starkness of its conception did not prevent the production traumas that seem integral to the creation myths of other favourites: the likes of Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo. Plans to shoot in Tajikistan had to be abandoned because of an earthquake. Having relocated to an abandoned hydroelectric power station in Estonia, Tarkovsky was dissatisfied with the cinematography and decided to shoot a pared-down version of the script all over again - in the same place. The price paid for this pursuit of an ideal is incalculable. Sound recordist Vladimir Sharun believes the deaths from cancer of Tarkovsky (in 1986), his wife Larissa and Anatoly Solonitsyn (who plays the Writer) were all due to contamination from a chemical plant upstream from the set.
The film itself has become synonymous both with cinema's claims to high art and a test of the viewer's ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett's enthusiasm for it - "every single frame of the film is burned into my retina" - attests not just to the director's lofty purity of purpose, but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement. So a certain amount of blowback is inevitable. David Thomson included Stalker in his pantheon of 1,000 memorable movies, but was dubious about the notion of the Room. Perhaps it's "an infinite, if dank enclosure in which an uncertain number of strangers are watching the works of Tarkovsky. Equally, it may be that as malfunction of one kind or another covers the world, we may have a hard time distinguishing the Room, the Zone, and the local multiplex."
Sometimes wry scepticism is a more appropriate tribute than po-faced reverence, especially given that Tarkovsky leaves ample room for doubt. Any claim made for the Zone ("the quietest place in the world," says the Stalker) is countered by the suggestion that it's a bit disappointing ("smells like a bog," says Professor). In an interview Tarkovsky even raised the possibility that the Zone did not exist and was merely the Stalker's invention.
Though it's easily forgotten, there's often a touch of comedy - even slapstick - in Tarkovsky-land. Deep in the Zone, on the threshold of the Room, the three guys are pondering the mysteries of existence when a phone rings. The professor answers: "Hello? No, this is not the clinic!" Was this the inspiration for those Orange-sponsored "Don't let a phone ruin your movie" scenarios?
I've seen Stalker more times than any film except The Great Escape. I've seen it when the projectionist got the reels in the wrong order (I was the only person who noticed), I've seen it on my own in Paris and dubbed into Italian in Rome, I've seen it on acid (remember that sequence when the solid ground begins to ripple?) and I've seen it on telly - and it's never quite as I remember. Like the Zone, it's always changing. Like the Stalker, I feel quite at home in it, but whenever I see the film I try to imagine what it might be like, watching it for the first time when it seems so weird.
Consider the first 15 minutes. After a credit sequence showing an oldish guy drinking in a gloomy bar, we peer through an interior set of doors into a room. Inside already, the camera takes us deeper indoors. It's as if Tarkovsky has started off where Antonioni left off in the penultimate inside-out shot of The Passenger and taken it a stage further: inside-in. It's slower than Antonioni, and without the colour. It has a kind of sub-monochrome in which the spectrum has been so compressed that it might turn out to be a source of energy, like oil and almost as dark - but with a gold sheen, too. The camera pans across the people in bed and then tracks back. Not a long take by Tarkovsky's standards, but still, one takes the point. "If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention."
The rumble of heavy transport - accompanied by an anthem to Homo Sovieticus - causes a glass to rattle across a table. The man wakes up and gets out of bed. Unusually, he sleeps without his trousers but with his sweater. Another weird thing is that, although trying not to wake his wife, he puts on his trousers and his boots before clomping quietly into the kitchen. His wife was awake, it turns out, or has been roused by his movements.
It would be interesting to compile a list of the first words spoken in films and run the results through a computer. In this instance they are spoken by the wife: "Why did you take my watch?" The film's only just started, she has just woken up and, from a husbandly point of view, she is nagging. No wonder he wants out! But of course we're also getting the big theme introduced: time. In effect, Tarkovsky is saying to the audience: "Forget about other ideas of time. Stop looking at your watches, give yourself over to Tarkovsky-time, and the helter-skelter mayhem of The Bourne Ultimatum will seem more tedious than L'Avventura."
The wife expands on this notion of time - she has lost her best years, grown old - and you're reminded again of Antonioni, because the plain truth is, she's no Monica Vitti. Then she lays a whole guilt trip on him, but the usual terms - you only think of yourself - are reversed. She says: "Even if you don't think of yourself ..." Whoa, some kind of Dostoevskian twist here.
She begs him to stay, but he's got to do what a holy fool's got to do. Tarkovsky's films have always invited allegorical interpretation, and certain viewers might be tempted to view the Stalker's impending trip in the light of recent history. Is the Zone an idealised image of the UK with its generous welfare system, a land of milk and honey with many opportunities for those willing to pick fruit for six quid an hour? Or, more radically, is the Stalker an asylum-seeker? It turns out, yes, that's exactly what he is! But he's seeking asylum from the world. Ridiculous, of course, to see a work through the prism of events that occur after it was completed, but the idea that Stalker imaginatively anticipated the Zone of Exclusion around Chernobyl has become a critical commonplace.
She says he'll end up in prison. He replies that "everywhere's a prison". One assumes this is intended metaphorically, but the film is constantly making us wonder about its connection to the state that funded it. (Worth pausing here to consider if Tarkovsky could ever have raised the dough to make this film in the unrepressive west.) Now, this was the 1970s, not the 1930s or the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was a vast prison camp. By the time of Stalker, communism had become, in historian Tony Judt's words, "a way of life to be endured".
Still, while the film may not be about the gulag, it is haunted by memories of the camps, from the overlap of vocabulary ("Zona", "the meat grinder") to the Stalker's Zek-style shaved head. The turnaround, as the film-maker Chris Marker has pointed out, is that here freedom is found within the wire.
After the Stalker leaves, his wife has one of those sexualised fits of which Tarkovsky seems to have been fond, writhing away in a climax of abandonment. He, on the other hand, like many men before and since, has gone to the pub. He's not there to meet his mates - this is not Distant Voices, Still Lives - but the people he's taking into the Zone. From the bar they can hear a train, can hear that lonesome whistle blow. So there are hints, here, of a heist movie - the Stalker being lured back into the Zone for one last job - and of a sci-fi western (ie "eastern"). They leave the bar, begin their journey into the cinematic unknown. In a way that might prove significant, the Stalker tramps through a puddle like a man with more important things on his mind than worrying about wet feet.
Since there are people out there who have not yet had Stalker burned into their retinas, and given the film's zero-gravity suspense - is anything going to happen? - I propose to leave it there, before the blissful shift into colour, before we glimpse the wonders of the Zone, ages before the miracle of the film's closing sequence. But three further observations won't spoil anyone's enjoyment.
One: despite their scepticism, Writer and Professor sufficiently buy into the Stalker's soggy faith that they end up wading, shoulder-deep, through radioactive-looking water without even removing their overcoats. Two: near the end, the Writer puts a crown of thorns on his head. Biblical? I dunno. Everything just is. Or isn't, but may be. Three: at a certain point the audacious claim is made that the reason we were put on earth was to create works of art. By the same token, it's not enough to say that Stalker is a great film - it is the reason cinema was invented.
Stalker – Andrei Tarkovsky | Centre for Creative Practices
Tarkovsky's
Stalker: A Poet in a Destitute Time
Alison Croggon
ANDREI TARKOVSKY'S CINEMA OF SPIRITUALITY
An
essay on Stalker by Joseph Mach
Re:
STALKER: a synopsis and analysis Ivan Grozny responds to the Mach essay,
The
Thing from Inner Space Slavoj Žižek from Art Margins,
"In
Stalker Tarkovsky foretold Chernobyl"
Shooting STALKER in
Tarkovsky's The Stalker: A Christian Allegory Set in the "Evil Empire" Gregory Halvorsen Schreck, a religious interpretation from East-West Church & Ministry Report, Summer 2001
Stalker:
DVD Review Donato Totaro from Offscreen,
A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of Time-Pressure,
Part 1 David George Menard from Offscreen,
A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of Time-Pressure,
Part 2 David George Menard
from Offscreen,
Stalker - Reverse Shot In the Zone, by Eric Hynes, Spring 2004
Here’s Gregory Wolfe reflecting on Stalker Images Journal, Winter 2008
Gregory
Wolfe on Tarkovsky's Stalker… and Image. - Looking Closer John Owen response to Gregory Wolfe essay,
Offscreen.com :: Temporal Defamiliarization and Mise-en-Scène in ... Temporal Defamiliarization and Mise-en-Scène in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, by Zoë Heyn-Jones from Offscreen, January 31, 2011, also seen at P.U.L.S.E. World, October 27, 2014: Temporal Defamiliarization and Mise-en-Scène in ... - PULSE
The Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
Žeksov Kulturni Centar Yossarian, July 8, 2007
Stalker Michael Brooke from DVD Times
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "EraserOz"
Kamera Todd Harbour, also seen here: Russian Film: Andrei Tarkovsky: Stalker - Сталкер (1979) and here: Andrei Tarkovsky - Stalker 1979 - Stormfront
Some thoughts on Tarkovsky's Stalker « Ruthless Culture Jonathan McCalmont
The Valve - A Literary Organ | Tarkovsky's Stalker A response to McCalmont by Adam Roberts
World
Cinema Review: Andrei Tarkovsky | Ivan's Childhood ... Four
Films by Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, and The
Sacrifice, by Douglas Messerli, October 30, 2011
Stalker: A Review « Sanctum In Heremis
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Celluloid Highway [Shaun Anderson]
night_porter: Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker Live Journal
Stalker or The Impossibility to Confess Oneself
Slant Magazine Nick
Schager
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]
Stalker -
TCM.com Felicia Feaster
STALKER
(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Dennis Grunes
Stalker: DVD Review – Offscreen Donato Totaro, September 2002
DVD
Journal D.K. Holm
Stalker John Sinnott from DVD Talk
digitallyObsessed
[Jon Danziger)
MichaelDVD - Region 4 DVD review [Steve Crawford]
A
Structural and Temporal Analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker ...
In
the Zone Dana Stevens reviews Geoff
Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Film About a
Journey to a Room (228 pages), a scene-by-scene analysis of the Tarkovsky
film, from Slate, March 2, 2012
Zona by
Geoff Dyer John Lingan book review
from The Quarterly Conversation,
March 5, 2012
The
Detours of Art by Tom McCormack - Moving Image Source book review of Geoff Dyer's Zona, a
retelling of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 arthouse sci-fi classic Stalker, March
8, 2012
David Thomson
Reviews Geoff Dyer's "Zona" | New Republic March 12, 2012
Sculpting
in Time - The Los Angeles Review of Books Sculpting in Time: Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky, by Jacob Mikanowski July 12, 2012
EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films Tyler Petty, listed at #15
Psychologically Significant Movies [Aleksandar Novakovic]
Stalker Arts and Faith
Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker: 'We are home!' Ben Atlas
Tarkovsky's
Stalker Review [Archive] - The Academy
Film discussion group,
What's your personal interpretation of the ending to Stalker ... Mubi, film discussion group
Daily
Briefing. "Zona": Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky's "Stalker" David Hudson from Mubi,
Reviews The
Fright Site
Green Integer Blog: Hope (on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker) pretty much a synopsis
The
Stalker meme Feuilleton,
Rerberg
and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker” A documentary on the making of the film, from
Feuilleton,
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy
Heilman
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Stalker Anthony Reed from All Movie Guide
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Reviews (Film) -
New Red Archives Nicky Garratt
reviews of Mirror, Stalker, and Solaris
•
View topic - Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
Criterion Forum, a film discussion group,
Zizek on Alter Ego and Tarkovsky’s Stalker Ben Atlas, January 9, 2010
Stalker – The Dream
Sequence Ben Atlas,
Tarkovsky on the Zone of
Uman Ben Atlas,
Tarkovsky’s Prayer Ben Atlas, November 7, 2010
Stalker
(Сталкер) - Andrei Tarkovsky (1979) photos from Avax
Andrei
Tarkovsky-Stalker (1979) photos from
Avax
STALKER
[1979] (Artificial Eye - #215) [DVD5 + DVD9] [2002] photos from Avax
Stalker - Reference Encyclopedic summary
International promotion posters
Stalking the Stalker: Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky Joshua Jelly-Schapiro interviews the author about his book Zona, from BFI Sight and Sound, November 12, 2013
[ Nostalghia.com | The Topics :: Scena - Andrei Tarkovsky on Stalker ] excerpts from Tarkovsky interviews with Luisa Capo in Scena, 1980
BBCi - Films Tom Dawson
Stalking Tarkovsky at the
Sheffield Doc/Fest David Cox
from The Guardian,
The
powerful resonances of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker Danny Leigh from The Guardian,
New
York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin,
DVDBeaver.com
- Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Stalker (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stalker
/ Сталкер - Tarkovsky - 1979 (eng
sub) YouTube (
Stalker
- Tarkovsky railroad sequence - YouTube (
Stalker - Dream Sequence (
Stalker
- Tarkovsky - YouTube Dream
Sequence (shot in one take, by the way)
(
The Dull Flame of
Desire poetry in Stalker film (
Stalker (Сталкер) entire full-length film
VOYAGE
IN TIME (Tempo di viaggio) – made for TV
VOYAGE
IN TIME (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983) | Dennis Grunes
I don’t know one piece of Italian art from another but am riveted by Tempo di viaggio, the documentary that Andrei Tarkovsky made in Italy while also making Nostalghia (1983), his first film after fleeing the Soviet Union. Part of the film consists of a debate between him and scenarist Tonino Guerra, Antonioni’s writer, about which locations to use. Tarkovsky, whom we see here in jeans, always seems sure about what he should shoot. He rejects architecture that Guerra suggests for being “too beautiful.” Ah, the requirements of art and of fastidious self-exiles!
It’s a mess of a film, with this and that thrown in, with alternative images of parched landscape and Tarkovsky’s signature wetness (a layer of fog clinging to water), and a sense of strangeness that encompasses Italy’s foreignness and Tarkovsky’s separation from family. One wonders how Tarkovsky could bear to leave Russia when such abandonment requires a futile search for his own soul.
I do not have any idea how devious Tempo di viaggio is. Going in, one assumes that the healthy debates between Tarkovsky and Guerra aren’t scripted. Ingmar Bergman is Tarkovsky’s god of cinema; remember the interviews of actors in The Passion of Anna?
Andrei indulges Tonino’s reading of a poem of his (Tonino’s, that is). When discussing Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), whose script Tonino helped write, and referring to its “conditional action,” is Andrei speaking from his heart or placating Tonino? Tarkovsky registers his love, also, for Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) and Jean Vigo, the “father of modern French cinema” whose “tenderness” especially attracts him.
Tarkovsky, among the most difficult-to-read of all brilliant filmmakers, says he is after “simplicity,” such as Bresson achieved in cinema, Bach, music, Leonardo, painting, Tolstoi, literature. Is he trying to find himself away from home?
Voyage in Time |
DVD Review | Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich
While still a student at university, Andrei
Tarkovsky visited a clairvoyant who, at the future filmmaker's request, called
up the spirit of fellow countryman and author Boris Pasternak. "You will
make seven films!" the Dr. Zhivago novelist told Tarkovsky in the
stentorian tones of the spirit world. "Only seven?" came his
disappointed reply. To which Pasternak amended, "But they'll all be
good!" Every frame of Tarkovsky's filmography is haunted by that simple
prophecy; his cinema at its best seems to exist outside the realm of natural
law, defying the mortal encroachments that eventually consumed the director in
the form of a fatal cancer. Recently released on DVD by Facets Video, Voyage
in Time (a Tarkovsky side-project to his–-pace Pasternak—seven features)
acts as a making-of companion piece to his sixth film Nostalghia,
though, befitting Tarkovsky's inimitable cinematic sense, it's unlike anything
one's ever seen. For a little over an hour the director and Italian
screenwriter Tonino Guerra (a frequent Antonioni collaborator) engage in
spirited dialogues on art and life while moving through a striking series of
exterior and interior tableaus. Tarkovsky makes no pretenses toward documentary
in Voyage in Time—he and Guerra are mere figures in a succession of
landscapes and this falsification of their creative experience helps to
undercut their conversation's inherent egotism. Essentially, Tarkovsky solves
the problem of the behind-the-scenes documentary by absorbing himself into the
mise-en-scène, becoming a character in his own story rather than its god-like
figurehead. Tarkovsky is a clearly controlling man, but Voyage in Time
reveals the more self-effacing aspects of his personality, forever humble
before the holy power of cinema.
Sad to say that Facets has botched this
release. Digital artifacts and audio hiss n' crackle are prevalent in the
full-frame mono transfer. There's a herky-jerkiness to any sequence reliant on
movement of camera or character and this suggests the NTSC DVD is made from a
PAL source. In addition, according to a Tarkovsky website,
Facets used a print with incorrectly translated and misspelled subtitles. This
is confirmed at several points in the film (e.g., when Tarkovsky's film Stalker
is translated as Stalkin').
Overall, a terrible transfer of an essential film.
Voyage in Time
(1983) | PopMatters Lesley Smith,
February 7, 2005
Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky completed only six feature films in a directorial career of more than 20 years. Each realizes a personal world intense and individual, ranging from that of a boy soldier during the Second World War, Ivan's Childhood (1962), to that of three scientists, far in the future, orbiting a sentient planet, Solaris (1972). Together, Trakovsky's films offer a vision of what cinema can be, a meditation on the individual's relationship to the transcendent.
Voyage in Time, a one-hour television film, snatches a fragment of Tarkovsky's working life. It catalogues one summer in the long partnership between Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, which culminated in Tarkovsky's threnody for his life in the Soviet Union, Nostalghia (1983). In this film, a Soviet writer, Andrei Gotchakov (Oleg Yonovsky), undertakes a month-long research trip to Italy, where he is assailed by a soul-threatening homesickness for his wife and child, who remain in the Soviet Union. The power of Voyage in Time lies in the parallels between the director's life and that of his protagonist, as they offer insight into the transformation of the personal -- autobiography, philosophy, psychology -- to the universal, which Tarkovsky called "the meaning of cinema."
According to his diaries, Tarkovsky reached Italy on his first two-month trip both elated and edgy. Personal and professional mortality pre-occupied him. The previous year, he had suffered a heart attack at the age of 46. In addition, Soviet authorities did not allow his wife and son to accompany him to Italy, a common tactic to encourage those allowed to travel abroad to return to the USSR. As his struggles with the Soviet censors grew more protracted, he feared he would be silenced as a filmmaker. At the same time, he was growing to love Italy, the nation that eventually became his home when he defected from the Soviet Union in 1984.
In this complex mood, he and Guerra embarked on a cross-country journey, scouting locations for their film, test-shooting as they went. The resulting documentary reveals their process of collaboration, emerging not simply between two men who see the world through film, but between two cultures and many eras. The conceit of a day spent going over their two months of work frames this meditation. As the artists move between the balcony and the interior of Guerra's Rome apartment, they discuss the locations they might use and the nature of their protagonist (how interested is he in architecture, where might he live?). As they mention each location, the film cuts in footage from that town or village, usually featuring an apparently ad hoc encounter. In Lecce they stop a priest on the street and quiz him about the peculiar quality of its architecture. In Sorrento they fail, in two languages, to find the white marble floor painted with rose petals for a Russian countess.
So far, so travelogue, albeit with intellectually demanding guides whose patience with minutiae might outlast that of their audience. As the "day" goes on, Tarkovsky answers questions about his work purportedly sent to Guerra by young cinephiles. These responses are less directly illuminating of his cinematic passion than Michal Leszczylowski's biopic Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1987). But they do begin to conjure up the time of the mind, the clashes of happenstance and memory, the long-dead and the never-realized, from which Tarkovsky and Guerra are inventing Nostalghia and which, retrospectively, emerges as the core of Voyage in Time.
The alchemy of their collaboration is perhaps best illustrated when Tarkovsky succumbs to irritation at his itinerary. In his Italian diaries, he enthuses about Italy's natural and architectural beauty. But as he and Guerra move from mediaeval church to mediaeval church, the repetition bothers him, for he can see no way in which their protagonist can live as they imagine him living in this tourist-strewn landscape. Guerra exclaims that he doesn't care if Tarkovsky forgets everything he has seen the very next day: they have to explore the motivation of a Russian who has come to Italy for a month. Guerra then draws a magical analogy, describing how a painter from his village, when he is teaching students, gives them an iron ball to hold in their left hand and a pencil in their right. He then asks them to draw a circle. They draw their circles, and each circle has volume, for it contains the weight of the ball in their left hand. In the same way, he wants Tarkovsky to carry the weight of all Italy into each shot in the film.
At this moment Tarkovsky's resistance collapses: he confesses he feels as if he is on holiday instead of working. It's hard not to hear a trace of guilt that he has found contentment in his temporary exile, a theme to which a later shot of Tarkovsky, turned away from the camera, leaning against a wall and twisting his wedding ring, also refers. Neither Nostalghia's protagonist nor the director can remain an abstract character. From the wandering scholar Andrei Gotchakov emerges the man so sunk in anomie only an apocalyptic visionary can arouse him; from the world-famous director filming his own artistic process emerges a man facing the possibility that he might have to choose between his family and his work.
In a 1979 interview with Guerra, Tarkovsky claims he always wanted to film like an amateur. He says he craved "the possibility to observe nature, and people, and film them, without haste. The story would be born autonomously; as the result of these observations, not from obliged shots, planned in the tiniest detail." Despite its artifice, in many ways Voyage in Time is that film. The story of artistic synergy that is realized, in which alienation and aspiration are equally important, conveys a deeply humanist vision of the end of the 20th century. In a poem composed for Tarkovsky during the shooting of Voyage in Time, Guerra writes, "But what we told each other / Is so light, it cannot be kept in." Facets' DVD lets us share in their mutual telling.
Final Note:
If you seek additional information on Tarkofsky, the best source is a Canadian website, which not only contains selections of Tarkovsky's writings and interviews, including his diaries, but also archives an international range of articles and commentaries translated into English. The publishers of this website also highlight one problem with the subtitling of Voyage in Time. They believe that Facets re-used a "draft" subtitle track, which contained some significant translation errors. A full list appears under the 24 October, 2004 entry on the News page. However, the stand-alone availability of this rarely seen film far outweighs any subtitling errors.
Tarkovsky and the World of Documentary – Offscreen Donato Totaro, August 2011
Ha
ha, it's Burl!: Burl reviews Voyage in Time! (1983)
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Movie Review & Summary
: Voyage in Time(1983) - Vitorr
Sounak Bhadra
Cine Outsider [Slarek] The Andrei Tarkovsky Companion
Film
@ The Digital Fix - The Andrei Tarkovsky Companion Noel Megahey
Voyage in Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tonino Guerra obituary | Film | The Guardian John Francis Lane, March 21, 2012
Tonino
Guerra: Screenwriter who worked with Fellini, Rosi ... John Riley obituary from The Independent, March 27, 2012
NOSTALGHIA A 97
A true gift to cinephiles: a new 35mm print of an unsurpassably gorgeous film by one of cinema’s greatest visionaries! We’re pleased to present the Canadian premiere of this deluxe 30th-anniversary re-release of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Shot in Tuscany, and co-written with prolific Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra (who also co-wrote Antonioni’s L’Avventura), Nostalghia was Tarkovsky’s first film made outside the USSR — he had finally tired of Soviet censorship — and proved to be his penultimate work. (1986’s The Sacrifice, made in Sweden, would be his last film.) While in Italy researching the life of an 18th-century Russian composer who died there, a Soviet musicologist has a sexually-charged but unconsummated relationship with his beautiful translator, and meets a mysterious madman (played by Bergman regular and Sacrifice star Erland Josephson) who is convinced that the world is about to end. Nostalghia is suffused with an almost overwhelming sense of longing and homesickness, and is composed of some of Tarkovsky’s most astonishing imagery. It shared, with Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, a special Grand Prize for Creative Cinema at Cannes in 1983 (given that year in lieu of the best director award). “Extraordinary ... Nostalghia is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours ... A world of fantastic textures, sumptuously muted colours, and terrarium-like humidity. This is a film that turns the spectacle of an ancient, leaky cellar into an image as memorable as any this century” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice).
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]
The first film of Tarkovsky to be made outside
A Russian academic (Jankovsky) visits Italy as part of his research on the life and work of a composer who has commited suicide. He engages in an estranged relationship with his translator (Giordano), and eventually shares his existential agonies with a solitary person (Josephson) labelled as mad by the community.
Tarkovsky follows here the Bergmanesque line of psychodrama as his main character, profoundly influenced by these two encounters, is led towards the ultimate struggle for individual catharsis.
The dark, permanently wet setting, reminiscent of Stalker and The Mirror, supplants the typical Tarkovsky reticence with some unique metaphysical allusions. The slow-moving camerawork may rend some scenes infuriating but the mystic beauty which emanates from the film - sequences like the one where the madman is burned in a square under the sounds of Beethoven's ninth symphony - gives Nostalgia an awe-inspiring, even disturbing vision of man's struggle for true faith.
Nostalghia (1983) ~
reviewed by Nick Burton | Pif Magazine
August 1, 1999
The films of the late Andrei Tarkovsky have a reputation of being audience unfriendly to a fault, of being difficult, highly personal and visual films with a stupifying effect on the viewer that has triggered a bout of attention deficit disorder in more than one viewer. The truth is that Tarkovsky, the son of a poet, uses an almost entirely poetic approach to filmmaking that bravely lets the audience decode for itself a good deal of what is shown. Yes it is difficult viewing and very demanding. But isn’t the function of poetry to use an almost codified personal language to express ideas? Then why is the same practice vilified in filmmaking? Aren’t images as malleable as words? Tarkovsky’s films establish a visual analog for poetry, a codifying of imagery into abstract thoughts and emotions that tap deeply into the subconscious and resonate in the way poetry does.
Nostalghia is the story of a renowned Russian poet, Andrei Gortchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), on a research mission in the Tuscan hills of Italy for a book on a minor Russian composer who studied in Italy. With his beautiful Italian translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), he visits a natural hot spring where villagers hope for immortality, and where he meets the eccentric Domenico (the great Swedish actor Erland Josephson, on loan from Ingmar Bergman), a man frightened by the spiritual malaise of the world who had once locked up his family for seven years waiting for the end of the world.
We soon see that Andrei inhabits two worlds, as most poets do – the world of his dreams and recollection of his boyhood farm house and village, and the waking world where he is fascinated by Domenico. Ignoring Eugenia’s need for love (in a memorable scene she watches women pray for children to a statue of the Virgin Mary), he visits Domenico. The old man asks him for a single favor… to light a candle and carry it across the pool at the hot spring, as the villagers, fearing he is insane, won’t let him. Eugenia berates Andrei for his intellectual aloofness and leaves. Andrei gets drunk and reads poetry in the ruins of a villa.
Eugenia calls from Rome, telling Andrei she’s seen Domenico and that he’s part of a demonstration in the streets of Rome. We see Domenico high atop a statue, giving a speech for brotherhood before pouring gasoline on himself in an act of self-immolation. Andrei takes a candle to the now empty pool, and carries it across, barely succeeding before his heart fails him. While Domenico has been defeated by the thought of a possible future, Andrei has been crippled by his nostalgia for childhood.
Like the films of Alain Resnais, Tarkovsky’s films are obsessed with memory. While I think some of Tarkovsky’s work – namely his mind-bending science fiction film Stalker and the even more personal Mirror – are more compelling films, Nostalghia represents an important contribution to the Tarkovsky canon, containing some of the director’s most indelible images. Domenico’s self-immolation is surreal and upsetting, played out in an atmosphere that recalls the madhouse in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (the gathered crowd looks dangerously mad), and the final image, of Andrei sitting by a small model of his boyhood home contained within the arches of a ruined Italian cathedral, sums up the film’s dialectic of reality and fantasy as only a powerful image can. Tarkovsky’s slowly tracking camera, as always, glides lovingly over images of incredible beauty and ugliness, perhaps best exemplified by Andrei’s visit to Domenico’s ruin of a house, where it literally rains inside. Co-written by Italian poet and screenwriter Tonino Guerra (a frequent collaborator of Michelangelo Antionioni), Nostalghia haunts the memory long after it’s over.
Nostalghia
- TCM.com Lang Thompson
Most films aim for efficient entertainment, they get you
in, get you out and it's done. You won't get anything like that with Andrei
Tarkovsky's Nostalghia
(1983) which critic J. Hoberman once described as "not so much a movie as
a place to inhabit for two hours." Lushly beautiful and haunting, Nostalghia is also a challenging,
thought-provoking work. Movie critic Leonard Maltin called it a
"provocative, insightful epic, lovingly rendered by one of the cinema's
true poets."
Tarkovsky's film follows the musicologist Gortchakov (played by Oleg Yankovsky
from The Mirror, 1975) during a research trip to
Nostalghia
can trace its beginnings back to early 1976 when Tarkovsky started working with
Italian screenwriter and long-time friend Tonino Guerra (a frequent Antonioni
collaborator) on a project called Journey Through Italy for Italian
television. Though a script was written, Tarkovsky was sidetracked for a few
years by work on Stalker (1979) and a stage adaptation of Hamlet.
In the summer of 1979, he briefly considered an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The
Idiot before picking up the Italian project again. It was now called Nostalghia (the word refers to a
particular Russian feeling when "far from their native land") and
Tarkovsky spent weeks in the Italian country with Guerra working on notes and
ideas. This resulted in Tarkovsky's only documentary, an hour-long compilation
of the journey called Time of Travel. Shortly after Tarkovsky returned
to
In the middle of 1980, Tarkovsky was back in
The main character of Gortchakov was originally intended for Anatoli Solonitsyn
(who'd played the lead role in Andrei Rublev, 1969) but he was seriously
ill and eventually died in June 1982. The role was offered to another Tarkovsky
veteran, Aleksandr Kajdanovsky (Stalker), but when he wasn't given
permission to leave the country it finally went to Oleg Yankovsky. In the
spring of 1982, Tarkovsky finalized the other actors and scouted locations in
Nostalghia
showed at
Synoptique -
Transcendental Images of Time and Memory ... Michael Vesia, November 1, 2004
Central Europe
Review - Tarkovsky: The Long Take That Kills Benjamin Halligan, November 13, 2000
Nostalghia • Senses of Cinema Acquarello from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
BAM
blog: The Way We Are/Were: Andrei Tarkovsky's ... The Way
We Are/Were: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, by Keith Uhlich from BAM Blog,
June 6, 2013
Nostalghia
(1983) | Motion State Review Evan
Jones, December 15, 2015
Dan Schneider on Nostalghia
- Cosmoetica also seen here: Nostalghia
Review (1983) - The Spinning Image
25. NOSTALGHIA (1983) | 366 Weird
Movies G. Smalley
The
Strangely Ineffable Power of 'Nostalghia' | PopMatters John Oursler
Movie
Review: Nostalghia (1983) – Coolsville
March 8, 2015
Studies
in Cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia'
Jeremy Carr from Studies in
Cinema, February 2014, also seen here:
Andrei
Tarkovsky’s ‘Nostalghia’ and
here: Sound
On Sight
Andrei
Tarkovsky's "Nostalghia' | Broad Street Review Robert Zaller
Tarkovsky's
NOSTALGHIA: Beauty in ... - Cinapse
Malachi Constant from Cinapse
Nostalghia : Sonic Cinema Brian Skutle
Andrei
Tarkovsky's Nostalghia Screens at BAM | Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Film @ The
Digital Fix - Nostalghia Michael Brooke
Nostalghia : DVD Talk
Review of the DVD Video Bill Gibron
Nostalghia / The
Dissolve Scott Tobias
Nostalghia
- TCM.com Lang Thompson
Blu-ray.com
[Casey Broadwater]
Nostalghia Blu-ray
Review | High Def Digest Steven
Cohen
Nostalghia
(US Blu-ray Review) - Diabolique Magazine
Madeleine Koestner, Blu-Ray
Nostalghia | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Kalvin
Henely, Blu-Ray
DVDTalk.com
- Blu-Ray [Jamie S. Rich]
DVD
Verdict (Blu-ray) [Daryl Loomis]
J.
Hoberman Opens His New York Times DVD Column With ... Sam Adams from indieWIRE
Next
Projection [Matthew Blevins]
CineScene.com
[Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)
Combustible
Celluloid Review - Nostalghia (1983), Andrei ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Nostalghia
(Andrei Tarkovsky 1983) - BlogalongaRusskie #6 Simon Kinnear from Kinnemaniac
Tarkovsky's
Nostalghia as a Cinematic Candle | Filmmaker ... Scott Macaulay from Filmmaker magazine, March 24, 2014
Andrei
Tarkovsky - Strictly Film School
Acquarello
NOSTALGHIA
(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983) Dennis Grunes
Nostalghia
| Review | Smells Like Screen Spirit
Dirk
Sonniksen
Films
Deserving of Greater Recognition IG from The
Most Underrated Movies
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
The
King Bulletin [Danny King]
Nick-Davis.com: Top
100: Nostalghia - Nick's Flick Picks
Nostalghia - Kino Lorber
Theatrical
Watch Nostalghia, the Russian
Melodrama by Andrei ... Fandor
New
York Times Vincent Canby
Andrei
Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia' on Blu-ray - The New York ... The
New York Times
Nostalghia - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
THE
SACRIFICE (Offret) A 100
Sweden Great Britain France (142 mi) 1986
Perhaps the most underrated film in all of Tarkovsky’s works, though it’s hard to be placed above ANDREI RUBLEV (1966), THE MIRROR (1975), and Stalker (1979), with SOLARIS (1972) not far behind, where it can be seen as the summation of his life and career, even his last will and testament, as the experience is unlike any other, the kind of thing that reinspires one’s belief in humankind. While there is some question whether Tarkovsky was aware of the gravity of his illness during the shooting, falling ill while making the film, yet he was still contemplating future projects and wasn’t diagnosed with terminal lung cancer until well into the editing process at the end of 1985, receiving treatments in Paris the following January, ultimately dying of lung cancer later that year in December 1986, where his wife Larissa (12 years later) and favorite actor Anatoliy Solonitsyn (4 years earlier) also died of the same cancer, as all were exposed to suspected chemical poisoning from contaminated waters during the lengthy shoot of Stalker (1979), where he was too ill to attend the screening at Cannes in 1986, winning the Grand Prize (2nd place) for the second time, also the FIPRESCI and Ecumenical Jury Prizes for the third times in his career, his prizes collected by his son Andrei, to whom this film is dedicated “with hope and confidence,” while it’s also listed among the "Vatican Best Films List" in a select group of 45 films compiled in 1995 on the 100th anniversary of cinema, where it’s included under the “Religion” category along with his earlier film, ANDREI RUBLEV (1969). No one made films like Tarkovsky, or shot scenes with his degree of artistic assuredness, whose somber, mentally challenging, and spiritually transcendent films are marked by exquisite film composition, mesmerizing long takes, philosophic curiosity, a devotion to classical music and art history, a fascination with exploring a mystical and spiritual realm of human understanding, while seamlessly blending dreams and memories into real time, though his likely successor may be Terrence Malick, who is equally inspired by many of the same metaphysical qualities, but his influence would have to extend to Béla Tarr, Carlos Reygadas, Andrei Zvyagintsev, Alexander Sokurov, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Claire Denis, who is credited as one of the casting directors in this film.
However, it should be pointed out that the unique beauty and reverential extravagance of Tarkovsky’s visual composition is matched by no other, so if viewers haven’t seen any of his films, it is recommended that you refrain from even looking at the images from his films on the Internet, YouTube or at stills in cinema books so that you will be exposed for the first time to the full impact of his visual mastery when experiencing his films. His films are that dazzling and awe-inspiring. The same can’t be said for anyone else. While he has a slim body of work, only completing 7 features in 25 years, his diaries were filled with ideas for dozens of films, as Tarkovsky complained bitterly about the bureaucratic resistance he encountered, where scripts had to be approved by official state censors, with the Party apparatus exercising increasing control over his films, forcing him to alter his original plans. For instance, he submitted his proposal for his second film ANDREI RUBLEV in 1961, which was completed in 1966, but not released in Russia until 1971, making it a ten-year process, though it was shown out of competition at Cannes in 1969 where it was immediately described as “the most profound, most powerful and most moving historical film ever to appear on the Russian screen.” Tarkovsky’s films are bewilderingly complex, sharing with fellow Russian citizens a mystical soul compelled to ask unanswerable questions with Dostoyevskian seriousness and sincerity, with viewers left adrift at the beginning of each new scene, where every single sequence leads to something that is completely surprising or unimaginable, often wondering how this event or that image fits into the overall understanding of the narrative, which may not become recognizable until well into the film, if at all. The dense tapestry compacted into each of his films are his trademark, where even decades later viewers are privileged to discover things you will find nowhere else, usually left with more questions than answers. But if there is a single image that runs through every one of his films it is water, including rivers, lakes, oceans, puddles, dripping water, or rain, especially rain, often coming in torrents that seem to catch his characters off guard, or even more incredulously rain falling indoors, where Tarkovsky uses rain as sculpture, with water seeping through a hole in the ceiling of a room, where no one else has been able to capture the movement—or the stillness—of water like Tarkovsky, and certainly no one has used it so artistically throughout their career.
Several Tarkovsky films begin or end with classical
paintings or works of art that profoundly illustrate or reinforce what we see
onscreen, opening here with a slow pan over Leonardo da Vinci’s The Adoration of the Magi
during the opening credits, an early, unfinished painting from 1481 that still
shows traces of the artist’s original drawing underneath the paint, depicting a
pagan world transforming into Christianity, establishing the theme of a gift or
sacrifice offered to God, a theme reinforced by the use of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, in particular an
aria in the form of a repeated prayer beautifully sung by Hungarian mezzo-soprano
Julia Hamari, Bach - Julia Hamari -
Matthäus Passion - Erbarme dich ... YouTube (7:34), that describes
Peter’s lament after having denied knowing Jesus three times.
Have mercy, my God,
for the sake of my tears!
Look upon me, heart and eyes
weep bitterly before You.
Have mercy, have mercy!
Shot in Närsholmen, on the southeast coast of Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, with a cast and crew that more appropriately resembles that of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, including his longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist, yet this is essentially a Russian film, where characters have a Dostoyevskian tendency to philosophize at any given moment. The opening sequence of the film couldn’t be more intriguing, consisting of the longest tracking shot (nine minutes and twenty six seconds) in Tarkovsky’s career, where we are introduced to Alexander (Erland Josephson), a retired actor and aging literary critic, and his young son that he calls Little Man (Tommy Kjellqvist), who is temporarily unable to speak from a minor throat operation, so the father has a prolonged monologue, describing the story of the legend of Ioann Kolo, a pupil of an orthodox monk named Pamve, who was ordered by his master to climb a mountain every day, to water a dead tree he had planted, until the tree came back to life, which, after three years, it finally did. Simultaneous to the telling of the story, Alexander is planting what looks like a dead tree in a lone location just off a path overlooking the Baltic Sea. They are interrupted by a visit from Alexander’s friend Otto (Allan Edwall), a Holy Fool character who arrives by bicycle as the postman, bringing a letter celebrating Alexander’s 50th birthday filled with humorous references to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, with Otto immediately breaking into a discussion on Nietzsche, adding his own spin on the encounter between the dwarf and Zarathustra, becoming something of his nemesis, jousting over the cycle of eternal recurrence, which suggests all events in one’s life will happen again and again, and continue happening infinitely. But as they walk, Otto teases Alexander for being so gloomy, while raising a curious idea that most of us are all living our lives in suspended animation, waiting for “something real and important” to happen, that he describes as an absolute moment that defines the rest of our lives into perpetuity, that could lead one to continual despair if life is judged as disappointing, or continual reaffirmation if one has the courage of one’s beliefs. After Otto leaves, Alexander sits down with Little Man and tells him the story of how he initially discovered this isolated house completely by accident (which is the real story of how Tarkovsky and his wife Larissa found their own house), thinking it’s the most beautiful place in the world before being reminded once again of the present and the emptiness of the human condition. “Words, words, words,” Alexander finally laments to himself in obvious exasperation, “Why can’t I do something?” This existential abyss is at the heart of the film, where in a godless world, with Alexander acknowledging God is “non-existent,” life has no meaning.
As they meander back home, strange shepherd’s calls can be heard in the background, recurring throughout the film, offering a mysterious presence of something eerie in the air, like the Sirens calling to Ulysses, sounding faint and off in the distance, but hauntingly beautiful. What follows is a black and white dream sequence, an overhead shot of a courtyard littered with debris, including an overturned car, but a noticeable absence of any people. By the time they get back to the vacation house, a picturesque locale overlooking the sea, we begin to see the quagmire of family dysfunction, having long ago abandoned any pretense of communication, where now they live desperately in an intensely private world of cold personal insults and verbal sparring, very much resembling the chilly world of Bergman chamber dramas, unlike anything previously seen from earlier Tarkovsky works, where even the choice of actors reveal traits heretofore unseen, especially that of British actress Susan Fleetwood (older sister to Mick, the founder of Fleetwood Mac) as Adelaide, Alexander’s wife, the only one speaking a combination of Swedish and English, where the emotional divide between them appears permanently soured. Also in the home is his somewhat indifferent teenage stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén) and Little Man, to whom he is completely devoted, along with Victor (Sven Wollter), the medical doctor who performed the throat operation, who may or may not be having an affair with Adelaide. The spacious interior decors is designed by Anna Asp, Bergman’s exquisite production designer from FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982), with the director resorting to meticulous choreography, as the actors move around the room during each shot, resembling the stifling, claustrophobic paralysis of a Chekhov drama, though it’s the visual stylization that holds our rapt attention, not the meaningless, rather banal conversation, though Otto at one point simply falls to the floor, as if dead on the spot, only to get up and declare, “An evil angel touched me.” Adelaide’s overbearing manner with her servants is the picture of arrogance and class contempt, literally ordering them around like pieces about to be sacrificed on a chessboard, where they’ve apparently learned to ignore her. Maria (Guðrún S. Gísladóttir) is from Iceland, living in town nearby, across an endlessly empty landscape, while Julia (Valérie Mairesse) tends to Little Man and more closely resembles the deeply religious maid in Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972). Just when dinner is almost ready, there is a ferocious, ear-splitting noise of jet fighters flying overhead, rattling the entire house, creating a transfixing moment of utter panic, where a pitcher of milk sitting on the cabinet spills onto the floor and shatters. When Alexander goes outside to investigate, color is strangely drained from the world.
The mood of the film shifts instantly, as does the musical soundtrack, where we hear the mysterious sounds of a Japanese flute performed by Watazumido-Shuso, Watazumi Doso Roshi, hocchiku - " Shingetsu 新月 " ("The ... “The Moonlit Soul” YouTube (5:22), which we later learn is a tape played by Alexander, but the peaceful calm is in stark contrast to the emotional shift that has taken place, as all sense the presence of unimaginable danger. When Alexander joins the others, they are watching an ominous television broadcast announcing the outbreak of a nuclear war before the screen goes blank, the phone lines are dead, and eventually the power goes out as well, though Alexander’s initial reaction is murmured to himself, “I have waited my whole life for this,” suggesting this is the decisive moment hinted at in the opening sequence with Otto, where suddenly his vision is clear, rising up against overwhelming feelings of loathing and self-contempt, and where the modern world lacks faith and spirituality, relying instead on technology, power, and fear, he has instantly found his voice. The autobiographical implications here are overwhelming, suggesting Tarkovsky was implicitly aware of his own fate, using Alexander as a force compelled to act against the impending doom of death and infinite nothingness, and in doing so, becomes the director’s own transparent voice. But first we’re forced to witness what is arguably the most uncomfortable scene in Tarkovsky’s career, as Adelaide starts implicating the others, hysterically pleading for them to do something, tossing herself on the floor, thrashing her legs violently as if in the throes of madness, where she goes on endlessly in the most shamefully overacted manner, screaming deliriously throughout, while as the viewer you’d do almost anything for her to just shut up, but it takes forever for Victor to finally sedate her with something out of his medical bag. Alexander, inspecting afterwards, finds a loaded gun. After a few rounds of cognac, the palpable fear in the room is tested, though the spookiest scenes involve Little Man asleep in his room, where Alexander wanders up there with the gun, presumably to put him out of his misery from the impending doom, as the blinds continually knock against the window, offering really tense and creepy atmosphere from a truly phenomenal sound design, which includes the continual shepherd’s calls as well, creating an ominous, ill-fated atmosphere, with characters occasionally staring straight at the camera. This leads to one of the most personal scenes of the film, which goes on for nearly five-minutes, where Alexander gets down on his knees and recites the Lord’s Prayer, followed by an eloquent plea to save mankind from Armageddon, delivered straight to the camera, brought on by a truly terrifying fear, as this is the ultimate war and nothing will be left afterwards, where one wonders if the director himself was ever driven to similar measures.
Lord, deliver us in
this terrible hour. Do not let my
children die, my friends, my wife... I
will give you all I possess. I will
leave the family I love. I shall destroy
my home, give up my son. I shall be
silent, will never speak with anyone again.
I shall give up everything that binds me to life, if You will only let
everything be as it was before, as it was this morning, as it was yesterday: so
that I may be spared this deadly, suffocating, bestial state of fear.
In this hour of a nuclear-devastated landscape, Tarkovsky and Nykvist performed significant amounts of color reduction, where as much as sixty percent of the color was removed, but these scenes are intermixed with surreal dream images that move in and out of color as well, making it hard to distinguish sleep from waking reality, as after an eventful night, plied with plenty of cognac, Alexander himself lies asleep on the sofa. Marta undresses and offers herself to Victor, her mother’s lover, while time slows to slow-motion, revealing a darkened interior hallway with rain falling from the ceiling, where one hears the sound of coins dropping onto the floor. Alexander can be seen heading out into the snow, discovering a recognizable dreamscape where he sees himself trudging through mud, finding silver coins lying next to the sleeping (or dead) form of his son, an inherent metaphor for the tremendous cost he must pay, waking to the enormous sound of jets flying overhead. But Otto is poking him awake as well, in a terribly agitated state, suggesting there may still be hope for the world. While Alexander remains groggy, Otto insists he could avert the imminent global disaster by sleeping with Maria, who he has heard is a soothsayer and witch. Initially finding the suggestion ridiculous, what other option does he have? So he halfheartedly sneaks out of the house in something of a humorous gesture, even changing his mind halfway along the way when he falls off the bike Otto lends him, but eventually finds himself standing in front of Maria’s door, a building we’ve seen before in one of the dream sequences, where Tarkovsky adds a Buñuelian twist, with sheep racing back and forth in front of the house, adding a bit of levity to an atmosphere drenched in perpetual grief and sorrow. While the shepherd’s continue to call, events become even more surreal than anything we’ve witnessed, where after initially turning him down, only afterwards does she realize just how desperate he is, leading him into her arms and to a levitation sequence hovering above the bed, much like there was in THE MIRROR (1979) and SOLARIS (1972), where we enter into the world of the supernatural, with recurring dream sequences, this time with people flooding into the streets in a crazed panic, interweaving various images seen throughout the film, including Maria dressed in Adelaide’s clothing and Marta nakedly chasing after chickens, leading into the meditative sounds of the flute playing. As Alexander awakes in his own home, with color returning to the world, along with the telephone and television, and music playing, with all seemingly right again, he realizes what he must do. While the audience is never certain if the events that transpire are real or a dream, but Alexander fulfills his vow in a remarkable closing sequence, directing the others to the tree that was planted just the day before, while he meticulously goes about the business of setting his house on fire. In one of the most powerful shots in cinema history, beautifully choreographed where events are timed several minutes into the six minute and 50 second shot, it was very difficult to achieve, obtaining near mythological status, failing in the first attempt when the camera jammed, having to be reshot and the house rebuilt, requiring an extra two weeks, but the cast and crew broke down in tears after the final take was completed. The back and forth choreographed madness has an absurd comical element, yet at the same time, the beauty of Alexander’s sacrifice is that no one realizes what he is trying to do, which only emphasizes the ultimate emotional devastation. While much of the astonishing beauty of the film is its dreamlike inner coherence, the tenderness of the ending is surprisingly life affirming, coming full circle, suggestive of a timeless Haiku poem, or a still moment frozen in time.
Time Out Wally Hammond
Tarkovsky described film as a mosaic of ‘fixed time’, and for him, while making this, time was running out fast (he died from cancer shortly after winning the Cannes Grand Prix for it). The result was a film unrivalled in the history of cinema in the expression of sheer dread. Made in Sweden, it tells in deceptively simple terms of a literary critic, once an actor (Josephson), who promises to give up everything ‘that connects him with the world’ in a bid to save it from the impending nuclear holocaust he hears announced on television. For those willing to acccept the tenets of Tarkovsky’s cinema of spiritual quest, his esoteric notions of Christian iconography and his obscure approach to cinematic meaning, the film can seem nothing less than miraculous. And it’s true that ‘The Sacrifice’ is most beautifully composed and superbly shot. But however great is Tarkovsky’s mastery of mise-en-scène, or astounding his use of sound composition, it appears dehumanised and not a little egocentric, closer to a study of madness and self-delusion than, as I believe Tarkovsky hoped, an illustration of the power of faith and self-sacrifice.
The Sacrifice Pacific Cinematheque
Tarkovsky is for me the greatest,” Ingmar Bergman once said. Tarkovsky’s devastating final film — “a Faust for the nuclear age” (David Parkinson) — was made in Sweden with several regular members of Bergman’s team, including cinematographer Sven Nykvist and actor Erland Josephson (who also appeared in Nostalghia). Described by Tarkovsky as a meditation on “the absence in our culture of room for spiritual experience,” the film is set on an isolated island, where Alexander (Josephson), a distinguished man of letters, lives in seemingly idyllic semi-retirement. The apple of his eye is his young son Little Man, who represents for him the great hope of the future. That future is abruptly shattered by the outbreak of the unthinkable: global nuclear war. In desperation, Alexander makes a private vow to God: he will renounce everything — family, possessions, even speech — if somehow the world can be put to rights again. Photographed in ethereal northern light, and opening and closing with two of cinema’s most breathtaking single-take sequence shots, The Sacrifice is a masterful, elegant film of great formal rigour and intensity. Tarkovsky supervised its editing from his hospital bed; he died of cancer in December 1986. “No one else can approach his sense of the Apocalyptic. His death leaves a gaping hole in the cinema of spiritual quest” (Chris Peachment, Time Out).
The Sacrifice - The New Yorker Richard Brody
Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film, from 1986, is a grand, unworldly, even antiworldly religious vision that depends on its perfect pitch to avoid absurdity and bathos. Alexander (Erland Josephson), a middle-aged critic, lives in a remote waterfront manor in rural Sweden with his frustrated wife, Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), her grown daughter, Martha (Filippa Franzén), and their young son (Tommy Kjellqvist), called only Little Man, who, after minor surgery, cannot speak. The action is set on Alexander’s birthday. He receives greetings, presents, and visits, but suddenly the house shakes with the thunder of military aircraft and a television broadcast announces an imminent nuclear attack. The members of the household and their guests are on the verge of a collective breakdown as they face the end, but Alexander’s friend Otto (Allan Edwall), a postman and retired history teacher, offers him a metaphysical bargain to save the world. The blend of midlife crisis and existential terror is reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but Tarkovsky makes it a world of his own. His images have a transcendental glow and a hieratic poise; alternating between contemplative distance and moral confrontation, they assert, in the most radical sense, the high cost of living—the unbearable price of earthly delights. In Swedish.
The Sacrifice | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Andrei Tarkovsky's last film (1986) isn't on the same level as his extraordinary Stalker, but it's a fitting apocalyptic statement, made when he knew he was dying of cancer. The first and penultimate shots—ten-minute takes that are, in very different ways, remarkable and complex achievements—manage to say more than most films do over their entire length. In between these shots one finds Tarkovsky working in a mode that bears a distinct relationship to Bergman—made all the more apparent by the Swedish setting, the cinematography (by Bergman's incomparable Sven Nykvist), and the casting of Erland Josephson in the lead—but the hallucinatory camera movements and the mysticism of the plot could belong to no one but Tarkovsky. As Alexander (Josephson), a university lecturer, celebrates his birthday with family and friends, a major nuclear crisis is reported on TV, followed by a power failure. Praying for the world to return to normal, Alexander promises to give up everything he has and winds up sleeping with his maid, reportedly a witch, to seal the bargain. As with Nostalghia, Tarkovsky's previous work of exile, it's possible to balk at the filmmaker's pretensions and antiquated sexual politics and yet be overwhelmed by his mastery and originality, as well as the conviction of his sincerity. Critics have been of little help in getting to the core of this powerful visionary; a better start might be to read Tarkovsky's book, Sculpting in Time. In Swedish with subtitles.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Jason Halprin
Critic Wesley Morris observed of our collective cultural habits, "I think everybody might have a handful of books or movies that they happily return to because they honestly don't remember the plot—they just remember the mood or the experience.” Similarly, I think everyone has movies they return to solely for a particular moment or scene. These moments can be so singular that everything around them fades slightly into the background. This isn't to make a virtue of flawed memory, but rather to highlight those directors with the rare gift to sculpt a mood or moment that hovers above a film. Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema is rife with these exalted moments: Capt. Kholin's acrobatic embrace of Masha over a trench and her limp surrender in IVAN'S CHILDHOOD; a floating candelabrum and a chandelier's subtle jangle in SOLARIS. Tilda Swinton encapsulated this phenomenon in a speech referencing STALKER: “I saw an image of a dream that I have been visited by all my life made real … A bird flying towards the camera dips its wing into the sand that fills a room. Did I imagine this? I haven't seen the film for years. Can somebody tell me?” Released in 1986 and garnering Tarkovsky his second Grand Prix at Cannes (Roland Joffé's THE MISSION took home the Palme d'Or—a banner year for Christendom) THE SACRIFICE is considered by some to be a challenging, ancillary work by the Russian master. With time though the debates over ‘slow cinema' and the film's relationship to Tarkovsky's legacy have faded, and what remain are some of the most haunting moments of the director's career: The sudden and uncanny desaturation of the film's image—courtesy of master cinematographer Sven Nykvist—as Erland Josephson roams his estate in a nuclear daze; the flickering TV test pattern reflected on the family in tableau; the film's breathtaking denouement, which never ceases to terrify me. These are the images I return to again and again, echoing Swinton's disbelief: Did I imagine this? Showing with Gerald Schnitzer's 1953 short DOOM TOWN (15 min, 35mm). (1986, 142 min, New 35mm Print)
The Sacrifice by Andrei Tarkovsky | Books | The Guardian Derek Malcolm, January 8, 1987
No film by Andrei Tarkovsky is anything other than a daunting prospect. He yields up his secrets slowly, massively and with the utter conviction of a filmmaker who knows he is out of step with his times and does not regret it. You have to draw a deep breath and plunge into his world with as much concentration as he has fashioned it.
The Sacrifice, which looks more and more like his testament, is no exception. Filmed in Sweden and using mostly Swedes both behind and in front of the cameras, it will inevitably seem like an incursion into Bergman territory. But, in fact, it is so Russian that it almost hurts, in its warning thunder, its call for sacrifice, and in its final intimation that there could just be hope.
This is a world we all secretly dread, on the very edge of nuclear disaster. It is part of our corporate nightmare. And, as in a nightmare, where you are falling and falling, there is the half-waking feeling that something can stop the descent if only we could will it strongly enough. That something, in Tarkovsky's terms, is faith, which can only be obtained by blasting through the dream into reality and then having the courage to change everything. Faith heals only with the most intense effort. Spirituality triumphs over materialism only after a bloody battle.
In The Sacrifice, a middle-aged intellectual, celebrating his birthday with family and friends at his isolated home by the sea, faces the prospect of the holocaust with them and strikes a bargain with the Almighty. He will give up everything, including his cherished son, in return for the chance to start again. After burning the house down, he is regarded as mad and taken away, but his son, a deaf mute, finds his voice and survives to water the tree his father had planted.
The film is full of those lengthy, intricate and virtuoso takes that, with symbolism as well as heightened realism, seek to post a stage in the argument. Erland Josephson plays the writer with utterly dogged concentration. Susan Fleetwood as his wife and Allan Edwall as the local postman provide the fire with which to melt some of Josephson's ice, but there is little real warmth in the film, because that is not what Tarkovsky is after. Needless to say, it is supremely well-fashioned.
Exceptional works of art like this are seldom flawless but equipped with so defiant a sense of their necessity that, even when you are bored, you feel it is a fault of concentration and not of what is actually up there on the screen. They trample you half to death with their superior strength of will and single-mindedness of purpose.
If you can even begin to cope with it, the dividends are immense and lasting. And even if you can't, there are whole sequences which will hold you like a vice. But for his death last week, I would have said that no one in the cinema at present can begin to compete with Tarkovsky at this level. And now there is a huge void. We have lost a hard master, but a master he was.
"A Second Look: Andrei Tarkovsky's 'The Sacrifice'" Dennis Lim from The LA Times, July 10, 2011
The most significant figure in all of postwar Soviet cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky died in 1986 at age 54, leaving behind only seven features, the first five produced in the Soviet Union and the last two in Italy and Sweden. The son of a poet, Tarkovsky made deliberate, cryptic films that dealt with such intangibles as the mysteries of existence, the contradictions of faith, the power of art and — most indelibly — the passing of time.
He was hardly the first or only filmmaker to engage with questions of temporality in film. Michelangelo Antonioni (obsessed with ennui and empty spaces), Andy Warhol (given to provocatively long running times) and Chantal Akerman (fixated on everyday ritual and minutiae) all made important contributions to the "cinema of duration," to use a term coined by the critic André Bazin.
But Tarkovsky, whose famous long takes signal a profound mistrust of the rapid montage of revolutionary Soviet cinema, was perhaps the most single-minded believer in the transcendent ability of the moving image to express what he called "the course of time within the frame." He spoke of "the pressure of time" and described the process of finding a film's rhythm as "sculpting in time" — a phrase that provided the title for his collection of essays.
These are no longer novel concepts in art cinema. Many of today's great directors — Hungary's Béla Tarr, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Alexander Sokurov, the Russian director most often called Tarkovsky's successor — make movies that in different ways respect and reflect the passage of time.
That said, lesser talents have adopted the long-take style as easy shorthand, an automatic bid for significance. Just as problematic, some impatient critics have rushed to classify any movie with a contemplative pace under the reductive rubric of "slow cinema" or, worse yet, written off all such films as boring and alienating, the province of elitist snobs.
While Tarkovsky has been a clear influence on many, his cosmic poetry remains inimitable. His ghostly sci-fi parable "Solaris" (1972) was recently issued on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, and his final film, "The Sacrifice" (1986), makes its DVD premiere this week, on standard-definition and Blu-ray editions from Kino.
Premiered at Cannes half a year before its director's death, "The Sacrifice" is often called a last testament. Tarkovsky completed it knowing he had terminal cancer, and he dedicated it to his son "with hope and confidence."
But while the film, which stares into the maw of mortality and apocalypse, has the grandeur of a final summation, it is far from neat or definitive, and despite what its title might suggest, it is not exactly a simple allegory of Christian atonement and self-sacrifice.
"The Sacrifice" unfolds over a 24-hour period, as friends and family gather to celebrate the birthday of Alexander (Erland Josephson), a wealthy actor turned professor who lives on a desolate Swedish island. The setting evokes Ingmar Bergman, one of Tarkovsky's favorite filmmakers, as does the involvement of Josephson and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, both Bergman collaborators.
The festivities coincide with the outbreak of World War III, and in the grip of a "sickening animal fear," Alexander strikes a deal with God, promising to sever all his worldly ties if the extinction of mankind is averted.
Leonardo da Vinci's painting "Adoration of the Magi," seen in the opening credits and referenced in the film, depicts the ceding of a pagan world to a Christian one. Tarkovsky's theological scheme is not as clear-cut: Alexander is an atheist who turns to God, but salvation depends on persuading a witch to sleep with him, or so he's told by the Nietzsche-quoting postman who arrives bearing telegrams and perhaps a divine message or two.
The concluding annihilation is powerful not least for its ambiguity: an act of faith, madness and transfiguration.
Given the sheer beauty and unwieldy philosophical ambition of Tarkovsky's films, it's not too far-fetched to suggest that his true heir is Terrence Malick — a filmmaker whose approach to space and time is fragmented where Tarkovsky's is unified but who shares with the Russian a mystical connection to nature and the elements and a compulsion to pose unanswerable questions with utmost seriousness and sincerity. ("The Sacrifice" opens and closes with the image of what you might call a tree of life.)
More than most filmmakers, both have molded the language of cinema to their own ends. Their ultimate project — to find concrete expression for the spiritual — is perhaps a perverse one. It's telling that they have inspired similar responses, a mix of cult-like reverence and hostile derision.
Both belong to the increasingly rare breed of artists who dare to think of art as a spiritual quest, who risk ridicule as they search for the sublime.
"Foreign Classics: Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice - To Sleep, Perchance to Dream?" David Parkinson from Moviemail, July 27, 2013
David delves into Andrei Tarkovsky's final film, the apocalyptic The Sacrifice. To plot a path through this complex film, David finds a connection with Shakespeare's Hamlet, a play that Tarkovsky was planning to adapt.
Contrary to popular belief, Andrei Tarkovsky did not know he was dying of cancer when he made The Sacrifice (1986). Indeed, he had already started contemplating future projects, which included a biography of the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (provisionally entitled Hoffmanniana) and an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Tarkovsky's interest in the latter is particularly intriguing, as there are several points of reference between the story of a Danish prince who prevaricates over avenging his father's murder and a Swedish father who decides that 'words, words, words' are not enough and strikes a bargain with God to prevent the world war that is likely to claim the life of his son. This most tantalising connection is a fortuitous one, as while the lines, 'To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream,' from the famous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, may not be spoken, they prove key to understanding The Sacrifice, a film whose ambiguity has resulted in many divergent readings.
While promoting the film, Tarkovsky claimed 'I wanted to show that one can resume life by restoring the union with oneself and by discovering a spiritual source. And to acquire this kind of moral autonomy, where one ceases to consider solely the material values, where one escapes from being the subject article of experimentation between the hands of society - a way - among others - is having the capacity to offer oneself in sacrifice.'
The story told in The Sacrifice is significantly different to the one Tarkovsky had originally planned to relate in a screenplay titled The Witch. 'The Sacrifice is a parable,' he once revealed. 'The significant events it contains can be interpreted in more than one way. The first version was entitled The Witch and it told the story of the hero's amazing cure from cancer. His family doctor having told him that his days were numbered, Alexander answered the door one day and was confronted by a soothsayer - the forerunner of Otto in the final version - who gave Alexander a strange, almost absurd instruction: he was to make his way to a woman reputed to be a witch and spend the night with her. The sick man obeyed as his only way out and, through God's mercy, was cured; this was confirmed by the astonished doctor. And then one wretched, stormy night, the witch appeared at Alexander's house, and at her bidding he happily left his splendid mansion and respected life and went off with her with nothing but the old coat on his back.'
However, when Anatoly Solonitsyn - who had taken the title role in Andrei Rublev (1966) and had also featured prominently in Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979) - succumbed to cancer in 1982, Tarkovsky was too devastated to pursue his original intention and redrafted the scenario to focus on a potential holocaust. But the irony was not lost on him, as he confided to his diary that the disease had finally caught up with him, as 'today, years later, I too am suffering from it'. While this may have turned out to be an accidental allusion to Tarkovsky's off-screen life, there is still plenty of autobiographical detail in the script. By then exiled from the Soviet Union, Tarkovsky had been worried about the fate of his young son Andrei and was grateful to actor Maximilian Schell for sending 10,000 roubles to the family in Moscow to help them pay their debts. Cruelly, Tarkovsky would only be able to see Andrei again after he had been diagnosed with cancer in December 1985 and it is touching to note that he dedicated the film to the boy 'with hope and confidence'.
One wonders whether Tarkovsky ever uttered anything similar to the prayer that Alexander offers up in a rare moment of privacy in The Sacrifice that almost sounds like an extract from a Shakespearean monologue: 'Lord, deliver us in this terrible hour. Do not let my children die, my friends, my wife... I will give you all I possess. I will leave the family I love. I shall destroy my home, give up my son. I shall be silent, will never speak with anyone again. I shall give up everything that binds me to life, if You will only let everything be as it was before, as it was this morning, as it was yesterday: so that I may be spared this deadly, suffocating, bestial state of fear.'
Alexander (Erland Josephson) is a philosopher with a belief in the rational rather than the spiritual, which allows him to be convinced of the prevalence of sin - 'Sin is that which is superfluous; and that being the case, our whole civilisation consists from beginning to end of sin.' - without being persuaded by the existence of a deity. Yet, he prays for himself and his loved ones to be spared Armageddon. It could be argued that, unlike Hamlet, he decides to act. Or he could have been so tormented by memories of the past wars he had witnessed that it was his subconscious that appealed to God for clemency. Alexander certainly falls asleep during the course of his birthday night (indeed, there is a possibility that his fear of ageing and the creeping inevitability of his own demise shape his imaginings rather than the threat of conflagration). But which parts of that momentous evening occur in waking reality and which in his sleeping mind?
Who is to say that Alexander hasn't dozed off before he takes a nap after praying? He kneels almost as soon as he hears the news bulletin about the imminence of conflict and appears to drop off soon afterwards. As he slumbers, he seems to see his stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén) offering herself to Victor (Sven Wollter), the doctor lover of her mother Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), while Alexander himself heads off into the snow to find his missing son, Gossen, who is known to everyone as Little Man (Tommy Kjellqvist). Yet, when Alexander wakes to Otto the postman (Allan Edwall) arriving during what seems to be a power cut to suggest that he could avert the imminent global disaster by sleeping with Maria (Guðrún S. Gísladóttir) Alexander seems not to know what he is talking about. The house has just been shaken to its core by jets flying overhead, yet Alexander seems blithely unaware of the crisis he is being urged to prevent. He could simply be sleepy and disorientated after his strange visions or he could be cocooned in a dreamworld that he had entered on finding the model house that Little Man has made for his birthday. Acting according to dream logic would certainly explain the alacrity with which Alexander falls in with Otto's far-fetched proposal and his willingness to continue on his fool's errand to Maria's house even after falling off the postman's borrowed bicycle as he rides through the darkened countryside.
Adding to the sense of ethereality is the cry of the unseen shepherd that pierces the night. But events take an even more surreal (ie dreamlike) turn once Alexander crosses Maria's threshold. As they make love, the couple levitate above the bed and the scene shifts to show the mute Little Man sleeping contentedly as the townsfolk rush through the streets in understandable panic. The next image shows Maria dressed in Adelaide's clothing, as she looks down indulgently on her lover snoozing on a camp bed, while the reverie ends with a bizarre shot of the naked Marta chasing chickens along a corridor.
This sequence begs the question, therefore, whose dream are we actually watching - Alexander's or Little Man's? The boy was certainly asleep in his room before dinner, as Adelaide sends Julia the maid (Valérie Mairesse) to wake him and he refuses to come and pretends to still be asleep when his father enters his room. Moreover, by lying beneath the tree as Alexander is taken away in an ambulance in the closing scene, it could be that Little Man is trying to dream himself another solution to an intractable problem.
There is, of course, a third option, as Maria appearing to catch sight of the charred ruins of a smouldering building suggests that we are witnessing a prophetic vision of what will befall Alexander and his family the following morning. Such ambiguity is typical of Tarkovsky and he even uses our knowledge of his earlier films to mislead us. In Nostalgia (1983), Erland Josephson had played Domenico, another holy fool who had set fire to himself in Rome while chanting a prayer for forgiveness. As Tarkovsky had used monochrome for the illusory segments in that film, it is easy to assume that he has followed the same scheme here as a saint rather than a madman sacrifices himself for others.
But Tarkovsky and cinematographer Sven Nykvist employ a tripartite strategy, as they also use desaturated colours shot in the Scandinavian 'white night' that form an uncertain middle ground between what is presumed to be the black and white of the fantasy sequences and the full colour of reality. The scene in which the family watch the TV news is clearly in colour. But we don't see the same bright hues until the following morning when the crisis has passed. Yet, even though this would seem to imply that everything between these scenes has taken place in the imagination of one or possibly more of the characters, some critics have even reached the conclusion that the denouement alone is dreamed, while others insist that everything happens as we see it and that there are no fantastical elements at all.
Does Alexander really believe that a random action by a single individual can stop a thermonuclear war? Or is the conflict simply the blinding light that causes him to experience a Damascene conversion? Could he and Maria actually have persuaded God that their desperate resort to extramarital coitus was sufficiently sanctified to prevent a catastrophe? Does Alexander sacrifice his sanity to save the planet or does he merely feign madness (as, indeed, does Hamlet) in order to keep his end of the bargain while retaining an outward appearance of atheism?
We shall never know for sure. But this remarkable film does seem to confirm Tarkovsky's deep spiritual conviction and the truth of Hamlet's contention that 'there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy'.
Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei Tarkovsky: Master of the Cinematic Image, by Stuart C. Hancock from Mars Hill Review 4, Winter/Spring 1996
Central Europe Review - Tarkovsky: The Long Take That Kills Benjamin Halligan, November 13, 2000
The Sacrifice | Cinelogue Carson Lund
Elemental Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 1 (Introduction) Adam Scovell from Celluloid Wicker Man, February 13, 2014, also seen here: Andrei Tarkovsky | Celluloid Wicker Man
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 2 (Chaos) Adam Scovell from Celluloid Wicker Man, March 6, 2014
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 3 (Natural and
Cyclic Rejuvenation) Adam Scovell
from Celluloid Wicker Man, March 20,
2014
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 4
(Zarathustra). Adam Scovell from Celluloid Wicker Man, April 3, 2014
Elemental
Chaos and Eternal Return in Scriabin and Andrei Tarkovsky – Part 5 (ANS
Synthesiser + Conclusions). Adam
Scovell from Celluloid Wicker Man,
March 31, 2014
A
documentary about Sven Nykvist’s lighting process on ‘The Sacrifice’ excerpts from the book In Reverence of
Light by Sven Nykvist and Bengt Forslund, from Cinephilia &
Beyond (Undated)
World
Cinema Review: Andrei Tarkovsky | Ivan's Childhood ... Four
Films by Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, and The
Sacrifice, by Douglas Messerli, October 30, 2011
Zarathustra's
gift in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice - Screening ... Gino Moliterno from Screening the Past, March 1, 2001, also seen here: The
sacrifice as Testament - An Existential Life
The Sacrifice • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno, July 18, 2001
Nick's Flick Picks [Nick Davis]
THE SACRIFICE Andrei Tarkovsky - Alt Film Guide Dan Schneider
Andrei Tarkovsky Achieved Sublimity Through 'The Sacrifice ... Jesse Solis from Pop Matters, September 1, 2011
The Sacrifice - TCM.com James Steffen
Andrei Tarkovsky's – The sacrifice (Offret) | SP Film Journal Wayne Gwee, June 23, 2013
The Eternal Recurrence in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice ... Dyssebeia, February 27, 2013
The Bravest Scene in Cinema Dyssebeia, August 28, 2012
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]
Andrei Tarkovsky - The Sacrifice - Spike Magazine Jonny Cooper, December 10, 2007
Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum on Tarkovsky Nostalghia.com news archives
Time Magazine [Richard Corliss]
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]
0-5 Stars Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
The Complete Andrei Tarkovsky - Harvard College Library Tarkovsky retrospective, February 2, 2014
How to Face a Nuclear Apocalypse: Tarkovsky's “The ... Michael Joshua Rowin from Fandor, April 4, 2011
Electric Sheep Magazine [John Bleasdale]
"Sacrifice, The (1986): Tarkovsky's Masterpiece" Emanuel Levy
DVDTalk.com - Blu-Ray [Jamie S. Rich]
Disc
Spotlight: Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice
Landon Palmer on Blu-Ray from Film
School Rejects
Blu-ray.com [Casey Broadwater]
Andrei Tarkovsky - Strictly Film School Acquarello
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)
Next Projection [Matthew Blevins]
Critic
With A Camera | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum on Chris Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Jennie Kermode
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Stunning and Impossible, Tarkovsky's Final Film, The Sacrifice Sam Weisberg from The Village Voice, November 12, 2014
Stories from behind the scenes of Tarkovsky's films | Russia ... Alexandra Guzeva, April 5, 2012
Final shot of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia: house with hills and a ... film discussion forum
"And Then There Was Sound: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky," by Andrea Truppin Sound in Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE, also an interview with Owe Svensson, Swedish sound mixer
An Interview with Layla Alexander Garrett Tarkovsky’s interpreter and personal assistant on THE SACRIFICE, by Jap Mees from Talking Pictures
BBCi - Films Jonathan Trout
A hard master Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, January 8, 1987
The Sacrifice Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, December 7, 2007
"Sacrifice" by Olga Surkova from the Moscow News
Siskel & Ebert (Video)
New York Times Vincent Canby
The Sacrifice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Behind the scenes on Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice on YouTube (8:02)
Tarr, Béla
Bela Tarr, The Films of Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
Pacific Cinamatheque and the Vancouver International Film Festival are pleased to present a retrospective of the films of Bela Tarr, a Hungarian filmmaker whose work remains little-known in North American, but who is gradually establishing a reputation as one of world cinema's most impressive and distinctive talents.
In fact, a critical buzz of major proportions has recently begun to gather around TarrÅs work, due primarily to the circulation on the festival scene of the director's astonishing Satantango (1994), a monumental, magical, rigorous, seven-hour, black-and-white magnum opus on eastern Europe in aftermath of communism that has drawn comparisons to the lofty likes of Angelopoulos, Antonioni, and Tarkovsky. Jonathan Rosenbaum of Chicago Reader chose Satantango as one of the top ten films of 1994; William Johnson of Film Comment cited it as "the highlight of the [1994] New York Film Festival" ; Dimitri Eipides of the Toronto International Film Festival described it as "an epic work by one the world most impressive filmmakers"; John Ewing of the Cleveland Cinematheque hailed it as "the film event of the year"; and J. Hoberman of the Village Voice recently selected it as one of best films of 1996 -- and claimed that, despite its seven-hour length, "more than a few of those who came to see it [during a brief engagement in New York last summer] came back to see it again."
Chicago's Rosenbaum had actually begun carrying the Bela Tarr torch long before the all the Satantango hullabaloo. In a prescient piece published in the Chicago Reader in 1990 (one of the earliest articles on Tarr to appear in English), Rosenbaum wrote, "Last year, I was bowled over by first encounter with Bela Tarr when I saw Damnation (1987), his fifth feature." Now having just seen Tarr's fourth feature, Almanac of Fall (1984) -- "a riveting experience" -- Rosenbaum proceeded to issue a lengthy encomium to TarrÅs work in which he described the Hungarian director as "much more of an artist than Peter Greenaway", and declared his desire "to see his earlier features -- Family Nest (1977), The Outsider (1980), and The Prefab People (1982). (RosenbaumÅs piece -- "A Bluffer's Guide to Bela Tarr"-- was recently reprinted in his well-received 1995 collection Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism).
If the likes of Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos are often invoked todescribe Tarr's more recent work, then John Cassavetes stand as a more apt touchstone for those earlier Tarr features. Claustrophobic, confrontational, loosely structured, rough-edged dramas, they feature improvisational acting and liberal use of close-ups and hand-held cameras, and typically focus on the emotional fissures of ordinary working-class existence. Their major themes have remained central to Tarr's work: "a constant attention to the deep malaise within society, dysfunctional families and individuals, and an inability to find happiness" (Piers Handling, Toronto I.F.F.).
Family Nest, Tarr's first feature, was made when the director was a mere 22 years old, and before he had received his formal training as a filmmaker. It earned the Hungarian Film Critics' Prize for best first feature, and shared top prize at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1979. The Outsider, Tarr's second feature, was made while he was a student at Budapest's Academy for Theatre and Film Art. He continued to refine his cinema verite methods in the highly regarded The Prefab People, Tarr's first film using professional actors.
Almanac of Fall marked an important transition in Tarr's work. The claustrophobic, confrontational, kitchen-sink dramatics of his earlier work remained in place -- Variety described Almanac as "an even more painful, scorching and unsettling image of Hungarian society" -- but the semi-documentary conventions were jettisoned for a new highly formal, highly controlled visual style, including experiments in the expressive use of colour and odd camera angles a la Raßl Ruiz.
Tarr's formal rigour and high stylization reached their maturity in Damnation and Satantango, spellbinding, moody, apocalyptic films in which "his canvas has expanded, his world view has become more refined (more dystopian and misanthropic!), and his control of the medium grown more highly assured. Damnation and Satantango will be viewed as central works of east European cinema in the decades to come. They sit astride a momentous event in history, the dissolution of the communist world, and document this moment in a way that only great art can. . . The films are reminiscent of Fellini's La dolce vita and Antonioni's L'avventura in the manner in which they mirror their times. For anyone who wants to visit the state of mind of present eastern Europe (be it Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, the plethora of new republics, or, of course, Hungary) these films are like X-rays, exposing a culture with insight, humanity and courage" (Handling).
"[Tarr] is slowly emerging as one of the most distinctive talents in the world, although it has taken him six films, and a career that began over 20 years ago, to reach this point. And he is still a young man." -- Piers Handling
A few words on Béla Tarr… — Crosscuts — Walker Art Center Jenny Jones, September 3, 2007
With films characterized as remarkable, mesmerizing, and
devastating–not to mention, in the case of Satantango, a bona-fide
masterpiece–Béla Tarr’s upcoming Regis
Dialogue and Retrospective (September 14-October 21) is sure to be an
extraordinary experience. For a sneak peek into the mind of the master, here is
film critic Howard Feinstein’s Regis essay on Béla Tarr. Feinstein will be
interviewing Tarr on-stage at the
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Critics have generally divided the famously uncompromising Hungarian director
Béla Tarr's films into two distinct stylistic periods, with a truncated TV
version of Macbeth (1982) marking a transitional point. Under the
influence of the "documentary fiction" movement led by Istvan Darday
(a politicized socialist realism), under whom he had been an assistant
director, as well as John Cassavetes, cinema vérité, and possibly even the
British "kitchen sink" school, he shot his first three features,
known as the "proletarian trilogy:" Family Nest (1979), The
Outsider (1981), and The Prefab People (1982). Here we have in urban
settings handheld camera, nonprofessional actors, some improvised dialogue,
multiple closeups, and conventional editing rhythms as Tarr explores the social
and economic conditions-- especially a major housing shortage--that play havoc
with the personal lives of his perpetually frustrated characters. (The seeds of
his obsession with cinematic time can be seen, for example, in the meaningful
ellipses.) In these claustrophobic environments, people become aggressive and
communication is impossible. Men are mostly irresponsible and either actively
or passively oppressive toward women, who may be victims but are decent and
sensitive to one another's plights.
Besides a concern with working-class people and the social circumstances of their private lives, these early low-budget features have other elements in common with the better known works of the later Tarr: whether unconscious or not, the striking compositions of his mise-en-scène, not to mention powerful ambient sound, reveal an aesthete's eye and ear. He has always been acutely aware of the process of seeing, which he will later take to a degree that undermines the conventions of cinema as we know it. A tiger doesn't change its stripes.
In the one-hour Macbeth, which has the feel of live television, gritty realism has been replaced by a spare stylization. He doesn't edit so much as follow his actors up and down, left and right, in real time. It comprises only two takes, but the second is 55 minutes long. Tarr is developing a logic of film time that is based on the action (or non-action) of his characters and the landscape in which they function--even if here it is within the confines of a theatrical proscenium. (The 1984 Almanac of Fall, shot almost entirely in interiors in which he uses architecture and objects to block his more bourgeois characters and comment on their nasty behavior, can also be thought of as a transitional work.)
In most of the films of Tarr's so-called second period, characters (and viewers) stare out of windows for prolonged periods--just as his camera, no longer handheld and frequently panning ever so slowly, surveys the minutiae of their lives and the (generally rural) landscapes that they inhabit with a bare minimum of cuts, and with a remarkably sharp depth of field. (He has frequently referred to location as a character in his work, and he and longtime partner, editor, and sometime coscreenwriter Ágnes Hranitzky spend a great deal of time finding the perfect locales in which to shoot.) Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994), and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) were all done in collaboration with novelist László Krasznahorkai, Hranitzky, cinematographer Gábor Medvigy, and composer Mihály Víg. (There is never any doubt as to who is boss.) On one level, the extremely long takes are a visual correlative to Krasznahorkai's famously long sentences. Someone, or a group, may walk for 10 minutes or longer, but the camera travels with them. Even if a section is, as in his seven-and-one-half hour magnum opus Satantango, an observation of the ordinary activity of an inebriated doctor in his home, Tarr has come as close as any filmmaker to finding a parallel to a gifted writer's detailed descriptions of life's banalities. What is truly astounding, especially in Satantango, is that long sequences are not necessarily successive but concurrent--"meanwhile, back at the ranch," without the crosscutting that D. W. Griffith made into convention. Redundancy is a recurring trope. No wonder Susan Sontag referred to Tarr among those directors whose films are "heroic violations of the norms."
In these last three films, Tarr has elaborated upon the fog machine that graced the Macbeth stage for texture and commentary. We still find fog, but also endless rain, mud, pigs, the peeling paint of rundown buildings, and large empty spaces. Through simple, generally unsympathetic characters, mostly peasants, he builds a visual and aural world--natural sounds have never sounded so dramatic--in which people are nasty, often drunk, criminal, and either susceptible to authoritarian leadership or authoritarians themselves. Incredibly quiet sequences alternate with boisterous pub scenes. The films are in black and white, but in a wide variety of subtle, calculated shades--including the variations on gray praised by Lotte Eisner when she described the German Expressionists of the silent era--to fit the situation at hand. (Tarr has said he despises the falseness of Kodak color stock.)
Some call these movies bleak, but I think of them as lying somewhere between anthropology and allegory. This is the landscape of a country beaten down by Communism, by false hopes, by the elements themselves. Tarr claims that these works are not at all political, although he acknowledges that he hopes they reveal a "social sensibility." Many critics call them metaphysical, cosmic, cousins to Tarkovsky (whom Tarr finds "soft"). Tarr will have none of that: for him, they are concrete and one should not think too much about such lofty things. (It's ironic that he originally studied philosophy.) No matter: these latter films ooze from their groundedness a strong sense of spirituality.
What is rarely mentioned is the humor of the films and the director himself, whose attitude toward life does not appear otherworldly. When asked recently whether things were improving in his homeland, the 51-year-old Tarr told Time Out New York, "We Hungarians were always too lazy--too lazy for Fascism, too lazy for Communism. We are eating too much, drinking too much, making love too much."
His most recent film is The Man From London, which premiered in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It was adapted by Krasznahorkai from a Georges Simenon novel. Shot in Sardinia with an international cast, it is set in a small seaside town. The film is a perfect marriage of Tarr's aesthetic sensibility and the policier. Complementing the trench coats and bright bulbs that suit the genre are the dark blackand- white stock (Fred Kelemen's cinematography is mesmerizing) and the director's propensity for shadows, fog, unbelievably slow pans and tracking shots, and somber, held accordion chords. Tarr nevertheless adds some signature touches from outside the genre, like the sequence of drunken eccentrics in a hotel bar. The basic plotline: Maloin (Czech actor Miroslav Krobot) is a signalman at a dockside railway who witnesses a robbery and murder, then steals the loot. Stalked by the man he has burned, he wrestles with his conscience about how to keep the money.
We are far from the plains of landlocked Hungary.
--Howard Feinstein, adapted from his essay in the 2006 Sarajevo Film Festival catalogue. New York-based Howard Feinstein has written on film for such publications as the Guardian, Vanity Fair, Time Out, the Times of London, Sight & Sound, Filmmaker, Premiere, Indiewire, and Out. He has curated exhibitions on ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia and since 1999 has been a selector for the Sarajevo Film Festival, where he also programs Panorama (fiction), Panorama Documentaries, and Tribute to, the annual directors' retrospectives (Béla Tarr received a tribute in 2006).
Interview: Béla Tarr, the Complete Works - Film Comment R. Emmet Sweeney interview from Film Comment, February 2, 2012
Instead of a golden watch, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is giving Béla Tarr a complete retrospective for his retirement, along with a theatrical run of his magisterial final film, The Turin Horse. The bleak (and bleakly funny) maestro of modernist black-and-white ruin, Tarr turned the post-communist landscapes of Hungary into elemental playgrounds of loneliness and decay. His films are populated by smoke, fog, and rain as much as the weathered faces of his brooding, binge-drinking protagonists. Tarr spoke with Film Comment about his career before the retrospective begins this weekend.
Could you talk about
joining the Béla Belázs studio, and how that led to the making of Family
Nest (79)?
It was really simple. I just wanted to do a movie, and it was one place I could go without a diploma. They said, OK, you can try, and they gave me a little bit of money. I shot it in five days, and it cost $10,000 or something like that.
The actors are all
nonprofessionals, working-class folks in Hungary. How did you cast them?
I knew them from before I started the movie. I was close to these kinds of people. I was working in a ship factory, and was always close to the ugly, miserable proletarians. I just wanted to show their day-to-day routines, their striving for a better life. I worked in a factory from 1973 to 1976, when I hurt my back, and couldn’t do physical work anymore.
What made you interested
in making films, coming from that background?
I loved the cinema always, and I loved to go watch movies. But what I saw there was just stupid lies and fake stories. I never saw life and I never saw anything about the people I knew. I never saw real passion, I never saw real emotions, or real camerawork. I never saw a real movie. I thought, if they cannot show me, then I have to do my movie.
Were you seeing Hollywood
films or local ones?
Everything everywhere is the same. The whole fucking storytelling thing is everywhere the same. That’s why I decided I have to do my movies.
When you did The
Outsider (81), how did you find lead actor András Szabó? He has a wonderful
face.
He was just a musician. He never acted in any movies. You have to understand that it doesn’t matter if I’m working with a big film star, or someone from the next factory. I’m looking for their personality, how they react… And when I choose them, I’m searching for how they are, like real human beings. When I get into real human situations in a scene, I want them to react how they would in their lives. They have to be natural, they have to be dancers. If someone is acting in my movies, I become mad and I stop them and say, “OK, this is nice, what you’re doing, but not in this movie. I’m interested in what is happening inside of you.”
Szabó embodies that
approach, with a very quiet, expressive “being” rather than an act. Where did
you meet him?
I was watching one of his concerts and afterward I asked him.
How did you work with
Ágnes Hranitzky on The Outsider and other films? She is listed as editor
and co-author.
It’s quite simple. I set most things up, in terms of the location and the set. Since the beginning, I prefer that she is there because everything happens once you get to the location, and she has a very sharp eye. She can always see if something is wrong. It’s more helpful to watch a film with four eyes, not only with two.
On Prefab People
(82), why did you decide to cast real actors?
Prefab People was the first movie in which I worked with professional actors, and that was the first moment when I moved away from the social aspect toward capturing human connections, of the couple. They were a real couple. I wanted to work with them because I love them, and love watching their personalities.
Talk about the transition
from the social realist style of your earlier films to the greater artifice of Macbeth
(82).
I don’t like this term “social realism.” If you create a movie, you create a fiction. It’s something that looks real, but of course it’s not real because it’s created. For me, they are not political movies. The real art is to show real human conditions and relations, and that’s all I try to do.
What attracted you to Macbeth?
When I went to film school, my professor said I had to do a kind of examination, and shoot something not in my style, something that’s classical. I was thinking, OK, I can do Macbeth. He was very surprised. But anyway, I did it, and really loved to do it. I loved to do it because my same mania came up. What is the relation between the man and the woman? What is happening within them? We cut out about half of the drama, because I was only focusing on these two people. What are their interests, what is their sexuality? A lot of things came up. And of course I did the whole movie in one take. Because it was video and we could do it. I enjoyed it!
What I like about is that
in many scenes, you can see the actors’ breath, as if they were already in the
cold of a morgue. Where did you shoot it?
By the end we got the support of TV, and got professional quality support, and we shot it in a castle in Budapest. There is a very long cellar, and we were shooting there.
How long did you rehearse
for the hour-long shot? How many takes?
We rehearsed for a while, and I think we did 10 takes. We could shoot twice a day, because afterward everyone was over [exhausted?]. I think we had eight takes. By the end I chose the best.
Almanac of Fall (84)
is another step towards greater artifice after Macbeth. Was it shot in a
studio?
It was shot in a real flat, which I used like a studio. We wanted it to look fake, like a cathedral of lies. About each person’s interests and how they betray each other and fight with each other. And how the fucking money and these interests destroy the human condition.
The characters are like
zombies circling a void. And this is the first time you worked with Mihály Vig,
whose droning scores seem well matched to your films.
He was in a rock ’n’ roll group and made some really beautiful music, so I thought why not, we should try. And you know, he’s a poet, a very clever man.
Next was Damnation
(88), your first collaboration with László Krasznahorkai. How did you meet and
conceive of this project?
A friend of mine, who is a college professor here, was reading the manuscript of Satantango, Laszlo’s first book, and he called me and said, “Here is a beautiful work for you.” He explained to me that it was Laszlo’s first book, and that I had to read it. I read it, and fell in love immediately. Afterwards I called him, and we sat together, and I don’t know how it happened, but our first discussion was totally OK, and we became friends.
We wanted to make Satantango into a film immediately, but no one let me do it, and I was in really deep shit. I had no chance to work in Hungary because the politicians here really didn’t like Almanac of Fall, saying it was decadent, really ugly and dirty. It was stupid. Anyway, we were thinking of something else to do, and I thought we should do a simple thing. So we wrote what became Damnation, and went to the Hungarian Film Institute, the Hungarian Film Archive, which had a small amount to give, and the lab, and somehow we made this movie. It was really cheap, but we were independent of the state censorship.
Damnation <strong>has
elements of film noir, from the torch-singing femme fatale to the regular guy
getting caught up in a web of criminality. Was American film noir an influence?
No, not at all. If you go to a small Hungarian town, a miner’s town, you don’t need American film noir. You have the real thing.
The central character in Damnation
is one of many passive observers in your films (like the Doctor in Satantango).
Instead of delivering the package himself, which he would do in a traditional
crime film, he simple passes the job off and watches from the outside.
You know, it’s a very cheap story. It’s not about the story. I wanted to show more than the story, because all stories are the same. But I really love the people, and I wanted to show you the people.
The landscape seems to
become more and more important to you as well.
The landscape is one of the main characters. The landscape has a face. We have to find the right location, like we have to find the right music. That’s why I need the music before shooting, because music is also one of the main characters.
Then came Satantango (94).
How were you able to get it made?
Damnation went to the Berlin Film Festival, but in Hungary everybody hated it. The politicians hated it, and they told me very clearly that I could not make movies in Hungary any more. We moved to Berlin, and lived there. When we were there, the wall fell down. Afterward, I went back to Hungary, and started to make Satantango.
How much of the book is in
the film? The English translation is finally coming here next month.
We kept the structure of the book. Like the tango, it’s six steps forward, six steps back. We kept the chapters, and we kept a lot of things. It is not a direct adaptation, because literature is one language, and film is another. There is no direct way between the two things.
But do you think your use
of long tracking shots is a way to translate Laszlo’s winding sentences into
film?
The takes get longer and longer to go along with my thinking. I don’t know how my takes are getting longer and longer. It was good meeting Laszlo, because his point of view—how he was watching the world and how I was watching the world—it was similar. And that’s why we work together. We never talk about the movie, we never talk about the art, we are always just talking about the life. Of course he is a very good writer, he writes beautiful sentences, and I have to find a way to show them, in the real. When you shoot a movie, you can only shoot the reality, something that definitely exists. You know, the feel of this movie is very concrete.
And you can see that in
the actors you use.
They are not actors, they are friends. It was a big mess.
A mess?
Yes. Because everyone was totally crazy about this shoot. It took two years. We could not shoot in the summer, because of the leaves on the trees, and we could not shoot in the winter, because of the snow. We could only shoot early spring or late autumn.
I think Satantango is
your funniest film.
All my movies are comedies! Except The Turin Horse.
Agreed. The comedies
continued with Werckmeister Harmonies (00), and the casting of the
pinched-face Lars Rudolph. Is it true you had no intention of making it until
you met Lars?
Yes. I read the book [Melancholy of Resistance] and loved it, but I could not conceive making a movie out of it, because I didn’t think anyone could play the main character, Valuska. Later, I was in Berlin, doing a workshop with young filmmakers. One of them did a casting call for her short movie, and I watched him sitting in the corner. He wasn’t an actor—at this time he was a street musician. I was watching him and I thought he was amazing, that he could be Valuska. Then I called Laszlo and said, I think now we can do the movie, because I found Valuska.
What was it about Lars
that made him perfect for the role?
I loved his personality and his presence, which is totally enough for me.
You have said how much you
hate stories, but with The Man From London (07) you adapted a very
famous storyteller in Georges Simenon.
It’s not an adaptation, I just loved the atmosphere of the novel. I read Simenon’s novel 20 years ago, and I only remember it for the atmosphere, images of a man over 50, who has a very monotonous daily life, with no chance for change. He sits in his cage alone, while the city is sleeping during a dark night. He is a really lonely man. I just wanted to do a movie about the loneliness. Someone over 50 who has no chance. And what happens when he gets that chance, a temptation.
It is one of your more
oppressive works, and seems to move even slower than the others. You used a new
DP, Fred Kelemen here. What was his input?
Fred was my student in Berlin in the beginning of the Nineties, his first years in film school. Afterward he became a filmmaker, and we made a short video together for Hungarian television called Journey on the Plain. On pre-production for The Man From London, I started thinking he could do it. I called him, and he came. And he did it perfectly. He was always very close to me.
The presence of Tilda
Swinton in the film is a bit jarring in the context of your usual performers.
How did she get involved?
It was a funny thing. We had everything cast, except for the mother. Ágnes went through actors and agencies, and she found a small photo of Tilda. But her name wasn’t on the picture, just an ID number. And so we were asking, “Who is this woman?” It was an unknown picture of her. And then they told me, and I thought…fuck. So I was calling her and asking her if she wanted to come, and she immediately said yes. I loved to work with her.
Now on to your first
non-comedy, The Turin Horse. How did it originate?
When I first met Laszlo, it was 1985. We just started to talk, and became friends. Once he had a lecture in a theater, and in closing he read this Nietzsche anecdote, but he added this question about what happened to the horse.* After this moment, we would always discuss, from time to time, what happened with the horse? We always came back to that question. I decided after The Man From London that it was over, that I was going to close the shop. But I was thinking and talking with Laszlo, this is our debt. We have to answer this question, “What happened with the horse?” We talked about it, and I knew it would be my last movie.
How did you meet Erika
Bók, who is the daughter in The Turin Horse and an important part of Satantango
and The Man From London as well?
She was a small girl in an orphanage. She really looked like a wild girl. Somehow we domesticated her. She wasn’t able to say hello, because she was incredibly closed. But she had these beautiful eyes and looked like a small rabbit. She was always in the corner, always afraid. She has grown up, and has a special presence, and was an amazing experience working with her.
The character of the
neighbor who gives a philosophical rant about the state of the world in The
Turin Horse is representative of a lot of holy drunks and fools in your
work. Who wrote this particular speech and what affinity to you have for these
end-of-the-bar prophets?
It was written by Laszlo. It just came up during the situation of the shooting, but it was written by him. It’s a normal human situation. If you are going to the next bar, and people are waiting for a drink, they are always talking, talking, talking, and then he gets the bottle…
Your films have some of
the greatest boozing scenes in history. What do you yourself get out of
drinking?
A kind of joy. And of course it is part of human life. We have to show the joy. The quality of the joy comes through much more clearly and the quality of the life.
* What happened with the horse, according to the epigraph to The Turin Horse: “In Turin on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of number six Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail. Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the cabman—Giuseppe? Carlo? Ettore?—loses his patience and takes the whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and that puts an end to the brutal scene of the cabman, who by this time is foaming with rage. The solidly built and full-moustached Nietzsche suddenly jumps up to the cab and throws his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His neighbor takes him home, where he lies still and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words: “Mutter, ich bin dumm,” and lives for another ten years, gentle and demented, in the care of his mother and sisters. Of the horse…we know nothing.”
Interview
| The Thinking Image: Fred Kelemen on Béla Tarr ... Robert Koehler interviews Fred Kelemen
regarding Béla Tarr from Cinema Scope, 2012
An aging, partially disabled father and his loyal, hard-working daughter endure six days and nights of a fierce windstorm in their lonely farmhouse while their horse—their means of sustenance—gradually loses its will to work or eat. This could be the stuff of a play, but Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse consciously contains its action and world to as small a space as possible while expanding his distinctly kinetic and time-stretching film language, nearly always premised on the possibilities of the moving camera. Indeed, as is noted in the conversation with Tarr’s cinematographer Fred Kelemen below, the film’s interior lighting scheme—including dimmer boards and dozens of fixed small lights—directly recalls elements of stage-lighting practice.
But Kelemen and Tarr are radically involved in cinema, as moments of random viewing of The Turin Horse (or, for that matter, their past collaboration, 2007’s The Man from London) amply demonstrate. Because of its black-and-white photography, its intensely celluloid textures and (mostly) minimized dialogue, it’s easy to cite The Turin Horse as a direct descendent of silent film. However, a close viewing, or preferably more than one, indicate that this is only part of the story, and not really the interesting part—much like the film’s text by Tarr and his “permanent” writer-collaborator Laszlo Krasznahorkai can be pegged as a tale of an oncoming apocalypse with great implications for today’s viewers. Such a reading tends to ignore the story’s essential absurdist essence, the will to go on despite all dire signs to the contrary. The Turin Horse is as much tied to Samuel Beckett as it is to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose (fictionalized) rescue of a horse being thrashed on a street in Turin was the wellspring for the film’s story.
If this is Tarr’s final film—which he currently insists that it is, stressing that he intended it to be his final work while preparing filming—then it appears to be a return to essentials. With Tarr, Kelemen—whose own films as director, including Fallen (2005), Nightfall (1999), and Frost (1997), revel in the moving shot—devised a remarkably intricate chain of moving images, never intending the baroque high points of Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Satantango (1994), or The Man from London, but fully in line with those films’ fascination with the visually dramatic possibilities that the moving camera can produce on screen and then directly to the viewer’s consciousness. This phenomenon is heightened by the deliberately slow tempo of most of the shots, producing a rigorously designed result that Kelemen refers to as “the thinking image.” Moreover, the individual shots always comprise multiple shots—shots within the shot—that actually don’t tie the film to the silent era, when only a handful of filmmakers deployed the moving camera, and the ones who did (such as Dziga Vertov and Abel Gance) bear no real connection with Tarr’s much more gradualist cinema. Rather, the shots-within-shot style is a look back toward Max Ophüls, whose balletic tracks and dollies declare that cinema can be choreographic. (“Choreography” proves to be one of Kelemen’s favourite words.)
Perhaps because of its extreme intimacy and radical denial of much breathing room outside, the images in The Turin Horse become in many ways the inner thoughts of its two characters, even as the characters exist inside the images. A shot that begins with the father looking outside (we see what he sees at first) gradually evolves into a larger shot of the living space until it changes yet again into a view of the daughter sewing; the conventional film grammar would call for cuts, and some would argue that the cut itself is the most cinematic of devices. But Tarr/Kelemen’s way with images argues for a different perspective: that instead of the cut, the ever-changing image in front of us produces a more mysterious, sometimes destabilizing effect, much like the way the mind can wander from thought to thought, or how we see our own bodies move through physical space. The tension between this frequently contemplative flow, a kind of anti-montage, and the harsh absurdities of the life laid out on screen is what energizes The Turin Horse, much like the intensity of the burnished colours in Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters—a painting which Tarr and Kelemen considered during their preparations, which makes sense as potato-eating is this family’s only dining experience—and pushes against the image’s depiction of sheer, unmitigated desperation.
Cinema Scope: How
did you and Béla Tarr meet and how did your working relationship develop?
Fred Kelemen: We met in January 1990 when Béla was presenting a retrospective of his films in Berlin. We saw each other at a café sitting at different tables without knowing each other. The following Monday we accidentally met at the office of the film school where he gave a small workshop of three or four days. He remembered me from the café and asked me to join his workshop. I agreed, and as it was for higher-level students I could not shoot an entire own work, but I did the camerawork for the other students who realized some small exercises. Béla and I immediately understood that we are connected, that we have similar approaches to the art of film and similar ideas about how to move the camera. From that moment, our relationship started. When we said goodbye after the workshop we knew that we would meet again. We did later in Budapest, where I regularly travel to see my family. And whenever he came to Berlin, he called me. So, slowly, we came together and our artistic ways were leading us in a similar direction. The first meeting was the beginning of a long way together that eventually led us up to the shooting of The Turin Horse.
Scope: In Tarr’s films one is always aware of the camera and its relationship to physical space. His cinema and your cinema make the viewer quite aware of the physical space and the relationship—either close or far—of where the camera is to bodies and space. Was that something you were immediately aware of in the workshops?
Kelemen: In those three or four days, it was somehow quite clear that we shared a kind of vision. Before studying in the film school, I was painting. What interested me extremely is that in cinema the picture is moving. So when I began my own filmmaking, I was moving the camera. In my application for studying at the film school, the movement was the essential element. It’s still the most interesting and adventurous thing—how the camera moves through space, how the camera reveals things by moving. It is like the movement of thoughts, your thoughts move and you reveal something. We move in the world and by moving we discover and understand. The human being is a moving being—physically and spiritually—not a stationary one. The moving image is thus a thinking image.
Scope: A fascinating aspect of the moving shot is the difference between the forward and reverse moving shot. My own aesthetic bias tends to prefer the reverse moving shot that gives the viewer more information. I sense that you and Tarr may also share that tendency, since the majority of your moves are reverses.
Kelemen: The very first shot is a reverse shot, and then it moves side to side…
Scope: Yes, it moves around. It reminds one of Ophüls. This must have been something that you’ve discussed.
Kelemen: Well, I can’t say in general…And that’s not to mention the parallel tracking shot going from side to side. The forward and reverse movements create entirely different tensions. It’s a very different feeling going toward an object or person than by revealing more and more of the space by going backwards. It’s not only a question of revelation, but of a different energy. It depends very much on the subject, what you shoot, what you want to say in the moment: one type of movement is better than another. For example, in The Turin Horse, when the daughter is reading the book the gypsies gave her, the camera moves closer and closer, very slowly. And this creates a different emotion than when the camera moves away from a person or an object.
Scope: That would also seem to be at the heart of what we were talking about before, about how you would plan out the shots.
Kelemen: We started with how the actors would go from place to place, and then we would plot out the shot. So the question was often, “How can we go from this starting picture to this ending picture?” For example, it was clear when they’re sitting and eating potatoes, we knew that she had to stand up and go over to the oven, and that’s where the shot would end. So the actors’ movement in the space was ahead of the camera movement. Finding the choreography for how the camera follows the character through space can be a very adventurous thing, almost really musical. We tried to find the optimal way, which means the most fluent. We searched for it together. We shared in the making of these shots, and it’s really an ongoing collaboration and conversation. Often a conversation without words, just with moving the camera and watching and feeling.
Scope: And a central aspect of these shots are the shots within the shots.
Kelemen: For sure. A good example is the shot that moves back from the long focal length shot through the window of the distant hills during a foggy day, which is both a zoom out and reverse moving shot back from the father, pulling back to reveal the daughter sewing at the dining table. Inside this shot are many individual shots, each one emphasizing a particular idea.
Scope: When you first saw the script of The Turin Horse, did the moving images come into your head at that point? Or was it more in conversation with Tarr that the pictures then formed in your own head? I ask that because the viewer is quite aware when watching the film that the cinematographer is a co-filmmaker and that the images seem to be as much yours as they are Tarr’s.
Kelemen: I can’t read without having images in my mind. And when I was reading, I was naturally imagining each scene in the film as a single shot. I never saw any cuts to break up the single shot. Not knowing the concrete space while reading, surely, I saw things differently from the way they actually turned out. I didn’t know where the door or table or a window would be. When Béla explained to me the positioning of all these crucial items and how he imagined certain pictures, and when I saw the set, then it was clearer. There weren’t so many options: the table is here, the door is here and so on. So Béla and I went scene by scene and sometimes we made little drawings of the space, like an architect’s floor plan, with lines for the movements of the actors and camera movements. And since we have similar ideas and imaginations about how to make images, we never disagreed. Béla is a film artist with a strong visual sense. We both know that the art of film is first of all a visual art. During the shooting, it is very rare that the movement of the camera had to be corrected fundamentally or the speed of it had to be changed, etc. according to what was imagined beforehand. Despite our close connection, Béla is the director in his films and he has the last decision—but as I said, we never disagree in these artistic questions.
Scope: You are very much a part of the creation of the shots, including the tempo of the camera moving in a particular direction, and also your decision to use an optical zoom to enhance the movement one way or the other. As camera operator, you have a considerable amount of control over the images’ look and dynamic.
Kelemen: That’s something I really like about this kind of shooting because it gets to be a physical performance. Naturally or intuitively, when we’re doing the work, we let the camera fly through the space. For sure, Béla is controlling the image via a video monitor.
Scope: Does that include the zoom shot, which Tarr told me the other day that he doesn’t much prefer?
Kelemen: It depends on how it is used. The zoom can be very disturbing if it is used in a rough way and it can ruin the whole feeling of a film. But if you use it carefully to frame your image and support the movement of the dolly, for example, you can produce a very nice, tender effect of dolly movement and zoom movement in one. It can become very fluid.
Scope: It’s quite elastic.
Kelemen: Yes, it’s very elastic, like a material you can form, like hot wax. It is like dancing with the world around, and while moving creating it. A quotation of Nietzsche comes to mind—that we have to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Scope: And this is where this film in particular is also different from silent film, because in silent cinema you didn’t have this kind of optical elasticity you’re talking about. This is what makes The Turin Horse a very modern film, while at the same time drawing much inspiration from silent cinema.
Kelemen: Cinema is fundamentally a visual art, as I said, not dependent on literature, it has much more to do with music. You can take the words away and you still have a film, but you can’t take the image away. And even a black screen is an image. So automatically, when you talk about silent cinema, you’re at the heart of cinema. I always prefer to focus on the visual and express what we have to say by way of the image and not by words.
Scope: And we see that in your own films.
Kelemen: Well, it’s a natural tendency. My view of cinema as primarily visual guides my work, whether I’m making my own films or working with, for example, Béla.
Scope: What do you both talk about in terms of the film’s ideas? This is not all a technical exercise for you. There’s clearly a great deal that goes on in terms of expressing the ideas that emerge in front of the camera.
Kelemen: For sure it’s not just a technical job. It is an artistic creation. As I tried to express before, the cooperation between Béla and me has a magical aspect. It is a rare human and artistic connection. We have the same point of view, we understand each other without words, we have the same heartbeat concerning the soul of the images, the timing, the framing, etc. It has to do with ideas but it’s also a matter of energies, intuitions, and a sense of the physical space, the feel of it, to use the images to tell something, to create an atmosphere. We don’t sit around having intellectual conversations. We shoot it in the way we like it.
Scope: Did you ever discuss Nietzsche?
Kelemen: Almost never. During one break we sat down and read one part of a text by Nietzsche. I have been familiar with his texts for a very long time. When I was 13 or 14 years old I read a text by him for the first time. Before studying at the film school, besides painting I studied philosophy. But the film is entirely understandable without any knowledge of Nietzsche at all, because it is simply human.
Scope: While watching it a second time, I found that it was funnier and that I was laughing more. And I realized that I was thinking much more of Beckett than Nietzsche.
Kelemen: When I was reading the script, I was thinking of Beckett, and that was something I really liked about it immediately. There is a convincing radical minimalism and an awareness of our human condition besides all illusions. The humour you discovered is a hidden and fine one. And for sure, the movie is not dark or depressing—it is rather purifying.
Scope: On some practical points, how large was the crew and how did you come upon the film’s unusual location?
Kelemen: We had a pretty small crew. In my department I had four technicians, two people in my camera team and the grip. The final choice came down to two different locations. We felt that the location with the hills and the lone tree was the perfect place, with more than enough room to build the horse stable and the house—it’s in Hungary.
Scope: And the horse?
Kelemen: The horse Ricsi is female. The name was given to her before. Béla found her. I was not present, so it is his story to tell. Ricsi is living on a farm now. We are pretty sure that she was poorly treated in her life before the film. She had this deep sadness in her eyes and she didn’t like to move with a carriage.
Scope: Just like Nietzsche’s horse.
Kelemen: Yes.
Scope: Ricsi even had an effect on the casting, right?
Kelemen: Béla had to find an actor, playing the father, who could work well with the horse.
Scope: An interesting aspect is the film’s lighting. When people see the film they might not be conscious to the degree that the film is painstakingly lit throughout. Could you go through the process of the lighting scheme?
Kelemen: It was clear for the interior setting that no sources of artificial light would be visible in the frame, except for the lamps in the night shots and the glow from the oven. During the day, all the light should look like its source originates through the windows. The natural light coming into the house that was built for the film was so low that without adding artificial light, the image would come out black. So all the interior shots are lit with a lot of lamps, trying to create the feeling that it’s a dark place with all the light coming in from the windows. The lighting was made for the space and according to the movements of the actors and the camera. When I lit a space, I had to know who’s going where. I had to make an architectural and choreographic plan so I could build up the light, knowing that as I move through the shot I may have lights to the camera’s left, and then lights to the right, and say when I walk through some darkness that would be a nice place to have a little light to touch the actor at a certain moment, for example. It has to do with movement and the rhythm of the film. There’s a music of light in the film and a logic of light.
Scope: So the lighting would change based on the movement in the scene, and you’d have to reset the light?
Kelemen: We created a basic light scheme inside the house, and for sure the place always had to look the same, but as well we changed the lights or their position, depending on the shot.
Scope: So depending on where the camera was, alterations in your lighting scheme had to happen. Just like in a studio.
Kelemen: It was like a studio, only more difficult, because we had the natural daylight entering from outside. We decided that most of the time the outside should be visible behind the windows when we’re in the house. I had to take care of the outside lights. If the light outside was dimming during or at the end of the day, I had to lower the lighting inside. So it was necessary permanently to create the right relation between outside and inside light.
Scope: Did you have dimmer boards?
Kelemen: Always.
Scope: So it was almost like you were lighting for the theatre.
Kelemen: Yes, but we also had this elasticity in the lighting like we had for the camera. Sometimes we would change the lighting inside a shot, so we put it up or put it down. We had notes on all these moves for the technicians on the crew. It was a precise work to move the power of the lights or even lamps according to the movement of the camera and the image we wanted to create. It is painting with lights. We had around 30 practical lights of various sizes set in and outside the house and around 15 practical lights in the stable.
Scope: Can you describe the shooting schedule?
Kelemen: We couldn’t shoot in summer since it would give us too much sunshine, we didn’t want to have rain, we didn’t want to have snow, and we didn’t want to have vegetation. So we could only shoot between winter and spring or between autumn and winter, and we had to stop in spring when the vegetation was too strong, and we had to wait for autumn to end for early winter. This was in 2009, and then we resumed last year. The necessities made us shoot in very limited parts of the year to get this dry, almost desert landscape. Nature forced our hand, so we had to constantly wait for the weather to be right whenever we were viewing the outside. It was extremely foggy one day, and it seemed as if it would be impossible to shoot. You couldn’t even make out the distant hill. But the more we looked at it, the more it seemed that it would be beautiful to shoot and it ended that an image from that shooting day is the one that’s used in the film’s poster art.
These specific conditions of nature presented some interesting challenges. For example, I was very concerned about making sure that the horse was going to be visible onscreen during the shots looking into the stable. The stable is fairly underlit, and if we were shooting later in the year, the horse would have shed her summer coat and become much darker as we moved into fall. I wasn’t sure at first that she would be viewable in the stable’s heavy shadows.
Scope: Where did the idea for the constant, driving wind come from?
Kelemen: It was in the script.
Scope: And how did you create the wind?
Kelemen: We had a huge crew and they were all blowing. (Laughs.) We had some old wind machines and sometimes we used a helicopter. The machines would have to move with the camera, so this was yet another choreographed element. We didn’t have wind machines big enough to blow the whole area, so, for example, when the camera is moving out of the house following an actor, we had to keep the wind machines following along so there would be no visible gap of calm in the shot as the actor is moving. Everything is moving, everything is part of a big choreography: the wind, the lights, the camera, the actors.
Scope: You must have questioned as to why the father and the daughter, once they’ve packed up and left, return to the house after they go over the horizon.
Kelemen: It’s very easy. They see something—you can only imagine what it is—that makes it not worth staying.
Scope: It seems like the most Beckett-like moment, because as bad as where they were, wherever they were heading was even worse.
Kelemen: No matter if it’s better or worse, but it’s something that stops them from keeping going. In this world there is no other world than this one. There is no escape. It does not matter where you are, but who you are and how you deal with yourself and others, and the conditions of life of which death is surely an integral part.
cineCollage :: Bela Tarr biography
Bela Tarr - Alchetron, The Free
Social Encyclopedia
biographical profile
Allmovie Jason Ankeny biography
Béla Tarr •
Great Director • Senses of Cinema
Jeremy Carr, June 22, 2017
Béla Tarr | IFFR brief bio
Béla Tarr – Cinema of
the World
Béla Tarr - Movies, Bio and Lists on MUBI
TCMDB filmography
The Bleak World of Bela Tarr - Talking Pictures Alan Pavelin
Béla Tarr | FilmGrab film stills
The Film Factory Sarajevo University’s School of Science and Technology
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
Bela Tarr - Strictly
Film School Acquarello film reviews
Bela Tarr | Tony McKibbin The
Monochromic Force Field (Undated)
A
Bluffer's Guide to Bela Tarr | Movie Review | Chicago ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 24, 1990
FILM
FESTIVAL REVIEW - SATANTANGO - A Seven-Hour ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times, October 8, 1994
The
Importance of Being Sarcastic | Movie Review | Chicago ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, October 13, 1994
A Place in the Pantheon | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 9, 1996
Are you sitting comfortably? Jonathan Romney from The Guardian, October 6, 2000, also seen here: essay - Fred Kelemen
Hope
Deep Within - Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies • Senses of ... Gabe
Klinger from Senses of Cinema,
December 28, 2000
The melancholy of resistance Peter Hames from Kinoeye, September 3, 2001
Points of No Return | Village Voice J. Hoberman, October 2, 2001
BAM/PFA - Film
Programs Tango, Hungarian Style: The
Films Of Béla Tarr, by Jason
Sanders, November 3, 2001
Sátántangó: And then there was Darkness Donato Totaro from Offscreen, April 2002
Why Béla Tarr's movie Werckmeister Harmonies is a ... Deep Waters, by Richard Williams from The Guardian, April 18, 2003
Béla Tarr's Marathon Masterpiece Casts a Devilish Spell ... J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, January 3, 2006
László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr - Harvard Film Archive January 12 – 17, 2006
Bela Tarr: Satantango David Auerbah from Waggish, January 12, 2006
Bela Tarr: Satantango [2] David Auerbah from Waggish, January 17, 2006
Bela Tarr: Satantango [3] David Auerbah from Waggish, February 11, 2006
TANGO marathon David Borwell, October 22, 2006
On Sátántangó Initial thoughts David Lowery from Drifting, November 13, 2006
Bela
Tarr's Sound Images: Cinema of Proximity » Reviews ... Gravity7, January 2007
Rain Man Michael
Atkinson from The Boston Phoenix,
January 10, 2007
The devil has
all the good tunes - hlo.hu Tim
Wilkinson from Hungarian Literature
Online, January 10, 2007
Lateral
Sculpture: Béla Tarr's Sátántangó | The House Next ... Ryland Walker Knight from The House Next Door, January 19, 2007
Béla Tarr's Slow Burn | Village Voice Ed Halter, February 13, 2007
Partisans in the persistent and hopeless fight for human dignity: Sátántangó David McDougall from Chained to the Cinematheque, March 5, 2007
Facets : Cinémathèque: Béla Tarr Tarr film symposium, September 2007
A few
words on Béla Tarr… Jenny
Jones from The Walker Art Center, September 3, 2007
Béla Tarr: Mysterious Harmonies Walker Art Center, September 14 – October 21, 2007
Tarr
Nation: Hungary for More Rob
Nelson from The Walker Art Center, September 19, 2007
Observations
on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium,
September 19, 2007
Dancing in the dark with Satantango Kathie Smith from The Walker Art Center, October 15, 2007
Unspoken
Cinema: Satantango by Rosenbaum
Harry Tuttle from Unspoken Cinema,
October 30, 2007
Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood Online excerpts from book written by Michael Atkinson (228 pages), January 1, 2008
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
Gus
Van Sant in the light of Béla Tarr
Jenny Jones from The Walker Art Center, March 17, 2008
The Spiders’ Webs (on Bela Tarr’s Satantango) Doug Messerli from Green Integer Blog, March 25, 2008
Nine Minutes of Cows Dan North from Spectacular Attractions, April 26, 2008
Shall We
Satantango? Cullen Gallagher from The L-magazine, July 25, 2008
Opening
Shots: “Satantango” (Bela Tarr, 1994)
James Hansen from Out 1 Film
Journal, July 28, 2008
Satantango | PopMatters Chris Robé, August 7, 2008
Béla
Tarr’s Long Takes (an education in film)
Adferoafferro from Cutting On the Action, August 18, 2008
Tarr Béla quits cinema? Harry Tuttle from Unspoken Cinema, November 6, 2008
Satantango (1994) A Film by Bela Tarr Carson Lund from Are the Hills Going to March Off?, November 27, 2008
BFI | Sight & Sound | The Man from London (0) The Weight of the World, by Michael Brooke from Sight and Sound, January 2009
FILM Satantango (Sátántangó) by Béla Tarr {2} Cutting On the Action, February 6, 2009
Shorts watched April 2009 Brandon’s Movie Memory, May 5, 2009
Unspoken Journal - Tarr Béla Harry Tuttle from Unspoken Cinema, May 13, 2009
Month of 121 Shorts: Visions of Europe Brandon’s Movie Memory, November 29, 2009
Sátántangó · The New Cult Canon · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias, May 27, 2010
The Captive
Audience – The New Inquiry Ryan Ruby
from The New Inquiry, June 6, 2011
Profile:
Bela Tarr | Southern Vision
Tyler, November 28, 2011
Masterclass par Tarr Béla Harry Tuttle from Unspoken Cinema, December 30, 2011 (video, 1:47:01)
Béla Tarr | The Seventh Art The
Turin Horse listed as #1 film of
2011, by Srikanth Srinivasan, January 1, 2012
Cinema's ultra-dark unknown genius - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, February 3, 2012
Columbia
Journal | REVIEW – Béla Tarr at the Lincoln ... Ela Bittencourt from Columbia Journal, February 13, 2012
The Melancholy Worlds of Béla Tarr - Harvard Film Archive March 9 – 25, 2012
The Turin Horse: A
Numbers Game – Offscreen Donato
Totaro, April 2012
The Turin Horse and the End of Civilization As We Know It David Hanley from Offscreen, April 2012
The
Aching Beauty of Bela Tarr (feat. one-week run of “The ... Béla
Tarr retrospective, April – June 2012
Tarr Béla's film company closes down Harry Tuttle from Unspoken Cinema, May 24, 2012
Béla Tarr retires from film-making … very, very slowly | Film ... John Patterson from The Guardian, May 25, 2012
Ten
Tangents for SATANTANGO (Talking around a novel ... Drew Johnson from The Collagist, August 6, 2012
Death
by degrees? Bela Tarr to open film academy | Film ... Xan Brooks from The Guardian, September 28, 2012
Unspoken
Cinema: Tarr's Film Academy 2013
Harry Tuttle from Unspoken Cinema,
September 28, 2012
The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr | The White Review Rose McLaren from The White Review, December 2012
The
Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes - Frames ... Phil Mann reviews a book on Tarr by András Bálint
Kovács, 2013 (pdf)
Bela
Tarr swaps film making for running unique school ... Daria Sito-Sucic from Reuters, February 25, 2013
Sátántangó (Film and
Novel) as Faulknerian Reverie ...
Jonathan Rosenbaum from Notes,
April 13, 2013
Book
Details : The Cinema of Béla Tarr
written by András Bálint Kovács (256 pages), published May 2013
Bela
Tarr Retrospective: Introduction
Bernardo Villela from The Movie
Rat, May 7, 2013
Michigan Quarterly Review|Béla Tarr's “Sátántangó” Eric McDowell from The Michigan Quarterly Review, July 4, 2013
When the Devil Danced in Hungary - The New York Review ... Adam Thirwell reviews László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango from The New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013
Is
Bela Tarr's 'Satantango' a Quiet Masterpiece or Just Dull? Landon
Palmer and Scott Beggs from Film
School Rejects, October 17, 2013
Review:
The Cinema of Béla Tarr - András Bálint Kovács Anders Weberg book review from The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, April 19,
2014
Apocalypse
Withheld: On Slowness & the Long Take in Béla ... Janice Lee and Jared Woodland on the long
takes from Satantango, from a
talk given in Los Angeles on April 24, 2014 at Errata
Salon: Slowness, curated by Amina Cain, from Entropy magazine, May 15, 2014
Review:
Béla Tarr, The Time After – Jacques Rancière ... Anders Weberg book review from The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, May 23, 2014
Tarrying
With the Nothing: Asking Anew Heidegger's Question of ... Tan Xing Lon lan from Senses of Cinema, June 18, 2014
Necsus | The cinema of Béla Tarr: The circle closesNECSUS The cinema of Béla Tarr: The circle closes, by András Bálint Kovács’, reviewed by Miklós Kiss from Necsus, June 13, 2014
Béla Tarr's
The Turin Horse...Cinema As Endgame • Delectant Meraj Dhir from Delectant, July 24, 2014
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh film reviews from Taste of Cinema, October 21, 2014
Watch: What if Béla Tarr Made Polanski's Repulsion? Sarah Salovaara from Filmmaker magazine, January 12, 2015 (video, 7:09)
The
Cracks in the Surface of Things: On Béla Tarr, Rancière ... William S. Allen from Screening the Past, June 2015
A personal report on an adventure called film.factory | BFI Jonathan Rosenbaum from BFI Sight and Sound, August 7, 2015
Béla Tarr Roundup Brandon’s Movie Memory, August 19, 2015, also seen here: Bela Tarr | Brandon's movie memory - Deeperintomovies.net
When Gus Met
Béla | Cinephile City John
Hanlon, September 24, 2015
Celebrated
Hungarian Director Béla Tarr Receives ... Hungary
Today, March 16, 2016
Bela Tarr interview Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion, around 1997
Interview
with Béla Tarr: About Werckmeister Harmonies ... Eric Schlosser interview from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1,
2000
Waiting for the
Prince - An Interview with Béla Tarr • Senses ... Fergus Daly and Maximilian Le Cain
interview from Senses of Cinema,
February 3, 2001
Interview:
Bela Tarr, Hungarian director |
Interviews | Guardian ... Jonathan Romney interview from The Guardian,
Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Bela Tarr interviewed Phil Ballard interview from Kinoeye, March 29, 2004
BOMB Magazine — Béla Tarr by Fionn Meade Fionn Meade interview from Bomb magazine, Summer 2007
Béla
Tarr on the ‘Turin Horse’ Konstanty Kuzma interview with
the director at
Bela Tarr: 'I Don't Want to Be A Stupid Filmmaker Who Is ... Georg Szalai interview from The Hollywood Reporter, September 3, 2011
An
Interview With Bela Tarr: Why He Says 'The Turin Horse ... - IndieWire Eric Kohn interview from indieWIRE,
February 9, 2012
Bela
Tarr: Hungarian auteur on 'Turin Horse' and quitting ... 24 Frames interview from The LA Times, February 9, 2012
Listening to the World: A Conversation with Béla Tarr ... Matt Levine and Jeremy Meckler interview from Walker Art Museum, March 20, 2012
The
Turin Horse: Interview with Bela Tarr | Electric Sheep Virginie Sélavy interview from the Edinburgh
Film Festival, June 4, 2012
Interview
with László Krasznahorkai | The White Review George Szirtes interview, September 2013
My
Master's Voice: Béla Tarr Interviewed by JR Robinson interview with J R Robinson, drummer from
musical group Wrekmeister
Harmonies, from Quietus, November
5, 2014
BOMB
Magazine — Béla Tarr, Fred Kelemen, & Mihály Víg ... collective conversation with Michael Guarneri
from Bomb magazine, December 2, 2014
Bela
Tarr Interview: Why He Abandoned His Film School ... - IndieWire Ben Croll interview, December 23, 2016
Bela
Tarr interview: why he won't return to feature ... - ScreenDaily Geoffrrey Macnab interview, January 27, 2017
2012
Sight & Sound poll results Sátántangó is listed as #35
Béla
Tarr | BFI Tarr’s director ballot
for Best Film in the Sight and Sound
Poll of 2012
Béla Tarr - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FAMILY NEST (Családi tüzfészek)
Family
Nest | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Bela Tarr's first feature (1977) and in every respect his rawest—a blunt piece of Hungarian social realism about a young couple forced to live with the husband's parents in a one-room apartment. This is strong stuff, but the highly formal director of Almanac of Fall, Damnation, and Satantango is still far from apparent.
Family Nest | Film Society of
Lincoln Center
Made when he was 22, Tarr’s striking debut feature has been likened to the work of John Cassavetes and Ken Loach for its warts-and-all snapshot of a seven-member family sharing a small apartment during a national housing crisis. The overcrowding puts particular pressure on the marriage of Laci, a soldier newly discharged from the army, and his wife Irén, who spends her days searching in vain for a home of their own—and an escape from Laci’s belligerent father. Impressively acted by a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, Family Nest offers a pungent critique of patriarchy in all its forms, and early evidence of Tarr’s innate mastery of the moving image.
Bela Tarr, The Films of Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
Bela Tarr's debut feature, made when the director was
twenty-two and still an amateur (he only entered film school after completing
the picture), Family Nest won the 1978 Hungarian Film Critics’ Prize for
best first feature, and shared the grand prize at the
Béla Tarr was only twenty two years old when he made Family
Nest, a very mature look at the housing problem that pervades late
seventies Budapest. Despite his young age, he was able to make a truthful and
at times, heartbreaking commentary on how a supposed political problem has
invaded the nucleus of Hungarian society, the family. His style is typical to
Eastern European Cinema: a cinema verite style wherein he uses primarily
non-actors and the visual appeal is almost non-existent, suggesting a
documentary feel to the entire exercise. Tarr would later on develop a style
that is completely his own, and would become a pillar in world cinema, his
unique style becoming a source of inspiration for filmmakers like Gus Van Sant,
Lav Diaz, and perhaps Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The center of the aftershock of the Hungarian housing project is Laci, a newly
released soldier and his wife Iren, who has lived in her father-in-law's pad
for the entire time Laci was away. Iren and Laci's father don't exactly have
the most perfect of relationships. The father insists that Iren raise her
daughter the way he wants him to, and dislikes the fact that Iren would bring
home some of her friends from work. Later in the film, the father would poison
Laci's mind by saying that Iren is cheating since she's been out for periods of
time at night, and that she's not exactly contributing enough money to the
household.
It's an almost impossible dream for the couple to get a flat of their own.
After all, a flat of their own will keep them away from the father's nonstop
nagging, or Laci's brother's irresponsibility. However, getting a flat would
require them to fall in line, and face the heartlessness of the government's
bureaucracy. Tarr would spend some time showing how this works. Outside, his
camera would catch other women telling their plights on the housing problem. A
woman was forced to squat in a vacant flat, to miserable results. Inside the
interview room, Iren would plead and beg the office worker to grant her the
flat she wants or else, her marriage would suffer. But the office worker is
merely a low ranking bureaucrat and he is in no position to hear the plight,
and suffers through Iren's reasoning and tears. It's a double-edged sword Tarr
is playing here, we see the plight of the house-needy residents, and also the
virtually useless office workers forced to hear out the complaints and the
destroyed lives of those in the mercy of an impersonal society.
It's an amazing debut feature from a very young director. Tarr dissects his
society with an experience that would've suited a far more older analyst. The
claustrophobic feel of the father's crowded flat, the banter upon banter heard
evertime there's a family dinner, the alcohol consumed to temporarily relieve
the tension at home, Tarr sees it as truthfully as any filmmaker could and his
camera shoots it with any cinematic falsity distilled from the scenario. It's
really an amazing feat which Tarr would eventually top in his later features.
Family Nest by Bela Tarr | Caught In The
Middle Paul Hellyer, January
21, 2013
Sunnyside kitchen: Családi tüzfészek (Family Nest, 1979) * * EEH from Sunnyside Kitchen
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
The melancholy of resistance Peter Hames from Kinoeye, September 3, 2001
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
Observations on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium, September 19, 2007
Ben
Russell, [The Movie Man] also seen
here: The
Movie Man: The Family Nest (1979) -
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
MovieMartyr.com - Family
Nest Jeremy Heilman
Family Nest | Film Review | Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Family Nest - Alchetron, The
Free Social Encyclopedia
Family Nest -
CinePassion Fernando F. Croce
Béla Tarr's
The Turin Horse...Cinema As Endgame • Delectant Meraj Dhir from Delectant, July 24, 2014
Bela
Tarr Retrospective: Introduction | The Movie Rat Bernardo Villela from The Movie Rat, May 7, 2013
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
Jordan Hoffman Dot Com » Family Nest (1979), Bela Tarr, C
Family Nest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A
Scene from Bela Tarr's Family Nest - dailymotion videos ... (video)
THE OUTSIDER (Szabadgyalog)
Outsider,
The Matthew Lotti from Cinematic
Threads
A mixed up young man (András Szabó) who doesn't like to work (working conditions in Hungary are shown as being horrendous) supposedly fathered a child with a woman who wants nothing to do with him (and has to pay child support) and inexplicably marries a woman he doesn't really love - what he really likes to do, play violin, he can't do professionally because he never went to school for it. While most of the other Tarr pictures just dwell on the misery, this one suggests that art is a way to relieve the pressures of reality - Szabó plays the violin and enjoys music and the music acts as his form of therapy. But Tarr is still Tarr, and his movie is still very leisurely and morose and not exactly original: it's a rather plodding series of scenes with people smoking and drinking and trying to blur reality: in a way, both drinking and listening to/playing music are forms of escape though in the end neither do much to help you escape fate (Szabó's character gets drafted and his irate wife sleeps with his brother). At least there aren't any dead whales or endless marital shouting matches in this one....
Bela Tarr, The Films of Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
The Outsider, Tarr's second feature, extended many of the
ideas explored in Family Nest. The film centres on a somewhat
directionless young male nurse, self-obsessed and frustrated by his life. Great
artists like Beethoven lived alone, they never married, but Andres finds that
this credo is much more complex than it sounds. He has just fathered a baby but
doesn't want to live with the mother, and his irresponsibility -- he is found
drunk with a patient -- leads him to look for work in a factory. His
aimlessness ends in a marriage to another woman that he doesn't really want,
and the two bicker constantly about the money they don't have. Shot in
close-up, the film instantly communicates a world of limited options where
everything seems oppressive. Andres's only escape seems to be through music, dancing
and drinking in the local taverns, and the occasional moment of warmth with his
girlfriend/wife. The film has the feel of catching life as it is lived --
extended scenes of dialogue, long moments of observation, the camera ever in
close-up. All contribute to a mood Tarr would explore more fully in his next
film, The Prefab People" (Piers Handling, Toronto I.F.F.). "An
unusual sort of fictionalized cinema truth film. . . [and an unusual] depiction
of a fringe side of socialist life" (Variety). Hungary 1981.
User
Reviews from imdb Author: Andrew Boone from Baltimore, Maryland,
June 16, 2015
Watching Béla Tarr's "The Outsider" was a similar
experience for me to watching Bresson's "A Gentle Woman", in that
both films saw me witnessing the use of color from a director that I had
previously thought constitutionally incapable of anything but black-and-white.
Tarr's vision of life, of course, is best suited to the black-and-white medium,
as was Bresson's, but like "A Gentle Woman", the uncharacteristic use
of color did nothing to sully my appreciation for this impressive film.
Tarr would become best known for his more formal, highly metaphysical works,
such as "Damnation" and "Werckmeister Harmonies", but here,
early in his career, we see him at the completely opposite end of the cinematic
spectrum. In his early features, instead of sheer, unmitigated formalism, Tarr
opted for absolute realism. These films are more political, where his later
work tends to be more philosophical (nihilistic, specifically). Instead of
Tarkovsky-esque camera-work infused with a certain Bressonian drabness, which
is the style that dominates Tarr's later films, what we get here is something
closer to Cassavetes than to Tarkovsky or Bresson.
Whether Tarr hadn't fully formed his vision of life and of cinema yet, or
whether he simply didn't have the means to make films any other way at this
point, I can't say for sure. But what's certain is that these early Tarr films
are a completely different experience. An inferior one, ultimately, but they're
still impressive films in their own right.
Tarr's debut feature, "Family Nest", from 1979, was a black-and-white
exercise in kitchen sink realism, which is as dissimilar to the style of his
later work as one can possibly imagine. Nevertheless, "Family Nest"
bears some similarities to those later films in terms of content. All Tarr's
films seem to incorporate characters who are trapped and paralyzed by either
social or existential conditions. In "Family Nest", an indictment of
the Hungarian society and government of the time, the prison was a social one,
not a metaphysical one. As a result, there was actually an implication that, if
freed from the oppressive weight of this flawed society, these characters might
actually be able to find some degree of happiness. Characters in future Tarr
films would not be so fortunate. In those films, it was the oppressive weight
of human existence that imprisoned them, and that, unlike society, is entirely
inescapable.
"The Outsider", released in 1981, continued predominately in the
realist mode of "Family Nest". Tarr decided to go with color here,
which was effective despite being inconsistent with his other films, but
otherwise the style here is very similar to his first film. In both cases we
have a low budget production with hand-held camera-work, nonprofessional actors
(I believe), and an overall realist aesthetic. However, unlike "Family
Nest", there are moments in "The Outsider" that really do move
toward formalism. So you can tell that Tarr did at least have that vision
inside of him when he made this film, even if he was just beginning to express
it, and to nourish it as it evolved bit by bit into what would eventually
become his preferred style of filmmaking.
Other than the superficial change to color, the place where "The
Outsider" can be most contrasted with "Family Nest" is the
source of the conflict, which was external in "Family Nest", and is
internal in "The Outsider". On a content level, "The
Outsider" is a bit of a cross between a traditional exercise in social
realism and an existential meditation on the human spirit (i.e. Ingmar Bergman).
In "Family Nest", the problems that were responsible for the misery
of the central characters were largely external, originating outwardly in their
flawed environment and social milieu. In "The Outsider", the
fundamental barrier that stands between our protagonist and happiness is an
inner one.
This chicken-egg conundrum was eventually resolved by Tarr, by the time he
reached "Damnation", maybe before. In "Family Nest", the
despairing human spirit is an echo of a broken social climate. The misery
begins on the outside, and is carried inward by victims of a flawed system. In
"The Outsider", however, this model of human suffering is reversed.
Society is the fractured form spawned from existential discontent, an inherent
burden of the human condition. Misery originates in the interior world of the
human soul, and ripples outward into society, thus moving in a direction
opposite to the one it took in "Family Nest".
Finally, in "Damnation" and Tarr's subsequent works, the question of
from where human misery originates is resolved. Or, rather, I should say, it is
ignored all together. It has been asked, and no answer having been found, it is
set aside as inconsequential. In "Damnation", neither the tormented
interior world of the soul nor the desolate exterior landscapes hold the source
of human despair. Anguish is simply a reality of human life, and so we find it
in both worlds: the internal and the external. The forsaken, barren landscapes
of the physical world are simply a reflection of the anguish in our souls, and
conversely, the suffering that is inherent to the human soul is merely a
reflection of the cold and harsh universe that envelops us. The inner and the
outer worlds of human existence are mirror images, and in that image we find
despair, anguish, and misery. There is no origin.
Ultimately, "The Outsider" is a formative work for Tarr, and by no
means one of his best films, but by any other standards than the extremely high
ones that Tarr has set for himself with his more recent films, it's a
legitimately impressive film. Expect something closer to Michael Fengler's
"Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?" and not "Werckmeister
Harmonies", for instance, and this will hopefully be as satisfying for you
as it was for me. I much prefer formalism to realism, but in the latter category,
it doesn't get too much better than this.
RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars
Observations
on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium,
September 19, 2007
Béla Tarr's
The Turin Horse...Cinema As Endgame • Delectant Meraj Dhir from Delectant, July 24, 2014
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
The Outsider
(1981 film) - Alchetron, the free social ...
Bela
Tarr Retrospective: Introduction | The Movie Rat Bernardo Villela from The Movie Rat, May 7, 2013
the outsider /
szabadgyalog Sofia International
Film Festival
The Outsider
(1981 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE PREFAB PEOPLE (Panelkapcsolat)
The Prefab People | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr's third feature (1982) is the best of his early forays into Cassavetes-style social realism, summing up the painful, claustrophobic, and heartfelt depictions of marital discord found in his two previous features, Family Nest and The Outsider, and finding even more to say. With Judit Pogany and Robert Koltai.
The Prefab People |
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Tarr’s portrait of a young, working-class married couple brings us close to the raw emotions brought forth as the mysteries of love unravel. The chronicle of their love’s rise and fall is told in moving flashback, working back from the day that bearish Férj (Róbert Koltai) packs up and leaves his fed-up wife Feleség (Judit Pogány). Set in the “prefab” apartment blocks of government housing, Tarr’s story is at once a clear-eyed look at a relationship and a no-nonsense sketch of a place and time.
“Just as despairing as his later films (and also shot in richly textured black-and-white), Tarr's early works are more feet-on-the-ground and never indulge in metaphysics. . . Prefab People is the best of them, an unrelenting, smell-the-sour-breath portrait of a blue-collar marriage dissolving under pressure from Communist-era poverty, masculine inadequacy, and restless depression. As the imploding wife, theater vet (and recently, Hungarian politician) Judit Pogány is wrenchingly convincing.” —Michael Atkinson, Village Voice
Bela Tarr, The Films of Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
A sole-baring, semi-documentary portrait of proletarian
life in socialist Hungary, The Prefab People is Bela Tarr's impressive
third feature, after Family Nest (1977) and The Outsider (1981),
and stands as an exemplar of his early style and concerns: claustrophobic
kitchen-sink drama; loose structure; improvisational acting style; liberal use
of close-up and hand-held camera; a focus on the fissures of ordinary
working-class existence. Using professional actors for the first time (but very
much in a gritty neorealist fashion), Tarr here offers an intensely detailed,
wrenching examination of the stresses in a young couple's marriage. It begins
with a catastrophic fight between husband and wife, then backtracks to reveal
how the couple arrived at this precipice: lives of deprivation, monotonous
work, cramped quarters, alcohol, arguments over child rearing. The film features
"a harrowing performance from the talented Judit Pogny as [the] wife"
(International Film Guide), and "owes quite a lot to the John
Cassavetes style. . . [There are] great moments of truth and intensity,
particularly moving here in the case of Judit Pogny, who carries most of the
film" (Variety). "Remarkable. . . delineate[s] the parameters
of Tarr’s view of the world. . . Underlying [the film] is an undeniable sense
of social and political criticism. . . [The conclusion is] one of the most
powerful and disturbing moments in all of Tarr's cinema" (Piers Handling,
Toronto I.F.F.).
Flashback #46 Srikanth Srinivasan from The Seventh Art, March 4, 2009
“What about those who are away for years? They never see their kids. The kids grow up with no dad. They grow up and the dad gets them ready-made “
After watching films like Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Hyderabad Blues 2 (1998), I had come to a kind of conclusion that films about marital life are and even have to be necessarily lengthy in order to depict relationships falling apart bolt by bolt. But Béla Tarr’s masterful venture The Prefab People brutally shatters that perception. The film is so masterfully crafted that I was afraid that Tarr would have to have a pathetic showdown in order to wrap up the film within 80 minutes. But gladly, one couldn’t have asked more after watching what Tarr delivers. He lets the film gradually evolve instead of providing it narrative momentum (but never without a direction). Watching The Prefab People, one can see why Mendes’ Revolutionary Road doesn’t exactly succeed.
The Prefab People is Tarr’s fourth feature and one can clearly see Tarr maturing as a filmmaker. He intelligently avoids all the mistakes of his previous outings (which were pretty good themselves) and makes it seem like a grand culmination of a chain of dress rehearsals. He substitutes the extreme verbosity of Family Nest (1979) with self-sufficient images. He sheds the self-indulgent meditation of The Outsider (1981) and makes a film that is universal in its appeal and as personal in its content. He avoids the complex mise-en-scene he employed in his mediocre single-shot adaptation of Macbeth (1982) and in exchange develops a keen sense of shot composition and cutting. One can virtually see where Sátántangó (1994) gets its pitch-perfect atmosphere from. But in spite of the trademark style of the director, The Prefab People is very much a cinema vérité film. It wouldn’t be a coincidence if one was continuously reminded of Cassavetes while watching this one. The resemblance is most glaring in the scene at the party, which has to be experienced to be believed.
These are beautiful characters and so are the actors. To use a worn out cliché, Tarr does not take sides. Both the husband and the wife have their own visions of what happiness is. Just that one is evidently naïve and the other is actually romanticized. But the masterstroke of the film is the Kubrickian theme of man and machine that Tarr blends in this outwardly boring suburban life. And just like the American genius’ style, Tarr controls his décor, landscapes and film equipment to provide a literature-free rendering of one of cinema’s most favorite themes.
Béla Tarr's third feature The Prefab People is often
considered the Hungarian's best out of his early documentary-like fiction
films. The film is a concise and personal look on a dying marriage in the midst
of a socialist country on the verge of impending commercialism. Tarr's palette
consists of residential buildings, smoke belching factories, dance clubs, and
of course, the harshly claustrophobic interiors of a middle class flat which
houses the couple and their two young children.
A celebration (consisting of a musical band playing a joyous melody) preempts
the film sarcastically. Right after the final notes of the joyous song ends,
Tarr pits his audience immediately on the hopeless marriage by introducing the
couple in a point of discordant intimacy. It's something you'd rather not see.
The husband (Robert Koltai) suddenly storms inside the flat, grabs his things
and tells the surprised wife (Judit Pogany) that he's leaving them for good.
Sounds of weeping and wailing ensue after as the wife begs the husband to
rethink his decision. Tarr abruptly ends the sequence, by showing something
that seems a bit sweeter, the couple's ninth anniversary. We really don't know
if the anniversary precedes the dramatic introductory sequence or if that was
after the husband has finally returned to the begging wife. The celebration
turns sour when the wife suddenly decides to use the anniversary as an avenue
to nag on the husband's domestic inadequacy.
It's not really an engaging film. It's more depressing than revealing. The
couple come and go ending every bit of something good with an opportunity to disagree.
A vacation turns sour when the husband suddenly decides to visit a friend and
becomes unaware that he has left his wife and children for about an hour and a
half. When he shows up, he gets a verbal lashing from the nagging wife. The
film is basically a repetition of scenes wherein the couple would lash out in
disagreement. It's obvious that they are both in love with each other, but
perhaps due to some societal or psychological reason, they always end up in
conflict.
Depressing, repetitive, taxing and sometimes unwatchable due to its saddeningly
intimate content, The Prefab People however showcases unmeasurable
talent from the young director. His camera captures the emotional angst as it
transforms from pleasant and normal relations to erupting and bitterly
unbearable domestic drama. In one fascinatingly done sequence, Tarr begins by
catching the couple enjoying an entertainment show which leads to a night of
frenzied dancing. Tarr then lets time pass by, catching the husband in drunken
ecstasy singing songs to pass time as the wife downs a glass of liquor, letting
her tears out in the film's single most honest image. It is in that melancholic
scene wherein Tarr lets alcohol dominate celluloid, catching the characters in
their most sincere and their most quiet repression of pent-up emotions.
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
Béla Tarr's
The Turin Horse...Cinema As Endgame • Delectant Meraj Dhir from Delectant, July 24, 2014
Observations
on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium,
September 19, 2007
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Hungarian
Master Keeps Feet on the Ground in Early Works ... Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
THE
PREFAB PEOPLE (Béla Tarr, 1982)
Dennis Grunes
Reeling
Reviews [Robin Clifford, Laura Clifford]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Prefab People -
Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
Bela
Tarr Retrospective: Introduction | The Movie Rat Bernardo Villela from The Movie Rat, May 7, 2013
The
Prefab People (Panelkapcsolat) | Village Voice Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
The Prefab People -
America Pink
The Prefab People -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ALMANAC OF THE FALL (Öszi almanac) B 88
aka: Autumn Almanac
Dark, dense, claustrophobic interior drama, framed completely inside an artificially abstract, closed world, considered a breakthrough film by Tarr
Bela Tarr, The Films of Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
"A watershed in Tarr's young career. . . an
outstanding film" (Piers Handling, Toronto I.F.F.), the visually
audacious, emotionally lacerating Almanac of Fall breaks away from the
rough-edged realism of the director's first three features, if not from their
cramped-apartment settings and painfully confrontational themes, and points to
the mind-blowing formal rigour and high stylization of his subsequent Damnation
and Satantango. Rendered in a richly expressive colour palette, elegant camera
movement, and bizarre camera angles, this elaborately choreographed drama has
five people -- an ageing woman, her son, her nurse, the nurse's lover, and the
son's friend -- confined to a crumbling bourgeois apartment, where they
quarrel, manoeuvre, form shifting alliances, and betray each other over money.
The hot-house emotional climate has drawn comparisons to Strindberg,
Cassavetes, and Bergman; the visual design -- contrapuntal, colour-coded
lighting (blue-greys and orange reds), weird angles -- suggests Peter Greenaway
and Raul Ruiz. "[A] painful, scorching and unsettling image of Hungarian
society. . . located in a sort of hellish limbo. . . this image of human
desolation brought to its climax is truly frightening" (Variety).
"Almanac of the Fall is a rivetting experience" (Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Almanac
of Fall | Movie Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule)
In his first three films Bela Tarr--conceivably the most important Eastern European filmmaker currently working--betrays an impatience with cinematic style, focusing almost exclusively on content, but that tendency was radically overturned with this 1984 feature, whose taste and intelligence are specifically (and exquisitely) cinematic and revealed Tarr as a master stylist. Set entirely in an apartment inhabited by an elderly woman, her son, his former teacher, the old woman's nurse, and the nurse's lover, the film consists mainly of intense two-part dialogues and encounters largely concerned with the old woman's money. The remarkable use of color depends on a lighting scheme that divides most areas (and characters) into blue and orange, and the elaborately choreographed mise en scene is consistently inventive and unpredictable, making use of highly unorthodox angles and very slow camera movements. As in Damnation (1987), the mise en scene often seems to be composed in counterpoint to the action, but the drama itself (whose Strindbergian power and sexual conflicts are realized with an intensity and concentration that suggests John Cassavetes) carries plenty of charge on its own.
Bela Tarr - Strictly
Film School Acquarello
Almanac of Fall opens to a bleak and resigned passage from Aleksandr
Pushkin: "Even if you kill me, I see no trace, this land is unknown,
the devil is probably leading, going round and round in circles." In a
large, austere, and impersonal apartment, a middle-aged woman named Hédi (Hédi
Temessy) recounts with detached acceptance the inevitable realization of an
ill-fated relationship, as a dour and attentive man (Miklós Székely B.) listens
on, consumed by thoughts of a similar dilemma in his own life. Later, alone in
another room within Hedi's apartment, he listens to his lover, Hedi's nurse
Anna (Erika Bodnár), remark with distracted and polite affection that she has
always led an independent and unattached life. Perhaps subconsciously, Anna
prefers to be unburdened by the responsibility of material possessions, but nevertheless
is intrigued by the idea of performing the mundane rituals associated with
leading a "normal" life. Yet even in her fanciful illusion of home
and sense of normalcy, there seems little room in her ideal life for her
insecure and emotionally dependent lover, even as he vacuously declares his
innate need to be with her. This seemingly hopeless and insincere display of
alienated affection will again resurface in another room of the apartment when
Hédi has an emotionally violent quarrel with her irresponsible and resentful
son (János Dezsi) who has returned home in need of money to squander on
alcohol. Consumed with envy and self-loathing, her son defiantly declares his
hopes for her death and threatens harm in order to get his way. Their
relationship is further strained by his decision to allow a financially
struggling teacher named Tibor to occupy a spare room without obtaining prior
approval from Hédi, a living arrangement that becomes increasingly complicated
when the lodger resorts to theft to settle his debts. Meanwhile, Anna attempts
to gain solidarity from Hédi's desperate son by commenting on his mother's
cruel nature, remarking "She is the happiest when you are desperate...She
does it with all of us", even as she feigns compassion for the emotionally
distraught Hédi. However, as the wanton and aimless residents perform their
destructive pattern of alliances, betrayals, and violence, the apartment
becomes an oppressive and dehumanizing dystopia of frustrated ambition,
repression, isolation, and emotional cruelty.
Béla Tarr creates a visually sublime and provocative film on emotional cruelty,
alienation, and moral bankruptcy in Almanac of Fall. Evoking the dramatic
tension of August Strindberg's plays and the intensity of Ingmar Bergman's chamber works, Tarr uses highly stylized,
artificially colored lighting, rigorous (and deliberate) formalism, minimalist
setting, and protracted dialogue to create an atmospherically charged and disquieting
environment. The film's pervasive sense of unnaturality and forced intimacy
reflects the hermetic, violative, and inbred nature of the occupants'
inhumanity and moral decay: the rampant duplicity and betrayal among the
apartment residents; the intrusiveness of the unusual camera angles (Tibor's
shave and subsequent attack); the unspoken and concealed acts of aggression
perpetrated within the household (Hédi's physical confrontation with her son,
and later, with Anna; Tibor's attack; Anna's rape). Inevitably, as the
disingenuous and self-consumed occupants of the insular apartment alternately
vie for Hédi's trust, allegiance, and control, what emerges is a haunting image
of lost and aimless spirits, like the pallid, unreconciled ghosts of dramatic tragedies,
drifting round and round in circles through the empty, soulless rooms of
their stifling and claustrophobic corporeality.
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
“Even if you kill me I see no trace/This land is unknown/The devil is probably leading/Going round and round in circles.”
The preceding quote, written by Pushkin, appears on a title card at the start of Bela Tarr’s Almanac of Fall, and as much as surely is lost in the translation, it seems to provide startling insight into the late work of the director. The enigmatic nature of both the deceptions people are capable of and the environments that they choose to inhabit can be felt in his later films’ tone. This mention of the devil, in a stark contrast to the strictly realistic naturalism of Tarr’s early films, offers a first sign of the hint of supernatural control that would continue to crop up in each of Tarr’s subsequent features. There exists a certain level of despair in the notion that people aren’t in control of their own fate and, as such, assigning blame to an unknowable and omnipotent figure seems an act of desperation. Most importantly, however, is the allusion to the insidious, circular nature of world events. Tarr’s insistently pessimistic films each present a serious of politically tinged disappointments, only to cruelly reveal them as phases in an unstoppable, continuously repeating cycle.
Set entirely in a single dilapidated mansion, Almanac of Fall is a claustrophobic chamber drama that tells the story of the home’s five residents, all people who in one way or another live on the fringe of society. The initial two inhabitants, a mother and son who live together, suspicious of each other’s actions, seem to emit a beacon of discontent that slowly attracts more transient souls to their fold. Without even a single shot to establish the world that surrounds the house, the mood becomes inescapably intimate. In this oppressive environ, the people talk of their fear to feel anything, especially confidence in the seemingly good intentions of their peers. Even sexual desire, like everything that enters the house, becomes hopelessly domesticated by the insistence of the environment, and can’t offer escape from these confines. Characters can’t help but eavesdrop on one another in such tight quarters, and before long their cabin fever manifests itself through the intense territorialism that grips each of them. Initially it seems that the mother’s fears that everyone is out to get her money are paranoid delusions, but they’re proven to be true by the scheming of the other tenants. The familial espionage that ensues contains an intrinsic social critique, since it looks at society’s most fundamental building block, the family unit. Throughout, Tarr seems exasperated by the capacity of each to believe that they are justified in their machinations, and in his inability to accept their individual actions, he seems to be expressing disgust and outrage at all of society.
By the end of Almanac of Fall, the characters’ contradictions have crisscrossed so many times upon themselves that the rationale behind any justification of one’s ill deeds seems an exercise in pointlessness. Each individual becomes their own moral center in this context, and as such their validations of their actions seem academic. Everyone seems entirely content to ignore anyone else’s point of view in order to further their own interests. Even though a comparatively innocent fall guy is found by the end of the movie, the punning title of the film seems to describe the decline of the group (and metaphorically society) as a whole, because they so willingly embrace the idea that the problem with their group lies within only one of their ranks instead of realizing that each of them contains the seed of corruption. Someone asks, “If we lost trust in everyone what would life be?” at the end without any sense of irony, and that seems the biggest joke of all, given the movie’s resolutely negative appraisal of humanity. The closing strains of the soundtrack, which feature a Hungarian version of “Que Sera Sera”, seem more in touch with the movie’s eventual, worn-down apathy. People might be scum, but whatever will be, will be.
A
Bluffer's Guide to Bela Tarr | Movie Review | Chicago ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 24, 1990
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
The melancholy of resistance Peter Hames from Kinoeye, September 3, 2001
Three Films by Béla Tarr: 'Almanac of Fall', 'Damnation' and ... Angelos Koutsourakis from Pop Matters
Observations on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium, September 19, 2007
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
Béla Tarr's
The Turin Horse...Cinema As Endgame • Delectant Meraj Dhir from Delectant, July 24, 2014
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Almanac of Fall
| Film Review | Slant Magazine
Jeremiah Kipp
Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz
ALMANAC
OF FALL (Béla Tarr, 1984) | Dennis Grunes
Almanac of Fall |
Mountain Xpress Ken Hanke
Béla Tarr – Cinema of
the World
Bela
Tarr Retrospective: Introduction | The Movie Rat Bernardo Villela from The Movie Rat, May 7, 2013
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
Almanac of Fall -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
View
clip (1) on YouTube (
View
clip (2) (
DAMNATION (Kárhozat)
Damnation | Jonathan Rosenbaum
One of Susan Sontag's favorite films, and it's easy to see why
(1987). People who don't have much use for the existential gloom of Antonioni
and Tarkovsky are advised to stay away, because many of the hallmarks of their
relentless black-and-white style and vision--lots of rain, fog, and stray dogs;
murky and decaying bars; artfully composed long takes made up of very slow and
almost continuous camera movements; offscreen mechanical noises--are so
forcefully present that the gloom almost seems like a fetish. The rather bare
story line in the middle of this--a reclusive loner (Miklos Szekely) is
hopelessly in love with a cabaret singer (Vali Kerekes), hopes to find
salvation in her, and gets her husband involved in a smuggling scheme so he can
spend some time with her--seems almost secondary to the formal beauty of Tarr's
spellbinding arabesques spun around the dingiest of all possible industrial
outposts. The near miracle is that something so compulsively watchable can be
made out of a setting and society that seem so depressive and petrified.
Bela Tarr, The Films of Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
Respected Chicago Reader critic
Jonathan Rosenbaum professed to being "bowled over by my first encounter
with Bela Tarr when I saw Damnation, his fifth feature." Acquainted or not
with Tarr's previous work, few would demur: the spellbinding Damnation is
a true stunner of formal and visual control -- and perhaps "the
quintessential film to mark the coming end of communism" (Piers Handling,
Toronto I.F.F.). Departing from the cinema-verite stylistics and kitchen-sink
claustrophobia of his early work, Tarr here fashions a rigorous, moody,
black-and-white film full of high-style mise-en-scene, expansive apocalyptic
landscapes. and slow, seductive camera movement worthy of Tarkovsky. The first
Tarr film co-written with another -- novelist L¸szlÖ Krasznahorkai, who also
collaborated on Satantango (1994), Tarr's monumental follow-up -- Damnation
"centres around a group of four people, all plotting and scheming
against each other. Karrer, tortured by the memory of his wifeÅs suicide, is
obsessed with a married singer with whom he's had an affair. He plots to get
the husband out of the way using a smuggling scam and the help of the owner of
a bar -- The Titanic (which says it all!) -- where they all spend their
time" (Handling). "A genuinely original piece of cinema set in Tarr's
usual world of intense personal relationships but framed here by a stylised
mise-en-scene somewhere between Neil Jordan and Jean-Jacques Beineix. . . [T]he
film exerts a strange fascination as the camera tracks and weaves through the
dismal settings. . . Tarr's universe is an acquired taste, but it is never less
than totally cinematic. . . Damnation [stands] out as a film with a
sense of true (if very personal) purpose" (Derek Elley, International
Film Guide).
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
The occasional, labored sound of inertia and friction emitted by
the motion of mining cable cars disrupts the unnerving silence of Karrer's
(Miklós Székely B.) austere and sparsely furnished apartment, as the lethargic
electric powered conveyances endlessly traverse along the overcast, desolate
landscape, obscured by the density of the fog. Karrer abstractedly stares out
the window before performing the ritual of his morning shave, his dour
countenance furrowed by resigned weariness and unarticulated personal turmoil.
Karrer leaves his apartment, descends through the dimly lit staircase, his
footsteps resonating through the empty halls, and pays an unexpected visit to
his estranged lover (Vali Kerekes), who unhesitantly drives him away, determined
to terminate their meaningless affair and create a better life for her daughter
with her devoted, but debt-ridden husband, Sebestyén (György Cserhalmi). But
Karrer refuses to concede defeat and, despite the repeated cautionary advice of
a pragmatic and well-intentioned cloakroom attendant (Hédi Temessy), continues
his dogged pursuit of his emotionally elusive lover, patronizing a morose and
tawdry bar called Titanik every evening, where she performs as a lounge singer.
Capitalizing on Sebestyén's financially dire straits, Karrer proposes a
mutually beneficial arrangement with a disreputable bar owner named Willarsky
(Gyula Pauer) for Sebestyén to serve as Willarsky's courier, a scheme designed
to create prolonged separation and marital division between the couple.
However, as Karrer becomes obsessed with winning back the alienated affection
of his aloof lover, he retreats further into the insularity of his profound
isolation and personal despair.
The first collaborative project between Hungarian novelist László Krashnahorkai
and filmmaker Béla Tarr (along with Tarr's editor and wife, Agnes Hranitzky),
Damnation is a bleak and nihilistic portrait of isolation, emotional betrayal,
and ennui. Using a near static camera, slow tracking shots, languid character
motion, pervasive inclement weather, bleak industrial landscape, and a
melancholic soundtrack by composer Mihaly Vig, Tarr reflects the desolation and
spiritual lethargy of the directionless and morally bankrupt protagonists: the
cloakroom attendant's hollow recitation of religious scripture to Karrer; the
dispassionate act of intimacy between Karrer and his lover; the somnambulistic
group line dance that recalls the opening image of the sluggish, automated
motion of cable cars. As in Tarr's earlier film, Almanac of Fall
(and subsequent epic work, Sátántangó),
the inanimate and dehumanized dance sequence serves as a metaphor for the
increasing faithlessness, hedonism, and moral irresponsibility of contemporary
existence. In the end, Karrer's selfish and destructive quest for connection
ironically leads him further into isolation, away from the artificial society
of human interaction, reduced to the primal community of his oppressive and
alienating environment.
Damnation (1988) Darren Hughes from Long Pauses, June 4, 2004
I've wondered, on occasion, what it might look like if a contemporary filmmaker were to use Sculpting in Time as a style guide of sorts, deliberately mimicking Tarkovsky's technique but toward very different ends. Would Tarkovsky's style, siphoned through another imagination, produce a similar effect? Would any of that strange poetic logic survive the translation?
Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr's Damnation (1988) makes for an interesting case study. Many of the Tarkovsky trademarks are on display: stark black-and-white photography, elliptical editing, textured (for lack of a better word) mise-en-scene, wet floors, wandering dogs, and lots and lots of rain; Tarr's camera creeps slowly through most of the film, typically from side-to-side, and shots last for minutes at a time. Damnation captures something of Stalker's dystopia and Nostalghia's sorrow, but Mirror casts the longest shadow. Vali Kerekes's resemblance to Margarita Terekhova is, at times, uncanny; her make-up seems even to have been designed to remind us of the circles under Terekhova's eyes.
And so, as I watched Damnation, I thought often of Tarkovsky; and yes, at times, Damnation felt like a Tarkovsky film. I would agree with Jonathon Rosenbaum that it is "compulsively watchable" for that very reason. But Tarr's and co-writer László Krashnahorkai's imaginations are no match for Tarkovsky's, and so the content of the film, ultimately, borders on the banal. Alienation and isolation and desperation are, of course, perfectly acceptable subjects for artistic meditation — Damnation joins an impressive body of work in that respect — but I was struck repeatedly by a clash of content and form that reduces the film, finally, to a string of platitudes and (even worse) symbols. Tarkovsky writes:
in film, every time, the first essential in any plastic composition, its necessary and final criterion, is whether it is true to life, specific and factual; that is what makes it unique. By contrast, symbols are born, and readily pass into general use to become clichés, when an author hits upon a particular plastic composition, ties it in with some mysterious turn of thought of his own, loads it with extraneous meaning.
The opening image in Damnation is a remarkable, three-minute shot of coal buckets soaring like cable cars into the horizon. It's the high point of the film, I think, because it lacks context. We are forced to sit patiently (or not so patiently), listening to the mechanical hum, watching as the buckets come and go, suspended in a moment of Gertrude Stein-like presence: "A bucket is a bucket is a bucket." The image is alive and contradictory and frustrating and beautiful. By the end of the film, though — after watching our hero repeatedly fail in his attempts to capture love, and, finally, giving up in his efforts entirely — those buckets have become just another symbol of meaningless motion. Acquarello draws an interesting parallel with one of the film's final scenes:
Using a near static camera, . . . Tarr reflects the desolation and spiritual lethargy of the directionless and morally bankrupt protagonists: the cloakroom attendant's hollow recitation of religious scripture to Karrer; the dispassionate act of intimacy between Karrer and his lover; the somnambulistic group line dance that recalls the opening image of the sluggish, automated motion of cable cars.
Likewise, the dogs that roam silently through much of the film (shades of Nostalghia) are transformed by Damnation's closing image into a trite symbol of man's savage nature (or some such oversimplification). I haven't decided yet if it is fair to call Damnation a failure because it doesn't meet Tarkovsky's standards, but I feel justified in my reservations. The film's style implies a kind of intellectual and spiritual freedom (for the viewer, for man, in general) that is simply absent in the film itself.
Through
a Glass Darkly: On Béla Tarr's Damnation - Bright ... Ela Bittencourt from Bright Lights Film Journal, also at Reverse Shot, August 25, 2012:
August 25,
2012 - Archive - Reverse Shot
Tarrying
With the Nothing: Asking Anew Heidegger's Question of ... Tan Xing Lon lan from Senses of Cinema, June 18, 2014
Unspoken
Cinema: Review Of Damnation Dan
Schneider
Only the
Cinema: Damnation Ed Howard
Damnation - Reviews
- Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton,
February 22, 2007
Bela Tarr | Tony McKibbin The
Monochromic Force Field
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
The melancholy of resistance Peter Hames from Kinoeye, September 3, 2001
The
Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr | The White Review Rose McLaren, December 2012
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
Kárhozat,
a film by Béla Tarr Ilpo Hirvonen
from Essence of Film
Damnation
(1988) Movie Review from Eye for Film
Anton Bitel
Dispatches
from Zembla: Damnation by Bela Tarr
Alok
Damnation | DVD Review
| Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp
Film
@ The Digital Fix - Werckmeister Harmonies ... Noel Megahey reviews Damnation (1988)
and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
Film
@ The Digital Fix - The Béla Tarr Collection Noel Megahey, Damnation (1988), Werckmeister
Harmonies (2000) and The Man From London (2007)
Three
Films by Béla Tarr: 'Almanac of Fall', 'Damnation' and ... Angelos Koutsourakis from Pop Matters
Observations
on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium,
September 19, 2007
Wittgenstein
Jr Reviews - Spurious: Karrer's
monologue from Bela Tarr's Damnation, October 8, 2008
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Reeling
Reviews [Robin Clifford, Laura Clifford]
Southern
Vision [Tyler Atkinson]
Damnation (1988, Bela Tarr) Brandon’s
Movie Memory, November 19, 2013
DAMNATION
(Béla Tarr, 1987) Denis Grunes
A
Film Rumination: Damnation, Bela Tarr (1987) | Science ... Joachim Boaz from Science Fiction Ruminations
Culture
Wars [Graham Barnfield]
Wild Realm Reviews: Damnation Paghat the Rat Girl
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse...Cinema As Endgame • Delectant Meraj Dhir from Delectant, July 24, 2014
Bonjour Tristesse (English) film photos
Without
Lifting A Finger: From Bela Tarr's "Damnation" just a few film photos
Damnation | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Nick Wrigley]
Damnation (film) -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Damnation by
Janice Lee | Quarterly Conversation
Joe Milazzo review of Damnation
by Janice Lee (168 pages), December 2, 2013
No
Weather for Memory to Live in: A Review of Damnation Megan Milks review of the book Damnation by Janice Lee from Fanzine, January 4, 2014
SÁTÁNTANGÓ A 100
Hungary Germany Switzerland
1994 (450 mi)
Is it still raining outside?
Extreme realism, a minimalist exercise on long takes and Eastern
European miserablism, examining the socialist collective work ethic and its
aftermath, where the citizenry is wallowing in their wretched misery,
hopelessness, and futility, caught in a web of infinite bleakness, utilizing a
visual expression that is at times overwhelming, with occasional
moments of extreme dark humor, sort of a visual Samuel Beckett with plenty of
time on his hands. Told over the
course of three days in 11 chapters, each a short story unto itself played out
in real time, adapted by the director and the author, László
Krasznahorkai from his novel, this is a 7 ½ hour movie,
usually shown with two fifteen minute intermissions, broken down to 2 ½ hrs, 2
hrs, and 3 hrs, using an overlapping time frame that reflects a different
person’s perspective of the same events, allowing us to develop over time an
intimate understanding of each of the main characters, as we see what no one
else sees, and what they don’t wish anyone else to see. With original music by Mihály Vig, this mammoth
black and white film shot by Gabor Medvigy is an extremely
dark apocalyptic vision, shot almost entirely in the rain, but even the
interiors are completely dark or barely lit, where perhaps a lone overhead bulb
may be visible, as only the barest sliver of light is allowed to exist in this
universe. Facets program director
Charles Coleman writes: “The blankets of
mud and rain do not obscure Tarr’s gallows humor.”
The opening is what appears to be a still camera shot of cows in the mud,
huddling safely within the parameters of their known world, but when the cows
venture away from the pack, the camera moves as well, following them in a long
tracking shot as they move behind buildings, which shows the expanse of a
dilapidated, multi-home collective farm which we come to learn is a three or four
hour walk to the nearest town. Within
this social network, one man is sleeping with another man’s wife, while another
man is entrenched in his own personal solitude, who seems to hate all social
relations with others, who would prefer never leaving his home, if he could, as
he watches outside the window of his home with binoculars, literally spying on
his neighbors, keeping a secret dossier on each one as he downs shots of
apricot brandy until he literally passes out, leaving his home only in search of
more brandy. Once he moves outside the
safety net of his home, the outside world is presented as dark and forbidding,
danger is everywhere.
We hear talk of
two men who were earlier reported dead that will be returning to the
collective, which causes anxiety to everyone, a few of whom were planning to
steal the cattle money which was supposed to be distributed to them later that
night. But word gets out, and this
secret deal is not so secret anymore, and the focus turns to these two outlaws,
who are seen summoned to the police upon their release. The police question why they have expressed
absolutely no interest in ever holding a job, a suspicion that is confirmed by
the two men, who are then called upon to perform a public service to the State,
which amounts to informing on others.
This film is a like a hallucination of reality, as initially, it seems
confined in the Eastern European mindset, where the State maintains absolute
power through intimidation and threat, gathering information by turning its own
citizens against one another, creating a world of deception, betrayal, paranoia
and mistrust. Unfortunately, this
mindset has come ever closer to home during the Bush years, as citizens in our
own country are now, authorized by the State, collecting secret data on one
another, to be utilized for potential citizen arrests. This technique limits any opposition to the
State’s views and maintains a constant state of anxiety among its citizens,
leaving them feeling completely powerless, the ideal state of mind for
continued exploitation by the State.
One of the major
themes of the film is an examination of the thought process of the collective,
whose individual suspicions are challenged after an unfortunate occurrence by
one of the outlaws, Irimías, a con man, a false prophet who places himself in
the role of Godsend or Savior, taking advantage of their dour mood and
promising them, if they all stick together and listen to him, a piece of a
better world, but he needs their money.
What we discover is that by allowing themselves to
be placed in dead end positions where their jobs mean little or nothing to
them, like this failed farm co-op, where their meager lives are stuck in a time
continuum of no inertia, they become susceptible to their greatest fear, being
at the mercy of others. The filmmaker
punctuates their weaknesses with a dazzling array of metaphoric imagery, one of
the strongest of which is a lonely young child, the only one on the farm, who
gets scolded by her mother, who then finds her cat and takes out her aggression
in the form of captivity and abuse, “I can do what I want with you, I’m
stronger than you,” before turning that abuse upon herself. This sequence overlaps several chapters, as
the girl peers into the window of a bar at night and sees all the adults in a
drunken state dancing hysterically to the tango music of a wild accordion,
before running away from them on foot into the black of night, always under a
deluge of rain. The adult’s drunken stupor,
which follows a brilliant extended sequence of uninterrupted dancing and mayhem
to an accordion refrain that keeps repeating itself endlessly, where they
appear to be frozen in time, leaves the adults helpless and hapless, the
perfect condition to allow themselves to be victimized and exploited. The repeated tracking shots, seemingly going
nowhere, of endless walking down long, muddy roads, where people are depicted
as dark, amorphous souls with paper and debris flying up into the air all
around them, reveals just how isolated these people are in the vast expanse of
existence, and despite their attempts to follow the rules and lead orderly
lives, they can’t begin to control the forces of nature swirling all around
them, so by the end of the film, we are back at the beginning, like Sisyphus starting
the cycle all over again.
Looking back, the opening sequence of cows fornicating in the mud and
rain renders no harm to anyone and is in perfect balance with nature, but then
sequence after sequence of tortured souls reveals the unbalanced state of man
that thrives on lies, deceit and treachery, believing in false icons, following
false prophets, captured in the net of their own fear, like the image of the
spiders weaving their tiny nets over the Satantango dancers in the bar
sequence, only to do it again night after night so that their delusions, and
the hold this falseness has over them, reoccurs again day after day.
...and the bells, bells, bells,
bells, bells, bells, bells...
The finale is in itself startling, and is a bit of a joke played by Béla
Tarr on all of us, as we suffer through the incredible duration and severity of
this film, filled with unbelievably compelling images of bleakness and despair,
but the most startling humor is not revealed until the very last and final
sequence. Despite man’s attempt to
protect himself from the danger outside, he is simply incapable of protecting
himself from the danger that lies within.
Edgar Allen Poe thoughts crept in, reminiscent of The Cask of the
Amontillado where Fortunato is drinking in the wine cellar and another
person cements him in, brick by brick, literally sealing him into his own
certain doom. In Tarr's version,
humanity is sealing themselves into the same fate, living in the presence of an
unending rain, an ever-extinguishing light, and an all-consuming darkness,
while off in the distance we hear an elusive, inexplicable sound of bells,
which may as well be a lost, unheeded call of freedom.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee...
Satantango
| Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
How can I do justice to this grungy seven-hour black comedy (1994), in many ways my favorite film of the 90s? Adapted by Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr and Laszlo Krasznahorkai from the latter's 1985 novel, this is a diabolical piece of sarcasm about the dreams, machinations, and betrayals of a failed farm collective, set during a few rainy fall days (two of them rendered more than once from the perspectives of different characters). The form of the novel was inspired by the steps of the tango—six forward, six backward—an idea reflected by the film's overlapping time structure, 12 sections, and remarkable choreographed long takes and camera movements. The subject of this brilliantly constructed narrative is nothing less than the world today, and its 431-minute running time is necessary not because Tarr has so much to say, but because he wants to say it right. In Hungarian with subtitles.
Bela Tarr, The
Films of Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
The most monumental magnum opus to hit these shores since
Kieslowski's The Decalogue, Bela Tarr's mammoth, mesmerizing Satantango
has been hailed by critics as one of the most important films of the
decade, and was recently selected by The Village Voice's J. Hoberman as
one of the best films of 1996. Nothing less than "a seven hour epic
offering a near-definitive statement about the end of Communism" (New York
F.F.), Satantango is based on a novel by L¸szlÖ Krasznahorkai, who co-wrote
Tarr's Damnation, and set on a decaying agricultural collective in the
apocalyptic aftermath of the Iron Curtain's collapse. A motley assortment of
desperate characters (including an alcoholic doctor and three couples) spins
webs of intrigue and betrayal, all the while dreaming of deliverance from their
hopeless existence. Hope does arrive, but in the person of a messianic con man
named Irimias (or Jeremiah), who comes with comic Romanian sidekick in tow.
Irimias's promise of a new and better life plays out in a tour de force dance
of ironically overlapping perspectives, with "the action involv[ing]
several loops that begin or end at the same incidents but follow different
characters, rather like Pulp Fiction in slow motion. This large-scale
divergence and convergence allows the film to embrace humour, poetry, and
horror without any break in tone" (William Johnson, Film Comment).
Sumptuously shot in immaculate black-and-white by Gabor Medvigy, the film
abounds in "long takes, serpentine camera movements, and large doses of
rain and mud [that] lend this dead-end saga a squalid splendour worthy of
Antonioni or Tarkovsky. . . Satantango is a stunning piece of filmmaking"
(John Ewing, Cleveland Cinematheque). "The images are wondrous. . . this
is not your ordinary seven-hour Hungarian film in black and white. A film by
turns funny, bleak and moving, Satantango is an epic work by one of the
worldÅs most impressive filmmakers" (Dimitri Eipides, Toronto I.F.F.).
"Extraordinary . . . as devastating in [its] social criticism as Fellini's
La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's La Notte were in their day"
(Piers Handling, TIFF). "Voluptuously mournful, bleakly comic,
astonishingly staged. . . More than a few who came to see it came back to see
it again. Maybe they can make it an annual event" (Hoberman). "A
magnum opus to end all magna opera, a dark, funny, apocalyptic allegory of the
Hungarian psyche that stimulates, irritates, soothes and startles with blinding
strokes of genius in equal turn. . . the film demands to be seen on the big
screen to work its mesmeric magic" (Derek Elley, Variety). "Satantango
has provided me with more pleasure, excitement, and even hope than any
other new picture IÅve seen this year" (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago
Reader). Hungary/Germany/Switzerland 1994.
10 Key Moments in Films (4th Batch) Jonathan Rosenbaum
1994 / Satantango – The doctor drinking himself into a stupor.
Hungary/Germany/Switzerland. Director: Béla Tarr. Actor:
Peter Berling. Original title: Sátántangó.
Why it’s Key: In a long, virtuoso sequence where practically nothing happens, we such how much work getting drunk can be.
Around 75 minutes into Satantango – a 450-minute, black and white black comedy set in rural Hungary in which everyone’s a scoundrel, everything is monstrous, and it never stops raining —- the film spends about an hour with a burly doctor, and for most of that time he’s alone. During the first half of this protracted stretch, filmed in very few takes, he’s seated in his shack, drinking himself into a stupor with fruit brandy when he isn’t spying on his neighbors through binoculars, pointlessly recording their precise movements in copious detail in a journal he’s keeping, or snapping at a woman who briefly stops by to deliver his food. We even see him nod off and start snoring at one point, and stumble to the floor and pass out at another. Otherwise he just keeps drinking, pouring out more fruit brandy, and mumbling to himself. Somehow, director Béla Tarr and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai, adapting his own novel, keep us mesmerized throughout this unholy spectacle.
By contrast, the second half of this sequence —- when the doctor runs out of brandy and has to trudge out into the rain and mud to get some more —- is action-packed. Yet what’s so hilarious about the first half, especially as it’s performed by Peter Berling (an actor best known for his work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder), is its demonstration of how much exertion is required simply for this overweight man to get himself drunker and drunker. This project becomes an almost heroic effort, worthy of Samuel Beckett.
Andréa Picard is
programme coordinator for Cinematheque Ontario, writing in Cinema Scope (link lost):
“The news is they are coming.” After a languorous eight-minute take of cows grazing in a wet field, attempting to copulate, prophetically lamenting, a slow pan which achingly reveals a muddy survey of the land (rendered through visuals, and haunting, reverberated sound) gives way to an intertitle bearing a messianic message: “The news is they are coming.” And the sound of distant church bells grows louder, rising above the eerie vibrations of the earth. So begins a seven-and-a-half hour journey through a soaking Hungarian rural wasteland, one whose advancements fatalistically abide by an overriding structure already blatantly alluded to in the title of the film and carried over from László Krasznahorkai’s novel. The tango: six steps forward, six steps back. (‘Satan’ refers to a diabolical scheme in which a false messiah/prophet dupes the community out of their homes and money.)
Tarr’s film begins with a weightiness, with an ascetic air of gravity. The screen is black, the credits are white and there is no music. There is a sense that what is to come will be profoundly disquieting. And much of what fills the screen in those 450 minutes is an uneasy mix of tragedy and absurdism fit into an eschatological scheme, both political fable and universal cynicism. The severity is meticulously captured by cinematographer Gabor Medvigy, whose precisely nuanced monochrome images beautifully (and patiently) reveal the texture of objects and surfaces, as well as the panoramic range of emotions and confusions expressed by the characters, often in relation to the land. The figures, members of a failed farming co-op, are themselves the embodiment of this tragi-absurdity; caricatures in an unforgiving predicament which continuously and somewhat ridiculously circumvents the paradoxical dread and hope for the End, caught in an infinite cycle of hardship, poverty and falseness; in the mud of post-communist Hungary.
Simultaneously creating and dismantling an apocalyptic framework — the deluge is forthcoming, the rains continue to fall and show no sign of ceasing (at least not for any prolonged period of time) — Tarr carves out a liminal space in which his characters stage their existential battles. The postponement of the End is not, as one might think, a result of the film’s inordinate length; it speaks to the inability of Sátántangó’s characters to escape their meagre existence, with or without faith. This Sartrean huis-clos ethos is rendered through the cyclical narrative, which insists upon the rehearsals of pathetic episodes, some shown more than once, through altering angles and points-of-view. These overlaps effectively abolish any sense of linear time, one which would perceivably lead to an end, to the fictionalized world, as well as to the film itself.
There’s no denying that Tarr is playing with time: screen time, real/physical time (not unlike Tarkovsky), historical time, theological time, universal time, chronological time, synchronic time, parataxic time. A random and seemingly meaningless comment (as the film progresses, however, one realizes that nothing is random or meaningless — all is tightly orchestrated) jokingly refers to Sátántangó’s defiance of chronological time. As the ‘Saviour,’ Irimías (biblical translation: Jeremiah) and his Romanian sidekick sit waiting on a bench in the police station, the bumbling acolyte notices that there are two clocks, neither of which tells the real time. Tarr provokes us to be suspicious of the narrative’s unfolding, suspicion rather than suspense acting as a catalyst for the viewer’s involvement. The two characters sit on the bench, like “two twigs in the rain caught in the perpetuity of defenselessness,” according to Irimías. A pathetic moment: both tragic and absurd.
A characteristic of the perpetual is that it exists beyond the chronos, thereby allowing for the collapse of succession. Time in Sátántangó is also suspended, as the narrative tango becomes a grotesque fête galante in which the characters gather at the centrepiece of the community, the local pub, and play out the age of shameless decadence, pre-Restoration-like. Up front and centre stage, they form an ensemble of drunken losers whose temporary flight from misery is a release into the burlesque. The accordion song is eternal, the dance neversending, the clamour of the old drunk repetitious. A man with a cheese roll stuck to his forehead glides across the screen, back and forth, echoing the film’s overall va et vient rhythm. These comedic moments betray the dark, unmeasurable suffering of a people whose hopes and dreams for the future are all but illusory. At one point, the characters are frozen, forming a deliberately positioned tableau of carnivalesque characters, from the beast-like woman to the beat poet with dark sunglasses. These are the entr’actes to Tarr’s Hungarian tragedy, ones which provide an impromptu respite from what appears to be a neverending era of utter despair.
Ironically, this release, this temporary flight from social awareness, unifies the characters into a community of survivors who aren’t necessarily admirable in their “plodding.” The predominant response to the continual antagonisms of a belligerent world is a concern for the self in which the law of the jungle is in effect. In an unforgettable scene, a young, elfish girl tortures and kills a cat, telling it: “I can do whatever I want to you. I’m stronger than you. I won’t feel sorry for you.” Hanging helplessly from a net drawstring pouch, the cat incarnates the defenselessness of the film’s characters. The murdering of the cat is, like every other sequence in Sátántangó, unflinchingly filmed, galvanized with experiential import. The episode is played out in real time, though its outcome recurs in déjà vu fashion in a subsequent chapter of the film.
“I’m sure something is going to happen today,” opines one of the characters as if the interminable waiting and general meaninglessness was over. But despite the arrival of the ‘Resurrected Saviour,’ the indeterminate interval continues for many more hours, temporally integrating present and past into a calculated destiny. As a seeming exponent of the peripatetic notion of man’s being-for-ever in the cycle of life, Sátántangó, like its characters, is a product of a burlesque modality which, in typical Eastern European style, aligns absurdity alongside tragedy. A black comedy perhaps. But one which, through a sophisticated use of time, acknowledges its own pathologies.
Film
@ The Digital Fix - Sátántangó Noel
Megahey
I know what you’re thinking. Seven and a quarter hours of miserable people trudging through drab, bleak Hungarian countryside in pouring rain - black and white, subtitled, slow, East European minimalist, arthouse cinema featuring long scenes where little is said and nothing much happens - Sátántangó isn’t exactly going to be a bundle of laughs. Well, you’ve got that right. The middle part of a trilogy of films co-written with the author László Krasznahorkai starting in 1987 with Damnation and ending in 2000 with Werckmeister Harmonies, the intimidating reputation of Béla Tarr’s four years in the making magnum opus Sátántangó from 1994 is only matched by its long anticipated release on DVD. It more than lives up to every expectation.
Despite its formidable reputation, Sátántangó is not as difficult and unapproachable as it might appear. Much in the same way that the plot of Damnation, such as it was, adhered to many of the styles and characteristics of a film noir, Sátántangó is actually something of a thriller, albeit one that is highly stylised, unusually structured and certainly at variance with the conventional pacing of the genre. A group of people are holed-up in a small farming community and it appears that they have been there for a long time, with a lot of money between them, all dreaming of a better life they are going to have when they get away. Kráner (János Derzsi) and Schmidt (László Lugossy) are planning to split the money between them and leave, but Futaki (Miklós B. Székely) – who, like everyone else, has been sleeping with Schmidt’s wife (Éva Almássy Albert) - overhears their plans and demands to be counted in. As they are arguing over how to divide the money between them, the news arrives that Irimiás and Petrina (Mihály Vig and Putyi Horváth) – long believed dead – have been seen causing a disturbance in a nearby inn and are heading their way.
With scenes taking place in practically real-time, long, slow and
endlessly drawn out, the characters mired in dark, muddy and desolate
locations, Tarr’s film says much about his view of the human condition, but it
is one that is specifically linked with Hungary’s status as a former Soviet
Bloc country. The opening scene – a single ten minute tracking shot following a
herd of bulls though the buildings that make up the farm yard where the
characters reside – sets the scene for a population lost and without direction,
wandering aimlessly with no purpose other than existing. It’s a modern-day
Sodom and Gomorrah, the inhabitants sleeping with each other’s wives, raucously
drinking and dancing, squabbling over what money they have been able to store
up under the old regime and waiting for the opportunity to make their getaway.
And the old regime is crumbling. The comings and goings of the people on the
farm are being documented by the Doctor (Peter Berling), who keeps them under
constant surveillance – but he’s grown fat and is too fond of his fruit brandy.
When Mrs Kráner warns him that she will no longer make deliveries for him, he
finds that he cannot fend for himself without the support of the people and
their complicity in keeping the old ways going. Similarly, Irimiás and Petrina
are hauled up before the military authorities who are outraged at their
inactivity and vagrancy, for failing to heed the rule of order. Human life
is meaningful, rich beautiful and filthy. It links everything. It mistreats
freedom only ...wasting it as if it were junk.”
The same themes that are evident in the other parts of the trilogy, Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies,
are even more evident here - people struggling to exist in impoverished
circumstances, their lives without direction, order or meaning. Here however,
the characters have money, resources and abilities, but no will or imagination
to do anything with them. Used to being treated like the cattle seen in the
first scene of the film, they have allowed themselves to be misused, mistreated
and spied upon, but finding relative safety and comfort by merging anonymously
into the herd. When that authority disappears, they find then that they have no
volition of their own, and no-one to stop them from over-indulging in the few
little pleasures that were available to them – drinking, dancing and
fornication. A spectre from the past however, in the form of Irimiás and
Petrina, has risen from the dead and is about to pass judgment on their lives.
There is no
small amount of pleasure to be gained from trying to figure out all the
symbolism and allegory in the story, and a certain degree of anticipation to be
drawn from the slow unfolding of events – the initial scenes are replayed over
the first four hours of the film from different perspectives, each cumulatively
adding to form a complete view of the sordid situation – but the real strength
of Sátántangó is almost
entirely within Tarr’s wonderful mise en scène. The camera lingers over
the grim, hard-set, craggy and worn faces of each of the characters, each of
the drab, dank rooms they inhabit and the bleakness of the featureless
landscape that surrounds them as they trudge and squelch down muddy roads under
heavy rain that almost beats them into the ground. The scenes stay static
enough for the viewer to savour every little detail – the gentle patter of the
rain building up to a heavy downpour, stray dogs wandering in the background,
the relentless ticking of passing time, the buzzing of flies crawling along
walls and tables. Tarr somehow even seems to have the spiders and flies
practically choreographed to appear on cue at the end of long ten minute takes.
The long unedited takes and the constant replaying of events serve to show how
everything is connected and all of it speaks of the aimlessness of the
characters and their grubby little lives and their relationship with the land
around them - life in misery in perpetuity. The camera is not static however –
it follows the characters, tracks them, closes in on them, encircles them –
each of the movements serving to emphasise a situation or condition.
There are many ways to interpret what is going on in Sátántangó, but the principal objective of Tarr’s
technique is to capture the essence of the characters and their surroundings,
drawing the viewer into this world and letting them experience every single
moment, in practically real-time sequences, from as many aspects as possible.
More than figuring out what is going on, what is more important is for the viewer
to open themselves up to the experience of the film and dance with the devil. Sátántangó is truth 24 times a second. At over
seven hours however, so much truth may be more than one can bear.
If you have seen the earlier Artificial Eye release of Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies and Damnation, you will have a fair idea what to expect here in Sátántangó, only more expansively and more in-depth - long, slow, drawn-out single unedited takes of black and white East European bleakness, the characters aimlessly wandering through rain sodden fields, drinking and carousing to fend off the misery of their lives, looking for someone to lead them, direct them and give their lives meaning. It’s over seven hours long and every single gruelling minute of it is astonishing. Tarkovsky and Bergman inevitably come to mind, both in technique and subject matter, but Béla Tarr takes those arthouse sensibilities to punishing extremes. Sátántangó goes further than most and in doing so, Tarr creates for himself a unique place in cinema and achieves a unique dialogue with the viewer, but it’s not an experience that everyone is going to want to put themselves through. It will leave an indelible impression on anyone who watches it, but those brave enough to sit through it all in one go may feel soiled and unable to ever remove the grime it leaves clinging to the skin.
Sátántangó (Film and
Novel) as Faulknerian Reverie ...
Jonathan Rosenbaum from Notes,
April 13, 2013
The
Importance of Being Sarcastic | Movie Review | Chicago ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, October 13, 1994
VIDEO
ESSAY: Sight and Sound Film Poll - Jonathan ... Kevin B. Lee on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s video
review from indieWIRE Press Play, May 24, 2012 (video, 6:16)
Satantango Tony McKibbon
Bela Tarr | Tony McKibbin The
Monochromic Force Field
Michigan
Quarterly Review|Béla Tarr's “Sátántangó”
Eric McDowell from Michigan
Quarterly Review, July 4, 2013
Ten
Tangents for SATANTANGO (Talking around a novel ... Drew Johnson from The Collagist, August 6, 2012
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
Flashback #34 Srikanth Srinivasan from The Seventh Art, Sptember 26, 2008
Sátántangó:
And then there was Darkness Donato
Totaro from Offscreen, April 2002,
also seen here: Sátántangó – Offscreen
The Spiders’ Webs (on Bela Tarr’s Satantango) Doug Messerli from Green Integer Blog, March 25, 2008
Sátántangó · The New Cult Canon · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias, May 27, 2010
Only the Cinema:
Sátántangó Ed Howard
The Captive
Audience – The New Inquiry Ryan Ruby
from The New Inquiry, June 6, 2011
The devil has
all the good tunes - hlo.hu Tim
Wilkinson from Hungarian Literature
Online, January 10, 2007
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
Lateral
Sculpture: Béla Tarr's Sátántangó | The House Next ... Ryland Walker Knight from The House Next Door, January 19, 2007
Nine Minutes of Cows Dan North from Spectacular Attractions, April 26, 2008
Shall We
Satantango? Cullen Gallagher from The L-magazine, July 25, 2008
Satantango | PopMatters Chris Robé, August 7, 2008
Dan Schneider on Satantango -
Cosmoetica June 4, 2009
notcoming.com | Sátántango Rumsey Taylor from Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Sátántangó
| Film Review | Slant Magazine Rumsey
Taylor
An
Intamate Epic: Satantango - Artvoice
Girish Shambu, July 23, 2008
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
moviemartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Southern
Vision [Tyler Atkinson]
Béla
Tarr's Marathon Masterpiece Casts a Devilish Spell ... J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, January 3, 2006
Dancing in the dark with Satantango Kathie Smith from The Walker Art Center, October 15, 2007
Béla Tarr's Slow Burn | Village Voice Ed Halter, February 13, 2007
SATANTANGO: TEN
YEARS LATER - criticalconditions.net
Nathan Duke
You
Should Watch the Seven-Hour Hungarian Film ... - Vice Rick Paulas from Vice channel, February 18, 2015
FILM
Satantango (Sátántangó) by Béla Tarr {2}
Adferoafferro from Cutting On the Action, February 6, 2009
A Place in the Pantheon | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 9, 1996
The melancholy of resistance Peter Hames from Kinoeye, September 3, 2001
Rain Man Michael
Atkinson from The Boston Phoenix,
January 10, 2007
Are you sitting comfortably? Jonathan Romney from The Guardian, October 6, 2000
The
Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr | The White Review Rose McLaren, December 2012
Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood Online excerpts from book written by Michael
Atkinson (228 pages), January 1, 2008
Points of No Return | Village Voice J. Hoberman, October 2, 2001
Bela Tarr: Satantango David Auerbah from Waggish, January 12, 2006
Bela Tarr: Satantango [2] David Auerbah from Waggish, January 17, 2006
Bela Tarr: Satantango [3] David Auerbah from Waggish, February 11, 2006
TANGO marathon David Borwell, October 22, 2006
Observations
on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium,
September 19, 2007
Satantango John Adams, DVD review from Movie Habit
On DVD:
“Satantango,” “Eagle Shooting Heroes” – IFC
Michael Atkinson
Satantango : DVD Talk
Review of the DVD Video Jamie S.
Rich
Three Films by Béla Tarr: 'Almanac of Fall', 'Damnation' and ... Angelos Koutsourakis from Pop Matters
satantango - review
at videovista Gary Couzens
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
The
Ecstasy of Endurance: Bela Tarr's Satantango - Flixist Hubert Vigilla from Flixist
Review: Satantango -
Next Projection Christopher Misch
Satantango (1994) – Long Pauses Darren Hughes
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Satantango (1994) A Film by Bela Tarr Carson Lund from Are the Hills Going to March Off?, November 27, 2008
Partisans in the persistent and hopeless fight for human dignity: Sátántangó David McDougall from Chained to the Cinematheque, March 5, 2007
On Sátántangó Initial thoughts David Lowery from Drifting, November 13, 2006
Satan’s tango Richard Warburton from True Contradictions
SÁTÁNTANGÓ (Béla Tarr, 1994) Dennis Grunes
kamera.co.uk - film review -
Satantango - Steven Yates
Sátántangó
(Hungary, 1994, Béla Tarr) | The House Next ... Dan Jardine and Ben Livant in a conversation
from Slant magazine
Jason Anderson on Bela Tarr's
Sátántángo - artforum.com / film
Jason Anderson from Artforum magazine
Sátántangó (2004)
– Review | Roobla Film Naomi
Barnwell
Out
1 Film Journal: Opening Shots: "Satantango" (Bela Tarr ... James Hansen from Out 1 Film Journal, July 28, 2008
Talking
of Bela Tarr's Sátántangó | Adam Roberts
The Huffington Post, November
10, 2014
Sátántangó (1994, Bela Tarr) Brandon’s
Movie Memory, December 7, 2006
Sátántangó
Explained (Tarr, 1994) Kamran
Ahmed from Aesthetics of the Mind,
March 2, 2016
Sátántangó
(Tarr, 1994) Kamran Ahmed from Aesthetics of the Mind, March 3, 2016
Sátántangó
Turns 15, MOMA Throws (Serious) Party ...
Nick Pinkerton from The Village
Voice
Sátántangó | Mountain
Xpress Ken Hanke
SATANTANGO (1994) | 366 Weird
Movies Alfred Eaker
The Bleak World of Bela
Tarr - Talking Pictures Alan Pavelin
Satantango
- Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
Bonjour
Tristesse (English) photos
Interview
with László Krasznahorkai | The White Review George Szirtes interview, September 2013
Satantango |
Variety Derek Elley
Are you sitting comfortably? Jonathan Romney from The Guardian, October 6, 2000, also seen here: essay - Fred
Kelemen
FILM
FESTIVAL REVIEW - SATANTANGO - A Seven-Hour ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times, October 8, 1994
Satantango -
Critic's Choice - Movies - Manohla Dargis ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, January 11, 2006
Satantango -
Mihály Vig - DVDBeaver.com Henrik
Sylow
Sátántangó -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Official site author László Krasznahorkai
Profile László Krasznahorkai profile by Péter Pál Tóth from Hungarian Literature Online
Laszlo Krasznahorkai Conversational Reading
László Krasznahorkai and James Wood Conversational Reading
When the Devil Danced in Hungary - The New York Review ... Adam Thirwell reviews László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango, now translated in English (274 pages), from The New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013
Dance with The Devil – The New Inquiry Dan Bevacqua book review of the László Krasznahorkai novel from The New Inquiry, Janury 23, 2012
Satan Said Dance | Books | The L Magazine - New York City's Local ... Michael Joshua Rowin book review of the László Krasznahorkai novelfrom The L Magazine, February 29, 2012
Bookslut | Satantango
by László Krasznahorkai Matt
McGregor book review from Bookslut,
March 2012
Satantango
- Krasznahorkai László - Complete Review
M.A. Orthofer book review of the László Krasznahorkai
novel from The Complete Review, March
1, 2012
Laszlo Krasznahorkai's 'Satantango' - The New York Times New York Times book review, March 18, 2012
Satantango — The Barnes & Noble Review Christopher Byrd book review March 29, 2012, republished at Salon, April 6, 2012: “Satantango”: Eloquent melancholia
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai – review | Books | The ... Theo Tait book review from The Guardian, May 9, 2012
Review: Satantango - New Statesman Jonathan Beckman book review, May 12, 2012
Sátántangó
by László Krasznahorkai: review - Telegraph
Beth Jones book review from The
Telegraph, May 17, 2012
Satantango - Review By Scott Morris
- Cadaverine Magazine Scott
Morris book review, June 11, 2012
Satantango - The Los Angeles Review of Books K. Thomas Khan book review, July 3, 2012
Three
Percent: Why This Book Should Win: "Satantango" by ... Chad W. Post post on why it should win the
2013 Best Translated Book Award, from Of
Open Letter Books, April 2, 2013
László
Krasznahorkai: Satantango | The Mookse and the ... Trevor Berrett book review from The Mookse and Gripes, April 24, 2013
When the Devil Danced in Hungary - The New York Review ... Adam Thirwell reviews László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango from The New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013
The Truth About
Lies: Satantango Jim Murdoch
book review, April 17, 2016
László Krasznahorkai Poet and novelist George Szirtes discusses
the visionary fiction of Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai from The BBC (05.26)
WERCKMEISTER
HARMONIES (Werckmeister harmóniák) A 100
Easily one of the
most hypnotic, raw and powerful films seen on the horrors of ethnic cleansing,
with elements of Tarkovsky’s mysticism, bold imagery, and a simpleton, or Holy
Fool, who is trying to make sense of the cosmos, but the world around him is
hopelessly spinning out of control, collapsing into lawlessness, tyranny, and
evil. With unmistakable parallels to Stalker
and ANDREI RUBLEV, as well as Mussorgsky’s dark opera Boris Godunov, a black and white film featuring long takes (only 49
shots) opens with a long sequence in a bar, Werckmeister Harmonies
(Opening Scene - GR-EN sub ... (10:13), our silent Andrei or WOYZECK-style
Holy Fool hero (Lars Rudolph), known as a visionary, arranges the drunks in
some semblance of order. Here is the sun
— a man stands. The earth spins around
the sun — a man spins. The moon spins
around the earth, which spins around the sun — the spinning men try, but keep
bumping into one another while absolutely haunting, original music by Mihaly
Vig plays, very much like the most mournful music of Arvo Pärt, and is the
heart and soul of the film. After an
attempt to explain an eclipse, where darkness engulfs the earth, where the
earth is thrown into utter turmoil, the barkeep throws them all out, where our
hero walks into the darkness, down an empty street, alone. There is an interior shot of our hero going
through the rhythms of life, going through the motions of cleaning up his home,
again, trying to make some semblance of order before he crawls under the covers
for sleep. In a long pan of what looks
like an industrial wasteland, cast in shadows of darkness and light, one hears
the sound of an approaching truck, at first far away, but then the sound is
enormous as one sees a giant truck load driven by a tractor, where our hero is
off in the corner bearing witness to this arrival. The circus has arrived under cover of the
night bringing what is advertised as a fantastic, giant whale, one of the
wonders of the world, also promising the appearance of The Prince. People mull about the town square in a fog,
everyone looks dour and mean, like they eat nails for breakfast. Despite the opening of the circus, no one
buys a ticket until our hero steps forward and is the first one willing to
enter the truck. The music plays as he
slowly comes face to face with the eye of a giant, stuffed whale, which, at
least in mood and atmosphere, feels extraordinary, like one of God’s original
creations, but we hear rumors of increasing violence, of store break-ins and of
danger lurking outside.
Everyone in town
is our hero’s aunt or uncle. One uncle
unravels the mysteries of Werckmeister as he plays the piano, calmly explaining
that the order of harmony is a deception.
People, including the great artists, were misinformed, as he introduces
what appears to be a twelve-note theory where dissonance prevails. Fassbinder’s Hanna Schygulla appears in the
uncle’s house and he immediately calls her a slut and orders her to leave at
once. However, she asks our hero to
demand that the uncle obtain names and signatures of a central cleanup
committee by 4 pm, to clean up the riff raff that’s been mulling on the streets
around the whale, which the uncle agrees to do, under threat that otherwise she
will move back into his house. She is
then seen in the home of a drunken officer waving a gun, dancing with him to
the sounds of brazen, military marching music.
Afterwards, she orders our hero to watch who is mulling about the town
square and to report back to her who says what, and to whom. He is warned by another uncle of the danger
brewing on the streets, who tells him “only an army can control this
madness.”
Our hero tries to
convince those gathered, drunken men to see the fantastic whale, but instead
they only threaten him. A loudspeaker
announcement is made that the show will temporarily be halted, as The Prince
cannot make an appearance. Our hero
sneaks inside the truck to get another glimpse of the whale, but overhears the
loud voices of arguing men, the deceivers covering up for the non-existent
Prince, like the Pretender Dimitri in Boris
Godunov, as he hears them preaching that all is deception and lies,
advocating bloodshed and merciless, merciless destruction, which leads to the
most powerful scene in the film. Tarr,
who was present at the screening, indicated he used 800 unemployed miners as
the men mulling around the streets, who then begin to march, boldly and
powerfully in a wordless formation where one hears the sounds of their steps as
they become eerily thunderous. It’s
freezing cold, their breath is seen steaming from their mouths, and the men are
carrying sticks and clubs. The feeling
is ominous. An overhead camera follows
them around each turn, the pulsating rhythm of marching men is brilliantly
captured, boldly reminiscent of Eisenstein’s
In the aftermath,
our hero is seen in the hospital, visited and cared for by his uncle, as he
seems feeble and demented from his experience.
The uncle is then seen entering the town square, which is now completely
empty. The haunting music returns, the
truck holding the whale has been shattered.
Sticks and debris are lying everywhere.
The whale stands unprotected, alone in the square, stripped naked, like
the man behind the curtain, covered only in a mist of covering fog. As the screen darkens, only the music is
heard — music.
From the opening
Genesis to the final Apocalypse, man plods his course in frailty, naked to the
certain evil that will devour him...stunning.
Werckmeister Harmonies | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
A chilling, mesmerizing, intense account of ethnic cleansing (in
spirit if not in letter) from Hungarian master Bela Tarr (2000, 145 min.), set
in virtually the same overcast, rural black-and-white world as his Damnation
and Satantango (both also cowritten by Laszlo Krasznahorkai). As in the Satantango,
Krasznahorkai worked with Tarr in adapting his own novel—in this case the first
to be translated into English, The Melancholy of Resistance, elaborately
restructured here in terms of narrative sequence and viewpoint so that it's
mainly limited to the experience of a simpleminded messenger and artist figure.
A decrepit “circus” (actually a huge truck) in an impoverished town displays the
stuffed body of “the largest whale in the world” while spreading rumors about
but failing to deliver a foreign “prince.” Eventually the unemployed male
locals head for the local hospital like a lynch mob and proceed to devastate
the premises. Krasznahorkai's parallels with southern gothic fiction are as
striking as those with other eastern European allegories, yielding cadenced
prose as monotonously grim as Thomas Bernhard's. The long takes following
characters—the structural equivalent of the novel's Faulknerian sentences,
though the content recalls Beckett's comedy of inertia—underline our easy
complicity with these monsters, and the actors, including Hanna Schygulla in a
welcome comeback, are riveting. I miss the sarcasm and sweep of Satantango,
but this is essential viewing, especially for anyone new to Tarr's cinema. In
German and Hungarian with subtitles.
Werckmeister
Harmonies | Film Review | Slant Magazine
Ed Gonzalez
In Béla Tarr's surreal epic Werckmeister Harmonies, a nameless European town is the center of a cosmic struggle. Tarr's precise yet effortless command of the long take is so transcendent as to suggest the presence of God. Every stoppage point within each shot becomes a heavenly composite of the film's collective whole. Gabor Medvigy's camera delicately roams and collects the light and shadow that suffocates the film's existential terrain. Janos Valushka (Lars Rudolph) steps into a local bar and perpetuates an abstract game of order with the bar's pawn-like patrons: The drunken men circle somberly around each other, aping the movement of the earth and moon around the sun. Drowned by an impenetrable yet hopeful darkness, this silent entity of a film becomes a purgatory between progress and complete an utter self-annihilation. A carnival attraction arrives and situates itself at the town square; it is there that ghostly men congregate, circling a truck that contains a large, metaphoric whale. Janos is entranced by the whale's omnipotence; its godly purity becomes the antithesis of the resentment Janos's uncle harbors for Werckmeister's splitting of the musical octave. The faceless Prince is the carnival's dictatorial ringmaster; his shadowy form signals the nightmarish tyranny the town's men take out on a dilapidated hospital's patients. This scenario is accompanied by Tarr's most startling masterstroke. His harmonious camera slithers silently in and out of a hospital held siege by political uncertainty and aggression against the meek that should inherit the earth. Medvigy's camera pauses, focusing on a curtain that reveals the frail naked form of an older man. On cue, Víg Mihály's melancholic score erupts and the film's tyrants are forced to assess their vicious need to strip the world of its humanity.
The Flesh Is
Bleak | Village Voice J. Hoberman,
October 9, 2001
Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, opening Friday at Anthology, is a totally sustained immersion in the magisterially bleak, voluptuously monochromatic, undeniably beautiful universe of muddy villages and cell-like rooms that the Hungarian filmmaker has created in collaboration with reclusive novelist László Krasznahorkai.
Three years in the making, this follow-up to the pair's epochal Sátántangó opens in a rural tavern frequented by stupefied sods. Just before closing time, young János Valuska (Lars Rudolph), the resident holy fool, uses some of the locals to dramatize a cosmological model of a lunar eclipse, with the moon hopping past the earth as the earth staggers around the twinkling sun. This intimation of celestial order is echoed by the film's title—it's named for the 17th-century organist and musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister, who divided the octave into 12 equal tones to create a system of major and minor notes. (Order is generally fraudulent in this world. We eventually meet a villager who wants to correct Werckmeister's "mistake.")
Like Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies is a work of bravura filmmaking—mainly a series of extremely long, largely mobile takes, edited without the normal pattern of shot-countershot. (The entire tavern scene is a single 15-minute shot.) Tarr's camera style has its equivalent in Krasznahorkai's lengthy, convoluted sentences, although the results are quite different. Werckmeister Harmonies is largely taciturn and anything but literary. Because the narrative is assembled from chunks of real time, the most banal incident can be expanded into something epic. Each cut is an event. The first has János walking home through an empty town illuminated mainly by the sickly glow of a single truck creeping along the street. This vehicle is the harbinger of the mysterious circus that has come to town, its attractions including an uncanny prince and a stuffed whale advertised as "the great sensation of the century."
The foggy morning finds the market square filled with clusters of grim, grizzled men. János is the first to buy a ticket to the circus and is properly fascinated by the leviathan's great scarred torso. Meanwhile, another mysterious presence, "Auntie" Tunde (Hanna Schygulla), has returned home and recruits the increasingly crazed János as a messenger-boy spy in the service of the political movement she's establishing in cahoots with the local police chief. There seems to be a prerevolutionary atmosphere, or maybe a growing panic, as the prince's appearance is announced and canceled and the square becomes the site of threatening bonfires.
"See how much trouble you've caused," János whispers to the whale. Before long, the rabble is marching through the town, advancing on what appears to be the local hospital, dragging out patients and smashing everything in a prolonged, clattering paroxysm that, already extraordinary for its choreography, seems all the more violent for being completely wordless. As in the market square, the townspeople seem to communicate by telepathy. The outburst is resolved (or not) by the arrival of an occupying army. Although Tunde may be in command, János is warned that his name is on the execution list.
The sight of tanks in the muddy streets and choppers hovering over the puszta hardly dispels the movie's 19th-century quality. The final image has the great sensation of the age lying in the center of the debris. Mournful and sardonic, Werckmeister Harmonies ends in the baleful light of a postapocalyptic morning after. The movie invites allegory even as it resists it.
Preserving
Disorder | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
Fred
Camper, December 20, 2001
Bela Tarr's seventh film,
a melancholy meditation on social disorder and senseless violence, begins with
an enigmatic scene in a bar. Janos Valuska, a postman in a small Hungarian
village, recruits three patrons to enact the heavens' rotations. One man serves
as the sun, vibrating his fingers to simulate its rays, while the other two
play the earth and moon. Valuska sets them spinning about each other, stopping
them to simulate a solar eclipse. Shot in a single ten-minute take, this
sequence acquires resonance as the film progresses, coming to stand for a quest
for harmony in a world that's falling apart. But appreciating its full import depends
on understanding the musical reference in the film's title, which most critics
have missed.
In the film -- receiving its Chicago
theatrical premiere at Facets Multimedia Center December 29 -- Valuska is
something of a holy fool. He soon sees a gigantic truck lumbering into town
carrying a huge preserved whale; parked in the market square, it also
advertises the arrival of a mysterious Prince. We learn that previous
appearances of the whale and Prince, who advocates chaos, have caused a
commotion in other locales, and there's already much discontent in this village
-- the people have no coal or phone service, and rumors of civil unrest run
rife.
One of Valuska's duties is to care for
retired music professor Gyuri Eszter. In response to the mounting troubles,
Eszter's estranged wife, Tunde, founds a political movement requiring a
"strong leader"; its goal is to "restore order, create
cleanliness" -- phrases with fascist echoes. She enlists the respected
Eszter as that leader. But despite their efforts, crowds of men gather in
ominous silence around the whale and grow uglier, and near the end a large
group of club-wielding men invades the local hospital, beating up patients and
smashing equipment.
Tarr has said the film, made between
1997 and 2000, was partly a response to the horrors in Bosnia, where
"ethnic cleansing" took the form of mass rape and mass murder. But
the details seem open to many interpretations. Valuska says the whale manifests
the magnificence of "the Lord's creative impulse," but it could also
signify capitalism at its crudest, exploiting nature for gain. And the camera
never identifies with the disasters on-screen -- there are no handheld
"action" shots here, just stately, calculated movements. One viewer
reportedly asked Tarr after a screening, "Where is the hope?" He
didn't answer, but his camera work, creating a tension between the order it
seeks and the disorder it finds, suggests -- as does Valuska's planetary
choreography -- that intelligence and balance are not completely absent from
this world.
Until the hospital scene near the end,
there's little action -- what makes the film gripping is the sense of dread
created by Tarr's camera. Continuing the long-take style of the opening (which
reiterates the long sentences of the novel on which the film is based, Laszlo
Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance), Tarr builds a subtle
suspense: we wait for things to fall apart. The men in the market square seem
statues frozen in space, but the camera's movements around them emphasize their
dynamically disordered arrangement. Long takes also serve as a reminder that
time has its own autonomy -- it's apart from humans' lurching violence. As the
hospital invasion begins, the camera slowly approaches a brightly lit doorway;
when men rush by, the camera tries to follow them from room to room but can't
keep up with their rampage. More deliberate, its movements measure time with an
almost metronomic inevitability, intensifying our sense of the devastation by
making clear that destruction, like time, cannot be reversed.
In many scenes the camera begins by
tracking with Valuska, who acts as the viewer's surrogate. But where in a
classic Hollywood film the camera's following of the hero makes his movements
seem successful assertions of will as he rescues a heroine or wins a war, in
Tarr's film the characters' independence is always qualified by the way the
camera pulls away from them to depict other aspects of the scene. Following
Valuska through the crowds in the market square, the camera seems drawn by a
gravitational pull to close-ups of the threatening faces around him. When
Valuska flees down a railroad track late in the film, the camera tracks in
front of him, then turns its attention to a pursuing helicopter -- one of many
deflections that deny him freedom. Similarly, offscreen sounds frequently
disrupt the action with news of social chaos, as when the camera moves from
Valuska to a postal clerk describing growing unrest.
The film's sensuous blacks and whites
often unite the visual field in a continuous tactile surface, as when the
camera observes the corrugated-metal side of the whale's truck. But those
surfaces are soon broken; here the camera quickly pans to a close-up of a
poster advertising the whale, isolated against the dark night. Throughout Tarr
creates a powerful tension between the camera's quest for unity and scenes of
disorder, the camera seeking balance where there is none. The composition of a
scene in which Valuska is charged with putting two kids to bed is tableaulike,
but the action is disruptive: one kid tries to attack Valuska with a drumstick
while the other jumps on the bed clanging disks together.
The full meaning of the film's quest
for order, though, must be understood in terms of the musical theories offered
by Eszter, the retired professor. (Though Valuska calls him "uncle,"
they're not related; it's an honorific.) Eszter's melancholy stems from what he
sees as music's slide away from godly harmony into modern imperfection, a
devolution he attributes (wrongly, but no matter) to 17th-century German music
theorist and organist Andreas Werckmeister. In a long speech, Eszter says that
the result of Werckmeister instituting Western music's current tuning system,
equal temperament -- in which the 12 notes of the octave are separated by
precisely equal intervals -- is that "all the intervals of masterpieces of
many centuries are false"; in a later scene he calls a prelude from Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier, meant to demonstrate the virtues of equal
temperament, "grating."
A little knowledge of music theory and
history helps illuminate Eszter's nostalgic references to Pythagoras and a
music of "pure intervals." For the Greek philosopher-mathematician,
music, mathematics, and astronomy were linked manifestations of the harmony of
the universe, a view that continued well into the Middle Ages. Pythagoras
argued that the most euphonious harmonies resulted from tones that reflected
the proportions of simple integers, such as 2:1 and 3:2. (Today we know that
these simple ratios, which represent an octave and a fifth, cause sound waves
to reinforce one another, producing consonant rather than dissonant chords.)
The music of the spheres was supposedly created by tones the planets emitted
while rotating -- Pythagoras believed that the organization of the cosmos was
based on the proportions among simple integers.
But basing musical scales on simple
ratios leads to contradictions, such as octaves that aren't true -- the impetus
behind equal temperament, which emerged in the Renaissance. But some, like
Eszter, consider every interval except the octave in this system
"impure" and "out of tune." This is a debate that continues
today: composer La Monte Young, for example, argues vehemently against equal
temperament as unharmonious and retuned a piano according to whole-number
ratios for his The Well-Tuned Piano.
In Eszter's terms, the camera's quest
for order and symmetry is a quest for the unified worldview of classical Greece
and the Middle Ages, for an ordered cosmos. But Tarr's view is more nuanced. In
the opening, Valuska attempts to create heavenly order -- the music of the
spheres -- using the materials available to him: his drunken neighbors. But his
response is quite unlike what one imagines the cultured Eszter's might be.
Valuska doesn't object to his planets' irregular lurchings; perhaps drunk
himself, he seems pleased with the performance. Tarr sees fascism's quest for
absolute order as wrong; Eszter's lugubrious musings on the falseness of equal
temperament, stemming from his desire for perfection, are misguided, as he
himself seems to acknowledge at the film's end by caring for Valuska. Though
Tarr makes his own attempts at ordering, he also acknowledges that humans are
imperfect by nature and that true harmony depends on imprecision and compromise.
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
Bela Tarr | Tony McKibbin The Monochromic Force Field
How
to Watch Werckmeister Harmonies | Spectacular ... Dan North from Spectacular Attractions, November 9, 2008
What’s
With the Werckmeister Whale Dan North from Spectacular Attractions, December 3, 2009
Werckmeister
Harmonies - Reverse Shot Jeff
Reichert, July 23, 2006
Best
of the Decade #14: Werckmeister Harmonies - Reverse ... Damon Smith from Reverse Shot, December 15, 2009
BFI
| Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Werckmeister ... Jonathan Romney from BFI Sight and Sound, April 2003
Werckmeister
Harmonies film review | The Seventh Art
Srikanth Srinivasan from The
Seventh Art, April 19, 2009
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]
"Adapting
Krasznahorkai" Andrew Schenker from The Cine-File, April 30, 2007
World
Cinema Review: Béla Tarr | Werckmeister harmóniák ... Douglas Messerli
MovieMartyr.com -
Werckmeister Harmonies Jeremy
Heilman
Janos and the Werckmeister Whale Kim Morgan from The Sunset Gun, June 14, 2010
Hope
Deep Within - Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies • Senses of ... Gabe
Klinger from Senses of Cinema,
December 28, 2000
Tarrying
With the Nothing: Asking Anew Heidegger's Question of ... Tan Xing Lon lan from Senses of Cinema, June 18, 2014
World
Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
MUSIC
OF THE SPHERES : Sheila Seacroft on ... Sheila Seacroft from Jigsaw Lounge
PULLING
THE STRINGS: Tarr & Hranitzy's 'Werckmeister ... Neil Young from Jigsaw lounge, February 22, 2006
Static
Mass Emporium [Ben Nicholson]
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, Béla Tarr) Brandon’s Movie Memory, December 30, 2007
Film Walrus Reviews: Review of Werckmeister Harmonies Film Walrus, January 19, 2008
Bela
Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies: Can human bodies ... Gravity7, March 2006
Celluloid Paradiso [André Crous]
SouthernVision
[Tyler Atkinson]
The
Conchie Comment: "Werckmeister Harmonies" by Béla ... Amy
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
The melancholy of resistance Peter Hames from Kinoeye, September 3, 2001
The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr | The White Review Rose McLaren, December 2012
Observations
on film art : The sarcastic laments of Béla Tarr David Bordwell on Tarr film symposium,
September 19, 2007
Werckmeister
Harmonies - Eye For Film Anton Bitel
Film
@ The Digital Fix - Werckmeister Harmonies ... Noel Megahey from The Digital Fix
Werckmeister
Harmonies DVD review | Cine Outsider L.K. Weston
Slant
Magazine DVD [Ed Gonzalez]
DVD Savant
Review: Werckmeister Harmonies - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, also seen
here: Werckmeister
Harmonies - TCM.com
The
Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Film
@ The Digital Fix - The Béla Tarr Collection Noel Megahey from The Digital Fix on The Bela
Tarr Collection
werckmeister
harmonies, damnation - review at videovista.net Peter Schilling on Werckmeister Harmonies and Damnation
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2000) Dennis Grunes
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Werckmeister Harmonies - CultureVulture.net George Wu
Talking Pictures [Alan Pavelin] and Howard Schumann
SubtitledOnline [Patrick Gamble]
Werckmeister harmóniák [Werckmeister Harmonies] (Béla ... Grant Phipps from Phipps Film, including a photo gallery
Etherial Musings Grace Wang, February 10, 2010
Reeling Reviews [Laura Clifford]
Wild Realm Reviews:
Werckmeister Harmonies Paghat
the Rat Girl
What
the Hell Was "Werckmeister Harmonies" - Miss Media ... Miss Media Junkie
Reviewing 'Ebert's Greatest Films': Werckmeister Harmonies ... Jaime Lopez from Screencrave
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Werckmeister
Harmonies - AMC.com Jeremiah Kipp
"Thirteen Images of Walking Through Fog from Werckmeister Harmonies" photo gallery from The Art of Memory
Bonjour Tristesse (English) photo gallery
Interview
with Béla Tarr: About Werckmeister Harmonies ... Eric Schlosser interview from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1,
2000
Waiting for the
Prince - An Interview with Béla Tarr • Senses ... Fergus Daly and Maximilian Le Cain
interview from Senses of Cinema,
February 3, 2001
Interview:
Bela Tarr, Hungarian director |
Interviews | Guardian ... Jonathan Romney interview from The Guardian,
Review:
'Werckmeister Harmonies' - Variety
Derek Elley
BBCi - Films Tom Dawson
Werckmeister
Harmonies | From the Guardian | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
"Deep Waters: Why Werckmeister Harmonies is a Masterpiece." Richard Williams from The Guardian, April 18, 2003
"Reality Cinema: Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies" Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, March 22, 2001
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
Werckmeister Harmonies Movie Review (2000) | Roger Ebert
Werckmeister
Harmonies - The New York Times
Lawrence Van Gelder, also seen here:
New
York Times
DVDBeaver.com
- Review [Nick Wrigley]
Werckmeister Harmonies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE
MAN FROM LONDON (A londoni férfi) B 86
More than any other film seen at the film fest, this one caused more
restlessness and discomfort in the audience, where people were routinely
getting up, walking out, or even talking out loud in general disgust, creating
a continual dialogue of malaise throughout the theater. A slower film you’re not likely to find,
where even the constant drone from some of the emotionless dialogue from a
police inspector is spoken as if the desired effect is to hypnotize the
audience. Shot by German filmmaker Fred
Kelemen using gorgeous black and white film with a camera that sweeps through
the seaside landscape in a crawl, moving mere inches every minute, oftentimes
obstructed by dark shadowy objects that block the view. This is not any ordinary film, nor is it
particularly enjoyable, this is cinema through obfuscation, where the pace is
so disturbingly slow, the camera at times intentionally stopping in front of a
specific spot and just staring endlessly, actually changing the way we view the
film, as we’re forced to ask ourselves what are we looking for? And if we drift off for a moment, we may miss
a decisive clue. In some ways this is a
Michael Haneke method, where the object of the film is to make the viewer as
uncomfortable as possible, possibly so disturbing that they flee the theater in
droves. Haneke uses variations on the
theme of violence, while Tarr, the maestro of bleak, reflecting a country
beaten down by communism, reduces the essentials to a bare minimal and then
seemingly hyper-exaggerates time through long takes, which is a cinematic
sleight of hand as he actually advances the story using segments shot in real
time.
Using the opening vantage point of a guard inside a glass-enclosed watch
tower, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, adapted by novelist László
Krasznahorkai, where Tarr’s long shots may be a visual correlative to his long
sentences, the camera slowly gazes out into the fog over the harbor lulling us into a dreamlike state where it takes every ounce of one's
concentration to see a man accidentally murdered over a suitcase, which
upon inspection is full of money. The
guard, Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), has a marriage that is one long marital spat
with the amateurishly dubbed Tilda Swinton, where their daughter is Erika Bók
from SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), the girl in the barn with the infamous cat sequence who
was 11 then but is now in her 20’s.
Maloin has issues with overprotecting his daughter, especially when a
man from London returns looking for his missing money, as well as a curious
police inspector dressed, appropriately enough, in a trench coat. But the story itself is barely there, blink
and you’ll miss it, while the pervasive mood is essentially the languorous pace
of the film, which by the final few shots borders on pretentiousness, as on
initial viewing that hardly feels like the end.
Some may find the finale extremely unsatisfying, where a few patrons
began clapping sarcastically, yelling bravo, but obviously feeling like they
were getting gypped. For a moment, I
felt that might actually be the midway point in the film, or that it might begin
again. As it turns out, one of the producers,
Humbert Balsan, committed suicide
after the shooting began, leading to alleged financial difficulties, so perhaps
Tarr shot so much film, and no more, similar to Toscanini who in performance
put down the baton and refused to play a single note beyond what Puccini
actually wrote in his incomplete final work TURANDOT that was finished by his
students. Mihaly Vig is credited once
more with a somber, hauntingly abstract, accordion accentuated musical score,
where there’s a brief dance refrain from SÁTÁNTANGÓ, where a man balancing an
egg on his forehead is dancing with a man holding a chair over his shoulders
which occasionally bumps into the egg man’s face. Shot in
The
Man From London | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
After the more complicated story lines of Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, Hungarian master Bela Tarr boils a Georges Simenon novel down to a few primal essentials: a railway worker in a dank and decaying port town witnesses a crime while stationed on a tower and then stumbles into some of the resulting situations. His 2007 film is about looking and listening, with a suggestive minimalist soundtrack and ravishing black-and-white cinematography by German filmmaker Fred Kelemen. Tarr's slow-as-molasses camera movements and endlessly protracted takes generate a trancelike sense of wonder, giving us time to think and always implying far more than they show. (As Tarr himself puts it, “The camera is inside and outside at the same time.”) The fine cast includes Tilda Swinton and Hungarian actress Erika Bok, who played in Satantango when she was 11 and is now in her early 20s. In Hungarian with subtitles.
Distributor
Wanted: The Man from London - Film Comment
Chris Chang from January/February 2008
Bloody Stasis Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s
decision to adapt a novel by the late Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon is
nothing if not ironic. Simenon was wildly prolific and created tightly paced
tales, while Tarr—well, you know. Sátántangó? Werckmeister Harmonies?
If you IMDb Simenon, Tarr emerges as the clear database loser—by a long shot:
173 entries to Tarr’s 14. But in The Man from London Tarr achieves an
uncanny re-creation of Simenon’s stifling atmosphere, oddly blacked-out
characters, and dead-end narrative style. Here, Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), a
nighttime train-station operator, witnesses a murder and with a little cunning
nets a suitcase filled with money in the aftermath. If this is a windfall,
you’d never tell from his expression. Through the entire course of the film he
looks as if he’s just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. The “plot”
involves whether or not the rightful owner of the money will get it back and
whether there is such a thing as rightful ownership of money in the first
place. The main locations are Maloin’s prison-like watchtower, the grim
apartment he shares with his mentally disturbed daughter and stressed-out wife
(a bizarrely cast Tilda Swinton), a pub/boardinghouse, and the beleaguered environs
of a coastal town that wants to say “somewhere in Eastern Europe” but can’t
summon the energy or willpower to do so. The camera is quintessential Tarr:
hovering in anticipation of things that won’t happen, tracking like a private
eye tailing a perp, and imbuing the black-and-white image with a caustic
malaise no other director comes near to achieving.
The festival-circuit party line has proclaimed The Man from London as
subpar Tarr. So what? Surely the counterargument is that minor Tarr is superior
to most other things. Opportunities to experience his work on the big screen
are few and far between. And to deny audiences the chance to see a new one is a
crime that not even Simenon would savor.
Introduction Cannes Page 8 Cannes Report: Mike D’Angelo from Nerve, 2007
Four years in the making, Béla Tarr's typically lugubrious The
Man from London opens with a series of tracking shots so intricate that
they alone might well have required three of those years to get just right.
What we dimly see, mostly via circular pools of light thrown by wall-mounted
lamps, kicks something off unprecedented in Tarr's oeuvre — namely, a plot. In
fact, it's roughly the same plot that drives No Country for Old Men:
Laconic dude stumbles onto briefcase full of stolen money, must elude both
criminals and cops.
Except, of course, that nothing gets "driven" in a Béla Tarr picture
— save for the impatient viewer, who will surely be driven mad. (I haven't seen
this many walkouts at a
That'll probably be more than enough to satisfy Tarr's small but loyal cadre of
fans, who've endured a seven-year wait since his last feature, Werckmeister
Harmonies. Personally, I run hot and cold on the guy — his legendary
7.5-hour Sátántangó, for examples, strikes me as about four hours of
masterpiece and 3.5 hours of deadly self-indulgence. Since then, his
self-indulgent side seems to have taken over. Several of Man from London's
few dozen shots left me breathless, but the film as a whole feels oddly
mummified; it's almost as if Tarr filmed his idea for the movie rather than the
movie itself, if that makes any sense. If you've longed to see Tilda Swinton
badly dubbed into Hungarian, however, you may never have another chance.
Dear
France, Thanks for Being You. With Gratitude and ... Manohla Dargis at Cannes from the New
York Times, May 24, 2007
One of the energizing and occasionally enervating consequences of attending an international film festival is that it forces you to face your own impatience. Much commercial cinema moves at a fairly accelerated clip, with anxious camerawork and nanosecond editing that verges on a flicker effect. Confronted with the longer takes and languorous pacing of some of the festival’s offerings, viewers hooked on speed cinema rush toward the exit, fall asleep in their seats or try to slow their biorhythms down, way down. Such was the case with “The Man From London,” by the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, making his first appearance in the main competition with this austere black-and-white work that had the press fleeing like panicked slaughterhouse cattle.
It isn’t bad, not at all. But it moves with Mr. Tarr’s characteristic deliberation, with leisurely shots that find the camera wending through confined interiors and a few exteriors for minutes at a time without interruption. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon and set in some undefined port town, it involves a night guard who watches over a shipping dock from inside a glassed-in tower. One evening he witnesses the accidental murder of a man holding a suitcase. He retrieves the case, which turns out to be stuffed with enough cash (£60,000) to make at least one Hungarian lose his bearings. An investigation ensues, but mostly there are long takes and long walks and the remarkable transformation of film space into a state of mind.
There are moments when watching one of Mr. Tarr’s films that it seems as if he doesn’t just want you to look at his images, but to somehow enter into them alongside the characters. The unhurried, at times somnolent movement of the camera as it prowls around the guard sitting at home in a pool of shimmering light or hunkered down in the moody shadows of his watchtower allows you to examine every mote of dust, nick in the wall, groove in his face. This experience with cinematic duration can be transporting, as in Mr. Tarr’s masterpiece “Satantango,” which after 420 trippy minutes makes you feel you have broken through to the other side and taken up residence inside the film with the mud and lyrical drear.
If anything, at 135 minutes “The Man From London” feels too short. The production began on a tragic note when Humbert Balsan, one of the producers, committed suicide after shooting commenced in 2005, leading to financial crises. It’s hard to know how his death or the money woes affected the film, but it feels unfinished, as if a reel or the inspiration for this specific story had gone missing. As always with this filmmaker, there are moments of crystalline beauty, but they remain isolated from one another. And, for all the time you spend with the guard, you never get inside his head. As his wife, the British actress Tilda Swinton (dubbed into Hungarian) proves distracting, but she certainly looks right at home amid the beautiful bleakness.
The
Man From London (A Londoni Ferfi) - ScreenDaily Jonathan Romney
The term "film noir" gets thoroughly redefined in Bela
Tarr's The Man From London, a mystery story cloaked in such stygian
darkness that some viewers may succumb to eye strain before its enigmas are
unfolded.
But feeling your way
through obscurity is the way you have to proceed with Hungarian director Tarr,
whose seven-hour Satantango put him on the map as one of European
cinema's authentic visionaries. Based on a Georges Simenon novel, The Man
From London bears all the trademarks of Tarr's recent films: dense
chiaroscuro, sparely deployed dialogue, a vividly evoked locale, and fluidly
wandering camera movements drawn out over hypnotically extended takes.
Despite a coherent,
economical plotline, this film's sheer slowness may prove too punishing for
many viewers, especially given that the film is in a more introspective
register than its predecessor Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). The Man
From London may not offer that film's sense of other-worldly revelation,
either, but Tarr's increasing camp of hardcore admirers, especially on the
festival circuit, will be certain to go the distance and appreciate a film that
is a refinement and consolidation rather than a major advance.
However, the film's
uncompromising aesthetic will deter all but the most determined arthouse
buyers, while the rigorously fine-tuned use of black and white may make the
film hard to sell on DVD, except to owners of top-notch plasma screens.
Shot in Bastia, Corsica,
the film is largely filtered through the consciousness of Maloin (Krobot), a
middle-aged man who works nights in a signal cabin controlling a dockside
railway. One night, he witnesses a set of strange events following the docking
of a ship: a man throws a suitcase onto the quay, which eventually ends up in
the water, along with a corpse. Maloin retrieves the case, which contains a
fortune in English banknotes, then goes home for an uneasy meal with his wife
(Swinton) and daughter Henriette (Bok). Meanwhile, a shady figure (Derszi) is
seen hovering round town. He turns out to be Brown, an Englishman who has
robbed his employer and who is now being watched closely by Morrison (Lenart),
a police inspector.
While the film is
perfectly coherent as narrative, you sense that Tarr and co-writer Laszlo
Krasznahorkai - whose novels have been the sources of Tarr's recent films -
have pared Simenon's book to the barest bones to transform it into a vehicle
for the exploration of space, time and sardonically implied existential
questions. The action takes place in a limited number of settings - mainly the
dockside, Maloin's flat and the local bar - which the drifting camera explores
so minutely that we end up feeling we know every corner of this enclosed world.
The shooting style will test the patience of casual viewers, but once you give
into its hypnotic intensity, the effect is galvanising: it puts you into a
state of heightened attention in which no detail is insignificant, no movement
lost.
German cinematographer
Fred Kelemen - whose own films as director, such as Fallen, are in a
similar mode - has achieved a tour de force of camerawork, not only in the
textures of light (moving in a single take through glaring sun, inky obscurity
and misty grey haze), but also in the painstakingly choreographed movements,
which give the film the edge of a forensic investigation.
The acting is far from
naturalistic, with Tarr casting partly for physical presence: apart from a
couple of alarming displays of rage, the scowling, weatherbeaten Kropot is
largely silent, a brooding, lumbering golem of a man. Tilda Swinton, visibly
dubbed into Hungarian and present in only two scenes, fits instantly into
Tarr's universe with her gaunt, haunted features, and while the voice may not
be hers, she's a striking force in her arguments with Maloin.
Dialogue, however, is used
largely as one instrument in the film's sound palette: Lenart's ancient
policeman, who has something of Max Von Sydow's baleful gravity, intones his
lines slowly in broken phrases, giving his character an ominous God-like
quality. When the characters burst into heated arguments, or when two shop
assistants jabber in frenzied chorus, they then lapse into silence, to
startling effect. Elsewhere, the sound of clocks, the sea, footsteps and
bar-room accordion - adding an extra dash of Simenon flavour - make up a
haunting, frugal backdrop.
Alternative
Film Guide [Dan Schneider] also seen here: The
Critical Movie Critics [Dan Schneider]
Reverse
Shot [Jeff Reichert] September 16,
2008
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Man from London (0) The
Weight of the World, by
Michael Brooke from Sight and Sound,
January 2009
World
Cinema Review: Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | A ... Douglas
Messerli from World Cinema Review,
April 25, 2012
Hungarian Master Béla Tarr's Austere, Atmospheric ... Pat Kewley from Pop Matters, March 19, 2012
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]
The Man From London, by Lisa K. Broad Tativille
VERTIGO | The Man from London John Bradburn from Vertigo magazine, December 2008
culturevulture.net – review Beverly Berning
The Man from London | Film Review | Slant Magazine Kevin B. Lee
The Man From London - Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young
The Films of Bela Tarr: The Man From London - Next ... Stacia Kissick Jones from Next Projection
The
Man From London DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek
Film
@ The Digital Fix - The Man From London
Noel Megahey
The
Man from London | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Budd Wilkins
DVD
Talk [Christopher McQuain]
The
Cannes-winning film that you'll probably never see. - Slate Dana Stevens
Vancouver visions David Bordwell from Observations on Film Art, October 2, 2007
The
Village Voice [Ed Gonzalez] Béla
Tarr's Magnificent Harmonies
Gives Way to Anemic Noir in The Man
From London
On
the Circuit: The Man From London | The House Next ... Keith Uhlich
Day
17 – The Man from London (Tarr) – The Art(s) of Slow ... Anders Weberg from The Art(s) of Slow Cinema
Cinemattraction.com [James Rocarols]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Chris Docker
The Man From London Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
THE MAN FROM LONDON (Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2007) Dennis Grunes
Electric Sheep Magazine John Berra
Filmmaker Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
The Man From London (2007, Bela Tarr) Brandon’s Movie Memory, February 6, 2010
The Man from London (2007) [10/10] | Southern Vision Tyler Atkinson
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
Keswick Film Club - Reviews - The Man From London John Stakes
a page of madness [Nicholas Vroman]
The New York Sun [Martin Tsai]
The Man From London - Talking Pictures Alan Pavelin
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The World According to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
Bonjour Tristesse (English) photos
The
Evening Class: THROWBACK THURSDAY—The ... Michael Guillen interview from The Evening Class
The Man From London, directed by Béla Tarr ... - Time Out David Jenkins
Film review: The Man from London | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]
Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn]
Slow-Motion Film Noir From Bela Tarr, Based on a Simenon ... Nathan Lee from The New York Times
DVDBeaver [Per-Olof Strandberg]
The Man from London -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE
What is this darkness? —The Daughter (Erika Bók)
Béla Tarr’s windswept vision of the coming apocalypse, where
the world begins to shut down, which he calls his most radical work, most
likely his final utterance as a filmmaker, like his last will and testament.
One thing you can say about Béla Tarr, he is a master of the long shot,
as evidenced by his first few shots, which are lengthy tracking shots following
a horse drawn wagon that swoop in and out several times, seemingly just under
the chin of the old, weather-beaten horse, then fading back to the side in a
medium shot that easily lasts over 5 minutes.
Supposedly using 30 shots in all in a two and a half hour film, Tarr is
brilliant at composing and choreographing shots, much like Tarkovsky’s
masterful house fire sequence at the end of The
Sacrifice (Offret) (1986), where 7 or 8 minutes into the shot the
camera is moving and discovering something new that wasn’t there before. Similarly, Tarr moves his camera in and out
of rooms or buildings, where the shot evolves into the art of inquisitiveness,
where the viewer is constantly questioning the world onscreen. Here the wind is howling throughout,
accompanied by a monotonous funeral dirge by Mihály Vig that never changes, but continually fades in and out of
the movie.
Besides the horse, there are only two characters, an aging, one-armed father (János Derzsi), who complains bitterly throughout, mostly barking out orders to his daughter, Erika Bók, who played the young girl playing with cats in SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), having grown up somewhat through the passing of the years. There is a brief narration that informs the audience of the poetic descriptions in the passing of time, where the film depicts six passing days. Mostly they sit in their remote country cottage, either lying down or staring out the window, where each venture outside is into a blustery wind that spells the end of the world. What happens is near wordless, marked by intense repetition, taking their clothes off at night, putting them back on in the morning, going outside to fetch water from the well, cooking potatoes, eating (including peeling) boiled potatoes with their fingers, while the father will take two swigs from an alcoholic concoction. There are passing events, but they are minimal, as a visitor comes for alcohol spouting theoretical philosophical utterances that may or may not sound convincing, but mostly he howls that the world is in ruin. In a somewhat amusing sequence, Gypsies come to borrow water from the well, and anything else they can get their hands on, who may as well be demonic Angels from Hell making their pronouncement of doom, but are run off by a bellowing ax-wielding father.
Etched in miserablism and darkness, it is reminiscent of the final scene in SÁTÁNTANGÓ where the doctor begins to seal himself in, cutting out all light from the outside world. Inside their cottage there are only glimpses of light, a window to the outside world, and an oil lamp at night. They soon discover the well dries up, a calamitous event where they pack up all their belongings in a wagon and make the long walk to the distant horizon, fading over the other side of the hillside, holding the shot for another minute or so, as they soon return, their spirits crushed, the world outside crumbling. They can’t understand why the horse stops eating, yet they are forced now to eat potatoes raw, where all hopes for the future are fading. The pervasive darkness is overwhelming what’s left of their lives, where nothing works any more, nothing can be explained, everything is shutting down, and the apocalypse is upon us. Even the wind dies down, as it’s not needed anymore. Nothing is left. Only the darkness.
Review: The Turin Horse | Newcity Film Ray Pride
Godard famously quipped that a movie has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. A Béla Tarr movie has rain, wind and despair, but not necessarily in that order. The Hungarian director of “The Werckmeister Harmonies” and “Sátántangó” says he’s chucking it in, at the age of fifty-six, with this Last Testament of High Miserabilism, and it’s an epic (and intimate) place at which to choose to end. It’s a fierce, glorious slog. In thirty shots that comprise the 146-minute running time of “The Turin Horse,” cinematographer Fred Kelemen, an ace director of the dark and brooding in his own right (“Abendland”) charts the light and dark of six days of increasingly dismal weather as an elderly farmer and his daughter watch their workhorse lose its will to live on their isolated rural homestead. It’s 1889, and it’s always, and it’s never. It’s a lustrous hell on earth, an apocalypse both minor and major, with little but boiled potatoes and plum brandy to stave off extinction. Kelemen has said that the production worked with theater-style dimmer boards for the lighting, enabling unusual flexibility across the extended duration of the takes. “In this world there is no other world than this one,” Kelemen told Robert Koehler in Cinema Scope magazine. “There is no escape. It does not matter where you are, but who you are and how you deal with yourself and others, and the conditions of life of which death is surely an integral part.” And yet! It’s one of the most fascinating film experiences of the past year. Some call it a masterpiece. I couldn’t imagine it without Mihály Vig’s score, which gives the cumulative horror a pulse, and perhaps even its heart. Co-written by László Krasznahorkai (“Sátántangó”); co-directed and edited by Tarr’s partner, Agnes Hranitzky. With Janos Derzsi, Erika Bok, Mihaly Kormos and the horse, Risci.
The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]
By now, Hungarian director Béla Tarr has staked his claim and
defined his territory as one of the last great visionaries of contemporary
cinema, an auteur in the ultimate, irreducible sense of the word, and one
of the few contemporary directors whose work is so distinctive as to stand in a
category of its own. Announced as his final film, The Turin Horse is a
none-more-bleak, hauntingly oppressive nightmare, an apocalyptic metaphor of
life and death that takes its starting point from a real-life episode:
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's witnessing of a
Tarr's methodical, merciless, unyielding structure of lengthy tracking
shots, minimal dialogue and obsessively repeating music hinges upon a
ritualistic, almost atavistic concept of repetition and recurrence, evoking
simultaneously the glory days of silent and early spoken cinema (though Fred
Keleman's luminous black-and-white is closer to the work of later
cinematography stylists such as Henri Alekan or William Lubtchansky) and the
desperate absurdism of Samuel Beckett's theatre. A gloomy one-way journey into
the heart of darkness of mankind, The Turin Horse is not so much a film as
a sensory experience - you go in expecting a conventional movie, you come
out disturbed, anguished, confronted with your own mortality made physical in
ways you are unlikely to have ever felt inside a cinema. Enter at your own
risk.
Berlin
Film Festival 2011: Geoff Andrew looks at the big ... Geoff Andrew
from Time Out
Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s fable-like ‘The Turin Horse’ won a Silver Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival. According to an introductory voiceover, it is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche stopping a Turin cab-driver from whipping his horse; having put an end to the cruelty, the writer returned home to his mother and sisters and spent the next ten years until his death in demented silence – whereas, we’re told, it’s not known what happened to the quadruped in question.
Whether the stark apocalyptic tale that follows this brief
prologue is intended as a corrective to that uncertainty is unclear; the Berlin
festival catalogue and some critics seem to believe the man and horse we first
see returning to a remote farm on the Hungarian plains are those described by
the narrator, though there’s no indication that the comments about Nietzsche
have any link to the main narrative save that they point up the randomly
chaotic, often bitterly cruel nature of existence.
The plot, such as it is, simply depicts six days in the life of the man –
elderly, with one useless arm and, perhaps, one blind eye – and the grown
daughter with whom he shares the cottage. They get up, get dressed, get water
from the well, try to go to work – though the horse, ailing and refusing to
eat, and an ever more violent gale prevent their doing so – eat (boiled
potatoes only, using their fingers), stare out at the storm, and sleep. One
day, a man visits to borrow brandy and speaks of the desolate prospects facing
greedy, self-serving humanity; another day, a passing band of gypsies comes to
the well but is driven away by the irate cottage-owner, leaving a religious
tome for his daughter as recompense. That’s it, in terms of story – except that
by the fifth day it feels as if the wind will never drop and the wretched pair
will never be able to leave their home.
All this – which lasts two and half hours – is conveyed by around 30 long,
elegant shots, beautifully lit and composed in monochrome by frequent Tarr
collaborator Fred Kelemen; other regulars on board for what he has described as
his last film include co-writer László Krasznahorkai (on whose novel Tarr’s
masterpiece ‘Sátántangó’ was based), composer Mihály Vig (here contributing a
dirge-like minimalist drone that matches the repetitively rhythmic raging of
the tempest), and editor/co-director Ágnes Hranitsky. The slow pace, the
generally miserabilist mood, the sparse dialogue and the focus on mundane
quotidian domestic ritual will not be to everyone’s taste, and at times the
sheer single-mindedness of the film threatens to slide into something like
self-parody. Yet somehow it weaves its hypnotic spell: so bold are both the
conception and execution of Tarr’s darkly cinematic elegy that the final scenes
are as sobering as anything in his – or indeed anyone else’s – body of work.
User
reviews from imdb Author: oOgiandujaOo from
Tarr's self-proclaimed last film is as open to interpretation as
any movie ever was. The film follows a man, his daughter, and their horse as
they struggle to survive during hard times in the late nineteenth century. It's
a simple minimalist movie that's often repetitive, reminiscent on a small scale
of the disharmony that develops in a previous film, Werckmeister Harmonies.
The idea for the movie came from an apocryphal story (Tarr doesn't label it as
such) about Nietzsche's time in
Tarr announced in the Q&A following the UK Premiere of Turin Horse at the
Edinburgh International Film Festvial, that he felt "something's
wrong", in a grand sense. The Turin Horse reflects this concern. What
exactly is wrong is left almost entirely up to you as the viewer to determine.
There's one clear allusion to watching television, but other than that the
symptomatology and etiology of modern malaise is open to question. You could
say that was a weakness of the movie, someone who believes that free migration
and rights for gays are the cause for societal decay, would be equally at home
watching this movie as someone who points at postmodernism or late capitalism.
Patricularly given that no root cause is identified, Tarr and co leave themselves
open to charges of the familiar canard of archaism - supposing that the past
was a safer more moral and ingenious place. The artist Jeff Koons has perhaps
the best counterarguments to Tarr's perspective on modern life. His stated
mission is to "remove bourgeois guilt and shame in responding to
banality" (highlighting the snobbery of those who cling to traditional
values), whereas Tarr's is perhaps to stoke it. I suppose what side you take
depends on whether you see someone fragging on a PlayStation and think
"good for them", or whether you bemoan their lack of appetite for
self-improvement or meaningful interaction with others. In the Q&A Tarr
said that he thinks that people spend too much time stuck in front of screens
waiting forlornly for something to happen, part of a sort of technological
cargo cult if you will.
On a gut level I felt the film went quickly; although empirically it's well
over two hours long, it's definitely mesmerising. I've felt for a time that the
best way to appreciate Werckmeister Harmonies is as narrative music, as a kind
of prelude and fugue, similarly The Turin Horse works well simply in terms of
rhythm and visual tone, as a meaningless sketch of the interaction of three
hardy entities.
Bela Tarr | Tony McKibbin The
Monochromic Force Field
The Turin Horse: A
Numbers Game – Offscreen Donato
Totaro from Offscreen, April 2012
The Turin Horse and the End of Civilization As We Know It David Hanley from Offscreen, April 2012
Of Horse And Man
| The Seventh Art Srikanth
Srinivasan, October 9, 2011
REALTOKYO
| Column | Tokyo Review | Vol.5: Béla Tarr ... Sawa Takashi from Tokyo Review, January 18, 2012
The
Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr | The White Review Rose McLaren, December 2012
Tracking
Shots at the Gates of Dawn on Notebook | MUBI Doug Dibbern, October 31, 2011
Béla Tarr's Turin
Horse » 3:AM Magazine Richard
Marshall, June 7, 2014, also posted September 4, 2015 here: On
Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse – Rhys Tranter
The Turin Horse By
Jeff Reichert - Reviews - Reverse Shot
February 8, 2012
notcoming.com | The
Turin Horse Michael Nordine
Béla Tarr's
The Turin Horse...Cinema As Endgame • Delectant Meraj Dhir from Delectant, July 24, 2014
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film review: The Turin Horse (2011)
Kieron Corliss, June 2012
Edge of Darkness:
“The Turin Horse” « Film Quarterly
Edward Lawrenson, Summer 2011
World
Cinema Review: Béla Tarr | A Torinói Ló (The Turin ... Douglas Messerli, November 10, 2011
Béla Tarr's The Turin
Horse - East European Film Bulletin
Konstanty Kuzma
Béla Tarr's The
Turin Horse: The social and the cosmic ...
Stefan Steinberg from The World
Socialist Web Site, March 7, 2011
The Cinema
of Cruelty - Counterpunch Louis
Proyect, January 30, 2015
Review:
Bela Tarr's Swan Song 'The Turin Horse' Is Despai ... Christopher Bell from The Playlist
The Turin Horse
(A Torinói ló) | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli
Movie
Review - 'The Turin Horse' - The Abyss Gazes ... - NPR Mark Jenkins, February 9, 2012
The
Turin Horse - review - - movieScope
Anton Bitel
Review:
The Turin Horse and iLL Manors - New Statesman Ryan Gilbey, May 30, 2012
Berlin
2011 Review: A TORINOI LO (The Turin Horse)
Robert Beames from What Culture
Béla
Tarr's “The Turin Horse,” a Transcendent Essential ... J. Hoberman from Blouin Art Info
Dan Schneider on The Turin
Horse - Cosmoetica Dan Schneider
A
Reading and Review of The Turin Horse | The Movie Rat Bernardo Villela from The Movie Rat, February 14, 2012
The World According
to Béla Tarr - KinoKultura András Bálint Kovács, January 26, 2008
The
Turin Horse (2011): Hungarian Master Filmmaker Béla ... Murtaza Ali Khan from A Potpourri of Vestiges
The Turin Horse (2011,
Bela Tarr) Brandon’s Movie Memory, December 29,
2011
'The
Turin Horse': The Daughter Abides | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Slant
Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
The Turin Horse ·
Film Review The Turin Horse · Movie ...
Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V.
Club
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]
The Films of Bela Tarr: The Turin Horse - NP Approved Matthew Blevins from Next Projection
The
House Next Door [Jonathan Pacheco]
Village
Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
October 2011 Ben
Sachs from Cine-File Blog,
THE HORSE OF TURIN (Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) Dennis Grunes
Eye for Film : The Turin Horse Movie Review (2010) Chris Docker
Filmmaker Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
Blu-ray.com [Casey Broadwater]
Joshua
Reviews Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse [Blu-ray Review] Joshua Brunsting
The Turin Horse | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Budd Wilkins
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]
The Turin Horse
(Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray
Christopher McQuain
The History of Cinema. Bela Tarr: biography, filmography ... detailed description of films from Piero Scaruffi
The Turin Horse - Little White Lies Matt Thrift
The
Turin Horse (2011) – Film Review | Roobla Film Harriet Matthews
[Review] The
Turin Horse - The Film Stage Danny
King
The
Quietus | Film | Film Reviews | Papa's Got A Brand New ... Colm McAuliffe from The Quietus, June 1, 2012
theartsdesk.com
[Graham Fuller]
The
Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]
Static
Mass Emporium [Ben Nicholson]
Independent
Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]
Subtitled
Online [Patrick Gamble] also
seen here at
Southern
Vision [Tyler Atkinson]
From the
Front Row: Review | "The Turin Horse" Matthew Lucas
Edinburgh
Film Festival 2011: THE TURIN HORSE
Adam Whyte
Next
Projection [Guido Pellegrini]
IcelandChronicles.com
[Pu the Owl]
Angeliki
Coconi's Unsung Films [Zachary Wyman]
The
Turin Horse (2011) – Béla Tarr (Jane McCracken) – A ... Jane McCracken from A World of Film
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Jigsaw
Lounge [Sheila Seacroft] Cluj film-festival report
Jigsaw
Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Slow Cinema of Bela Tarr ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema
User
reviews from imdb Author: benjaoming from
User
reviews from imdb Author: ingmar-kubrick from
User reviews from imdb Author: Antonia Alverez from Spain
Béla
Tarr on the ‘Turin Horse’ Konstanty Kuzma interview with
the director at
Interview: Béla Tarr, the Complete Works - Film Comment R. Emmet Sweeney interview from Film Comment, February 2, 2012
An
Interview With Bela Tarr: Why He Says 'The Turin Horse ... - IndieWire Eric Kohn interview from indieWIRE,
February 9, 2012
The
Turin Horse: Interview with Bela Tarr | Electric Sheep Virginie
Sélavy interview, June 4, 2012
Interview | The Thinking Image: Fred Kelemen on Béla Tarr ... Robert Koehler interviews Fred Kelemen regarding Béla Tarr from Cinema Scope, 2012
The Turin
Horse - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings ...
TV Guide
The
Hollywood Reporter [Ray Bennett]
The Turin Horse
(2012), directed by Béla Tarr | Film review
Dave Calhoun
Time
Out New York [Joshua Rothkppf]
The Turin Horse – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The
Turin Horse, Bela Tarr, 146 mins (15) | Reviews ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent
Examiner.com
[Rick Marianetti]
The
Turin Horse movie review -- The Turin Horse showtimes ... Mark Feeney from The Boston Globe
Review: The
Turin Horse - Reviews - Boston Phoenix
Peter Keough
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Pasadena
Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
'The
Turin Horse' will pull you if you let it: Movie review ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
Perspective:
Bela Tarr and Laszlo Krasznahorkai's artful ... Perspective: Bela Tarr and Laszlo
Krasznahorkai's artful pairing, by John Penner from The LA
Times
Bela Tarr's Final Film, 'The Turin Horse' - The New York Times A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
The Turin Horse -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
The summer's silliest cinematic experience has to be The Cell, ostensibly a slightly futuristic serial killer movie but, subtextually, a commercial for the Saatchi collection. Carrying to extremes the postmodern notion that art is never original, director Tarsem Singh not only uses The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and Strange Days as ur-texts but scavenges from 20 years of music videos (including his own for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion") and 35 years of art references—which are amusing enough but absurd as a hook for a mass-market movie.
This hook is made physical in the form of metal rings screwed into the back of a serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) who hangs himself from them à la performance artist Ron Athey. Other prominent sources are Joseph Beuys, Joan Jonas, Lisa Yuskavage, Matthew Barney, the Chapman brothers, Damien Hirst—the sliced horse is hilarious even if you see the joke coming long in advance. Singh seems hell-bent on including every piece from the "Sensation" show. What with the Master Musicians of Jajouka on the soundtrack and Eiko Ishioka's gorgeous, kabuki-like costumes, The Cell is a bit of a multiculti experience as well.
If you aren't intent on keeping an art checklist, I don't know how you'll get through The Cell without falling asleep. Singh isn't big on suspense or shock. The ludicrous plot devolves into a triangle formed by the killer, a psychotherapist (Jennifer Lopez) who enters his unconscious via some top-secret electro-chemical device, and an FBI agent (Vince Vaughn) whose mission is to locate the killer's final victim before it's too late.
In lieu of acting, Lopez, Vaughn, and D'Onofrio engage in some kind of pouting competition the rules of which only they are aware. (Lopez's most memorable moment comes when Singh catches her casually examining the interior of her fridge, the curving line of her buttocks approximating the sinuous shape of the Sahara sand dunes where we first encounter her.) The scene where the gold-dusted D'Onofrio plaintively sings "Mairzy Doats" as he disembowels a prone, struggling Vaughn takes digitized wet dreams to a new level (warning: this is not a pull quote), but, overall, The Cell is not nearly the mindfuck it wants to be.
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala)
The Cell is one of the more innovative films I've seen, and perhaps is a portent about the future state of film-making. The movie features breath-taking and surreal visuals combining science fiction and fantasy elements, a decent race-against-time plot involving a serial killer, and some pseudo-intellectual commentary on the effects of child abuse.
Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) is a child psychologist who is part of a therapeutic experiment that involves directly accessing the minds of comatose children in the hopes of helping them "wake up". Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) is a serial killer of young girls whose method of execution (and sexual gratification) involves putting them in a chamber and filling it with water slowly while capturing the entire event on camera. In the process of taking care of his latest victim, Carl is apprehended by the police, but in a comatose stage. Catherine agrees to enter his mind to reveal the location of his last victim before she is drowned.
This is not a standard serial killer movie, because here the killer actually wants to be caught and punished. As Catherine enters Carl's mind, she slowly gains his trust and uncovers the motivations for his actions, which involves abuse as a child (including a harsh baptism). The film is compassionate in the portrayal of the killer and tries to make the point that even though there are some people who've been abused who turn out okay, it's non-trivial to run into the right set of circumstances that would enable one to break the vicious cycle. Yet, there is no excuse for harming another individual. The resolution of this difficult conundrum is handled well in the end.
Visually, the movie is a psychedelic trip, in a way reminding me of my experience at Burning Man 2000. Even though some of the visuals are cheesy (like tie-dye shirts are), they work well because of the context in which they are used. Director Tarsem Singh, who has made his name directing music videos, has selected the music well to complement the visuals, which makes the whole output more effective. Jennifer Lopez does a fine acting job and Vincent D'Onofrio is convincing in his portrayal of a serial killer who seeks redemption.
Ultimately because The Cell is somewhat closer to a work of art than an entertainment product, it will undoubtedly draw a polarised reaction. Like Being John Malkovich, also a debut film made by Spike Jonze, a director who primarily worked with music videos previously, this movie captures your imagination and does more than deliver pure entertainment. I highly recommend checking it out on the big screen.
Reel.com DVD review [Tor Thorsen]
Critical opinions varied wildly upon release of The Cell — Roger Ebert hailed it as "one of the year's best films" while The San Francisco Examiner's Wesley Holmes dubbed it "a schlocky dud for the ages." Most viewers will find that director Tarsem Singh's debut falls somewhere in between, with some dazzling visuals enhancing a decent B-movie plot, before it stumbles with a slipshod ending.
Inside the Mind of a Killer
The Cell is basically a Silence
of the Lambs wannabe with a Dreamscape-like
psychological spin. After a prolonged investigation, FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn,
looking like he hasn't stopped partying since Swingers) finally corners
the serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent
D'Onofrio). Much to Novak's dismay, Stargher slips into a coma before he can
reveal the whereabouts of his next victim, who is set to drown in underground
chamber that will fill with water within the next few days.
Novak's only hope to locate the girl is Catharine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist who has developed a high-tech therapy which allows her to project herself into her patients' subconscious. He convinces her to take a trip into Stargher's psyche, where she relives some of the horrendous childhood trauma that drove him insane (an interesting but undeveloped plot point) and confronts the murderous demon he is today. There, Deane has to confront her own fears, not get trapped inside the killer's mind, and so on.
A Visual Treat
Story-wise, The Cell may not be very innovative. But visually, veteran
music-video-maker Singh creates a surreal realm of disturbing, glossy imagery.
Sometimes the events on-screen look like a Hieronymus Bosch painting (like when
Deane walks through a museum-like hall full of Stargher's victims). Other
times, it's as though you're watching a TV spot for Lexus (when Lopez strides
around a serene desert in a white gown).
Either way, The Cell is superb eye candy, and the DVD edition of the film perfectly recreates the experience of seeing it in the theater. Presented in 2.40:1 widescreen and enhanced for 16x9 TVs, the image is crisp and spotless, with an impeccable color transfer that allows you savor the rich reds and eerie greens of cinematographer Paul Laufer's vivid palette. The film's visual style also carried over to the disc's animated menus, which feature both menacing and pleasant images from the film split by a line of flame and several ornate, Hellraiser-esque boxes displaying images from the film.
Plethora of Extras
Such a level of detail is common in New Line's Platinum series (which is
beginning to rival the Criterion Collection in its deluxe treatment of films on
DVD), as are a plethora of extras. The Cell is no exception, including a
fast-paced commentary track from Singh (who is funny, but hard to understand at
times) and another, more informative audio track with comments from a panel of
crew members including Laufer, Visual Effects Supervisor Kevin Todd Haug, and
Production Designer Tom Foden.
The disc also includes deleted scenes which feature optional commentary from Singh — not only do they look much less rough than most outtakes, they also feature the film's original, more creepy ending. There are also an isolated score audio track, and a pair of featurettes. The first, "Style as Substance," is merely a so-so promotional documentary that basically shows the members of the cast and crew talking about how brilliant Singh is (they all refer to him as "TAR-sem" in rapturous tones). However, the second, "Visual Vignettes," is a fascinating look at some of the film's more difficult scenes: not only does it follow events on the set, it does so using DVD's multi-angle technology, a feature rarely used outside of the porn genre. "Vignettes" also includes interviews and detailed reproductions of storyboards.
There are also more extras, both conventional — two trailers,
filmographies, and a DVD-ROM script-to-screen comparison — and unconventional —
primarily the interactive "Brain Map" and "Empathy Test"
features. While the brain map merely shows you which areas of the brain control
which other areas of behavior, the empathy test determines whether or not
you're a sociopath through questions that'll have you feeling like
culturevulture.net Tom Block
Tarsem Singh’s The Cell asks the provocative question,
“What goes on inside a serial killer’s mind?,” and ends by concluding that he
mostly wants to dress up in one of
Carl Stargher
(Vincent D’Onofrio) has a thing about purity. His only companion is an albino
German Shepherd, he’s left behind him a trail of murdered women whose skin he
bleaches to a snow-white pallor, and the sexual violations he commits on their
corpses are staged as purification rites. He’s just grabbed his latest victim
and stashed her in a subterranean glass-walled cell when a neurological seizure
leaves him both in a coma and in the hands of the authorities. FBI agent Peter
Novak (Vince Vaughn) has figured out that he’s the killer, and Novak also knows
that this new prisoner has some 40 hours to live before Stargher’s automated
death-tub will finish her off. But how can he extract her location from
Stargher in his state of living death? The answer lies in an experimental form
of chemical/electrical therapy that allows one person to enter another person’s
mind and directly experience all the layers of their mental workings in real
time. Because child therapist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) is the only
person who’s gone through the process, she’s chosen to step inside Stargher’s
personality in the hope that she can somehow learn the location of the cell.
The Cell may sound
like a literal version of The Silence of
the Lambs, but most of its running time is dedicated to taking the
outlandish production design of The Matrix one step further.
Two-thirds of the movie occurs inside the mind of one character or another, and
even a single character’s consciousness can give home to many different looks
and motifs, ranging from the innards of what looks like a rundown hotel to a
high gilt chamber to stunning desert landscapes that seem like the embodiment
of a metaphysical state of being. All of the movie’s effort has been poured
into its look, and even its real world settings have the painted-on vividness
of a state of the art computer game.
The Cell is more of a polyglot coffee-table book than it is a movie, drawing visual inspiration from fashion design, classical and religious art, Jungian symbolism, modern sculpture, and the commercials and music videos that Singh directed before now. “The imagery came from everywhere,” production designer Tom Foden has said, as if the filmmakers’ lack of discrimination were an asset. Well, The Cell may be a triumph of production design, but unlike last year’s Being John Malkovich, it’s wholly uninterested in mining the possibilities of a movie that’s set inside one of its character’s minds.
The few visions that are specifically related to Stargher’s personality revolve around the hideous abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his father – that is, the one event that we might assume would have occurred to such a man. But why is his world bereft of those absurd perceptions and surreal juxtapositions that we notice in our own minds on an almost hourly basis, the ones that seemingly allow us to smell a color, or that make a matchbook suddenly seem larger than the universe? Even such a fundamental aspect of human life as music may not mean much to a psychopath, but wouldn’t at least one song – even if it was “Roll Out the Barrel” – bounce through Stargher’s head at some point in the hours that Catherine spends there? And why do we only see only two versions of the real Stargher? Where is the 16-year old, or the one whose car broke down on the freeway that time? Why did Singh and screenwriter Mark Protosevich take their eclectic grab bag of images “from everywhere” without making a real concession to the one source that’s actually rooted in their story?
The Cell is so focused on its visual trickery that it can’t even be bothered to follow through on its original premise. When Catherine is “captured” within Stargher’s dream-world, and Novak must join her there in order to save her, it’s his discovery of a banal, earthbound clue that solves one of the central problems facing the investigation. After raising the expectation that a confrontation between the straight and demented worlds will after all amount to something, in the end the movie comes down to some old-fashioned police work that Catherine isn’t even a part of.
At least The Cell’s concentration on visuals keeps the primitive dialogue to a minimum, and if Catherine doesn’t have much of a character, neither does she have some synthetic backstory pasted onto her to give her substance. The movie’s one joke (which is probably unintentional) comes when Catherine “reverses the feed” and invites Stargher into her mind for a change, and we see that this woman, who on the outside is a picture of saintly empathy, is just as much a queen in her world as Stargher is a king in his. Garbed in a nun’s habit and inhabiting a pastel world that’s awash in cherry blossoms, she’s a Virgin Mary whose mental landscape is a prayer card.
Singh has concocted a flick for people who think that mere sensation can sustain a movie, and who don’t require any more coherence than what can be gotten from flipping through a fashion magazine. It doesn’t matter if the scenes are superficial or even clammily reprehensible so long as the groovy pictures keep on coming. Movies like The Cell are cinematic pacifiers, and we might as well be in a coma while we’re watching them..
Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) also seen here: PopMatters
Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) #1 Film of the Year
The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow] nothing short of a masterpiece
BFI | Sight & Sound |
The Cell (2000) Ken Hollings,
December 2000
Plume-Noire.com Film Analysis: The Cell Fred Thom
Jigsaw Lounge a tarted-up rehash of the 1983’s minor classic Dreamscape
“The Cell” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul James Diers
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Depth
Psychology David Edelstein
from Slate
“The Cell” - Salon.com Max Garrone
The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Movielocity Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch)
Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley)
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Political Film Society Michael Haas
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)
eFilmCritic.com Thom
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez)
The Digital Bits Todd Doogan, rated a D
filmcritic.com escapes The Cell Christopher Null
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
The Boston Phoenix Gary Susman, also seen here: Anchorage Press (Gary Susman)
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times #6 Film of the Year
New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
Tarsem feels like a distant relative, perhaps the black
sheep, of the Julie Taymor family, as no one else comes close to capturing such
undisputedly bold imagery in films today.
Reminiscent of Orson Welles carrying a visualization for OTHELLO (1952)
in his head for years, filming only when the money was there, this film was largely
financed by several millions of the director’s own money while shooting in over
twenty-five different countries over the course of four years. To say that this is a personal project is an
understatement, as the sheer look of this film is so magisterial that one must
believe it is timeless. Already two
years old, it is hard to fathom how a film like this runs into difficulty getting
distributed as the artistry involved is nothing less than magnificent. This is no ordinary story, as the entire
globe appears to have been utilized in some fashion in the making of this highly
inventive film, adapted from an otherwise obscure Bulgarian film YO HO HO
(1981) directed by Zako Keskija, which has a similar storyline about a
developing friendship in a hospital ward of an injured 10-year old boy with a
broken arm and an actor who has suffered a severe spinal injury, where the
hospital staff become participants in an imagined pirate story that holds the
boy captivated, written by Valeri Petrov (storyline here: full summary, see a review here: Gotterdammerung [Branislav L. Slantchev]). The director and young actor won awards at
the
In this adaptation, Lee Pace is Roy Walker, a seriously injured patient who may never walk again, whose hopes are deflated further when the woman he loves walks out on him. Adrift in a meaningless fog, young 5-year old Untaru as Alexandria, herself recovering from a broken arm, accidentally enters his life from a hospital corridor and develops a deep affection for his imaginative adventure stories told in serial installments with a smooth southern drawl that not only delight, but captivate her to the core of her being, which surprisingly involves people around them transformed into a new, phantasmagorical world, much like THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) or something we might find from the mind of Miyazaki, where her very life is at stake in each and every outcome. Roy is the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler bandit, who with his band of thieves, accompanied by Alexandria herself, has sworn revenge on the evil Governor Odious, the scourge of the planet who hides behind faceless men in armor, as if a time shift has suddenly returned them to the Arabian Nights subject to the mercy and might of the Roman empire. Yet strangely Roy and his men carry single shot firearms along with an archer, an explosives expert, also Charles Darwin sketching the development of monkeys, who seem no match for the multitude of soldiers who at times overwhelm them in staggering numbers alone, sometimes appearing in moving geometric shapes and designs. The less said the better about what actually happens in this movie, as part of the thrill is being carried along for the ride, but mention must be made of Colin Watkinson’s fluid cinematography, Krishna Levy’s unworldly music, which includes Beethoven’s 2nd movement from his 7th Symphony (played by a Bulgarian orchestra), art director Lisa Hart, production designer Ged Clarke, and the stunning costume designs of Eiko Ishioka, as all contribute in the creation of this unusual kaleidoscope of form.
I simply disagree with those that find no dramatic weight to this film, or who are unmoved by this spectacle, as Pace and Untaru work exceptionally well together and are symbiotically interwoven between two worlds, displaying a surprising amount of charm and humor, all leading to a unique climax of sorts that is as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking, where Untaru’s thoughts at the end reach unprecedented heights in what amounts to a mesmerizing monologue that couldn’t be more compelling. One of the delights of experiencing this film is its obvious joy in cinema itself where visual expression defines their interior world, using a variety of techniques all to the film’s advantage, opening in black and white over the opening credits, moving back and forth in time, using actors in multiple, near unrecognizable roles. This becomes a veritable study in storytelling techniques, blending the line between fantasy and reality until they intersect, made even more remarkable by the awesome set designs built on locations around the world, shot in the widest angle possible suggesting futuristic landscape designs, creating imaginary villains that can appear in hordes from out of nowhere, literally extending the limits of the audience’s ability to grasp just what is happening, concealing what the film is even about until the very end, when in a deliriously captivating picture perfect film montage, which could just as easily be a lesson on the origins of cinema, with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and a host of others leading the way, paying homage to all who have come before, there is a flood of recognition and appreciation for the director’s motives, who is truly to be commended for inventing this delightful cinema paradiso. Maybe we know what happens by the end, maybe we don’t, I’m not sure it really matters, as it’s the journey along the way that we’ll remember. This is an extraordinary road movie that takes us around the world through a 5-year old’s imagination, reminding us of the delights of childhood, like waiting impatiently for Santa Claus when we couldn’t wait for the next thing to happen, where every anticipated thought and idea felt like the most important moments in the world. Like the cinematic rhapsodies of Terence Malick or the architectural magnificence of Orson Welles, this film makes us appreciate how cinema can speak to us on such intimate terms, as if we’re the only ones in the room who’ve been invited on this special journey.
The
Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
Something like a pain-fueled, R-rated Princess Bride, The
Fall straddles the intertwined worlds of storytelling and story. One half is a
child’s-eye-view tour of the convalescent wing of a
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Amsterdam
Fantastic Film Festival report
Rather more carefree, art-for-art's-sake fare - on a budget
astronomically higher than either of the Spanish prizewinners - was to be found
in The Fall,
a giddily elaborate fantasia from the florid imagination of the
advert/pop-video director who prefers to go by the single name 'Tarsem'. Tarsem
Singh Dhandwar is the gentleman's full moniker, and his movie - a quantum leap
ahead of his disastrous Hollywood-thriller debut The Cell - borrows much from the visual
and oral traditions of his native
An airily whimsical split-level narrative - about an injured 1920s stuntman and the young girl he befriends while recuperating in hospital, spinning her a swashbuckling yarn which Tarsem simultaneously illustrates (with footage shot in two dozen countries) - The Fall (nothing to do with either Albert Camus or Mark E Smith, more's the pity) has been in a kind of distribution limbo since premiering at Toronto in 2006. But, while undeniably bonkers, it boasts terrific central performances from movie-star-of-tomorrow Lee Pace (of current Pushing Daisies TV fame) and little Catinca Untaru (one of the most astonishing child performers since Shirley Temple hung up her knickerbockers), and has garnered enough fans - and, indeed, fanatics - on the festival-circuit to suggest it may yet belatedly end where it belongs, up on our biggest multiplex screens.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
The second feature by music video and TV commercial visual stylist Tarsem ("The Cell") is a deliciously vivid adventure fantasy.
The fantasy comes from a tall tale spun by Ray (Lee Pace), a Hollywood stuntman in the 1920s recovering from a punishing fall (which has paralyzed him from the waist down) and a broken heart (which has paralyzed his will to live), the latter inflicted by Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), an Eastern European immigrant who broke her arm in the California orange orchards.
For Ray, the story is little more than an enticement to coax
It doesn't take long to realize that the story reflects both of their lives, originating from his movie background and wounded romanticism and filtered through her imagination and experiences (complete with characters cast from her life, a la "The Wizard of Oz"). It's like a Terry Gilliam fantasy directed by Zhang Yimou and reimagined by a child, with the fears and fantasies that mingle through the film becoming almost naively direct reflections of their respective emotional lives.
The storybook images of stunning landscapes and lavish settings are a visual feast (Tarsem shot the fantasy scenes piecemeal all over the world over the course of four years) and the narrative innocence of wild turns and impossible feats (like traveling from China to New York to Paris on horseback in what seems like a day) is a charge.
But what's so enchanting is the film's celebration of the way stories, once told, take on a life of their own within the hearts and imaginations of those who hear them, read them, see them. Or is that something I've brought to his fantasy?
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
As writer-director
Tarsem Singh (these days, just "Tarsem") explains it, he first had
the idea for The Fall 14 years ago, but was unable to secure funding for
a dark, miserablist fantasy shot in more than a dozen countries, based on a
Bulgarian drama (1981's Yo Ho Ho), and largely written by the
improvisational choices of a 5-year-old girl. And no wonder. The Fall ranks
up there with the collected directorial works of Crispin Glover as an
impossible-to-sell act of creative love and insane genius; Tarsem wound up
financing it himself, piggybacking his shoots on his commercial-directing work
around the world. But for such a homemade project, it's a staggeringly polished
and beautiful one, heavily informed by Tarsem's work in commercials and music
videos. (He's best known for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion.") It
resembles Cirque Du Soleil's Journey Of Man, another vividly colored
fantasia that drew on some of the world's most beautiful backgrounds for color.
But story-wise, it's a little more like the black-sheep brother of The
Princess Bride.
Pushing Daisies' Lee Pace stars as a depressed film
stuntman with a broken back. Confined to a hospital and mooning over the woman
who left him for the film's leading man, he pretends to befriend a Romanian
child (5-year-old Catinca Untaru) who's also recuperating in the hospital after
a fall. Making up an elaborate fairy tale for her, incorporating personnel from
the hospital and situations from his own lovelorn life, he earns her trust,
then refuses to continue the story until she steals him some pills, so he can
kill himself. As the plot develops, the story he tells her reflects and winds
into their real-life situation, and Tarsem brings Pace's fable to vivid life
onscreen.
The Fall has its flaws: Untaru's sequences are
largely improvised, and while she's adorable and strikingly naturalistic,
Tarsem's process for building her story leads to long, wandering, repetitive
scenes between her and Pace. And the entire film, with its multi-country
collection of vivid locales, its high-toned compositions, and its unrepentant
melodrama, is pretentious to the point of laughability. And yet the structure
is so delicate, the ideas are so ambitious, and the imagery is so hellishly
flamboyant that it's easy to fall into Tarsem's over-the-top vision. His only
previous feature film, The Cell, was all style and no substance. The
Fall crams in both to a staggering degree. It's the most glorious,
wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
As many music video directors have been unfortunate enough to discover, a talent for matching vivid imagery and hyperkinetic edits to the rhythm and tone of a specific song is not one that always carries over gracefully to the realm of feature filmmaking. Visual trickery and enough cuts to shame a Benihana chef can provide quite a rush in a five-minute time span, but when stretched out to two hours without any careful modulation and refinement, the music-video aesthetic can be exhausting to endure.
Anyone who’s sat through the film work of music video veterans Joseph Kahn (Torque), Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in 60 Seconds) and Jonas Åkerlund (whose Spun, according to the Internet Movie Database, holds the record for the most edits in a feature film, at over 5,000 - not something to be proud of) can attest to this. As for those who consider Michael Bay to be Satan incarnate - a flock I’m not really a part of, for the record - they, much like Albert Brooks flustered over the component parts of the phrase “nest egg” in Lost in America, probably don’t want to hear the words “music” and “video” conjoined in the same sentence ever again.
But there’s no denying that the act of conjuring up the perfect visual correlative for a pre-recorded song requires a rich imagination, which means that when a director transitions from the MTV training ground to the big screen with the intention of respecting the distinctive properties of cinema, the results of splashing that well-honed imagination up on a larger canvas can be breathtaking. And since a feature-length narrative is one of the new tools that music video directors get to play around with when they graduate to film, it’s not surprising that some of the best movies made by music video veterans demonstrate a fascination with story comparable to the curiosity with which a child regards his first set of Legos.
Whether it’s Nicolas Cage’s screenwriter grappling with how to turn a book about orchids into a viable script in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, or Jake Gyllenhaal’s cartoonist piecing together a string of clues and assumptions into a theoretical solution to a serial killer case in Zodiac, the protagonists of these films get a near electrical charge out of forming narratives from disparate scraps, and that charge proves to be infectious. As it happens, Fincher and Jonze have now thrown their clout behind The Fall, the second film from Tarsem, an Indian-born stylist who first gained acclaim for his unforgettable music video for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” (and who prefers to go without his surname of “Singh”).
The credits list
Fincher and Jonze as “presenting” the film, which essentially means they’re
using their cultural cachet to help the film find an audience. Based solely on
Tarsem’s film debut, the high-toned slasher flick The Cell, he seems a somewhat
unlikely choice for two artistic heavyweights to get behind. Sure, his outré,
nightmarish images enlivened a by-the-numbers yarn, but he seemed to regard
story as little more than a clothesline to dangle those images from.
Part of what makes The
Fall such a wonderful surprise, not to mention the best movie of the year so
far by a wide mile, is how it expresses certain profound, human truths about
the art of storytelling. More than merely justifying Fincher and Jonze’s
endorsement with this sophomore effort, Tarsem proves to be even more dazzled
by the primal power of film narrative than either of those estimable forebears.
He also manages the rather impressive task of making The Cell appear in hindsight to be a warm-up act for a major auteur, by taking themes and motifs from that debut (the notion of one person rescuing another from a perilous state of limbo; heavy baptismal symbolism) and expanding on them here, to greater effect.
The figure suspended in limbo in The Fall is Roy Walker (Lee Pace), a stuntman recuperating from an on-set tumble in a hospital who pines, painfully, for an ex-girlfriend who has recently left him for the matinee star he was doubling for. Not dead, but hardly alive emotionally, Roy is one day visited serendipitously by Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a five-year-old patient from another ward whose past is also marked with trauma, but who perseveres optimistically in the way children magically seem to.
There’s no possible way of overstating how gorgeously Tarsem brings this story-within-the-story to visual life. His unbridled imagination and pre-CGI techniques recall the great fantasists who came to prominence in the ‘80s, such as Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and Jim Henson. And some of his other methods are reminiscent of even more legendary antecedents - like David Lean, he composes his most stunning tableaux by shooting his actors in eye-catching natural locations (the cast and crew traveled to 18 countries for the production, according to the press notes) from the widest angle he can, and like cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, he delights in using simple trick edits to alter the direction the story evolves in.
That the story does evolve, very movingly, is what supports
Tarsem’s visionary flourishes. It would be as dastardly as any of Governor
Odious’ maneuverings to give away too many particulars of how Roy and
Alexandria’s emerging friendship begins to manifest itself in Roy’s tale of the
Black Bandit, but the key to the movie’s singular magic is in how the viewer
comes to realize that the myth Roy is spinning is literally a matter of
life-and-death in the real world. As
A question arises: is
How spectators choose to interpret The Fall will be interesting to see. Cynics may scoff at the ostentatious stylization on display; truly, their loss. In retaining both the essential innocence and danger of the moviegoing experience - that which makes it a valuable recreational pursuit for one’s inner child - Tarsem has made one of the few films in recent years that feels built to endure for generations.
Liberations of Mind, Spirit, and
Vision: The Fall by Tarsem Singh ...
Daniel Garrett from Offscreen,
October 2008
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
The Fall Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot, May 29, 2008
: Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
BeyondHollywood.com Gopal
Monsters and Critics Maura Reilly
Electric Sheep Magazine James Merchant
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Fall, The (2008) Peter Sobczynski
Flickering Myth [Kirsty Capes]
Cinemattraction.com [Tim Hayes]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
FilmJerk.com Review [Brian Orndorf] also here: OhmyNews [Brian Orndorf] and here: DVD Talk rating it a D
The Fall (2008), directed
by Tarsem | Film review - Time Out
Trevor Johnston
Irish Cinephile [Eamonn Rafferty]
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Roger Ebert [Chicago Sun Times]
'The Fall' Finds Its Special Effects in the Real World - The New York ... Nathan Lee from The New York Times
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray review [Gary Tooze]
YouTube - Tarsem's The Fall - Travel sequence clip (1.00)
Tarsem's
The Fall - The Model build and destruction (
Tarsem's
The Fall - Official Trailer (
"The
Fall" russian trailer (
The Fall
- Behind the Scenes with Director Tarsem Singh (
Reflections on Tarsem Part 1 during the shooting of THE CELL (.15)
Reflections on Tarsem Part 2 (1.16)
"The Cell' Trailer (
DTC India Tarsem Singh commercial featuring Ashwaria Rai, Bollywood star and Miss World (.59)
elephant pepsi
Tarsem Singh’s pepsi commercial set in
Films by Frank Tashlin Jonathan Rosenbaum
The brilliant but neglected satirist Frank Tashlin once
defined his subject matter as “the nonsense of what we call civilization,” and
these three features, which open a rare, monthlong retrospective at the
Feature: Tashlin Fernando F. Croce from Slant magazine
Comedy is a serious business, and during his
exhilarating 1950s heyday, Frank Tashlin fashioned a blend of joyous abandon
and trenchant nihilism that continually undercut laughter with despair. The
main impression one gets from his comedies isn't the significant but overused
notion of the former animator tending to live-action cartoons, but that of a
cutting, slapstick cousin to fellow subversive Douglas Sirk: Like Sirk's grand
gloss-operas, Tashlin's frenetic romps were vilified by contemporary reviewers,
then exalted by Cahiers du Cinéma, and, finally, treasured for their
seditious dismantling of Eisenhower-era American mores. Both filmmakers were
suspicious of the culture's worship of success, and both saw the American Dream
potentially as the ultimate entombment for the characters, inevitably framed by
their material possessions—the TV screen that ensnares and distorts Tony
Randall in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter might be the
same one that entrapped Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows. Whereas
Sirk employed his European irony for distanced commentary, however, Tashlin
flaunted his American brassiness for complicit immersion into the nation's startling
pop frenzies; imitation of life is what both auteurs are all about, yet in
Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It Juanita Moore is
grooving to Eddie Cochran's rockabilly tunes.
The Girl Can't Help It, the director's most
emblematic picture, is an appropriate choice to kick off the Tashlin fest at
Film Forum (August 25 - September 7). Blinded by the jukebox palette,
surrounded by the sounds of rock n' roll, and alarmed by the ampleness of Jayne
Mansfield, it's a movie made for consumption just as it draws a complex,
mutually critical net between consumers and products. Rock music here is but
one of the facets of American pop culture which fascinated and repelled Tashlin
throughout his career—what links it to comic books (Artists and Models)
and movies (Hollywood or Bust) in the auteur's caustic worldview is how
easily such vital cultural manifestations could have their feral energy tamed
and bottled for a media-controlled public, with advertisement the
Mephistophelian mediator (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?). There's a
feeling that the characters themselves have been manufactured, that Jerry Lewis
and Mansfield are brand names, encased into their own personas. Roy Rogers
literally plays himself in Son of Paleface, yet it's interesting to note
that this splendid western spoof, one of Tashlin's funniest and airiest, is
staged in an Old West far removed from the suffocating '50s. It's also one of
the films that reveal the director's cartoon past most directly, with Bob Hope
basically playing Daffy Duck, his body stretching and spinning to the old
Looney Tunes rhythms.
Born in 1913, Tashlin had a vast experience in show business, working for both
Merrie Melodies and Disney and developing gags for Hal Roach, the Marx
Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Lucille Ball, and Red Skelton, among others. Working
at the Warner Bros. animation studios along with Tex Avery, Robert Clampett,
and Chuck Jones, Tashlin learned the freedom allowed by the cartoon line, a
freedom he brought to his live-action canvases after he graduated to directing.
"Impossible" jests abound in Tashlin:
And yet how many other visions this bleak can feature as many instances of
liberating laugher? Tashlin's is a jaundiced eye, sometimes nearly Nabokovian
in its sardonicism—Bachelor Flat features not just Terry-Thomas as a
transplanted European teacher surveying modern American, but also Tuesday Weld,
one of the early candidates for the movie version of Lolita—but, like
Nabokov, he knew the allure of consumerism. His harsh critique scarcely
detracts from the riotous appreciation of the characters' élan, or the
celebration of the shiny sheen from which the works themselves are inescapably
a part of. There is no moment funnier and more profound in the retrospective
than Jerry Lewis appearing on a television show in Artists and Models
and becoming simultaneously the poster boy for shilling comic books and a
warning sign of their fallout. If Lewis as an auteur glories in the
transcendental powers of human personality (his own, of course), Tashlin
brutally envisions society's perpetual desire to package that humanity and vend
it to the masses like so many cherry-red Cadillacs. The list of pupils over the
years is extensive (Lewis, Jean-Luc Godard, Russ Meyer, Joe Dante, Quentin
Tarantino, Álex de la Iglesia), but Tashlin's hilarious and sobering brand of
rebellious comedy remains unique, its exultant vulgarity still richly contradictory.
Tish Tash: A Blog Tribute to Frank
Tashlin
Frank Tashlin |
American cartoonist, writer, animator, and director ... biography
Frank Tashlin | Looney
Tunes Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia
biography
Frank Tashlin • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Ethan de Seife, December 2, 2003
Frank
Tashlin - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Dana B. Polan from Film Reference
Frank Tashlin - NNDB brief bio
Frank Tashlin – New York
Review Books brief bio
Frank
Tashlin: "But most of the people missed the point" - Pseudopodium 1951 cartoon
The
director who augmented Jayne - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune, July 2, 2006
Unmanly Men Meet Womanly Women: Frank Tashlin's Satires Still ... The New York Times, August 20, 2006
frank
tashlin – Brandon's movie memory
various articles since March 6, 2009
"Beautiful Vulgarities" Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Sounds, Images, September 6, 2010
Frank Tashlin - The AV Club Nathan Rabin, August 11, 2011
Tashlinesque:
The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank
Tashlin (272 pages), written
by Ethan de Seife, 2012
UPNEBookPartners - Tashlinesque:
Ethan de Seife Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin (272 pages),
written by Ethan de Seife, 2012
DVD Extra: Jerry Lewis, Frank Tashlin on Blu-ray | New York Post Lou Lumenick, February 14, 2012
Review:
Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin ... Leah Churner reviews a new book, Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of
Frank Tashlin (272 pages), written by Ethan de Seife from The Austin Chronicle, May 25, 2012
Screwball
Comics: The Cartoons of Frank Tashlin
Paul Tumey, July 18, 2012
About
Frank Tashlin ... by devilkais on DeviantArt October 31, 2012
15 Reasons Why Frank Tashlin Was Awesome - Cartoon Brew Amid Amidi, February 19, 2013
Masters
of Cinema Monthly - La Poison, Fear and Desire, Frank ... Craig Skinner, March 5, 2013
Modernism from Clement Greenberg to Frank Tashlin - Lola Journal Burke Hilsabeck from the Lola Journal, September 2013
The
World That Isn't: The Films of Frank Tashlin - doc films - University ...
Jack Hamm, April 5, 2015
'The
Alphabet Murders' Is Agatha Christie Set in a Cartoon World ... Michael Barrett from Pop Matters, June 5, 2015
MichaelBarrier.com
-- Interviews: Frank Tashlin Michael
Barrier interview of Tashlin, December 16, 2004
Frank
Tashlin (1913 - 1972) - Find A Grave Memorial
The Girl Can't
Help It, directed by Frank Tashlin | Film review - Time Out
The quintessential '50s rock film, containing legendary appearances from Fats Domino, the Platters, Little Richard and Gene Vincent among its seventeen numbers, though the greatest musical moment is perhaps Eddie Cochran belting out '20 Flight Rock'. The story is a fairly biting satire on the PR worlds of rock and advertising, with Ewell as a press agent and Mansfield as a dumb blonde who rockets to stardom after imitating a prison siren on a rock record. This is the film in which Tashlin made Mansfield hold two milk bottles next to her boobs for a momentary visual gag; and he was capable of even crueller humour, as the sequel Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? proved.
The Girl Can't Help It · Dvd Review Jayne Mansfield ... - The AV Club Nathan Rabin
In Frank Tashlin's 1956 film The Girl Can't Help It, Jayne Mansfield creates a deafening buzz simply by wriggling her way to and from powder rooms. Similarly, Tony Randall's ad-man attains a perverse celebrity merely by posing as the boyfriend of Mansfield's sex bomb in Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? In Mansfield, former animator Tashlin found the shimmering, abundant embodiment of post-war consumerism, with its boob tubes, dumbed-down pop culture, screaming teenyboppers, and ubiquitous advertising.
The Girl Can't Help It plays Mansfield's bodacious curves against the primal driving rhythms of a revolutionary, irrepressible new cultural force called rock 'n' roll. Deft straight man Tom Ewell stars as a boozy failed agent who spies a second chance for success when singing mobster Edmond O'Brien gives him six weeks to turn ostensibly talentless gal-pal Mansfield into a star. Girl's wall-to-wall soundtrack of early rock songs, like Little Richard's infectious title track, didn't quite anticipate the raging, anarchic force and minimalist aesthetic of groups like the Ramones, but the film was still presciently punk-rock in its contempt for the emptiness of mass culture and its bone-deep cynicism about show business. Tashlin depicts the music industry as a cross between advertising and organized crime, where talent is irrelevant, and image and marketing trump all other considerations.
In 1957's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Randall's life is turned upside down when movie star Mansfield convinces him to pose as her "lover-doll" to make her boyfriend jealous. Though every bit as cynical and satirical as its predecessor, Hunter is also sweeter and funnier, thanks to Randall's affability. In Hunter, a key to the executive bathroom qualifies as the ultimate brass ring; in its own frothy way, Tashlin's film is as trenchant a commentary on the all-American mania for success as The Great Gatsby. Alas, Tashlin had nothing to do with 1958's The Sheriff Of Fractured Jaw, an intermittently amusing trifle about a daft Englishman who comes to the Old West to sell guns and ends up becoming sheriff of the titular hellhole. Sheriff gleans some mild chuckles out of its protagonist's fish-out-of-water predicament, but subplots involving a range war and a romance with saloon proprietor Mansfield go nowhere. Tashlin transformed Mansfield into a delirious icon of post-war plenty, but in other filmmakers' hands, she was often just a ditz with a nice figure.
Slant
Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
Years before Kenneth Anger, Frank Tashlin
located the decadent
Taking a cue from the decade's manic consumerism, Murdock orders a bit of
manufacturing of his own: Shaping his blond bombshell fiancée Jerri Jordan
(Jayne Mansfield) from a "nobody" into a star, an assignment that
naturally falls to Tom.
In Living Color | Village Voice J. Hoberman, August 15, 2006
Half a century ago this summer: Elvis on TV, the surrounding hysteria approached only by that around dead star James Dean; Ike poised for re-election; Marilyn Monroe marrying Arthur Miller, who has just defied HUAC; liberation movements gathering momentum in Alabama and Eastern Europe; Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Searchers still playing drive-ins, The Ten Commandments set to drop, and in production, The Girl Can’t Help It!
Revived for a week at Film Forum, The Girl Can’t Help It is the garish acme of CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color, monumentally loud and blatantly exploitative —a veritable Parthenon of vulgarity and a supremely unfunny comedy that is pure eau de Fifty-Six. This satire of Elvis and Marilyn (or rather, of their clones) shimmers with radioactive pinks and cobalt blues; at once strident and static, the movie defines the atomic-Wurlitzer chrome- tailfin Fontainebleau-lobby look. Producer-director-co-writer Frank Tashlin is one of the very few Hollywood directors who broke into movies as an animator and, like the Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis comedies that preceded it, The Girl Can’t Help It is something like a live-action Looney Tune.
Every aspect of The Girl Can’t Help It is at once secondhand and bigger than life. Malibu doubles as “Long Island,” home of Edmond O’Brien, a retired gangster who favors plaid tuxedos, has a Vermeer on his wall, and desires nothing more than to transform fiancée Jayne Mansfield into any sort of star. (She is already a Kabuki goddess with blindingly platinum, blonder-than-blond tresses and contours that make Jessica Rabbit seem like a bunny-hopping denizen of the Nature Channel.) With unerring irrationality, O’Brien hires alcoholic press agent Tom Ewell to perform his particular publicity voodoo. Like America’s, the resultant success is universal and banal beyond anyone’s dreams. The idea is so much more magical than the achievement . . .
Leading man Ewell is wizened, dyspeptic, and so lacking in charisma that he is easily upstaged by the jukebox that blasts out the movie’s unforgettable title song—appropriated by John Waters some 15 years later as the only appropriate way to introduce his 300-pound gender-blur Divine. Having lusted after Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch (1955), Ewell gets to make out with an imitation Marilyn—devised by 20th Century Fox to punish the original after she left the studio. Self-conscious self-referentiality is Tashlin’s stock in trade, along with a case of alienation so severe it dares not speak its name. Jayne’s unconvincing desire for domesticity suggests one automobile industry observer’s characterization of the newly elongated, blatantly forward-thrusting, gaudily two-toned 1955 Chrysler: “Marilyn Monroe as a housewife.”
Grotesque stereotypes collide with billboard-sized caricatures. This proto Pop Art pathology might be too painful to contemplate were it not for the exotic life forms flourishing around its periphery. Climaxing with a rock show performed for an audience of teenage white zombies, The Girl Can’t Help It is populated by all manner of failed honkers and would-be cool cats—as well as Fats Domino, the Platters, a gospel-shouting Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent (his band, the Blue Caps, wearing actual blue caps). The coolest presence ever recorded by a Hollywood camera may be Little Richard, first seen standing entranced before a piano—as if wondering whether to pulverize or incinerate it.
Julie London is on the set as well—she plays herself as a manifestation of Ewell’s delirium tremors. Instead of the checkered demons and pink elephants he normally sees, the drunken flack hallucinates London sprawled across his rumpled bed chantoozing “Cry Me a River.” But, beyond good or evil, The Girl Can’t Help It belongs to Mansfield—a computer-generated image before the fact. (The Girl and Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? have been newly released as part of Fox’s Mansfield DVD box.)
Squealing and purring, Jayne sashays like Mae West through this raucous, new-minted rock ‘n’ roll world—so abstract that even the sparkles have sparkles. It hardly seems coincidental that she’s given the name “Jerri” to match the Ewell character’s “Tom” and echo the famous cartoon cat-and-mouse combo of the 1940s.
Film Forum is following The Girl Can’t Help It with a week of Tashlin features and one program of his animated cartoons. The two forms should be seen together. Tashlin’s animations are characterized by cinematic angles and editing, even as his features are implacably anti-natural.
An actual and metaphorical flatness heightens the sense of artifice. Gags are callous and the laws of physics flouted with impunity. Bob Hope drives a car across an abyss at one point in Son of Paleface (1952), and his delayed response to Jane Russell’s charms is typical Tashlin: Hope nonchalantly lights his pipe; it unfurls like a party whistle as smoke pours out of his ears; his body spins while his face remains fixed front, drooling over Russell’s bodice. There is a sense in which Tashlin’s best jokes aren’t really funny. But neither is a pas de deux.
Tashlin may have been only Jerry Lewis’s idea of an intellectual, but his oeuvre is a Bartlett’s of mass-culture quotations: His cartoons parody contemporary movies and comic strips; his films typically revolve around some aspect of American mass media. Hollywood or Bust (1956) concerns the movies. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) satirizes advertising. Tom Ewell plays a TV writer in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956). Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis produce comic books in Artists and Models (1955).
For Tashlin, the media constituted a single system. In Artists and Models, Lewis overhears The Honeymooners‘ “Ralph Kramden” fighting with his wife “Alice” in the apartment upstairs; later, Dean Martin dances with “Shirley Temple” and the “Little Rascals,” and when he serenades Dorothy Malone, it is noted that he sings like the guy who sang “That’s Amore,” i.e., Dean Martin. The social context is a nation of robotic image junkies. The movie fans in Hollywood or Bust and Rock Hunter are typical. In Artists and Models, Lewis is exhibited on TV as evidence of “what can happen to the human brain on a steady diet of comic books” while art is synonymous with idiocy. The movie’s insipid, if outrageously derriére-garde, finale has Jerry and Dino duel with their brushes to body-paint showgirls in plumed headgear: “On the streets of Montmartre, there’s a Frenchy kind of art . . . ”
On the back lot in Burbank, however, Tashlin is the original pop-culture Pop Artist. Artists and Models, which ranks with Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as his quintessential movie, opens with Dean Martin painting the lips on an enormous billboard face—James Rosenquist before he discovered his destiny. Like Roy Lichtenstein, Tashlin cartooned cartoons; like Andy Warhol, he represented stars as representations of themselves. His landscapes, where they exist, look like molded plastic. They have the fetishized surfaces, at once seductive and repellent, of a Tom Wesselmann still life. The guy couldn’t help it.
Along with Douglas Sirk, Tashlin embraced American vulgarity in all its lurid, widescreen splendor, deploying flesh-and-blood caricatures as if to cast Sirk’s most famous title: Imitation of Life. That one director made “comedies” and the other “melodramas” hardly matters. Both trafficked in Technicolor flesh tones and laminated sheen, the supreme garishness of mid-’50s consumer culture—the flat, flaming all-American inauthenticity that Euro-theorists like Eco and Baudrillard would, decades later, term hyperreal.
Not
How It Seems: 'The Girl Can't Help It' (1956) | REBEAT Magazine Emma Sedam, August 26, 2015
Why I love Jayne Mansfield's performance in The Girl Can't Help It Abbey Bender from Little White Lies, June 17, 2017
The Girl Can't
Help It Review – Comedy Film Nerds
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The Girl Can't Help
It (1956) - Blu-ray.com
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CAN'T HELP IT, THE 1956 - The Video Beat
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Girl Can't Help It (1956) - Frank Tashlin | Review | AllMovie Keith Phipps
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Help It | film by Tashlin [1956] | Britannica.com
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Opening Shots: The Girl Can't Help It | Scanners | Roger Ebert Jim Emerson
Movie
Review - - Screen: One-Track Film; 'Girl Can't Help It' Has a ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times
Time Out New York: Keith Uhlich
Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall) is as low as one can be on the mad-men totem pole, an all-around average schnook who longs for the respect of his snooty boss and droolingly covets a key to the executive washroom. But this ad-agency lackey has a bigger problem, since his company is about to lose its top account (with Stay-Put lipstick) and his job is on the line. It’s only thanks to his flighty fan-girl niece that inspiration strikes: He just needs to get buxom starlet Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield)—in town for a bit of incognito publicity—to endorse Stay-Put, and Stay-Put will, well, stay put.
By contrast, Frank Tashlin’s colorful CinemaScope satire never holds fast to anything. The plot, adapted by the director from a hit George Axelrod play, is but a pretext for an endless series of see-what-sticks gags: Targets include everything from the pervasive TV culture that was then dragging audiences away from theaters (“Your big 21-inch screens,” Randall sneers in a hilarious fourth-wall-breaking sequence) to the near-cannibalistic celebrity worship that has only increased over time. Mansfield embodies the greatest joke of all—her shameless Marilyn Monroe clone has a dress-up poodle at her side, a laugh that sounds like a bomb-dropping whistle and an all-encompassing ditziness (is she in on the joke or isn’t she?) that constantly catches you off guard. She’s this unabashedly crude movie’s bleached-blond heart and soul.
Rockwell Hunter (Tony Randall) writes advertisements for television commercials and the corporation he works for is about to lose a major account from a lipstick company called ‘Stay-Put’. The company needs its product to become a sensation and when Rock sees his niece April (an autograph hunter and president of Rita Marlowe fan club) on TV trying to snap Marlowe’s autograph, Hunter tracks down Marlowe and asks for an endorsement as Marlowe has some “oh-so-kissable lips”.
Actress Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) has come to NY to be “in seclusion” from her on-and-off again beau Bobo, star of a Tarzan TV show (played by her real life husband Mickey Hargitay), and in an attempt to make Bobo jealous fakes a relationship with Hunter whom she calls her “lover doll”. The press goes mad for Rita and “Lover Doll” and teenage girls get “Lover Doll” fever.
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter is simply stunning, it’s hard to believe that houses, outfits and furnishings looked that cool, I seriously want to live in this film. The costumes, sets and colors are so out there and Jayne is even more exaggerated and extreme than she was in The Girl Can’t Help It. When she’s wearing polka-dots her dog sports polka dots and her trademark high-pitched feminine squeals are even more extreme and absurd. Mansfield – in all her glory – is so far past over-the-top that she is a walking, breathing cartoon.
The film is a witty commentary on the world of Television and advertising. Tashlin uses satire and techniques such as breaking the fourth wall to get the real laughs. He loathed the TV medium and is very critical (but in a fun way) about celebrity and consumerism, this film being the magnum opus of his satire. There’s also a lot of references to Jayne Mansfield and Tashlin’s careers which are another source of in-jokes and as long as you get them.
Right from the opening credits (including the studio logo and accompanying music) Tashlin’s flair is at work here: Randall is pictured alongside the Fox logo playing instruments and talks throughout this normally untouched scene of corporate fanfare. Never one to miss an opportunity to be subversive, Tashlin has laced the film with satirical fourth-wall breaking shenanigans. There’s a break in the film where Randall comes out and says “Ladies and gentlemen, this break in our motion picture is made out of respect for the TV fans in our audience, who are accustomed to constant interruptions in their programs for messages from sponsors. We want all you TV fans to feel at home, and not forget the thrill you get, watching television on your big, 21-inch screens.”
Tashlin was a cartoonist, worked for Disney and was a screenwriter before turning director and everything from the film’s humour to Jayne’s extremeness reflects this. An absolute must see for fans of Americana and 50s culture. The film is ultimately a commentary on 50s mania, the teenyboppers, the cult of celebrity-ism, the beast that television created; and most importantly pokes fun and leaves you questioning the American drive to be successful and when you deconstruct it, how empty of an idea it really is.
The Madman release of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter is excellent. Presented in a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen the film looks incredibly lush. Madman have given the film the deluxe treatment of releasing it in their esteemed Directors Suite label. Would be awesome if Madman give The Girl Can’t Help It the Directors Suite treatment – hint hint!
Although there’s no extra features bar the theatrical trailer, the DVD comes with a 16 page booklet. The booklet is an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum (film critic for Chicago Reader) and has full colour pictures throughout.
Slant
Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
Frank Tashlin never could harmonize his
celebratory/critical impulses toward American pop culture, so it comes as no
surprise that Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Tashlin's masterpiece, is
both his funniest and most despairing picture. It is also fitting that, after
surveying a culture's many popular obsessions (comic books, movies, rock 'n
roll), the director saves the sharpest knives for the institution whose job it
is to package them for mass consumption: advertising. Following a trademark bit
of Tashlinesque wall-breaking (star Tony Randall plays the Fox fanfare on a
small orchestra of instruments, then forgets the title during his
introduction), the opening credits roll as a series of tableaux-sketches, each
skewering the inanities of ludicrous products pitched frontally to audiences
("Pour yourself a full glass of that heavily-brewed, clear swamp water,
Shelton's Beer"; "Wow Soap contains fallout, the exclusive patented
ingredient"). The sequence hints at a trenchant critique under the
rollicking humor; the phony ads, ridiculous but hardly too far removed from
authentic commercials, posit the notion of consumers serving their products
instead of the other way around, culminating with a spokesperson pulled into
the hungry maw of a washing machine.
The characters are being similarly devoured by the system they breathlessly
scramble to support, chief among them Rock Hunter (Randall), a Madison Avenue
ad executive sinking in the quicksand of slogans, jingles, and campaigns. His
spot in the company's totem is low, and he may lose his position if he can't
come up with an idea to sell his newest product, Stay-Put Lipstick. Fortunately
for him, flying into town is
Although several of the characters are aware of the advertising world's
machinations, none of them are above its sway, and, in one of the film's most
merciless gags, the hero comes home one night to find both his niece and his
fiancée (Betsy Drake) paralyzed from overdosing in bust-expanding exercises.
Because Tashlin, like Billy Wilder, often equated success in "the nonsense
of what we call our civilization" with prostitution (or, at least,
hucksterism), the title's query becomes not so much a matter of whether
than of when: Rock Hunter's ascension in his firm's importance ladder
may seem divine, but to Tashlin it is all just a Faustian deal sealed with the
coveted key to the Executive Bathroom, a corrupt Holy Grail complete with a
heavenly chorus.
People in Tashlin's movies often become extensions of their material possessions,
and the irony of the merchandising cuts both ways: Just as Rita Marlowe is a
hilarious pop construct—a Marilyn Monroe spoof that is also transparently Jayne
Mansfield's own dig at her image—she also molds Rock into a replica of her
long-lost true love. Characters contort themselves to fit the fetishization of
image rampant through society, always causing pain to their own souls; Drake
hopes to lure Rock back to her by turning herself into a buxom fembot, but, as
she pliantly puts it, "Those tight sweaters are too heavy."
Savage as it is, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? remains, paradoxically,
among Tashlin's most joyous works. Continuously vibrating with comic energy,
the Cinemascope screen is a playpen of jubilant brassiness, compounded by superb
performances. The director may loathe the fact that the characters sell their
souls, yet he can't help but admire the brio and creativity with which they do
it, like the ravenous force with which Rock embraces his new stud persona or
the slippery glibness his associate (Henry Jones) employs in navigating Madison
Avenue's polluted waters. Tashlin knew that he was inescapably a part of the
culture he was satirizing, and the picture's head-on immersion in proto-New
Wave homage (everything from Tarzan and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
to Louella Parsons and Groucho Marx) amounts to the auteur's confession of his
complicity. After all, when a young fan announces that she's going to see The Girl Can't Help It again,
"courageous youth" is all caustic sidekick Joan Blondell can snap.
Indeed, the film's mid-narrative break could be seen as a reversal of the
famous opening of The Girl Can't Help It: Where Tom Ewell
stretched the image into the widescreen rectangle, here Randall shrinks it down
to the TV square, made grainy and monochromatic "for all you TV
fans." Tashlin's most radical rupture, however, lies in Blondell's
monologue about her days helping silent-film actresses and vainly attempting to
forget a long-lost love, a moment of unexpectedly naked emotion where the
character's wisecracking façade is cracked and the pain underneath is captured
in a harsh single-take. Lured and trapped by the gilded cages of consumerism,
the characters yearn for a Rousseau-like return to Nature; Rock dreams of a
chicken farm, while the company president (John Williams) would rather be
tending to roses than clients. The subversive tragedy of Will Success Spoil
Rock Hunter? is that the cartoon surfaces of Tashlin are closer to the
entrapping gloss of Sirk than it is first apparent. The happy ending is
nominally enforced, yet the characters remain frozen in their rigid roles,
becoming, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, "abstract Brechtian
commentators on their own dilemmas." Our laughter explodes only to
dissipate grimly.
Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste Magazine Aaron Cutler
The most prevalent cultural stereotypes about the 1950s in America are largely negative. The Fifties were rife with racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. The Fifties had class hierarchies and strict social-role expectations. The Fifties were full of secretaries sleeping with their bosses, deeply square men just discovering the work “OK.”
What gets lost in this easy demonizing is that we’re reacting to perceived images of an era more so than to the era itself. The Truman-to-Kennedy period was an amazingly self-reflexive one in American media, during which the culture produced images of itself with unprecedented quantity and speed. The period opened with the best-attended year in American movie history (1946), but this apex immediately preceded the rise of television, whose stars would soon be appearing in magazines, in newspapers and on billboards. The country literally became an empire of signs, and one reason so much art made during and about the period focused on Manhattan advertising companies is that they dictated the terms by which Americans lived. The Fifties was a self-creating brand name.
One can indulge in that first age of branding through Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a dizzying 1957 metatext recently released on a shimmering Masters of Cinema Blu-ray that captures its candy colors. The disc offers a few enticing extras, including vintage promotional material and a video introduction by filmmaker Joe Dante (Gremlins) discussing director Frank Tashlin’s career, but the treasure is the film itself, which, ironically, critiques merchandising. Its first several minutes consist mainly of mock commercials involving products gone haywire. A man pouring a headless beer watches foam explode out of the glass; a handy-dandy electric razor loses itself in a beard; a new laundry machine devours its owner.
The folks these products confound are all cheery Caucasians—our hero has told us that, “This picture is about advertising agencies and television commercials,” which means we’ll see only people that could appear on TV. They include Rock Hunter, a meek little ad man of gray-flannel dreams who over the course of the film will nearly trade in his beloved fiancée-secretary for a high-pitched-speaking film star, as well as Tony Randall, the actor playing Hunter, who introduces himself in the opening credits, and who was then best known to audiences from television appearances. The movie star, Rita Marlowe (the name a Doctor Faustus joke), who’s plucked up Rocky at random to get back at a beau, has starred in films such as The Girl Can’t Help It and Kiss Them for Me—and so, coincidentally, did Jayne Mansfield, the actress playing her.
To watch Mansfield act stupid in this picture (her former guy, she says, is “with another bleached blonde—I mean another blonde”) is to watch an actress brilliantly burlesque her own image; a TV special once called Mansfield “the ultimate dumb blonde who had a 163 IQ.” The hip shakes, the “ooooooh” in her voice, and yes, the blonde hair, further suggest Marilyn Monroe (not surprisingly, George Axelrod, the author of Rock Hunter’s source play, had also written The Seven Year Itch). Yet the particular quality of Mansfield’s knowingness calls to mind less 1955’s Itch, a deeply cruel and ugly movie in which men slobber over Monroe without her doing much to counteract it, than it does 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Monroe’s Lorelei Lee acts just dumb enough for men to throw themselves at her, and get blackmailed doing it. Monroe (with help) invented her own cooing image precisely and carefully, without necessarily being bound to it—just catch the anger in her eyes as she rails against Robert Mitchum in River of No Return. Mansfield (with help) invented herself as a Monroe parody in The Girl Can’t Help It and Rock Hunter well enough to become a star in her own right. She wasn’t as controlled a performer as Monroe was—the exactness with which Monroe manages small gestures in Blondes is startling—but the strength of her Rock Hunter performance lies in its awareness that she’s not Monroe. What Lorelei Lee gets from men with helpless, hapless vulnerability Rita Marlowe gets by ordering them around. While Marlowe’s moments of weakness and uncertainty feel insincere, her moments of calculation, as when she tells Hunter what a good kisser he is so that he’ll keep up the ruse of their romance, are brilliant. Watching Mansfield play ironic distance helps one realize that a parody of a parody is unfolding. Mansfield is simultaneously playing Marlowe, herself, and Monroe, who played at being herself as well.
All these copies may lead the viewer to think that there is no such thing as an original self. The movie develops this thought with the scene of a Marlowe/Mansfield/Monroe imitator asking Hunter to sign her back, and of Hunter’s fiancée walking and talking like M/M/M in the hope that she’ll attract him back. The film fills itself with women trying to measure up to an image, expending great intelligence in an effort to play dumb. But the men are the same way. Rock Hunter’s image of success (and this is important—it is an image) is a key to the executive washroom, a hallowed quarter accompanied by an angelic choir each time he steals a glimpse inside. His boss’s secret image of success is winning the prize in a gardening competition, far away from the metropolis, but that isn’t any more or less pure than the dreams characters have of other kinds of material triumph—each vision of success in this movie is made up of big, tall, flashy stuff.
With all the worrying over success that Hunter’s characters do, it’s worth asking how exactly the film defines success. At film’s end the characters state harmoniously and homogenously that, “Success is just the art of being happy. And being happy is just the very living end.” But a more accurate definition might be that success (cribbing from Joseph McBride on Capra) is a catastrophe, in the sense that it’s random and chaotic and can come or go at any time. A junior executive might win a promotion as easily and as surprisingly as an actress might win an audition, or as easily and as surprisingly as a man might love a movie star—capitalist culture thrives on such dreams of getting rich quick, and the image culture, an important component, pushes these fantasies hard.
Success comes and goes as does fame or fortune, or as a person’s definition of success changes, whichever comes first. Certainly Rock Hunter’s definition changes as he realizes that the celebrity (and higher pay checks) he’s earned from being Rita Marlowe’s boytoy don’t satisfy him. The speech he ends up giving is a marvel of invention. The new company president with a Harvard degree finally decides:
“I’m an average guy, and all us average guys are successes. We run the works. Not the big guy behind the big desk. He’s knocking himself out trying to figure out how to please us—how to please you and me and all the other us’s like us. Who do they try to sell with advertising? Nobody but us. Who gives a television series a good trendex? We do. Who elects the presidents? Nobody but us.”
It’s worth noting that Rock Hunter works as a writer of TV commercials. This power-to-the-people stuff is exactly what advertising companies have always used to sell their products, both in the 1950s and now, telling consumers that they have the choice not to buy a mass market good when really their other option is to buy another mass market good in its stead. The product can be a new soap, a new film, or a new politician.
Yet the speech does have a weird poignancy that keeps one from rejecting it completely, which a reference to another cultural product might help explain. Rock Hunter’s director, Frank Tashlin, was the best director of slapstick that Hollywood had seen since Preston Sturges, perhaps because both filmmakers’ views of slapstick were closely tied to their views of capitalism—a man might get clonked on the head as suddenly as he might lose all his money in the stock market, and then might as suddenly leap up and get it back. In Sturges’s great 1940 film, Christmas in July, a man thinks he’s won a contest, spends his winnings accordingly, learns the company made a mistake, and has to return all the money until, in the film’s final thirty seconds, he wins the contest for real. This rise-and-fall drama plays out before the eyes of an older man, long tenured, who says he knows he’s a success because he can’t fathom living in a country where most people fail. The next day, we know, he’ll simply go back to his desk.
Sturges’s man has probably created this rationalization himself, whereas Rock Hunter’s rationalization feels like it’s come from TV. But both men could very well be right in exalting what they view as their average qualities, though Rock Hunter presages YouTube by suggesting that, as soon as a camera falls on someone, he or she isn’t average anymore. Maybe Rock Hunter would be happy living with his secretary, Jenny, herself played by Cary Grant´s real-life wife, Betsy Drake; maybe he would be happy sitting at home watching TV, a small, black-and-white, fuzzed-out circle with which the movie occasionally interrupts the action of its gorgeous CinemaScope plot. Tashlin was a dazzling graphic stylist who directed some of Jerry Lewis’s greatest hits; Fox was a major studio. Maybe Rock Hunter would be happier as a pig farmer. But—and this is the critic, as well as the movie, talking—Rita Marlowe’s world looks like more fun.
Western Culture Coming and Going [THE CASE OF THE GRINNING ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, July 21, 2006
Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? - Reviews - Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski, August 30, 2006
The Films of Frank Tashlin [Michael E. Grost]
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? | American Film Industry
Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? - TCM.com
Michael Atkinson
Cinema Reel: Mad Men and Women | The New Yorker August 8, 2011
Best Adapted Screenplay: 1957 [Erik Beck]
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Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) - Frank Tashlin | Review ... Lucia Bozzola from All-Movie
Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? | film by Tashlin [1957] | Britannica.com
Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? | Film | The Guardian Philip French
Movie
Review - - Screen: Farce From Fox; 'Will Success Spoil Rock ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]
Only Looney Tunes madman (and Weehawken native) Frank
Tashlin could direct a film whose pre-credit sequence involves Doris Day's bare
snatch peeking up at Rod Taylor (who has miraculously snagged her mermaid
swimming trunk on his, err, fishing pole) from beneath the Catalina waters. And
furthermore, only a director as brazenly irreverent as Tashlin could still
fashion a few hours of romantic entanglements and misunderstandings to keep his
"battle of the sexes" Jacuzzi bubbling even following the brazen
sexual overtones of said opening sequence. Any other director, more grounded by
undue reverence to the anti-chemistry between Taylor and Day (playing, as it
turns out, a NASA scientist with the secret to overcoming weightlessness in
outer space and his clumsy "biographer," respectively), would likely
overcook Everett Freeman's exposition-heavy script like Day's banana crème
cake, which is fried to a rock in Taylor's space-age nuclear kitchen. But
Tashlin, who spent at least a few years coming up with ways to put Bugs Bunny
into form-fitting, tit-hugging cashmere sweater tops, turns Freeman's central
parallel—the war between man and woman against the war between the domestic and
Communist spy networks—into just the sort of half-cocked farce the scenario
deserves. The result eventually flails airlessly, not unlike Day herself when
she's mistakenly locked inside
The Glass Bottom Boat - TCM.com Emily Soares
Looking for a madcap romp complete with Cold War intrigue? Take a
ride on The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) with Doris Day and Rod Taylor. Brought to
you by director Frank Tashlin, famous for his send-ups of '50s and '60s mass
culture, who delivers spy thriller parodies, romance and even a few musical
numbers in this screwball comedy, which includes a distinctly comedic
supporting cast. Doris Day plays a widow who has just started a new job in
public relations at a space laboratory that develops inventions by engineering
wizard Rod Taylor. Day moonlights as a mermaid for her dad's Catalina glass
bottom boat tour business and, as the film opens, is literally hooked by
Taylor, little knowing that he's her new boss. Taylor sets his sights on the
dizzy but wholesome blond and the stage is set for mistaken identities galore,
most of them set in motion by those protecting Taylor's top-secret project,
known as Gismo. They become certain that Day's mysterious calls to a certain
Vladimir (her dog), and other misinterpreted behavior, are proof she's a secret
agent. Meanwhile, Doris sings, Rod falls hard, and the Soviets ultimately miss
the boat in this classic mid-sixties romp.
It is perhaps no wonder that the French, the first (the only?) ones on the
planet to fully embrace Jerry Lewis would also be the premiere filmgoers to
herald Frank Tashlin as a master of the absurd, while Americans remained,
during his lifetime, largely unsure what to make of him. Tashlin and Lewis made
eight pictures together (beginning with Artists and Models, 1955) and
it's still not known whether Dom DeLuise's performance in The Glass Bottom Boat
(his second-ever film appearance) as a bumbling informant, was inspired by
Lewis or not, even though it's very close to the type of wacky characters Lewis
played in Tashlin's comedies. Tashlin, of course, is known for his
bigger-than-life cartoon-like style (especially visible in films like The
Girl Can't Help It, 1956 and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, 1957),
a happy hangover from Tashlin's beginnings as a successful animator, working
alongside luminary Tex Avery. And, as in the world of cartoons, Tashlin's
live-action work is often devoted to characters with rubbery faces and plot
lines that require significant suspension of disbelief.
Tashlin's hand-picked supporting cast for The Glass Bottom Boat is a veritable
who's who of comic character actors: George Tobias and Alice Pearce reprise
their roles as the nosey neighbors from Bewitched, of which they'd
already been a successful part for several seasons; John McGiver (The Patty
Duke Show) is the sour-faced corporate executive; Edward Andrews (Tea
and Sympathy, 1956) as the randy General; Paul Lynde (Bye Bye Birdie,
1963) as the over-zealous security guard; and Dick Martin (Rowan and
Martin's Laugh-In) is perfect as Taylor's opportunistic and womanizing
co-worker. TV and radio host Arthur Godfrey plays Day's rough and ready father
and delivers a musical interlude as well. Keep your eyes peeled for a most
surprising cameo appearance by Robert Vaughn (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.)
as well. Australian-born Rod Taylor (The Time Machine, 1960) is
perfectly cast as the romantic lead and straight man amid this mayhem and is
convincing, as usual, as the smart and debonair recipient of Day's ire and
affection.
Gadgets are another key part of Tashlin's cast, and The Glass Bottom Boat has a
number of them -- from the anti-gravity invention known as Gismo, to a kitchen
with every space-age gimmick imaginable, including a push-button, self-cleaning
eggbeater and a mess-hating robot that is activated when anything touches the
floor (yes, that goes for people too).
At the time, reviews of The Glass Bottom Boat suggested that Tashlin brought
out a new quality in his star Doris Day and raised her comedic skills to new
heights. The movie was Day and Tashlin's first film together and they would go
on to collaborate on Caprice (1967) the following year, which Day wanted
to turn down, but was already committed to it by her husband/manager Marty
Melcher. In 1968, at the time of Melcher's death, Day discovered that he had
mismanaged or embezzled all of her career earnings and she was flat broke. Day
bounced back with The Doris Day Show, and eventually was awarded damages
from her former lawyer, who had helped Melcher "manage" her business.
Doris Day, Rod Taylor,
The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) | The Films of ... The Films of Doris Day
Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
The Complete Rod Taylor Site: Glass Bottom Boat
TV/Movie
Set - The Glass Bottom Boat ( 1966 ) - Silver Scenes - A Blog ... The Metzinger Sisters from Silver Scenes
TheMovieScene.co.uk [Andy Webb]
digitallyObsessed! [Mark Zimmer]
The Glass Bottom
Boat (1966) - Blu-ray.com
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Film
Review: The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) | CINESPIRIA
Secluded
Charm: Classic Film Review: The Glass Bottom Boat (1966)
The
Glass Bottom Boat (1966) - Frank Tashlin | Review | AllMovie Craig Butler
Movie
Review - - The Screen: 'The Glass Bottom Boat':Comedy at ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also seen here:
New
York Times [Vincent Canby]
Jacques Tati was born
in Le Pecq, on the outskirts of Paris, where his father ran a picture-framing
business. The family name was Tatischeff; Tati's grandparents were respectively
Russian, French, Dutch and Italian, apt ancestry for a film-maker who thought
in universally accessible images rather than in words. Intended for the family
business, Tati was sent to an art college and then apprenticed to a firm in
London, where he picked up a taste for rugby football. Back in France, he
joined a rugger club, where he took to amusing his fellow-players with
after-match mimes - so successfully that he decided to act professionally in
the music halls. As Tati recalled it, his father was scandalised. "I would
be cut off without a sou, he said, if I wanted to do such a thing. Well, I am
without the sou still and I am perfectly happy."
Tati's act, in which
he ingeniously mimed a wide range of sporting activities, soon brought him
fame. The novelist Colette was among his admirers, writing how Tati could be
"both the player, the ball and the tennis racquet, … simultaneously the
football and the goalkeeper, the boxer and his opponent, the bicycle and the
cyclist. Without any props, he conjures up his accessories and his
partners." Some of Tati's stage acts were preserved in five shorts, directed
by others, that he appeared in during the 1930s.
Tati's directorial
career began in 1947 with another short, L'Ecole des facteurs, in which
he played a rural postman. It was so successful that he expanded it into his
first full-length feature, Jour de fête (1949), set in a lovingly
observed French village. Already all the characteristics of Tati's film-making
style are present and correct. There are few close-ups, as he found them
unsubtle and nudging. Dialogue is kept to a minimum and matters little, but the
inventive soundtrack is all-important. The humour is gentle, unforced (even
unobtrusive) and almost entirely visual.
Jour de fête was warmly received and won an award for
best script at the Venice Film Festival. Meticulous and unhurried as ever, Tati
took four years before making its successor, Les Vacances de M. Hulot
(1953). His most famous film, it introduced his onscreen alter ego, the
pipe-smoking, gangling, well-meaning Hulot, unwitting creator of chaos, on
holiday at a small sleepy Brittany seaside resort. It brought Tati numerous
prizes and international recognition.
Mon oncle (1958) once again starred Hulot,
contrasting his cheerful, ramshackle way of life in a traditional Paris
quartier with the sterile, ultramodern home of his sister and brother in-law -
where Hulot contrives to cause unintentional mayhem. Again the film did well,
though some critics noted an ominously didactic note creeping into the humour.
Tati's obsessive
perfectionism, and his unworldly attitude to budgets, came to a head with Playtime
(1967). His most ambitious project, a satire on bureaucracy, modern
architecture and international tourism, it was three years in the making and
involved the construction of a vast six-acre set outside Paris. Hulot appears,
but only as a relatively marginal figure. Audience response was disappointing
and Tati was brought to financial ruin.
He completed only one
more feature film, Trafic (1971), in which Hulot drives an experimental
vehicle to a motorshow in Amsterdam. His last work was a film for Swedish
television, Parade (1974), set in a circus, which allowed him to reprise
several of his old music hall acts. At the time of his death he was working on
a film in which Hulot would not appear at all. It was to have been called Confusion.
Jacques
Tati - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Dave Kehr from Film
Reference, also seen here: Jacques
Tati facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ...
Jacques Tati's father was disappointed that his son didn't enter the family business, the restoration and framing of old paintings. In Jacques Tati's films, however, the art of framing—of selecting borders and playing on the limits of the image—achieved new expressive heights. Instead of restoring old paintings, Tati restored the art of visual comedy, bringing out a new density and brilliance of detail, a new clarity of composition. He is one of the handful of film artists—the others would include Griffith, Eisenstein, Murnau, Bresson—who can be said to have transformed the medium at its most basic level, to have found a new way of seeing.
After a short career as a rugby player, Tati entered the French music hall circuit of the early 1930s; his act consisted of pantomime parodies of the sports stars of the era. Several of his routines were filmed as shorts in the 1930s (and he appeared as a supporting actor in two films by Claude Autant-Lara), but he did not return to direction until after the war, with the 1947 short L'Ecole des facteurs. Two years later, the short was expanded into a feature, Jour de fête. Here Tati plays a village postman who, struck by the "modern, efficient" methods he sees in a short film on the American postal system, decides to streamline his own operations. The satiric theme that runs through all of Tati's work—the coldness of modern technology—is already well developed, but more importantly, so is his visual style. Many of the gags in Jour de fête depend on the use of framelines and foreground objects to obscure the comic event—not to punch home the gag, but to hide it and purify it, to force the spectator to intuit, and sometimes invent, the joke for himself.
Tati took four years to make his next film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot's Holiday), which introduced the character he was to play for the rest of his career—a gently eccentric Frenchman whose tall, reedy figure was perpetually bent forward as if by the weight of the pipe he always kept clamped in his mouth. The warmth of the characterization, plus the radiant inventiveness of the sight gags, made Mr. Hulot an international success, yet the film already suggests Tati's dissatisfaction with the traditional idea of the comic star. Hulot is not a comedian, in the sense of being the source and focus of the humor; he is, rather, an attitude, a signpost, a perspective that reveals the humor in the world around him.
Mon Oncle is a transitional film: though Hulot had abdicated his star status, he is still singled out among the characters—prominent, but strangely marginal. With Playtime, released after nine years of expensive, painstaking production, Tati's intentions become clear. Hulot was now merely one figure among many, weaving in and out of the action much like the Mackintosh Man in Joyce's Ulysses. And just as Tati the actor refuses to use his character to guide the audience through the film, so does Tati the director refuse to use close-ups, emphatic camera angles, or montage to guide the audience to the humor in the images. Playtime is composed almost entirely of long-shot tableaux that leave the viewer free to wander through the frame, picking up the gags that may be occurring in the foreground, the background, or off to one side. The film returns an innocence of vision to the spectator; no value judgements or hierarchies of interest have been made for us. We are given a clear field, left to respond freely to an environment that has not been polluted with prejudices.
Audiences used to being told what to see, however, found the freedom of Playtime oppressive. The film (released in several versions, from a 70mm stereo cut that ran over three hours to an absurdly truncated American version of 93 minutes) was a commercial failure. It plunged Tati deep into personal debt.
Tati's last theatrical film, the 1971 Traffic, would have
seemed a masterpiece from anyone else, but for Tati it was clearly a protective
return to a more traditional style. Tati's final project, a 60-minute
television film titled Parade, has never been shown in
Tativille official website
Jacques Tati | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Jason Ankeny
left to right: Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Harold Lloyd/ Jacques ... historic photos from Richard’s Site
Jacques Tati • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Jaime N. Christley from Senses of Cinema, May 21, 2002
Jacques Tati Profile - TCM.com Bret Wood
Jacques Tati - biography and films - Films de France extensive biography
Jacques Tati Facts - Biography - YourDictionary biography
Jacques Tati | French actor and director | Britannica.com biography
Jacques Tati (Creator) - TV Tropes brief bio
Future Movies Directors Spotlight bio info
Comedy
genius, Jacques Tati: France's answer to Mr Bean – in ... Essential
Jacques Tati Blu-ray box set profile
from The Guardian
Jacques
Tati. The Complete Works - TASCHEN Books
Collector's Edition box set
CriterionForum.org:
Packaging for The Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray
Jacques Tati: A film history comments and archival photos from Tati films
Jacques_Tati_2007 capsule reviews for a Tati retrospective
Jacques Tati capsule comments from various books and online references to Tati
The History of Cinema. Jacques Tati: biography, filmography, reviews ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
Welcome
to Tativille: The Comic Genius of Jacques Tati | The ... Pacific Cinematheque
The
Modern Times Of Jacques Tati - Culture Trip
(Undated)
JACQUES TATI
| The New Yorker Penelope
Gilliat, August 28, 1971
jacques tati, actor and director who created mr. hulot, is dead Obituary from The New York Times, November 6, 1982
Waiting for Hulot [ABSTRACT] Anthony Lane’s book review of “Jacques Tati: His Life and Art” by David Bellos from the New Yorker, November 13, 2000
Mon Oncle on DVD – Offscreen Donato Totaro from Offscreen, November 2001
OUR MAN IN PARIS: As French as... Jacques Tati? | Independent, The ... John Lichfield from the Independent, April 29, 2002
My holiday with Monsieur Hulot | Features | guardian.co.uk Film Peter Lennon from the Guardian, July 23, 2003
Adrian Martin: Playtime: The magic of Jacques Tati from The Age, April 8, 2004
A joyous quartet of works by Tati - Film - www.theage.com.au Philippa Hawker on a Tati retrospective from The Age, April 15, 2004
Jacques
Tati: Last Bastion of Innocence • Senses of Cinema Pedro Blas Gonzalez, October 20, 2005
JACQUES TATI -
Confusion movie with Ron ... - Xavier Lorente-Darracq Xavier Lorente-Darracq (2006)
Dance on Camera
Festival - Movies - The New York Times
A Film Comic Who Portrayed
Life’s Drama With His Feet, by Jennifer Dunning from The New York Times, January 5, 2008
anArchitecture: Weekly Architecture Clips, Part 3, Jacques Tati. clips from MON ONCLE and PLAYTIME, by Christoph, February 4, 2008
Jacques Tati's TRAFIC on Criterion DVD | Jonathan Rosenbaum June 26, 2008
The
Dance of Playtime - From the Current - The Criterion Collection Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 18, 2009
Jacques Tati | MoMA December 18, 2009 – January 2, 2010
ROSENBAUM ON TATI - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen, January 27, 2010, also seen here: The Evening Class: ROSENBAUM ON TATI
Jacques Tati's ode to his illegitimate daughter - Telegraph Sylvain Chomet’s animated feature L’Illusionniste using an unpublished Tati manuscript, by Henry Samuel, June 16, 2010
Lines
and Circles [PLAYTIME and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from Moving Image Source, December 3, 2010
The
secret of Jacques Tati | Balder and Dash | Roger Ebert May 26, 2010 family letter speaking “against”
Sylvain Chomet’s animated feature L’Illusionniste
using an unpublished Tati manuscript, also comments from Tati’s obituary from Paris Match, published on the Ebert site
December 29, 2010
When
Sparks Met Comedy Genius Jacques Tati in 1974 | Dangerous ... Dangerous Minds, January 4, 2011
Jacques
Tati: an appreciation | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist including an excerpt from a 1958 interview with
André Bazin and François Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema, February 5,
2012
Films &
Architecture: "My Uncle" | ArchDaily Daniel Portilla, August 1, 2012
Mon Oncle: Tati,
Bergson and Cinematic Comedy – Offscreen
David Addelman, January 2013
Jacques Tati – The Restored Collection | 4:3 - Four Three Film Brad Mariano, August 26, 2014
Jacques
Tati: Composing in Sound and Image - From the Current ... Jonathan Rosenbaum at Criterion, October 28,
2014
The Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve Noel Murray, November 3, 2014
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, November 4, 2014
Retrospective: The Complete Works Of Comedy Genius Jacques Tati ... Rodrigo Perez from indieWIRE, November 20, 2014
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Classic Comedies of Jacques Tati ... Ananya Ghosh from Taste of Cinema, December 3, 2014
Alice
Rawsthorn on Jacques Tati's Playtime | DisegnoDaily Alice Rawsthorn, June 4, 2015
The
Comforting Mirth of Jacques Tati – The Screening Room Iain Reid, August 21, 2015
The Auteurs:
Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis
NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
A user's guide to the modern world... according to Jacques Tati | BFI David Parkinson from BFI Sight and Sound, December 21, 2015
The Cinematographic Brilliance of Jacques Tati | Gorilla Film Online Louie Freeman-Bassett, January 14, 2016
French
Film: Top 5 Jacques Tati Movies - France Today Justin Postlethwaite, January 18, 2016
CLOSE-UP
| Close-Up on Jacques Tati February
6 – 20, 2016
Jacques Tati | Frieze By
Design, Alice Rawsthorn, June 10, 2016
Watch:
What Drives Jacques Tati's Visual, Cinematic Comedy Max Winter from No Film School, December 14, 2016
TSPDT - Jacques Tati They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Jacques
Tati: an appreciation | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist including an excerpt from a 1958 interview with
André Bazin and François Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema, February 5,
2012
An Interview with
Jacques Tati • Cinephilia & Beyond 31-minute radio interview with Studs Terkel
in 1962, and more…also seen here: An Interview
with Jacques Tati - Studs Terkel Radio Archive Blog ...
Wes on Jacques
Tati – The Rushmore Academy Wes
Anderson comments on the influence of Tati, written for a French film
retrospective, April 11, 2009
Jonathan Rosenbaum's 5 Best Directors
Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Jacques
Tati (1907 - 1982) - Find A Grave Memorial
Jacques Tati - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
JACQUES TATI HOMMAGE YouTube (9:15)
Two rarely seen short comedies featuring Jacques Tati comprise this special double feature and offer a cherished glimpse of one the French cinema's master comedians. GAl DIMANCHE -- Tati and a friend buy a mini bus, pick up some tourists and set themselves up as travel tour guides. SWING TO THE LEFT -- A farmhand gets hoodwinked into going a few boxing rounds with a champ.
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
SOIGNE TON GAUCHE (Swing to the
Left)
aka: Watch Your Left
see film above
Images Movie Journal David Ng, also reviewing MR HULOT’S
Reel.com DVD review [Juliet Clark] (excerpt)
Included with M. Hulot's Holiday is "Soigne ton gauche" ("Watch Your Left"), a 1936 film directed by René Clément and featuring a young and rangy Tati as a small-town ne'er-do-well who fancies himself a boxer. Tati's physical acting is already impressive; the absurdist choreography of the boxing match shows the actor's debt to Buster Keaton.
Soigne ton
gauche (1936) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
On a farm in rural
This early film, written and starring
Whilst not quite vintage Tati material, Soigne ton gauche features some side-splitting sequences which makes it a hugely entertaining and memorable short film. You wonder why Tati took so long to make a name for himself in cinema, when, on the basis of his performance in this film, he clearly has at least nine-tenths of the talent of those other great film slapstick comedians, Charlie Chaplin and Buston Keaton. The film’s closing scene, with the comic country postman cycling off into the distance, seems to presage Tati’s first notable work as a director, L’École des facteurs, made a decade later.
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
The Auteurs: Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
Sylvie et le
fantôme (1945) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Sylvia is an imaginative 16 year old girl who has fallen in love with the man in an old portrait - Alain de Francigny, her grandmother’s lover who died many years ago in a duel. She is upset when her father is forced to sell the painting to allow them to go on living in their old château. Amused by his daughter’s fantasies, the Baron engages an actor to play the part of a ghost, to roam the castle on his daughter’s birthday night. Two other men, each attracted to Sylvie, also decide to pretend to be ghosts to draw her attention. Needless-to-say, the real ghost of Alain de Francigny is far from amused at this usurpation of his role...
User reviews from imdb
Author: Robert Armstrong
(elbob-o@webtv.net) from
There really is a ghost, by the way, yet to most of the
residents of this once-grand palatial estate the ghost is merely the fantasy of
an over-imaginative 17-year-old named Sylvie. The great mansion is now being
sold off piece by piece to satisfy creditors, and when a portrait, believed by
Sylvie to be occupied by her beloved phantom, is sold, her grandfather decides
to hire an actor to portray the ghost in order to give Sylvie one last chance
to believe in her dreams before she grows up.
As the real ghost, roaming the mansion more than usual now that his resting
place of choice, the portrait (Sylvie was right), has been removed, observes
the errant artifices of Sylvie's grandfather, it turns out that no fewer than
three persons have shown up claiming to be the actor who will haunt Sylvie's
forthcoming birthday party: two young men who have fallen in love with Sylvie,
one of them a fugitive, and an older man, the one actually sent by the casting
agency. Grandpere decides to employ all three. One could say there are three
young men, since the ghost himself also appears enamored of Sylvie, and
absconds with the older actor's white sheet in an attempt to make a appearance
himself (the French filmmakers appear blissfully unaware of how these ghost
costumes stand a chance, unintentionally, of transmitting a completely
different subtext to an American audience!). He has a time managing the
costume, however, and so for the most part Sylvie's tangible contact with
"phantoms" is by way of her two erstwhile, earthly suitors. Irony abounds
in the fact that while there really is a ghost, the appearance of same
continues to be sustained almost entirely by the fanciful dialogues of the
living. The fact that her phantom has not only two different voices but
distinctly different personalities begs a comparison to Robert Jean Nathan's
Portrait of Jennie, filmed three years later, in which the title spirit is a
somewhat different character each time the hero encounters her.
On the negative side, the comedy's ability to work independently of the actual
ghost also means that the character of the ghost is largely unemployed. Care
was taken to have a known comedian, Jaques Tati, in the role (this is a few
years before Tati's emergence as auteur in his Postman and Monsieur Hulot
films), yet for much of this film his pale image is seen merely wandering
through the set -- some great double-exposure effects here -- looking wistful.
To both credit and deficit, this is a> film version of a play; it's great
that the fantasy is sustained to such a large extent by the almost poetic
dialogue, yet one wishes that the filmmakers had pushed a little further to
make this a ghost movie, depending more on sonic and visual effects to make the
experience a little spookier.
The Ravel-like music is often beautiful, helping to bridge reality,
fabrication, and the ethereal. It's never allowed to overpower the rest of the
film, yet I suspect that a modern stereo recording of the music alone would
probably give a stronger statement of what moods the composer was trying to
infuse. The English subtitles are just enough to keep the
francophonically-impaired abreast of the conversation, without covering half
the screen nor detracting from the flow of the original French, which in this
case sounds good whether one can understand all of it or not. One blooper does
occur when one of the ghosts, according to the subtitles, assures Sylvie that
he is "discrete" (discreet).
The idea of the grandfather creating a "ghost story" as an attempt to
give Sylvie one last adventure before she grows up is possibly (I'd speculate)
the inspiration for the treatment used in Disney's animated film version of
Peter Pan, which differs significantly from Barrie's original story in that the
adventures of Wendy and her brothers, plus the issue of Wendy's impending adulthood,
are compressed into a single evening.
Sylvie and the Phantom is a very satisfying film in all: hopefully it will continue to teach
filmmakers a thing or two about where their audience's sense of fantasy can be
found, and awakened.
The Forgotten: Ghostwatch on Notebook | MUBI David Cairns
Claude Autant-Lara is not an easy man to like. This mainly stems from his disgraceful old age -- Autant-Lara belonged to that generation of filmmakers rejected by the up-and-coming nouvelle vague, and his early commercial success dried up in the Sixties, rendering him unemployable after 1977, when he was aged seventy-six. But old Claude was still physically very active (he lived to be ninety-nine) and refused to go gently into a peaceful retirement. Casting around for some means to occupy his twilight years, he alighted, as many a senior citizen has before and since, upon the idea of fascism. Joining France's far-right National Front party, he became a representative at the European parliament, where he was eventually forced to stand down after giving interviews full of racial insults, incitement to violence, and full-on holocaust denial.
So it's hard to fathom how this bitter, unpleasant and dangerous individual could have made films, in a long and varied career, which are often charming, poetic, romantic and beautiful. Perhaps if he'd been able to continue doing so his mind wouldn't have been corrupted by the canker of prejudice and hatred.
Sylvie et le fantôme (1946) is just such a movie, a gentle comic love story based on a play by Alfred Adam. The setting is a castle, the central event is a birthday party, and the theatrical farce structure at times calls to mind Renoir's La règle du jeu, an impression reinforced by the presence of that film's poacher/manservant, Julien Carette, her promoted to majordomo. But Autant-Lara's film is not a complex, bitter and strange film like Renoir's, nor is it a masterpiece. It's lightweight but poetic.
Sylvie, 18, is played by Odette Joyeux, 32 (she would still be playing a pretty young thing in La ronde, 1950). She's a wistful, dreamy girl, in love with the portrait of a deceased almost-relative, the man her grandmother loved but did not wed. She likes to imagine him as a ghost, wandering the halls of her ancestral castle. In fact, he is a ghost, and he does wander the halls of her ancestral castle. Here things get really interesting for the cinephile, because just as you may be thinking that you have no wish to engage with the wretched racist Autant-Lara's work, however "charming" someone says it is, I have to tell you that the ghost is played, in pretty well his only real romantic leading role, by Jacques Tati.
We first meet the ghost, known as the White Hunter, as he emerges from his portrait, accompanied by his faithful phantom spaniel. He's transparent and mute, as he remains throughout the film. René Cloërec's music, a breathy sort of pan-pipes creation, is extraordinarily beautiful, spine-tingling and moving. These moments lift the film from the potential mire of light comic whimsy to something ineffably beautiful.
Tati at this time had made a name for himself as a comic mime artist on stage, in which capacity his name had come up as a candidate for the role of Deburau in Les enfants du paradis, eventually played by Jean-Louis Barrault (how different film history might have been!) But producer Fred Orain remembered Tati's name, and when Sylvie came along, Tati got the part.
It's a limited role, not because the White Hunter doesn't speak, which is no disability for Tati, but because nobody else can see or hear him, so character interaction is all one way. And nearly all the business involving the ghost's interactions with the world entails special effects, so that Tati is at the mercy of sheets on strings and double exposures. Nevertheless, the casting pays off. Apple-cheeked and practically dashing in his luminous hunting garb, Tati exudes sweetness and melancholy as he attempts to woo Sylvie from beyond the grave. It ought to be a bit creepy, but it isn't.
"It's the only special effects film in the history of French cinema!" lied Autant-Lara. "It was an insane idea! One hundred and three takes with special effects, and we had absolutely no gear! We used an optical glass, just like when in a railway carriage you can see in the window both the scenery on the other side and a reflection of the people inside. You look at the set through the optical glass, and on the left, placed at exactly ninety degrees to it, the same identical set covered in black velours. Imagine the size of the whole thing! Two sets instead of one! And it was all shut in, it was like an oven in there! The slightest movements of old Tati had to be mapped out on both sets... we were stuck in the studio for four months, we got about three hours' sleep a night, whilst that producer wrote me letters saying I was a scoundrel and a thief!" -- Autant-Lara, quoted by David Bellos in his biography Jacques Tati. As the filmmaker describes his work, he uses the hyperbole and hysteria of the politician.
Plot complications: Sylvie's father (Pierre Larquey, a Clouzot regular: the batty psychatrist in Le corbeau) wants to celebrate her coming of age with one last night of childhood fantasy. He wants the ghost she believes in to appear to her for one night. So he sends for an actor to impersonate the ghost, wearing a Klan-like shroud. Not one but three impersonators show up: an aging ham actor from the agency, a young fellow in love with Sylvie, and a burglar. All three are hired to don the yellowing robes and appear in turn at Sylvie's birthday party, to startle the guests and delight Sylvie. Sylvie will meet and romance both the young swain and the young fugitive from justice, believing them both to be the ghost. It's complicated stuff, young love.
Jealous, the ghost decides to steal the old actor's costume and impersonate himself. At least wearing a sheet he will be visible to Sylvie. Farcical complications pile on top of each other, all worked out with high technical cunning, but as in most French cinema of the pre-New Wave era, there's a tender melancholy underneath, and that's Tati's department. At the end, Sylvie has made her choice and invested her emotions in life and reality. The ghost departs for the heavens, his translucent cocker spaniel barking silently behind him, the astral woodwinds blowing farewell.
It's hard to square this lovely film with Autant-Lara's later, bilious political activities. Giving due credit to screenwriter Jean Aurenche, a legendary figure in French film, as actor (in L'Age D'Or), animator and screenwriter (for Carné and Allegret, and later Tavernier) helps, but Autant-Lara still must be credited with accessing some kind of inner beauty of spirit, not yet extinguished or curdled. A film like this is a small bauble to place in the balance against his later evils, but it will hopefully outlast them.
Sylvie et le
fantôme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
aka: Devil in the Flesh
Le Diable au
corps (1946) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Marthe Grangier, a nurse in a military hospital during the First World War, is pressurised into getting married by her parents. She has a relationship with a much younger man, François Jaubert, but passes him over when she grows tired of his selfishness and immaturity. Instead, she allows herself to be drawn into a loveless marriage with an officer. Some time later, François re-enters Marthe’s life. Now, Marthe cannot resist falling in love with François, although he hardly seems to have changed for the better...
Although Philipe
was technically too old as the boy in this intensely realized adaptation of
Radiguet's classic novel about teenage love, it is impossible to think of
anyone else in the role. Desperately handsome and rather frail (he was to die
aged only 39) Philipe had an almost ethereal quality and a sense of
vulnerability that gave the youngster's memories of his affair with an older
woman (Presle) an overwhelming intensity. The story, told in flashback (she has
died), is set at the end of the Great War, when Radiguet was himself a
teenager. It's told with atmospheric relish by Autant-Lara.
One of the cornerstones of the cinéma de papa so
opportunistically maligned by Truffaut, this solid adaptation (by Aurenche and
Bost) of the Raymond Radiguet novel hasn't lost its power to move. While all
around celebrate the end of the war in 1918, a schoolboy (Philipe) remembers
his impossible affair with an older married woman (Presle), from whose funeral
he is barred. Autant-Lara unfortunately overplays some of his stylistic devices
(such as the slowed-down sound that announces each flashback), but for the main
part he elicits sensitive performances from his leads, and the smoky
photography and sets evoke a unique period atmosphere.
User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
Fact 1:Claude Autant-Lara's mother was a pacifist
activist.She was a thespian of la Comedy Française and she was fired because of
her opinions in WW1.She was even jailed.
When it was released,"le Diable au Corps" caused a
scandal;well-meaning people were saying that the Army ,the Red Cross,the soldiers
and their wives were dragged through the mud.Autant Lara was a rebel at the
time:conformism was not his way ,as such works as "Douce" had already
showed.Raymond Radiguet's novel was tailor made for him.
Gerard Philipe was too old for the part:he was supposed to be 17,and he was
actually born the same year as his co-star Micheline Presles!That's why such
lines as "When you're young,I'll be old" cannot be taken too
seriously by those who know the two French actors.But anyway Philippe's youthful
looks can delude people quite well.
The film is a long flashback,with a prologue ,a scene in the middle of the film
and an epilogue in the present.François attends her lover's funeral
.Autant-Lara ,who was first a film editor ,makes the best of the sound effects
and the fuzziness of the pictures when he introduces the three long
flashbacks.This woman was married to a soldier gone to war.
Lines have warned us before the cast and credits;in brief,this is par
excellence a romantic movie;some scenes are quite remarkable:
-The lovers in front of the fireplace,then boating on the lake where they are
not sheltered from the outside world .
-The landing-stage ,which plays a prominent part in the story:when she
leaves,it may be the last goodbye;the night they pretend they did not come to
the rendezvous (and they both did).
- Marthe's coffin taken out of the church,when the crowd cries out of joy
,rejoices and applauds.Is it to celebrate the Armistice or to the adulteress
'death."Now,it's women's turn to die" a man yells.
FACT2: in the late fifties ,A.L.,who had not yet lost his bite,planned to make
a movie about a burning subject:the contentious objector "Tu ne tueras
Point".Gerard Philippe had agreed to play the lead,but he died before the
movie could begin to be filmed (the censorship was harsh in the Algeria War
years)and was replaced by Laurent Terzieff.
As an user points out,"Le Diable Au Corps" seems to have vanished
into thin air.It has not been screened for years (more than 20 years).Is it
because of the remake?Or like "Tu ne Tueras Point" which was never
broadcast,is the subject still too scandalous?
FACT 3:A.L could never get over the Nouvelle Vague's (and others)attacks and if
my memory serves me well,he gave some of his works to the Swiss government
-"cause there(France) they ignore me,they despise me"-Like an user
wrote,he did support the far right wing circa 1980 till his death.(in spite of
such works as "Le Franciscain de Bourges" (1967) an extraordinary
performance by Hardy Kruger playing a Nazi priest,a saint in a living hell)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
User reviews from imdb
Author: maike-1 from
BC,
In this short film - a sort of character study for the later full length feature 'Jour de Fete', Tati plays a postman who has to operate more efficiently to meet a new schedule. The way in which he tries to speed up his round while still sticking to all the human interactions that come with being a postmen in the - still rural - setting of a small French village in the mid of the 20th century. Tati's physical slapstick is simply delightful. His humour is never rude or degrading to anyone involved but merely wonders about the intricacies of human interaction. He has an incredible talent for showing us what this is *really* about and is disarming in his directness and honesty. Especially the dance sequence in the café brings my mind to a halt every time I see it ... there are no words to really do it justice.
User reviews from imdb Author: tgvittone from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
While I feel that a knowledge of Tati's entire oeuvre would
be necessary to comment appropriately on his genius for physical comedy, this
short is a fine introduction to the hallmarks of his style.
His gift for physical comedy is underscored by an understanding of the nuance
and rhythm of motion, and how it portrays character. Underneath it all is his
unfailing warmth for the beauty and simplicity of the human community -- at
least the community where our familiarity with our neighbors carries the
sweetness and lyricism so lost in the icy excess of the modern...and
post-modern.
The scene where he enters a cafe and dances to jazz music, along with a few
other couples who happen to be in the cafe, is masterful. The postman's joy in
dance, in motion, and, most of all, in the spontaneous, is the stuff of genius.
What's more, it's great entertainment.
You may also marvel and wonder at just how he technically accomplished the
shots of the postman's bicycle riding itself. My opinion is that Tati was a
remarkable artist and the 20th century was graced by his presence beyond its
merit.
Tati did more in less than half an hour here than most film artists will
accomplish in their career.
L’École des
facteurs (1947) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
In his office, the chief postman of a French rural community puts three junior postmen through a course of intensive training. The aim is to reduce the time of their postal round so that they can catch the airmail plane on time. In the classroom, François may be the star pupil, but when he gets back to his daily round, countless obstacles prevent him from succeeding in his mission...
Although massively overshadowed by Jacques Tati's subsequent
works, L’École des facteurs merits consideration as a small comic
masterpiece in its own right. Replete with visual jokes (many of
which are as fresh as funny as they were when the film was made), it ought to
be ranked along side the silent slapstick classics of Charlie Chaplin and Buster
Keaton which clearly influenced Tati in making the film.
Amongst the many unforgettable comic situations, one favourite is the scene where Tati (as François the postman) gets separated from his bicycle and the latter carries on regardless, with the postman running along behind. Tati’s confrontation with a time-wasting level-crossing is equally memorable.
L’École des facteurs was such a success that Tati re-made it the following year as Jour de fête , adding additional material to make this his first full-length film.
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
The Auteurs: Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
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Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
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Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
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Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
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Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
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Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
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REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
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The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
“Here we have the true descendant of the silent movie comedians relying as he does on sight gags. What also emerges is his brilliant use of space—the tiny incident at the corner of the screen—an ability to create characters in a few revealing shots, and his slightly sentimental view of the old French values.” — Holt’s Foreign Film Guide.
First and foremost, there is the music. Tati made a career picking upbeat,
deliriously happy jazz soundtracks for his film, rivaled only perhaps by the
distinctively original orchestrations of Fellini’s Nino
In typical French fashion, François is overwhelmed by the unending offer of free drinks, which is the only acceptable way a Frenchman shows his gratitude. François, unlike Monsieur Hulot who works completely in pantomime, does occasionally speak but expresses a limited vocabulary, mostly reduced to off-handed shrugs and expressions, usually accompanied by huge doses of physical comedy. Tati is a master of the sight gag and this film has no real narrative but is a neverending series of sight gags strung one after the other. While getting drunk, François witnesses in horror as a newsreel shows how the high tech American postal workers have improved their efficiency through upgraded modernization, complete with a fleet of motorcycles, airplanes, and even helicopters to deliver the mail, which are shown along with images of the typically fit American postal worker as represented by poster-like calendar photos of handsome body builders, causing him to never hear the end of it as he is mocked throughout the rest of the film. By the time François realizes he still has mail to deliver, he has already been derogatorily nicknamed “the American.” There’s a hilarious bit where he remains dead drunk riding alone on a country road and he can’t remount his bike, as he continually gets thwarted by a fence that stands between him and his bike. As a matter of French pride, François devises new and improved short cuts to deliver the mail, moving ever faster as he makes his rounds, where villagers sarcastically shout out at him to go go go "Allez allez a l'Americaine," which includes ballet-like dive-bombing techniques on his bicycle as he swerves his way through crowds, avoiding geese and livestock as they’re ambling across the street, but he’s stymied by a railroad crossing gate that confounds him by lifting his bike into the air. At one point, of course, he leans his bike onto a parked car to deliver a letter, only to have the car pull away propelling his bike to continue on its path as if it had a life of its own, swerving around corners, driving through congested city streets, all while poor François is hastily following on foot in futile pursuit.
While the film was initially envisioned to bloom into full blown color once the festival came alive, actually shooting the film with two cameras, one with color film and the other with black and white, there was a problem developing the color film so it was released exclusively in black and white. Tati was allegedly unhappy with this version and tinkered with it later in life, actually re-shooting several scenes where the role of the painter is greatly expanded, magically adding a whirlwind of color to the town, bringing an even more delightful carnival feeling so one might get the impression this would be an event worth waiting for once a year. While a color version has been available since 1995, it should be noted that the color is based on subpar 1949 standards which produces uneven results that might remind viewers of a poor quality Ted Turner colorization. While the holiday is never actually mentioned in the film, the celebratory drinking, the references to national pride, not only in the flying of the flags but also lauding the essential French character against that of the more technology oriented Americans, seems to go hand in hand with Bastille Day, the French version of their own Independence Day. By the end, François has given up his notion to singlehandedly modernize the French postal service and readily takes his place back among the ordinary citizens that comprise the French heartland, a generous, warm hearted man who feels right at home in the lazy rhythms of a sleepy pastoral countryside. The pace of the film resembles awakening from a slumber where the festival is idealized in a highly energized, dreamlike state, only to return back to the slumber when it’s all over.
Every Tati film marks
simultaneously [a] a moment in the work of Jacques Tati; [b] a moment in the
history of French society and French cinema; [c] a moment in film history.
Since 1948, the six films that he has realized are those that have scanned our
history the best. Tati isn't just a rare filmmaker, the author of few films
[all of them good], he's a living point of reference. We all belong to a period
of Tati's cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that stretches
from Mon oncle [1958: the year before the New Wave] to Playtime [1967: the year
before the events of May '68]. There is hardly anyone else but Chaplin who,
since the sound period, has had this privilege, this supreme authority: to be
present even when he isn't filming, and, when he's filming, to be precisely up
to the moment—that is, just a little bit in advance. Tati: a witness first and
last.
—Serge Daney, La rampe [translation by Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Color of Paradise | Jonathan Rosenbaum]
Like Keaton before him, Tati devised
gags of such sheer intricacy as to prove on occasion just too beautiful to be
laughed at (it's no accident that the truly funniest talkies - Fields, the Marx
Brothers - were hardly directed at all). In this, his first feature, reissued
in its original 'splash colour' version (never shown at the time), an almost
plotless tale of a village postman's endeavours to streamline his service à
l'américaine is enhanced by a radiographic vision of rural minutiae which
one might call hyper-realist, were it not for that term's sleek urban
connotations. As for Tati the performer, he makes cycling along a tranquil
country lane as spellbinding as if it were taking place on a high wire.
Among his admirers are Jean Cocteau and François Truffaut; and
Marguerite Duras called Jacques Tati (1908-1982) "perhaps the world's
greatest filmmaker." But few in
Jour de fête (1947), Tati's first film, newly restored in color, is a mild apprentice work for his later near-masterpieces. It's a whimsical tale about a one-day fair in the town square of a small French village. A carnival roustabout, Roger (Guy Decobie), flirts with a local gal whenever his wife turns her head. The town postman, François (Tati), delivers the mail by bicycle.
There's no story at all, just lots of comme ci comme ça visual gags. Tati is pretty funny when, dead drunk, he tries to mount his bicycle from the other side of a fence. He gets funnier when, emulating American mailmen he encounters in a chauvinist US documentary (they deliver letters by dropping from a helicopter), he decides that speed is everything. He races his bicycle, frenzied American-style, until he learns the lesson that slow and French is A-okay. Tati's pre-Monsieur Hulot persona is Charles De Gaulle on wheels, as a lanky, likable country rube.
CriterionForum.org: Jour de fete Blu-ray Review also seen here: Jour de fête - BFI
Jacques Tati's
award-winning feature début - a dazzling blend of satire and slapstick - was
early evidence of his unique talent. Acclaimed by international critics as an
innovative comic masterpiece, Jour de fête is an hilarious exposé of the
modern obsession with speed and efficiency, set amidst the rural surroundings
of a tiny French village.
Tati plays an
appealingly self-deluded buffoon, François - a postman who, impressed by the
bristling efficiency of the U.S. postal system, makes a wholly misguided
attempt to introduce modern methods in the depths of rural France. Initially
released in black and white, but also shot in Thomsoncolor, an untested colour
process, the film has been restored and is finally available in its original
delicate colour.
Jour de fête was shot in the summer of 1947 in the
little town of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre in the Berry region of France, some 200
km south of Paris. The film was an expansion of the 15-minute short, L'Ecole
des facteurs, that Tati had made the previous year, and almost all the gags
in the short are recycled into the longer film. Tati's antics on his wayward
bike are endlessly inventive and the film also serves as an affectionate,
gently mocking tribute to a vanishing way of life. François' brief infatuation
with 'American' methods of speed and efficiency prefigures the satire on
modernity that Tati would go on develop in Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime
(1967).
Jour de fête at first aroused little interest among
French distributors. Not until after its London premiere in March 1949, when it
got good reviews and went on general release, did the French industry sit up
and take notice. It won a prize for 'best scenario' at the Venice Film
Festival, and in 1950 it was awarded the 'Grand Prix du cinéma français'.
5. Jour de fete.
The posthumous processing and editing of Jacques Tati's 1947 first feature
using the original and innovative Thomson-Color process was big news everywhere
in the world--except, apparently, in the offices of Miramax, which distributed
the film belatedly (it opened in France three years ago) and as inconspicuously
as possible. (Miramax gave the same short shrift to the restoration of Jacques
Demy's glorious 1967 musical The Young Girls of Rochefort--my favorite
revival of the year, which like Jour de fete was shown at the Music Box.
So if you're wondering why the national press ignored these two French gems,
ask the Weinstein brothers, the heads of Miramax.) The first color feature shot
in France, Jour de fete is arguably the least of Tati's six features,
but that's like saying Ozu's Equinox Flower doesn't quite equal
Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums. Tati is a key comic
filmmaker in the history of cinema, and regardless of what the Weinsteins
think, none of his features is expendable. Apart from offering an ideal
introduction to his work, Jour de fete paints a definitive, loving, and
beautiful portrait of a remote village in postwar
The precious legacy of Thomson-Color, an experimental process conceived as an artisanal invention, is that it allows us to see what the world looked like in 1947, not simply what color films of 1947 looked like. All of Tati's films are time capsules--a quality they share with Ozu's--as well as encapsulations of the world that invite us to cherish it aesthetically. Even more than Joe Dante, Tati teaches us something about the act of spectatorship, though in Tati's case the subject is how we look at the world, not at movies and TV. Maybe that's because back then we still had the world to look at; Jour de fete reminds us more than a little of what we've lost.
User reviews from imdb Author: JohnHowardReid
The color version is certainly a revelation and much to be
preferred to the murky black-and-white sub-titled print I saw on original
theatrical release. Actually sub-titles are not really necessary at all. Even
born-and-bred Parisians would have difficulty penetrating the heavy provincial
accents of the villagers. Furthermore, much of the dialogue is deliberately
mumbled, slurred or made indecipherable by background noise. The only stretch
of speech that is clearly heard is the narration of the tent movie and its
information could easily be picked up by simply watching the visuals. Even an
ability to understand the old lady (she is supposed to be a native but has an
incongruous Parisian accent) who acts as a narrator to tie the various segments
together is not at all important.
So what we actually have here is pure pantomime that is given added realism by
being filtered through an aural surround. Tati is the perfect clown who makes
the most of a succession of clever gags that are superbly timed and all the
more enjoyable because of their insight into the mores and customs of the
little village. In fact as a revelation of village life with all its
atmosphere, its interplay, its horseplay, its petty quarrels, its come-and-go
tensions, the movie is second to none.
The support characters too have a wonderful part to play in the action, whether
professional players like Frankeur,
The beautiful music score lends further enchantment to the pastel colors of
Tati's immaculately chosen locations.
All told, a little masterpiece and a fitting herald to Tati's best and most
celebrated movie, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953).
User
reviews from imdb Author: robin-414 from
I saw Jour de Fete in a little cinema in 1983, as part of a
double bill with M. Hulot's
Jour de Fete had just been re released, and it was the black and white print
with the hand-painted details that we saw, which I daresay added to the quaint,
playful atmosphere of this film.
Some years later, I saw the restored Thompson-Color version...and I can
understand why some reviewers thought it was computer-coloured, because it has
that look about it - the tones don't enhance textures, they seem to float over
the film, giving it the look of a hand-coloured lobby card; some of the Laurel
and Hardy films, which have been computer-coloured, have the same look - not
entirely objectionable, if you think Laurel and Hardy are funnier in colour.
The duo tones of the restored Tati picture don't hurt it at all, and in fact,
add a fuzzy, dreamlike quality to the entertainment.
However, I have a belief which rails against everything I've heard about this
'restored version'. Everyone seems to think that a black and white version of
the film was shot simultaneously, in the event of the colour process not
working. Having seen both releases, I didn't see enough difference between them
to make me believe that Tati set up two cameras - one for colour, one for black
and white - side by side for every shot. There are production stills in which
we see two cameras side by side, but it's not uncommon for such a set up,
perhaps where there may be different focal requirements for a scene, or so that
shooting can continue without stopping to reload.
I'm convinced Tati was using a two-strip process, a limited colour system
similar to methods that had been used since the 1920s. It would mean that two
strips of black and white negative film, each receiving filtered images would
be combined in the laboratory to create a colour, or limited colour end result.
So, if the system couldn't be processed, one of those strips of film would be
processed in the normal way, and I'm pretty sure that's what would have
happened here. So, I suppose the standby version sort of was shot
simultaneously, but it would seem more straightforward to say that the film
could only be processed in mono.
However, this is just a personal theory, based what I've seen, and bits I know,
and if there is any proof that I'm absolutely wrong, I'll withdraw my comment.
Except the comment that, black and white, or colour, Jour de Fete is one of the
great joys of the cinema. I haven't seen it for almost 10 years, and I need to
see it again soon.
MichaelDVD Region4 [Steve Crawford]
French comic master Jacques Tati co-wrote, directed and starred in Jour de fête. It marked his feature film debut, and is regarded by many critics as a masterpiece.
In 1947, Tati made a short film entitled L'ecole des facteurs (School for Postmen), which featured the character of François, the Postman. It was this character that Tati re-visited and expanded on for the main character in Jour de fête.
The films opens with a fifty four second introduction, explaining the restoration of the film. I will explain more about this later in the review.
The annual travelling carnival is coming to the
Amongst the chaos, François the postman (Jacques Tati) arrives in the village on his daily round, and quickly takes control of erecting the flag pole. The hotel owner (Jacques Beauvais), is trying to secure ribbons to the front of his shop. The barber (Roger Rafal) keeps sticking his nose out the front door to check on progress. And of course, the village ladies are busy putting the finishing touches on their new dresses. The old lady of the village has seen many years of this bedlam, and explains to the audience about these characters. Her experience is so great of this annual event that she can even predict what these people will do in all the confusion.
When Roger (Guy Decomble), the carnival owner arrives, the village children are eager to help set up the carousel, which is the main attraction for the young folk. Of course, this quaint little carnival would not be complete without the sideshows and the cinema tent. These are the attractions for the adults, so it seems.
The cinema is showing a documentary about
The behind-the-scenes story of the film is an interesting one. Jour
de fête was to be
The only reason a film existed at all was through some wise insurance. Jacques Tati actually filmed using two cameras, one using the new colour film and the other using black and white stock. The cameras were placed side by side, and filmed exactly the same scenes. Because the colour film was totally useless at the time, the black and white version was subsequently released in 1949.
In 1964 Tati decided to re-edit, re-mix the sound and hand colour the titles on the film. He also chose to film extra footage, adding another character, that of a painter. This version became the standard, until fairly recently.
In 1995 the film was given a painstaking restoration. This involved using the original colour film where possible, and using computer colourisation techniques for the remaining film. Of interest though are night scenes - they have been left in black and white.
The fact that Tati passed away in 1982 meant this process would have been sacrilege if not for the two people involved. The process was supervised by Tati's daughter, Sophie Tatischeff and cameraman, Francois Ede. Sophie was a respected film editor in her own right, and she had an excellent understanding of her father's use of colour in the film. She also chose to remove the character of the painter to bring the film back to its original concept. (Sophie unfortunately passed away in 2001).
With the 1995 restoration, we now have a version that is as close as we will ever get to the true Jour de fête, as Tati originally intended.
Jacques
Tati: Things Fall Together Criterion essay by David Cairns, November 04,
2014
Jacques
Tati, Historian Criterion essay by
Kristin Ross, October 30, 2014
Jacques
Tati: Composing in Sound and Image Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum,
October 28, 2014
Scatterbrained
Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati Criterion essay by James Quandt, October 27,
2014
Jour de fête (1949) -
The Criterion Collection
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
The
Color of Paradise | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 16, 1998
Jacques Tati – The Restored Collection | 4:3 - Four Three Film Brad Mariano, August 26, 2014
ROSENBAUM ON TATI - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen, January 27, 2010, also seen here: The Evening Class: ROSENBAUM ON TATI
Jour de fête (1948) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Jour de Fête comments on the film with archival photos
The Auteurs:
Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis
NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
Jacques Tati's Jour de fête and Mon Oncle on dual format in October ... CineOutsider
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Roll Film [Borzo /
Strauss]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Alison Dalzell]
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Jour de fete Ray Pride from New City
The
Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
DVDBeaver Per-Olof Strandberg
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
Jacques tati.Jour de fete [1949] YouTube (7:43)
"The best, most genuinely inventive and funny of his films." —Vincent Canby
The pipe-smoking
Hulot takes his backfiring, midget car out of the garage and heads for a
perfect seaside resort, filled with typically rich Americans who are speaking
English, one beautiful girl that Hulot has his eye on, and an elderly woman who
is pleased as punch with Hulot himself.
Reminiscent of the perfect timing of Buster Keaton, with a loose and
unconventional narrative, filled with a satiric characters and a choreography
of black and white images and sight gags, featuring plenty of slapstick, with a
unique use of sound, pacing, editing, and framing, this has a memorable sound
track which was rerecorded in 1961, where irrelevant chatter is consumed by
real sound, particularly some extraordinary upbeat jazz music which can always
be counted on to provide a thrill. But
the real beauty of this film is the fireworks finale, which is simply
breathtaking in its visual splendor as well as its unmistakable hilarity.
Adrian Martin from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
This enduring and endearing classic of French cinema
revealed Jacques Tati, in only his second feature as a director, to be one of
the medium’s most inventive and original stylists. A virtually plotless and
wordless succession of incidents accruing at a beachside resort, the film milks
laughter from the most seemingly banal minutiae of everyday life. Alongside the
elaborately staged events—such as a pack of travelers pacing from one train
platform to the next as incomprehensibly distorted loudspeaker messages
blare—there are many droll, lovely moments where nothing much is happening at
all. People just sit, eat, read, and stare, determined to be in holiday mode at
all times. The stoic silliness of it all is extremely infectious.
Tati understood as finely as Alfred Hitchcock that mise en
scène is not something to be imposed by filmmakers but discovered within the
rituals of everyday life: how close
people sit to each other in a dining room; the codes governing when people are
allowed to look at one another; all the rules of etiquette and public
deportment in play during the free-but-structured time of the French holiday
period—Tati found the inspiration for his comedy in such acute observation.
The film rigorously controls the comic timing, spatial
set-ups, and post-synchronized sounds of its brilliantly conceived gags—even
the oft-repeated noise of a spring door is funny, due to the way Tati
“musicalizes” it. He takes familiar gag forms—like the Keatonesque manner in
which the hero berserkly imitates the movements of an exercise-freak—and then
makes them strange through the way he shoots and cuts the action, often quickly
switching attention to another gag beginning nearby.
Although in his later films Tati deliberately restricted
his own on-screen appearances, here the gangly, awkward figure of his eponymous
Hulot is a major source of charm and hilarity—and there is even the poignant
trace of a tentative but missed love intrigue, forever hesitating before
entering and space, forever apologizing and politely agreeing with everyone
present once he does, Hulot cannot fail to trigger some calamity with his
over-anxious body movements—culminating in the cinema’s most inspired display
of fireworks.
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, directed by Jacques Tati | Film review Geoff Andrew from Time Out
Tati's most consistently enjoyable comedy, a gentle portrait
of the clumsy, well-meaning Hulot on vacation in a provincial seaside resort.
The quiet, delicately observed slapstick here works with far more hits than
misses, although in comparison with, say, Keaton, Tati's cold detachment from
his characters seems to result in a decided lack of insight into human
behaviour. But at least in contrast to later works like Playtime and Traffic,
there's enough dramatic structure to make it more than simply a series of
one-off gags.
The reedy, pipe-smoking Mr. Hulot spends a week's vacation at a slightly battered seaside hotel, where he battles inanimate objects and thinks--long and hard--about flirting with a pretty girl. Jacques Tati's 1953 masterpiece features some of the funniest and loveliest slapstick imaginable, yet it is also a work of impressive formal innovation, casting off the tyranny of a plotline in favor of loosely associated tones, episodes, and images. (Tati would find the visual correlative of this technique in his great 1968 Playtime.) The soundtrack, in which dialogue is subsumed by sound effects, is a masterful piece of musique concrete; Tati rerecorded and embellished it in 1961. In French with subtitles. 86 min.
This 1953 comedy is a pure and original waft of wit and silliness. Jacques Tati invented (as writer-director) and then perfected (as actor) the character of Monsieur Hulot, a pipe-smoking stumbler who's open to any new friendship or experience, especially if it can lead to balletic pratfalls. As one guest among many at a simple seaside resort, Hulot walks through a neatly linked series of events that never quite add up to a real plot--he tries out a folding boat, he tries to dance, he tries not to offend while changing for a swim--and yet an entire story comes together nonetheless. (Think Seinfeld, but without words.) Steve Martin, Rowan Atkinson, and neo-clown Bill Irwin all owe an enormous debt to Tati, as does any director who values a deliberate sense of time, space, and surprise.
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday BFI Screen Online (link lost)
"He is a
'lunaire', Hulot. Someone with his head on the moon." —Jacques Tati, interview with Denis Hart, Daily Telegraph,
Tati's warm-hearted
caricature of the middle-class vacationing is a scrapbook of seaside snapshots
and anecdotes. With the informal charm of a home movie, this is observational
comedy at its laid back finest. The deceptively casual cascade of gags revives
the visual beauty of the silent era. Dialogue is minimal but Tati's sound jokes
are superb. From the babbling station tannoy to the squeaking door of the hotel
dining room, Tati gives inanimate objects a life of their own.
Monsieur Hulot, all
lolloping limbs, pipe and hat, became one of cinema's best-loved characters.
Throwing himself into everything from a tennis match to a fancy dress party,
Hulot is an accident personified. Amiable and courteous, he is a gentle
lunatic, unaware that his enthusiasms are forging a delicious trail of
disaster. A major influence on comedians from Terry Jones to Dom Joly, and
particularly Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean, Tati's legacy remains still strong
today.
Seeing the finished
film's idiosyncratic structure, Tati's financial backers had serious doubts
about its commercial appeal. A rapturous public preview proved them wrong, and
in the summer of 1953, a French general strike kept Parisians in the city
during August while the film played to capacity crowds. A cinematic sea breeze,
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday will revive on even the stickiest summer day.
Les
Vacances de M.Hulot BFI Screen Online (link lost)
The film that brought
Tati international acclaim also launched his on-screen alter ego: the
courteous, well-meaning, eternally accident-prone and much loved Monsieur
Hulot. Les Vacances de M. Hulot, BFI
Video's best-selling Jacques Tati feature film on VHS, is now released for the
first time in the UK on DVD.
Hulot is an
unforgettable character on the screen, walking with a long-legged, bouncy lope,
his body leaning forward at a gravity-defying angle, accentuated by a
tipped-forward hat, a long-stemmed, jutting pipe and trousers a few inches too
short. He only utters one word in the entire film, 'Hulot', communicating by
movement and gesture, with a shy, slightly apologetic smile. He rarely
initiates gags; he reacts. Things happen to him and around him, and half the
time he doesn't even notice the confusion he's caused.
Les Vacances de
M. Hulot is set in a
sleepy French coastal resort which is seasonally disrupted by fun-loving
holidaymakers. At the centre of the chaos is the eccentric Hulot, struggling at
all times to maintain appearances, but somehow entirely divorced from his
immediate surroundings. There is virtually no plot - the film is a series of
incidents, a seamless succession of gently mocking studies of human absurdity.
The pace is utterly relaxed; often very little seems to be happening, but
deftly observed little social rituals and unspoken codes of etiquette are
constantly in play.
The film was shot
during the summer of 1952 at the small Breton seaside resort of
Saint-Marc-sur-mer, chosen for its unspoilt, unmodernised charm. Tati mainly
cast non-professionals, with other actors recruited from the music hall. He
always placed much importance on his soundtrack; once shooting was complete, he
said, 'it remains for me to "re-shoot" each scene, this time not for
the images but for the sound'. Hulot's rickety vehicle, a 1924 Amilcar, and
sound effects such as the 'ba-doingg' made by the swing door into the hotel
dining room almost qualify as characters in their own right.
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
If I had to pick one filmmaker who was most probably an alien from outer space, it would be Jacques Tati. In his movies, people are viewed as the most awkward and absurd creatures imaginable, like weird puppets who are made to dance in arcane, goofy social rituals. The humor is drier than dry - a viewer is just as likely to gape with an open mouth and puzzled expression as he is to laugh.
This film introduced the character of Monsieur Hulot, played by Tati himself - an overly courteous, middle-aged bachelor who walks with a peculiar half-step, smokes a pipe, and acts decisively even though he has no idea what's going on. He goes on holiday to the beach in an odd little car that is constantly backfiring, and we follow him as he interacts with the other vacationers at a seaside hotel. There is no plot. The camera just observes the curious behavior of people "enjoying themselves," often with the accompaniment of an inspid "easy listening" type musical theme.
There are laugh-out-loud moments, as when a collapsible canoe snaps shut over Hulot while he is rowing in it, or when his spare tire gets mistaken for a wreath at a funeral, or the brilliant ending sequence involving a small shed full of fireworks. But more often, Tati simply focuses on little details of daily behavior, with maniacal precision. The exaggerated body language exhibited by the holiday-goers as they play cards, stroll about, or bow to one another in greeting; the punctuating sounds of routine, such as the squeak of the dining room door as it opens and closes (the soundtrack is as full of amusing sound effects as it is almost empty of dialogue); Hulot's hesitant navigation of the simplest physical actions, such as sitting or taking his hat off; all produce the effect of seeing human interaction divested of customary meaning and invested with the ridiculousness of distance. But never, I should note, with contempt; there is no hatred or anger in Tati's universe, only a blind, well-intentioned lunge forward to the next challenge.
When Buster Keaton was asked what he thought of Tati he said, "I don't know what you'd call him. He is just out to be artistic." This, of course, was not meant as praise. Indeed, Tati violated the time-tested rules of comedy. He deliberately ignored the idea of building up to a gag. In Mr. Hulot's Holiday he takes the gags apart, presents set-ups without payoffs, gags without set-ups, deflates the gag before it can build, or does without set-ups or gags altogether, playing with the audience's expectations that there should be some. I think one needs to be in a certain frame of mind in order to really enjoy the film - relaxed, unconcerned with schedules or appointments, and free for the time being of any rancor or resentment, especially towards oneself. Yes, Tati is something of an acquired taste, but well worth the time, if you can spare it.
Les
Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953)
James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Monsieur Hulot sets out for his summer holiday at the peaceful seaside resort of St. Marc-Sur-Mer. No sooner has he arrived, in his trusty old jalopy, than the nightmare of his fellow holiday-makers begins. Oblivious to the chaos and unrest he causes about him, Monsieur Hulot makes the most of his holiday - boating, horse-riding and playing tennis. For some, the holiday from Hell cannot end soon enough...
Having established himself as a director and comic performer
in Jour de fête, Jacques Tati won
international acclaim with his next film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot.
The film won a brace of awards across the globe, not least of which the Prix de
la Critique at
An extraordinary mélange of slapstick comedy (often veering towards the surreal) and visual poetry, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot paints a portrait of French middle-class life which is both charming and cruel. It shows not only Tati’s flair for comedy (which is virtually unsurpassed in French cinema) but also his particular talent for observation. There is so much detail and content in this film that it is impossible to take it all in and appreciate Tati’s genius by watching the film just once. Like all great masterpieces it demands much closer scrutiny to see the skill of the great creative force behind it (the same applies equally to Tati’s subsequent films, notably Mon Oncle and Playtime).
In common with much of Tati’s work, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot has an oblique autobiographical side to it — the film appears to say as much about the observer (i.e. Tati himself) as the observed. On the surface, the film is a cheerful satire on the French bourgeois holiday, principally concerned with mocking well-to-do ladies with their absurd hats and quaint double standards. On closer examination, other facets begin to emerge and the film appears more melancholic more despairing, than comic. Abandoned children become more noticeable, Hulot appears a much more solitary individual, and even that funny English lady takes on a tragic dimension. It would be stretching it perhaps to say that Tati intended this film to be about the suffering of the human soul, but inescapable loneliness is a recurring theme. The soundtrack is strangely divorced from the images, giving the film an odd dream-like, existentialist feel. It is as if the film were being seen in retrospect, from a distance, perhaps by Hurlot recalling the happier times in his life, or by Martians making a study of life on Earth with some powerful telescope..?
Whatever Tati’s intentions, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot is a remarkable and hugely original piece of cinema, quite different to anything else at the time and since. The seemingly endless stream of visual jokes are brilliantly realised and have a timeless quality which ensure that the film will continue to entertain future generations. And for those who want to go beyond the veneer of comic routines and perhaps divine something of Tati’s inner soul, this singular cinematic postcard has a great deal more to offer.
Jacques
Tati: Things Fall Together Criterion essay by David Cairns, November 04,
2014
Jacques
Tati, Historian Criterion essay by
Kristin Ross, October 30, 2014
Jacques
Tati: Composing in Sound and Image Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum,
October 28, 2014
Scatterbrained
Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati Criterion essay by James Quandt, October 27,
2014
Monsieur
Hulot's Holiday (1953) - The Criterion Collection
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
Jacques
Tati: Last Bastion of Innocence • Senses of Cinema Pedro Blas Gonzalez, October 20, 2005
Images - Jacques Tati: M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle David Ng, also reviewing MON ONCLE
Jacques Tati – The Restored Collection | 4:3 - Four Three Film Brad Mariano, August 26, 2014
ROSENBAUM ON TATI - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen, January 27, 2010, also seen here: The Evening Class: ROSENBAUM ON TATI
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
filmcritic.com takes a Holiday Jake Euker
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
Mr. Hulot's Holiday on the making of the film through comments and archival photos
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson also reviews MON ONCLE and PLAYTIME
The Auteurs: Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]
M. Hulot's alter ego Derek Malcolm from the Guardian, May 17, 1971
Fun
and games with Monsieur Hulot Emilie
Bickerton from The Guardian,
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times also seen here: Newspaper
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
Read
the New York Times Review » Bosley
Crowther, also seen here: Movie
Review - - The Screen in Review; French Satirical Film Opens ...
The Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
YouTube - Jacques tati. les vacances de M Hulot (restaurant) (5:34)
MON ONCLE B 89
France Italy (117 mi) 1958
“Hulot's
second screen appearance was enough to put him among the immortals.”
— Holt’s Foreign Film Guide
The modernization
of Mr Hulot, featuring an ultra-modern apartment that resembles the world of
Wallace and Gromit, where everything, with the push of a button, takes on a
life of its own, similar to Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES. There’s a wonderful choreography of bit after
bit, all very funny, where Hulot is the happy-go-lucky uncle of the kid in the
house whose parents pretty much gag his imagination, so Hulot, offering an
alternative to the seriousness of the modern world, takes him on adventures
where he can just be a kid at play.
There’s an inventive repeated gag routine with the gurgling fish
fountain that begins to look like a Marx Brothers routine. While the overall story seems mostly silly,
there’s a lot to like here with plenty of laughs, where the kids are much
funnier than the stodgy adults, and perhaps it goes on a bit too long, but it’s
well worth the highly original and eccentric journey.
Philip Kemp from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
In his first two features, The Big Day (1948) and Mr.
Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Jacques Tati lovingly celebrated the charms of the
provincial, random, and dilapidated. In My
Uncle, he directs his satire against the mania for mechanization that
threatens those easygoing old ways of life.
Tati’s perennial screen persona, the gangling,
near-wordless Monsieur Hulot, lives in a rickety old quartier of
As always with Tati, the humor is almost entirely
visual—and aural. Few comedians have made such creative use of the soundtrack,
and the clickings, buzzings, hissings, and sputterings of the Arpels’s assorted
gizmos and of the machinery in the factory where Arpel ill-advisedly gives his
brother-in-law a job, often reach a pitch of controlled lunacy. Tati takes
mischievous delight in showing how automation, supposedly designed to improve
the quality of life, works against comfort, relaxation, and pleasure. But the human
element, represented by the walking disaster area that is Hulot, can never be
excluded. There is a melancholy undertow to My
Uncle—pneumatic drills rattle ominously over the credits—but a wistful
optimism too.
Tati's first film
in colour. Yes, his contrast of the glorious awfulness of the Arpels' automated
Modernistic house with Hulot's disordered Bohemianism is simplistic. Yes, Hulot
as champion of the individual is oddly de-personalised. And one might even
conclude that Tati is a closet misanthrope. Such text-book reservations come
and go as this extraordinary film meanders like the Arpels' concrete garden
path. But while some episodes are protracted, many are unforgettably funny,
wonderfully observed, and always technically brilliant. Insane gadgets slam and
roar, high heels click like metronomes, and even a depressed dachshund in a
tartan overcoat obligingly submits to Tati's meticulous direction.
Mon Oncle BFI Screen Online (link lost)
Jacques Tati's
multi-award-winning third feature, Mon Oncle - a satirical assault on
the twin targets of efficiency and the modern world - confirmed his reputation
as the foremost comic artist of his day. Mon Oncle was a major hit,
picking up a string of awards, including the Prix spécial du jury at
Cannes, the New York Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Film, and the 1959
Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Tati's second outing
as the accident-prone Monsieur Hulot takes him to Paris where the aggressively
high-tech lifestyle of his relatives, the Arpels, is contrasted with his old-fashioned
ways in a scruffy part of town. Young Gérard Arpel is very fond of his gauche
uncle but his disapproving parents resolve to get Hulot a job or a wife. The
disastrous outcome is a masterpiece of design and symmetry and of technically
brilliant gags. The heart-warming ending is true to Tati's vision of the modern
world as a confusing place that is ultimately full of charm and humanity.
Mon Oncle was shot between September 1956 and
February 1957 at three different locations. The old Parisian suburb of
Saint-Maur served for 'le vieux quartier', where Hulot's wonderfully ramshackle
house was built into the town's main square. The Arpels' modernistic dwelling
was constructed at the Victorine studios in Nice, and the wasteland between the
two was shot at Créteil, a few miles outside Paris, where a new town was about
to be built.
Looking to the
international market, and wishing to avoid subtitles (which he always
disliked), Tati shot two versions of the film - Mon Oncle and My
Uncle, the latter with signs like 'ECOLE' and 'SORTIE' replaced with their
English equivalents and much of the main dialogue dubbed into English, but with
some characters speaking French.
filmcritic.com
Jake Euker
We always hold it against the French that they love Jerry
Lewis -- it's a valid complaint -- but their taste in homegrown screen
comedians is light years better than their taste in imports, and their favorite
there has always been Jacques Tati. In his best movies, Tati played a character
named Monsieur Hulot, an awkward, likable bachelor invariably attired in a
sporty hat and trenchcoat, who clenched a pipe in his teeth at all times and
took an interest in anyone or anything that passed his way. For Tati, Hulot
embodied all that was warm and human in his homeland: he frequented the kind of
small café that Paris is famous for, bought food from vegetable carts, lived in
a Mansard-roofed walk-up, and knew all his neighbors and all his neighbors'
pets. In Hulot's
But in 1958 there was another kind of
And the details are killingly funny. We find the boy's home, for example, a
stylized fish fountain in the courtyard that sputters to life only when guests
are present, fashionable aluminum and plastic chairs that all but fail to function
as a place to sit, and a kitchen full of buzzers and mysterious appliances that
is truly wondrous to behold. The richest of the film's humor comes from
watching the homeowners bravely trying to actually live amid this hostile
modernity. One running joke involves a pair of round windows that transform the
house's exterior into a robot face at night, the couple appearing in them like
pupils in its eyes.
The antithesis to this is, of course, M. Hulot's world of warmth and humanity.
In a subplot, Hulot applies for a job at the plastics plant where his
brother-in-law works in management, and the results are predictably
catastrophic. But in contrast to today's frantic comedy, the chaos in Mon
Oncle is characteristically subdued; it is among Tati's gifts that his gags
are often so subtle as to threaten to get away unnoticed.
Mon Oncle picked up the 1959 Oscar for best foreign language film, and
it shines as bright as ever on the new Criterion DVD release. The DVD also
features Tati's 1947 short film L'école des facteurs, in which a rural
postman encounters similar problems with modernization, and an engaging video
introduction by actor Terry Jones.
Mon oncle (1958) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Monsieur Hulot rents a modest rooftop apartment in an old
part of
Five years after Les Vacances de Monsier Hulot proved
a major critical success, Jacques Tati and Monsieur Hulot returned to cinema
screens across the world in Mon Oncle, a film which proved to be one of
the cinematic highlights of 1958. As with Tati’s previous film, Mon
Oncle delighted the critics and was a commercial success. The film
won not just the Special Jury Prize at
In a similar vein to René Clair’s À nous la liberté and Chaplin’s Modern Times, Mon Oncle is primarily a satire on the dehumanising effect of technology on society and family life. Monsieur Hulot and the Arpel family represent two opposite extremes of the social spectrum - Hulot, the unemployed working class man, symbolises the past, the Arpels, the epitome of nouveau-riche bourgeoisie, representing the future. Yet it becomes clear that both are ill at ease with the new technology which has entered their lives. Hulot manages to bring a factory to a virtual standstill in a matter of minutes, whilst the Arpels easily get themselves locked up in their own garage and have to rely on their maid to rescue them. The moral is that technology has its place but there is a point at which such progress becomes more of a burden than an benefit to mankind. Technology for its own sake (such as the fully automated kitchen which resembles a dentist’s surgery) is a sterile, meaningless development, its main function being to allow you to impress your neighbours. Of course, human nature being what it is, once the technological genie is out of the bottle there is no going back. Playtime , Tati's next film, pursues some of these ideas further and paints a somewhat more worrying vision of technological progress.
Mon Oncle features some of Tati’s best visual jokes - such as the house-proud wife constantly switching on and off her ornamental garden fountain whenever a guest arrives, and the high jinks at the plastics factory, where Hulot manages to get a machine to produce plastic pipes in the shape of strings of sausages. As in many of Tati’s films, contrasts are made between children (whom Tati most closely seems to identify with) an adults (who are usually portrayed as idiots). The artificial pomposity of the Arpels is ridiculed whereas the natural rebelliousness of the young boys is glorified. This suggests a parable of innocence in which the children, who have yet to succumb to the charms of technology are shown to be wiser than adults who, for reasons of greed or vanity, have made technology their god. That Hulot seems to get on better with children (and stray dogs) only serves to underline this simple message.
Not only is Mon Oncle an a greatly entertaining piece of cinema, it is also frighteningly prophetic. Forty years on, the charming world inhabited by Monsieur Hulot has all but disappeared and, to a greater or lesser extent, we have all ended up slaves of technology, much of which is of dubious benefit. To this audience, watching Mon Oncle can be a poignant experience. As we laugh at the exploits of Monsieur Hulot and his inability to adapt to a changing world, we see something of ourselves and perhaps nurture a secret yearning to return to a simpler, less technologically orientated way of life.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
As the second installment in the Hulot series, Mon Oncle is a
much different, and in my opinion far more advanced piece of filmmaking. Where
Tati takes us on a nostalgic look at the past in M. Hulot's
We are soon introduced to Hulot's sister's family, the Arpels. Living behind an
iron gate in a futuristic dream home, she keeps the place fastidiously clean
and orderly. The yard is sectioned into multicolored rock beds and lawns, with
concrete step stones and a winding pathway to the front gate, which passes by
an ungodly fountain meant to impress visitors. The inside is sparse, yet
decidedly functional; the kitchen is brimming with modern gadgetry. M. Hulot,
on the other hand, lives in the old part of town, where horse-drawn carriages
can still be found, and we see his arrival home as he makes his way up the
stairways, glimpsed through the many windows and openings in the multistory apartment
building where he lives. Like his sister, he has a sense of order, as evidenced
by his replacing a brick from the crumbling ruins of a wall; yet, depite his
attempts to conform, Hulot does not fit into the new world order. He is pegged
for a job at his brother-in-law's plastics factory by M. Arpel, who feels Hulot
needs a respectable position to fit with their social status, and partly to
overcome his jealousy over Hulot's childish rapport with Arpel's son. Hulot
obliges, but a mishap while going to the interview causes a fatal
misunderstanding, one of many throughout the film. To me, the plot here is far
less important than the exposé on the characters that populate it: the uptight,
increasingly modern and materialistic sister's family and social circle, and
the bumbling, yet honest Hulot, who delights in more simple pleasures, like the
singing of his neighbor's bird, or spending time playing with his nephew, or
conversing with the locals on the street.
Tati's powers of observation are brilliant: the street sweeper who never
sweeps, the appearances of social status evidenced in Hulot's sister's
ultramodern, yet sterile house full of gadgetry, and of course the fish
fountain that only gets used when trying to impress important guests. As is the
case with M. Hulot's
Before I had seen any of Tati's work, I had seen references to earlier
comedians like Keaton or Chaplin, though, from my albeit limited exposure to
both, the connection is not that clear, since, other than that all three are
brilliant at what they do, to me, these older artists excel more at playing the
buffoon, a style I often find overdone, and not all that funny. Tati, on the
other hand, reminds me more of the later Peter Sellers (probably due to Tati's
influence), especially his Clouseau roles, where he constantly, yet unwittingly
causes havoc, with a much more innocent and natural, though clumsy, style. I
find this more understated (though ocassionally over-the-top) performance much
more appealing, personally.
I also love the use of color throughout this film, as those "modern"
steel grey and blue 1950s palettes are wonderfully captured, juxtaposed against
the browns and greens of vacant lots and decaying leftovers from pre-war
society. As we see throughout Mon Oncle, the old is being removed for the sake
of the new. Tati's take on this modernized world leaves one with the impression
that he hasn't much favor for it, as its inhabitants are more often than not
restrained by their technology. Unlike Hulot's carefree strolling through the
old neighborhoods, idly gossiping with the inhabitants, his sister has to put
on a show for her neighbors, with some hilarious consequences.
Jacques
Tati: Things Fall Together Criterion essay by David Cairns, November 04,
2014
Jacques
Tati, Historian Criterion essay by
Kristin Ross, October 30, 2014
Jacques
Tati: Composing in Sound and Image Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum,
October 28, 2014
Scatterbrained
Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati Criterion essay by James Quandt, October 27,
2014
Mon oncle Criterion essay by Matt Zoller Seitz, January
05, 2004
Mon oncle Criterion essay by Alan Rich, July 01, 1990
APRIL IN
TATIVILLE Criterion essay by
Alexandre Mabilon, April 22, 2009
On
the Channel: Happy Black Friday Criterion essay by Michael Sragow, November
25, 2016
Mon oncle (1958) - The
Criterion Collection
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
Mon Oncle on DVD – Offscreen Donato Totaro from Offscreen, November 2001
Mon Oncle: Tati,
Bergson and Cinematic Comedy – Offscreen
David Addelman, January 2013
Images - Jacques Tati: M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle David Ng, also reviewing MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY
Jacques
Tati – The Restored Collection | 4:3 - Four Three Film Brad Mariano, August 26, 2014
The Auteurs:
Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis
NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
Jacques Tati's Jour de fête and Mon Oncle on dual format in October ... CineOutsider
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson also
reviews MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY and PLAYTIME
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Mon Oncle comments on the film with archival photos
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
DearCinema Ankur Agarwal
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page
VideoVista Alan Garside
Film Intuition Jen Johans
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
Screen: Tati's Look at Modern Life; 'My Uncle' - The New York Times Bosley Crowther
CRITIC'S CHOICE; In
English, Tati Confronts Modern Times
Dave Kehr from the New York Times,
June 20, 2005
The Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
PLAYTIME
Ethan de Selfe from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Playtime
is less a film than one man’s successful attempt to encourage us to see with
new eyes. Indeed, director Jacques Tati’s timeless masterpiece is concerned,
from start to finish, with imbuing the viewer with a totally new set of sensory
experiences. Like no other movie, Playtime has the power to make us question
our very faculties of ears and eyes.
Known for years as the bumbling Monsieur Hulot in such
great works as Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
(1953) and My Uncle (1958), Tati was
far more than a clown, though he played that role with aplomb. Tati’s comic
work is a bridge between silent and sound film, between vaudeville and the
modern era. But it is for his visual sensibilities that he is best remembered. The
gags in his films aren’t really gags at all, but odd little moments that add up
to an overall tone of a world being slightly askew. When there are enough such
moments—and they are crammed into literally every corner of Playtime’s unbelievably dense mise en
scène—we begin to realize that they are not there to make us laugh so much as
to make us consider our roles as viewers.
Playtime
takes place in a cold, clinical version of a futuristic city, and the fiercely
rectilinear sets were built from the ground up, at great expense. Playtime was an immensely costly
film—not the least because it was shot in 70mm—and its box-office returns were
miniscule, which kept Tati in hock for a decade after its release. “Tativille”
is one of the great achievements of set design—or of megalomania, depending on
your perspective. The set had its own roads, electrical systems, and one of the
office buildings even had a working elevator. And not since the days of German
Expressionism had a director achieved so much with forced perspective: Carefully building to scale in order to make
something look much farther away than it is.
The world of Tativille is clinical, harsh, and sterile, but
Hulot, who wanders through it all with bemused attachment, occasionally finds
little patches of organic matter. He finds a flower vendor, for example, who
brings a little color to this gray city; and Hulot alone is able to make sense
of the bizarrely designed streetlights by likening their shape to that of a
tiny bouquet. Playtime has much to say
about clinical modernity impinging upon older, more earthy ways of life. On one
level, the film is about how modern city living has the potential to crush any
shred of individuality one may still possess.
Playtime’s
elaborate visual jokes are far, far too numerous to recount here. Suffice it to
say that almost every single object of modern existence—televisions, cars,
supermarkets, airports, vacuum cleaners—is given new life and new form here as
comic object.
All the patterns in Playtime
come to a head in the incredible restaurant scene, which lasts 45 minutes and
which is so visually and sonically dense that repeated viewings are absolutely
essential. But repeated viewings are simply more occasions for pleasure. No
films offers so rich a viewing experience as Playtime.
Tati's Hulot on
the loose in a surreal, scarcely recognisable Paris, tangling intermittently
with a troop of nice American matrons on a 24-hour trip. Not so much a saga of
the individual against an increasingly dehumanised decor, it's more a
semi-celebratory symphony to Tati's sensational city-set, all reflections and
rectangles, steel, chrome, gleaming sheet metal and trompe l'oeil plate
glass. Shot in colour that looks almost like monochrome, recorded in five-track
stereo sound with scarcely a word of speech (the mysterious language of objects
echoes louder than words), this jewel of Tati's career is a hallucinatory comic
vision on the verge of abstraction.
Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)
The most visually inventive film of the 60s is also one of the funniest. For this remarkable 1967 comedy about man and his modern world, Jacques Tati attempted nothing less than a complete reworking of the conventional notions of montage and, amazingly, he succeeded. Instead of cutting within scenes, Tati creates comic tableaux of such detail that, as film scholar Noel Burch has said, the film has to be seen not only several times, but from several different points in the theater to be appreciated fully. Within the film's three large movements, Tati's M. Hulot goes from fear of his ultramodern, glass-towered environment to a poetic transcendence of it. A masterpiece among masterpieces, and certainly the last word on Mies van der Rohe. In French with subtitles. 108 min.
User Reviews from imdb Author: Zach Campbell (rashomon82@hotmail.com) from Burke, Virginia, USA
The only other movie I know that is as profound and beautiful and
challenging as this is Tarkovsky's "Stalker." But
"Playtime" may prove to be a better, more accessible example of what
films can do. Tati so radically deconstructs space and depth within a film that
it is almost unrecognisable: Spielberg doesn't have this level of
craftsmanship, and not even Kubrick ever did. Virtually dialogue-free and spryly
paced, "Playtime" works on nearly any possible level.
It can be seen as simply a superficial comedy, and as that, it succeeds because
it is, well, very funny. (Modern technology is the golden cow that Tati
playfully cuts down to size.) On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, is
a work that stands the art of film on its head, commenting wryly on the nature
of human beings, culminating to a party in a restaurant that gets completely
out of hand. It's so beautiful.
Words really don't do justice to this movie. One last thing: The big screen is
the ideal medium to see this film; that's true of every film, but this one more
than most others. Unfortunately, I haven't had this privelege, and if you don't
either, rent it anyway. It's too good to be missed.
User Reviews from imdb Author: jonathan-577 from Canada
And so I fall even deeper in love with Jacques Tati. And I had the temerity to refer to Jour de Fete as "teeming with life"!! This movie is just towering. Keaton never went bankrupt giving nine years of his life to a single two-hour declaration of frivolity; Chaplin was never so confident of his moral stance that he could just stand aside and happily let it shine. It must have five hundred characters in it - not actors, not parts - characters, each one articulated, each one given their proud moment in the celebration. Tati thinks human beings are so marvelous that they can even survive the supreme indignity of modernist architecture, lost together in the confoundingly intricate mini-city he built to describe modern Paris (and beyond). Underscored by the dozen or so doppelgangers who drift through, Tati's M. Hulot is just another good-natured bungler flowing along in an incomprehensible sea of bodies - so lively that you'd have to watch it a dozen times to catch everything, so vast that it would be totally incomprehensible on television. The two hours don't fly by, but by the time we arrive at the cacophonous dinner scene to end all dinner scenes, we never want it to end. It makes "The Party" look like "My Dinner With Andre." And instead of winding things down after that forty-five-minute epiphany, we are treated to another one! Grandma Kay was right about Tati, and bless TIFF's heart for ending their summer calendar with this one. This, my friends, is a MOVIE.
All Movie Guide [Elbert Ventura]
A miraculous achievement by any stretch of the imagination, Playtime
was the movie that both sank Jacques Tati's
career and cemented his critical reputation. Famously fastidious and exercising
complete creative control (only Robert Bresson
among contemporary French directors had as much authority over his projects), Tati
spent nearly a decade between his previous feature, Mon Oncle,
and this folly of a movie. Set in a hysterically hyperbolic modernized
Playtime | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader – Note, this is the only film where IMDb lists Jonathan Rosenbaum in the movie credits (Though not listed, he has also been credited in Wikipedia Jonathan Rosenbaum (film critic) as an extra in Robert Bresson’s FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER [1971])
My all-time favorite movie, this 1967 French comedy by actor-director Jacques Tati almost certainly has the most intricately designed mise en scene in all of cinema. Dave Kehr had it right: “Tati attempted nothing less than a complete reworking of the conventional notions of montage and, amazingly, he succeeded. Instead of cutting within scenes, Tati creates comic tableaux of such detail that, as Noel Burch has said, the film has to be seen not only several times, but from several different points in the theater to be appreciated fully. Within the film’s three large movements, Tati’s M. Hulot goes from fear of his ultramodern, glass-towered environment to a poetic transcendence of it.” This restored 70-millimeter version, with four-track DTS sound, expands the possibilities of becoming creatively lost in Tati’s vast frames and then finding one’s way again. His studio-constructed vision of Paris begins in daytime with nightmarishly regimented straight lines and right angles and proceeds to night with accidental yet celebratory curves of people instinctively coming together. It peaks in an extraordinary sequence, set in a gradually disintegrating restaurant that comprises almost half the film: once various musicians start to perform, the viewer’s gaze inevitably follows the customers in a kind of improvised dance, collecting and juxtaposing simultaneous comic events and details. Even after all these years the film still teaches me how to live in cities–specifically, how to read disconnected visual and aural signals in clusters that are counterbalanced and comically orchestrated. In this alienating landscape everyone is a tourist, but Tati suggests that once we can find one another, we all belong. In English, French, and German, without subtitles–but you won’t need them.
Jacques Tati's psycho-geographical treatise par excellence, PLAYTIME, begins in a pedagogical mode: for the first hour, working entirely in and around a multimillion-dollar parody of contemporary skyscrapers constructed in the outskirts of Paris, he teaches the viewer a new way to watch a film. The primary use of long shots and deep focus suggests a Bazinian spectatorial freedom, but the meticulously dubbed, panlingual audio is constantly in close-up: from the cacophony of American tourists to the analog buzzing of an office intercom, from the crash of Mr. Hulot's umbrella to the comic deformation of a squeaky leather chair. By the time we reach a long sequence set outside an apartment with soundproof glass, we have learned that the ear can lead the eye as often as the reverse. And none too soon, for the next 40 minutes--detailing the opening night of the posh "Royal Garden" restaurant and its progressively chaotic, visually and aurally exhausting demolition at the unconscious hands of a repressed, consuming tourist society--is what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls "one of the most staggering accomplishments on film." Here, Tati inscribes an intricate, painterly progression on his enormous canvas: from a restrictive, rigid grammar of straight lines and orthogonal angles to the continuous sweeps of French curves, expressed most directly in the movement of his characters' bodies--progressively intoxicated and compelled not just by alcohol and the increasingly frantic music but by an inevitable collective camaraderie--as they travel through an overplanned and overheating environment that, in a series of destructive sight gags, has lost its organizational power to constrain human desire. Once a disastrous critical flop, PLAYTIME is an odd and striking masterpiece of urban studies that absolutely must be seen on the big screen.
Playtime BFI
Screen Online (link lost)
Playtime, the first of four newly restored Jacques
Tati films to be released on DVD by BFI Video this year, is a surreal, comic
vision of mankind's battle against the overwhelming depersonalisation of modern
life. Tati stars as the hapless Hulot, ambling through the massive metropolis
specially constructed for the film. Playtime was his most ambitious work
and is regarded by many as his masterpiece.
Three years in the
making, the film involved the construction, on the southeast outskirts of
Paris, of a vast, futuristic set covering six acres - dubbed Tativille by the
press, and much visited by tourists. Tati gently pokes fun at modern
architecture, package tourism, and the self-defeating rituals of impersonal
bureaucracy. He shows fascination with people's choreographed movements as they
negotiate the modernist labyrinth, revealing unlooked-for lyricism within the
most sterile of surroundings.
In the film's second
half, his camera watches with evident delight as a pretentious, newly opened
restaurant gradually disintegrates, and a small informal bistro magically
creates itself out of the shattered elements.
Playtime was ahead of its time in its radical
approach. There are virtually no plot-lines and no invitation to identify with
the characters. Instead, the film is multi-layered with sight and sound gags.
Jokes unfold in various parts of the frame simultaneously and the soundtrack -
a meticulously composed cacophony of footsteps, gibberish and lounge music -
only adds to the absurdity.
Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled
This time, the props go to Zach and Jaime for bringing this one to my attention (though, if you’re looking, there are as many people praising Playtime as one of film’s greatest experimental triumphs as there are cast members in the film itself, including Rosenbaum). For those who aren’t familiar with this one, it’s a 1967 French comedy by director/actor/contortionist Jacques Tati, and at it’s very core it’s an extremely democratic comedic romp (again, Rosenbaum’s designation). By “democratic,” he means that it is a film about “the people” as opposed to “the individual.” There isn’t a single close-up shot in the whole film; they’re all long shots of Paris crowds — the flowergirls, the travel agents, the doormen, the families, the drunks, and also the flocks of American tourists. It’s invigorating in ways that most other movies aren’t even within earshot of because, since you are in charge of where you want your focus to go amongst the rich frames of people, you truly feel like you’re a participant in the film. When a waiter at a mod restaurant rips his pants on a sharp chairback, the entire group of people within the shot fix their gaze on the same place that your own eyes are drawn to, and the effect is supremely generous. You get what you give, but Tati gives so much in addition, as there are indeed conventional comedic “gags” in the mix too — my personal favorites include the rippling-effect that a jet of air-conditioning has on an old woman’s exposed back, and the non-adventures of the world’s most self-centered, preening waiter. In many ways, the film achieves the heightening effect that De Palma’s split-screens do; only here there aren’t two rigid halves on the screen, there are hundreds of criss-crossing “virtual” split screens that even go so far as into the third dimension (not literally, but background and foreground are of equal importance in Playtime). When Tati isn’t heightening one’s senses with clean, exciting logistics, he’s tickling our fancy with light fantasy (such as the final, one-for-the-ages scene involving a simply enchanting traffic jam). Tati the actor (he plays the bumbling Hulot in this and many of his other films) is both graceful and unpredictable. Playtime offers up concrete proof that Tati the director is also graceful and unpredictable… and in a class all his own.
The Village Voice [Elliott Stein]
His first three features made it clear that Jacques Tati was the pre-eminent European director-comedian of the sound era. As a performer, Tati has been compared to the great silent clowns Buster Keaton and Max Linder, although he's basically an isolated eccentric. It might be more useful to consider Tati the director in the company of modernist control-freak auteurs Bresson and Antonioni, who didn't make comedies but created their own worlds.
Tati's signature comic character ambled into movies with Monsieur
Hulot's Holiday (1953), his second film. Tall, awkward, blank-faced Hulot
is an endearingly clumsy everyman whose incompetence is preferable to the
inhuman competence of the modern world. Tati's fourth feature and boldest
experiment, the visionary Playtime (1967) was nearly three years in
production. Its big budget included the cost of building vast glass and steel
sets that represented the director's jaundiced view of modern
Playtime has the tiniest plot ever filmed in 70mm. Hulot
wanders in and out of the action at random. After following a group of American
tourists who have been herded through the antiseptic new quarters of
"Tativille" was kept standing for a while, and like the immense Babylon set from Griffith's Intolerance that was visible from all over Los Angeles, it became a tourist attraction. Tati wanted the buildings preserved for use by young filmmakers, but as in a scene from one of his films, they were torn down to make room for a highway.
Jacques
Tati: Things Fall Together Criterion essay by David Cairns, November 04,
2014
Jacques
Tati, Historian Criterion essay by
Kristin Ross, October 30, 2014
Jacques
Tati: Composing in Sound and Image Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum,
October 28, 2014
Scatterbrained
Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati Criterion essay by James Quandt, October 27,
2014
Playtime: Things Fall Apart,
Beautifully Criterion essay by
David Cairns, December 02, 2010
The
Dance of Playtime Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, August
18, 2009
Playtime Criterion essay by Kent Jones, June 03, 2001
APRIL IN
TATIVILLE Criterion essay by
Alexandre Mabilon, April 22, 2009
PlayTime (1967) - The
Criterion Collection
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
Jacques Tati: Last Bastion of Innocence • Senses of Cinema Pedro Blas Gonzalez, October 20, 2005
Alice
Rawsthorn on Jacques Tati's Playtime | DisegnoDaily Alice Rawsthorn, June 4, 2015
Lines and Circles [PLAYTIME and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from Moving Image Source, December 3, 2010
Critic After Dark Noel Vera, on comparing the film to Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Jacques Tati – The Restored Collection | 4:3 - Four Three Film Brad Mariano, August 26, 2014
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
Playtime (1967) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
filmjourney.org [Doug Cummings]
Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages [Laura Sinagra]
not coming to a theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
The Cinematographic Brilliance of Jacques Tati | Gorilla Film Online Louie Freeman-Bassett, January 14, 2016
Play Time (1967) by Jacques Tati - A Comedy Film about Modernist ... John Engelen from Dedece Blog, November 11, 2014
ROSENBAUM ON
TATI - ScreenAnarchy Michael
Guillen, January 27, 2010, also seen here:
The
Evening Class: ROSENBAUM ON TATI
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
digitallyOBSESSED! [Jeff Ulmer] (2006)
Playtime
(Tati, 1967) Derek Smith from Cinematic Reflections
Movie Gazette DVD review [Anton Bitel]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The Auteurs: Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
CineScene.com [Pat Padua] (capsule review)
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale, who is shocked, appalled, and stupefied that it has remained a beloved classic all these years
DVD
Savant Review Glenn Erickson also
reviews Mr. HULOT’S
Playtime comments on the film with archival photos, also seen here: delboy.com
archined.nl Tati
at the Nai, an artistic look at the influence of architecture on Tati
films,
Playtime bits The reconstruction of the 70mm print of
"Play Time" by Jerome Deschamps from 70 mm News,
Details about distribution, the 2003 70mm restoration and historical data The Restoration of Playtime, by Jean-Rene Faillot from 70 mm News, April 18, 2004
architecture.uwaterloo.ca Architectural discussion questions based on Tati’s film PLAYTIME, Fall 2004
architecture.uwaterloo.ca More architectural discussion, Fall 2007
Event Details: Doc Films: Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati) Triple Bill from Girlish, November 10, 2006
Jacques Tati's Playtime: life-affirming comedy | Film | The Guardian Jonathan Romney, October 24, 2014
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
Movie Review - - PLAYTIME - NYTimes.com - The New York Times Vincent Canby
The Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
EVENING CLASSES (Cours du
soir)
User reviews from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN
Cours du soir is a sometimes funny Tati short, but it's own format harms it quite a bit. The film is of Tati teaching a night class how to mime as he does. It's not too funny watching Tati mime in front of a class. The tennis and horse riding bits are sort of lame. The postmen skit was done much better in the earlier short School for Postmen. The only really good thing in the film is his fisherman sketch. Otherwise, it's not too great. Nice to watch if you are a Tati fan. 6/10.
User reviews from imdb Author: gerritschroder from Help, I've been mugged
Tati made this film during the course of filming Playtime.
This must have been the price he paid the devil for the miracle he performed in
the longer movie. Here, he teaches a wordless course in mime for an audience of
attentive note-takers. I became catatonic early on in this eternal twenty
minutes of torture (really, I haven't been this far in Hell since I took 4
grams of mushrooms in 78). Tati is a fisherman, a horseback rider, a tennis
player, etc., observing every boring nuance that would make anyone wonder why a
kind human being would want to perform such quotidian behavior before a
still-living audience.
Even worse than Parade.
Tati's one of my top three directors. Don't watch this.
Cours du soir (1967) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Jacques Tati gives a lesson in the art of comedy to a class of would-be actors. Having explained the importance of observation (which he illustrates with reference to tennis players and jockeys), he shows his eager students the correct way to trip up a flight of stairs.
Whilst not the most significant of Jacques Tati’s contributions to cinema, Cours du soir offers some insight into the master’s very individual comic technique. Tati’s mimes, of different species of smoker and angler, provide the most entertaining part of the film, although you do get the impression that here is a gifted magician who is perhaps revealing too much of his art. It is appropriate that Tati should make this film towards the end of his career (ironically on the set of Playtime, the film which would ruin him). It offers a suitably witty post-script to a distinguished (albeit cruelly frustrated) film-making career.
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
The Auteurs: Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
The Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
TRAFIC (Traffic)
"the odd beauty that can be revealed in the shapes,
patterns and colors created by the technology of planned obsolescence"
—Vincent Canby from The New York Times
Tati's typically
weird and wonderful series of sketches involving the delivery of a
state-of-the-art caravan to a motor show is deliciously perceptive and often
very funny. While the plotlessness and lack of dialogue may take some getting
used to for the uninitiated, Tati's sense of humour quickly becomes addictive.
His observations on the perversity of a society too reliant on the automobile,
with all the tedium, accidents and destruction it entails, are spot on, and he
directs with a humanistic yet detached eye. A work which is reminiscent of
Chaplin's Modern Times.
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)
With M. Hulot
prominent in the cast, Trafic is careful effort by Jacques Tati, made
during his late, insolvent career. In his previous Hulot films, Tati’s
interests are progressively collective and observant instead of narrative (in Playtime, the
cumulative film in this progression, M. Hulot is sometimes unnoticed in the
film’s periphery). Both Mon Oncle and Playtime contain scenes
that satirize a workday commute on a crowded highway; Trafic is
essentially an extension of one of these scenes. It’s familiar, and nonetheless
spirited and inventive.
User
reviews from imdb Author: (edwartell@hotmail.com)
from
Jacques Tati's final film shows his frustrations with modern
progress, and car congestion in particular. Suffice it to say that on a trip
from
User reviews from imdb Author: Sqoon from San Jose, CA
Jacques Tati attempts to drastically transform his alter ego
for the final installment of the Hulot series, and naturally you can't blame
him (one being that this comes after the financial disaster of Playtime, but
especially because of the fact that he has added dimensions to Hulot in every
film) but in most respects, Traffic is considerably stunted. It's still quite
good, but a serious disappointment after Holiday, Oncle, and Playtime, which
after ascending in genius and brilliance, there would be no place to go but
down.
Traffic has the most conventional plot of the entire series - there's a set
goal (getting the Altra car to the convention) - but rather than making the
film more accessible, it only makes it more alien. All the Hulot films are
blithely and happily adrift, propelled only by its jokes and reoccurring
characters, but in the case of having a clear goal in mind, the deliberate slow
pacing begins to weigh the film down. Because we are anticipating their arrival
at the car show, throughout the movie we wonder what's in store and the
build-up creates impatience, rather than the usual relaxation. If Tati was
going for accessibility and conventionality, why didn't he employ a faster,
three-act structure?
It's unfortunate to see gone the Hulot of old who was content on just walking
around for days; in Trafic he's constantly running around doing busy work (he's
on screen for nearly half the movie but actually doesn't do much of anything
noteworthy). Like in the other films, he never knows what to do with himself
and the world doesn't know what to do with him, but in Trafic, the problem is
that this is a world Hulot created: he designed the Altra and it is he who
wants to get it to the car show. He is imposing himself on the world, rather
than the world that is crashing down on him and him fighting back, so the gags
and observations aren't as pure or natural.
The stops the mini-caravan makes and the exploration of new roadside towns are
perfect opportunities to bring back the old Hulot, but Tati seems almost afraid
to let the world come to Hulot on their own terms. Scenes like two kids playing
a beautiful tune on an acoustic by a lake or Hulot arriving at a convenience
store feel like set-ups for great scenes which were left on the editing room
floor.
I still really enjoyed the movie (there are some inspired visuals and Hulot is
Hulot; it's always great to see him on the screen) but these were specific
negative points I thought were worth bringing up.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Everyone is incapable of dealing with the modern world, but
Mr. Hulot is even worse off than the rest of us. He's handicapped by his good
intentions. Every move he makes involves him more deeply in a bizarre
misadventure that started off as a simple favor to someone.
For example. He's trying to wake up the garage mechanic's wife, and he
inadvertently pulls the ivy from the side of their house. So he climbs up the
ivy in an attempt to pull it back in place, and how is he to know that his
ankle will get caught, the ivy will slip, and he will find himself hanging upside
down from the side of a house in the middle of the night - and with the coins
and keys falling from his pockets and interrupting a seduction? He is, of
course, too tactful to call out for help.
The lesson, I guess, is that if you want to survive the era of modern
technology, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. Mr. Hulot (who appeared memorably in
"Mr.
Hulot's Holiday" and in the 1959 Oscar-winner "My Uncle")
refuses to take such a pessimistic view, however, in the brilliant new comedy
by Jacques
Tati, "Traffic."
It wouldn't be in character. Hulot, played by Tati, looks much the same as
always. He has the wrinkled tan raincoat, the battered hat, the yellow socks
peeping out from under his too-short pants. This time he is the director of
design for a
The challenge is to transport this vehicle to the international auto show in
Tati's endless invention creates a series of incidents along the road. The
incidents are so involved they're almost impossible to describe, but Hulot
copes with them with good nature and never loses his philosophical equilibrium.
Tati is actually a silent comedian; his films are made with an amusing mixture
of languages, but no one says anything very important and he doesn't use
subtitles because then we might read them and miss a sight gag.
It's his sense of sight - his ability to see how ridiculous people and things
really look, when you view them sanely that's at the heart of his humor. His
portraits of other drivers, for example, tell us without explanation that car
owners come to resemble their cars (just as pet owners come to resemble their
pets). Even windshield wipers have a way of moving in time to the personalities
of the people inside.
That is the way it should be. It is also nice, by the way, that the windshield
wipers are being used. Because that means it is raining, and Mr. Hulot at last
gets to use his umbrella. You see? There is a purpose for everything, even
rain.
Jacques
Tati: Things Fall Together Criterion essay by David Cairns, November 04,
2014
Jacques
Tati, Historian Criterion essay by
Kristin Ross, October 30, 2014
Jacques
Tati: Composing in Sound and Image Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum,
October 28, 2014
Scatterbrained
Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati Criterion essay by James Quandt, October 27,
2014
Trafic: Watching the Wheels Criterion essay by Jonathan Romney, July 14,
2008
Trafic (1971) - The Criterion
Collection
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
Jacques Tati's TRAFIC on Criterion DVD | Jonathan Rosenbaum June 26, 2008
'Trafic':
When Tati Drove Himself to the Edge - The New York Sun Gary Giddens, July 8, 2008
Jacques Tati – The Restored Collection | 4:3 - Four Three Film Brad Mariano, August 26, 2014
ROSENBAUM ON
TATI - ScreenAnarchy Michael
Guillen, January 27, 2010, also seen here:
The
Evening Class: ROSENBAUM ON TATI
Trafic (1971) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Traffic brief
film comments with archival photos
The Auteurs: Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
Movie Review - - Tati's Terrific 'Traffic':Tati's Terrific 'Traffic' - NYTimes ... Vincent Canby
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
PARADE – made for TV
“a luminous trail of colors in an electronic landscape.” —Serge Daney
Tati's final film
- made originally for Swedish television - and it's not up to much. For a
start, it's a video-to-film transfer, and looks fuzzy and nasty on a cinema
screen. Secondly, it's simply a record of a circus performance with a few
surrealist trimmings - an odd gag about motorcycle helmets, for instance, which
amounts to very little. Your enjoyment of it will no doubt depend on your
position on Tati. Was he a gifted comedy performer, a clown of genius who charmed
a generation? Or was he an overrated bore who milked every joke to death and
beyond? Only those who believe the former should inspect this footnote to his
career.
An eccentric slice
of light entertainment ring-mastered by Tati. He contributes a couple of
superlative mime routines, and even briefly resurrects Hulot as a klutzy angler
battling with slippery fish and a folding stool. But the show, and its host,
are not the main thing. Les clowns, c'est vous announces Tati:
contributions from the floor are invited and (thanks to judicious plants) are
forthcoming, with scuffles erupting in the orchestra, a hatcheck girl
surrounded by crash helmets, and a myriad other behind-the-scenes incongruities
and calamities. This was Tati's valediction, made for Swedish TV the year he
went bankrupt. Shot live, and on video, it can't aspire to the meticulous mise
en scène of his big screen work; and one feels saddened that this great
director should have found no other outlet for his genius.
10 Key Moments in Films (4th Batch) Jonathan Rosenbaum
1974 / Parade – Two kids playing with circus props after the show is supposedly over.
France/Sweden. Director: Jacques Tati. Actors: Anna-Karin
Dandenell, Juri Jägerstedt.
Why it’s Key: Tati ends his career by asserting that we, not he, are the greatest show on earth.
The final sequence in Jacques Tati’s last and least known feature —- a performance shot mainly on video in Stockholm’s Circus Theatre for Swedish television, but also a passionate manifesto —- is almost four minutes of improvisation by two kids: a three-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy, playing with stage props after the show is over and mainly trying to imitate the professionals they’ve just seen. According to Tati’s biographer David Bellos, these tots, recruited from a nursery, were selected not just for their looks but also because they were the least obedient in following orders. Their restless activities — hitting bells with hammers, painting, trying to juggle with paintbrushes, letting air out of balloons, trying to play musical instruments, and rocking back and forth inside huge bowls —- look strictly unsupervised.
Parade is Tati’s ultimate assertion that ordinary people and spectators can be as interesting and as enlightening to watch as professional entertainers, himself included. (He’s the emcee, and he also performs his most famous pantomimes, but he takes care to show how bored one little girl is when he makes his first appearance.) This is also part of the message of his masterpiece Playtime, but Tati radicalizes the notion even further here by going out into the lobby and focusing on latecomers just as the show’s getting started. And after he focuses on these two kids performing their own show at the end, and doing it strictly for themselves, he pans upward past a couple of adult spectators in the otherwise empty front bleachers.
User reviews from imdb
Author: zetes from
Tati was really going for something here, but I'm not quite
sure what. He's being so subtle here that I couldn't really tell what his point
was.
The film is all about a circus, with performances by clowns, magicians,
acrobats, jugglers, a band, and Jacques Tati. The different scenes vary in
worth - the jugglers are awesome, but there's one sequence, where people try to
jump on a pony and a donkey, that's very cruel to animals (although it ends
wonderfully). One of the bigger disappointments of the film are Jacques Tati's
mimes. Not that they're bad, but Tati fans have already seen them all. He
impersonates a football player, a boxer, a tennis player, a fisherman, and an
equestrian. This is how he first got famous in the 30s and 40s, by
impersonating sportsmen, but at 70 something, his miming isn't as great
anymore. And we've seen them all the way back to Watch Your Left and up to The
Night Course.
The action isn't just of the circus performers. Tati also goes behind the
scenes of the circus and especially to the audience. A lot of the film, in
fact, observes the audience. We get to know several of them as characters.
The ending is quite great. It has the same bittersweet tone that all of Tati's
endings have. I actually teared up a little, but that was mostly because I knew
that this was the last time "Une film de Jacques Tati" would ever
appear on screen. I didn't love Parade, but I certainly liked it.
User reviews from imdb
Author: zetes from
It felt slight the first time around, but, wow, this really is a great film. It now reminds me of two other television productions from great European directors around the same time period, Fellini's Clowns and Bergman's The Magic Flute. Many people love those films, both very mediocre in their respective directors' canons, but there seems to be little love for Parade. It is deliberately low-key, but I found a lot in it this second time. At first glance, it doesn't seem to be much more than a filmed circus performance. But there's more. We don't only see the performances, although they probably take up most of the screen time. We also see the performers backstage. We see how much they love to do this. Even during the intermission, when no member of the audience can see him, Tati performs one of his mime acts for his fellow performers. And, something I didn't pay much attention to the first time, these performers, when they're backstage - and sometimes when they're on the stage - are constantly painting, painting pictures, the sets, all kinds of things. Not only is this film about the love of performance, but the love of artistic creation. And not only is it about that, but it's also about the audience's joy of watching the performers, and, sometimes, their joy of interacting with the performers onstage. Parade buzzes with a sense of Andre Bazin's famed moment. There's so much beauty to be found. And then there's that gorgeous ending, with the little boy and girl re-enacting the circus performers as they break down their sets and disappear. What a magical image Tati has left us, his final of the cinema. I love him more than, I believe, any other director. He touches me deeply in my heart.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
A distillation not of Jacques Tati per se, but of communal spectacle and creation -- cinema. The circus is the setting, abstracted into blank spotlights but with the audience always present, always as much a part of the show as the jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, drummers, and assorted pratfall artisans. At the center is Tati, silver-haired in a turtleneck, miming taking punches in the ring, riding a horse, directing traffic, swinging a tennis racket in slow-mo. Playtime and Traffic exhausted the French producers, so the auteur staged his swansong as a Swedish TV-special, a casual affair, a slender recording of dance-hall whimsy and a profound summarization of a man's life and art. There are card tricks and sight gags about asscracks, the hat-check woman scrambles to find room for the many motorcycle helmets; Au Hasard Balthazar is lovingly remembered, a hockey team is benched behind a string quartet that works mainly with horns and hammers. The magical instrument on display remains the human body in full view, Tati's and the performers' and the audiences', the camera always keeping the master of ceremonies and his creations at the same distance -- Tati enjoys an active viewer, the little boy caught dozing by the aisle later provides the capper to the helium-balloon ballad. The human shape vanished amid Playtime's modern landscape only to be rediscovered at the circus, with renewed hope in art (psychedelic rock is as valid a form of expression here as classical violins, yodeling, flamenco ondulations, and Edith Piafing). Much closer to Numéro Deux than to Fellini's I Clowns, for Tati shares Godard's sense of the death and rebirth of film, taking a final bow and leaving the medium in the hands of the young. Cinematography by Gunnar Fischer and Jean Badal.
Parade (1974) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
An excited audience of men, women and children take their seats in a circus tent, eager for the spectacle to begin. The genial Monsieur Loyal greets everyone with an invitation that all are welcome to join in the show. A cavalcade of acrobats, clowns and singers appear to entertain one and all. Too soon, the show is over, and two small children explore the remnants of the evening’s amusements backstage...
In the course of twenty-six years, Jacques Tati made only six
full-length films, yet his contribution to French cinema is immense. Each
of these six films is a timeless comedy jewel, offering a view of life that is
quite unlike anything any other filmmaker has come up with. The universe
of Jacques Tati is unique - with a childlike innocence and subtle blending of
the everyday with the surreal. Tati himself appears in each of his films,
and shows that he is a comic performer of considerable talent, easily in the
same league as those other comedy magicians of the Twentieth Century, Charlie
Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
The main reason why Jacques Tati made so few films was his almost manic
perfectionism. His exigencies and fastidiousness as a director were to
prove to be his downfall. Virtually bankrupted by the commercial failure
off his most ambitious film, Playtime
(1967), Tati had great difficulty attracting funding for any further
projects. His final film, Parade , was made for Swedish television on a
shoestring budget, and sees Tati return to the boisterous music hall world in
which he began his career as a mime artist in the 1930s. Tati had planned
to make another film after this, Confusion , but died before he could get the
project off the ground.
Parade differs markedly from Tati’s other five films, most notably in that it
has no plot, no apparent structure and is closer in form to the style of a
documentary. The film is deceptively simple, depicting a circus show with
the minimum of cinematic embellishment. For all its simplicity, Parade
has an inexplicable hold on the spectator; it evokes a very strong sense of
warmth and good-feeling, which comes partly from a feeling of nostalgia (for
anyone who has ever attended a live circus show) and also from Tati’s unerring
ability to capture little moments of pure magic, such as two small children
forming an instant rapport.
Parade looks crude and unstructured, almost as if the whole thing was
improvised in one evening, but this is just part of Tati’s
illusion. Every moment of this film is meticulously constructed with
skill and intelligence. Part of the appeal of the circus is that the acts
look spontaneous, but the audience knows that endless preparation has preceded
each performance. The genius of Tati is that his behind-the-scenes
perfectionism rarely reveals itself on screen; it is like the mechanism of some
great ornate clock, hidden from the viewer, but responsible for something we
can instantly appreciate.
In Parade, Tati completely removes the boundary between spectator and
performer. The reactions and contributions of the audience are as much a
part of the film as the circus acts are, making the point that without an
audience, art would have no value and no meaning. This importance
of the relationship between performer and spectator is something which Tati
would have learned early in his career as a music hall artiste, and it is theme
which runs through all of his films, most noticeably in Parade. The art
of comedy is not to get an audience to laugh at you; it is to get an audience
to love you - and this is what Tati achieved, with effortless brilliance,
throughout his career.
Jacques
Tati: Things Fall Together Criterion essay by David Cairns, November 04,
2014
Jacques
Tati, Historian Criterion essay by
Kristin Ross, October 30, 2014
Jacques
Tati: Composing in Sound and Image Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, October
28, 2014
Scatterbrained
Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati Criterion essay by James Quandt, October 27,
2014
Parade (1974) - The
Criterion Collection
The Complete Jacques Tati - The Criterion Collection
Jacques Tati – The Restored Collection | 4:3 - Four Three Film Brad Mariano, August 26, 2014
ROSENBAUM ON
TATI - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen,
January 27, 2010, also seen here:
The
Evening Class: ROSENBAUM ON TATI
The Auteurs: Jacques Tati | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, October 4, 2015
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) • Blu-ray ... Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati / The Dissolve
Noel Murray, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati on Blu-ray | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The Complete Jacques Tati | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Francis Rizzo III, Criterion
Blu-Ray
The
Complete Jacques Tati · Film Review The sparse Complete ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club,
Criterion Blu-Ray
REVIEW: “THE COMPLETE JACQUES TATI”, CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jacques Tati Jens Johans, Criterion Blu-Ray
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The Blu-ray Box Set of the Year: "The Complete Jacques Tati ... Peter Sobczynski from The Ebert Site
The
Complete Jacques Tati Blu-ray - DVD Beaver
Taub, Ari
The attraction to
this film is the stunning look of Judy Garland who at age 19 never looked
better, beautifully photographed at perhaps the peak of her attractiveness,
through the film is fairly cornball and her role as older sister in a close
knit family is a warm up for one of her best roles ever as Esther Smith in MEET
ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944), filmed a year later directed by her future
husband. But Garland is Lily Mars, a
small town girl from Indiana who dreams of becoming a star and hounds local
theater director Van Heflin for a part, at first kidnapping his new script and
forcing him to endure her rendition of Lady
Macbeth to get it back, preceded by a younger sister’s musical introduction
of Lily, but later climbing over the wall to crash one of his dinner parties,
where she jumps into the middle of a Tommy Dorsey number and starts singing “Tom,
Tom, the Piper's Son.” Made just before GIRL CRAZY (1943), the last
of the Garland and Micky Rooney vehicles, this features Garland in the
transition years between a teenager and a young adult. She’s still stuck as an innocent though her love
interest (Van Heflin) is a good decade older.
At first one wondered if she’d make it all the way through without
singing, as the leading actress in Van Heflin’s musical is Mártha Eggerth, who plays an exotic Russian
countess with a squeaky, high-pitched voice that is decidedly not as pleasant
to hear as Garland, though that’s exactly what we do as we have to sit through
several lame musical numbers with Eggerth.
Garland steals her way into the Broadway show in New York, if only by
obtaining a bit part as the countess’s maid, but Van Heflin is soon spending
all his time with Garland instead of his leading lady, which leaves her
fuming.
When Van Heflin
takes her out to a New York nightclub, the band asks the young ingénue to perform. Eggerth walks in as Garland is performing a
comical imitation of her foreign manner and Hungarian accent, turning it into a
raucous cabaret number. Eggerth does not
get the joke and walks out of the show.
Of course, Lily is immediately shuffled into playing the lead, but she’s
not exactly a Russian countess, so the show looks miserable and hopeless though
Lily is thrilled at the opportunity.
When Eggerth decides she wants to return to the show, Lily is forced to
gracefully step aside and let her dreams wait for another day. This is cliché driven material where there
aren’t even any good songs, where Garland eventually peforms her fair share,
but none better than her comic rendition when crashing the party. The movie apparently spent its entire budget
on the final “Broadway Rhythm” musical sequence, a formal gown and tails affair
where Garland wears her hair up and gets the glamor treatment for the first
time in her life. She actually looks a
bit gaunt and overly thin in my estimation, but she nails the number. As a war effort film, there weren’t a lot of
great scripts floating around, and this was certainly not one of them. Without Garland’s performance, this would be
a huge flop, but with it the film is tolerable.
This makes GIRL CRAZY seem miraculously entertaining by comparison.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Judy Garland crashes Broadway, bringing a breath of fresh, midwestern air to its jaded denizens. There's a Booth Tarkington novel in here somewhere, but the real author is Louis B. Mayer, still working out his feverish fantasies of the goyim. Directed by Norman Taurog, with Van Heflin, Richard Carlson, Spring Byington, and the big bands of Bob Crosby and Tommy Dorsey (1943).
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author:
Neil
Doyle from
Too bad that JUDY GARLAND was at
her most attractive, photographed with great skill and looking fabulous--while
coping with a script that had to be an insult to anyone's intelligence--even
way back in 1943!
VAN HEFLIN proves that he had a certain comic flair (although a little
exaggerated) and was certainly worthy of a better role than the one he copes
with here. Supporting players Spring Byington and Fay Bainter lend solid
support--but it's all just too weak in the story department for anyone to
overcome the ridiculous script.
Judy manages to get through the material in good shape--showing comic skill in
many scenes and emotional maturity in others. The ending is rather predictable
and is followed by a show biz finale that seems to be tacked on to give the
film a plush fade-out in which
But, all in all, lacks the charm and credibility it should have had to make it
truly worth watching. Among the supporting players, Connie Gilchrist and
Richard Carlson do some nice work. Carlson is surprisingly gifted at comedy and
should have attempted more such roles.
Worth noting: the doorknob business is the only original touch in the whole
show!
Presenting
Lily Mars - TCM.com Frank Miller
Judy Garland was already a screen veteran at the ripe old
age of 19 in 1943, when she starred in Presenting Lily Mars, a coming-of-age musical for
producer Joseph Pasternak, the former-Universal honcho who had tried to get her
for his studio years earlier when she was first starting out. Although by the
time the film came out
MGM had originally bought the rights to Booth Tarkington's 1933 novel about a
small-town girl who rises from the chorus to become a star as a vehicle for Lana
Turner. But as the film's producer, recent arrival Pasternak, looked at the
script, it seemed too lightweight for the glamour girl, who was being groomed
for more dramatic roles. Instead, he suggested the studio add songs to make it
more suitable for either
Presenting Lily Mars
would give
At the time, MGM was working
Originally,
The result was a medley of popular classics anchored by "Broadway
Rhythm," which Freed had co-written for Broadway Melody of 1936
(1935). Back then, Eleanor Powell had danced one of her quick-fire, sexy tap
solos to the tune. This time out,
MGM hailed the "Broadway Rhythm" finale as
mardecortesbaja.com :: EVERY LITTLE MOVEMENT (HAS A MEANING ALL ...
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [2/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review
The New York Sun
(Gary Giddins) review Searching
for Musical Stars, January 23, 2007
CHUD.com (Tom Fuchs) dvd
review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)
review
The New York Times review T.S.
Mostly a shot of adrenaline
for the war effort, this is the 9th and last of the MGM movies
co-starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland (they later made a guest appearance
together in WORDS AND MUSIC in 1948), meeting here in the most improbable of
circumstances. Rooney is a New York
playboy whose nightlife is ruining his chance at a future, as he’s become
something of a tabloid sensation—see June Allison sizzle in a flirtatious
nightclub rendition of “Treat Me Rough”—so his father sends him to an all-male
mining college out in the middle of nowhere out west called Cody College. Rooney never spends a second of time in a
classroom, as it’s pretty much all fun and games for him, where Garland is the
only girl in town, the granddaughter of the college dean. Adding to unexpected scenarios is the
continuing appearance of the Tommy Dorsey band and the exclusive use of the
music of George and Ira Gershwin, suave urbanites to the core, yet here their
music is sung out in the utter desolation of cowboy country, complete with
cactus trees and rolling sagebrush. This
odd combination is mostly silly and hardly feels à propos, but that’s show
biz. Rooney is a self-centered and mostly
obnoxious city slicker runt from the outset that Garland finds offensive, so
she has little use for him except to laugh that he hasn’t a clue what he’s
doing out there, but he makes an amusing fool of himself continually changing
positions in a car sequence "Could You Use
Me" where
he attempts (unsuccessfully) to make the most of his boyish charm. Garland, radiant as ever at this stage in her
career where she’s just 21, is always overdressed, sometimes peculiarly dressed
to make her look younger, but her hair is always perfect, whether coming out
from under the bottom of fixing a car or elegantly on her birthday as she sings
“Embraceable You” to all the guys at the school, deliberately making sure each
one knows she’s singing the song just for him.
Here Judy is on the set with about 100 guys who become her own personal
props and chorus line. What follows is
one of the worst wedding proposals on record, which is so bad that it leaves an
opportunity for Mickey to actually look pretty good next to that.
By now thoroughly indoctrinated by the studio
to take amphetamines and barbiturates in order to keep churning out an assembly
line of pictures, Garland does not suffer any noticeable ill effects, but
Rooney has never been more manic than here, especially as he does an impromptu
comedy bit with an unplugged microphone that 50 years after the fact boggles the
mind that it was left in the picture.
Did people find this funny then?
They concoct a storyline where the school is about to be shut down for
lack of enrollment, so Judy & Mickey hatch an idea that will attract
students, proposing a Rodeo Days weekend and beauty pageant, where Mickey has
to choose between Judy, now his sweetheart, or the Governor’s daughter (Frances
Rafferty). Complications ensue. But not to worry, as it’s all wrapped up in
an extravagant Busby Berkeley final production number that is the essence of
exaggeration and indulgence, as the mind staggers at the thought of what this
picture might have looked like in the hands of Berkeley, who was quickly
removed as director of the picture after the all-consuming effort to complete
this one sequence. Gershwin’s “I Got
Rhythm” never looked like this before, as the parade of constantly interweaving
choreography resembles marching band formations, with a bizarre use of
bullwhips, guns, and reverse photography.
Nonetheless, it’s a barnstormer of a number and one that
enthusiastically delivers everything it sets out to do, as it literally dazzles
the mind. Garland was already starring
in her first solo lead role, the already completed film PRESENTING LILY MARS
(1943) released six months earlier the same year, so the assembly line child
actor phase of her career was effectively over.
MEET
User reviews from imdb Author: didi-5 from
This Gershwin musical, first staged in 1930 (and filmed, not altogether
successfully from a musical point of view, by RKO in 1932) gets another movie
version, this time tailored for the talents of MGM's two top young stars, Judy
Garland and Mickey Rooney.
The original story gets ditched and in place we get the usual 'kids putting on
a show' stuff that Judy and Mickey did in all their collaborations during the
1930s/40s. The songs are done very well - Judy sings 'But Not For Me' and it is
absolutely stunning, the way she is photographed during this sequence really
complementing the beautiful melody of the song. 'Embraceable You', an
unforgivable omission from the '32 version (it was filmed but then scrapped on
the wisdom of David Selznick) is back. So Judy is great, while Mickey does the
same bubbly act as always but he certainly had talent.
Perhaps one day we'll see a version which does justice to both the original
plot as staged *and* the score. Neither the '32 or '43 versions quite got there
- but both are worth your time, if only for quite different reasons.
CineScene.com (Les Phillips) review
This is the last, or next to last, Mickey Rooney/Judy
At 23, Rooney is utterly charismatic; his dancing in the opening
number, set in a Manhattan nightclub, projects sex, ease, utter confidence,
agility, and a hint of decadence. In other words, huge star quality. This is a
Gershwin musical, with the songs mostly cribbed from other Gershwin musicals,
and with a crucial exception, they're done very well.
Then we get to the closing production number, one of the
strangest you'll ever see, and completely miscalculated. You have to suspend
disbelief and agree that, yes, someone really would bring the Tommy Dorsey
Orchestra (led by the real Tommy Dorsey and specifically identified as such)
out to remotest
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]
Girl
Crazy's musical finale has the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra trek out to
remotest
Anyway, Norman Taurog
directed the rest of the film, which is not great, but not bad. The plot has
big-city playboy Danny Churchill (Rooney) sent away to a boy’s college-cum-dude
ranch by his publishing magnate father (Henry O’Neill) to learn some
responsibility. Much of the first act is taken up with city mouse/country mouse
hijinks: see the city boy try to ride a horse; see the city boy struggle with
getting up at the crack of dawn; see the city boy's sense of humor fall flat
amidst all the laconic Westerners. He gets embroiled in romantic shenanigans
with Ginger Gray (
The music, most of it standards by the brothers Gershwin, is
excellent, although it's not always used as well as it could be, likely because
of Taurog's lack of Berkeley's visual imagination (although I'm not sure how
much to blame dance director Charles Walters). The camera is bound by all of
I'm ashamed to admit that this is the first Garland-Rooney
film I've seen. I do like their chemistry, although I've never been a huge
Girl
Crazy (1943) - TCM.com Roger
Fristoe
Two sensational bundles of pure talent, Mickey Rooney and
Judy Garland formed a perfect screen team with their engaging personalities,
abundant energy and obvious devotion to each other. Fast friends for most of
their lives, the pair became one of
Originally a George and Ira Gershwin stage hit, Girl Crazy had been
filmed by RKO in 1932, starring Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey in a version
that put the emphasis on comedy and gave short shrift to the show's wonderful
songs. MGM bought the property in 1939 and considered using it as a follow-up
vehicle for Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell after Broadway Melody of 1940
(1940). But music supervisor and
The Mickey-Judy version of Girl Crazy, produced by MGM's prestigious
Arthur Freed unit, restores the show's entire score and adds "Fascinatin'
Rhythm" from another Gershwin musical, Lady Be Good. Rooney and
Busby Berkeley, who had previously directed Rooney and
Happily, the director brought in as
User reviews from imdb Author: inframan from the lower
depths
User reviews from imdb Author: Dreamer-36 from
User reviews from imdb Author: Wayne Malin
(wwaayynnee51@hotmail.com) from
User reviews from imdb Author: marknyc from
User reviews from imdb Author: kidboots from
User reviews from imdb Author: bkoganbing from
User reviews from imdb Author: funkyfry from
The New York Times review Theodore Strauss
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Judy Garland Database film review: "Girl Crazy" Judy Garland Database
"Review:'Girl Crazy'" Soundtrack review by Steve Schwartz from Classical Net
"Home
on the Range and on the Stage", Charles Isherwood theater review from The New York Times,
Girl Crazy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
USA (120 mi) 1948
InsidePulse [Corey3rd] Joe Corey reviewing Classical Musicals from the Dream Factory: Volume 2
Words and Music puts a Hollywood spin on the troubled
Lorenz Hart and his partnership with Richard Rogers. Hart (played by Mickey
Rooney) comes off as a bit of a wayward genius. While Rogers dilligently comes
up with the music, Hart has lyrics scattered through various magazines. We see
how they came up with "Manhattan," "The Lady is a Tramp"
and "Blue Moon." The movie is star studded with great musical moments from Mel
Torme, Lena Horne and Perry Como. Gene Kelly turns Apache to deliver
"Slaughter on Tenth Avenue." As it turns out, a majority of this film
is a lie. Hart wasn't close to being Rooney's character. He was more self
destructive than the Hayes Code permitted. Plus he was gay and not merely a guy
who couldn't find the right girl. But if you can chuckle at these dramatic
alterations, you'll be charmed by the performances. Judy Garland breaks out
"Johnny One Note." She and Rooney put on a show with "I Wish I
Were in Love Again." But the true scene stealer is Lena Horne's rendition
of "Lady Is a Tramp." If you rewatch Words and Music, odds are
you'll be using chapter skip to avoid the emoting.
Words
and Music - TCM.com Amy Cox
Jam-packed with blockbuster songs performed by some of MGM's top
talent, Words and Music (1948) is a lavish film biography of the songwriting
duo Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. In the early 1920s the diminutive Hart
(played by the equally short Mickey Rooney) teams up with Rodgers (Tom Drake)
to launch a successful 24-year music career, penning nearly 500 songs together
until Hart's death in 1943 at the age of 47. In the highly fictionalized story
arc, Rodgers marries his dream girl (Janet Leigh) while Hart (who was gay in
real life) pines after Peggy (Betty Garrett). After Peggy's rejection, Hart
spirals into depression and eventually death.
Most critics panned the bare bones plot but showered praise on the sparkling
musical numbers that were liberally sprinkled throughout the movie. According
to a Variety review at the time, MGM had made the Rodgers and Hart
biopic a "slim and pleasant framework on which to hang some 22 of their
most melodious and best-known tunes." Many of the musical stars played
themselves or small character parts so they could convincingly break into song
at some point in the film. June Allyson, Perry Como, Ann Sothern, Mel Tormé and
Cyd Charisse were just some of the singing sensations in the extravaganza.
Among the singing standouts was Lena Horne, who appeared as herself singing in
a nightclub scene. Horne was among the few singled out in reviews for special
accolades. "The best number in the show will be Lena Horne's sweet
enunciation of the haunting `Where or When,'" the New York Times
reviewer wrote, while Newsweek reported, "Lena Horne... brings the
film to its toes with her vocalization of `Where or When' and `The Lady is a
Tramp.'" Horne had numerous fans on the Words and Music set, too. In her
autobiography There Really Was a Hollywood, Janet Leigh recalls the
electricity while filming Horne's scenes at the nightclub surrounded by tables
of extras: "Those eyes were so on fire they needed an extinguisher, that
mouth passionately caressed each word, each syllable. She was dynamite. It
wasn't in the script but the `audience' spontaneously responded with a standing
ovations."
Also earning high marks from fans and critics alike was Judy Garland, appearing
as herself, too. She first sings solo the showstopper "Johnny One
Note," and then duets with familiar screen partner Rooney in "I Wish
I Were in Love Again." The tune had been cut from the original score of
the 1939 Garland-Rooney hit Babes in Arms because it was considered then
too sophisticated. Leigh writes in her autobiography that crowds of people
arrived on the set the morning Garland was scheduled to appear for a glimpse of
the superstar. But they had a long wait. "Normally, Mickey would have
boiled over, but he was only calm and patient. He knew, I guess most knew
(except me), that Judy had been going through one of her rough periods and was
having trouble pulling herself together. Around eleven o'clock [producer Arthur
Freed] escorted Miss Garland to the stage, where she was greeted like royalty."
Rooney, himself, wrote in his autobiography Life Is Too Short that he
wasn't very dependable while making Words and Music, either. It was his last
picture under contract to MGM, and he was going out at night and drinking
heavily with a crowd led by bandleader Tommy Dorsey. His hangovers got so bad
he started skipping work on Mondays to help recover. "Our old friend
[director] Norman Taurog shot around me and Judy. It was a wonder that the
picture went only $140,000 over budget."
Words and Music also features the first full-length modern ballet piece in a
Hollywood movie. Choreographed and danced by Gene Kelly, with Vera-Ellen as his
partner, "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" provided the show-stopping
seven-minute finale to the film. Originally appearing in the Rodgers and Hart
Broadway musical comedy On Your Toes, the music was used by Kelly to
tell the story via dance of a sad love affair on the New York streets.
Vera-Ellen always considered it the best work of her Hollywood career.
Like many biographical movies, Words and Music glosses over the real lives and
relationship between Rodgers and Hart, the men behind the clever words and
brilliant music of so many songs. But with the abundance of hits by the duo in
the movie - such as "I Married an Angel," "Blue Moon," and
"Thou Swell" - "one gladly forgives the story - which doesn't
matter," as the Hollywood Reporter noted.
Words and Music: An Unsung Masterpiece? - Bright Lights Film Journal Allan Vanneman, December 1, 1998
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss)
DVD Verdict - Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory: Volume 2 [Bryan Pope]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
Seeing
Double in the Electric Mist: An Interview with Bertrand Tavernier Chris Mosey interview from Cineaste, Fall 2009
In The Electric Mist is a film with a split personality. It may well become a cult movie for that very reason, examined time and again to explain fundamental differences between American and European ways of moviemaking. Of course, it could also disappear into its own misty oblivion. Only time will tell.
Made in America by award-winning French film director Bertrand Tavernier, based on a best-selling novel by James Lee Burke and starring Tommy Lee Jones and John Goodman, it certainly had all the makings of one major box-office and critical success. Instead it exists in two versions, neither of which has thus far exactly taken audiences and reviewers by storm. One of these, 117 minutes long, was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2009 before being released in European cinemas two months later. At the same time, the second—102 minutes long, cut very differently from the European version, and containing different scenes—went straight to DVD in the United States.
The European version opens with a lovingly depicted journey through the southern Louisiana bayou. The mist of the title drifts through the pecan trees as Tommy Lee Jones intones, in voice-over, “In ancient times people put stones on the graves of their dead so their souls would not wander and afflict the living. I’d always thought this to be a practice of superstitious and primitive people but I was about to learn that the dead can hover on the edge of our vision with the density and luminosity of mist and that their claim on the earth can be as legitimate and tenacious as our own.”
The American film starts with Jones, who plays Dave Robicheaux, a cop with a violent past in Vietnam, sitting in a bar ruminating on his alcoholism. He expresses himself in more prosaic fashion. Sometimes he feels like having a drink, he says, but he always manages to resist the temptation.
Throughout the two versions of In The Electric Mist , there are differences, some subtle, some major, culminating in an ending in which the European version leaves a great deal—perhaps too much—to the viewer’s imagination, while the U.S. version makes plain exactly what has happened.
This bizarre situation is the result of a row between Tavernier and both his American producer, Michael Fitzgerald, and editor, Roberto Silvi, concerning the cutting of the movie. When their disagreements proved impossible to resolve, the only solution was to release two versions of the same film, one for either side of the Atlantic. Fitzgerald, head of Ithaca Pictures, supervised Silvi on the cutting of the shorter, faster-paced film for the U.S. market. Tavernier, with the help of editor Thierry Derocles, kept the picture at its original length, leaving in scenes that, while superfluous to the intrigue, he felt were necessary to explain Robicheaux’s complex personality.
Leslie Felperin, writing in Variety, compared the two versions thus: “The U.S.-only version of the pic… pares back so much of the backstory, that ends are left lying loose everywhere. Tavernier’s preferred version is both more cohesive and thought-provoking, but dawdles getting to the point. Both versions, however, are essentially flawed by the fact that [the] killer’s revelation feels deeply underwhelming. At least the Tavernier version eschews the tacky summing up and oo!-spooky last shot mini twist that makes the U.S.-only version play like a made-for-TV movie.”
Where does all this leave Tavernier? Is his long love affair with America and its cinema over? He has visited the U.S. on numerous occasions and is author of two books, the monumental 50 ans de cinéma américain (50 Years of American Cinema) , and a collection of interviews with great American filmmakers, Amis américains (American Friends) .
In an interview in conjunction with the screening of his version of In The Electric Mist at the Utopia Cinema in the ancient southern city of Avignon, the director refused to comment on his dispute with Fitzgerald, which took more than a year to resolve following shooting in the spring of 2007.
*****
Cineaste: You won’t say anything about it at all?
Bertrand Tavernier : Nothing. Nothing at all. What I say is, “Look at the two versions and make up your own mind.” This will explain the situation. I cannot comment. Having the two versions is something that I wanted. We reached a point in our negotiations when I saw that this was the only solution. It was a good way to settle the situation.
Cineaste: So you’re reasonably happy with things?
Tavernier: Not reasonably… absolutely happy. I’m absolutely happy with this two-film solution. It is something I wanted. The producer keeps the rights for the States. He had some money to recoup so it was the best way to give him what he wanted. So I am not reasonably happy, I am absolutely happy.
Cineaste: And your version of the film will be released in Europe?
Tavernier: Not just Europe. In the world. In the whole world outside of the United States.
Cineaste: How about people in the United States who might prefer to see your version of the film?
Tavernier: They will be able to see it when my version is released on DVD. Maybe… perhaps I should not suggest this now, but there could perhaps come a time in the future when a DVD will be released with both versions on it. Like for Blade Runner, like for many films that have been cut or changed.
Cineaste: So, just as movie buffs debate the significance of the unicorn in Blade Runner and whether or not the Harrison Ford character was himself a replicant, they’ll be able to argue about what you meant with the fishing sequence and Dave Robicheaux’s soliloquy on the latex salamander he’s using as bait [neither in the U.S. version, nor the book]. Not to mention his dream of a white she wolf who lives in a tree, descending to eat her young each morning [not in the U.S. version but in the book].
Tavernier: Who knows? Maybe…
Cineaste: What made you choose In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead [the novel’s full title] from all the Robicheaux books?
Tavernier: Well first I should say that I am a great admirer of all Burke’s books—the ones I have read, and that is most of them. I like his style, the melange of introspection, lyricism, description that is very meditative and beautiful and then, of course, the dialog. I find Burke a writer of genius when it comes to dialog. He knows how to evoke the character in a few phrases. He writes romans noirs in which characters come before the intrigue. With Harlan Coban it is just intrigue, intrigue, intrigue, with a new development in every chapter. And afterwards you feel manipulated. You don’t have any characters. The characters are nothing. You remember Burke’s characters long after you put the novel down. You may not remember the intrigue but you remember the characters. In The Electric Mist in particular appealed to me because of the General [the shade of General John Bell Hood, a Confederate Civil War hero, who helps Robicheaux track down a serial killer], and because of many other things. I love what it says about the relationship between the past and the present, the way the two are mixed together, the way the present has its roots in the past. This is something I have touched on in some of the films I have made in France. It was something that I felt really close to.
Cineaste: Why is the mist “electric”?
Tavernier: I see that as meaning a mixture of mystery and tension. I never asked Burke why he called it that. The only thing I did ask him was what color it was. He said blueish.
Cineaste: What is it you like about Dave Robicheaux?
Tavernier: The fact that he is such a complex character. He is somebody who has wounds, who has been hurt by life, but who still fights on behalf of what George Orwell called “the common decency.” He typifies all the virtues of that expression: the sense of collectivity and idealism, generosity, the act of giving without receiving. Although he has a wife and family, Robicheaux is also very solitary. He is haunted by the idea of rediscovering the Louisiana of his childhood, he is willing to fight to rediscover it. He would like to change the world but he knows that the world won’t be changed. He seeks to protect his moral integrity. He is alone because he doesn’t want his wife to be involved in his work. His first wife was killed by gangsters. He is someone who has already paid dearly for his moral integrity. He tries to protect his house, which is a kind of oasis for him. But he has dark, somber streaks that make him complex and very human. When he has explosions of violence, he feels guilty about them. He suffers remorse. I like men who fight, who have shadows and who are not always right. I like them even if their battle is not likely to succeed. I have an enormous tenderness for Robicheaux. I have a liking for him that stems from the first book I read about him. I feel very close to that, to the violence and to his regrets for using it as he does.
Cineaste: I wouldn’t put you down as a violent man.
Tavernier: No, no, of course, I’m not. But I make films about people who are me and not me. For example, I’ve done two films about war. I’ve never been to war. I’ve never been drafted or enlisted. I’ve never been in the army. I made a film about the police and I’m not a cop. I try through my films to understand the world, to get to know people and places I know nothing about. This was the case with southern Louisiana. I knew nothing about it, and I wanted to discover it.
Cineaste: Was there any attraction in the historical French involvement?
Tavernier: No, none at all. I was attracted purely by Burke’s descriptions of it. He made it fascinating, complex, dangerous, and I wanted to learn about it for myself. As Burke says—he told me this several times—Louisiana is not an American state anymore, it is the Third World. It’s closer to Bangladesh than the rest of the U.S.
Cineaste: You stayed with him before starting work on the film?
Tavernier: Yes, once or twice in Louisiana and twice at his other home in Montana. My stays varied from a week to ten-fifteen days. I worked a lot with him on the screenplay. He told me so many things about Louisiana. He explained its history, the political context. He drove me all around New Iberia [the area of southern Louisiana where the film is set]. He introduced me to people, the local sheriff, took me to all the places that I later used in the film. He has a tremendous knowledge about Louisiana and knows the whole story of the War Between the States as it affected Louisiana.
Cineaste: That’s the American Civil War?
Tavernier: People in Louisiana call it the War Between the States. That’s the way Burke and Tommy Lee Jones refer to it. Jones and nearly all the other principal actors in the film are from Louisiana. Mary Steenburgen, who plays Bootsie, Robicheaux’s wife, is from Arkansas.
Cineaste: How about Levon Helm [formerly one of the leaders of The Band ] who plays the General?
Tavernier: He’s not from Louisiana but he is from the South. Buddy Guy [the blues singer who plays Sam “Hogman” Patin] is from Louisiana. It was Tommy Lee Jones’s idea to have him and Levon Helm. And on the soundtrack I use people from Louisiana. There’s Clifton Chenier, Nathan Williams, Michael Doucet [the Cajun fiddler who founded the band BeauSoleil ]. This was very important for me. When I talked to people in New Orleans, they were very contemptuous of The Big Easy [Jim McBride’s 1987 thriller set in New Orleans and starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin]. They laughed it off as a Hollywood approach to Louisiana. They felt they had been stereotyped, said the accents were all wrong. They never stopped complaining about it. They put great importance on accents. This was one of the reasons I tried to find actors from the places where we were filming. Ryan Rilette, who plays Jimmie, is from the Ninth District of New Orleans, where we filmed some sequences. He has exactly the accent of that quarter, which is not at all like the accents of other quarters of the city. For me an accent is not just a way of talking, it is a way of walking, of talking, of dressing too. John Goodman told me my film is one of the most exact films made about Louisiana.
Cineaste: You have scenes of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and Bootsie is involved with a charity helping the victims.
Tavernier: That’s not in the book but it’s something that I wanted very much to have in the movie. I thought it would be exciting to have a background that allowed me to show the state of New Orleans and to say at least something about the political situation in Louisiana today. A lot of the roads in Louisiana reminded me of the roads in Cambodia [where Tavernier filmed his 2004 film Holy Lola ]. They are badly cared for, full of holes. Traveling by car there can be extremely difficult. In New Orleans it was difficult to film because the lorry kept hitting enormous holes in the road, throwing the camera off balance.
Cineaste: For your very first feature film, L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (The Clockmaker) in 1974, you took a story by Georges Simenon set in the U.S. and transposed it to Lyon in France. Then again, in Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate) , in 1981, you took Jim Thompson’s novel Pop 1280 and changed the setting from a West Texas boom town to French West Africa. Did you ever think of doing something similar with In The Electric Mist?
Tavernier: No, it would have been impossible to set it anywhere else other than southern Louisiana. With those earlier films, I didn’t feel ready to go to the States to film. This time around I had more knowledge, more tradecraft. I knew I could get by. I had already filmed in the states, in Tennessee [ Mississippi Blues, 1984] and New York [a sequence in Round Midnight, 1986]. The result is a film completed in forty-one days—very, very quickly. And which I could make exactly as I wanted. I have made a film which is, first of all, a French production. The film was financed by TF1 international, with some help from the State of Louisiana because it was shot there. I chose to work with an American producer because I knew that I could not make a film in America without doing this. It would have broken union rules. Therefore I chose a producer who had worked with Tommy Lee Jones [Fitzgerald produced the 2005 film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which was directed by Jones]. He had made some other films that were interesting too— The Pledge, Wise Blood. I said to myself that I would ask a producer who was a little artistic.
Cineaste: The way the Mafia is featured in your film is very different than movies such as the Godfather series, in which its leaders have social aspirations and live a life of luxury.
Tavernier: One of my concerns was to remain faithful to the way Burke sees the Mafia. He has a very precise and very real vision of the Mafia. No glamor. The first time we encounter the principal Mafioso in the film [Julie “Babyfeet” Balboni, played by John Goodman] it is by a motel swimming pool with plastic chairs, a décor absolument nul —no big deluxe Florida hotel. So too his manner is horribly cheap and vulgar. Burke says all the mafiosi he ever encountered had no taste and dressed disgustingly. They were enormously stupid people. Burke insists on the extraordinary stupidity of people who are violent. He says they would be too stupid to do the most simple work, such as “removing chewing gum from cinema seats.”
Cineaste: Your filming of southern Louisiana seemed very heartfelt.
Tavernier: I wanted to show the beauty of the bayou, the light, the landscape. And I didn’t want to show it as a French director. I wanted it to be as seen through the eyes of Dave Robicheaux. You discover a country through the eyes of the people who live in it.
Cineaste: How did you get on with the actors?
Tavernier: Oh, very well… no real problems. Tommy Lee Jones worked with me on the dialog. Only once did we quarrel. He came up with the idea of inventing new relationships between the characters and I threatened to quit the film if he pursued this. But in general we got along very well and his work greatly enriched the scenario. It was also very easy to work with John Goodman. I told him to remember that he was a third-generation Italian, so no Italian accent. I told him not to play the character as a mafioso, to forget all the films he had seen.
Cineaste: Did you talk with the actors about other directors they had worked with?
Tavernier: Very, very little. That didn’t really interest me. With Tommy Lee Jones, I talked about art, literature, painting, politics… and Bush. I found that very interesting. He was violently against Bush, called him “a false Texan.” We talked about architecture too. And history. He told me a lot of things I didn’t know about the famous John Brown—that he was in fact a feminist, had a great rapport with the progressive women of his time.
Once he mentioned the Coen brothers. He described them as “slick New York guys”—that was all he said about them. But when I make a film, I am not a movie buff. I have so many problems—human, logistic—to contend with. I did not see any American films when I was in Louisiana. The films I watched in New Iberia were French— La grande illusion, La bête humaine, Touchez pas au Grisbi. I felt I needed to rediscover my language, my culture.
Cineaste: How do you see the new generation of American filmmakers?
Tavernier: In the past, American directors watched French films, knew about French cinema. Not any more. They don’t even watch old American films, their own cinema. I don’t have anything in common with such people. You know, when you see a film in the cinema in the United States, the lights are never completely switched off. This is so that people can come and go to buy popcorn. You are continually disturbed by people eating next to you. The last film I saw in a cinema in the U.S., the man next to me was eating a Chinese meal. In France I prefer to go to the cinema to watch movies. But there… In New Orleans there wasn’t a single foreign film. With the exception of a festival when one can see several different foreign films in a week, there is nothing. In a city where you have several universities, very few people care about seeing foreign films. I wanted to come back to France to finish the cutting because I couldn’t do it there. To see just American films… [He shakes his head sorrowfully]. DVD saved me in Louisiana. All that merde in the cinemas...
Interview:
Bertrand Tavernier - Film Comment
Max Nelson interview, March 13, 2014
Bertrand Tavernier is one of a small number of working filmmakers capable of juggling a prolific career behind the camera (he has been making films steadily for the past 40 years) with an equally accomplished double life as a critic and film scholar. With Jean-Pierre Coursodon, he is the author of the monumental, 1,300-page compendium 50 Years of American Cinema, in addition to a lengthy history of writing for Positif, Cahiers du cinéma, and this magazine. His body of work as a director spans a dizzying range of genres: among many others, politically loaded crime drama (The Clockmaker, his 1974 debut), police procedural (L.627, 92), historical romance (The Princess of Montpensier, 10), World War II epic (Life and Nothing But, 89), and jazz film (’Round Midnight, 86, starring Dexter Gordon and Herbie Hancock).
Quai d’Orsay—titled The French Minister in its U.S. release—is a breathless catalogue of backroom political storms and stresses centered on a young, ambitious speechwriter working for an eccentric foreign minister. It’s also Tavernier’s first all-out comedy, and he approaches the genre with a fine eye for character and a careful sense of pace. With its rapid-fire dialogue exchanges and its string of pressure-cooker crises—set to the lively tempo of Philippe Sarde’s terrific score—the film is as close to the territory of classic American screwball comedy as it is to the political landscape of contemporary France. Tavernier adapted the movie from a graphic novel by Christophe Blain and Antonin Baudry—the latter a former speechwriter under the legendary minister Dominique de Villepin, whose 2003 address to the United Nations against the Iraq War is quoted directly in the film.
FILM COMMENT spoke with Tavernier about his parallel lives as a director and film buff, his approach to structure and rhythm, his love for Howard Hawks and Jacques Becker, and the unseen logic behind the apparent chaos of a film set.
The theme of this conversation—in keeping with the pace of your new film—was initially going to be “the world’s fastest screwball comedies,” so I wanted to start with a general question: what considerations, in your experience, go into determining the speed of a movie?
Difficult question. First, I must say one thing. When I start working on a film, I stop being a film buff. I very rarely see films to influence either my work, or the work of my collaborators. I want to stick to the film I’m doing and the characters, without thinking about other films. Of course, when I’m doing a comedy like Quai d’Orsay, I have in mind the rhythm of great comedies like His Girl Friday, To Be or Not to Be, or Billy Wilder’s films. I didn’t need to see any of them again. I also had in mind something that Hawks said: a good comedy is a comedy which could, with a few changes, be directed in a more straightforward, even dramatic manner. You could take the screenplay of Quai d’Orsay and with a few adjustments—not so many—you could have a good dramatic film. After all, it’s a film which deals with a potential war, with—at one point—a cargo which is going to explode and maybe kill a few million people, and the danger of civil war in Africa. It’s all very serious.
I also had in mind, as I said earlier, the rhythm, the pace. The pace of a film—especially of a comedy—must come from one or two main characters. I have seen films, especially recent films, where the directors try to stick with a single kind of pace because everybody told them that the audience is impatient, so you have to move fast. The film is trying to move faster than the characters. Or the film is always moving at the same speed, which is, for me, the opposite of real rhythm. Rhythm must include—even if they’re only 20 or 30 seconds—moments when you break the rhythm. The speed had to come from the character of the minister, who was always in movement, always running, unable to sit down for two minutes, unable not to do anything. The rhythm also had to come organically from the character of Arthur, who always has to do something but is always rebuffed. What he does is ignored and thrown away, so he has to start again and start again. I had to get that feeling in the rhythm, and I think I got it. The rhythm of the film is really imposed, dictated, and determined organically by the character—like in The Princess of Montpensier, or L.627, or Capitaine Conan [96].
Part of what’s interesting about that dynamic in Quai d’Orsay is that you have one character within the film imposing a rhythm on another character. So, to some degree, for the rhythm to feel natural, it has to feel forced.
Yes. And the rhythm is always stopping when you come to the character played by Niels Arestrup, who is always slowing the scenes down, speaking slowly…
Falling asleep…
And falling asleep. It’s like he’s saying, “You move too fast. Stop, think, wait, we’ll find a solution.” And that’s good. He’s always doing things—reading, signing, talking on the phone, or absorbing huge stacks of files—but just a shot with him, or three lines from him, allows me from time to time to break the rhythm and the speed of the film.
That’s one of the respects in which the film reminds me of certain classic Hollywood comedies. They always include all this buffer space, passages that absorb the shock of the manic stretches surrounding them.
Especially films like His Girl Friday or One, Two, Three.
These very quiet, hushed, slow scenes—like the exchange in His Girl Friday between Rosalind Russell and the imprisoned man.
Yes. It’s surprising how dramatic the background of that film is—it’s the death penalty—and you laugh all the time.
In some sense, it’s those quiet buffer scenes that really end up being the dramatic core of the movie.
Yeah. There was another director I was thinking of, without seeing the films—because, again, making a film is so exciting, so demanding, and so involving that I don’t want to see other images. But I was remembering some of the comedies of Jacques Becker. I know he’s not known in this country, and it’s a pity, because for me he is, if not the greatest, then one of the greatest French directors of the Forties and Fifties. One of the greatest. One of the most underrated in this country. I know they re-released Antoine et Antoinette recently, which is a masterpiece, but Edouard et Caroline is a wonderful comedy: very, very funny, with tremendous space, and some moments when it suddenly becomes serious. Just at the end, there’s a moment when it could become a drama. It’s done with such grace and elegance in the direction.
I find Becker the equal of—if not better than—even people like Hawks. He had such a wide range: going from Casque d’or to Edouard et Caroline, or from Antoine et Antoinette to Touchez pas au grisbi to Le Trou. An enormous range, and always with the same deeply organic quality. He was doing things which were extremely bold and extremely new, but they were done so fluidly that nobody noticed how new it was. The character of Gabin in Touchez pas au grisbi, for instance, pre-dates all the antiheroes of the Sixties and Seventies: in the way he’s macho with women, or the way he wants to go to bed early. It's a destruction of Gabin’s image, and of the whole romantic image of the hero. This gangster is just a bourgeois who wants to have a bourgeois wife and doesn’t want to sleep late or have any problems. That was incredibly daring with somebody like Gabin. There are very few actors who were willing to challenge their own image like that: he had the reputation of being the great seducer, the romantic guy, the hero of all the prewar films. And then he was playing the opposite. I love that.
One thing that might unite Becker and Hawks is that they didn’t primarily make comedies.
Becker started with dramas. His first film is a kind of tongue-in-cheek gangster film, but his second is a murder drama set in the country. He was, by the way, a great admirer of Hawks and Hathaway. During the first Cahiers interview with Hawks, Becker was present in the room.
Do you think that the way these directors made comedies was somehow affected by the fact that they spent so much of their careers making dramatic films?
Maybe. Coming out of directing dramas, they had a kind of elegant style which was very well suited for comedy. And maybe by doing those dramas, they knew how to transform a dramatic scene into a comedy.
The comedies are always threatening to become dramas.
Yeah. I don’t know if that’s true of all Hawks, though: I’m not sure I Was a Male War Bride could have been a dramatic film.
Another striking aspect of Quai d’Orsay for me is structural: for increasingly long stretches of the movie—during the crisis with the ship, for instance—the film leaves Arthur altogether.
He would have been useless. He is there with the other advisors, and there’s a moment between him and Valerie, but there’s no possibility for him to help solve the thing. I do not care about losing a character. You get him back, and you get him back with a very good scene. And at that moment, the audience has absorbed the fact that, more or less, even if he’s not present, he is getting everything that’s happening. He is slowly becoming a member of the cabinet, so he doesn’t have to be present to know what’s happening.
I find your question strange, because there are so many novels and plays in which you lose a character for 20 minutes. I love freedom. I love to be able to do what I want, not to follow a pattern where, when you have a main character, he has to be there in every moment. I’ve never made films where the screenplay is dictated by the plot. Especially in many of the latest films I’ve made, I want to give the impression that the screenplay is written by the characters. My films are often very collective; even if you have one, two, or three main parts, every character counts. I can jump from one to the other; I want to be able to build a whole film—Safe Conduct [02]—on two heroes who practically never meet. I want to have the possibility of making that. It gives me a very free dramatic construction, where I can jump from one character to the other.
I’m suffering from everything that’s predictable: films that look like they’re coming from a three-act screenplay, or that have twists which seem to be dictated by the screenwriters and imposed on the characters. I want to get rid of all that. I want to enjoy the freedom of narration.
Part of the effect in this case is that you get the sense that the characters are always reacting to events out in the world.
Absolutely. Sometimes it’s a challenge. In L.627, if I wanted to be true to the essence of the work of the police squad, I had to accept the fact that they will fail at one thing, start another investigation, and change gears suddenly to follow something unexpected. The story was starting over all the time. Normally, that’s something that screenwriters hate. I had to accept it and ask myself: “What can I do to overcome something that can be problematic for the audience?” I had to be able to understand the state of mind of people for whom nothing is ever finished. The moment they think they can have some rest, they have to start again; they have to work. If you deal with that frontally, if you accept it, you can overcome the problem, even make what could have been a problem into a virtue. You find a kind of narrative which will be exciting, providing you put a lot of gusto and energy into it, and providing never waste time indulging yourself. I did it in L.627, Capitaine Conan, and Safe Conduct, and I knew it could work here too. They’re doing 20 things at the same time, but in the end, we must feel the progression even if what they’ve tried to do has stopped or failed. It’s something I liked in the graphic novel: you finish one thing, and you have another problem immediately, or two problems at the same time. You have to start all over again.
I think that contributes here to the film’s sense of humor as well.
Yeah, the repetition can be a source of fun.
Another element that contributes to the tone is the very inventive use of language: everyone’s talking past each other and over each other’s heads.
It’s something that Robert Altman did brilliantly. He’s one of my heroes in many ways. In Tanner ’88 or Nashville, he’s doing that constantly. Gregory La Cava, too, in Stage Door.
How did you make sure the comic impact of the language would carry over from the graphic novel?
I think the characters were very well written in the graphic novel. It was very funny; at the same time, it felt true. That was the story of the writer’s life. He told, very simply, what happened to him. And you can feel that. I wanted to preserve the energy of the novel, not to copy the way it was ordered. This is the trap. A graphic novel is not a storyboard. You must understand what is great in it, and sometimes that will mean finding solutions which are the opposite of what is actually in the graphic novel. I can just give you a detail: in the novel, I looked at Christophe Blain’s wonderful drawings, and in some of them, the foreign minister is moving so fast that he has five or six arms, like an Indian god. Papers are flying. I had to keep this idea, but I didn’t want to do any kind of special effect. Instead, I had him walk as if he was preceded by a kind of mini-storm. He’s like the character in Peanuts who is always followed by dust. When he comes into a room, everything flies, and he never has any kind of look towards what’s happening around him.
One of the great foreign affairs ministers, when he saw the film, said: “That is a wonderful idea. It gives the right color to the character. He doesn’t leave anything concrete; he’s so far away in his own vision that he never sees that he’s bothering everybody. He’s living in another dimension.”
He sets the rhythm of the space, but he’s also constantly disrupting it.
Totally. He creates an enormous chaos around him. Sometimes, when I was doing the film, I thought: “My God, it’s a fable about filmmaking.” Some directors seem to create a huge chaos on the set, but in the end, when you see the finished film, it has tremendous logic. It was very late, during the editing, that I discovered that in his brilliant speech in front of the council of security—which is a real speech—the minister is using all the formulas which he has been repeating throughout the film. It sounds absurd when he gives these lists—“ténacité,” et cetera—but in the end, they are all in the speech, and they make sense. It’s as if he tries out a lot of formulas verbally, and then, having created a lot of chaos around him, succeeds in doing something which is structured, organized, and incredibly well written—the most brilliant speech in French diplomacy for two or three decades. It was vilified in this country at the time, but he was totally right. Everything which was in the speech is now timeless. It’s precise, intelligent, true and wise. During the whole film, you would have a problem attributing those adjectives to the character of the minister.
That was what attracted me to the story: that the politics of individuals are more important than their behavior or their crazy way of talking. Politicians can only be judged by their effects—not by the way they dress, talk, or scream, or the fact that they contradict themselves, say stupid things, or sound emphatic and arrogant. They can be all of that if, at the end, the result is terrific. In exactly the same way, some directors can seem nasty or mean; others want to change their screenplay whenever they meet somebody. But in the end, something will happen, and it will be great.
Bertrand
Tavernier | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Rebecca Flint Marx biography
Bertrand
Tavernier - biography and films - Films de France biography by James Travers
Bertrand
Tavernier - Director - Films as Director and ... - Film Reference Robin Wood, updated by Rob Edelman and Robin
Wood
Biography
for Bertrand Tavernier - TCM.com
brief bio
Bertrand Tavernier |
The Montgomery Fellows brief bio
Film
& Nothing But: Bertrand Tavernier | Quad Cinema
Bertrand Tavernier Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Carloss James Chamberlin from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2003
If
You Haven't Heard of French Director Bertrand Tavernier, Here's a ... Vadim Rizov from indieWIRE, March 20, 2014
Bertrand Tavernier, Playing Geopolitics For Laughs Howie Movshowitz from NPR, March 22, 2014
Lose
Yourself in the Odd Beauty of Bertrand Tavernier's Films | Village ... Bilge Ebiri from The Village Voice, June 19, 2017
[The
Daily] Bertrand Tavernier at the Quad - From the Current - The ... David Hudson from Criterion, June 20, 2017
My
Journey Through French Cinema: Personal Canon-Building with ... Vadim Rizov from Filmmaker magazine, June 20, 2017
An interview with Bertrand Tavernier Richard Phillips interview from the World Socialist Web Site, July 10, 1999
Bertrand Tavernier
| Film | The Guardian Adrian
Wooton interview from The Guardian,
November 12, 2002
The
Rumpus Interview With Bertrand Tavernier - The Rumpus.net Julie Treneer interview, March 13, 2009
'I
am a director first. I can't just take holidays when I like' - The Irish Times Tara Brady interview, June 6, 2013
A
Conversation With Bertrand Tavernier: On Politics, His Favorite Star ... John Farr interview from The Huffington Post, April 11, 2014
A
CONVERSATION WITH BERTRAND TAVERNIER, by Susan King Susana King interview from American Cinematheque, June 13, 2017
Bertrand
Tavernier: “French Cinema is not Limited to the Nouvelle ... Ariane Fert interview from France-Amérique, June 14,
2017
France (105 mi) 1974
Michel Descombes (Philippe Noiret) is a simple watchmaker in Lyons, a widower who enjoys hanging out with his friends. One day the police come to his shop, and he learns that his son, Bernard, has apparently committed a murder. The victim is the former boss of the young man’s girlfriend, a girl that Michel didn’t even know existed. As he works with the primary detective (Jean Rochefort) on the case to help locate his son and determine a motive, he realizes how little he knows about his child’s life… but is determined to support and protect him.
There’s a lot more going on here, too. Political films are always a struggle for me, doubly so when the politics are foreign, and even more so when they’re 38 years old. I often felt like I was missing the point, and I probably did. Michel seems to be coming to terms with (or discovering) his own rebellious, revolutionary streak, but also denying the political implications — if there are any — to Bernard’s actions. In general I think the political message of the film is lost on me.
But as a character study, it’s a very good film. Noiret was quite busy at this time, in the same year he appeared in Le Secret (which I recently reviewed) and Ferreri’s awkward farce Don’t Touch the White Woman. And the previous year he had appeared in a far better Ferreri film, La Grande Bouffe (which gets a clever mention in this film). Here he still has that shabby, likable Walter Matthau-ish quality, but the performance is quite subtle, understated and introspective. Noiret quietly registers his revelations on his face, you can sense him weighing information in his mind. As a “crime film” it’s rather unusual, focusing little on either the police or the suspect, but rather the suspect’s father, a man not prone to emotional outbursts but who is clearly affected by it all. It’s a character worth spending time with.
I do wish I had a better grasp on the film’s political messages, but it was still a good experience. I should also note that there is some excellent camerawork, including a couple of lengthy and impressive tracking shots. Rating: Good (76)
Digitally Obsessed [Dale Dobson]
Michel DesCombes (Philippe Noiret) is The Clockmaker (L'Horloger de Saint-Paul), a middle-aged
man who finds himself in the middle of a police investigation and its attendant
media circus after his son Bernard (Sylvain Rougerie) is accused of murder.
Leftist politics, strong-arm threats, deceitful journalistic tactics, and an
unlikely friendship with Police Inspector Guilboud (Jean Rochefort) complicate
Michel's life and his reaction to the situation. But as he struggles with his
emotions, Monsieur DesCombes begins to recognize his younger self in his
estranged son; the two are drawn closer together even as Bernard faces up to
twenty years in prison.
Bernard Tavernier, an ex-film critic who became a founding member of the French
New Wave movement, collaborated with screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre
Bost to adapt Georges Simenon's novel to the screen. The Clockmaker takes its time with the story—there's some mystery
involved, but the film unfolds in a completely naturalistic way, chronicling
Michel's actions in the days after the murder with little dramatic manipulation
or compression. Tavernier also takes the liberty of focusing exclusively on
Michel—while we do meet Bernard, we don't hear his side of the story, and we see
him and his actions solely through the eyes of his father. This quiet, intimate
approach is what gives The Clockmaker
much of its power—it recognizes that life-changing events often happen moment
by moment, rather than in the artificially structured manner demanded by
fiction. The dialogue even comments on the gaps between "movie
reality" and reality on several occasions, and Tavernier's film is careful
to maintain a cinéma vérité feel. (This is not to suggest that film has
a low-budget or documentary style—excellent cinematography and careful, almost
geometric composition provide evidence of the director's hand at work,
particularly in a Lynchian opening shot of an automobile burning ferociously in
the night.)
Star Philippe Noiret contributes another strong performance to the New Wave
cinema, and he does it in such a transparent way that he scarcely seems to be
acting. Noiret's Michel makes his decisions privately, but the thought process
is very visible onscreen—whenever he so much as brushes a hand across his
forehead, we know exactly what he's feeling. His performance is a critical
element of the film—we never even meet many of the characters who are mentioned
or glimpsed in photographs, and the story is carried on Noiret's shoulders.
Jean Rochefort also contributes an effective, credible performance as Inspector
Guilboud, a bureaucratic but human official who sympathizes with Michel even as
he tracks Bernard down.
There's a political subtext to the film—Bernard's alleged victim is a hated
factory supervisor, an authoritarian lecher who uses his power to harass the
working girls and fight the union, and we learn that Michel himself has a
history of resisting abusive authority. But The Clockmaker is not a political film—the political discussions
and opinions voiced by its characters lend texture and realism to the story,
but have little to do with its intended message. It is a portrait of one man's
relationship with his son, and the potential for redemption in time of crisis.
It's intimate, touching and thoroughly credible. Recommended.
Films de France [James Travers]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The Clockmaker Movie Review & Film Summary (1976) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - THE CLOCKMAKER - The New York Times Vincent Canby
DVDBeaver.com
[Per-Olof Strandberg]
France Germany (130 mi) 1980 ‘Scope
What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]
Death Watch has probably disappeared from local screens by now, but it’s an ambitious and interesting film that deserves a little notice. Director Bertrand Tavernier has had three intriguing movies hit Seattle screens in the last few months: A Week’s Vacation (1980) at the Film Festival, The Judge and the Assassin (1975) at the Seven Gables, and Death Watch, the French Tavernier’s first English-language film, at the Crest. Shooting in English seems to have been a bit of a problem for Tavernier, as Death Watch doesn’t flow quite as smoothly as A Week’s Vacation. But there are so many ideas flying around in Death Watch—maybe too many ideas—that it’s always fascinating to watch.
For one thing, Death Watch is engaging just in terms of storyline: a TV producer (Harry Dean Stanton) comes up with an idea for a ratings bonanza. He puts movie camera in the eyes of one of his cameramen (Harvey Keitel) and has the guy record the final days of a patient with a terminal illness (Romy Schneider). Schneider doesn’t want her last days filmed, and she tries to escape; when Keitel finds her and stays with her, she doesn’t know she’s being filmed, so her life is recorded, and she becomes the highest-rated show for days without knowing it.
When Keitel begins to have second thoughts about the humanity of his filming, there’s a problem: he cannot close his eyes, because if the cameras are deprived of light for more than a few minutes, they will malfunction and blind him. (This means that he no longer sleeps, and there is much made of the fact that his dreams have been taken away from him.)
An overload of rich cinematic material here, and Tavernier isn’t quite the accomplished juggler to pull it all off—not yet. But the thing remains compelling, a fact that is in large part due to Romy Schneider’s superb performance. Keitel is erratic, and gives a non-directed performance, but Schneider, seen against the stunning landscape of Scotland, makes her private character seem quietly triumphant at film’s end, and leaves behind a record of a very human being.
First published in the Herald, November 1982
This is a complete coincidence—I just pulled out this review because I was looking for sci-fi titles last week—but apparently Death Watch is currently enjoying a restored re-release in Britain, and getting a little of the attention it failed to get the first time around. It is well worth a look, and Romy Schneider’s performance is special. By the time this opened in the U.S., she was already dead.
First released in 1980, I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to see, or even hear of, Death Watch. It may seem paradoxical to say so but I think it’s a masterpiece even while I recognise a number of small flaws. I only hope that others see it and agree with me.
The plot is almost scarily prescient. In the future, terminal illness is a rarity. In fact, it’s so rare that one TV executive (Vincent, played by Harry Dean Stanton) knows that when he finds someone in such a state he will have struck gold for his latest TV hit, Death Watch. Harvey Keitel plays cameraman Roddy, a man who no longer needs to carry a camera because he has had one implanted into his eye. The early footage seems good and Roddy will be the main cameraman for Death Watch, he just has to remember the golden rule – always stay near to some light source. Any spell of darkness could break “the equipment”, rendering Roddy blind. He can’t even close his eyes, learning to nap with them open. But what good is a cameraman without a captivating subject? That’s where Katherine Mortonhoe (Romy Schneider) comes in. She is dying and Vincent makes his offer. Allow herself to be filmed in the process and receive a large amount of cash while touching the lives of many people who somehow need to feel close to death, to go through the range of emotions that advancements in technology seem to have taken from them. Or maybe Vincent is just saying whatever he has to in order to get Katherine’s cooperation. Katherine, however, still doesn’t want to be involved and when she tries to take the money and run she is then befriended by Roddy, unaware of his recording abilities.
As well as those already mentioned, Death Watch also has a small-but-powerful role for Max Von Sydow, the first movie role for a Mr. Robbie Coltrane and the rugged beauty of Glasgow to add to the embarrassment of riches it offers viewers. William Russell is also very good as the doctor who advises Katherine, Therese Liotard is quite good as Roddy’s ex and Vadim Glowna is . . . . . . there . . . . in the role of Harry Graves, Katherine’s current husband.
The ideas onscreen here are all-too believable. Some have already become a reality while others seem to be just around the corner for us. Computers replacing teachers and also, a lot of the time, replacing hard work and creativity (Katherine is a writer who feeds her plotlines through a computer that analyses them and then advises her of potential sales). A hit TV show that sets out to show someone dying. A future that still has grit and grime to it but seems to lack colour and a sense of fun, it even seems to lack emotionally-stimulating art.
The three main performances from Schneider, Keitel and Stanton are superb so it doesn’t really matter about the uneven work from the supporting players. The script, by director Bernard Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is effective, sometimes unnerving and almost always beautiful. There are moments in the last third of the movie that may feel a bit too over the top, a bit too luvvy-ish with the poetic nature and sentiments being spoken, but the movie earns those moments and they’re underlined by the pain and needs of the characters.
Tavernier avoids the two standard sci-fi styles, things are neither too cold and sterile nor too beautifully sleek and ergonomic. The future has happened and things have moved along faster than people could have imagined but buildings are still made of stone and technological advancements haven’t miraculously wiped out class divisions and poverty. This is science fiction getting right to, and blurring, the edges of science fact.
I could go on and on about this film for a long time yet but I’ve already written far too much. In case you didn’t notice, I think that David Compton (writer of the source novel) is someone of brilliance, I think that the main actors involved are brilliant and I think that Bertrand Tavernier is someone I should really have taken more notice of years before now. This, to me, is essential cinema.
Death Watch is available on DVD now and I urge film lovers to pick it up ASAP. The disc comes with a few extras, the best of which is an interview with Bertrand Tavernier that lasts almost 40 minutes. How much pleasure you will deride from the behind-the-scenes photo galler, the image gallery or the trailer depends on how easily pleased you are. Thankfully, the movie itself makes this an essential purchase.
The
subjectivity of watching: Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch (1980 ... Kenneth George Godwin
Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity [Adam Lippe]
Death Watch
(1980) – That Was A Bit Mental
Ronan Martin
Death
Watch (1980) - Articles - TCM.com
Nathaniel Thompson
Cagey Films [kgeorge] Kenneth George Godwin
Films by the Year [Dan Willard]
The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
DVD Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson]
Blu-ray.com - Region A [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Review: Death Watch (1980):
Filmhouse: Edinburgh: 3 Bombs
Neil McEwan
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]
10
great films set in Glasgow | BFI
Pasquale Iannone
10
great films set in Scotland | Screenwriter - The Irish Times
New York Times [Vincent Canby]
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
France (102 mi) 1980 ‘Scope
Une Semaine
de Vacances, directed by Bertrand Tavernier ... - Time Out
Twelve years on from 1968, and the children of Marx and Coca-Cola are hitting their first mid-life crises' - in this case forcing a Lyonnaise teacher (Baye) to take une semaine de vacances and reassess her life. Tavernier avoids the reactionary ploys of 'unmarried women' stories, and his combination of solidly-crafted European finesse and fluid transatlantic shooting style effectively staves off intimations of the film's middlebrow nature. At the same time, the tentative celebrations of life's minor felicities - food, friendship, a community of good, nameless people - provide genuine warmth, and the final mood of cautious optimism is justified surprisingly well.
User Reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil July 18, 2007
Here's another strong piece of work from a giant in French
cinema, Bertrand Tavernier who is always on the alert to pore over various
social problems who are still topical many years after the shootings of the
films. "Une Semaine De Vacances" deals with education, a domain
Tavernier will explore again twenty years later with "Ca Commence
Aujourd'Hui" (1999).
The first thing that springs to mind is that by discovering this wondrous movie,
one realizes that Tavernier uses education to make the portrait of a French
teacher, Laurence acted with sensitivity by Nathalie Baye. The latter, one
morning decides not to go to her secondary school after a breakdown. Her doctor
(Philippe Léotard) gives her one week's rest during which she will review her
career, even her life. As she hangs around with her lover Pierre (Gérard
Lanvin), family and friends and makes new acquaintances, numerous questions,
doubts and fears haunt her: did she really want to devote her life to teaching?
Is she reliable enough to sustain interest amid her students? Should she have
children with Pierre? Through her personal quest and a fragmented narration,
Tavernier seizes the opportunity to make a mixing of different issues about
education both from teachers but also between parents and children (Michel
Galabru and his son with whom his relationships are rather blighted and there's
a Philippe Noiret cameo whose son is in prison: it's a nod to Tavernier's first
film: "l'Horloger De Saint Paul" (1974)). Other points involved are
loneliness, old age (Laurence's old female neighbor), doubt (one of Laurence's
students doesn't trust in herself while one of her colleagues puts her teaching
career to an end because she's fed up with the incessant changing reforms in
education) and different steps in the life of a woman: as I previously said,
Pierre is craving for children but Laurence is undetermined about this.
So, education isn't only at the core of "une Semaine De Vacances" but
one theme among several ones that are explored in the space of one week.
There's a lot of food for thought, reflection and at the end of the viewing,
one feels much more clever and available to have a look at the world that
surrounds us. It's bracing cinema as we would like to watch it more often. God
bless Bertrand Tavernier!
Une semaine de vacances - A Week's Holiday - Bertrand Tavernier ... James Travers from Films de France
COUP DE TORCHON (Clean Slate)
France (128 mi) 1981
Clean Slate, directed by Bertrand Tavernier | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Purists may object to Tavernier's treatment of Jim Thompson's excellent if sordid and sadistic thriller, Pop.1280, but this eccentric, darkly comic look at a series of bizarre murders is stylishly well-crafted, and thoroughly entertaining. Transferring the action from the American Deep South to French West Africa in the late '30s, Tavernier elicits a characteristically colourful performance from Noiret as the manic but outwardly easy going slob of a cop who initiates a private vendetta against the town's more obnoxious citizens by resorting to murder. Strange insights into the effects of racism and the complicity of its victims, embellished with black wit and an elegant visual sense.
Bertrand Tavernier's rowdy, broad, unsettling moral tale (1981) of a corrupt minor law-enforcement official in French colonial Africa who, tired of being pushed around by his wife, colleagues, friends, and the local pimps, decides to enforce more law than anybody wants. Like Jacques Becker in Goupi Mains Rouges, Tavernier follows screwball comedy out to its other side as madness: you're never sure whether what you're watching is high spirits or insanity, and the characters keep reversing themselves. Working with two veterans of the French “tradition of quality,” set designer Alexandre Trauner and coscenarist Jean Aurenche, Tavernier created one of the freshest French films in years—it has wit, dash, and fiber. With Philippe Noiret, Isabelle Huppert, Stephane Audran, Eddy Mitchell, and Guy Marchand. In French with subtitles.
What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]
The waves of heat that shimmer above the African plain in the opening sequence of Coup de Torchon are not just indicators of the visual texture of the film—dusty, unstable, with a goodly amount of strolling hand-held camera—they also serve as a prediction of the clarity of the film’s theme. Which is to say that nothing is very clear at all in Bertrand Tavernier’s latest movie; that’s just as it should be, since Tavernier is offering up provocative questions about some heavyweight ideas—Morality and Justice, for instance—and steadfastly refusing to lay down any answers.
Instead, Coup de Torchon glides in a dreamy ambiguity; if the issues that Tavernier engages are heavyweight—and Tavernier, l’auteur of The Judge and the Assassin and A Week’s Vacation, is rather refreshingly resolute about tackling ideas as well as characters—his manner is nimble. He describes Coup de Torchon as a “Metaphysical Comedy,” and that should take care of anyone who needs a snap summation of this unclassifiable film.
The head cop of the town of Bourkassa, French West Africa (it’s 1938), is not quite the jellyfish he appears to be. Even as he kowtows to the local pimps (in exchange for pocket money) and lazily lets law enforcement slide, Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is starting to carry out little revenges. Nothing more than dumping a shaker of salt into his (supposed) brother-in-law’s coffee, but he is striking back. To the townspeople, he is simply the bumbling wishy-washy government flunky, and they would never suspect him of being capable of sawing a hole in the outdoor latrine as a practical joke, let alone of murder, but he will do both.
At some point, Cordier gets the idea—and we’re never sure just when, or even whether he really believes it—that he is Jesus Christ, or a reasonable facsimile, sent to this Earth to clean things up. So he starts “correcting” the situation by killing people, at which times he shows more fervor than he usually demonstrates (basically, Cordier would prefer to be sleeping or eating all the time).
“The termites keep eating the crosses,” says the town priest, planting a new wooden crucifix in the earth. “Good thing Christ is cast iron,” observes Cordier. Cordier is much less durable than that church’s icon, and it is the termites of the world—bigotry, cruelty, mendacity—that have eaten into him and presumably set off his bizarre behavior. “It’s a dirty job,” sighs Cordier, as the burden of being the son of God weighs down upon him. The weariness—it’s gone past frustration, that’s too active a world—of the battle to keep the insects off oneself is beautifully captured by Tavernier (and his co-writer, Jean Aurenche—they based their movie on Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280), nowhere more powerfully than in the final, haunting image.
Much of that power comes from Tavernier’s lead actor—the lead actor in almost all his films—Philippe Noiret, who shuffles, slouches and rolls through the comedic/horrific paces with the agility of a big sea lion in water. Stubble-bearded, pink-shirted, and round-bellied, Noiret gives one of those performances in which an actor seems to do nothing and does everything. (He’s aided by superb work by three special actresses: Stéphane Audrane, Isabelle Huppert, and Irène Skobline.) Noiret and Tavernier don’t let us forget that Cordier is both a personality for examination, and an all-too-recognizable portrait of somebody who lives inside all of us.
First published in The Informer, July 1983
I think this was just about the time I started reading Jim Thompson, and Pop. 1280 was probably the first Thompson book, which would explain why I didn’t say more about it. This film is perhaps Tavernier’s masterpiece, although I can’t be definitive; his movies of the last decade haven’t been shown much in the States. The 1980s were good to him, though. I met Tavernier once when he came to the Seattle International Film Festival, and he happily talked about seeing Fifties starlet Julia Adams in a movie that morning on TV, and his growing interest in the movies of William Wellman–exactly as you hoped he would talk. Detail about the movie I did not know until years later: the pink shirt Philippe Noiret wears in this film was an homage to the dirty pink shirt Dean Martin wears in Rio Bravo. So there’s another reason to like it.
I've picked out at least three stories in COUP DE TORCHON. The first is psychological, the second could be political, the third would love to be metaphysical. In 1938, in Bourkassa, a village of French West Africa comprising "Population 1,275" (the name of the celebrated Jim Thompson novel from which the film is adapted), the cop is called Lucien Cordier. He's a naive, spineless man, easy to hold up to ridicule. {Philippe} Noiret is the hero of the first story: his big body takes blows and doesn't return them, effaces itself. But Cordier is held in contempt by people themselves so evidently contemptible (Marielle as a pimp, Marchand as a soldier and Eddy Mitchell as a notorious parasite) that the spectator feels that all this is exaggerated, that there is an eel under the rock. And if Cordier wasn't so weak or naive? And if he cooked something up for us? (One knows the importance of cooking in {Bertrand} Tavernier's films.)
Effectively, a second takes the relay of the first: Lucien Cordier sets himself to kill, without warning but without anger. We are here in the "even at the base of abjection he finds the force to rebel against an inadmissible situation" story. In this occurrence, the situation in Africa on the day before war, Bourkassa like a cabaret set, the intense mediocrity of colonial life, with its African zombies and its lost and repulsive little white men. Noiret is also the hero of this story. This time, it's his big body that gives blows and his intelligence that plans them. Oh good, says the relieved spectator: a little revolt, a little simplistic anti-colonialism is good. And at the same time, he's not convinced, the spectator; he says that in 1981, an anti-colonialist film is a little facile and almost retro. Today, a director, especially of the left, should go further, interrogate more deeply. (Look at Schlondorff.) And if Cordier wasn't only courageous and rebellious? And if Tavernier cooked us up something else?
So the third story tumbles down, the most ambitious of the three. The cabaret becomes very bloody and Cordier very talkative. Not weak, not naive, he gives a true course in Evil and negative theology for novices. All this explains itself: if the cop never arrests anyone, it's because, lucidly, he knows that all his little world is condemned - and him with it. So he would be, not one who kills nor one who saves, but one who destroys indifferently those who are already lost and who ignore it (from the ignoble Mercaillou to the good Negro Vendredi.) And when he kills, it's a little of himself that dies. Noiret is more than ever the hero of the story, a little chubby exterminating angel, certainly, but implacable. Beginning as a thick farce on the side of an African Clochermerle, COUP DE TORCHON would love to end on the side of the aces of error and redemption. On the side of Christians. Ford or Graham Greene, for example. In 1938, Tavernier tells us that the white man's burden (again!) was very heavy to carry. Thank God.
I again ask myself why these three stories set end to end don't manage to make a good film, at least a film. Why COUP DE TORCHON remains less troubling than its subject, less risky than old-fashioned, less dynamic than agitated. Why the direction in steadycam transforms the space into a rugby field and the characters into a confused mass, making the spectator seasick without moving him? I respond to myself:
1. Something about Noiret doesn't work. From the beginning of the film, it's clear that that the game of Noiret is just a setting, bringing not a gram of trouble to a supposedly sulfurous story. Noiret plays naifs with a clever air, weaklings with a hard air: he equalizes everything, he is monotone. One sees the actor measure out his setting, one doesn't see the character take form. He sweats, he agitates himself, he falls, but that doesn't mean that he moves. COUP DE TORCHON fails to make us discover "another Noiret," who would be for Tavernier the object of an affectionate documentary and not a narcissistic double.
2. Something about Cordier doesn't work. In the film, there is only one character. Only one that has a history, a soul, questions in a world where no one poses them: it's Cordier. The others are just the decor of his inner trajectory. One can find them more or less successful: Huppert rather good cast against type, Marielle convincing in a second half-role, Audran equal to herself, Marchand already stereotyped, Eddy Mitchell evidently remarkable in the role of the little chatterbox Nono. He only prevents them from weighing up to Cordier-Noiret, the only one who advances the story and who's interesting to all who feel. It's as if Tavernier asked spectators to laugh (even falsely) at the spectacle offered by the little whites of Bourkassa but that, of those who consider themselves deep thinkers, he begs them to direct their regard towards the little Africans who eat squatting down under the eye of Cordier in the first and last shots of the film. Would the meaning of the film be here? The meaning, perhaps, but not the film. And what one sees is the film, not its meaning.
3. Something about the dialogue doesn't work. So Noiret lends his body and voice. But it's no more than a loan, justly. The motor of the film is the dialogue, and like one could expect, that of {Jean} Aurenche and Tavernier oscillates between the funny story and the disenchanted aphorism about the human condition. The illustrated screenplay is a tenacious film genre, returning from afar (but it's returning, that's sure). It rarely produces interesting films but it pleases the public that, titillated every twenty seconds by a bon mot, becomes the film's accomplice more than its spectator. This showiness in dialogue writing only "works" in two cases: that of the actor-writer (Guitry) or that of the great, genial show-off (Jouvet, Brasseur, Berry performed their "numbers," without caring about the rest.) Today, those great, genial show-offs are dead. One must invent others. It's clear that Tavernier is devoting himself to it. He has a lot on his plate.
4. Something about the Tradition of Quality doesn't work. Obviously, I'm playing naive (and weak), I know that all this has a name: Tradition of Quality and that Tavernier has made no secret of his love for this cinema "of the old school", where the dialogue always matters more than the story and casting over direction. Good. But the more the Tradition of Quality returns (and it returns at full speed, unfortunately) the better one understands the extent to which it wasn't only an aesthetic affair, but an attitude of spirit, an ideology (the big word is let out, never mind.) Formal academicism, the submission of cinema to literature and literature to the author's words, the revindication of professionalism always arrive in tandem with a pessimistic vision of a dull, disenchanted world. Academicism is lazy. It's illusory to want to change this rotting world, so why the Devil make it the subject of a story and direction, of a game with the spectator? To what goal? Why incarnate Evil in a story (like Hitchcock, Bresson and Dreyer have done, to remain among the Christians) where all the world's horror can be summed up at little cost in a bon mot, on the counter of a bistro, in Bourkassa or elsewhere? Because it goes quicker, it's less difficult and upsets no one. The favorite character of the old Tradition of Quality cinema (one finds it with Clair, Carné, Autant-Lara), the one to whom one never tells stories because he already knows everything, the bad public quickly blasé, is the Devil. One must one day make a history of French cinema through the character of the Devil. It would be very revealing.
If I've told the three stories of COUP DE TORCHON, it's because it is clear for me that Tavernier hesitates between them. A psychological story? To what goal? And one passes to the political story. To what goal? And one passes to the metaphysical. I had the feeling of a pre-determined escape- a shame because this Christian scenario seems to interest Tavernier the man. It's Tavernier the artist who doesn't follow.
Translated by Steve Erickson, with assistance from Philippe St-Germain.
Originally published in LIBERATION November 6, 1981.
Coup de
torchon Criterion essay by
Michael Dare, May 12, 2001
Coup de torchon
(1981) - The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Ruthless Reviews [Alex K.] (Potentially Offensive)
Wednesday Editor's Pick: Coup de Torchon (1981) - Alt Screen
Moving Image Source: Mark Asch + Cullen Gallagher August 11, 2008
Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Flicks - Cinescene Chris Dashiell
Coup de Torchon Erik Lundegaard
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson, Criterion
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Daniel Hirshleifer, Criterion
Coup De Torchon : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Aaron Beierle, Criterion
Coup De
Torchon - Criterion : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Gil Jawetz, Criterion
Coup de torchon | Featured
Screening | Screen Slate
Carole Golum
The L Magazine [Justin Stewart]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Movie
Review - - 'COUP DE TORCHON,' LIFE IN A FRENCH COLONY ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times
Graceful in a
classical style, like architecture, this film works on many different levels in
one unexpected day of glorious beauty and gently peaking emotions, a day in the
life of an elderly, established painter, Mr. Ladmiral, played by Louis Ducreux,
that visually pays tribute to the beautiful French countrysides, a favorite of
the Impressionists, as Mr. Ladmiral, well-settled into the fame that has long
been his, spends quiet days in solitude at his country home, his weeks marked
only by his regular Sunday visits by his boring, bourgeois son, his son’s
starched but beautiful wife, two roguish boys, and a Renoir-dressed daughter in
the summer of 1910. But on this day, he
is surprised by the unannounced visit of his adored daughter Irene (Sabine
Azema), refined, high-strung, demanding and unbending, her pride conceals her
greatest passions, and the day takes a sudden turn when she takes charge and an
outbreak of happiness prevails everywhere, waking Ladmiral from his nap, always
in a mad rush, taking him for a drive in her new car, dancing at an outdoor
cafe in a rapturous moment of grace, beauty, and love. She receives a phone call and is all too
suddenly reminded of the life she left in Paris, leaving Mr. Ladmiral alone
that evening after he sees everyone to the train, returning slowly to his home
where in the final sequence he studies the scene to perhaps begin a new
painting. This is a very classic,
measured and joyous experience, filled with history and sweeping panoramas, a
film that takes a longer time to develop its deeper understandings, suggesting
that life is always a matter of love, touched with melancholy grace and subtle
emotion, where the camera glides across the lovely interiors and exteriors like
an artist’s brush across the canvas.
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
It's easy to see why this film by Bertrand Tavernier won the Best Director prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. The drama covers one day in 1912 in the life of Monsieur Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux), an elderly painter who is visited in his country home by his son and daughter. Edouard (Michel Aumont), who is married to a pious wife and has three children, wants desperately to win his father's approval. While he plays the role of dutiful son, his lovely, irresponsible and unmarried sister irene (Sabine Azema) bursts on the scene, shattering the tranquility of the Sunday afternoon with her bubbly energy and personal vibrancy. She, of course, is the apple of her father's eye.
The film's visual beauty is striking, and all the characters are just right. From a luncheon, a doze outside after the meal, a ride in a new car, and a dance in a tavern on the green, Tavernier draws forth a bittersweet commentary on the injustice and dynamism of family politics. Best of all, the director celebrates the unexpected ways artistic creativity can be renewed by catalysts who arrive in a rush and depart just as quickly. A Sunday in the Country is a total delight.
EyeForFilm.co.uk David Stanners
Set in pre World War One rural France, Sunday In The Country tells the story of an ageing painter, Monsieur Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux), who lives in a big house and reminisces about his deceased wife and past experiences. Accompanied by his housekeeper (Monique Chaumette), he is joined on Sunday by his son Gonzague (Michel Aumont), daughter-in-law Marie-Therese (Genevieve Mnich), daughter Irene (Sabine Azema) and grandchildren.
Sunday by name and Sunday by nature, the narrative plods along at a rural pace. Not much happens, as Monsieur L chats to Gonzague about life, painting and more painting, while quietly considering his son's lacklustre marriage to a placid, servile woman. Gonzague finds his father's overbearing talents as an artist difficult to handle and sheepishly converses with Marie-Therese about his limitations, mediocrity and insecurities. At the same time he tries to score points by reminding his father how reliable and faithful he is to these Sunday visits, unlike his flamboyant, whimsical sister, whose visits are few and far between. When Irene does eventually make an appearance, her jovial nature turns the house upside down, much to her father's delight.
Bertrand Tavernier has created a quiet little film, so quiet that it fails to communicate much at all. The excretion of family truths and difficulties are so mundane, that dramatic possibility soon evaporates. When the vivacious Irene turns up, hope shines briefly for a moment, but is soon extinguished.
It is as if Tavernier has drawn the outline concept of pre-war drama on a blank canvas, but forgot to fill it in. The characters are played as well as can be expected, but with little to work with, their efforts are soon washed ashore. It seems harsh to criticise such a quiet, harmless little picture, but, as a piece of family drama, Sunday In The Country is more dull than quiet and more nonchalant than harmless.
User Reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil July 16, 2007
A lot of people consider it Tavernier's best.
An old man lives in the country in a desirable property. He waits for his children's
visit. Whereas his son, Gonzague, who lives a bourgeois life with wife and kids
frequently turns up, his daughter Irene, a socialite, a woman ahead of her time
is often too busy in Paris to remember her old papa.
On a clear sunny day, they all gather in the father's house. Suddenly the house
does not look that much cozy. The novel on which the movie is based is called
"Mr Ladmiral Va Bientôt Mourir" (M. Ladmiral is soon going to die) and
Death shows beneath the placid surface: a terrifying vision of the old man on
his death bed – there is a similar scene in John Huston's last work; – a fleeting
souvenir of a picnic in the garden where they used to eat (wild?) strawberries;
more prosaically, when the family arrives near the church, they can hear
"Nearer my God to thee," (the Titanic band's canticle!).
The admirable sequence in the Guinguettes displays not only Tavernier's tribute
to Auguste Renoir, but also his love for the true masters of the French cinema:
Auguste's son Jean ("Une Partie de Campagne"), Julien Duvivier
("La Belle Equipe") and Jacques Becker ("Casque d'or").
This is a brilliant movie by the man who is perhaps the greatest living French
director. His command of the picture is so fascinating that even the frequent
voice-overs are not redundant.
Like this? Try these.......
Make Way for Tomorrow, Leo McCarey 1937
Une Partie de Campagne, Jean Renoir 1936
Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman 1957
Eglantine, Jean Claude Brialy 1971
The Dead, John Huston 1987
Un dimanche a la campagne - A Sunday in the Country - Bertrand ... James Travers from Films de France
A Film Rumination: A Sunday in the Country, Bertrand Tavernier (1984 ... Joachim Boaz
A Sunday In The Country - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings ... TV Guide
Movie
Review : Risk, Love On 'A Sunday In Country' - latimes Sheila Benson
A Sunday in the Country Movie Review (1984) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - BERTRAND TAVERNIER'S 'SUNDAY IN THE ... Janet
Maslin from The New York Times
A Sunday in the
Country - Wikipedia
USA France (133 mi) 1986 ‘Scope
'Round Midnight,
directed by Bertrand Tavernier | Film review - Time Out
Tavernier's offbeat love letter to bebop gets the best jazz film award since Sven Klang's Combo. Night after night in the pouring rain, a young Frenchman (Cluzet) squats outside a Parisian jazz club, listening to the sublime saxophone of one 'Dale Turner'. Since Turner, a shambling bear of a man, is troubled by the jazzman's classic demons of drink and drugs, it is not long before the young man has befriended him, rescued him from cheap flophouses, and installed him in his own flat, where kindness and devotion achieve some kind of advance over the depredations of the jazz life. The film reeks of the authentic stuff of jazz, smoky with atmosphere and all as blue as a Gauloise packet. Dale Turner, as played by Dexter Gordon, seems to be an amalgam of Bud Powell and Lester Young, but the private, rueful dignity that he brings to bear is all his own.
Round
Midnight | Chicago Reader Pat Graham
Bertrand Tavernier's perenially heavy mood seems especially well suited to this indigo-shaded story (1986) of a black American sax man (Dexter Gordon) living and performing in Paris in the late 50s, though the point here is the music (enlarging on Tavernier's well-known affection for American blues-jazz idioms): the not-quite-satisfactory relationship Tavernier concocts between Gordon's alcoholic musician and a chirrupy young Frenchman who becomes his self-appointed protector seems little more than a dramatic excuse for the performances that flow around it. Gordon's remarkable as the emotionally disarranged, psychologically disintegrating jazzman, and when the little Frenchman calls him a genius, you suddenly realize what that overused term implies: not moral worthiness or superior personhood but a giftedness beyond accounting that hardly belongs to character at all. With Francois Cluzet, Gabrielle Haker, Lonette McKee, and a slew of topflight jazz performers (Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Freddie Hubbard).
Movie Review: Round Midnight (1986) | movingtheriver.com Matt P.
‘Round Midnight’ turns 30 today, and its status as one of the great jazz movies was confirmed at a birthday screening last night at the Cine Lumiere in South Kensington.
Whilst the recent ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Miles Ahead’ were moderate commercial successes, they were subject to withering criticism in some quarters – I was with the naysayers regarding the former but, after watching the trailer, couldn’t even drag myself to the latter.
So until Woody Allen makes his long-promised big-budget ‘birth of jazz’ film, ‘Round Midnight’ is probably the best we’re gonna get. Its success even ushered in a short-lived Hollywood jazz revival – Clint Eastwood produced the wonderful ‘Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser’ (1987) and directed the underwhelming ‘Bird’ (1988), followed by Bruce Weber’s acclaimed Chet Baker documentary ‘Let’s Get Lost’ (1988) and Spike Lee’s ‘Mo Better Blues’ (1990).
‘Round Midnight’ is loosely based on the memoir/biography ‘Dance Of The Infidels’ by Francis Paudras, a Parisian graphic designer who befriended legendary bebop pianist Bud Powell – and became his carer, business manager and confidante – during Bud’s expat period.
The film focuses mainly on the relationship between Francis and Dale Turner, a fictional mash-up of Powell and saxophonist Lester Young. My dad and I loved ‘Round Midnight’ from first viewing and, at a guess, very much related to Francis’s passion for jazz and desire to see his hero ‘living well’, rather than scuffling from gig to gig, drink to drink (Dad visited Paudras in France in the late ’80s in his capacity as a TV producer, but the proposed documentary never got made).
Put simply, the film ‘gets’ jazz; it’s immediately obvious that almost everyone involved loves the music and its players. Despite an incredibly slow, dark (as in: you can’t really see what’s going on) opening 20 minutes, ‘Round Midnight’ finally delivers the grandeur, romance and tragedy of America’s classical music.
Dexter Gordon’s Oscar-nominated lead performance still thrills, 30 years on. Though his character mainly spends the first half of the film trying to get wasted, we can forgive him anything, especially when we hear of the beatings and racist abuse regularly doled out during his time in the army (this dialogue, according to director/co-writer Bertrand Tavernier, was pure autobiography on Gordon’s part).
Elsewhere, Martin Scorsese has some fun with his portrayal of the fairly sleazy New York booking agent Goodley, while Francois Cluzet gives a strong, touching performance as the quick-tempered though loyal Francis.
Tavernier has finally found a way to represent jazz on screen, and it couldn’t be simpler – just round up the best players available (including Tony Williams, Bobby Hutcherson, Billy Higgins, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Freddie Hubbard, most of whom also have speaking parts), get them to play live and capture a performance in one take if possible.
It’s no great surprise that Herbie’s soundtrack won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1987, though the film’s original music arguably never quite evokes the high-energy rush of prime late-’50s bebop-tinged jazz. No matter: both ‘Round Midnight’ and its score have aged pretty damn well.
The best fiction film ever made on a jazz subject. `Round Midnight ... David Sterrit from The Christian Science Monitor
Near the beginning of ``Round Midnight,'' jazz musician Dexter Gordon takes the stage of a small nightclub, brings his saxophone to his lips, and blows some of the most amazing notes I've heard in any film. The melody is slow and sweet, but the tone is tough and unadorned. It's a typical Gordon sound, with an air of mingled sadness and beauty that perfectly suits the picture's atmosphere. Although it's not directly a biographical film, ``Round Midnight'' has deep roots in jazz history and especially in the life of Bud Powell, the greatest piano player of the bebop era. The filmmakers acknowledge that their story was ``inspired by'' experiences of Powell and Francis Paudras, a French jazz aficionado who befriended and supported him. They have also dedicated the movie to Powell and sax star Lester Young, two men whose talents and personalities seem conjoined in the picture's main character, played by Gordon in one of the year's most stunning performances.
The film begins disjointedly, with oddly spliced-together views of the 1950s New York jazz scene. This isn't the most inviting way to start a movie, and some viewers may lose patience with it. But it turns out to be a perfect mood-setter for the story that slowly emerges from the fog -- a story of friendship, loyalty, and commitment, and how those qualities help a troubled artist find respite from social and psychological demons that have long threatened to drive him over the edge.
The action starts in earnest when the melancholy hero, a sax player named Dale Turner, leaves New York for Europe, which took in more than one American jazz expatriate during the '50s.
Hoping a new environment will somehow soothe his feverish mind and renew his musical quest, he settles in Paris and joins the small but close-knit jazz community there. Its members share the job of baby-sitting for this gifted, troubled man -- holding his pay, making sure he gets to the club on time, keeping him away from the alcohol that has already come close to killing him.
It's obvious to everyone, including Dale, that this is a losing battle. Although the reasons for his suffering aren't spelled out, they have gone on too long and cut too deep for an overseas flight and a ``fresh start'' to erase.
Dale is about to collapse under their weight, perhaps with a sigh of relief, when a new friend enters his life: a white Parisian jazz fan named Francis Borier, who has idolized Dale from afar. Thrilled at the chance to be near his hero, not to mention helping and encouraging him, he selflessly takes the crumbling musician under his wing. Gradually but gratefully, Dale responds to this friendship -- relaxing his emotions, clearing his turbulent thoughts, curbing his self-destructive habits.
``Round Midnight'' isn't a sentimental film, despite some flat-footed statements about the closeness of beauty and pain. Francis's friendship is no panacea, and eventually Dale feels the time has come to face New York and his jazz roots again. Francis has already put a strain on his own life -- he's a single parent with a young daughter to care for -- and can't stay forever as Dale's guardian angel. In the end, Dale loses the long battle with his inner demons. But it's clear that Francis's presence has made a crucial and uplifting difference in what could have been a far more tortured twilight to his life.
Although it's an American production, ``Round Midnight'' was directed by French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, whose slow, measured style has made such films as ``The Clockmaker'' and ``Let Joy Reign Supreme'' seem more lethargic than contemplative. Magically, this approach is just right for the balladlike moods of ``Round Midnight,'' which takes its title from the greatest of all jazz nocturnes. The story and characters have ample time to stretch, breathe, and burrow their way under the viewer's skin.
Also contributing to the film's success is a deliciously eccentric performance by Dexter Gordon and a likable one by Fran,cois Cluzet, who would be more effective as Francis if he weren't such a Dustin Hoffman look-alike. The fine cast also includes real-life musicians Herbie Hancock and Bobby Hutcherson, among others, and real-life movie director Martin Scorsese as a pushy agent.
``Round Midnight'' is a downbeat film that touches on more than its share of unhappiness. Tavernier has a deep love for jazz, however -- in conversation, he has delighted me with his witty comparisons of filmmakers and musicians -- and treats the material with taste and tact.
By all accounts, the real Bud Powell was vastly more disturbed than his counterpart on-screen, and the makers of ``Round Midnight'' deserve praise for stressing his genius more than his nightmares. Jazz historian Nat Hentoff once wrote that, even on a bad night, when Powell played ``whatever else was roaring or whispering in his head [was] swept aside by music.'' That's the man who's evoked and eulogized in ``Round Midnight,'' surely the best fiction film ever made on a jazz subject.
Movie
Review: 'Round Midnight (1986) – A Jazz Masterpiece | Fino's ... Fino’s Weblog
''Round Midnight' review by JC • Letterboxd
ROUND
MIDNIGHT – Herbie Hancock | MOVIE MUSIC UK Jonathan Broxton
'Round Midnight :
DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video
Gil Jawetz
'Round Midnight (1986) -
Blu-ray.com
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Round Midnight (1986) | Emanuel Levy
Why
Dexter Gordon's "Round Midnight" is 1st among jazz films | KUVO ... Steve Chavis
Film Screenings: Round
Midnight — The Dexter Gordon Society
Round Midnight
Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Washington Post [Paul Attanasio]
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
'Round Midnight Movie Review & Film Summary (1986) | Roger Ebert
Round
Midnight - The New York Times
Round Midnight
(film) - Wikipedia
France Italy (131 mi) 1987
The usually temperate Tavernier veers towards the dark side in this catalogue of medieval cruelty. Lord of the manor Donnadieu returns from the wars in a state of rage, seeking nothing but bloodshed and harm. He rapes his daughter, dresses his insufficiently macho son in a frock and sets the hunt on him, and plunders the neighbourhood. Just the situation for a hero to set right, but none is forthcoming. This monster only dies when he himself wills it. Tavernier has enjoyed recreating the detail of this cheerless world, with its contending superstitions. But it's relentlessly brutal and extremely long. What were they again, the rewards of Tragedy?
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum]
128 minutes of slow-motion torture. Bertrand Tavernier's misconceived catalog of suffering and squalor during the Middle Ages—specifically his grim account of incest and humiliation after a lord (Bernard Pierre Donnadieu) returns from the Hundred Years' War to rape his daughter (Julie Delpy), berate his son (Nils Tavernier), curse God, and abuse a few others—is worthy of Woody Allen in one of his unfunny, self-flagellating moods. The toneless script is by Colo Tavernier O'Hagan, who previously collaborated with her ex-husband on that oatmeal manifesto known as A Sunday in the Country. If the earlier film was a square celebration of mediocrity, this one is an equally square and gutless attempt to do something down and dirty without knowing precisely how or why. A fine original score by jazz bassist Ron Carter and some good cinematography by Bruno de Keyzer get wasted in an art film that, like the worst of Allen, manages to bore you (and bore into you) with its relentless determination to be as depressing as possible for no reason in particular.
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Bertrand Tavernier offers a cruel vision of French life in the Middle Ages in the unrelievedly grim "Beatrice," the history of Lord Cortemare, castle owner, child abuser, village pillager and knight of the realm. Cortemare is so despicable that he makes the Marquis de Sade look like Alan Alda.
Tavernier, who directed " 'Round Midnight" and "A Sunday in the Country," debunks the chivalric dream with this brutal, grueling period piece. Cortemare (Bernard Pierre Donnadieu) is a hugely tragic figure -- wailing, ranting and generally carrying on. Not even one of Kurosawa's Shakespearean samurai adaptations could contain this character. He's outlandish, beyond context, completely irredeemable. Traumatized when he killed his mother's lover at age 10, he takes it out on every woman in the whole world ever after. He is given to sexist remarks, throwing women off horses and sexual humiliation. And, considering his son Arnaud (Nils Tavernier, the director's son) weak, he dresses him up in women's clothes and makes him the prey in a manhunt.
His daughter Beatrice (Julie Delpy) is a devout, angel-faced virgin who adores her father and her brother, perhaps overmuch. She hunts birds, romps with the children and cares for the family property while the men are at war. Angry at her for selling his tapestry and eager to defy God, Cortemare rapes, and therefore ruins, his daughter -- and not only that, he murders her magpie.
Wispy, sorrowful and resigned, Delpy is effective in this awful part. But things are so horrid, suicide would seem like a happy ending to the long nightmare of her life, so relentlessly invoked and carefully detailed. This time Tavernier's strength -- an ability to engulf us in his world -- is his weakness. Alack, he's given us Camelot as a cesspool.
Review for La passion
Béatrice (1987) - IMDb
Jonathan Fain
New York Times [Walter Goodman]
France (135 mi) 1989 ‘Scope
Life and
Nothing But, directed by Bertrand Tavernier | Film ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
In 1920 in Northern France, haute Parisienne Irène (Azéma) and local teacher Alice (Vignal) search, respectively, for the husband and fiancé they have lost in the war. They find themselves thrown on the mercy of the head of the Missing in Action office, Major Dellaplane (Noiret), whose unending efforts to identify the countless dead, shell-shocked and missing are continually being diverted by a military establishment bent on glorifying French courage with a funeral ceremony for the Unknown Soldier. The film focuses on the way these three interact, but in so doing, broaches bureaucratic hypocrisy and corruption, post-war poverty and racism, social inequality and the deceptions of romantic involvement. But it's Tavernier's careful orchestration of his medium that most expressively colours the motifs of solitude, grief and loss. Subtle, fluid camera movements explore grey fields and stark, impeccably designed sets to supply a palpable sense of time and place; unsentimental yet dignified performances (with Noiret outstanding in his hundredth film role) underline the discreet humanism of Tavernier's approach.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
The aftermath of war is littered with loss. Bodies lie unclaimed, unrecognisable. Mothers, wives, sweethearts search for a sign in crowded country hospitals of life, of death, even a maimed torso, or shell-shocked brain that belongs to the man who marched away, with ignorance and pride, so many years before.
By October 1920, France is beginning her slow recovery. Trains are running again, even if stations are in ruins. Farmers find unexploded bombs under the blades of their ploughs. The sight of Arabs and Asians in the fields, helping the army, is not uncommon.
Bureaucrats and politicians have begun the nationalistic revival. Sculptors are in demand to create elaborate monuments to the memory of every fallen hero from every village in every district. Investigators are out looking for the corpse of an unknown soldier, to rest forever under the Arc de Triomphe, as a symbol of... what? Glory?
The feeling of tenuous control and haphazard order filters down to those whose security has never been restored. A young teacher loses her job when a qualified veteran from the front returns. Carriages of Red Cross wounded are blown up in a tunnel, still booby trapped from the period of the German retreat.
Life is balanced between luck, circumstance and privilege. Everything has changed and yet everything remains the same. The military represents law and order, as expected, while, beneath that uniformed facade, a beautiful chaos is attempting to corrupt truth.
Major Dellaplane (Philippe Noiret) has seen too much horror to respect the organisations that condoned it. His job is to discover the identity and fate of 350,000 missing men. He takes the ethics of what he does seriously and treats the rest with disdain, or gentle mockery.
When an aristocratic lady from Paris (Sabine Azema) appears, seeking knowledge of her husband, the Major is intrigued, annoyed and eventually infatuated. Their love affair, which is not a love affair, weaves through the centre of this broad canvas, never dominating, hardly announcing its intentions.
From such muddy, grey-toned, misty material, Bertrand Tavernier has crafted a magnificent piece of work, so clear of sentiment, so rich in irony, enormously enhanced by Noiret's sensitive portrayal of an old soldier, sickened by protocol, shy of emotional response and locked into the dignity of a disciplined sense of self.
Bertrand Tavernier's "Life and Nothing But" does a lot of things well. It's a textured story, beautifully told, that captures the spirit of post-World War I France where it is set; it's brilliantly, even spectacularly acted; it's handsome, intelligent and even, on occasion, richly moving.
So why do I feel so indifferent to it?
The answer lies in what's missing, rather than in what's shown. Based on a script by the director and his collaborator, Jean Cosmos, "Life and Nothing But" examines that period just after the war, when the moment for heroism has passed and what's left is the messy job of cleaning up. Its central character is an officer with the War Casualties Identification Bureau -- a bureaucrat named Dellaplane (Philippe Noiret) -- whose thankless and nearly impossible task it is to account for the 350,000 French who are missing in action.
Poring over his ledgers, he sets about this labor with an obsessive meticulousness that borders on the comic. He knows this is the part of the war that no one cares about, least of all his superiors, who would prefer that the books be closed as quickly as possible. His dedication doesn't impress them, it annoys them, but Maj. Dellaplane sticks to his grim duties, primarily for the sake of the families of the missing, who roam the battlegrounds and search the field hospitals for their loved ones.
The picture revolves around the relationship between the major and two women, a wealthy Parisian and a provincial schoolteacher who are searching for their lost mates. Irene (Sabine Azema), with her furs and aristocratic beauty, assumes she will be treated with all the deference due her station. Backing her up is her father-in-law, a powerful senator who has agitated both in the press and in the halls of government for swift resolution to the problem of the MIAs.
Understandably, Dellaplane takes unkindly to these pressures, assuring the lady that her case will receive only the "1/350,000th of my attention" that it merits. At the same time -- and for reasons that have more to do with his attraction to her than the worthiness of her claims -- he goes to great lengths to brush aside the pesky bureaucratic hassles that get in her way. By uneasy steps, they build a kinship that blossoms into love, though the major, who is a careful man, is unable to act upon his newly discovered passion at the moment when it most counts.
The movie's greatest problem may be that it too greatly resembles its main character. What the picture lacks is emotion; a veil of malaise hangs between us and the film. And while this may have been something like the mood of postwar France, it feels more generalized than that, more like empty attitudinizing.
The characters don't emerge with much vivacity, either. The teacher, Alice (Pascale Vignal), is wanly conceived; she's included in the story, it seems, only to allow for a rather predictable plot twist late in the film. Noiret makes an engagingly rugged camera subject, and though he gives an authoritative performance, it's not a terribly penetrating or affecting one. Except for some bawdiness early on and the occasional flash of irony, he mopes his way through the picture.
Azema, on the other hand, is a revelation, especially early in the film when Irene vents her haughty indignation at the incompetence of the army bureaucrats. She brings a fierce sexuality to the part, and beneath that a sense of elegant, love-starved weariness. This is strong, furied acting from a ravishingly gifted actress.
In "Life and Nothing But," Tavernier works with classical restraint that translates most often as aloofness. The movie's style allows for everything except a freely expressed passion. And without it, the film, whatever its other virtues, pales.
Ruthless Reviews (potentially offensive) Alex K.
Review for La vie et rien
d'autre (1989) - IMDb Sandra
J. Grossmann
DVDTalk Matt Langdon
France (145 mi) 1992
L.627 | Theater
Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
The title of Bertrand Tavernier's well-turned 146-minute French thriller (1992) refers to the article from the French Code of Public Health that forbids "all offenses linked to the possession, traffic, and consumption of narcotics." Cowritten by former narcotics officer Michel Alexandre, this film takes a realistic approach, following the everyday routines and bureaucratic frustrations of a Parisian narc, well played by Didier Bezace. The character never quite says "It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it," but this is the general idea, and with an able if not very well-known cast Tavernier makes an absorbing and authentic-looking movie out of it. More to the point, he implicates the audience in the sliminess of certain police operations in a way that has challenging and potent political ramifications--which is probably why this movie has been assailed by both the left and the right in France. See it and make up your own mind.
L.627, directed by Bertrand Tavernier | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Parisian drugs-squad detective Lulu (Besace) has an obsessive mission, born of a hatred for the way drugs waste lives, as in the case of his junkie-prostitute friend Cécile (Guirao). But the department is underfunded; he's saddled with several colleagues who are incompetent, naive or racist; and his various relationships, with his superiors, his wife (Garcia-Fogel), addicts and informants, merely serve to muddy his idealistic code. Tavernier's documentary-style policier is admirable, intriguing, and finally something of a disappointment. On the credit side, it never pulls its punches, it's unsentimental in its depiction of both law enforcers and breakers, it acknowledges that both the system and racial inequality exacerbate the drugs problem, and its raw, rambling narrative makes for an impressively authentic alternative to the slick, heroic clichés produced by the Hollywood mainstream. But the film - engrossing enough in any ten-minute excerpt - lacks dramatic drive, frequently slipping into tedious procedural detail.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Real life is not structured, like fiction. Even conversations sound fractious. A well-made screenplay is far too polished and yet that is what we applaud. Reality has no beginning, middle and end; it has surprise, chaos and boredom.
Bertrand Tavernier has made a two-and-a-half hour cop movie in the style of cinema verite. It is not the real thing. That would be a documentary - even documentaries are edited, which, according to purists, is cheating. In order to create the impression of honesty, explanation is avoided and plot runs naturally into the wall.
Lulu (Didier Besace) is in his thirties. He's been a plain-clothes flic long enough to realise it's a pissing in the wind kind of job. He's not cynical. He cares. Even on a stakeout, in the back of a fuggy transit, waiting for someone who doesn't appear, he's not agonising about what he's doing with his life. He's just doing it.
What he likes best is cultivating contacts and setting up traps. In drug prevention, stoolies are vital. Without them, les flics wouldn't have a clue. Even with them, they cock it up more often than not.
Lulu hates paperwork. L.627 is a form. One of thousands. The film has a simple message - bureaucracy is a bad mother. Lulu wants to catch the fat cats who are destroying a generation of kids, the dealers. He doesn't want to be stuck behind a desk.
He has a young wife he hardly ever sees and a prostitute friend who is HIV-positive. He joins a new crew and a certain amount of banter takes place, usually sexist, especially when Marie (Charlotte Kady), the feisty female operative, is around. The contrast between silly pranks and serious business carries on throughout.
In the end the impression is that cops are no worse than anyone else. Some are sadistic, others racist, and their battle against crime may be lost before it has begun. Life on the force has fewer perks and less rewards. Camaraderie holds them together. Talk is tenuous.
"Sometimes I'm scared."
"Me too,"
It's a job. Like any other? It's not entertainment.
L.627 (France, 1992). Movie reviews by Dr. Edwin Jahiel.
In case you are not aware of it, Bertrand Tavernier is an incredibly talented and original film-maker who stands at the top of the pyramid, not only that of French movies but of films from all nations. He is also a polymath, a voracious reader, a scholar of film including American cinema from its babyhood to now (he is also fluent in English), has a wicked sense of humor, and, andŠ I 'll stop before this begins to sound like paid advertising!
L.627 (France, 1992) is (approximately) the 21st of over 30 movies made by Tavernier, who also scripted most of them. The title is that of a section of the French Code of Public Health. It deals with drugs, their dealers and users, arrests, penalties and such.
In France as well as elsewhere, drugs are a major, ever-spreading problem, and a hot issue. Tavernier's decision to make a film on the subject was spurred on by his thinking that the French Establishment treated this scourge with inefficiency. Tavernier recalls a 1985 meeting with the then Prime Minister, (or was it a Minister? I forget) to whom the filmmaker expressed how aghast he was at the sight of dealers peddling cocaine and heroin right outside schools or in the corridors of the subway. Replied the PM :" I asked you to talk with me about important matters!" This reinforced Tavernier's decision to make L.627.
His aim was to show what French police movies and police series did not show: endless stalkings, endless hours of policemen hiding in frozen or roasting, claustrophobic vehicles, petty details including in the offices, etc. Tavernier spent much time with the police and their activities. His experiences convinced him that it was his civic duty to speak up, even to denounce the awful conditions of the drug squads or police details. By the same token, he would negate the "mythology" of those French cop-movies that ape the older American styles.
Tavernier sought out a most experienced cop, a veteran narcotics investigator, Michel Alexandre. (He is listed as co-writer in the film's credits.)
The two men met through Nils Tavernier, the director's son and an actor (he is also in L.627) who, to play a policeman in Catherine Breillat's "Dirty Like an Angel" (1991) had prepared with Mr. Alexandre as consultant.
Tavernier Senior and detective Michel Alexandre hit it off right away. The director asked the lawman to write down all he could/would about his police experiences, Three months later, the latter delivered to Tavernier some 400 pages of text, including dialog.
Tavernier's search for authenticity also included specific requests to his director of photography. Such as no changing the lighting of real, on-location shots. No cut-away shots of certain types: if a cop follows a suspect, stay on what the cop sees. and don't shift to a closeup of the suspect. No fancy angles or devices of the traditional cop-movies style. And so on.
The film came out in France in September 1992. It was controversial, especially as it pulled no punches vis-à-vis reprehensible aspects of the police as well as the neglect of that body. Yet the picture was found by some to go too easy on the cops.
If L.627 has to have a label, the closest would be "docudrama," but with the stress on "docu" rather than on "drama." There are no bravura pieces, no exaggerations, no grandstanding, no romances. Whatever peripherals exist reinforce the movie. (I will not disclose details here.) There are no camera-friendly beautifications--or colorful uglifications. It all looks and feels very realŠand, seeing that it is a Tavernier opus, it also has its share of humor, natural, sharp and always making valid points.
By the standards of police movies L.627 is not just realistic but super-realistic -- call in naturalistic in terms of literature. I mean by this, the raw depiction of people, places and actions without a smidgen of embellishments or all the many "colorful" or "movie" aspects that are inserted in cop pics or TV series, especially in the American-made ones. Here the structure is organic (and think of how rare this is in movies!)
In fact, even docudramas cannot resist the temptation of inventions which will enhance (?) matters and impress the public.
[A useful study would compare the usual movies, including the best, such as "The French Connection" in the expanded genres, with Tavernier's utter refusal to add filmic come-ons.]
This is a work that unlike anything you have seen. It is set in Greater Paris, both in central and peripheral locations, always depicted in totally anti-romantic fashion. No " oh la la" or "beautiful Paris" here. Grungy, shabby and very real, it makes not a single concession to movie-movie-ism, whether it depicts main streets or mean streets, slums, hovels, police stations that lack materials they need, stations that confine and crowd the cops in miserable offices which can be even smaller than a normal house-trailer yet are packed with people.
In the U.S.A and abroad, for the millions of viewers who are familiar from features and from TV series with American police stations, their means of communication, their computers and other equipment, the offices as well as other relevant spaces in this film look antiquated to say the least, and almost penurious.
In one station the personnel has been waiting in vain for months for carbon paper. (Many younger viewers won't even know what this is.) Even the telephones are not up to date -yet modern ones certainly were common in 1992 France.
Bureaucracy reigns. In some ways, one feels the presence of that famous, ironical French saying: "Pourquoi faire simple quand on peut faire complique? (Translation: Why make it simple when you can make it complicated?)
Other viewers, especially among the sharp-eyed, film-savvy ones, will notice the full-fledged non-artiness in the photography. No fancy angles, no zooms from close-ups to long shots, and so on.
This being a French movie about French cops, there is no dearth of talk, whether shop-talk, professional, personal or combinations thereof. Talk is part and parcel of French culture, the power of dialogue and conversation is ingrained in that country - and without chauvinism I must say that it is one of the beauties of French life. Boring your interlocutor is or ought to be a sin. In fact, even porno movies use talk where their American equivalent uses moans.
A splendid, fascinating film, and even for (or in the context of) France, a one-of-a-kind experience.
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
L.627 | Variety David Stratton
Movie
Review - The New York Times
Stephen Holden
France (125) 1994
Review for La fille de d'Artagnan (1994) - IMDb Dragan Antulov
Just like Hollywood studios today, writers in the past era made sequels, thus trying to earn some extra money by exploiting their past successes. French writer Alexander Dumas Pere, one of the most prolific and best known 19th Century authors, bowed under popular pressure and reunited the protagonists of his best-known novel THREE MUSKETEERS. Such effort didn't result in the novel comparable to the original, but century and half later this fact didn't discourage makers of LA FILLE D'ARTAGNAN, 1994 period adventure directed by Bernard Tavernier, to launch sequel of their own.
The plot begins in France 1654. Black man, apparently escaped slave, seeks shelter in one convent. His pursuers manage to catch him and they kill mother superior in the process. This turns out to be big mistake because one of the witnesses is Eloise (played by Sophie Marceau), daughter of famous musketeer and swordsman D'Artagnan (played by Philippe Noiret). Despite being a woman and being sent to convent, Eloise has inherited her father's martial skills and taste for adventure. Convinced that the incident is part of large- scale conspiracy, Eloise travels to Paris in order to warn young king Louis XIV (played by Stéphane Legros). In the process she becomes object of interest for Cardinal Mazarin (played by Gigi Proietti), king's corrupt prime minister. In the meantime D'Artagnan gathers his old musketeer comrades in order to fight the conspiracy. It is easier said than done, because the age had taken its toll and D'Artagnan and his friends aren't as fit and able as they used to be. It is left for Eloise to compensate their weaknesses with her youthful zeal.
We might speculate that Bernard Tavernier's motive for this project was his disgust with the way Hollywood had treated THREE MUSKETEERS in its 1993 MTV-style version. Whatever the motives, Tavernier directs this swashbuckling adventure with the skill usually not associated with the filmmaker best known for serious dramas. Famous French actress Sophie Marceau (best known for her rather uninspired performance in BRAVEHEART) shows great ability as action star. Apart from lush period settings and good swashbuckling action, the movie is full of humour, but some of finer jokes would be lost to people not so familiar with 17th Century history of France. On the other hand, it is fun to see Gigi Proietti and his character of Roman Catholic Cardinal running France (at times the world's mightiest state) in the same manner mafia chieftain run their "families". The acting is mostly good, although Claude Rich overacts in his role of villain. Yet, despite those flaws, LA FILLE D'ARTAGNAN is a movie that should be recommended to fans of period spectacles. Its two hours are going to pass much quicker than three hours of LA REINE MARGOT.
World Cinema – D'Artagnan's Daughter (1994) - Flickering Myth Simon Moore
Perhaps you went to the
cinema recently. Perhaps you too were inflicted with a headache’s worth of 3D
trailer worryingly titled The Three Musketeers, featuring the kind of buff,
swaggering nonces we’re used to seeing in Pirates of the Caribbean series. It
seems determined to be epic, or somesuch other flash word. With lines like
“Only we can prevent the coming apocalypse”, the plot seems destined to go the
way of Pirates; straight up its own arse.
Whatever happened to all
the fun in the world? Didn’t we already have a rubbish Musketeers remake back
in the ‘90s? Why does D’Artagnan always look like a girl in these films? These
questions and more can be answered with eerie precision and excellent humour by
D’Artagnan’s Daughter.
Chances are this one
passed you by; short of the odd Amelie, French cinema doesn’t get much of a
look-in at UK cinemas. A pre-Braveheart-fame Sophie Marceau leads the cast with
gusto as Eloïse D’Artagnan, a hot-headed tomboy with a taste for adventure and
a talent for swordplay kept under wraps in a remote convent. French acting
legend Philippe Noiret plays D’Artagnan, the fourth musketeer himself, grown
old and fat, aching in places he never dreamed existed. A murdered Mother
Superior and a mysterious laundry list prompt Eloïse to seek out her father and
implore him to investigate.
The plot from here on is
farcical and thrilling by degrees, with all the passion and patois of Alexandre
Dumas’ original stories. Tavernier gets straight to the heart of these blithe,
wry characters in a way no director has come close to since Richard Lester’s
acclaimed pair of Musketeers films in the ‘70s. Here, spectacle goes hand in
hand with comedy gold. Deadly swordplay quickly develops into spirited
horseplay; daring rescues get rudely interrupted by desperate escapes.
Film-makers adapting a Dumas story forget his wicked sense of humour at their
peril.
In this respect, special
credit must go to Claude Rich’s Duc de Crassac. His is a character both
monstrously ambitious and delightfully daft. He proposes to Sophie Marceau’s
chest. He schemes mid-coitus. Whenever you fear this film might take itself too
seriously, you spot Crassac unashamedly leering at a nun whilst he’s having his
dastardly plans explained to him by a subordinate. And he’s not even the best
part about D’Artagnan’s Daughter.
What is, then? It could
be the swordplay, fast and flamboyant, brimming with surprise and suspense.
Scenes showcasing Marceau’s skills in particular are riotous and tense by
degrees, as her mad-flailing-novice style terrifies and perplexes her
opponents. Or it could be the musketeers themselves, rheumatic oddballs and
hard cases to a man. It might be the mad mix of supporting characters,
confusing and bamboozling each other with sex and politics and eyepatches.
Ultimately, all these separate elements might sum up to a good film, but it’s
the direction that makes D’Artagnan’s Daughter greater than the sum of its
parts.
Tavernier doesn’t treat a
comic scene like comedy. There’s no jokey musical cues to instruct us that this
scene or that line is supposed to be funny. His actors play it deadpan all the
way. There’s a scene where the Duc de Crassac poisons his chief poisoner. The
look on the poisoner’s face is more perplexed than anguished. Crassac says,
with a little shrug, “You knew too much.” Not a hint of malice, not a cackle to
be seen. As if this is a perfectly normal thing to do. Rich doesn’t play a
villain, he plays a callous, ambitious idiot, genuinely convinced he’s
justified in committing murder.
D’Artagnan’s Daughter is
precisely the kind of fun and feisty swashbuckler French cinema excels at.
Tavernier throws conspiracy, duels to the death and father/daughter tensions
into an adventure film and still keeps the tone indomitably light-hearted. This
is quintessential Saturday night entertainment; it just happens to be in
French. So man up. You’ll stop noticing the subtitles after the first tavern
brawl anyway.
Simon Moore is a budding
screenwriter, passionate about films both current and classic. He has a strong
comedy leaning with an inexplicable affection for 80s montages and movies that
you can’t quite work out on the first viewing.
The
Daughter of D'Artagnan la Fille de D'Artagnan | Variety Brendan Kelly
France (118 mi)
1999 ‘Scope
It All
Starts Today, directed by Bertrand Tavernier | Film ... - Time Out
A war movie that happens to take place in a nursery school in northern France, this is wrenching, unpatronising social conscience cinema. Daniel (Torreton) is the embattled headteacher, fighting to do the best by his kids in a former mining community - a job that's tantamount to social work. Daniel's convictions are fiercely and unapologetically socialist, and Tavernier plunges us into the life of the school without pause. Using the documentary-style Steadicam technique of his policier L.627, Tavernier conveys the stimulation, the inspiration, and the frustration of teaching, as well as the limitless demands it makes on the teacher's compassion. Torreton is intense and dynamic, persuading us of Daniel's anger at a post-socialist political agenda and a quieter, poetic sensibility. It's Ken Loach territory, and like Loach, not beyond melodrama - Daniel's crisis of faith is linked to the fate of an alcoholic mother and an abused child - but also like Loach, too salutary to be fobbed off with condescension. Some critics have found the ending over-optimistic, but after the many troubled parental relationships in Tavernier's films, from The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul, through 'Round Midnight to These Foolish Things, this precious affirmation is surely merited.
BFI | Sight
& Sound | It All Starts Today (1999)
Kevin Jackson from Sight
and Sound, August 1999
Hernaing, in northern France: a
former mining town with 34 per cent unemployment. Daniel Lefebvre is an
idealistic principal of an primary school and a would-be writer. He struggles
to do his best for his young charges but is constantly thwarted by the
incompetence or indifference of the regional authorities, the hostility of his
superiors and the apathy or despair of the parents themselves. Escorting five-year-old
Laetitia home after her drunken mother, Mme Henry, collapses in the schoolyard
and runs off, Daniel finds their flat in a state of freezing squalor. His
attempts to do something about this crisis and others have mixed results. With
the help of children's nurse Samia, he effects some small improvements, but his
tendency to rage at bureaucrats brings down on him a school inspection.
Meanwhile, his ex-miner father
suffers a near-fatal stroke. The sullen son of his girlfriend Valéria helps
some thugs break into the primary school to vandalise it. Valéria resents his
apparent unwillingness to give her another child. Beset by problems, he
momentarily neglects the Henry family, who have had all their benefits cut off.
Mme Henry kills herself and her children with an overdose of Phenobarbital. The
Henrys are given an elaborate funeral by the local authorities which Daniel
refuses to attend. Instead, Valéria, Daniel and the schoolchildren organise a
festival at the school. Daniel agrees to try for a child with Valéria. At his
parent's house, his mother reads to his father from a manuscript Daniel's
written, a poetic tribute to the uncrushable spirit of their region's people.
According to interviews Bertrand Tavernier has given to the French press, It All Starts Today all began with tales told by the fireside. The director was on holiday with his daughter Tiffany Tavernier, and listened with fascinated dismay to her new boyfriend Dominique Sampiero, the director of a primary school, as he described events from his working life. Sampiero told him about a mother from whom he was trying to collect a subscription of 30 francs (about £3), who couldn't pay because she had only 30 francs to last her for the rest of the month; about another young matron who turned up hours late to collect her child and then collapsed in the playground, dead drunk. It struck Tavernier, he says, that he hadn't seen too many stories of this kind in French cinema lately, and set about helping to fill the gap himself. He wrote It All Starts Today's screenplay in collaboration with Sampiero and Tiffany Tavernier (who have since married, so this film about troubled families is itself a family affair) and both those sad tales have made it into the final cut.
It's worth stressing the factual and personal origins of Tavernier's film to disarm, or at least qualify, some of the objections it will surely provoke in cynics and miserabilists on this side of the Channel. Not only is its hero a smouldering, macho-but-sensitive hunk (admirably played by Philippe Torreton, on his fourth outing with Tavernier after L.627, L'Appât and Capitaine Conan), he also moonlights as a lyric poet whose macho-but-sensitive aperçus blossom here and there in the soundtrack. Not only is his waitress girlfriend as beautiful as a French movie actress – as Maria Pitarresi, in fact – but she spends her own leisure hours with welding goggles and blow-torch, making avant-garde metal sculptures.
For a putatively serious-minded study of social deprivation, this artsy stuff looks several shades too glamorous; more unkindly, it looks silly. (I was not the only one who giggled at the first ominous sighting of sculpture.) Surely Tavernier is far too canny to believe audiences capable of responding enthusiastically to, say, Ken Loach's Raining Stones are still in need of such quaint narrative sweeteners? Does he think we can only sympathise with underclass characters if coaxed into the mood by a hero and heroine who are egregiously comely and artists to boot? Probably so: and in Tavernier's defence, it must be stressed that life can be as contrived as art, since Daniel's original, Sampiero, is indeed a poet, with a dozen slim volumes to his name who, judging by his photographs, scores fairly high himself on the macho-but-sensitive scale.
Yet to understand all is not always to forgive all, and even after one concedes that some of the more improbable elements of this film are faithful enough to reality, it continues to seem an uneasy marriage between social realism and soap. Although Tavernier has said, no doubt rightly, he couldn't have made a documentary on this material because the real-life families would have refused "from timidity or pride" to take part, a lot of the most memorable and telling passages in the film are its quieter moments shot in documentary or pseudo-documentary style. In the most haunting of these, an older colleague of Daniel's talks to an unseen interlocutor in standard news-gathering interview format, jump-cuts and all, about the frightening decline she has witnessed in her pupils' most elementary skills. Nowadays, "they don't even know how to talk."
There are other sequences which have something of this quality of unforced observation when Tavernier slackens his narrative reins and allows us the chance to ponder his widescreen images: the seasonal transformation of the northern French landscape from mid-winter starkness to summer lushness (a plain but adequately tactful parallel to the emotional expansion taking place in Daniel, who seems poised to father a child after all and maybe break through as a writer); the wretched domestic interiors with the odd quasi-genteel memento of more prosperous days, such as a useless barometer; the clumsy, faltering rhythms of children at their play-work; and Daniel coaxing them along with a generosity and fairness that is more impressive, more a work of art, than his rather overwrought scribblings. Had the whole film been made in this spirit, it might have been some species of masterpiece. But for all its virtues of heart and mind, It All Starts Today has the whiff of unduly conscious artifice, and is mainly.
It All Starts Today (Ca Commence Aujourd'hui) (2000) | PopMatters David Sanjek
Ruthless Reviews [Alex K.] (Potentially Offensive)
World Socialist Web Site Richard Phillips
Political Film Review Michael Haas
IT ALL STARTS TODAY | Film Journal International Doris Toumarkine
It All Starts
Today Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club
Paths of Most Resistance Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice, September 5, 2000
It All Starts Today (ca commence aujourd'hui) - CultureVulture.net Gary Mairs
Ça
commence aujourd'hui Michael
Brooke from Digital Fix
Movie Habit video review Marty Mapes
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
New York Times A.O. Scott
It All Starts Today -
Wikipedia
Safe Conduct | NYFF54 -
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Bertrand Tavernier’s vigorous and varied portrait of Occupation-era filmmaking in France achieves a Breugelesque richness of perspective—this is a story told by a director deeply in love with his subject. Tavernier’s hero is ace assistant director Jean-Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), who helps directors like Maurice Tourneur (Philippe Morier-Genoud) bring their most difficult visual ideas to life, negotiates his way through the German hierarchy at Continental Films, and works for the Resistance. With Denis Podalydès in the role of screenwriter (and future Tavernier collaborator) Jean Aurenche, Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet as producer Roger Richebé, and Laurent Schilling as the screenwriter Charles Spaak.
Laissez-Passer,
directed by Bertrand Tavernier | Film review - Time Out
Tavernier surveys the Occupation years in this expansive fresco of the French film industry's fortunes during WWII. Were those film-makers who worked for German-controlled production companies to be judged Nazi collaborators, or were there more subtle strategies of struggle in the compromises of everyday survival? The film has ample time to explore various positions, but the focus is primarily on two real-life individuals: assistant director and family man Jean Devaivre (Gamblin), whose can-do movie-making expertise effectively masks his courageous Resistance exploits; and brilliant screenwriter Jean Aurenche (Podalydès), who salves his conscience by refusing various job offers, even if it leaves him in penury. Breathless pacing whisks us through moral dilemmas, insurgent scrapes and lovingly recreated studio floor atmosphere. All of which is never less than watchable, yet fails to engage on any deeper level because Tavernier already has his mind made up about everything. Unless you're familiar with names like Charles Spaak or Pierre Bost, you may find Laissez-Passer bustling, intriguing and slightly academic. Tavernier's investment in the material is obvious, but cramming in enough material for three pictures may not have been the best way to serve it.
Paris,
1942-43. The French cinema industry is largely under the sway of the
German-controlled production company Continental Films, founded in 1940 by
Alfred Greven. Directors, screenwriters and actors are in profound disagreement
about whether working for Continental is a way of "hiding between the
wolf's fangs, where it cannot bite you", or tantamount to collaboration.
The
film traces the contrasting itineraries of two real-life figures, director
Jean-Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) and screenwriter Jean Aurenche (Denis
Podalydès). Devaivre, happily married with a small child, joins Continental
because it provides excellent cover for his Resistance activities. Aurenche, in
constant transit between his three women lovers, uses any possible excuse to
turn down offers of work from the Germans, jeopardising his livelihood.
Devaivre's brother-in-law Jacques Dubuis (Olivier Brun), a film extra, is
seized by the occupying troops because of his work for the Resistance; we learn
he was to die in prison at the age of 20. Devaivre and Aurenche survive the war
and continue their careers.
Review
"Were
things as black and white as people subsequently made out? Where do you draw
the line between collaboration, survival and resistance? No film has ever dealt
with these issues." Tavernier's grand claims for his most recent feature
did not succeed in convincing the French public: Laissez-passer did very poorly
at the box office there, perhaps a sign that the French may finally be reaching
saturation point where les années noires are concerned. The film stands at the
crossroads of two well-established genres, the Occupation/ Resistance movie and
the film about film-making. In many respects it represents a throwback to the
earlier type of Resistance movie - from René Clément's La Bataille du rail
(1945) to Jean-Pierre Melville's L'Armée des ombres (1969) - dominant before
Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1973). Full- blown collaboration is conspicuous
by its absence, the Germans are oppressively clean cut and given to barking
orders, Resistants bomb trains and - despite Tavernier's statement - the good,
the bad and the ugly are on the whole clearly and instantly identifiable.
The
distinctiveness of Tavernier's approach lies in his use of real-life characters
drawn from the 1940s French film industry, including the actor Michel Simon and
the two protagonists. Jean-Devaivre was a minor film-maker whose best-known
work La Dame d'onze heures was revived in France a few years ago at Tavernier's
instigation. Jean Aurenche is a far better-known figure - one half, along with
Pierre Bost, of the most influential scriptwriting team in Fourth Republic
cinema. (He also worked on several of Tavernier's early films.) This is
significant because Laissez-passer derives much of its resonance from the
allusions it makes to major recent debates in French film. Aurenche and Bost
were denounced by the critics working for Cahiers du cinéma, notably François
Truffaut, as the constipated epitome of a reactionary cinema, and Tavernier's
adoption of them was a provocative gesture which led to his work thereafter -
including the current film - receiving short shrift from Cahiers. Other
film-makers who appear as characters in Laissez-passer - André Cayatte,
Jean-Paul Le Chanois - were key figures in what Cahiers derisively called
"le cinéma de qualité", so Tavernier's film can be read as a defence
and reassertion of a cinematic tradition long eclipsed by the New Wave.
In
its use of muted, often muddied colours, Laissez-passer recalls Tavernier's
post-World War I epic Life and Nothing But (1989) as well as other Occupation
movies such as Claude Berri's Uranus (1990), though it differs from those films
in using no major stars. Denis Podalydès is a suitably schizoid Aurenche -
crafty and astute in his avoidance of collaboration, almost comically
tumultuous in his private life - while Jacques Gamblin makes Devaivre
convincing as a fearless Resistance hero of the old school. But ultimately
Laissez-passer is a team film rather than a star vehicle, providing a further
slant on a period many might have thought done to death, and skilfully scripted
to sustain attention throughout its almost three-hour running time. Tavernier
shows us, in more ways than one, that le ciné ma de qualité lives on.
World
Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
plume-noire.com
- Analysis of Safe Conduct (Laissez-Passer)
Corinne Le Dour-Zana
To Have and to Hold | Village Voice Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice, October 8, 2002
Safe Conduct Review |
CultureVulture - CultureVulture.net
Rachel Kaplan
Safe Conduct |
Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed
Gonzalez
dOc DVD Review:
Safe Conduct (Laissez-passer) (2002)
Matt Peterson
Safe
Conduct (Laissez-passer) : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Holly E. Ordway
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Shadows
on the Wall [Rich Cline]
Bertrand Tavernier Adrian Wooton interview from The Guardian, November 12, 2002
Bertrand
Tavernier's latest film causes a stir | Film | The Guardian Geoffrey
Macnab from The Guardian, October 23,
2002
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Safe
Conduct Movie Review & Film Summary (2003) | Roger Ebert
New York Times Elvis MItchell
THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER
(La Princesse de Montpensier)
France Germany (139 mi) 2010 ‘Scope
Even if it had no other virtues, Bertrand
Tavernier’s film of Madame de la Fayette’s novel should be applauded for
showing up the cliché-ridden vacuity of Ridley Scott’s ‘Robin of the Hood’ (as
the French title almost has it). No displays of CGI virtuosity here; no
Pythonesque emphasis on muck; no resort to ‘legendary’ stereotypes or apeing of
contemporary fashions; just a good story well told, with excellent
performances, a properly researched but never flashy attention to historical
detail, and a clear sense of what the film is actually meant to be about.
The Princess in question is Marie de Mézières, a beautiful young heiress in
love with the Duc de Guise but promised to his brother. The film begins in 1562
when her father, receiving a better offer, reneges on the agreement and has her
married to Philippe, Prince de Montpensier, whose friend and mentor the Comte
de Chabannes – banished as a deserter after he gave up killing during the war
between the Catholics and Huguenots – is enlisted to educate the young woman.
It’s awkward enough when this older man – not just a soldier, but a scientist,
philosopher and aesthete – secretly falls for his charge; far more problematic,
however, is the jealousy felt and angrily expressed by Philippe when it becomes
clear that de Guise still wants Marie. And then there’s the king’s brother, the
Duc d’Anjou…
It’s a fairly complex story, then, but Taverier handles it with the assurance
characteristic of his finest work; he’s as at home with the brutal battle
sequences as he is with the more intimate scenes between Marie and her various
admirers. He’s helped no end by a cast of largely unknown young actors; for
most of us, only Lambert Wilson, extremely effective as Chabannes, will be familiar,
though one can’t help feeling that the likes of Mélanie Thierry, Gaspard Ulliel
and Raphaël Personnaz – all extremely good-looking and all very effective as
Marie, de Guise and Anjou respectively – will be returning to our screens with
some regularity. Philippe Sarde’s music and Bruno de Keyzer’s ‘Scope camerawork
are also deserving of special mention. Old-fashioned it may be, but Tavernier’s
film impresses from start to finish.
When Bertrand
Tavernier embarked on his first period piece, Let Joy Reign Supreme, some 35 years ago, he produced a stunning
portrait of life at the court of the Bourbons in early 18th century. This time
he goes back in time another 150 years, to one of the darkest, most tormented,
periods of French history, using for his backdrop the brutal wars waged by the
Catholic court against the Protestant dissidents, and doing his best to
integrate a powerfully emotional love story into the course of history, and do
justice to both. It is an impossible mission at which he almost - if not quite
- succeeds.
Working from an almost forgotten short novel by the celebrated Mme de Lafayette and using a cast of very talented, though not yet easily recognisable, new faces - Lambert Wilson excepted - Tavernier shows once again his mettle as a consummate film artist, impressively assisted by cinematographer Bruno de Keyzer who is nothing short of a magician in using lights and shadows.
Costumes and sets are sumptuous at all times, and the film is a lavish production in every respect, with the added bonus of Tavernier’s painterly and ironic eye for detail. But since some history lessons may be essential for audiences trying to follow the plot, and the film might encounter some resistance beyond the arthouse circuit, especially once it steps out of the Francophone realm.
In 1562, the young, winsome, Marie de Mezieres (Thierry) is in love with her cousin Henri de Guise (Ulliel), but her father forces her into the more advantageous marriage to Philippe de Montpensier (Leprince-Ringuet), whom she has never met before.
But just after they are they wed Montpensier is required to
return to the front and fight for the crown, leaving his wife in the company of
the older, impoverished, Count de Chabannes (
The rebellious young woman cannot forget her first love, nor does she take well to the instructions of her guardian, who soon falls under her spell as well. A third admirer, the Duke of Anjou (Personnaz), joins the list of admirers once he sets eyes on her and the relationship between the four men becomes more entangled as the couple are required to join the Royal Court in Paris.
Her husband’s jealousy is ignited when de Guise insists on pursuing his fo Marie, who is initially hesitant, but soon enthusiastic. The Duke d’Anjou, who is set to follow his sickly brother Charles IX to the throne, uses his authority to thwart the affair but Chabannes, in a noble selfless act of denial, sacrifices his own feelings for the Princess to allow her a night with her lover.
The main problem for many will be following all the intricacies of the French court and its proceedings and the part they play in the general context of history, which the script suggests rather than spells out.
This was period of instability in
The script takes for granted that the viewers should be
familiar with names and events, and it is difficult to appreciate that the
story spreads over a period of at least 10 years. The film’s strength lies,
however, in Thierry’s portrait of the Princess, who would rather follow her
heart than her fortunes. She is given solid support by
Their performances will probably carry more weight with the audiences than the portrayal of the world they’re supposed to live in… which, ultimately, may have been Tavernier’s intention all along.
Review: The Princess of Montpensier - Film Comment Gary Giddens, March/April 2011
Madame de La Fayette, writing anonymously in the 17th century, equidistant in time between Cervantes and Defoe, helped originate the novel form, bringing to its development not only a woman’s point of view but probing psychological acuity. Celebrated, more in France than here, for La Princesse de Clèves, she also wrote, in 1662, a short story called “La Princesse de Montpensier”—a roundelay of marital and sexual cross-purposes set against the 16th-century conflict between Catholics and Huguenots, so plot-driven and devoid of descriptions (hardly an adjective interrupts the action) that it reads quite like a film treatment. Bertrand Tavernier has expanded it into a sly, alluring, and at times unsettling examination of the parallels between violence in the public and private spheres, in a society where a young woman, great in beauty and wealth, may be traded as chattel and pursued as the doe in a competitive hunt. He has made an intimate epic, as coolly calculated as a chess match, in which blood on the battlefield and on the bedsheets (after a public wedding consummation) is the fuel of economic and political power and masculine pride.
The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre has a place in film history as a component of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, yet has been ignored by filmmakers since 1916. In The Princess of Montpensier, it is relegated to the background, a monstrous intrusion in a climactic scene and the payoff of Catherine de Medici’s palace machinations. Yet the film, like the story it faithfully follows (to the point of including La Fayette’s dialogue) is concerned with intrigue involving the princess, Marie (radiantly, warily played by Mélanie Thierry) and her four suitors: her husband, Philippe (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet); his mentor and her tutor, Chabannes (Lambert Wilson); her childhood love, Guise (Gaspard Ulliel); and Anjou, the future Henry III (Raphael Personnaz). Tavernier and Jean Cosmos, revising an earlier script byFrançois-Olivier Rousseau, have proportioned the roles of the male characters more equally than in the original story, choreographing a more intricate and dramatically satisfying rivalry. They also ultimately allow Marie a measure of empowering independence, though it requires her “withdrawal” from love—much as the faithful Chabannes had attempted to withdraw from war.
The elaboration of Chabannes—who disappears from patches of the original story (inexplicably ill), serving at times as a deus ex machina dupe—into the film’s moral center is perhaps Tavernier’s most ingenious conceit. La Fayette doesn’t explain why he abandons the Huguenots for the Papists except as an act of friendship toward Philippe. The film begins with a fast, in media res battle in which one side pursues the other into a farmhouse and, “in the name of Christ,” slaughters them all—including a pregnant woman. Chabannes, appalled by his own actions, quits the fight, refusing to arm himself for either side, and is serendipitously saved from a hanging by Philippe, who entrusts him with instructing the princess whom he has been forced to marry. Tavernier also chooses to tell the story in the non-puritanical terms of the 16th century, when the action takes place, rather than in those that dominated La Fayette’s era, which would not have allowed her to permit adultery or avoid a judgmental verdict for Marie’s wayward desire.
The acting is superb, especially by two veterans: Lambert Wilson’s Chabannes, who compares himself to St. Paul but is hopelessly smitten with the princess, and Michel Vuillermoz as Philippe’s odious father, stealing his every scene as ruthlessly as his character steals Marie for his son. Of the younger actors, a virtually unrecognizable Gaspard Ulliel astonishes as the bloodthirsty, faithless Guise, making full use of his George Macready–esque facial scar (caused by a dog when he was six). The battle scenes are muddy and brutal, the domestic ones audaciously detailed with disquisitions on astronomy, poetry, the preparation for cooking eels. Bruno de Keyzer’s vivid photography and Philippe Sarde’s score contribute to the triumph of a historical film with a fiercely modern temper.
Ruthless Culture [Jonathan McCalmont]
THE
PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER - Ruthless Reviews Alex K.
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Spring
Arts Guide: Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of ... - Village Voice Aaron Hillis, March 30, 2011
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Film-Forward.com [Kevin Filipski]
Review: 'The Princess Of Montpensier' Tries To Find Some New ... Christopher Bell from indieWIRE
The
Princess Of Montpensier · Film Review The ... - The AV Club Noel Murray
Next Projection [Julian Carrington]
MUBI's Notebook: The Ferroni Brigade June 28, 2010
ScreenAnarchy [Kwenton Bellette]
Princess of Montpensier, The Patrick McGavin at Cannes from Emanuel Levy, May 19, 2010
Brad Brevet at Cannes from The Rope of Silicon, May 16, 2010
The House Next Door [Matt Noller]
Heat in the Bedroom and on the Battlefield in the Superb Princess of Montpensier Nick Pinkerton from The Village Voice
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Plume-Noire.com [Moland Fengkov]
Guy Lodge at Cannes from In Contention, May 16, 2010
Cannes
2010. Bertrand Tavernier's "The Princess of Montpensier" - Mubi David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 17, 2010
The Hollywood Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]
Q&A: Bertrand Tavernier - The Hollywood Reporter Rebecca Leffler interview, May 15, 2010, also seen here: THR
The
Princess of Montpensier | Variety
Leslie Felperin
Time Out New York [David Fear]
The
Princess of Montpensier – review | Film | The Guardian Jason Solomons
The
Princess of Montpensier – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Toronto Screen Shots [James McNally]
Thierry lights up Tavernier's Renaissance drama Jenny Barchfield at Cannes from The Washington Post, May 16, 2010
Movie
review: 'The Princess of Montpensier' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana Monji]
The
New York Times [Manohla Dargis] also
seen here: Bertrand
Tavernier's 'Princess of Montpensier' - Review - The New ...
Cloying Royals Scheme for Greater Glory Joan Dupont from The New York Times, May 19, 2010
JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA (Voyage à travers le
cinéma français) B 89
France (195
mi) 2016
Born in Lyon, home
of Lumière’s first studio that is considered the birthplace of film, so
Bertrand Tavernier, director of such diverse films as A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY
(1984) and ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT (1986), feels an inherited birthright to preserve
what survives of French film. Given the
best of a postwar education, Tavernier is the son of a Resistance fighter René
Tavernier who provided shelter to French communist poet Louis Aragon during the
occupation, a patriot whose writings and moral outlook helped shape his view as
an artist, as his father believed words were “as important and lethal as
bullets.” Accordingly, Tavernier
devoured French films as a child, deciding at the age of fourteen that he
wanted to direct, keeping a scrapbook of cinema memorabilia for his favorite
films and directors, developing a lifelong obsession for French film’s place in
history, which this film lovingly examines over the course of more than three
hours, exploring directors, composers, and actors, providing a treasure-trove
of clips while offering his own unique commentary. This is a whirlwind project that may only
just be the tip of the iceberg, as Tavernier plans an additional 8-hour
television series that delves into Tati, Bresson, Pagnol, Ditri, Clouzeau,
French cinema during the occupation, foreigners working in French cinema,
forgotten people like Raymond Bernard, Maurice Turner, or Anatole Litvak, and
lesser known women or underrated directors, including an additional 40-minutes
on Julien Duvivier, one of his personal favorites. So consider this a Master class on French
films, perhaps a parallel work to Godard’s HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÈMA (1989) or
Scorsese’s A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN FILMS
(1995), but viewed through the gentle refinement of a man of letters, as
Tavernier has been described as “a
warm and gregarious man with an encyclopedic knowledge of American and
international film,” who has worked within the industry his entire life
and currently serves as the president of the Institute Lumière in Lyon, while
Cannes Festival director Thierry Frémaux, a graduate of the university, is also
its director, where the primary goal is preserving French films. As a law student who preferred to write film
criticism, Tavernier founded his own cinema magazine L’Etrave, worked as an assistant director with Jean-Pierre
Melville, and got a job as a press agent to help usher in the French New Wave,
so it appears there is no one better to provide a bridge between the past and
the present for modern day viewers.
One of Tavernier’s earliest memories at the
age of four is looking out the window and seeing bombs flashing in the sky,
which he feels is reminiscent of a similar feeling he gets when stepping into a
movie theater, where in a darkened theater a projector illuminates images that
bombard his imagination. At about the
age of six, he was sent to a sanitarium where he was bedridden while treated
for a misalignment of his eyes probably due to tuberculosis, very possibly
caused by malnutrition due to wartime shortages. Once a week they showed films at the
sanitarium, where the first film he recalls seeing is Dernier Atout (1942) by Jacques Becker, which left him deeply
impressed, claiming Becker loved American films, particularly Ernst Lubitsch
and Henry Hathaway, taking from them what he liked, in terms of rhythm and
pace, keeping dialogue to a minimum, but making his films exclusively
French. Offering clips from half a dozen
of his films, many of which have recently been restored by Pathé and Gaumont,
who funded the film, where mutual interests in this project collide, allowing
Tavernier to take delight in some of his favorite scenes, pointing out Simone
Signoret’s enthralling entrance to a dancehall in Casque d’Or (1952), seen later gunned down on the streets of Paris
by Resistance informants in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969). The
opening image of the film comes from Vigo’s L'Atalante
(1934), one of the most enchanting films ever made, claiming the music composed
by Maurice
Jaubert gave the film a sublime lyrical quality, with
Tavernier standing in front of the camera overlooking a beautiful pastoral view
from his home, recalling his initial taste of cinema where he rarely left the
screening rooms of Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française,
taking it all in, where he still recalls taking to the streets in May ’68 to
defend the proposed firing of Langlois by French culture minister André
Malraux, but New Wave filmmakers protested, shutting down the Cannes Film
Festival that year until he was reinstated to his position. Tavernier tries to restore the fallen
reputation of Marcel Carné, claiming the man couldn’t write a screenplay, yet
could direct masterpieces, holding a special affection for Hotel du Nord
(1938), claiming it is years ahead of its time in depicting the working
conditions of women, while making no moral judgments about prostitutes and
homosexuals, instead showing them with a great degree of warmth, finding a
common humanity.
Tavernier exalts in the films of Jean Renoir, while
taking a look at actor Jean Gabin, who could do no wrong before the war,
displaying his versatility in La Grande Illusion (1937), where he
interrupts a vaudeville style performance by French prisoners in a German POW
camp to announce a French victory at the epic battle of Verdun, a momentary
glimmer of hope, where the entire group spontaneously bursts into singing “La
Marseillaise,” but was later chastised for joining Jean Renoir and Julien
Duvivier in the United States while France was occupied, where Gabin wasn’t
viewed the same upon his return, claiming he spent the war in Beverly Hills. While resurrecting interest in relative
unknowns like Duvivier and Edmond T. Gréville, Tavernier’s insight into Melville is particularly
noteworthy, having worked with him at Melville’s own Studio Jenner set,
pointing out a familiar staircase used in several films, but also side doors
and back alleys. Melville was known as a
tyrant on the set, yet was never punctual himself, often appearing hours after
the actors were scheduled to arrive, where Jean-Paul Belmondo goes into a
incensed screaming rant on his obvious inconsideration of others on the set of Le Doulos (1963), yet Tavernier also
exclaims the virtues of Melville, who loved American films as well, especially
William Wyler, recalling a long tracking shot of Lino Ventura running down the
street in Army of Shadows (1969),
where he refuses to interject music, as American filmmakers would do, where
instead all you can hear is the sound of his feet hitting the pavement, nothing
else, in a style that more closely resembles Bresson. Tavernier apparently previewed a rough cut
with American director Martin Scorsese, showing him scenes from Jean Delannoy’s
Macao: LeEnfer du Jeu (1939),
including a terrific tracking shot of a war between China and Japan, with the
Japanese relentlessly bombing the city, shown through continual explosions, where
houses are destroyed, but the shot ends on the legs of a beautiful woman
mending her stockings in the midst of this mayhem. Scorsese reportedly stood up and exclaimed,
“What a great shot! I want to see that
film.” This reaction is precisely what the
director is looking for, to reinstill enthusiasm for French films, both known
and unknown, where he greatly admires Godard, Chabrol, and Varda, showing
clips from Godard’s Contempt (1963),
with the obligatory Brigitte Bardot nude scene (that is not a nude scene)
demanded by the producers, but also Pierrot
le Fou (1965), Varda’s Cleo from 5 to
7 (1962), holding a special place for Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution in Alphaville (1965), reminding one of the
characters who breaks out into English, “Speak French. Nobody likes subtitles.” Chabrol is curiously described as “understood only by pharmacists and himself,” as if he’s some kind of danger
to the status quo, but by the end, Tavernier is extolling the virtues of
Claude Sautet, an author who also studied painting and sculpture before
discovering a passion for cinema. By the
end, Tavernier can be seen chatting with Thierry Frémaux, as both are intimately involved with preserving French
films. A beautifully edited work, that includes
inspirational clips from Truffaut’s The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), but also, oddly enough, an
evaluation of French film composers, it continuously elicits a love for cinema
through an appreciation for French culture, challenging our long-held
perceptions with plenty of fresh new insights.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Scott Pfeiffer
The first of a projected series, this is Bertrand Tavernier's very personal, illuminating three-hour-plus waltz through my favorite of the great world cinemas. Gazing upon Jacques Becker's cinema, and the incandescent Simone Signoret, Tavernier muses we can feel his characters' heartbeats. He honors Jean Gabin, in the words of Roger Ebert "the greatest of all French leading men," with passages from Becker, Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier. Screenwriter Jacques Prévert gets love for his work with Marcel Carne, as do composers Antoine Duhamel and Georges Delarue for the beauty of their scores for François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Tavernier takes a long look at Jean-Pierre Melville, his first mentor, and celebrates Claude Sautet. Given one lifetime, we may never get to see all of the films quoted here, but at least a lifelong connoisseur has given us a taste of the best.
Cannes
2016: The Shock of the Real - Film Comment Kent Jones, July 5, 2016
Loach’s Palme d’Or–winning I, Daniel Blake, Léaud’s performance in Serra’s film, and Bertrand Tavernier’s glorious Journey Through French Cinema in Cannes Classics offered three touching reminders of the passing of time, and three different embodiments of durability. Tavernier’s journey is a deeply personal one, at once reverent and unapologetically honest about the limitations of his heroes, the kind of close criticism that can result only from respect and intimate knowledge. It is also a shining example of what appears to be a growing genre: the documentary examination and celebration of the art of narrative cinema in the shadow of its evolution into a specialty item within the broader landscape of audiovisual entertainment. Tavernier’s celebration is a reminder of the growing coarseness of movies, and Loach’s film is a melodramatic attack on the growing coarseness of “managed care”—in the end, two manifestations of the same misbegotten moment.
Telluride
Film Festival 2016 Janina Ciezadlo from Merely Circulating
I loved Tavernier's My Journey Through French Cinema. For some
reason, I was expecting some kind of school-book lesson and instead the film was
a very personal tour through his experience of that history. It was his story.
From Lyon, like the Lumière brothers, as a child Tavernier was sent to a
sanatorium for a treatment of tuberculosis that affected his eye. It was there
he bagin to watch films. He came from family prominent and cultured enough to
have sheltered the poet Louis Aragon during the war.
Like Schlondorff (more about this later) and Risisent, Tavernier eventually got
to know everyone. He started taking care of the parrot in Malle’s Zazie dans le
Métro and later was an assistant to Melville, but shifted into public relations
before he began to make films. He loved, I as I do, poetic realism, and began
his story with Jacques Becker, on to Carné, then spent a long time discussing
Melville. The history was filled with clips—I think he said there were 100— and
he had wonderful shots of the Studio, Mellville’s in the Rue Jenner. He showed
how Mellville used certain areas over and over again in a series of films like Le
Doulous and Samourai. “Spare and melancholy and rigorous” were his
descriptions of Melville’s style and oeuvre, analyzing his shot reverse shot
sequences in depth to show how he got his effects. He also used the word
melancholy to describe the actor Jean Gabin, and I realized on leaving
that the generous, forgiving expressions on the open face of Gabin, the
sad stories of Carné (Le Jour se lève and Quai des ombres), the popular front
and the sharp illuminations in netherworlds of Melville saw me through one of
the most difficult periods of my life. I showed them in my classes, so I saw
them over and over again. I had the thought that I would not have survived
without them, but then perhaps this is an overly romantic idea.
Among the wealth of detail– a comment about Howard Hawkes: putting the camera
at eye-level—and insight in Tavernier’s history was his observation on the
sources of American and French film music, the Americans used Romantic music,
Mahler and Brahms among others, while the French were fond of the more modernist
and optimistic tones of composers like Poulanc. One of my problems with
Classical Hollywood all along was the heaviness of the scores, (although I
forgive it in Billy Wilder’s films). It seemed so obvious once he said it: the
lightness of French film is carried by their modernist scores. Both
Rissient and Schlondorf had a great deal to say about Fritz Lang, his
post-American life and his influence on their careers, neither mentioned
Godard, but Tavernier pulled out that wonderful clip from his Le Mépris,
with Lang in his suit watching the antics of Piccoli, Jack Palance and Bardot.
He also mentioned an obscure New Wave film: Adieu Philipine by Jacques
Rozier which Claudia Gorbman showed us so long ago. These oral histories are
incredible. Even, Lotte Eisner whose book on German Expressionism, The Haunted
Screen, was so important in our understanding of German Expressionism and Noir
of was a friend and advocate of Tavernier and the others.
It’s hard to write about a film like this, and the Rissient film, was even more
conversational, but I learned so much from Tavernier. I learned about Lemmy
Caution’s career and that I need go back and see more of the films of Claude
Sautet. One of the biggest lessons of course, is how collaborative the
art of film is. Listening to these men, you realize great films emerge from
communities—despite and because of the auteur theory—of people working together
and undoubtedly conversing and conversing and conversing.
My
Journey Through French Cinema - Reviews - Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton from Reverse Shot, October 2, 2016
Now 75 years old, Bertrand Tavernier was a bit too young at the watershed movie moment of 1959-60 to be lashed together with the disparate talents who, in maybe the most successful instance of branding in film history, were billed as a New Wave. Tavernier is something of an outside man, then, disinterested in perpetuating certain us-vs.-them binaries erected in those contentious days of yore, and the collection of figures to whom he pays varying types of tribute to in the three-hours-plus of My Journey Through French Cinema is appropriately idiosyncratic, made up of those he encountered as a young, budding cinephile, as well as others he met when he was starting out in the industry as Jean-Pierre Melville’s assistant and as a press agent for producer Georges de Beauregard. There are passages devoted to Jean Renoir, a darling of the Cahiers crew; and to Marcel Carné, the very embodiment of the pilloried cinéma de papa; as well as to American expat John Berry and Claude Sautet, an approximate contemporary of the New Wavers who was never part of the club. In one crucial respect, however, Tavernier—very much his own man when it comes to his tastes—is completely of a piece with his approximate generational coevals in French cinephilia, for whom the experience of movie love is inextricable from the formative experience or understanding of World War II, and the lingering memory (first- or secondhand) of the Popular Front, Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance, and Liberation.
Tavernier’s narration ties together the film’s collection of clips, interviews, and archival footage, including de Beauregard making the rather mystifying statement that the films of Claude Chabrol are “understood only by pharmacists and himself.” The director also not-infrequently appears to address the camera, making the connection between cinema and the wartime experience explicit when discussing his very early memory of the Liberation reaching his hometown of Lyon, and the connection that has persisted through his life linking the hope sensed at this moment to the promise held forth by the cinema. (Though he was just a toddler during the Occupation, Tavernier’s understanding of the Resistance was more than mythic: his father, René, was an active participant, and helped shelter Louis Aragon during the war—something that Tavernier the younger would later turn to his professional advantage.)
Recounting his biography—a childhood bout with strabismus very possibly caused by malnutrition due to wartime shortages that left him with a wonky right eye, the ciné-club archival research, and the names of dozens of home-away-from-home theaters, most long gone—provides Tavernier with the jumping-off points from which to launch into discussions of a variety of figures. The recollection of an early, formative memory of a cinematic image opens into a discourse on the director whom Tavernier would later discover to have been responsible for that very image: Jacques Becker. The story behind the discovery of a disused print of a forgotten film rolls quite naturally into a discussion of that film’s author, Edmond T. Gréville, an Anglo-French independent operator on whom Tavernier and others would spearhead a critical rediscovery on the strength of titles like Remous (1934) and Noose (1948). But throughout this engaging ramble, planned in great detail in order to sustain the appearance of extemporaneous spontaneity, the topic of the War just keeps coming up, be it in the distinguished anti-Nazi records of the likes of former Free French fighters Melville and Jean Gabin, or the worrisome drift toward collaboration evident in certain correspondences by Renoir, who eventually decamped for America.
These biographical notes aren’t inserted to vindicate or condemn, but to serve as aspects of well-rounded critical portraits of each man. (And it should be noted that Tavernier’s episodes of extended analysis are, without exception, devoted to men, though he has announced intention to shift focus in another forthcoming episode.) He exalts Renoir as an artist, while debunking some of the accumulated, often self-perpetuated myths about his practice, including his claims to having improvised at the last minute a famous sequence shot in The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936). Tavernier’s insights into Melville’s process are still more keen, having spent a great deal of time at Melville’s Studio Jenner atelier, whose front door and back staircase he identifies as they recur in different guises in several of Melville’s films.
The pedagogical utility of a project like this, when done correctly, is enormous. For myself, as well as surely for a great many movie lovers, the likes of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies or David Gill and Kevin Brownlow’s Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (both 1995) constituted a film school on VHS tape, something to watch with a pen at the ready in order to take down titles. (And altogether form a rebuke to lazy “video essays” that do little more than identify a tendency in a director’s work and string illustrative passages together.) In this spirit, My Journey Through French Cinema passes along a marvelous watch list—it makes you want to see the films under discussion, or see them again, in a new light. But more than just a model for what movies to watch, it offers a refresher course in how to talk about what you’ve been looking at. Throughout his opus, Tavernier displays an admirable characteristic that is largely absent from contemporary criticism. Rather than fortifying “for” and “against” positions, he considers what is worthy of praise and rebuke in the work of each figure that he addresses: the films that work in his estimation, and those that don’t; a director’s shortcomings (Carné apparently couldn’t write a screenplay to save his life) and his redeeming characteristics (his curatorial intelligence and gut instinct still produced a half-dozen films that touch the superlative.)
Tavernier approaches his subject not only as a film lover but also as a film director who knows his way around a set, a man with an inexhaustible appetite for dish about behind-the-scenes goings on and an insatiable curiosity for what makes movies tick, how certain effects are achieved and how things are actually pulled off. (Too young for the New Wave, he is old enough to have met practically everyone, for the lifespan of cinema is only that of two men.) This, again, is a vital and very frequently ignored part of the duty of the film cultural commentariat, usually elided for less knowledge-intensive and demanding approaches like amateur sociology, adjectival avalanches, or How Did This Movie Make Me Feel? (Which, really . . . who cares?) There is a great deal of talk about lens lengths and the intricacies of Maurice Jaubert’s scores and the arduous process through which Carné and production designer Alexandre Trauner secured permission to put Gabin on his lonesome top floor aerie in Le jour se lève (1939) and the precise methodology through which Melville calibrated his shot-reverse shot dialogues, and absolutely no pseudo-mystical babble about “the magic of the movies” or any similar gee-whiz tommyrot. I could have gone on ingesting this sort of stuff for at least twice as long as the movie runs, and there’s every indication that Tavernier could’ve continued to hold court for at least that long—and proposes to in future episodes—but this one doesn’t end so much as run off, like handwriting bunched at the bottom of a filled-up sheet of paper. It’s a minor cosmetic blot on a magisterial piece of cinema criticism: three hours out of the day, though offering months of viewing fodder.
Film
of the Week: My Journey Through French Cinema - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, June 23, 2017
A few years ago, at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico, I attended a joint master class shared by Bertrand Tavernier and Stephen Frears. The former did most of the talking: where the British director is notoriously a man of few words, Tavernier is, unapologetically, a man of many. But one of the things they both discussed is their tendency to diversify, skipping between entirely different topics from film to film, without obvious continuity and without attempting to impose a consistent auteur identity. Asked why they make so many different types of film, Tavernier said that there were two schools of director. There are miners, who constantly drill deeper and deeper into the same seam, and there are farmers—the English word he used, in fact, was “peasants,” not quite the exact English translation of paysans—who plant different crops at different times and thrive on variety. To which Frears replied, with his trademark mock-grouchiness, “I’ve never been called a peasant before.”
“Peasants,” or farmer-directors, generally get a bad press. Critics and film buffs alike usually get most excited about filmmakers who always resemble themselves, or at least who manage to show different aspects of their identity within a reasonably narrow set of parameters. Of course, we all grumble when the Dardennes make another film that seems to adhere too much to their familiar template, or when Wes Anderson paints himself further into his idiosyncratic toy-box corner; and yet much about what we value about these artists is precisely the insistence with which they pursue their Wesness or their Dardennité.
By contrast, unless farmer-directors are lucky enough to establish a reputation for being consistently expert, we tend to consider their versatility as a flaw—a character flaw and an artistic one. We mistrust people who speak in too many different voices, or have too many different interests, as if they lacked the strength of character to impose their personality forcefully early on and to keep it imposed, unbendingly, once and for all. But perhaps, as a critic, such mistrust is a habit you learn to resist with time, as you learn how often a single person can change in a lifetime—or even from year to year, from film to film. We’ve all read dismissals (or written them) of filmmakers who are reluctant to display a single unbending self; we call them inconsistent or anonymous. But that quality can also sometimes show selflessness and maturity: an ability to resist the temptation of narcissism. Not every filmmaker is fixated on the imperative “Me” factor associated with the likes of Lars von Trier or Gaspar Noé. Besides, those of us who disparage self-effacing, versatile directors (I know how often I’ve been guilty of this)—haven’t we learned from the original tenets of auteurism, which propose that directors’ deep identities can be hard to discern, hidden as they often are in the diverse fabric of their work? A signature doesn’t always have to be a brand.
Bertrand Tavernier is one of the more eminent paysans of contemporary film: it’s not easy to detect a consistent sensibility behind films as disparate as, say, The Judge and the Assassin, Coup de Torchon, A Sunday in the Country, Daddy Nostalgia, L. 627, and The Princess of Montpensier, and I haven’t even mentioned his documentaries. But perhaps that sensibility becomes a lot easier to identify in the light of Tavernier’s documentary My Journey Through French Cinema—thanks to which it becomes clear that all his films are made by a man who is obsessive about movies, but also passionately interested in the world and its political realities. It also perhaps emerges that, the more interested an artist is in a whole variety of different things, the less they may need to impose a single stamp on every work they create in response. If you are fascinated, as Tavernier is, by generations of filmmakers as adaptable in their own different ways as Jean Renoir, Jean Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Edmond T. Gréville, then abstaining from writing your own name in screaming upper case may be simply a form of historically minded humility, decency even.
It could be argued that Tavernier’s latest film is the most overtly personal of his works, essentially an autobiographical account of his apprenticeship as a cinephile; despite the English release title My Journey…, the French original is more modestly just Voyage à travers le Cinéma Français. The three-hour film is at once a pendant to Tavernier’s and Jean-Pierre Coursodon’s book 50 Ans de Cinéma Américain and the director’s answer to the rather more omnivorous 1995 A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. My Journey is a curious rag-bag, roughly stitched together: Tavernier mainly speaks to camera, but late in the film appears in conversation with Thierry Frémaux, while along the way throwing in, sometimes abruptly, testimonies from people as diverse as Jean-Paul Gaultier (on his love of Becker’s fashion picture Falbalas) and the late, extravagantly bearded composer Antoine Duhamel (Pierrot le Fou and a number of Tavernier’s own films).
There are elements of memoir in My Journey, at times almost Proustian in their free-associativeness—as befits a man who realizes that cinema screens were always somehow connected for him with memories of seeing lights in the sky during the Liberation in his native Lyon. Tavernier remembers that Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist was the only film he ever heard booed on the Champs Elysées—“along with The Night of the Hunter at the Marbeuf.” He remembers seeing Melville’s Bob le Flambeur several times at Lyon cinema Le Club, where there would be striptease acts between the movies—not because of the stripper, he adds, but nevertheless remembers her somewhat ruefully. Memories become threads: My Journey starts in Lyon, in the park where Tavernier’s parental home once stood, and where he later filmed Philippe Noiret in The Clockmaker of St Paul (74); it was also where his father, during World War II, gave shelter to the great Surrealist writer Louis Aragon, whom Tavernier much later invited to a screening of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, inspiring a famous article.
Here is Tavernier the childhood cinephile-to-be, not realizing for years that the very first film that excited him, as a 6-year-old child sent to a sanatorium for TB, was Becker’s Dernier Atout (Trump Card, 1942). Here is Tavernier the omnivorous young moviegoer, his own enthusiasms measured against those of the earnest young critics tenderly spoofed by Luc Moullet in his 1989 comedy Les Sièges de l’Alcazar. Here is Tavernier, the political youth, determined to see the banned Octobre à Paris (Jacques Panijel, 1962), about the brutal suppression of the Algerian demonstration of October 1961; and getting his glasses crushed by a CRS officer who had just clubbed him, during the 1968 demonstrations in support of Cinémathèque founder Henri Langlois. Here is Tavernier the apprentice archivist, rescuing prints of Samuel Fuller and Edgar G. Ulmer films—plus two Gréville nitrates—from being turned into combs. Here’s Tavernier the melomane, making us listen to the often underrated brilliance of French film composers, among them Maurice Jaubert, Georges Auric, Jacques Ibert, and Vladimir Kosma, who gave the world—and the jazz repertoire—“Autumn Leaves” and who gets his own section here.
My Journey is also a compendium of tributes to some of the filmmakers and movie people that Tavernier loves, some of whom he knew and worked with, either as an assistant director (Melville) or as a publicist (working for producer Georges de Beauregard, after Melville told him he’d never made the grade as an AD). Melville is one of the men Tavernier considers one of his two cinema “godfathers,” along with Claude Sautet (whose fits of rage are mocked, in a delicious clip, by Michel Piccoli). But even when it comes to the godfathers, Tavernier isn’t blinded by admiration: he’s pretty harsh on his Deux Hommes dans Manhattan and Melville’s acting in it, doesn’t rate him as an original writer, and deplores his readiness in berating and humiliating anyone who happened to be in his range (including Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Tavernier himself, who got it in the neck for recommending he see Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet). But he admires Melville in so many other ways—not least for his ingenuity and economic brilliance in managing to make use of every corner of his Studio Jenner as a set, including the back door and the corridor to the bar.
Special love and admiration go to the “prince of marginal directors,” Edmond T. Gréville, who had both French and British careers, but who was on the skids by the time Tavernier befriended him in the early ’60s—and wow, does My Journey ever make you want to see Gréville’s “staggeringly bold” film Remous (1934), about sexual impotence, with its delirious series of abrupt cuts during a kissing sequence. Other passions open your eyes to the unknown: the most revelatory clip is of Cet homme est dangereux, directed in 1953 by one Jean Sacha, a nocturnal, super-stylish adventure in which Eddie Constantine, as transatlantic tough guy Lemmy Caution, warns an Anglophone femme, “Speak French. People don’t like subtitles.”
Other names are more canonical. Tavernier proves an astute reader of Becker’s style—his dislike of cheap effect, his rhythm—but also of his character as a filmmaker whose work exuded empathy and decency. He defends Marcel Carné against common criticisms, and argues that his films show him as a solitary man who depended on writer Jacques Prévert to bring him a sense of generosity. Jean Renoir, is of course, the great Jean Renoir—and yet Tavernier looks the facts in the face when it comes to the director’s tendency to be attracted to the winning side, which brought him perilously close to embracing the wrong cause in World War Two. Jean Gabin, who has his own section, said, “As a filmmaker, Renoir was a genius; as a man, he was a whore.”
My Journey is a partial, personal sketch of French cinema—some might call it erratic. It’s a rather male one, too: Tavernier tends to focus more on male actors, with asides for Arletty and Simone Signoret, while the only woman director to figure, briefly, is Agnès Varda. It’s just the start of the journey, however. The film ends with a dedication to Becker and Sautet, plus many, many others. But, an end caption tells us, there are many more to come: Autant-Lara, Bresson, Grémillon, Ophüls, Guitry, Tati… All these, you imagine, will complete a composite portrait, through his precursors, of Tavernier the director, the historian, the cinephile. Posterity will decide whether Tavernier the artist is essentially more than the sum of all the films he has watched and thought about. A farmer-director’s humility might lead him to argue that he doesn’t need to be more than that, but what does make him more is the real-world history he has also lived through and documented. The next page of Tavernier’s cinematic map, whenever that’s due, will be well worth exploring.
Review:
Bertrand Tavernier's MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH ... Dustin Chang from Screen Anarchy
Tavernier's
“My Journey Through French Cinema” Is ... - Village Voice Jordan Hoffman, June 20, 2017
My
Journey Through French Cinema is a fond ... - Film - The AV Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
My
Journey Through French Cinema | Film Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard
Five
Takeaways from Bertrand Tavernier's 'Journey through French ... The
Melangerie, October 3, 2016
'A
Journey Through French Cinema': Cannes Review | Reviews | Alan Hunter from Screendaily
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
NYFF54:
Retrospective (Erudition and Love) | Talking Pictures Robin Holland, September 30, 2016
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Anne-Katrin Titze]
My
Journey Through French Cinema | NYFF54
Cinema
Bliss: 54th New York Film Festival offers a refuge from the ... Doris Toumarkine from Film Journal
International
My
Journey through French Cinema - Chicago International Film F
Bertrand
Tavernier on 'My Journey Through French Cinema' | Variety Martin Dale interview, October 9, 2016
Bertrand
Tavernier’s Dramatic ‘Journey’ Through French Cinema Malina Saval interview from Variety, September 30, 2016
Eye
For Film: Bertrand Tavernier in conversation on My Journey . Anne-Katrin Titze interview from Eye for Film
September 29, 2016
'A
Journey Through French Cinema': Cannes Review | Hollywood Jordan Mintzer from The Hollywood Reporter
'My
Journey Through French Cinema' is a deeply personal and ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Tavernier's
Journey Through French Cinema Is More Revel Than ... Jordan Hoffman from The LA Weekly
My
Journey Through French Cinema Movie Review (2017) | Roger Ebert Godfrey Cheshire
Review: Those Movies, Himself - Bertrand
Tavernier's Tour of French Cinema Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
Paolo
Taviani and Vittorio - Director - Films as Directors:, Publications Lillian Schiff, updated by Rob Edelman from Film Reference
Since the early 1960s, when they realized that fiction feature films were going to be their main interest, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have written scenarios and scripts, designed settings, developed a filmmaking style and philosophy, directed a dozen features, and patiently explained their methods and concepts to many interviewers and audiences in Italy and abroad.
Although influenced to some extent by neorealism—such as the films of Rossellini and De Santis, characterized by on-location settings, natural lighting, authentic environmental sounds, non-professional actors, and an emphasis on "the people" as protagonists—the Tavianis want reviewers to see their films as invented and staged, as interpretations of history rather than as documentaries. They draw upon their early interests and background—as youngsters they saw musicals and concerts but not movies—and use artistic and technical means and methods similar to those utilized in theater and opera. Their films in which music is part of plot and theme reveal an inventory of flutes, accordions, record players, radios, human singing voices, folk tunes, opera, and oratorio (mostly Italian but also German), and even "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
The photography in their films takes the eye back to the horizon or across a huge field, far along a road or deep into the front of a church or schoolroom. Even casual viewers must realize the frequent alternation of intense close-ups and long shots that never cease to remind one of locale. In addition, thoughts and dreams are often given visual expression: A picture of a girl and her brother studying on a couch follows her interior monologue about missing the long yellow couch in her living room ( La notte di San Lorenzo ); a prisoner in solitary confinement for ten years creates a world of sound and sight expressed on the screen ( San Michele aveva un gallo ).
With theatrical form and technique serving as the framework for their political cinema, and complex, individualistic characters as protagonists, the Tavianis are as concerned with corruption, abuse of power, poverty, and suffering as were the neorealists and their successors. Struck by the autobiography of Gavino Ledda, which became their well-received Padre Padrone , they investigate the abuse of power by a father, compelled by tradition and his own need to survive to keep his son a slave. Amazingly, the illiterate, virtually mute shepherd boy whom a quirk of fate (army service) rescues from lifetime isolation becomes a professor of linguistics through curiosity, will, and energy. In Un uomo da Bruciare Salvatore, who wants to help Sicilian peasants break the Mafia's hold, is complex, intellectual, and egotistical.
Other themes and topics in Taviani films include divorce, revolution as an ongoing effort interrupted by interludes of other activity, the changing ways of dealing with power and corruption, resistance in war, fascism, and the necessity of communal action for accomplishment. The Tavianis use the past to illuminate the present, show the suffering of opposing sides, and stress the major role of heritage and environment. Their characters ask questions about their lives that lead to positive solutions (and sometimes to failure). The two directors believe in the possibility of an eventual utopia.
In 1987 the Tavianis made their first English-language film, Good Morning Babylon , a poetic, sweetly nostalgic ode to the origins of cinema and the invulnerability of great art. Their scenario chronicles the plight of two Italian-born siblings whose ancestors are craftsmen who for centuries have restored cathedrals. They arrive in America during the 1920s and end up designing sets for D. W. Griffith's Intolerance. This was followed by two works as outstanding as any of their earlier films. Il Sole anche di notte (Night Sun) , adapted from Tolstoi's "Father Sergius," is the story of a young man who is deeply troubled by the knowledge that he exists in a world of temptation and hypocrisy. He sees that too many of his fellow humans seek sex and status, and then turn to religion only to ease their guilt. All he wishes is to find inner tranquility, so he becomes a monk—and even cuts off his finger rather than give in to his desires and allow himself to be seduced by a temptress. A sensitive man who only wishes to make the world a better place, Father Sergius only can end up disappointed; he becomes an eternal wanderer, forever seeking the true meaning of his life and existence. Ultimately, the Tavianis are able to elicit a special sensitivity toward the human condition in the film.
Fiorile is linked to Night Sun as an intricate, sardonic tale of tainted innocence. While on his way from Paris to Tuscany to visit his sick, hermit-like father, whom he hasn't seen in a decade, a man discloses to his two young children the story of their ancestry. He commences by telling them of the nefarious means by which their forefathers became rich during the Napoleonic era—and how this wealth became a family curse for future generations. In Fiorile , the Tavianis examine the manner in which ill-gotten affluence will tarnish the soul and only result in misery. While their films are not lacking in political content—they keenly illustrate how greed, cruelty, lust for power, and temptation will wither one's soul—the cinema of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is one of a simple, but never simplistic, humanism.
Taviani Brothers -
biography - The Neorealism biography
Taviani brothers |
Italian filmmakers | Britannica.com
biography
Paolo Taviani - Movies, Bio and Lists on MUBI
The
Best Movies Directed by Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani - Flickchart
The Taviani Brothers - UCLA.edu revelatory essay by Peter Reiher
Taviani
Brothers Bring Order Out Of `Kaos` - tribunedigital ... On a Taviani
Brothers Retrospective, by David Kehr from The Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1986
All in the
Stars | Village Voice Michael
Atkinson for a retrospective, November 13, 2001
Renowned
Italian film director and screenwriter Vittorio Taviani to ... Middlebury College, July 19, 2012
Caesar
Must Die, The Pirogue, Reviews by Stanley Kauffmann | New ... The New
Republic, February 1, 2013
Taviani
brothers give the world a taste of Italy - Fresno Filmworks Olga Verkhotina, February 24, 2013
Paolo
and Vittorio Taviani: 'For us it was cinema or death' | Film | The ... Ryan Gilbert from The Guardian, March 1, 2013
Retrospective
of Paolo & Vittorio Taviani Hong Kong,
April 14, 2013
The
Taviani Brothers Take On Boccaccio And The Decameron In Their ... Cheri from I Love Italian Movies, February 27, 2014
Review:
Tavianis' 'Padre Padrone,' 'Night of the Shooting Stars,' 'Kaos ... The LA
Times, January 28, 2016
The
Taviani Brothers Collection Blu-ray: Father and Master, The Night ... Jeffrey Kauffman, February 16, 2016
The
Taviani Brothers Collection | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, February 18, 2016
Superheroes,
Storytellers, Swimmers, and Saints: Cinema Made in ... Cinema Made in
Italy 2016, Alex Ramon from Pop Matters, March 7, 2016
Three
Films by Paolo & Vittorio Taviani - Fetch Publicity July 11, 2016
THREE
FILMS BY PAOLO & VITTORIO TAVIANI - Starburst Magazine Summer, 2016
Blu-Ray
Review | Three Films by Paolo & Vittorio Taviani | The Geek ... Graham Williamson from The Geek Show, July 25, 2016
Three
Films by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani | Socialist Review Bob Light, July/August 2016
A
Masterly Movie Adaptation of Short Stories by Luigi Pirandello - The ... The New
Yorker, January 16, 2017
What
Roberto Rossellini Taught the Taviani Brothers - From the ... Criterion site video, July 12, 2017 (2:47)
TSPDT - Paolo &
Vittorio Taviani
Caesar
Must Die: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani interview | Movie News ... Helen Barlow interview from SBS, September
19, 2012
Paolo
and Vittorio Taviani • Directors - Cineuropa Camillo De Marco interview from Cineuropa, February 26, 2015
Italy's
Taviani Brothers On Selected Works And What A Gentleman ... Nick Vivarelli interview from Variety, January 25, 2016
Wondrous
Boccaccio/Paolo Taviani - earthwiZe is here, baby. Judy Gelman Myers interview from Director Talk, June 22, 2016
Paolo and
Vittorio Taviani - Wikipedia
A masterful
performance by Marcello Mastroianni, in a manic black comedy about a world
weary warrior from the Napoleonic era who wishes for nothing more than a life
of ease following years in prison for his political activities, but he is kidnapped
by his former followers who are convinced he is ready to lead them into
action. Each time he is ready to slip
away and separate himself from his former life, an act of fate pulls him deeper
and deeper into the mire. His only
recourse is to brazenly betray his friends again and again in the hopes of
ditching them forever, but always they feel from him some sign of revolutionary
fervor and follow his every projected thought, until near the end, when he
knows all is lost and he is running from battle, he finds one lone comrade who
once more praises the extraordinary revolutionary purpose running through his
blood, and no matter how delirious, Marcello makes his fateful move, with an
absolutely haunting and delightful musical score by Ennio Morricone.
Allonsanfan | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
A little-seen 1974 film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. The setting is 1816 Italy in the wake of Napoleon's retreat; an upper-class radical (Marcello Mastroianni), losing his ideological fervor and tired of fighting, yearns to return to his previous life, but his peasant followers won't let him--they kidnap him and force him to lead one last raid. With Laura Betti and Lea Massari.
Allonsanfan | Film
review - Time Out Tony Rayns
A film with an
even greater thrust of excitement than the Tavianis' subsequent Padre
Padrone. Mastroianni, at his most convincingly dissolute, plays a spineless
aristocrat who wanders through Italy in 1816 trying to rub out his past
association with a radical group, without daring to tell them he's lost their
faith in Napoleonic revolution. The tangled and sumptuously melodramatic plot
allows the Tavianis to lay into left-wing idealism and gullibility without
departing from their own commitment for a second. Ennio
Morricone's score tops a rousing and passionate entertainment.
Movie
Review - - SCREEN: EARLY TAVIANI - The New York Times Janet Maslin
PAOLO and Vittorio Taviani's ''Allonsanfan'' was made in
1974, when the brothers' film making style was a good deal more quixotic than
it is today. Fevered and fanciful, it follows an aristocrat named Fulvio
(Marcello Mastroianni), a onetime revolutionary now living in post-Napoleonic
''Allonsanfan,'' which opens today at the Public Theater, has some of the vibrancy of subsequent Taviani films like ''Padre Padrone'' and ''The Night of the Shooting Stars,'' if not much of the coherence. A rich visual style punctuated by the occasional non sequitur accompanies Fulvio's treacherous interactions with his former revolutionary comrades, including a title character named for ''La Marseillaise.''
Fulvio's duplicity catches up with him, but not before he has drifted from an exuberantly crude long-time mistress (played by Lea Massari) to the beautiful, solemn lover of his friend and rival. The latter woman is played by Mimsy Farmer, looking ravishing in long red braids and providing yet another of the film's little surprises.
Mr. Mastroianni captures the aristocrat's weakness and his imposing stature with equal conviction, however limited he is by the film makers' conception of Fulvio as a slyly passive figure. In any case, the performance is well woven into the film's larger scheme. Among the other virtues of ''Allonsanfan,'' which is worth seeing as a footnote to the Tavianis' career if not as an introduction, is Ennio Morricone's marching music, which accompanies the band of revolutionaries that wanders through the story. When the music prompts them to dance, they break into their post- Napoleonic version of something Michael Jackson might do.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Lost and found: Allonsanfàn Michael Brooke, July 2011
“A film of extraordinary density and allusiveness from its
opening moments, a torrent of baroque images, extravagant musics and stylistic
rhetoric, posited somewhere between 19th-century melodrama and popular opera. Allonsanfàn…
aligns itself with other Italian films like Leone’s Once upon a Time in the
West and Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem as a paean to cinema as
a revolutionary medium, a medium which can make rhetorical use of material from
earlier films, literature or opera, but revitalise it in the transcription. The
result may be somewhat muted politically, but it’s aesthetically thrilling.”
— Tony Rayns, Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1978
Once arthouse darlings, the Taviani brothers are now shunned by UK distributors. Michael Brooke resurrects their 1974 film Allonsanfàn, a picaresque yarn about ineffectual insurrectionists in post-Napoleonic Italy
Alphabetical proximity aside, there was little that obviously linked Quentin Tarantino with the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani until an unexpected memory jog at the very end of Inglourious Basterds. I’d only seen their 1974 film Allonsanfàn once, probably in the late 1980s, but although my visual memory of it had dimmed to a few images of a scruffily bearded Marcello Mastroianni and a gigantic toad framed by a doorway, I recognised Ennio Morricone’s main theme immediately.
Widely anthologised on Euro-soundtrack compilations as ‘Rabbia e tarantella’, it’s a crescendo perpetuo that constantly feels as if it’s about to erupt into a magnificent main theme, though even the strident brass interruption at the end offers no more than yet another variation on the original riff. It’s a perfect accompaniment for a picaresque yarn about ineffectual insurrectionists in 1816, just after the Napoleonic yoke was lifted from Italy, but decades before the country’s unification.
The Tavianis have been so comprehensively blanked by British distributors since 1994 (when Fiorile opened belatedly to an indifferent reception) that it’s startling to recall how high their profile was after the Palme d’Or-winning Padre Padrone (1977) first put them on the international map. With all their films from those years getting some UK exposure, mostly on the big screen (though 1979’s Il prato/The Meadow went straight to television), they had a better track record than Fellini, never mind their immediate contemporaries. But despite their 15-year run as arthouse darlings, this period only represents the middle act of their career; the five films apiece from the pre-1977 and post-1993 periods have remained almost entirely invisible for UK audiences.
The exception was Allonsanfàn, which was given a belated UK release in 1978, but largely shunned by the repertory-cinema programmers who preferred the brothers’ more immediately accessible later efforts The Night of San Lorenzo (La notte di San Lorenzo, 1982) and Kaos (1984). Aside from a long-deleted American VHS release with reputedly dreadful subtitles, Allonsanfàn doesn’t seem to have been released on any English-friendly video format, and while my imported Surf Video DVD has an excellent transfer, it’s entirely in Italian. The same linguistic restrictions apply to other Italian DVDs of the Tavianis’ early works, but since those films were never released in the UK at all, the opportunity to catch up with them in any form was gratefully seized.
Watching I sovversi (The Subversives, 1967), San Michele aveva un gallo (Saint Michael Had a Rooster, 1971) and Allonsanfàn back to back, it became clear that the Tavianis’ main preoccupation in those early years was the political disillusionment running deeply through Italian society at the time – I sovversi even uses the 1964 funeral of Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti as the starting point for a multi-faceted exploration of where the Left potentially went astray. San Michele, meanwhile, is a direct precursor to Allonsanfàn: set in the 1870s, it follows anarchist internationalist Guido Maneri (Giulio Brogi) as he attempts to turn an Umbrian village into a test bed for his ideas – without much success.
Allonsanfàn’s protagonist Fulvio Imbriani (Marcello Mastrioanni) has the opposite problem. A former aristocrat, he has no shortage of influence or support, thanks to his prominent membership of the underground sect known as the ‘Sublime Brothers’; but his own incarceration has left him thoroughly disillusioned with revolutionary ideals, and determined to start afresh. Self-disgust, however, prevents him from admitting this change of heart even to his former comrades, compelling him to try to undermine their plans without betraying himself – a mission whose ultimately abject failure comes as little surprise.
Allonsanfàn is a much richer film than a simplistic political reading permits. Mastroianni could hardly be more perfectly cast as Fulvio, a man whose every action is marked by a Hamlet-like hesitancy, deriving at least as much from intellectual indecision as from physical cowardice. His tragedy is that, although he repudiates the Sublime Brothers’ methods and ideology, he does so not from a reactionary perspective but from an impossibly idealistic one: like Guido Maneri, he’s a dreamer, not a doer. Accordingly, Allonsanfàn lays Fulvio’s psyche bare in a way that verges on magic realism. The aforementioned toad makes an unexpectedly literal appearance after Fulvio tries to scare his son with a night-time horror story, while a dinner-party game in which representative colours are assigned to his relatives is accompanied by Fulvio repainting them in his mind’s eye.
Visually, the Tavianis’ treatment is as distinctive as a signature: a series of deceptively simple, static compositions in which timeless landscape and architecture implicitly mock the ephemeral human conflict being played out in the foreground. Giuseppe Ruzzolini’s cinematography and Giovanni Sbarra’s production design are immaculate, with Lina Nerli Taviani’s costumes standing out for their conceptual wit as well as their vivid use of colour. The way the Sublime Brothers segue from pointy-hooded KKK lookalikes to nattily red-jacketed insurrectionists creates an effect both absurd and deadly serious – a description that also applies to the film’s very title. The nickname of the son of the Sublime Brothers’ now-dead founder, ‘Allonsanfàn’ is derived from “allons enfants”, the first two words of the ‘Marseillaise’, here infantilised by the removal of the original context. Talking of music, Morricone’s deliciously inventive score is frequently woven into the action, most memorably in the scene in which Fulvio’s sister Esther (Laura Betti) turns a half-remembered ditty into a full-blown song-and-dance number, or when Fulvio himself borrows a violin in a restaurant to impress his son.
Above all, this wittily rumbustious, almost operatic film offers a stirring reminder of a time when European filmmakers regularly engaged with serious political ideas, without compromising their cinematic creativity. Parts of Allonsanfàn, especially the long-shot insurrections themselves, recall the work of Miklós Jancsó, who was ignored in Britain for even longer than the Tavianis, but has recently enjoyed a mini-revival. Is it too much to hope that the Tavianis will get a similar second chance?
Post-Punk Cinema Club: Allonsanfàn (1974)
2011 — Best Old Films « Rightwing Film Geek Victor Morton
Cinepassion
Fernando F. Croce
Allonsanfan
(1973): By the Taviani Brothers | Emanuel Levy
Allonsanfan
(1973) - Paolo Taviani,Vittorio Taviani | Review | AllMovie Robert Firsching
Allonsanfan -
Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
'Allonsanfan':
A Lyrical Homage To A Lost Cause - latimes
Kevin Thomas, May 10, 1985
`Allonsanfan`:
Great Film Unfolds Like Opera - tribunedigital ... Larry Kart from The Chicago Tribune, March 28, 1986
Ennio Morricone | Soundtrack Daniel Azevedo, June 21, 2013
An unflinching, raw
and brutal story of a 6-year old boy removed from 1st grade by his
brutally domineering father, Omero Antonutti, and banished to the crushing
isolation of the rocky, high country of Sardinia, where it is his fate to
survive virtually alone, with only the family flocks of sheep for company, a
virtual outcast from humanity and a slave to his father. The sense of loneliness is frighteningly
profound as the boy grows rebellious, but illiterate, trapped by the
limitations of his archaic dialect. The
boy grows to manhood (Saverio Marconi ) and discovers language, music and
culture in an extraordinarily emotional cinematic depiction, contrasting his
soaring discoveries with his blinding rage, the ancient rituals of country life
and the beckoning of a newly undiscovered world. He vows to outwit his harsh father by
discovering his own way, using a simple, straightforward style, intellectual
yet direct and earthy, with some surreal detail and extraordinary use of sound,
such as when an accordion player suddenly appears on a hillside playing a
Strauss waltz, we hear it as a man would who has only heard the rustling of an
oak, the braying of goats, and the sound of the wind – not as a lone
instrument, but as a blast of joyous, orchestral music, and it is this music,
and the promise of other worlds it contains, that is inspiring. In another hilarious sequence, which is
actually eavesdropping on the secret thoughts of the whole town, the camera
cuts from one scene of lust to another, boys sodomizing mules and masturbating
over chickens, parents grappling on a bed, lovers taking each other in passion,
while the sounds of their feverish panting swells into a communal rhapsody of
lust. This is a unique work filled with
rugged, desolate poetry and harsh physical power, based on the autobiography of
Gavino Ledda.
Padre
Padrone | Chicago Reader Dave
Kehr
Neo-neorealism from the Taviani brothers, who emerged from the obscurity of Italian television to take the grand prize at Cannes with this 1977 study of a boy growing up under the geographical and familial oppression of Sardinia. Its sense of loneliness is frighteningly profound, while its simple, straightforward style depends on a shrewd choice of telling, sometimes surreal detail. In Italian with subtitles. 117 min.
Padre Padrone | Film
review - Time Out Tony Rayns
A Sardinian shepherd manages to free himself from his family,
educate himself, then return home to fight an overdue battle with the figure
who oppressed him, his father. Padre Padrone is a terrific subject, a true
story that illuminates a universal problem: how can one man make a positive
stand against his own patriarchal society? The boy's acquisition of language is
a key factor, and the film's triumph is that it actualises this in an extraordinarily
emotive way: after a consciously theatrical introduction, it presents fragments
of experience (landscape, sounds, routines) which cohere into a vision of
nature and human society as the boy matures.
The Taviani brothers, who wrote and directed this film version of Gavino Ledda's 1974 autobiography, have learned to fuse political commitment and artistic commitment into stylized passion. Ledda's story is about how he was enslaved as a child, imprisoned in a sheepfold, and forced to tend the family flock, and of how he fought his way out of the isolation and silence--how he struggled for words. The spirit of the film isn't naturalistic--it's animistic. And the Tavianis' technique is deliberately barbaric; their vision is on the nightmare side of primitivism, where the elements themselves are the boy's enemies. The grotesquely natural cruelty is mythological--almost rhapsodic. Though made in 16 mm, for Italian television, this extraordinary work--pungent and carnal, and in faintly psychedelic Romanesque color--took the two top prizes at Cannes (the Golden Palm and the International Critics' Prize). With Saverio Marconi, Omero Antonutti, Margella Michelangeli, and Ledda, as himself, at the beginning and the end. In Italian. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book When the Lights Go Down.
padre padrone -
review at videovista Gary
Couzens
Padre Padrone (which translates as 'father master') is based
on the autobiography of Gavino Ledda. Born the son of a shepherd (Omero
Antonuitti), Gavino (Fabrizio Forte as a child, Saverio Marioni as an
adolescent) is taken out of school and forced to follow the family trade in a
remote, isolated part of
The Taviani brothers' second feature (after Allonsanfan, made in 1974) was the
one that made their reputation. The Italian television company RAI was notably
forward thinking in putting money into theatrical features in the 1960s and
since. Padre Padrone, shot on a tiny budget in 16mm, went on to win the Palme
d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Padre Padrone is not a pretty picture: the Tavianis don't flinch in depicting
the hardships Gavino endured. It's a frank, earthy film, including a scene of
bestiality (probably a first for a TV production) depicted as probably a fact
of life in a backward rural community such as this one. Unusually for
television, the Tavianis shoot much of the film in masters and medium shots,
reserving close-ups for when they really count. And there's not an ounce of
sentimentality to be found. But this isn't just a work of unadorned realism -
the Tavianis employ some adventurous touches such as entering the heads of the schoolchildren
in the opening scene, and even those of a goat Gavino is trying to milk.
Needless to say this isn't for children, the squeamish or the easily offended.
It's on the slow-moving side. But it is a journey well worth making: by not
shrinking from the adversity, they make us feel Gavino's triumph.
Rising from the depths of Italian TV, the Taviani brothers
put themselves on the international map with this
Next Projection [Rowena Santos Aquino]
The
Evil That Men Do | The New Yorker
February 4, 2013
Padre Padrone (1977):
Taviannis's Brutal Tale of Brutal Childhood ... Emanuel Levy
Padre
Padrone Review (1977) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
PADRE
PADRONE: My Father My Master by Gavino ... - Kirkus Reviews brief review of the book the film is based
upon
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman] The Taviani Brothers Collection
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Clayton Dillard] The Taviani Brothers Collection
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay] The Taviani Brothers Collection
The
Taviani Brothers Collection (Padre Padrone / The Night of the ... Justin Remer, Blu-Ray, The Taviani Brothers
Collection
EyeForFilm.co.uk Anton Bitel
Chris Dashiell at CineScene (down the page)
'Padre Padrone' review by
Graham Williamson • Letterboxd
Padre Padrone
- Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
My
favourite Cannes winner: Padre Padrone | Film | The Guardian Ryan Gilbey, April 28, 2015
Padre
Padrone | Film | The Guardian Philip
French
Review:
Tavianis' 'Padre Padrone,' 'Night of the Shooting Stars,' 'Kaos ... The LA
Times, January 28, 2016
The
Night of the Shooting Stars Movie Review (1982) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - Movie: Man's Inhumanity to Son - NYTimes.com Janet Maslin
How can you not fall
in love with Isabella Rossellini in her film debut, cast as a small-town girl
with two lovers, becoming a trio through most of the film, set against the
exquisite beauty of the Tuscan landscape where they roll in the meadow in
harmony with the bees and the flowers and the bugs. Giovanni (Saverio Marconi, the son in PADRE
PADRONE), falls in love with her at first sight, seeing her wearing stilts,
marching in a children’s parade in the center of San Geminiano, a volunteer
drama instructor helping the children express themselves theatrically,
confessing to the children a story that happened to her as a young girl: A great flood washed her from her home until
she found a giant tree where she could hold on for safety, along with the birds
and other animals, all finding a refuge in the storm. She then asked the children to express what
they thought she and the other animals might feel, leading Giovanni to confess
to her how he felt as a child witnessing Roberto Rossellini’s (Isabella’s
real-life father) film, GERMANY YEAR ZERO, when in the ruins of war-torn
Germany, a child chooses suicide, leading Giovanni to realize with a sense of
greater urgency just how important it is to be alive. These memories and confessions draw them into
romance.
But when her boy friend
Enzo (Michele Placido) returns, we are reminded of how early in their
relationship she mourns what happens to best friends, with their greatest
moments of shared love and happiness, how they always become separated,
yearning that these three friends will be different. And while the three of them try, they
ultimately fail to make the love last, and when they are about to separate, she
dreams of being the Pied Piper in the meadow, leading the children of San Geminiano
away from their sleeping parents, who are the cause of the corruption and
Fascism and dissatisfaction in each other’s lives, leading them to safety in an
enchanted forest where they will grow up and become different adults. But her dream turns sour as she feels the
presence of her two young lovers about to murder her as their only way out, in
a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” suicide, but she wakes up and leaves. Giovanni then dies after she has gone, after
being bitten by her rabies-infected dog.
And as her train passes by, his body is lifted in a helicopter over the
town, carrying him to a safe refuge, which never comes.
This is a beautiful
film about the love and fragility of the human spirit, how it rises and falls,
and can be left unattended, leaving the spirit to die alone, tragically, as is
the human condition.
love, like life, is fleeting,
and like life in the meadow,
one must be about planting the
seeds of love,
or like life, love will die
The Meadow Dave Kehr from Chicago Reader
A rarely screened 1980 feature by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Padre Padrone, The Night of the Shooting Stars). A young city lawyer arrives in the Tuscan countryside to settle his grandfather's estate; he meets and falls in love with Eugenia (Isabella Rossellini), but she doesn't want to leave her longtime lover, an agriculturalist with utopian ideals. With Michele Placido and Saverio Marconi.
Rather
surprisingly considering her parentage, Rossellini had had only one tiny screen
role before this lead part, which won her an award as Bbest New Actress from
the Italian critics. She plays Eugenia, a graduate who is stuck in a boring job
and living with Enzo (Placido). When she meets Giovanni (Marconi) a would-be
film-maker they have an affair, although she has no intention of leaving the
South or her long-time boyfriend for Milan and the dream-filled Giovanni. This
slim tale of three people caught between inaction and hope looks as beautiful
as most Taviani brothers movies, but at two hours stretches credibility and
patience.
User
reviews from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca
(italiangerry@gmail.com) from
Shot in the Tuscan countryside, "Il
Movie Review - - 'THE MEADOW,' FROM ITALY - NYTimes.com Vincent Canby from The New York Times
Opera in cinema, a
bedtime story is recalled in flashback, to a time when the storytelling mother
was just a child during the last days of WWII, while the Allied forces were
near a small town in Tuscany, San Martino, very much like the Taviani’s home
town, San Miniato, the real-life site of a German massacre, which the Taviani’s
turned into their first short film in 1954, SAN MINIATO, JULY 1944. In this film, which takes place on the Night
of San Lorenzo, when all dreams come true, the residents are led by a man,
purportedly based on the Taviani’s own father, who helps them flee through the
countryside amid exploding shells, lighting up the sky instead of stars, trying
to escape the Nazi’s advance on their unprotected village, along with other
Fascist Italian collaborators, burning their homes, wreaking sadistic revenge
on the women, children, and the elderly.
A cathedral is bombed to kill worshippers. The images of death are movingly witnessed
with a childlike innocence, using magic and poetry set against the horrors of
war, like traveling through a Shakespearian forest that exists only in the
memory of the 6-year old child. In one
scene, a Sicilian girl who has been shot and is already dead, is seen flirting
and making small talk with some approaching American GI’s before she finally
accepts her death. Trying to pick the
name he will use in the Resistance, another young boy who sings in the church
chooses the name Requiem. Daily
struggles for food take priority over bullets.
Together, these moments signify the gravity of World War II while remembering
the dignity of everyday life.
Particularly poignant are the performances of Margarita Lozano and Omero
Antonutti (the father in PADRE PADRONE), which includes one night of love in
what they feel may be their last night on earth. The film is based on fragments of war
memories, based on wartime incidents that were actually witnessed by children
who were, at the time, adolescents.
Everything shown is alleged to be true, as well as events that they
didn’t witness, but have been picked up, one by one, from all kinds of sources,
official and otherwise, creating a film on how an individual’s memories are
used to form a communal folklore, so that we recall what we’ve heard from
others as readily as what we’ve actually seen or heard ourselves. This is a beautiful tapestry of fact, myth,
and wartime memory, a testament of human aspiration, romantic and intense, a
story to be passed down from one generation to the next.
Amazon.com
With its subtle mixture of
wartime hardship, comedic interludes, and a hallucinatory hint of Italian magic
realism, The Night of the Shooting Stars was named the best film of 1982
by the prestigious National Society of Film Critics. Drawing inspiration from
their own experiences in Nazi-occupied Italy, the codirecting Taviani brothers
(Paolo and Vittorio) remade this feature from their 1954 debut short "San
Miniato, July 1944," framing its touching yet occasionally vague tale of
wartime survival as a bedtime story, told by a loving mother from her memories
as a 6-year-old, fleeing her Tuscan village in the closing days of World War
II. American liberation is promised within days, but the Nazis have rigged
village houses with mines, so the residents of San Martino flee to the
countryside, where encounters with fascists are common and deadly. The film's
dreamy nostalgia isn't as satisfying as, say, Cinema Paradiso, but it's
still a lovely film, filled with quintessentially Italian vitality while
proving, as one character observes, that "even true stories can end
well." --Jeff Shannon
On the Night of
San Lorenzo, the night of falling stars when wishes come true, a woman recalls
for her loved one another such night long ago, when a group of peasants fled
the Nazis through the Tuscan countryside and exploding shells shot through the
sky instead of stars. The Taviani brothers have transformed this story from
their own childhood into a collective epic handed down orally through the
decades, but wildly embellished in the re-telling. It's at once more ambitious
in its sweep and more Utopian than their previous Padre Padrone, more
romantic in its desire to recapture a lost, breathless intensity of experience.
For all of the American cinema's infatuation with "childlike innocence" in the late 70s, this 1982 film is the only one of its era I know that captures a child's point of view both convincingly and movingly. Directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have brought a sense of premorality both to the composition of the images and the shape of the narrative: the cosmic and the trivial have equal importance in the balanced frames, and no one episode is stressed at the dramatic expense of another. The time is 1944, and the residents of the small Italian town of San Martino are escaping from the German occupying forces; among them is a little girl who will grow up to tell the story to her son—and us.
In its feeling and completeness, this film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani may rank close to Jean Renoir's bafflingly beautiful GRAND ILLUSION, and maybe because it's about the Second World War and Renoir's film was about the First, at times it's like a more deracinated GRAND ILLUSION. The story is a woman's memories of her adventures as a 6-year-old in a Tuscan village and its environs during the summer of 1944, when the American troops were rumored only days away, and the Germans who had held the area under occupation were preparing to clear out--preparations that included mining the houses so they could blow them up. Yet this setting is magical, like a Shakespearean forest, and the woman's account has the quality of folklore and legend, and even its most tragic moments can be dizzyingly comic. The full fresco treatment that the directors give to the events of that summer is based on their own wartime experiences as adolescents, and on the accounts of others; it's this teeming, fecund mixture, fermenting in their heads for almost 40 years, that produces the film's giddy, hallucinated realism. With Omero Antonutti (who was the father in PADRE PADRONE) as the leader of the group of two or three dozen villagers who sneak away in the night to find the Americans. The script is by the Tavianis and the producer, Giuliani G. De Negri, with the collaboration of Tonino Guerra; the score is by Nicola Piovani; the cinematography is by Franco di Giacomo. In Italian. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.
The Night of the Shooting Stars, directed by Vittorio Taviani and Paolo ... David Ehrlich from Time Out
A minor classic that sees WWII through the eyes of a child
For Italian filmmaking brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the cinema has always been linked to their childhood experiences during WWII—the story goes that they wandered into a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan shortly after the fighting stopped and were thunderstruck by how it made sense of their own experiences. With 1982’s beautifully bittersweet The Night of Shooting Stars, the subject of an immaculate new restoration, the Tavianis were able to pay it forward.
Framed as a bedtime story that a mother is telling her child, their film reanimates a bloody historical footnote through the eyes of six-year-old Cecilia (Micol Guidelli), someone young enough to find something wonderfully exciting about the madness of war. Set in and around the picturesque Italian town of San Marino during the twilight of its occupation, the Taviani’s episodic tragicomedy begins with a gaggle of citizens being told that the Germans have mined their houses, and that their only recourse is to take shelter in the local cathedral. In reality it was a trap, but the film graciously rewrites the past and allows a rabble of eccentric characters to escape the carnage—an old man named Galvano (Omero Antonutti) is neither trusting nor patient enough to wait for salvation, and so he leads those willing to follow him toward the dangerous hills beyond their home.
A kaleidoscope of horrors that never strays far from a sense of childlike mischief, The Night of the Shooting Stars bridges the gap between Fellini and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Its cast of characters is as memorable as the savagery with which they’re disposed, and the occasional flights of fancy—such as a scene in which our precocious heroine imagines the freedom fighters as a phalanx of Greek warriors—illustrates how war is somehow untethered from reality, like a slab of butter sliding off a knife. Although it spins in circles for too long before its climactic wheat-field shoot out, no other Taviani brothers film so vividly captures the prevailing ethos of their life’s work: “Living may be tragic,” Vittorio once said, “but life isn’t.”
Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]
Set in the Tuscan countryside during the conflict between the Italian fascists and the peasants at the end of World War II, this is pretty much a recollection from the director's childhood. However, it is told through the eyes of a small girl who records the events surrounding the evacuation of her village, the coming of the Americans and the fight between the peasants and the fascists.
The Taviani brothers have constructed here an epic account of
historical events and personal experiences, a beautiful wedlock of realistic
and poetic elements which is a homage to the rich tradition of neorealism.
Borrowing themes from Rosseltini's Paisa, the Taviani brothers pave the
way for a breakthrough in contemporary cinematography. They blend inventively
the realist theme of the past with the naturalistic element inherent in their
work (Knos, The Night Sun) infusing into the film flashes of
surrealism. The scene for example, of the battle where the young girl conjures
a fantastic moment where partisans are being perceived as Greek warriors, while
the fascist who threatens her life falls dead as he is pierced by several
spears. It's a film whose richness is epitomised by the aesthetic perfection of
its imagery and the emotional intensity brought about by the abrupt portrayal
of war and by the immeasurable warmth characterising human relationships. One
can never forget the sequence where two young girls meet some GIs - the
encounter between
Photographed in the rich colours of the Italian landscape, and supplemented by a melancholic yet strai~gely nostalgic score by Nicola Piovani, The Night of San Lorenzo introduces a truly sublime vision to cinema. For all those who sLill believe in cinema as magic, here is a masterpiece to see and treasure in your memory.
La
Notte di San Lorenzo: Film or Theater? - Thanks for the Use of ... Dan Sallitt from Thanks for the Use of the Hall
'The
Night of the Shooting Stars' review by Edith Nelson • Letterboxd
Night
of the Shooting Stars, The Review (1982) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
All in the
Stars | Village Voice Michael
Atkinson, November 13, 2001
La
notte di San Lorenzo (aka The Night of the Shooting Stars) | The ... Matt Blake from The Wild Eye
Night of the Shooting Stars - Talking Pictures Howard Schumann
The
Night of the Shooting Stars : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov
The
Night of the Shooting Stars : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Matt Langdon
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman] The Taviani Brothers Collection
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Clayton Dillard] The Taviani Brothers Collection
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay] The Taviani Brothers Collection
The
Taviani Brothers Collection (Padre Padrone / The Night of the ... Justin Remer, Blu-Ray, The Taviani Brothers
Collection
La notte di San
Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars) Marcia Yarrow from The American Magazine
Brooklyn Magazine: Jeremy Polacek
Spirituality & Health (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat)
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum November 05, 1982
Pisa as set for films by Paolo and Vittorio Traviani
The
Night Of The Shooting Stars Movie Trailer, Reviews and More ... TV Guide
Review:
Tavianis' 'Padre Padrone,' 'Night of the Shooting Stars,' 'Kaos ... The LA
Times, January 28, 2016
The Night of the Shooting Stars Movie Review (1982) | Roger Ebert
NIGHT
OF SHOOTING STARS - The New York Times
Vincent Canby
Magic
Neorealism in World War's Wake - The New York Times J. Hoberman, April 07, 2016, also seen here: The New York Times: J. Hoberman
DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]
The Night
of the Shooting Stars - Wikipedia
Italy France (188 mi)
1984
Five episodes taken
from the fiction of playwright Luigi Pirandello, set in the mountainous regions
of Sicily, which opens with aerial pans of ancient temples and landscapes whose
barren appearance hides great richness and drama, which is suggested by the use
of swelling music as an unseen character in each episode, which are filled with
elegance, drama, and life. “The Other
Son” reveals the loss of a mother’s sons immigrating to
Kaos, directed by Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani | Film ... - Time Out
A bandit plays bowls with the head of an old woman's husband, a peasant turns werewolf, a hunchback gets trapped in an outsized olive jar, a tyrant denies tenants the right to bury their dead, and Pirandello shares his sorrows with his mother's ghosts. The common link between the stories, adapted from Pirandello, is the vast, empty Sicilian landscape harbouring a richness of dramatic tales at once emotional and elemental. This is a film of fierce sunlight, bleached rocks, dark interiors, silent stares, and dialogue as rough and sparse as the land. In the years since the Tavianis' Padre Padrone, naturalism has given ground to a more grotesque vision of the past, allowing black comedy to creep into the always subtle socio-historical subject matter. Exhilarating.
Partly financed by Italian television, this film by Paolo and
Vittorio Taviani is composed of adaptations of four folkloric Pirandello
stories set in Sicily, plus a prologue and an epilogue. It was intended to be
shown on TV, in four installments, as well as in theatres, and when foreign
distributors bought the rights to present it theatrically the Tavianis (Paolo
and Vittorio Taviani) suggested that they should cut one story or another-the
one least likely to appeal to their country's tastes. The American distributor
decided to run the film in totò. That might be called exemplary, but the result
is a mixed blessing. At 3 hours and 8 minutes it's too much movie, and too much
harsh beauty. The panoramic grandeur wears you down. You feel emotionally
filled by the first and second stories, which are about fate and have superb
moments. During the third and fourth, which are about trickery, you feel
surfeited. They're hardly worth sitting through, but they take you to the
revivifying epilogue, which is a full-fledged epiphany and sends you out dazed
and happy. There's greatness in this movie, but it's wise to be prepared for
the passages that are clumsy and tedious; don't get angry and leave, or you'll
lose the rapturous beauty of the epilogue. With the magnificent Margarita
Lozano as the madwoman of the first story, and, in the final moments, Omero
Antonutti as Pirandello. Tonino Guerra collaborated with the Tavianis (Paolo
and Vittorio) on the script; the marvellous score is by Nicola Piovani; the
cinematography is by Giuseppe Lanci. In Italian. Released by MGM/United Artists
Classics.
For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Hooked.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]
With a free adaptation from Luigi Pirandello's works, the Taviani brothers have constructed an ethereal odyssey into the Sicilian landscape. A highly fragmented film - with four stories and an epilogue - it brings together all the main actors whom the Tavianis had previously collaborated with, in a voluptuous naturalistic trip.
In the first story, "The Other Son", a mad woman
(Lozano) repudiates one of her sons for she cannot bear the memories associated
with the father of the child. Against a background of Italian immigrantion to
Kaos is a film of a glorious naturalism previously unencountered
in cinema. Giuseppe Lanci's incredible photography, along with the mythical
character of the stories and Piovani's unearthly music, ascribe to the film a kind
of dreamlike fluidity. Aerial views of temples and castles on top of rocks,
full moons with mystical power, vast stretches of land under the sunlight, and
an almost purifying
FILM
- TAVIANIS' 'KAOS,' FOUR TALES OF SICILY - The New York ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times, also seen here:
Movie
Review - - PIRANDELLO TALES IN THE TRAVIANNI BROTHERS
''KAOS,'' the Greek word for ''Chaos,'' is a curious title for the new film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a film with a profound and stirring sense of natural order. Adapted loosely from stories by Luigi Pirandello (the title in fact comes from a Pirandello quotation about the derivation of ''Cavusu,'' the name of a forest near his native village), ''Kaos'' tells four separate tales of Sicilian life. These fables, plus an epilogue about the author himself, are united by their shared imagery, their strong sense of community, their final ironies and the clear, graceful way in which they are told.
''Kaos'' unfolds with the rapturous simplicity that was most apparent in ''Padre, Padrone,'' the first of the Taviani brothers' films to be released here, and that is even more mesmerizing this time. Yet ''Kaos'' also has an edge. The Pirandello influence makes itself felt in the twists of fate that turn each tale's principals against prevailing values, and in the bittersweet note on which the stories conclude; as for the Tavianis, their contribution is an earthy, knowing storytelling style that finds a folk wisdom in the characters' humanity. In any case, the task of adapting Pirandello proves particularly felicitous for these screenwriter-directors. Rigorous and eloquent, effortlessly poetic, ''Kaos'' is the Tavianis at their best.
The film opens with spectacular Sicilian scenery and a sequence in which a group of shepherds find a male crow on a nest full of eggs. Some suggest killing the bird for this transgression, or at the very least humiliating him; instead, one shepherd ties a bell around the bird's neck and sets him free. This bird then circles his way through the subsequent stories, making his own music and serving as a stubborn, indefatigable reminder of nature's mysteries. Here and elsewhere, the film finds an inexplicable rightness in phenomena that seem to defy reason.
The first story, ''The Other Son,'' concerns a Sicilian
mother (Margarita Lozano) pining for two boys who have emigrated to
During one of these marches, the emigrants stop for a break of several hours - and it is the Tavianis' unique, if romantic, feeling for communal scenes that enables them to let these peasants re-create their village life in an open field, without even requiring many props. Then, across the field, we see a man watching over a few cattle, even though the land is too barren for them to graze. Neither he nor the cattle belong there, but he is following his mother - the same mother who pines so incessantly for her other offspring. The rest of the tale provides the mother's account of how this strange situation can have come to be.
''Moon Sickness'' concerns a lonely young bride, Sidora (Enrica Maria Modugno), who has been living only briefly with her new husband Bata (Claudio Bigagli) when the first full moon of their marriage occurs. Bata warns her to bar the doors and windows, then goes outside and howls so horribly that he leaves his wife petrified. In the morning, Bata is shamed by his behavior and goes to the village square, where - in a sequence especially well suited to the Tavianis' affectionate folk humor - he makes an anguished confession to the closed doors and shuttered windows that surround him. Nobody peers out at Bata, but somebody, somehow, provides him with a chair. There is never any doubt that the rest of the villagers are just behind their shutters, listening to every word.
In another lovely sequence, Bata explains that his troubles began when his mother, working late in the fields when he was an infant, exposed the baby to his first full moon. Since then, the moon has driven him to temporary madness, and now he fears for his wife's safety. When a solution is suggested - that Sidora be watched over by Saro (Massimo Bonetti), a handsome cousin whom she almost married anyhow - the situation becomes much more complicated. And it grows even more so when, on the night of the next full moon, Sidora hides in her cottage and makes plans for herself and Saro, without knowing that outside it has grown very cloudy. Of the four stories, it is ''Moon Sickness'' that has the most sadly knowing resolution.
''The Jar'' is richer, more allegorical, and more fanciful. Don Lollo (Ciccio Ingrassia), a wealthy landowner, has produced such a prodigious olive crop that he orders an immense container for the oil. The jar, a terra cotta jug that is as big as a man, becomes Don Lollo's proudest possession. It stands in the middle of his courtyard until, one night, a shadow passes briefly over the face of the moon. When the shadow is gone, the jar is split in two.
The story tells what happens when Don Lollo's glowering Uncle
Dima (Franco Franchi), a man who likes to scare small boys by telling them he
is the Devil's son, comes to fix the jug, and in the process seals himself up
inside. The jar becomes a representation of Don Lollo's hold over the
villagers, who must choose between saving Dima or preserving the Don's power.
Like the other stories here, ''The Jar'' uses elements like the moon's
influence, the sturdy, venerable architecture of
The fourth story, the briefest and most minor, is ''Requiem,'' about a village elder (Salvatore Rossi) who wishes to be buried in a particular spot, in defiance of the Baron (Pasquale Spadola) who owns the land. But ''Requiem'' serves a consolidating function, since it specifically recalls the opening scene (with the presence of the same actors) and anticipates the last. In the Epilogue, entitled ''Conversing With Mother,'' Luigi Pirandello (Omero Antonutti) returns to the same town that is seen in ''Requiem,'' and is visited by the apparition of his late mother (Regina Bianchi). She speaks of the importance of the departed, then tells a story of her own girlhood - one that lets ''Kaos'' end as it has begun, with a vision of strength, survival, and overwhelming natural beauty.
Kaos Peter Reiher
Luigi
Pirandello on Film: L'Umorismo and Confronting the Other of the ... L'Umorismo and Confronting the Other of the
Self, by Chadwick
Jenkins from Pop Matters, January 13,
2017
Kaos - Film (Movie)
Plot and Review - Publications - Film Reference Patricia King Hanson
The
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard
Scheib
Kaos (1984) by P. G. R. Nair - Boloji.com February 25, 2013
A Masterly Movie Adaptation of Short Stories by ... - The New Yorker Richard Brody, January 16, 2017
dOc DVD Review: Kaos (1984) - Digitally Obsessed Jon Danziger
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman] The Taviani Brothers Collection
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Clayton Dillard] The Taviani Brothers Collection
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay] The Taviani Brothers Collection
The
Taviani Brothers Collection (Padre Padrone / The Night of the ... Justin Remer, Blu-Ray, The Taviani Brothers
Collection
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Kaos (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani -1984) -cafe Pellicola – window to ... Shlomi Ron from Café Pellicola
Kaos - Movie Reviews
and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
Review:
Tavianis' 'Padre Padrone,' 'Night of the Shooting Stars,' 'Kaos ... The LA
Times, January 28, 2016
The New York Times: J. Hoberman April 07, 2016
Kaos (film) - Alchetron,
The Free Social Encyclopedia
Italy France
USA (118 mi) 1987
All right, so all
their films can’t be masterpieces. This
is a tribute to the silent film era of D.
Good Morning Babylon, directed by Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani ... Geoff Andrew from Time Out
The Taviani brothers' first (mainly) English language film, set just before and during World War I, concerns two inseparable Tuscan brothers, stonemasons who - like their forefathers - restore Romanesque cathedrals. Suddenly finding themselves without work, they travel to America in search of the fortune that will allow them to return to revive their father's business; after endless setbacks, they finally win acclaim for their work on the Babylonian elephants for DW Griffith's Intolerance. As in their previous films, the Tavianis take an oblique and deeply personal look at history to create a fable of enormous resonance. Realism merges with the surreal, fact with fiction, and a faux-naif surface (not unlike that of the films from the period depicted) conceals a complex interweaving of familiar Taviani themes: the continuing strengths and shortcomings of tradition and patriarchy, the importance of imagination, memory and collective endeavour. Typically, sentimentality is held at bay by the cool, formalised direction. The performances throughout are splendid, the symbolism never intrusive, the entire achievement witty and elegant.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]
The Taviani brothers' (Kaos) first English language film
is a sumptuous, lyrical, fairytale which gives a decidedly Italian slant to the
early days of
In 1915 two humble brothers (Vincent Spano and Joaquim De
Almeida) emigrate from
Maybe D. W.
There is an obvious conflict between the delicacy of the film and
its attempt at an epic sprawl, and the Worid War One melodrama is dubious
(perhaps it is meant to reflect
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
"Good Morning,
When the family restoration business fails, Papa Bonanni (Omero Antonutti),
their father sends his favorite sons off to the
The provincial filmmakers have heretofore looked at the society of
The Tavianis, children of World War II, are soldiers of cinema, battling old
dreams. Naturally they were drawn to "Intolerance," which found no
audience in the war-mongering
After a somber opening in
The brothers are rather likable scamps, who must be "always and forever equal," warns their somber father, "or you'll grow to hate each other." Till the prophecy is fulfilled, Nicola and Andrea are closer than grade-school girlfriends. They even fall in love at the same time with dancing girls Edna and Mabel. Marriage and pregnancy follows for each; then tragedy befalls the Bonannis and their separate journeys begin, the brothers reunited finally on a Tuscan battlefield.
Spano, who costarred in "Baby, It's You," is Nicola, and the Portuguese-born De Almeida is Andrea. And they convey a convincing kinship, working first in Italian and then English dialogue. Greta Scacchi, an actress who makes hearts pittypat but has yet to land a good part, is Mabel, a dancing girl who falls for Nicola. And Desiree Becker, a Luxembourg-born actress, makes her English-language movie debut as Mabel's bosom buddy Edna.
They're cute with their tops dangling off, while their Old Country boys make
love with everything but their boots on. Meatball macho. Scacchi gets caught in
a silly speech about the free-spirited days of movie-making: "Let's just
promise not to forget this
Charles Dance, a star of the PBS series "Jewel in the Crown,"
comes up with a bluegrass accent the likes of which
The dialogue is often speechy as written by the Tavianis and Tonino Guerra
from a story treatment by Lloyd Fonvielle, who wrote the abominable "The
Bride" and cowrote the grody "Lords of Discipline." These master
filmmakers nevertheless offer flashes of visual virtuosity, but also are guilty
of some sloppy lapses, as when these turn-of-the-century heroes are clearly
standing on 1980s concrete by the San Francisco Cannery. And when the brothers
are chasing fakey fireflies, we shouldn't be thinking that they aren't
indigenous to
In a way, the Tavianis have made a movie about themselves, a noble failure
about Italian immigrants who come to
Review for Good morning
Babilonia (1987) - IMDb Mark
R. Leeper
Pisa as set for films by Paolo and Vittorio Traviani
Tavianis' 'Babylon' Depicts Early Hollywood - The New York Times Janet Maslin
CAESAR
MUST DIE (Cesare deve morire) B 87
We
hope that when the film is released to the general public that cinemagoers will
say to themselves or even those around them… that even a prisoner with a
dreadful sentence, even a life sentence, is and remains a human being.
—Paolo Taviani
It’s great to see the Taviani Brothers are back and still making
relevant films, last seen in 1987 with GOOD MORNING, BABYLON a quarter century
ago, but they have been working right along, writing and directing a few
made-for-TV movies, but nothing on the festival circuit, so after winning the
Golden Bear 1st Prize at Berlin, this was a pleasant and most unexpected
surprise. It was the Taviani’s ultra-realistic PADRE PADRONE (1977) that
won the
With 6 months preparation time, the process begins in a rehearsal room
with the director, with each inmate herded back into their cells afterwards
where they often continue practicing while confined, or when gathered in small
groups in a recreation area. Often they
would veer off script, adding some choice line from their own personal
experience that at least for the moment impacts upon the scene, a kind of
jailhouse improvisation used to get into character. Using Italian dialects instead of
Shakespeare’s English, the speech used is what we hear everyday instead of
ancient text in Iambic pentameter, where inmates could largely be themselves, some
with incredibly expressive faces. Often
using long takes from cinematographer Simone Zampagni, many linger on inmates
as they exchange dialogue or are seen rehearsing significant scenes, both in
and out of character, where this fuses fictional moments into the play,
altering the style and rhythm of a historical drama and turning it into a work
breathing with the life of the participants, as if this is the telling of their stories. This heightens the artificiality of
performing a play, where the staging of the work in and around the confined
prison space is highly inventive, creating a fascinating tension beneath the
surface of the film, where some of the more significant speeches from the play,
presumably to a large assembled crowd of friends and Romans, are simply set
before a lone window of the prison which offers a view looking out, where the
claustrophobic cells and recreation areas, for all practical purposes, become
the Roman Forum and the Senate. The
directors take liberties with one character, Salvatore Striano who plays Brutus,
as he is a former convict who was pardonned from Rebibbia in 2006 but
participates as if he were still an inmate.
Certainly one critique with the final product may be with the lushly
romanticized saxophone score from Vittorio’s son GiulianoTaviani which might
sound more appropriate in Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972).
While
called Julius Caesar, the play is
largely about the insurrectionist actions of Brutus, who conspires to
assassinate the Roman leader, eventually tracked down and defeated by the Roman
army at the
Screen
Comment [A.J. Goldmann]
In
The Tavianis (Padre Padrone, Kaos), who are now in their eighties, entered a
high-security prison near
I called the film quasi-documentary because the Tavianis have cheated just a little bit. The film’s Brutus is Salvatore Striano, an ex-con who returned to prison to play this role. Not that the audience feels this lack of authenticity. If anything, Striano contributes much of the fury, passion and pain that make Caesar Must Die so compelling.
Time
Out London [Geoff Andrew]
When it was announced that ‘Caesar Must
Die’, the new film by veteran Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio
Taviani, had won the Golden Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, a
surprisingly large proportion of those who’d attended the event greeted the
news with bemusement, even open hostility. Clearly, quite a few of those
commentators hadn’t quite grasped what the Tavianis were getting at (one writer
even claimed the film was a documentary); others simply hadn’t bothered to see
the film. Which only goes to show how long the brothers – now both in their
early eighties and once widely acknowledged as major European arthouse
directors for the likes of ‘Padre Padrone’, ‘The Night of San Lorenzo’, ‘Kaos’
and ‘Good Morning Bablyon’ – have been out of the limelight.
Not that the Tavianis haven’t been producing good films
in the last two decades. But it’s fair to say that ‘Caesar Must Die’ is the
brothers’ most satisfying work since 1990’s ‘Night Sun’. It takes a simple idea
– following the preparations for a stage performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Julius
Caesar’ by a group of inmates at the Rebibbia maximum security prison – from
which it mines an impressive variety of riches. Beginning with the end of the
triumphant performance, and then flashing back to the start of casting and
rehearsals, the film’s mere 76 minutes are more resonant than many far longer
films, thanks to the way the Tavianis explore the complex relationship between
life and art.
Frequently the actors themselves – many of them mafiosi
serving life sentences for murder and drug-related crimes – comment on how and
why the loosely adapted play feels relevant to their own experiences; at other
times, we the viewers are left to work out precisely what’s meant to be part of
the production and what isn’t and to draw our own conclusions about the import
of what we’re seeing and hearing. Either way, the Tavianis’ subtle play with
the shifting strata of reality and artifice ensures that nothing in the film
can simply be taken at face value. In terms of meaning, it constantly operates
on more than one level.
Inevitably, then, Shakespeare’s tale of commitment,
betrayal and power struggle is made to reflect not only on the dynamics of the
prison population but on contemporary – and yes, more specifically,
contemporary Italian – politics. As such, the film is entirely characteristic
of the Tavianis in that it is a witty cautionary tale of failed idealism,
revolutionary communal action, endless cyclical Utopianism and the value and
concomitant cost of a commitment to art. As one inmate confides upon returning
to his routine existence after the exhilaration of a rapturously received
performance, ‘Ever since I discovered art, this cell has truly become a
prison.’
Even at this stage in their lives and careers, the
Tavianis remain deeply aware of such contradictions and paradoxes, and it’s
this that makes ‘Caesar Must Die’ so humane, intelligent and affecting.
The
Film Emporium [Andy Buckle]
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's powerful drama-within-a-drama, Caesar Must Die, which picked up the Golden Bear earlier this year at Berlinale and is playing in the Official Competition here at the Sydney Film Festival, is a mesmerising blend of documentary, narrative and cinematic style. It is one of the most original and inventive, and ultimately inspiring, ways to bring Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to the screen one could imagine.
The film was made in
Knowledge of Julius Caesar is not essential to understanding and
benefiting from this film. Hey, I loved it. Some of the play's rich themes -
possessing the power as Caesar once did, only to be tempted by tyranny and
ultimately turned on by those he trusted - become apparent throughout the film.
For many of these men, imprisoned for drug and contraband trafficking,
mafia-related felonies and even murder, unraveling Caesar's story and
emotionally involving themselves in their characters does unlock parallels.
For the most part, this is a documentary, but there are times when you genuinely feel like you are watching this play unfold before your eyes. The difference is, these men are not actors, but unkempt inmates rehearsing in their daily leisure time. They are still very very good and some have clear passion for performance and really work hard to capture the essence of their characters. But what will happen after the curtain call and the final public performance? They will all raise their arms and swords in the air and yell out in pride, and likely have mixed feelings of relief and sorrow. The finale is uplifting and hugely inspiring on one level, and very sad on another.
What is extraordinary about this film is just how cinematic it is. It is beautifully shot, predominantly in black-and-white, though colour is used whenever we are given a glimpse of the world outside the prison and during the performance. Colour is an essential feature of the film, and used to juxtapose between their prison world and the sense of freedom they feel when performing on stage. The use of music is also hauntingly beautiful, with a particularly eerie melody used to separate some of the film's most compelling rehearsal sequences. A lot of the takes are also very long, lingering on the inmates as they exchange dialogue, observing as the scene evolves not just par course with Shakespeare but within this potentially hostile environment.
When the prisoners are rehearsing, sometimes they change the lines of the script and break character, but it is not always obvious they have done so. We are so immersed in this particular period of their lives, and aren't privileged to more than their audition for the role and their rehearsing, so though they are real people with names, we naturally attribute them with their Caesar characters. While it could be argued that more time spent with the inmates prior to their rehearsals would have benefitted ones emotional connection to them - learning what sort of person they are out of character, for example - I felt this emotional connection was very present. We are revealed to their crime/s and their individual personalities shine through in their auditions. The way they dedicate themselves to their roles, and the brief experiences we get of them having broken character - in reaction to a line in the script and how that makes them feel, or when suppressed emotions toward one another resurface - was more than adequate.
As for the Taviani Brothers, who are now both in their 80's, this
is a return to the screen after quite an absence. Winners of the Palme d'Or in
1977 for Padre Padrone, these veterans of Italian cinema have created
something pretty special here. I was mesmerised, and I wholly embraced the
direction they took to bring Julius Caesar to the screen. Part
Shakespearian adaptation, part prison drama, part human philosophical study;
this is a wonderful opening to the Official Competition at the Sydney Film
Festival.
Caesar
Must Die, The Pirogue, Reviews by Stanley Kauffmann | New ... The New
Republic, February 1, 2013
Caesar Must Die -
KINOCaviar.com Diane Sippl
Caesar Must
Die | Reverse Shot Damon Smith
Sound
On Sight Tope Ogundare
Berlinale
Dispatch: The Taviani Brothers — Who? — Return with a ... Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline, February 12, 2012
Cargo: Michael Sicinski September 17, 2012
Movie
Review: Edelstein on Caesar Must Die -- Vulture David Edelstein
Shakespeare
Unchained: Taviani Brothers' 'Caesar Must Die ... Maria Garcia from Film International
Caesar
Must Die takes Shakespeare to the slammer | Movie Review ... Ben Sachs from Chicago
Reader, March 21, 2013
Before
they put Shakespeare in the slammer, the Taviani brothers ... Ben Sachs from Chicago Reader, March 28, 2013
FilmSchoolRejects
[Daniel Walber]
Eric
Kohn indieWIRE
Prisonmovies.net
[Eric Penumbra]
Nigel
Andrews bemoaning the outcome at the
Berlin Film Fest, from The Financial
Times
Screen
International [Lee Marshall]
An
Online Universe [Sam McCosh]
I
Love Italian Movies [Cheri Passell]
Filmaluation
[Hemanth Kissoon]
NYFF
2012 | Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's CAESAR MUST DIE - Fandor David Hudson
Hollywood
Reporter [David Rooney]
Caesar Must Die
(2013), directed by Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani ... Dave Calhoun from Time Out London
Paolo
and Vittorio Taviani: 'For us it was cinema or death' | Film | The ... Ryan Gilbert from The Guardian, March 1, 2013
Paolo
and Vittorio Taviani Direct 'Caesar Must Die' - The New York ... The New
York Times, February 3, 2013
WONDROUS BOCCACCIO (Maraviglioso
Boccaccio)
Italy France
(120 mi) 2015
Wondrous
Boccaccio | Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
Given the bawdiness of many tales in The Decameron, one might be surprised that writer-directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (The Night of the Shooting Stars) have included only one risque story (about a couple of wayward nuns) in their 2015 adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio's classic. A group of bereaved youngsters flee medieval Florence to escape from the plague and, out in the countryside, console each other with fables about star-crossed lovers and dark obsessions (in the best of them a faithful swain rescues an infected woman whose husband has left her for dead). The brothers take a somber approach to the material, and the spare production design suits the stark choices facing the characters. Sometimes these attractive storytellers resemble the posed subjects of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and their comportment helps make the filmmakers' case for art and discipline over chaos and despair. In Italian with subtitles.
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, perhaps Italy's greatest living filmmakers, have often looked to the classics for inspiration, adapting works by Goethe, Shakespeare, and Pirandello. Here, they tackle The Decameron--or rather, its narrative frame and five of its tales. The brothers emphasize the social context in which Boccaccio wrote; the film, which takes place in 1348, opens with an extended passage detailing the effects of the Black Death on Italy's population, and it often returns to discussions of the Plague. In this light, the imaginative stories shared by the principal characters--ten young adults who have fled Plague-ridden Florence for an isolated rural villa--seem like efforts to beat back the surrounding horror. The Tavianis draw attention to the characters' vulnerability by casting young, inexperienced actors in the roles and by utilizing stripped-down mise-en-scene and extreme long shots that reduce people to dots on a landscape. (The latter device, which the directors have employed consistently across their films, requires big-screen presentation to be truly appreciated.) Such imagery reminds us not only of the threat of death, but of the force of history, which eventually renders all people insignificant. Yet the film is hardly pessimistic; the Tavianis want to celebrate narrative art as a force as powerful as history or death. The wonder of Boccaccio, as the Tavianis see it, is that his stories remain vital seven centuries after they were written; those of us lucky enough to be on this planet can still derive meaning from them during the short time we're here.
The House Next Door [Chris Cabin]
In contrast, Wondrous Boccaccio, the latest whatsit from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is awash in overt style, from the purposefully stilted performances to the loud, brilliant colors of the set design to the Tavianis’ unpredictable, thrilling choice in music. In loosely adapting the titular author’s The Decameron, the brothers have made an endearing and wise comedy about the art and ultimate utility of storytelling. The film centers on a group of young men and women who flee Florence in the face of the Black Death, only to then spend 10 days telling mythical stories of fools and murderers.
The central theme, as in the source material, is in how storytelling both enables and guises darker truths and wilder desires. Even the framing device suggests a necessity in ignoring death in favor of a small slice of Eden where men and women can share tall tales. The stories are all tinged with sin, from a senior nun’s hypocritical witch hunt for a fornicating sister to two men’s cruel and finally ghastly idea to tell a fool that he’s invisible. The Taviani brothers consider the darker elements of life much easier to look at and analyze at a distance, and the writer-directors frame and light much of their shots as if they were trying to recreate Masaccio’s paintings. This is especially true of the dying and the dead we see early on in the film, images that seemingly wear the falseness of their beautiful aesthetic out front. Great films, like great stories, survive death, but those who create them crucially do not, and though Wondrous Boccaccio isn’t the Taviani brothers’ strongest film to date, it’s one that feels uniquely at peace with the limitations of art and depiction in the face of oblivion.
Artsforum Magazine [John Arkelian]
The year is 1348 and the cultural capital city of Florence is stricken with the plague (the Black Death was to wipe out three-quarters of its population). Carts in the street pick up the dead, who are unceremoniously consigned to anonymous mass graves. Death hangs over the city like a miasma; it can come at any time and it strikes the rich, the poor, the young, and the old without favor or distinction. Seven young women and three young men resolve to leave the city and to take their chances closer to nature, in a villa surrounded by a verdant green valley. Once there, they pass the time by taking turns telling stories, a new one each day. That scenario (ten young adults telling stories) is lifted from “The Decameron” by the Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75).
His book contained 100 tales of love; here we get five. In one, a woman recovers from the plague and has to choose between the husband who bowed to his family’s demands that he cast her off while she was ill, and the man who saved her. In the second, a simple soul falls for an elaborate prank, being duped by his fellows into believing that possession of a black rock will confer invisibility – a supposed state that he puts to no good use. In the third, a duke bears an obsessive love for his daughter (whether it crosses the line from paternal is ambiguous) and is tormented by her love for his protégé. In the fourth, nuns in a convent decide that they are as much creatures of the flesh as of the spirit. In the fifth, a man is ruined by his unrequited love for a married woman, retreating to the countryside with his only friend, his beloved falcon. But he crosses paths with the object of his love once more, when she is widowed; what ensues is a darker cousin to the sort of ironic twist that made O. Henry famous.
It’s a strange movie, and hard to categorize. It’s lushly beautiful to look at: These are attractive young women and men, and each is robed in a single color. What tableaux they form framed against the Tuscan countryside – sitting on a lawn framed by a low-half wall, walking in candle-lit procession, or sleeping on a green meadow after dining on wild berries and cold spring water. A disagreement is interrupted by a thunderstorm, which takes our ten characters outdoors, where they are symbolically renewed and cleansed by the falling rain. Elsewhere, horsemen galloping across a green valley are seen from high above, as if by a falcon. The stories the ten exiles tell are ones of self-delusion, obsession, unrequited love, and sacrifice. (We had the impression that “The Decameron’s” stories were oft-ribald, but the ones told here are not.) It’s a simple enough premise, simply depicted, but the result is surprisingly transfixing. There’s a theatricality about the way the ten characters move across their ‘stage,’ and there’s a painterly quality to the way color, lighting, and the grouping of figures is used. Moments here look like a Renaissance painting sprung to life. The stories themselves probably aren’t quite ‘morality tales,’ in the strict sense; but they certainly are ‘tales with morals’ about the glories and indignities of matters of the heart and matters of the ego. “Wondrous Boccaccio” earned nominations at Italy’s Academy Awards (the David di Donatello Awards) for Best Production Design, Costumes, and Hair Design. For ages 16+: Very brief partial nudity.
Superheroes,
Storytellers, Swimmers, and Saints: Cinema Made in ... Cinema Made in
Italy 2016, Alex Ramon from Pop Matters, March 7, 2016
The Periphery: Philip Conklin Day 1, April 16, 2015
Vulture: Bilge Ebiri April 15, 2015
The New Yorker: Richard Brody April 13, 2015
Films
set in Tuscany | Wondrous Boccaccio, (Paolo and Vittorio ... February 2015
A
FILM By PAOLO & VittORiO tAViANi - uniFrance Films Wondrous Boccaccio Press Kit
'Wondrous
Boccaccio': Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young
'Wondrous
Boccaccio' Review: A Misfire From Italy's Taviani Brothers ... Jay Weissberg from Variety
At
Tribeca: Wondrous Boccaccio : A Decameron for the Tuckered Out ...
Brandon Judell from Huffington
Post
Wondrous
Boccaccio - Wikipedia
Taylor, Elizabeth – actress
Elizabeth Taylor Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Cinema from BFI Screen Online
One of the most celebrated stars in film history, not just for - or even primarily for - her talents, though these are not negligible, but for her astonishing beauty when young and her equally astonishing capacity to stay in the headlines for several decades.
Few private lives have been lived so publicly: her career as an actress, begun enchantingly as a child, scarcely rivalled those as serial bride (eight times at last count, including twice to Richard Burton, involving a decade-long media circus), diamond collectress, and survivor of life-threatening illnesses.
Most of her film career, embracing National Velvet (US, d.
Clarence Brown, 1944) and Cleopatra (US, d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963),
belongs to
Her British film roles include Rebecca in Ivanhoe (d. Richard Thorpe, 1952), the lobotomised Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer (d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959), the leads in two of Losey's least successful films, Boom and Secret Ceremony (1968), and a film star - what else? - in the Agatha Christie mystery, The Mirror Crack'd (d. Guy Hamilton, 1980).
Other husbands included (2) Michael Wilding, (3) producer Mike Todd, (4) actor/singer Eddie Fisher (5). She was made a Dame (the title seemed apt) in 2000, but, above all, a survivor.
Biographies: Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star by Kitty
Kelley (1981);
Elizabeth Taylor Resource Elizabeth Taylor Archives, with separate entries for each film, TV, stage, news archive, photographs, etc.
Kennedy Center bio. for Elizabeth Taylor
"Elizabeth
Taylor" biography from
Biography
"Elizabeth Taylor Biography" biography from All Sands
Elizabeth Taylor Broadway Data Base
Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF)
American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR)
Literature on Elizabeth Taylor
"Elizabeth
Taylor: Star Rising" Time magazine,
Elizabeth Taylor Through the Lens of Hollywood Photo Legend Bob Time magazine slide show, also here: The Many Marriages of Elizabeth Taylor
TIME Magazine Cover: Elizabeth Taylor - Aug. 22, 1949 - Actresses ... and accompanying slide shows: Remembering Elizabeth Taylor also here: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and here: Fashion Icon: Taylor Tops the Best Oscar Gowns
"1975:
Liz Taylor and Richard Burton remarry" BBC On This Day,
"Elizabeth Taylor at Republican Women's Club, 1978" photo from The Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 26, 1978
"Elizabeth
Taylor - Diet Tips On How To Become A Size 6" Dena Kleiman from The New York Times, May 23, 1986
She
wasn't much of an actress, but...
Tom Dewe Mathews from The
Guardian,
Liz Taylor: Her
Life in Pictures. Dame Elizabeth Taylor Receives Dame Commander of the Order of
the British Empire. Life. 2011
photos,
"Elizabeth
Taylor - Dame Liz Slams Bush Over Saddam Ultimatum - Contactmusic News"
Liz
Taylor: Oscars will be my swansong The Guardian,
Taylor
skipped Oscars over war with Iraq The Guardian, March 26, 2003
"Actress Taylor defends
Jackson" BBC News,
"Aids unit
donated by Liz Taylor" BBC News,
"CNN
Larry King Live: Interview With Elizabeth Taylor" Transcript of interview from CNN, May 30, 2006
Violet
Eyes To Die For Louis Bayard book
review of
Taylor
inducted into California Hall of Fame
Class of 2007, California Museum
Taylor
'not planning ninth wedding'"
"Elizabeth Taylor
has a new man" Liz Smith from Variety, September 12, 2007
"Striking
writers give Elizabeth Taylor a pass"
CNN News,
"Taylor
and Winters Still Going Strong"
Entertainment Tonight,
Philip
French's screen legends: Elizabeth Taylor Philip French from The Observer,
Pass
notes No 2,761: Elizabeth Taylor The Guardian,
Elizabeth Taylor failed to renounce US citizenship Greg Sabin from Mental Floss, May 5, 2010
"Watch out, boys. . . Liz Taylor's coming home" Richard Kay from The Daily Mail Online, May 17, 2010
"A
Love Too Big To Last" Sam
Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger from Vanity
Fair, July 2010
"Elizabeth Taylor remains hospitalized for heart failure" Christopher Weber from The LA Daily News, February 13, 2011
Elizabeth
Taylor's New York Times obiturary writer died six years ago Tony Pierce from The LA Times,
Video: Five Elizabeth Taylor performances we’ll never forget Susan King from The LA Times,
Obituary:
Elizabeth Taylor BBC News,
"Dame
Elizabeth Taylor dies at the age of 79" BBC News, March 23, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor:
A filmography BBC News,
How
Elizabeth Taylor redefined celebrity BBC News,
Taylor's private
life in spotlight BBC News,
Tributes paid to
'beautiful' Taylor BBC News,
In pictures:
Elizabeth Taylor BBC News,
"Hampstead Garden Suburb born Dame Elizabeth Taylor dies aged 79 Alex Hayes from The London Times, March 23, 2011
Elizabeth
Taylor: A life in pictures Ronald
Bergan from The Guardian,
Hollywood mourns Taylor Domini Rushe from The Guardian, March 23, 2011
Elizabeth
Taylor: gay icon Paul Flynn from The
Guardian,
"Elizabeth Taylor was an icon in Washington" Laura Klairmont from The CNN Political Ticker, March 23, 2011
"Elizabeth Taylor Dies of Congestive Heart Failure." Madison Gray from Time magazine, March 23, 2011, also including: See TIME's photo-essay "Remembering Elizabeth Taylor."
A
farewell to the most fleshly of all actresses. Dana Stevens from Slate,
Elizabeth
Taylor's delightful vulgarity. Simon
Doonan from Slate,
Beautiful,
Brilliant, Ugly Talents: RIP LIZ Kim
Morgan from Sunset Gun,
"Hollywood
Icon Elizabeth Taylor Dies at 79"
Sheila Marikar from ABC News, March 23, 2011, also photos: Elizabeth
Taylor Through the Years
"A Jew by Choice: Elizabeth
Taylor, 1932-2011" Benjamin
Ivry from The Jewish Daily Forward,
"Elizabeth
Taylor, Gay Icon, HIV/AIDS Activist, Dies At 79" David Badash from The New Civil Rights Movement, March 23, 2011
SAG
Remembers the Life and Legacy of Elizabeth Taylor. Screen Actors Guild Screen
Actor’s Guild,
"Actress
Elizabeth Taylor dies at age 79"
Douglas Stanglin from USA Today,
Elizabeth Taylor: a career in clips Guy Lodge from The Guardian, March 23, 2011
"Michael
Kors talks to Dame Elizabeth Taylor"
Michael Kors interview from Harper’s
Bazaar, March 23, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor had a love-hate fling with Oscar The
Awards Insider,
"UPDATED:
Elizabeth Taylor Laid To Rest In Glendale" Access
"Elizabeth
Taylor - the Hampstead girl who seduced the world" James Christopher from The London Evening Standard, March 24, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor: The eyes had it - An appreciation by Times film critic Kenneth Turan The LA Times, March 24, 2011
Essay: Elizabeth Taylor, the woman who invented celebrity Neal Gabler from The LA Times,
"Great
legend' Elizabeth Taylor remembered"
BBC News,
Elizabeth Taylor dies aged 79" ABC News in Australia, March 24, 2011, also including: Photo gallery
Elizabeth
Taylor: let the story melt away and just gaze David Thompson from The Guardian,
Elizabeth Taylor: The life, the looks, the movies, the smarts, the talent Hadley Freeman from The Guardian, March 24, 2011
Clancy
Sigal on Taylor The Guardian,
Elizabeth Taylor: the icon's icon La JohnJoseph from The Guardian, March 24, 2011
In
praise of ... Elizabeth Taylor Editorial page from The Guardian,
Elizabeth
Taylor: how Guardian critics rated her films The
Guardian,
An
Appraisal: An Alluring Beauty Exempt From Fashion’s Rules Cathy Horyn from The New York Times,
"Exploring
Elizabeth Taylor's Jewish conversion"
Jessica Ravitz from CNN,
"Legendary
Actress Elizabeth Taylor's Legacy and Generosity Lives on in New Orleans" NO/AIDS Task Force,
"Elizabeth Taylor's funeral takes place in LA's celebrity cemetery" Ewen MacAskil from The Guardian, March 25, 2011, also: Gallery: tributes to Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor late to her own funeral, just as she planned Chicago Tribune, March 25, 2011, which includes a 3 minute Sam Rubin video: VIDEO: The Career and Life of Elizabeth Taylor, also Photos: Elizabeth Taylor | 1932-2011, also Pictures: Elizabeth Taylor through the years
"Elizabeth
Taylor: Beautiful Mutant"
Roxanne Palmer from Slate,
"Elizabeth
Taylor and Israel, a lasting love"
Nathan Burstein from The
Washington Post, March 26, 2011
In
praise of ... Elizabeth Taylor Philip French from The Observer,
Elizabeth Taylor's nude portrait at 24 seen for the first time ... Liz Thomas from Mail Online, April 2, 2011
Elizabeth
Taylor at 24? Nude Portrait is Dancer Lee Evans UPDATE - Thompson on Hollywood
Elizabeth
Taylor's Wedding Photos Life magazine
Elizabeth
Taylor and Eddie Fisher Life magazine
Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton Life magazine
Elizabeth Taylor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Do
you have any idea what your hateful, bullying tribe has been up to? Cause
around here, you represent a whole new category of despicable. So, if you plan
on ever making friends, or sharing a bowl, or seeing a human vagina without a
credit card, get in the closet, Baptist boy, and stay there.
—Lauryn (Tania Raymonde)
Easily the best thing about this film is the title, which immediately
offers a multitude of suggestible images inside each individual’s head, which,
as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the movie, though it attempts
to link jazz improvisation to the unforeseen forks in the road of life’s
journey, though that’s at best a feeble effort.
Instead this is an occasionally smart, often funny and bitingly satiric
comedy on the fickle nature of youthful idealism, where God and religion often
get tossed into the mix of corporate evil and religious persecution, where it’s
easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.
While this film is occasionally hilarious, often similar to the dizzying
kaleidoscopic blur that is Whit Stillman’s Damsels
in Distress (2011), though not nearly as consistently entertaining, this on
the other hand moves to the other coast and reflects West coast elitism. Loosely adapted by the director,
cinematographer Ben Pearson, and author Donald Miller from his autobiographical
book Blue
Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on
Christian Spirituality, a collection of personal essays,
this much more fictionalized journey starts out in Texas with a glimpse of
Southern fundamental Baptism through the conservative eyes of a true believer,
Don (Marshall Allman), who is the assistant youth pastor. An only child living with his devout single
mom (Jenny Littleton), the two are like peas in a pod, while off in the
distance somewhere is the more out-of-sorts divorced and atheist father (Eric
Lange), known as the Hobo, looking a bit like Allen Ginsberg, living inside a
trailer in the woods somewhere, a free thinker who also believes in free sex
and jazz, compiling an extensive John Coltrane record collection, whose claim
to fame is his philosophy that jazz is like life “because it doesn’t
resolve.” Using his contacts, knowing
his son is bright, he gets him into the prestigious Reed College in Portland,
Oregon, affectionately known by locals as Weed College, labeled “the most
godless campus in America” where the average IQ is 138, supposedly two points
higher than genius level, a bastion of hippies, art students, and environmental
junkies, the kinds of kids that comprise the hard core leftist agenda, but with
rich parents who can afford their transition into progressive activism. When Don realizes his mother is concealing an
affair with the already married youth pastor, he’s off to what is arguably the
most liberal college in the
Initially, this fish-out-of-water transition is hilarious, as the portrait of Reed feels like something right out of Mad magazine, as the attention to detail is uniquely accurate while seemingly greatly exaggerated, but this is a college campus that prides itself on free expression, where no cause goes unnoticed, and everyone seems to already have a fairly well developed, often capricious, point of view. Immediately Don is singled out as the Texas Baptist boy, a lone voice on campus, where he soon finds that blending into the majority views is easier, often making self-effacing jokes about Christianity, where the suppressed anger of his mother’s morally hypocritical actions remain foremost in his mind. When he starts submerging his personality in a self-imposed purgatory of alcohol abuse, the film immediately loses its edge, as he’s obviously a sheep gone astray, and it’s only a matter of time before he finds his way back to the flock again. The film then goes on two parallel tracks, one delightfully successful, a developing romance with a cute blond named Penny (Claire Holt), who’s in one of his classes and happens to be a similarly God-fearing Christian who is conscious guided, somewhat along the lines of Sally Struthers on the Christian TV Network, where Struthers is always seen soliciting religious contributions for starving orphans around the world, while the other is a walking disaster, the irreverent and obnoxious actions of the Pope (Justin Welborn), a student running around in a Pope’s garments whose sole mission appears to be to prevent students from reading church-based literature, freeing them from the regressive force-fed chains of mental bondage, an anarchistic figure who takes Don under his wing, almost always in a perpetual state of inebriation. Despite her supposed naiveté, Penny may be the best thing in the picture, as she’s the only one, apparently, standing up for and acting upon her beliefs, while everyone else seems to be pushing a constantly shifting personal agenda of some kind, which may as well be a new theme of the week.
Adding to the religious blasphemy is Don’s first friend he meets on campus, a lesbian named Lauryn (Tania Raymonde), whose decisively opinionated conversation he overhears in a unisex restroom, but the two become fast friends and confessional soulmates, where Lauryn is often hurt by the unpredictable twists and turns of love, while Don is turning into a one-man wrecking ball, where he’s basically against whatever the prevailing point of view may be, deeply immersed in a sort of self-protected bubble of immunity where he refuses to allow himself to get hurt simply by not believing in anything. Penny has a hard time with this side of himself, as he’s the one suddenly turning a blind eye to his own hypocrisy by pretending not to care about anything, including his inability to forgive his Commandment breaking mother. Despite the stereotype of Christian outreach, at least Penny’s view of religion doesn’t alter or change her perspective, nor does she force her views on others, like the everpresent overbearing Pope who’s simply a pompous ass, instead she’s a persistent force for good. But despite high hopes from the smart and freshly atypical opening, the film bogs down at the end in a kind of Pope-led Bacchanalia ceremony of pagan worship, which is a climaxing set piece of godless sin, initially a mockery of Catholicism and rigid thinking before it turns out to be an unseen healing force for Don, just as naïve as Penny, a novice in the world around him, where the college journey turns out to be his road to enlightenment. This gentle, coming-of-age film gets the existential tone of transition correct from a kid living at home with his mother, basically brainwashed by the church, suddenly free to explore other trains of thought, which is of course liberating, even if what you discover isn’t far from where you started. The progressive world of college is seen as a neverending series of choices, where his previous assurance and cliché’d understanding of God in his life turns into a search for meaning and truth, where college is fertile grounds for exploration. This is an oddly satiric exposé of secular extremism that rejects the hypocrisy and turns into a much healthier and well-rounded understanding of religion.
It's Movie Time [John DeSando]
Whether we like it or not, college is
an existential odyssey landing us in more uncertain territory than we began. I
attended liberal
Ratchet up that liberalism to arguably the most
liberal college in the
It's a gentle, counter culture film about secular
extremism that actually leads Don to an understanding of religion transcending
Christian moms and hypocritical pastors.
Blue Like Jazz is successful showing the liberating
nature of a college where the average student IQ is 138, classroom discussions
pit cultures against each other to find common ground, and one is free to
express to the delight and challenge of others. The film fails, however, to
provide a coherent point of view because of its passion for discursive episodes
not always linked by motif or theme. Just too many eccentrics and not enough
time.
The defining event of the search for godlessness
leading to God is Renn Fayre, the annual selection of a "Pope," meant
to be a mockery of exalted Catholicism that turns out to be a growth point in
the intellectual journey of freshman Don. He turns out to be not unlike the
Graduate's Benjamin, naïve but on his glacial way to enlightenment.
Blue Like Jazz is a charming, incoherent
coming-of-age film that made me nostalgic for the low-key anarchy of
Georgetown, where I may have grown away from the orthodoxy of the Sisters of
Saint Joseph in favor of the secular humanism of the Jesuits, but where even I
have to admit uncertainty about the existence of God is a pleasant antidote to
the uncompromising certainty of the Baltimore Catechism.
Blue Like Jazz | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin
As the gaudy grosses of Courageous, Fireproof, and the recent anti-abortion heart-tugger October Baby indelibly illustrate, there are vast fortunes to be made preaching shamelessly to the converted in the most histrionic, melodramatic manner possible. Attempting to reach hearts and minds through a more subtle, nuanced approach is a much trickier proposition from a commercial standpoint. Accordingly, Blue Like Jazz, a surprisingly nuanced, even-handed and ingratiatingly ambiguous adaptation of Donald Miller’s semiautobiographical book about a young man’s disillusionment and rapprochement with his Christian beliefs during a mind-opening, life-changing stint at the hippie utopia Reed College, was financed partially through crowd-sourcing powerhouse Kickstarter, even though it’s based on a bestselling book that has sold around a million and a half copies. Like its protagonist, it risks being caught between worlds.
Marshall Allman stars as Miller’s surrogate, a devout young
Southern Baptist who impulsively decides to go to
At its best, Blue Like Jazz captures the exhilarating sense of possibility that comes with throwing off the shackles of dogma and repression and embracing the diversity and eccentricity of life in all its Technicolor richness, but it’s ultimately a Christian film, so all roads eventually lead back to Jesus. Blue Like Jazz makes a virtue of open-mindedness. It’s affectionate and unexpectedly sophisticated in its depiction of bohemian college life, even as Allman’s arc from bitter disillusionment with his faith and the hypocrites that corrupt it to Zen acceptance of Christianity’s faults feels a little rushed, and his relationship with a good Christian girl (Claire Holt) remains underdeveloped. Blue Like Jazz tips its hand at the end, but until then, it’s a glorious anomaly: a subtle, sophisticated, open-minded, and courageously non-judgmental Christian film even non-believers can enjoy. Hallelujah!
The fact that Ted Baehr, the conservative Christian media critic and founder of Movieguide, which dissects books and movies according to their adherence to a “Biblical perspective,” doesn’t like Blue Like Jazz is the first sign that it is a faith-based film of some merit and one that actually has a chance of making an impact beyond the choir. Unlike evangelical Sunday School lessons disguised as movies best exemplified in the amateurish work of brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick (Courageous, Facing the Giants), Blue Like Jazz dares to confront its audience, both secular and religious, by honestly dealing with the complexities of religion, politics, and personal identity. The film is challenging, rather than dogmatic, and it seeks to invoke reflection, rather than simply sermonizing. It is by no means perfect—it spends too much time skimming the surface of its protagonist’s existential issues without fully fleshing it out—but it still effectively gets to the heart of what it means to have a crisis of faith. What Baehr (and other narrow-minded evangelical critics) miss is that there is a pointed difference in what a film depicts and what it has to say about what is depicted.
Based on the best-selling 2003 autobiographical essay collection of the same title by Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz tells a largely fictionalized version of Miller’s own faith journey, which began with him fully entrenched in his conservative Southern Baptist upbringing in Houston before rejecting Christianity entirely and departing to Reed College, a West Coast bastion of lifestyle experimentation and radical politics, before finally realizing that he can’t shake his faith and must find a way to reconcile his belief in God with his recognition of the failings of His followers. Miller’s on-screen surrogate is played by Marshall Allman, an engaging, open-faced young actor now known for his recurring role on Showtime’s vampire series True Blood. Allman plays Don as naïve and eager, which is why he is so violently shaken to learn that his religiously devout mother (Jenny Littleton) has been having an affair with the married youth pastor (Jason Marsden) with whom he works. Shocked at this multi-faceted betrayal, Don turns down an opportunity to attend a Baptist university and instead accepts an offer from his bohemian, atheist father (Eric Lange) to attend Reed.
There he is a literal fish out of water, surrounded on all sides by exactly the kind of people he had been protected from all his life (and who, in the world according to Baehr, should never show up on a movie screen). One of the first friends he makes is a politically outspoken lesbian named Lauryn (Tania Raymonde), who takes him under her wing and teaches him how not to look like he just arrived from a Southern church supper (she advises him right away to keep his Christianity in the closet, a political reversal for Don who is used to homosexuals being in the closet and the first of the film’s numerous critiques of how open-mindedness is often in the eye of the beholder). Don also finds himself drawn to a senior student (Justin Wellborn) who parades around campus in a mockery of a pope costume and revels in firebrand denunciations of just about everything, but religion in particular. Don is most drawn, however, to Penny (Claire Holt), who is just as politically active as all the other Reed students (her personal crusades are against faceless corporate entities, especially a bottled water company that exploits the Third World for profit), but has a sweetness and generosity to her. Penny has her own mind, but she wears it with less aggressiveness than either Lauryn or the Pope, thus making her the film’s model of how to engage politically and morally without tearing down others needlessly.
Much of the film’s plot has a slightly meandering quality, as Don makes his way through the landscape of Portland, Oregon, which is beset with all manner of counterculture oddities, including random people who ride around town dressed in full animal costumes, a constant barrage of political demonstrations, and an active rejection of umbrellas despite the regular rainfall. As Don becomes more comfortable in his new environs, he also becomes more comfortable in rejecting his Christian beliefs, which he does in ways that are demeaning and sometimes cruel, best evidenced in a malicious prank involving a giant condom on the steeple of a nearby Episcopalian church. The pastor’s turn-the-other-cheek response to this and several other indignities heaped on his church by Don and others presents a meaningful contrast to the shallow, superficial antics of Don’s church back home, whose hypocritical youth pastor spawned his rebellion. Thus, while Blue Like Jazz is certainly true to Donald Miller’s wary attitude toward organized religion, it rightly depicts religion as having the potential for both immense good and immense bad.
Director Steve Taylor, who began his career as a Christian singer/songwriter before shifting over to filmmaking, brings a sharp eye and acute visual sense to the film, which makes it look and feel much more expensive and polished than it actually is (when one of the film’s original financiers backed out at the last minute, the production was able to generate more than $300,000 in funds on Kickstarter, making it one of the fund-raising web sites biggest success stories). He punches it up with indie pop tunes and several humorous animated segments that feel completely of a piece with the film’s off-beat tone. The screenplay, which was penned by Miller, cinematographer Ben Pearson, and Taylor, is loose, but engaging, maintaining a fast, often funny vibe with a rhythm all its own. It helps that all the performers, most of whom are relative unknowns, are so good, and the location work at Reed College (with Vanderbilt doing some stand-in work) creates a sense of atmosphere that is crucial in developing the contrast between the two halves of Don’s life. The best thing I can say about Blue Like Jazz is that it remains true to its convictions—that faith is not a monolithic entity but rather an evolving part of one’s soul that, when authentic, may be tested and bent, but never fully broken. While Don engages in all manner of unseemly behavior at Reed and becomes, for lack of a better word, a jerk, he ultimately comes around in the end—not in a hackneyed way that tries to right all wrongs in a sermonizing manner, but rather in a way that is genuine in its messiness and lack of complete resolve. In other words, real.
Taylor-Made:
Why You’re Missing Out If You Don’t Go See Blue Like Jazz Jeffrey Overstreet from Filmwell,
Should
we stomp Blue Like Jazz because it isn’t some kind of timeless, poetic
masterpiece? Jeffrey Overstreet from
Looking Closer,
Movie Review: Blue Like Jazz « Chrisicisms C. Dubbs
Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]
the mayward blog: Review: Blue Like Jazz Joel Mayward
Review: Christianity & College Life Collide In Fresh 'Blue Like Jazz ... Gabe Toro from The indieWIRE Playlist
Lost in Reviews [Sarah Ksiazek]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]
Jesusfreakhideout.com [John DiBiase]
Movie
Buzzers [Chris McKittrick]
Scared Silly: Classic Hollywood Horror-Comedies
Blue Like Jazz unleashes dogma Robin Tovey from Reed magazine
Christianity Today [Josh Hurst]
Frank Swietek - ShowReview One Guys Opinion
Blue Like Jazz - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Benjamin Mercer
Combustible Celluloid Review - Blue Like Jazz (2012), Steve Taylor ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Blue Like Jazz | College Movie Review Steven Davis
Review: Blue Like Jazz - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Brett Michel
Christian themes, but off-key - Philly.com Barbara Vancheri from The Philadelphia Inquirer
'Blue Like Jazz' is a wandering spiritual journey Roger Moore from The St. Louis Dispatch
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'Blue Like Jazz': Off to college, back to church David Lewis from The SF Chronicle
Blue Like Jazz - Movies - The New York Times
What if you don't like what I got to say 'bout white
people? —
Aibileen Clark (Viola
At a time when racism is rearing its ugly head with a black President, with all the fringe groups aligning themselves to denounce the man with a feverish tone of racist hostility, this is an era when all too many whites once again believe they are entitled to the best jobs, the best schools, and the best neighborhoods, allowing blacks to fend for themselves in the criminally infested, ghetto jungles of America, which so many in America believe is where they belong, or in prisons, as they’re too afraid to believe in a world of diverse humanity. The promise of hope for a cultural shift in the 60’s died a quick death with the selfish indulgence of the 70’s when racism was once again quickly swept under the rug, where the perennial problem is out of sight, out of mind, as so many whites continue to live separate and apart from any significant black population. So long as there remains such a significant cultural divide based on racial segregation and unequal opportunities, the age old disparities between races still exist, where a recent study by the Pew Research Center suggests the median net worth of white Americans ($113, 149) is twenty times more than for black households ($5677), a number that has grown staggeringly worse due to the recession, where blacks have been hit harder than any other group, as they were the poorest and most vulnerable to begin with. Generation after generation, election after election, this picture of gross inequity has remained unchanged, and if anything, despite many ballyhooed social advances, the economic disparity has only gotten worse.
A major complaint against Kathryn Stockett's 2009 bestselling novel The Help was that a white woman raised by a black nanny hired by her affluent parents had no business writing a Civil Rights era novel from the perspective of black maids, but then again, no one told Mark Twain or William Faulkner that they couldn’t write stories about “Negroes” in their time. Quite simply, there’s nothing wrong with white people telling their stories, sharing their views of history, so it’s not really who’s telling the story, but the story itself that matters and what truths are revealed. Certainly the first obstacle this movie has to overcome is what’s so fascinating about a film depicting black women in the most demeaning and subservient positions? And the second is overcoming the perception that this is an Oprah endorsed best seller released as a sanitized Disney film. In the final analysis, the film never overcomes these objections, as the rich white women living in the aristocratic Southern plantations all have black maids, every single one, where most have been handed down in the family since slavery days, where families continued to feel a sense of ownership with their “help” well past the 1950’s. So in this movie, where the men have scant presence (sorry Brian), the white women “owners” are almost all portrayed as vile and one-dimensional while the black maids reflect the more complex side of humanity. This stereotypical depiction prevents the movie from ever rising above such a narrow view, as the characters themselves just won’t allow it, remaining pigeonholed by the historic limitations of the script.
While this is adapted from a literary work with a largely terrific cast, perhaps the best way to approach this film is viewing it as one might a play, complete with a revolving stage and a plethora of characters to discover, where part of the fun is relishing the colorful characters observed in such close range, each seen in light of their own history, awash in the sins of the era. It seems like the current generation views the 60’s through the prism of the TV show Mad Men, where television replaces the void of their own shallow understanding of history, suggesting a culture of few who read anymore. In that sense, it’s better to view history through the eyes of someone who was actually there, even if they were not a major player. While Kathryn Stockett wrote the novel, the director Tate Taylor was one of her best friends growing up, both white, perhaps not the ablest of writers or directors, but they offer a shared understanding, so this plays out with the intimacy of a personal diary, rich in the meticulous detail of the powers of close observation. Would anyone complain for one second if we were eavesdropping on a conversation between Southern white neighbors Truman Capote and Harper Lee? Granted, this isn’t To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that made no attempt to interject history, but instead thrived on the magnificent details of Southern life. Here it is the suffocatingly restricted characters of the maids that through the advancements of the Civil Rights movement eventually learn to appreciate some additional elbow room.
Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the pre-Civil Rights years of the early 1960s, the mood is soured by hearing the blatantly racist views directed towards their own hired help (while they are standing there!) reflected in the ordinary conversations of women’s social gatherings, led by the politically aspiring Queen Bee influence of Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly Holbrook, a woman of high social standing who prefers to keep blacks in their place, completely separate from whites, except, apparently, to raise their children, as if white hands are too good to be soiled by handling their own children. What really hurts the expansion of the mood is the either all good or all evil treatment of the characters, where a few slip between the cracks, namely Hilly’s mother, the deliriously crazy Sissy Spacek, and the social outcast Jessica Chastain, apparently risen from trailer trash, who is treated as if she has leprosy, where even the blacks won’t get near her. These exaggerations allow wonderful comic portrayals, as there’s plenty of humor to be found in this film, as otherwise it would be smothered in the singleminded earnestness of the do-gooder lead character, Emma Stone as Skeeter, a young white woman from a wealthy family who has just returned from college, an aspiring writer who decides to set the tilted world back on its axis by writing the stories of the black women who work as hired help, showing, as she puts it, “the other side.” Two characters in particular are allowed to shine, Viola Davis as Aibileen, the heart and soul of the film, a devout Christian who believes God offers more than the life she’s been handed, bitter after losing her own grown son in an industrial accident, where economic circumstances ironically forced her to raise rich white children instead of her own. The other is Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson, Aibileen’s best friend, who steals every scene she’s in, a dizzyingly funny comic delight, a woman not afraid to speak her mind, a prized role in any movie. It’s interesting that Disney would get into the business of promoting a movie with social issues, but their own squeaky clean image restrictions prevent them from taking a more complicated, in-depth, and realistic approach, where the real horrors of growing up in the Jim Crow South are intentionally kept offscreen.
Lawsuit
Against The Help Author Kathryn Stockett Scrapped Emily Witt from The
Kathryn Stockett, author of the mega-bestselling novel The Help, was sued by Ablene Cooper, a black housekeeper and nanny who claimed that a character of the same race, profession and a very similar name, Aibileen, was based on her life. Ms. Cooper works for Ms. Stockett’s brother and alleged that Ms. Stockett had used her name and likeness in the novel without permission.
The AP reports that the lawsuit was dismissed today for having been filed after a one-year statute of limitations.
Andy's Film Blog [Andy Kaiser]
In 1963 a plucky young woman returns home from college in
Agents of Destruction Stuart Klawans from The Nation
To understand why we need The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975, the compilation documentary by Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson, it might be useful to watch a contrasting, studio-made fantasy about the American racial struggle at a slightly earlier moment. Give in, if you haven’t already done so, and see The Help, the most adorable drama ever made about the civil rights movement, and also the most cloacal.
By now, you will know that this highly popular film version of
Kathryn Stockett’s novel is a just-so story, relating how the black domestic
workers of
It’s a familiar scheme for a social-problem movie—sturdy,
reassuring and sentimental—providing ample potential for comic relief and in
the present instance no surprises at all, except for how well The Help
plays and how deeply it’s concerned with pee and poop. I don’t think it’s entirely
fair to complain, as some have done, that The Help uses a white
point-of-view character to shove aside the black women who are ostensibly the
film’s subject; the voiceover narration belongs to
Hollywood Jesus [Elisabeth Leitch]
The story of a young white socialite and several African American
maids who dare to tell their stories and challenge the societal norms of
racially oppressive early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, Kathryn Stockett's The
Help is one of those books that came out of nowhere, jumped to the top of The
New York Times bestseller list, and kept pulling in readers week after
week after week. Tackling issues such as racism, religious hypocrisy, and
deep-set societal norms and countering them with acts of courage, love, and the
embrace of truths and values beyond the prescribed, its story is one that can't
help but inspire thought and promote discussion. Top all that off with
multi-dimensional characters brought to life by some of the best actresses in
Hollywood today, and this summer's movie adaptation of The Help is one
that not only tells a story that entertains from beginning to end but does so
in a way that will be remembered.
Although The Help is screenwriter and director Tate Taylor's first
foray into the world of big-budget filmmaking, you would never know it. The big
studio money its novel's bestselling status brought in surely played a part in
decorating its perfectly Southern sets, dressing it bevy of young socialites,
and recruiting a talented cast of women including current it-girls, veteran fan
favorites, and Academy Award winners and nominees. However, like the book that
came before it, its greatest strength is in its characters—revealed in a
screenplay which truly shows the extremes of love and hate through people and
the struggle to navigate the road between what is and what is right through
personal journeys—and through the performances which hit both those extremes
and those complexities on the head in a way that does honor to the courageous
and challenging stories of each and every one of its characters.
What is perhaps most interesting about each of the characters in The Help
is the different ways in which each woman relates to the flawed societal norms
that surround her. Although the primary impetus for the story that unfolds,
Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) serves more as a practical example of the cost of
challenging the status quo, depicting a journey that, while noble, is more
about an execution of what she already knew—and had more power to do than
most—than any sort of deeply personal realization. On the opposite side of the
status quo is Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), the story's villain, and a
woman so steeped in racist and classist norms that to call her actions
malicious would miss the true nature of her character. To be certain, she is
conceited, self-centered, and completely awful. However, less someone trying to
promote her beliefs, Hilly is a woman who is so defined and controlled by what
she has always believed to be true that from her perspective, she's simply
living and acting according to the only truth she knows.
The narrator and the character with whom the movie's journey begins and ends,
Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) is a woman whose relationship with the
discriminatory structures that surround her is slightly more complex. At the
beginning of the film, Skeeter asks Aibileen if she always knew she was going
to be a maid, to which she replies, yes. But when Skeeter asks her if she ever
dreamed of being something else, she also replies, yes. As the story continues,
we watch as Aibileen quietly absorbs discriminatory treatment at the hands of
the grown white women she serves while also giving her all to help the children
she cares for see value in themselves and others beyond their mothers'
definitions. And in just those simple exchanges we are given a glimpse into
both Aibileen's resignation to the seemingly unalterable reality around her and
a piece of her that can't help but believe in a better reality enough to dream
that things could be different.
Decidedly the funniest, most entertaining characters in the
movie, Aibileen's fiery, outspoken best friend Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer)
and her social outcast employer Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain) also offer
perhaps the most unique perspective on discrimination and its impact. A woman
who sees absolutely no line between black and white and treats Minny just as
she would anyone else, Celia herself proves that the
Affected in different ways by the discriminatory norms and values that define
their society, the characters in The Help reveal just how
discrimination affects those who live inside its sphere of influence. While
most of us would rather not admit it, sometimes the lies of our life seem so
true we become their greatest supporters without thinking anything of it.
Sometimes any other truth can seem so distant and unattainable that the lies
that surround us oppress us and rob us of all sense of value. But as we also
see through the characters in The Help, no matter how pervasive the
lies that tell us we have no value or have no place in this world may become
there is always room for the truth to be spoken.
Sure, speaking out against widely accepted norms may be scary. Yes, there will
be those who try to silence those voices that do. But as The Help
unfolds and various characters play different roles in speaking and acting
according to a truth of human value outside of that which divides black from
white and values one human over another, what is interesting to see is that
almost every character takes that leap of faith not in their own interests, but
rather in the interests of another. For Aibileen, it is a sermon on being
willing to lay down your life for another to do what's right that prompts her
to begin the project with Skeeter. For both Minny and Celia, it is the kindness
that each shows to the other that causes both to finally believe in their value
and stand up for themselves. And as those acts of selflessness and love just
continue to build up and strengthen every women within their reach while the
selfish bent of Hilly and others like her only seems to wear them down more
with each passing hour, you see that not only will the truth be heard but that
when that truth is bound up in love it will always be more powerful than even
the greatest forces of ignorance, hatred, and untruth that may stand in its way
David Denby: “The Help” : The New Yorker
World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]
Capital New York [Sheila O'Malley]
New York Magazine [David Edelstein]
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
The Help | Senna | 1960s Racism in Black and ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal
The Help reviewed - Slate Dana Stevens
Movieline
[Stephanie Zacharek] which includes
a Jen Yamato interview with Viola
"The
Help": A tale of not-so-ancient American history - Andrew O ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon,
What we talk about
when we talk about “The Help” Andrew
O’Hehir from Salon,
The dirty secrets of “The Help” Laura Miller from Salon,
Jessica Chastain: The dazzling redhead who's suddenly everywhere Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, September 22, 2011
Christian
Science Monitor [Peter Rainer]
Emma
Stone and 'The Help': Does liking this movie make you racist? Maud Dillingham from the Christian Science Monitor,
The Help Heller McAlpin’s book review from The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2009, reprinted here September 5, 2010: Classic review: The Help
The Film Stage [Kristy Puchko]
eFilmCritic.com [Erik Childress]
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
The Help Is an Unexpected – If Wonderful ... - Eclipse Magazine Sheldon A. Wiebe from Eclipse magazine
Understanding
Screenwriting #79: The Help, The Whistleblower, Fury, and more Tom Stempel from The House Next Door,
The Reel Critic.com [Lisa Minzey]
Village Voice [Karina Longworth]
Filmcritic.com Jason McKiernan
We Got This Covered [Amy Devoe]
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
New York Observer [Meghan Keane]
Review: The Help makes the most of ensemble including Emma ... Drew McWeeny from HitFix
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Caitlyn Collins]
The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]
Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Boxoffice Magazine [Sara Maria Vizcarrondo]
Screen Comment [Saïdeh Pakravan]
The Phantom Tollbooth [Marie Asner]
BrianOrndorf.com [Brian Orndorf]
Matt's Movie Reviews [Matthew Pejkovic]
Battleship Pretension [Jack Fleischer]
advancescreenings.com [Matthew Fong]
Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
The Help | Review | Screen - Screen International John Hazelton
tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Viola Davis
had concerns about playing maid in 'The Help' Kevin C. Johnson interviews actress Viola
Davis from The St. Louis Dispatch,
Tonight
at the Movies [Laurie Curtis] including
Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]
The Hollywood Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
The Help: Civil rights lite, played for laughs - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen
Hartford Advocate [Ann Lewinson]
Philadelphia Inquirer [Carrie Rickey]
Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]
Orlando Sentinel [Roger Moore]
New Orleans Times-Picayune [Mike Scott]
St.
Louis Post Dispatch [Joe Williams]
'The Help' is the latest book-movie adaptation Joe Williams from The St. Louis Dispatch,
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Arizona Republic [Bill Goodykoontz]
San Francisco Chronicle [Amy Biancolli]
Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The New York Times [Manohla Dargis]]
GET ON UP C+ 78
USA (138 mi) 2014 Official site
Like most Hollywood biopic tales, this one barely scratches the surface and tells us little about the man that we don’t already know, where you’d think with Mick Jagger as a producer that the film would at least offer proof positive as to how he changed or altered the music industry, but except for an early run-in with Little Richard, a man Brown idolized, few other musical acts are even mentioned. Making matters worse, despite a heartfelt performance by Chadwick Boseman, seen earlier in the Jackie Robinson story 42 (2013), the music is entirely lip-synched, which certainly takes the starch out of any live performance, though every note he sings in the film is sung by James Brown. Having seen Brown perform in documentaries on soul music or the decade of the 60’s, none of which is included in the film, Boseman is a pale substitute, especially with the camera continually cutting away after a few seconds, never capturing any extended dance moves, lacking the quickness, stamina, and dexterity of the man who largely invented break dancing, possessing astounding acrobatic agility, where the man knew how to use the microphone to great effect, often kicking it with his feet where it bounced right back into his hands, while building theatrical tension near the end of his performance of James Brown performs "Please Please Please ... - YouTube (6:15), usually his closing number, as they keep pulling him away from the microphone, throwing a cape over him, and leading him away, only to have him resurrect himself in a surge of energy that was repeated several times for dramatic effect, as the audience was simply enthralled by his showmanship. White audiences may have preferred Elvis, even as a Vegas act, calling him the King, but James Brown was likely the most electrifying performer on the musical stage that we’ve ever seen, the man all others aspire to be. That legendary quality simply doesn’t come across here, where unfortunately Chadwick Boseman isn’t in the same league as imitators Prince or Michael Jackson (interestingly joining Brown onstage Michael Jackson & James Brown (High Quality) YouTube, 3:33), who stole nearly all their onstage moves from James Brown (as did MC Hammer, Usher, Bruno Mars, Chris Brown, and even Janelle Monae), acquiring the undisputed title of the Godfather of Soul. While others had a similar flair for showmanship, like Jerry Lee Lewis and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, or the incomparable Tina Turner, but they never had such a powerhouse band behind them, rehearsed to perfection, where the jolt of raw electric energy pulsating from that stage has never been seen before or since, especially accompanied by such fabulous dance moves performed while literally screaming the songs, sweat pouring off his face, earning the reputation for “the hardest working man in show business.”
Born under a backdrop of scarcity from such remote isolation, basically growing up in a rundown shack in the woods with a physically abusive father (Lennie James) who was rarely at home and a terrified mother (Viola Davis) that eventually left to save her skin, Brown experienced dire poverty and stark deprivation as a young boy, where he’s seen as a child getting his first pair of dress shoes by removing them from the feet of a lynched man. As Brown describes in his memoir, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, “Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a cabin with nobody else there, it gave me my own mind. No matter what came my way after that—prison, personal problems, government harassment—I had the ability to fall back on myself.” Young James is played by two boys, Jamarion and Jordan Scott, both of whom are stellar, where eventually he was dropped off by his father to live with his Aunt Honey (Octavia Spencer), the Madame of a whorehouse, where he was expected to help bring in the customers. While the film skips around a lot, not really in any coherent fashion, it was written by English brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, who also wrote the Tom Cruise alien, sci-fi movie EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014), directed by white director Tate Taylor, who also directed The Help (2011), really missing a major opportunity here, leaving out major chunks of his life, while strangely opening with the worst scene in the film, an embarrassingly bad, cringeworthy, drug-induced, shotgun-toting stage of his life that doesn’t really connect to anything except to suggest by that time in his life he’d lost his mind, most likely due to drugs. The movie tries to probe his inner psyche throughout, where somehow the choice to convey a near psychotic state through hallucinations is probably not the best way to do it, as to many in the audience that opening sequence shows him as just another crazy, gun-carrying “Negro” that we need to be afraid of, as the scene is expressed in such blatant stereotypical terms. While the movie attempts to suggest his physical abuse in childhood led to his own tyrannical abuse of others, including his second wife (Jill Scott) and members of his band, who were rehearsed to death, never given a day off, while ruled over with an iron fist and either fined or fired should they fail to meet his standards of perfection. It’s ironic, then, that the film is perfectly willing to overlook so many of his own personal transgressions, like drug abuse, physical violence, domestic abuse, rape allegations, numerous extramarital children, or legal troubles, quickly skimming over them or omitting them altogether, never really placing them in the context of his life. In a near surreal moment, Brown and his band are heading for an appearance before the American troops when they come under Vietcong fire in a U.S. plane in 1968, where Brown is crazily haranguing the pilot about how he’s not afraid of death, when he then turns to the camera and asks the audience, “You ready?” The film then jumps back into his childhood. This ridiculous device, continually used throughout the film, was similarly used in Eastwood’s Jersey Boys (2014), a carryover from the Broadway stage. In both instances it just feels silly, where unlike the theater, in film you already have the audience’s undivided attention, and this only detracts from that interest, feeling more like trickery, a gimmick that just doesn’t work.
Brown was a middle-school dropout with no formal musical training (he could not read a chart, much less write one), but he had an intuitive grasp to remember and reproduce any tune or riff he heard, but also to hear the underlying structures of music and make them his own. Like most black artists from the era, his roots are singing gospel music in church, the flamboyant hand-clapping, stomp-and-shout, get-down-on-your-knees and wail style of gospel music that Ray Charles first brought to popular music in 1959 with “What’d I Say” Ray Charles - What'd I Say LIVE YouTube (4:15). Brown is the source of more hits than anyone of any color after Elvis Presley and stands virtually unrivalled as the preeminent pioneer and practitioner of the essential black musical styles of the 60’s and early 70’s—soul and funk—and the progenitor of rap and hip-hop, where the estate of James Brown earns millions each year on royalties from rap samplings. While he screams and howls in nearly every song he ever recorded, there is very little, if anything, in the range of vocal emotion that he cannot express, and the same can be said of his almost perpetual motion onstage. Even in the early years, his daring was unparalleled, as he was determined to be sensational, even if that meant swinging from the rafters, doing flying splits from atop a grand piano (causing his knees to bleed), and even leaping from a theater balcony into the orchestra pit, where his outrageousness was carefully calculated to convey that he was always in control. Despite his lack of education, Brown always exhibited a dogged interest in financial matters, where in 1962 he wanted to make a live record at the Apollo Theater, where King Records producer Syd Nathan (Fred Melamed) opposed the idea, claiming it would never receive radio airplay. So Brown put up his own money to record what went on to become a fixture on the playlist of many R&B radio stations, many playing the entire first half of the album, breaking for a commercial, and returning for the second half. It spent 66 weeks on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart, peaking at #2. It remains to this day one of the more electrically charged live recordings available, listed as #25 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Soon afterwards, Brown began a campaign to wrest ownership of the royalty-generating master tapes in the King archives, obtaining a measure of creative and commercial control that no popular musician, black or white, had quite achieved, and for years afterward he kept the tapes in a bag that was with him at all times. At the peak of the Civil Rights struggle in 1968, he released one of his hit songs, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” James Brown - 1968 Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud ... YouTube (5:58) simultaneous to the Tommie Lee Smith and John Carlos Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, becoming embraced as an anthem to the civil rights movement. James Brown wasn’t just unapologetically black, he was the darkest-skinned American performer to ever achieve such stardom. This racial component, so significant in defining the overall importance of this man, is altogether missing from the film. According to Gregory Allen Howard from Portside, July 31, 2014, The Whitewashing of James Brown | Portside:
There are over fifty black iconic biopics and black-themed movies in development in Hollywood, including multiple Richard Pryor projects, five Martin Luther King projects, multiple Marvin Gaye projects, and civil rights projects, and only one or two have an African American writer. Our entire history has been given over to white writers…
Let me tell you who James Brown was, really, not the Wikipedia James Brown.
He was a civil rights icon. Put James in the pantheon of the most impactful black men of the 20th century, and he would not be out of place. How can I make such an assertion? One song: "I'm Black and I'm Proud."
Before that song, if you wanted to start a fight with a man of color, all one had to do was call him black. Up until the mid-sixties, we were trying define ourselves: not colored anymore, now Negro. But black was not something we called ourselves. And along comes this little man and proudly states, "I'm black and I'm proud!" He took the thing that the oppressor used to bludgeon us and made it a weapon of pride for us.
That song caught on like wildfire. One day, our heads were down, the next day, our heads were held high, proud of who we were. We had all these groups, civil rights groups, Muslims, Panthers, but it was JB who gave us our swagger. That song lifted up an entire race! He put us on his back and carried us. Dr. King gave us our rights. JB gave us our dignity. Civil rights icon? You better believe it.
When that song came on the radio, cars stopped in the street. People turned up their radios, came out of their houses, and sang along with it; radio stations put it in a loop and played it for hours. The next day people greeted each other with "Hello, black man!" "My black brother." JB made black beautiful overnight.
While the film is largely a showcase for James Brown’s music, including unending set pieces of Brown in performance from the early 60’s through the late 80’s, it’s also about the people that he pushed out of his life, leading him to become a sad and tragic figure at the end of his life when he’s largely alone. Outside of Brown, the other star of the show is his soft-spoken sideman Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), a man with a moral conscience, whose family took in Brown as a young 17-year old offender with no family of his own and in need of a permanent address to meet the conditions of parole. These two hit it off immediately, where Byrd’s gospel group The Starlighters visited the prison where Brown was serving time for petty theft, becoming his most loyal and devoted friend throughout his life, a backup singer often brought to the front by Brown, grateful to be sure, even awestruck by Brown’s musical genius, but also resentful of what he was forced to put up with in Brown, becoming cognizant of his failings. Together they formed the original group The Famous Flames, seen at a club impressed by none other than Little Richard (Brandon Smith, also excellent), taking the vacated stage during a break and creating a sensation, playing the Chitlin' circuit where Brown was introduced to his longtime manager Ben Bart (Dan Aykroyd), becoming the star of the act, eventually introducing Maceo Parker (Craig Robinson) as leader of an electrifying horn section that moved in unison as they played — check them out here in the concluding number that comes at the end of a frenzied 18-minute performance on the TAMI show in 1964, James Brown performs and dances to "Night Train" - YouTube (5:01), a song Sonny Liston used to listen to during his boxing workouts. The entire 18-minutes, featuring “Out of Sight” (3:30), “Prisoner of Love” (3:30), “Please, Please, Please” (6:15), and “Night Train” (5:01), may be the best performance footage of Brown and his band currently available on YouTube, James Brown - Full TAMI Show Performance, 1964 - YouTube (18:15). As Brown puts it in his memoir, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, “We did a bunch of songs, nonstop, like always…I don’t think I ever danced so hard in my life, and I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast.” Another superb example of Brown in action is here seven years later with Bootsy Collins(!) on bass, James Brown Italy 1971 - YouTube (15:10), performing “Get On Up” (5:30) with sideman Bobby Byrd, “This Is a Man’s World” (4:10), and “Soul Power” (5:30). Brown could captivate audiences anywhere around the world with a daring boldness and ferocity of spirit, a volcanic force that when he played, gyrating asses could not sit still, but had to move. And for those who only heard James Brown shout and holler and never believed he could sing, there are these performances, literally days from one another, James Brown performs "Try Me". Live at the Boston Garden. April 5, 1968. YouTube (2:03), while in one of the first color recordings of Brown, James Brown performs "Try Me". Live at the Apollo Theater, March 1968 YouTube (2:43). “Try Me” is also the bring-down-the-house final song of the film, a ballad that shows what he could do in a slow song with all its nuances, changing the lyrics to fit the moment, sung late in their lives with Bobby Byrd sitting in the crowd, creating a tender message that is all the more poignant for expressing the connectedness and inescapability of the past, not only the shared love, but all that has been lost between these two friends. It’s a heartbreaking moment.
Get On Up - Directed by Tate Taylor • Film ... - Exclaim! Kevin Scott
Soul Brother No. 1. Mr. Dynamite. The Godfather of Soul.
Legendary performer James Brown certainly was known by a host of different
nicknames throughout his career, but did anyone ever truly get to know the man?
While the possibility may sound like it would only make the task more difficult
for a biopic like Get On Up, this actually paves the way for an
unflinching account of a dirt-poor kid's single-minded pursuit of success,
brought to vibrant life in an electric performance by Chadwick Boseman.
Jumping freely around to different periods of Brown's life in a welcome
departure from typical genre fare, the film begins with the bizarre scene of
Brown wielding a gun at a store he owns in 1988 when no one fesses up to having
dropped a deuce in the bathroom. His troubled childhood is pieced together in
glimpses, from a humble upbringing in a Georgia shack to being abandoned by his
parents and then eventually saved from prison by a musician named Bobby Byrd
(Nelsan Ellis) who recognizes Brown's vocal talent.
When Universal Attractions agent Ben Bart (Dan Akroyd) entices him with a hefty
payday, Brown has few qualms about letting Byrd and the rest of his Famous
Flames band take a backseat to his own unquestionable star appeal. Levelling
members with fines at even the slightest hint of insubordination, Brown
continues to solidify his own legend by using his signature flair and funky
dance moves to ignite stages and help advance the civil rights movement.
Narrated directly into the camera at times by Brown himself, this isn't exactly
a glorifying portrayal of the singer in how it shines a light on all of his
egomaniacal and abusive ways. There's a startling moment, after Brown has
smacked his wife silly just for allowing herself to be ogled at a Christmas
celebration, when Brown looks sheepishly into the camera as if he's sorry we
had to see that.
Following his breakout turn in last year's 42, Boseman shows a stunning
range within just the two roles. Where his Jackie Robinson was a study in
stoicism amidst prejudice, here he is tasked with embodying the unparalleled
magnetism of an icon, and proves every bit as up to the task. In replicating
the raw energy of Brown's live performances and his unmistakable (and sometimes
nearly unintelligible) manner of speaking, Boseman captures the man's essence
in painstaking detail.
Reunited with a handful of the actors from his last film, The Help,
director Tate Taylor works from a script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (who
have a had a pretty good summer after also co-writing Edge of Tomorrow).
It may strain a little too hard for answers and closure by the end, but the
film leaves room for plenty of humour and probes intriguingly into the causes
and costs of ruthless ambition in a way that, much like Brown himself, feels
surprisingly fresh and alive.
Get on Up | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
Awkward and shapeless as most biopics have historically been, most of them at least understand that what attracts audiences to them in the first place—aside from the spectacle of having actors and makeup technicians trying to one-up each others' performances—is their depictions of both their subjects' rise and their fall. Dramatizations of famous people waiting on tables, counting their pennies, finally hoisting up and tearing down that country road toward their destinies are dramatic. Illustrations of power and influence slipping through larger-than-life personalities' fingers as they spiral inevitably toward substance abuse and domestic betrayals are dramatic. Dwelling on the simple fact that somebody was electrifyingly talented when, even under the best circumstances, the actor you're watching play that person can still only muster a pale shadow of said celebrity's genius? Not inherently dramatic.
That the time-shuffling James Brown biopic Get on Up opens with an unmistakable low point in the Godfather of Funk's long and checkered history, with the musician waving around a shotgun while trainees at one of his franchise locations cower in terror, turns out to be a major red herring. As if taking a cue from its own title, the movie emphatically sets its sights on the upward trajectory of Brown's career, spending the bulk of its time depicting how Brown (played with winning doses of insouciance by Chadwick Boseman) transcended his abusive, backwoods upbringing and his adolescence spent in servitude to his brothel-madam aunt, promising "Pretty girls! Whiskey!" to roving packs of Korean War veterans traveling through town. (In one disquieting, isolated sequence, the preteen Brown is seen pulling a pair of shiny dress shoes from the swinging corpse of a lynched man.) Sentenced to prison for upward of 10 years for stealing a man's suit, Brown quickly befriends Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), the frontman of the Famous Flames, a gospel group that performs at Brown's penitentiary, and helps him get his feet on the ground once he's released. Brown joins their group, teaches them to sing from the crotch, and swipes the microphone at a juke joint while Little Richard takes a tinkle break out back, a breach of etiquette that earns the "Tutti Frutti" superstar-in-waiting's respect. (As Richard, Brandon Mychal Smith works stank-face wonders with his one-scene part, alternately warning Brown of the dangers of "white devil" record execs and feeling him up and down with his darting eyes.)
Bolstered by the enthusiastic response their new act has been getting, the Famous Flames implode before they can even tour the chitlin' circuit in earnest. The record company decides Brown has to be a headliner, and the rest of the group will have to be satisfied with standing behind an ampersand. Despite Brown's reassurance that he had nothing to do with the decision, they bristle and walk. All except Byrd. The episode is but one of the many instances of Get on Up conflating Brown's musical genius with his basically compassionate nature, as if asserting both to be mutual givens, an attitude that comes to find its most prominent example in Byrd himself.
To wit, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Brown's turbulent life knows there are countless narrative ellipses being quietly shuffled out of the deck via the film's jumbled chronology. Only once does the film show him abusing drugs. Only twice does the film depict him engaging in the kind of domestic abuse that plagued his police record for decades, and even one of those moments transforms into extra-heavy petting. (The film repeatedly evinces a weirdly retro-revisionist take on the concept of sexual violence as foreplay. As did Brown's parents, so does Brown himself: slapping, then tickling—or vice versa.) In place of these or any other legitimately dramatic elements of Brown's life that don't involve hiring and then firing musicians who would later become key members of Parliament-Funkadelic's lineup, Byrd is left to bind the film's hagiographic-leaning pieces together. As the film turns a blind eye to why Brown moved from ex-wife to ex-wife, it basks in the reason Byrd remains loyal to Brown: As he tells Maceo Parker (a subdued Craig Robinson), there comes a time when lesser talents come to realize they need to back off in order to allow the greater talent to shine, and maybe if they're lucky they'll be swept up in the glory. A sentiment I've no doubt the makers of the well-acted but frustratingly inert Get on Up understand all too well.
I Feel Groot! « - Grantland Wesley Morris
Is there such a thing as state-of-the-art lip-syncing? Because I’ve never seen anything like what Chadwick Boseman does as James Brown in Get on Up. By the time the movie gets to Brown’s aerobic 1971 Paris show — which he does here in a onesie whose top is just a vest — you’re no longer watching an actor mouth “Soul Power.” You’re watching the words torpedo from his mouth. It’s an electric magic trick: a soaking-wet performer understanding that the key to the illusion, to transcending mere impersonation, is wedding Brown’s passion to precision. If something goes just a hair wrong, the arrow misses the apple and lands in somebody’s head.
Boseman speaks in a version of Brown’s charred country husk, risking intelligibility for accuracy. There were moments when I only kind of caught what he said. While Brown could belt, he could also mumble. But the singing’s a different story. That voice was a weapon of art. Who’d be dumb enough to try to imitate it?
For the first song or two, you’re skeptical of the fake-it approach. But then Boseman’s Brown takes the stage at a Georgia juke joint in the mid-1950s, and it’s clear that whatever he’s doing with this performance has started to work. Little Richard (Brandon Smith, who’s very good) exits — or rather, given the bitchy oracle he is here, goes poof! Then Brown and his bandmates sneak on after him and do the old jump-blues classic “Caldonia.” The camera gets right up in Boseman’s face so you can take it all in: the sweat and the straining and the shuffling around a tiny stage. The sex, basically. Boseman probably overdoes the unself-consciously ugly expressions Brown made when he performed, but that’s what pulls you through the looking glass: It hurts to be this good.
For this performance to work, you have to believe that the man strutting around and doing the kicks and splits and falling down on one knee is the same cat whose interjections are exploding off the screen amid the music. You have to see strain in his face and lips and muscles. The timing of the syncing and the illusion of live singing have to combine to feel real. You have to be able to look into Boseman’s face and feel, as you could with James Brown, that what you’re seeing and hearing is glorious and obscene and original: the radical, ripping rasp of a voice.
Brown didn’t jive or play black for a white audience. That was the shock of his talent: Unlike Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, he never adulterated it. The voice was one-size-fits-all. He had a raw, irreducible wail whose volume and vibrato he could control. What was ironically exhilarating about him, of course, was that he rehearsed obsessively in order to master seeming like a preacher on fire. He was also multiorgasmic. Brown was always. About. To. Come. He’d bend down on one knee and receive the cape from his forever sideman, Bobby Byrd, seeming spent, only to whip around, ready to go again. All night. Whether the songs lasted two minutes or 10, they, too, were all ready to go all night.
Get on Up lasts 138 minutes, and
as good as Boseman and a dozen other actors are, I don’t think I could have
lasted a minute more. Brown was an exhausting entertainer. This is exhaustive
entertainment. The clichés wear you out — recording sessions, hit songs, women,
babies, childhood flashbacks, highs, lows, hair (so much fried hair),
arguments, makeups, somebody saying “I can’t do this anymore.” So does the fact
that the filmmakers don’t know what to make of Brown’s contradictions — his
conservatism and progressiveness, his abstemiousness and indulgence, his
appreciation for and abuse of women, his drill-sergeant bandleadership and his
soldier-on-furlough ways. There’s too much jumping across time, too much of
Brown speaking right into the camera. Why on earth sit through a fictional film
of his life — especially one as fictional as this — when there are at least
half a dozen documentaries that can give you exactly what you need?
The screenwriters are the English
brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (and Mick Jagger is the producer). If
you didn’t know these two also wrote Edge of Tomorrow, you could tell by
the slippery approach to time and the small-but-unstoppable larger-than-life
protagonist. The first batch of scenes in Get on Up move explosively
around the decades, from Brown prowling the bowels of the Omni Coliseum in the
mid-1990s; to that time in 1988 when he took a shotgun to a strip mall; to him
and the J.B.’s under Vietcong fire in a U.S. plane in 1968; to him looking into
the camera and asking us, “You ready?” after which comes a fireball that whisks
us to 1939 and the one-room shack that once was his home. The movie wants to
offer Brown as a self-made force of nature who made his own weather. He started
as a nothing who quit school in seventh grade and became an impervious
industry. “I can never quit when it gets hard,” he says at some point. “I goes
forward … I live.”
All this leaping across time begins,
more or less, with that shotgun incident. It’s not an auspicious raising of the
curtain. Brown pulls up to his office in Augusta, disoriented — officially, he
was high on PCP. He deduces that someone attending the insurance seminar in the
adjoining office has used his personal bathroom, the one with a gold record on
the wall. Greatly upset, he interrupts the session, terrifies the attendees,
blasts a hole in the ceiling, and zeroes in on the mortified culprit. He talks
gibberish. It’s a crude introduction that should make fans of half-baked
black-male characters feel right at home. Yeah, we very much know this is James
Brown. But the movie is content to present him as a crazy old Negro with a
shotgun.
This is hardly an unconventional
approach to movie biography. Close your eyes and it could be Why Do Fools
Fall in Love or Ray: the presentation of contradictions, of a
star’s brilliance and decline. But Get on Up’s digressions can be
compelling. When Brown loses the thread of his rant at that seminar, it’s
because hallucinations of his own screaming and rhythm section cloud over him.
This won’t be the last daydream he has. But Get on Up isn’t a movie
about structural fantastical narrative. It’s not about how James Brown wound up
stoned and armed in a tracksuit or the ensuing car chase and subsequent
arrests. The scenes are cuts on a greatest-hits collection. Remember the time
when JB flew his Learjet to meet President Johnson? What about the legendary Boston Garden show Brown put on the night
after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination?
After almost two hours, the film
implies that the spur for the insurance-seminar incident is grief over his son
Teddy, who died 15 years earlier. This bit isn’t unobjectionable. It more or
less happened. It’s just misguided. The Butterworths and the movie’s director,
Tate Taylor, are up to something interesting. They’re trying to represent
Brown’s psyche. They put the movie in his voice and imagine the story from his
point of view. When he’s pantomiming “I Feel Good,” with his Famous
Flames on the all-white studio set of 1965’s Frankie Avalon–Dwayne Hickman
vehicle Ski Party, the track starts to warp. He surveys the white faces
and the snowflake cardigan he’s got on and fantasizes about being half-dressed
and sweaty onstage draped in black women. But the self-consciousness goes too
far. We see him smack his second wife, DeeDee Jenkins (Jill Scott), across the
kitchen. Well, the slap occurs offscreen. We see her crash into a table as he
walks toward the camera and glowers at us. Is this a movie about House of
Cards’ Frank Underwood or the Godfather of Soul?
The emotional hook is the friendship
between Brown and Byrd, who’s played with easy, memorable warmth by Nelsan
Ellis. The movie even cooks up a scenario in which Byrd’s gospel group (the
Starlighters) comes to the prison where a teenage Brown is serving five-to-13 for
petty theft and the two men fall in musical love. Byrd tried to remain devoted
to Brown after the players in the J.B.’s demanded payment and time off and
Brown fired them — bye, Maceo Parker (Craig Robinson); bye, Pee Wee Ellis
(Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter). Brown was the Proud Mary of self-made music
icons: He never did anything nice and easy.
Taylor sends a lot of movie at you. There’s a flashback that feels lifted from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. There’s a very funny cut into the audience at a live show, where, in one shot, Scott is mildly turned on, and in the next she’s fully, wildly aroused and drenched in sweat. Often Taylor is throwing at us the cast of his previous film, The Help. Viola Davis plays Brown’s abandoning mother. Octavia Spencer is the aunt who puts Little Junior, as he’s called, to work routing men to her brothel. Allison Janney, Aunjanue Ellis, and Ahna O’Reilly are also here, Janney for one of the dumbest cutaways in the movie.
The Help was a moral mess: Black women need white women to help lift them up. Get on Up would seem to be a corrective: If a white hand tries to help Brown, he smacks it. The movie is sure to point out that he knew the racial score, that powerful whites would exploit blacks when they could and that black people had to have the dignity, ambition, and belief to empower themselves. Brown was serious about that, and the movie almost gives that seriousness its due. After some of the black crowd rushes the stage at that Garden show, Brown turns ruminatively cross, wondering aloud what’s going on. “Either we together or we ain’t.”
He was in a sociopolitical bind, between black radicals who thought he was just a capitalist and whites who suspected he had the power to start riots. On his way to meet Johnson, he tells his manager Ben Bart (Dan Aykroyd), “I’m just a soul brother whining on his private jet.” You laugh at the line, and then, not much later, there he is in a recording studio wearing an Afro and dashiki surrounded by children who belt, “Say it loud — ‘I’m black and I’m proud!’” This movie is the opposite of The Help. Brown wanted African Americans lifting themselves up. He was an elevator.
For a few years, biographical
moviemaking had been taking a single angle on a subject, or it applied
parameters. The scripts of Peter Morgan — The Queen, Frost/Nixon,
The Damned United, Rush — were character studies set against
specific moments in history. Lincoln was about a president and the
agonizing ecstasy of the legislative process. Walk the Line reconsidered
Johnny Cash’s life as a romantic drama with his wife, June. These movies are
windows onto icons. There are too many windows in Get on Up. It quite
easily could have been a movie about that night at the Garden, about a real
test of a man’s character, of a city’s, and, by extension, a nation’s.
There are too many Browns for any one
film to get a proper handle on who he was. The results here are both
psychologically keen and presumptuous (mostly with regard to his mother and his
sexuality), but fragmentary, too. The story is of a man so full of himself —
and so full of selves — that he was practically a nesting doll. That, of
course, leaves the filmmakers to rely on Boseman for coherence. His challenge
is to keep you from thinking about Eddie Murphy’s hot tub impersonation, from sensing only an
outsize joke. He has to find a way to take you past caricature and into
characterization. This movie gives Boseman a much clearer shot at that than did
last year’s Jackie Robinson movie 42, which was more
about the courageous effrontery of Branch Rickey than it was about Robinson and
Wendell Smith, the black journalist who was effectively Robinson’s minder.
Boseman has a wide, serious-looking
face. The hair and makeup artists here try not to overdo it. When Davis drops
by Brown’s dressing room, her droopy face rhymes with his. Boseman is pliably
handsome enough that he can keep playing the great Negroes of the last 100
years — James Baldwin should be next. But he has given Robinson and now Brown
enough different charisma for him not to be just a paper doll. With Robinson,
he played stoicism. With Brown, he’s playing everything else. There’s a long
rehearsal sequence for “Cold Sweat” in which Brown’s manic, punitive genius
surfaces, and another scene after the band quits in which his paranoid
self-aggrandizement takes over. But Boseman is most alive when it seems that
Brown’s singing voice is his own. It never seems more so than when he stands
stock-still in an arena and does “Try Me.” It’s a lie, of course. But such is
Brown’s everlasting artistry and Boseman’s interpretation of it that you’re
momentarily certain it’s true.
“Mr. Brown,” Philip Gourevitch from The New Yorker, July 29, 2002
James Brown at the T.A.M.I. Show - The New Yorker David Remnick, July 30, 2014
James Brown, one of the greats of post-war American ... Richard Phillips from The World Socialist Website, January 17, 2007
World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]
Get on Up Is an Inspired James Brown Biopic | Film Reviews ... Stephanie Zacharek from LA Weekly, also from the Village Voice seen here: James Brown Biopic Get On Up Does The Godfather Proud ...
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
James Brown Killed Dumb Biopics: Why the Messy Get On ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice
Review: 'Get On Up' Starring Chadwick Boseman ... - Indiewire Kimber Myers from The Playlist
*Get On Up* Review | Vanity Fair Katey Rich
Vulture.com - devouring culture! (Bilge Ebiri)
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
Get On Up / The Dissolve Keith Phipps
Get On Up | Reviews | Screen - Screen International Tim Grierson
ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Movie Metropolis [William David Lee]
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]
DVD Sleuth [Mike Long] Blu-Ray
DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Christopher Zabel]
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]
Little White Lies [David Jenkins]
Get
On Up - The AV Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Get On Up - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Mark Tolch]
'Get On Up' Movie Review | Rolling Stone Peter Travers
'Get On Up' Review: The Glowing Tribute that the ... - Pajiba Dustin Rowles
Mick Jagger Talks James Brown on the Set of Biopic 'Get On Up David Peisner interviews producer Jagger and actor Chadwick Boseman from Rolling Stone magazine, February 4, 2014
James Brown Biopic 'Get On Up': Heroic Acting In A ... - NPR Linda Wertheimer interviews LA film critic Kenneth Turan on the film from NPR, August 1, 2014
'Get On Up': Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden
Film Review: 'Get On Up' - Variety Scott Foundas
Get On Up: biopic tries to get under James Brown's skin ... Tom Shone from The Guardian
Get On Up review - The Guardian Mark Kermode from The Observer
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Joseph Anthony]
Austin Chronicle [William Goss]
Review: 'Get on Up' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Get On Up - Roger Ebert Odie Henderson
'Get On Up' Stars Chadwick Boseman as James Brown ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times, also seenhere: New York Times [STEPHEN HOLDEN]
James Brown - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
5 Ways James Brown Made An Impact On American Culture Brennan Williams from The Huffington Post, July 30, 2014
Nearly a decade after the release of his popular The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),
Mark Twain published The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn in 1885, considered one of the great American novels
largely due to painting such a vivid portrait of life along the Mississippi
River, including the use of highly colorful characters, a somewhat scathing use
of Southern antebellum flavor, including the controversial use of regional
dialect, making satiric references to entrenched attitudes towards slavery that
persisted at the time, including language and stereotypes now deplored as
racist, including the frequent use of the word “nigger,” which does not appear
in the film. The book was condemned by
author Louisa May Alcott upon release and the public library in Concord, Massachusetts
refused to carry the book, claiming it was “more
suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” Despite continuing efforts to ban this book
specifically for the protagonist’s language, including condensed editions
released today which delete the offensive words, what’s unique is the original
inclusion as a remarkable depiction of regional accuracy. This is an era when public lynchings of
disobedient or caught runaway slaves were still common, an incident that is
aptly described in the book but was deleted in this film.
To this Irish born director’s credit, he was an avid reader
and previously filmed TOM SAWYER in 1917 and HUCK AND TOM a year later, so he
was intimately familiar with the material, but deleted much of the most controversial
aspects of the story. Still, there are
somewhat shocking visual portrayals of slaves as lazy and listless, often seen
sleeping throughout the day, while slave children are happily seen eating
watermelon. Truthfully, this film is no
more shocking than the depiction of slaves fiercely loyal to the Confederacy in
GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), often listed as one of the great American films,
including 1001 Movies You Must See Before
You Die. Noted as the first feature length film version of the
popular book, it was recently restored to a 35 mm print by the film
preservationist George Eastman House, including occasional use of surrealism
and color tinting. The Silent film is
being released with a newly scored soundtrack by the Mont Alto Orchestra, which
is included in the version seen on Turner Classic Movies television and airing
the same night as the Portage theater screening, courtesy of the Northwest
Chicago Film Society, which included live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren. While the vivid detail of the restored image
is state of the art, there are a few cuts to a black screen noting a sequence
with lost footage, also some nearly destroyed images that show signs of print
deterioration.
Without the use of any real stars, the
film opens and closes with bookend shots of Mark Twain sitting in a rocking
chair on his front porch, where the movie becomes his recollections of what
he’d written, seen as a companion piece to Tom
Sawyer. Set on the Missouri shores
of the Mississippi River a decade or so before the Civil War, Huck, played by
17-year old Lewis Sargent, is placed under the guardianship of two stern
elderly women, Widow Douglas and her contrary and authoritarian minded sister
Miss Watson who seem bound a determined to teach him some manners, forever
instilling upon him some rules to live by. Despite the confining chokehold from
the restricted, civilized life, it’s better than when his drunk and abusive
father returns to the scene literally kidnapping him and enslaving him with the
sole intention of beating him, where Huck’s soon had enough of “civilization,”
fakes his death and escapes on a raft down the river with an escaped slave
named Jim. Shortly afterwards the duo is
met on the riverbank by a pair of escaping con artists claiming to be a Duke
and a King, two outrageous scoundrels who do nothing but continually hatch
plans to fool people into parting with their cash. When they hear of the death of a property
owner, they soon impersonate the missing brothers who stand to inherit the
proceeds, quickly acquiring a bagful of cash that Huck hides from the scheming
imposters as he’s fallen for one of the daughters, who becomes the girl of his
dreams, Mary Jane, played by Esther Ralston, who by the end of the decade
became one of the highest paid Silent film actresses, known for her flamboyant
lifestyle that included riding around in a chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce where
the chauffeur’s uniform matched the color of her dress.
Huck’s journey leads him to a personal
transformation, as he slowly comes to realize that all is not as it seems, that
Jim is his real friend, loyal and helpful, despite being on the run from the
law, while the Duke and the King are liars and cheats who always find a public
following of fools yet they continually get away scot free, though in the book
they are eventually tarred and feathered.
In the end Huck realizes that Jim’s escape from slavery, a world of
captive brutality, is no different than his own need to escape the vicious
beatings from his own drunk and belligerent father. Despite what seems like neverending inner
titles advancing the story, where you spend much of the time reading this
movie, the director makes little differentiation between the changing
perceptions on land and on the river, where what’s missing is the wry humor and
relentlessly sarcastic, observational tone that holds society on the riverbank
up to ridicule by continually poking fun at the neverending hypocrisy happening
all around them. By leaving out the most
provocative and detestable material, the director is undermining the full power
and intent of the novel. Absent Twain’s
real genius, which is to belittle and castrate existing trends of wrongfully
imposed morality through a kind of everyday, warm and folksy humor, ironically
using two oddly illiterate heroes to expose this kind of social revelation, the
audience here is rarely in on the joke, often missing the eventual elevation of
one’s consciousness from the seething tone of disenchantment with the now duly
deposed antebellum world. Huck’s flight
to freedom should feel like an iconic journey that the entire newly liberated,
post Civil War nation is taking right alongside with him.
User
reviews from imdb Author: rdjeffers from
An old maid adopts motherless Huckleberry Finn to "sivilize" his
coarse, free-spirited behavior. Her plans are thwarted when the boy is
kidnapped by his father, the abusive town drunk. Huck escapes by faking his own
murder and befriends a runaway slave. Their tranquil life of rafting on the
river is interrupted by two seedy con-men who sell Jim and involve Huck in
fraud, while he masquerades as his best friend Tom Sawyer and falls in love.
Missing the satirical bite and social consciousness of Mark Twain's 1885 novel,
director William Desmond Taylor's Huckleberry Finn (1920) displays a
sentimental fondness for the story in a production that typifies the consistent
quality associated with Taylor and Paramount Pictures. Huckleberry Finn is also
noteworthy as the first theatrical film version of the book and for Esther
Ralston's oldest surviving performance in a feature film, as the object of
Huck's affection Mary Jane Wilkes.
Huckleberry Finn: Information from Answers.com
There are no huge names attached to this silent version of the
classic Mark Twain story (although director William
Desmond Taylor would become famous a couple of years later when he was
mysteriously murdered). But stars weren't necessary; everyone in
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Patrick Friel
The film event not to miss this week
is the local premiere of the George Eastman House's recent restoration of the
1920 film HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Showing in a new, tinted 35mm print, it is not
likely to be an aesthetic revelation, but there are many other things to
commend it. Not least of which is how often does one get to see a rare silent
film, in a new restored print, in an actual movie theater, with live organ accompaniment?
The Silent Film Society's summer festival aside, not often enough. It is, as
mentioned above, quite a rare film as well—unseen, until the GEH's efforts made
it available again, since its original release. It is also the first
feature-length adaptation of Twain's novel, though a severely truncated one,
apparently. Still, the trailer available here
provides some evidence that director William Desmond Taylor strived for
authenticity in his location shooting and casting.
Alt Film Guide [Danny Fortune]
Directed by William Desmond Taylor, Huckleberry Finn stars a fresh, freckle-faced Lewis Sargent as Huck. (Sargent was also featured in another 1920 Taylor production, The Soul of Youth.) Set in the antebellum South, this sentimental retelling of Mark Twain's iconic story revolves around the adventures of Huckleberry Finn after he is kidnapped by his no-good, drunken father (Frank Lanning). When Huck manages to escape, he enjoys his newfound freedom so much that he continues to elude the search party. As a result, everyone thinks he is dead.
Soon, Huck is joined by Jim (George Reed), a slave on the run. Later on, they meet up with a pair of chicken thieves who scheme to cheat three young girls from their father's inheritance.
Taylor, best known today as the murder victim of one of the biggest scandals in Hollywood history, skillfully directs Huckleberry Finn, always moving the action forward, and getting sustained performances from the actors. Frank E. Garbutt's carefully lit cinematography helps to enhance the drama.
Huckleberry Finn was reviewed at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Image: SFSFF.
© Danny Fortune
Note from the editor: William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his
At the time,
A
restored black-and-white that wasn't so black-and-white Nina Metz from The Chicago Tribune,
Here's what I first noticed when I pulled up the trailer for the 1920 silent film "Huckleberry Finn" on YouTube: With his freckles and dark hair part parted firmly down the center, Lewis Sargent's title character looks exactly like Alfalfa, that other puckish pipsqueak from the black-and-white era. And then there's this: Every time actor Frank Lanning appears on-screen as Huck's soused father, you'd swear someone digitally inserted a performance by Will Ferrell instead. The resemblance is just uncanny.
Recently restored by the George Eastman House (the museum and
archive in Rochester, N.Y., where the Kodak founder was based), the film that
was once thought lost to the ages comes to the Portage Theater Wednesday,
courtesy of the Northwest Chicago Film Society. It is the kind of unique event
worth marking on your calendar — the first time in 90 years that this version
of "Huckleberry Finn" will be seen in
Vast numbers of silent films have disappeared from
As for "Huckleberry Finn," a single print was
discovered in
It's fairly common to find old American films in foreign
archives. As Westphal explained: "A print would tour around and then get
to the end of the circuit, and then that last theater was faced with the
question of: Do we pay the cost of international shipping? Or do we just keep
it and figure that the studio, in this case
The film sat pretty much untouched and under wraps in the Eastman House's archives for years. Because it was a nitrate print (made of the highly flammable film stock that gradually decomposes with age) the archives made a copy using more stable modern materials, but the full restoration process (which included translating the film back into English) didn't begin in earnest until just a few years ago, in anticipation of 2010's 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's death.
A popular film when it was first released (it grossed $3.5 million, according to Sargent, who later groused that he earned just $35 a week on the picture), it was the third film from director William Desmond Taylor based on Twain's work. Taylor (who was also an actor) made some 80 movies over the course of his career before he was found murdered in his home in 1922. Anthony L'Abbate, who spearheaded the film's restoration at the Eastman House, noted that "there was a lot of speculation that his murder involved some Hollywood starlets and drugs were supposedly involved, but to this day it remains unsolved," a scandal that has overshadowed Taylor's work as a director.
Considering the aim here is to recreate the 1920 film experience, warts and all, I asked how the current restoration deals with the book's use of the N-word as they were translating the film's intertitles back to English. "We tried to be faithful to the work of Twain, and we tried to approach the film with a 1920s sensibility. Basically, how audiences would have seen it at a time when people were a lot more comfortable with their prejudices than they are now," L'Abbate said. "We did use the N-word once when Jim refers to himself as that in the Danish translation, and other times we used less harsh but equally offensive terms such as 'colored' or 'darky.' Unfortunately we did not have a script to work from, so we used the novel for our dialogue."
Here's something else to note: Though it was shot in black and white, individual scenes in the film are tinted in various colors. This was a common practice in silent films. Filmmakers would literally dip the film stock into tubs of dye to achieve the effect. "I guess it was so normal that it's seldom remarked upon — you don't even read about it in reviews from the time," said Westphal, explaining the collective amnesia about that practice. (Among the tinted films in the Eastman archives is a stag film tinted green.) As the years progressed and nitrate prints were preserved on newer film stock, it was cheaper and easier to simply make a black-and-white print.
Here's how the colors are used in "Huckleberry Finn," according to L'Abbate: "If they're outside and it's daytime, the scene is tinted yellow for sunshine. Scenes dealing with Huck's father and his alcohol problem, they were tinted green, which was more of an emotional-impact tint rather than a typical tint that's replicating sunshine or red for firelight. Nighttime is usually tinted blue. In this case, we were confused because the nitrate prints had most of the nighttime scenes tinted pink, and we were like, this doesn't make any sense. But we found out from a colleague at the Library of Congress that blue tints sometimes fade to pink."
"Huckleberry Finn" screens Wednesday at the Portage Theater, with live accompaniment from Jay
Warren on the
Huckleberry
Finn (1920)
Film
Preservation Friday #2: The Restoration of Huckleberry Finn
HUCKLEBERRY
FINN to be seen for the first time in nearly 90 years at the 360 / 365 George
Eastman House Film Festival Anthony
Labbatte,
TCM tribute — silents,
please! Jared Case from George
Eastman House,
Huck Finn Arrives in Pittsburgh Ben Tucker from George Eastman House,
William Desmond Taylor: The Unsolved Murder by Dina-Marie Kulzer
Huck
Finn Loses the 'N' Word - Studio 360
Michael Guerriero from Studio 360,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Titus Time
Out
Riven with strife - war and political
intrigue, lust, revenge, cannibalism, you name it - Titus Andronicus has
always scared off film-makers. You suspect the play's twisted illogic and
ignominious reputation have been a more significant disincentive than the
violence. Best known for her fantastic staging of Disney's The Lion King,
Taymor has bitten the bullet. Her Titus shirks nothing, rather it
bombards us with great gobs of conceit - like the time travelling child who
witnesses the infamy unfold. Then there's the production design which places
pinball games and classic convertibles in Ancient Rome; and when Lavinia is
raped and dismembered, Taymor gives her twigs for hands like a refugee from a
nightmare fairytale. It's tasteless, maybe, but very much alive. Even when the
film feels silly or embarrassing, sheer creative brio carries it through.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Titus (1999) John Wrathall from Sight and Sound, October 2000
Ancient Rome. Having captured
Tamora, queen of the Goths, general Titus has her eldest son sacrificed in
accordance with ritual, ignoring her plea for mercy. Saturninus, newly
acclaimed emperor of Rome, decides to marry Titus' daughter Lavinia but she
elopes with his brother Bassianus. Saturninus marries Tamora, who as empress
can avenge herself on Titus.
Encouraged by Tamora's Moorish
slave Aaron, her sons Chiron and Demetrius murder Bassianus and rape Lavinia,
cutting off her tongue and hands. Aaron frames Titus' sons Martius and Quintus
for Bassianus' murder. They are sentenced to death and Titus' only remaining son
Lucius is banished. Tricked into believing that his sons will be pardoned in
return, Titus lets Aaron cut off his hand, only to have Martius and Quintus'
heads delivered to him. Titus vows revenge and sends Lucius to the Goths to
raise an army. His appetite for vengeance is strengthened when Lavinia
identifies her attackers. Meanwhile Tamora has given birth to a son; Aaron, not
Saturninus, is the father. Aaron runs away with the child and is captured by
the Goths, now commanded by Lucius. In an effort to save his baby, Aaron
confesses his crimes.
Titus invites Tamora and her
entourage to a feast. He then kills Chiron and Demetrius and bakes them in a
pie, which he serves to Saturninus and Tamora at the feast. Titus then kills
Tamora. Saturninus kills Titus. Lucius kills Saturninus. Lucius is proclaimed
emperor. He condemns Aaron to death, but spares his son.
Julie Taymor first directed Shakespeare's early tragedy Titus Andronicus off Broadway in 1994, and her film version - her feature debut - incorporates many visual motifs (and one cast member, Harry Lennix) from that production. But anyone expecting a stodgy dose of filmed theatre is immediately wrong-footed by the surreal opening sequence, in which a little boy enacts scenes of carnage with his toys on a kitchen table, and then - as if he has conjured up the spirit of violence - finds himself thrust into a real-life war. He emerges into the Coliseum in time to see Roman general Titus march in at the head of his victorious troops, terrifying in their mud-caked armour. It's a breathtaking and brilliantly choreographed opening, plunging us straight into Act I, Scene One of the play.
Titus was released in the
Taymor's style, however, couldn't be more different from Ridley Scott's.
Instead of creating ancient
Eager to allow Shakespeare's words to shine through as clearly as possible, Taymor shoots the dialogue scenes fairly straight, with a minimum of background action. As if in compensation, she punctuates them with moments of stunning spectacle, whether set-piece crowd scenes (armies on the move, a Fellini-esque orgy) or hallucinatory flashback sequences using multilayered video imagery. This alternation between talk and spectacle gives the film a slightly awkward, theatrical rhythm, so that despite the dynamism of individual sequences, the film never quite picks up the momentum to sustain it over 160 minutes. But this is as much to do with the unwieldy structure of the play itself, which - apart from its astonishing lurches in tone between atrocity, poetry and wilful absurdity - seems to offer us serial protagonists to root for: first Tamora, then Aaron the Moor, and only lastly, from Act III onwards, Titus himself.
Taymor's audacious mix of styles may not ultimately gel, but if you had to film Titus Andronicus, it's hard to imagine doing it in a more challenging, dynamic - and faithful - way. And what theatre could rival Taymor's cast: Anthony Hopkins as Titus, for once stretched by a role to the full range of his talent; Jessica Lange as Tamora, the revenge-driven empress presented here as a human tigress, swathed in tattoos and sheathed in gold lamé; and Harry Lennix, bringing a grace and dignity to the role of her lover and henchman, the villainous Aaron.
Frida Geoff Andrew from Time Out
It's easy to see the attraction of a film about Frida Kahlo. The Mexican painter was spirited, rebellious, proudly true to her idiosyncratic talents, and, despite being crippled in a bus accident, she led an unusually eventful life. Just the ingredients for a romantic inspirational drama! Or for a thin string of colourful clichés. That's far too harsh an assessment of Hayek's well meaning hymn to the determination and artistic originality of a national heroine, but it does point up the weaknesses of the film. Notwithstanding an eagerness to display her bust at regular intervals, the actress/producer makes for an efficient lead, and the same is true of Molina's Diego Rivera. Kahlo's relationship with the womanising muralist is the movie's backbone, as opposed to the link between experience and art, which is stated, not dramatised. The script rushes events, races past characters, deploys welcome animation and special effects for dreams, trips abroad and paintings come to life. It also fields irritatingly cute cameos. Those unfamiliar with Kahlo's life and work will find it lively and informative, but depth of character and insights into the creative process aren't part of the hagiographic equation.
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Though Frida is easier to swallow than Julie Taymor's
preposterous Titus, the eye candy here lacks considerable brio. A
magical realist's trolley accident leaves 18-year-old Frida Khalo (Slama Hayek)
a victim of body horrors for the next 29 years. Frida and Diego Rivera (a
remarkable Alfred Molina) meet soon after. They discuss politics, get married
and take their communist revelry to Rockefeller's
For Frida (Miramax), her new biographical movie about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the director Julie Taymor has a thrilling visual idea and a crippling visual idea. It's the same idea: to treat Frida as a figure in a Frida Kahlo painting. Thanks to some of the most exquisite special effects you'll ever see, flat paintings suddenly acquire three dimensions, and three-dimensional people freeze and become part of a larger canvas.
If you want rich folk-art colors, brainy spectacle, and breezy soap opera, then Frida is the biopic for you. Taymor has taken a leap as a filmmaker from her first feature, Titus (1999), which was sensational but stylistically all over the map (with acting to match). Frida is more fluid and confident. If you want to know why Frida Kahlo is more than a painter—she's an icon, a mass-culture phenomenon, a cottage industry—look no further: Taymor prints the legend. After the bus crash that nearly ended the young Kahlo's life, Taymor serves up a sacred/ghastly image of the young woman (played by Salma Hayek) splayed out, impaled, covered in bright red blood and gold (meant for a cathedral ceiling). Frida wakes to a chilling Day of the Dead skeleton show of doctors and nurses, animated by the great film surrealists the Brothers Quay. Her wedding ceremony to the muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) is just as Kahlo painted it, and when she's stricken over the breakup of their marriage (after she has caught Rivera having sex with her sister), the image is from her Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair. Again and again the seminal events in Frida's life are seen through the prism of her artistry.
Kahlo herself made it difficult to separate them. Although she's grouped with the Surrealists—Dalí, Magritte, Miró, Picasso—she wasn't happy with that label. "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't," she once said. "I never painted dreams. I painted my reality." That's a little dodgy. All Surrealists—all Expressionists, even a few Cubists, for that matter—use extreme stylization to portray the world as they think it really is, not as it appears. But Kahlo had broken with the Surrealists for political reasons, and she was eager to claim her Self as the core of her aesthetic. (No wonder people like Madonna spend millions to own her paintings.)
What's wrong with that? Only that life and art are not the same, and making them bleed so thoroughly into each other—as Taymor does—has a way of trivializing the artistic process. Kahlo was enormously canny and resourceful in taking traditional folk art and miracle paintings known as retablos and transforming them into mythic visions of her own physical pain and emotional dislocation. Here, those visions seem to leap fully formed from her imagination. When she appears in wildly colorful Mexican garb, with heavy necklaces, with her braids wrapped around her head like a helmet, with her mustache slightly highlighted and eyebrows defiantly conjoined, it's as if she was born that way. In Frida, we're given no insight into the most astounding creation of Kahlo's life: Frida Kahlo, feminist icon.
Salma Hayek has such a lithe and wriggly little body and is so
revved up and raring to go that she doesn't convey much of the ugly physical
paralysis of Frida's life; and there's something twittery about her voice that
reminds me of Penélope Cruz. But she's likably game. Even better is Molina, who
brings a lightness to the fat Rivera; Molina creates a figure of titanic
irresponsibility, a creature of impulse with no obligation to reconcile his
political, personal, and aesthetic ideals. But the movie grows ever more
sketchy and diffuse—symptoms of most
Salma Hayek stars in and produces a very personal biopic of Mexican artist/free thinker Frida Kahlo. Julie Taymore (Titus) brings a strong vision to the proceedings, and crafts an excellent testament to a woman of many talents and her tumultuous relationship with the communist artist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina).
Beginning in
During Frida's downtime she focuses on painting, and once she manages to walk again (to the great surprise of her family) she immediately seeks out Senor Rivera (who she repeatedly calls ‘panzon') to ask his opinion of her work. Diego is a serial womanizer, but Kahlo is more than a match for him – in fact she knows already that if he wants to sleep with her he'll lie about her artistic talent. The fact that she's onto his game doesn't deter him, and soon the two become lovers, more because of how much alike they are than anything else. Diego introduces her to his radical friends (and ex-wife portrayed by Valeria Golino) and in one great party scene Kahlo outdrinks the fellas to earn a dance with Ashley Judd as the actress Tina Modotti. Frida's sexuality is yet another aspect in which she trumps Diego, as later she beds one of his mistresses and is told that she had outperformed her husband.
Though strong in her ideals and spirit, Frida doesn't capitalize
on her talent, and is content to let Diego bask in the limelight. This
eventually leads them to move to
Their stint in
It's their ideals that ultimately cause their orbits to connect
once more, as Diego is forced to plead with Kahlo to allow the communist
refugee Leon Trotsky to stay with her father whilst living in exile in
Hayek has gotten plenty of notice for ‘going ugly' by sporting the by-now famous unibrow, but it should be said that she captures the fire and spirit of a woman who lives her entire life in emotional and physical pain, yet refuses to give credence to either.
World Socialist Web Site Joanna Laurier
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
Paint Job Carol Kino from Slate
Plume-Noire.com Film Review & Feature Anji Milanovic
kamera.co.uk - film review - Frida - Bob Carroll
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, also seen here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs] and here: Frida - Nitrate Online Review
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
CounterPunch Marta Russell
Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]
Nick's Flick Picks (Capsule Review)
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
filmcritic.com Aarom Lazenby
Sketch Of An Artist David Ansen from Newsweek
Why not Frida and Diego? John Nesbit from Culture Cartel
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann] Nigel Watson and Howard Schumann
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Bright Lights Film Journal :: Little Stabs of Homo Happiness (and ... Gary Morris, May 2003
Substance Overshadowed By Style Lee Chase IV from Culture Cartel
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger
DVD Movie Guide Colin Jacobson
Frida (Special Edition) - DVD review (1 of 2) - DVD Town Yunda Eddie Feng
Movie Magazine International [Purple]
BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
You
were always waiting for this moment to arrive
Following months of viewing different versions of what were arguably the best trailers of the year, this is a glowing, sumptuous experience of exhilaration and sheer inventiveness, dazzling from the opening shot, beautifully extending the boundaries of cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel and the use of ‘Scope, Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE Beatlefest is easily her best film effort so far, as the anything goes, imaginary world of a musical only enhances her ability to shine. For the first half of this film, it’s probably the best film seen all year, but by the time Bono makes his Kesey connection, “You’re either on the bus or off the bus,” and Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite takes us through his loopy surrealistic world of chaotic disorder, the entrance of which looks like something out of the COLOSSUS OF RHODES (1961), the emotional bottom falls out of the experience as people’s lives start falling apart. In its place are overly simplistic renditions of the times, perhaps top heavy with typical imagery of police confrontations with Vietnam war demonstrators, never really getting under the surface of any of the leading players, nothing that can pull the audience into their world, which the first half does so well for at least a half dozen characters.
Opening dramatically in song, John Lennon’s highly personalized, almost hushed lyrics from “Girl,” where the singing is done by the actor’s themselves, the film distinguishes itself by adhering to character references from Beatles songs and allowing the lyrics to tell the story of a jubilant and sad encounter between a boy and a girl from opposite ends of the globe, Jim Sturgess as Jude, a somewhat cherubic, baby-faced kid who’s had to work in the shipping yards to make ends meet for his single mom, and Evan Rachel Wood as Lucy, the pampered, free spirited suburban girl who’s had everything handed to her, who has her life in front of her but hasn’t a clue what to do with it. When her high school boy friend is drafted, they vow, as lovers do, to write and wait for one another, while on the other side of the world Jude is promising his girl friend the same thing, using the same lyrics from “Hold Me Tight” to project similar worlds, despite the differing social status.
Jude is off to America in search of his missing father, an
American GI who was stationed in Liverpool during the war, a guy who never knew
he existed and is none too pleased at meeting him, while Lucy has to contend
with the bizarre and crazy antics of her brother, Joe Anderson as Max, a
wild-eyed kid who drops out of school with no real ambition other than a
Quixote-like quest for discovery. Max
runs into Jude and invites him home for a rancorous Thanksgiving dinner with
the folks in suburbia, becoming best friends forever, and this before he
realizes Lucy is his sister, who immediately captures his heart. Before you can blink, Max and Jude run off to
Greenwich Village to discover the world, renting a room from “Sexy Sadie,”
played by Dana Fuchs looking ever so much like Drea de Matteo, a hard drinking
singer who slinks her way into the sultry world of Janis Joplin, a rock icon
whose career was anything but sultry. But
easily the most outstanding early sequence features an unnamed Asian high
school cheerleader (TV Carpio as Prudence, we later learn) who is out
practicing on the football field at the same time as the players, who starts
singing this incredibly sad and mournful, startlingly off-kilter rendition of
“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which expresses her alienation to the in-crowd, as
cheerleaders and football players flirt and carry on while football players
fling one another across the screen with great abandon while we assume she’s
got a thing for one of the players. Next
thing you know, she’s out on the road hitching a ride to who knows where,
amusingly re-entering the other storyline by the spoken phrase from Jude, “She
came in through the bathroom window.” Her
lesbian intentions only become clear later when Prudence literally needs to be
coaxed out of the closet, where they all gather outside her locked door and
urge her gently and sweetly in song: “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out and
play.” Very inventive.
This kind of lyrical context is beautifully interwoven
throughout the entire film, some hilarious, others heartbreaking, like when a little black kid from
Detroit breaks into "Let It Be" while riots in the street are
breaking out all around him, a sequence that continues with the boisterous
support of an Aretha Franklin-like all-black choir that takes the song into
magical heights, but ending with a funeral scene of that same little boy in a
coffin as "he" continues singing the song (in spirit) alone. Taymor, as usual, receives highly incendiary
negative criticism, some even calling this the worst film of the year (Village Voice critic Robert Wilonsky, the
stand in for Ebert on Ebert & Roeper), but this is really not due to her skills
as a filmmaker, but her degree of purpose, as she uses a take-no-prisoners
approach. She refuses to downplay or compromise
her vision, trusting her artistic impulses, creating some of the more vividly
imaginative sequences shown onscreen this year.
The early
build up of innocence and hope is simply unsurpassed, but there is a subsequent
letdown exploring the darkness of the Vietnam era, taking a great big dive into
60's demonstration overkill, where unfortunately it at times veers into laughable
stereotypical territory. The two leads and the entire cast are terrific,
and there's some brilliant cameo appearances, one by Joe Cocker in multiple
roles, another by Selma Hayek whose multiple images as a army hospital nurse
with a syringe in her hand reappear like the actor Deep Roy in CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2005) to the
tune of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” yet another by Bono as Ken Kesey who swaggeringly
sings “I Am a Walrus,” which looked like a laugh riot to play, each role
drawing a smile. All that was missing were appearances by Paul and Yoko
Ono making up.
Lucy receives a jolt of reality when her guy gets killed in Vietnam and decides to join her brother and Jude in New York for awhile, adding to this mix Martin Luther McCoy, a Jimi Hendrix-like guitar phenom named Jo-Jo whose younger brother died in the Detroit riots earlier in the film, who also arrives in New York and answers an ad for Sadie’s lead guitarist to the intoxicating sounds of “Come Together,” all moving in under the same roof of what feels like spirited bohemian underachievers. But just as things start to jell for everyone, with Lucy and Jude entangled in a myriad of surreal love fantasies, perhaps expressed best when she sings to herself a hauntingly quiet rendition of “If I Fell” before their first kiss, the same goes for Sadie and Jo-Jo with their boisterous Ike and Tina onstage chemistry with “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road,” while brother Max receives his draft induction notice, and next thing you know, posters on the wall of the draft board literally come alive pointing their finger at Max exclaiming “I Want You, I Want You So Bad,” and he’s off to Vietnam (“She’s So Heavy”) in one of the wilder choreographed numbers mixed with a highly stylized surrealistic flourish that expresses how the world is tilted on edge.
Jude becomes a very talented artist but remains noncommittal on politics (“Nothing’s gonna change my world”), while Lucy desperately joins the anti-war movement creating a rift that becomes the film’s biggest contrivance, as she is never once convincing as a so-called radical turned “revolutionary” (so Jude can snidely sing the song “Revolution”) and crudely dismisses Jude’s obvious talents as nothing more than doodles and cartoons just as the screen comes alive with his blazing red images of bleeding strawberries, more war imagery, to the massive sounds of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The two become separated, as does Prudence, as does Sadie and her guitar man, while newsreel war reports saturate the television screens to the divisive and horribly screeching sounds of “Helter Skelter” sung by Sadie to a raucous crowd of war resisters getting their heads bashed in as they are arrested in mass numbers. Turbulence defines the times that are a-changin’. There’s a wonderfully quiet moment of reflection afterwards with Lucy alone on a dock singing “Blackbird,” which reintroduces the key that holds this universe together. Perhaps there’s a few too many police in riot gear, which gives the impression kids were under siege, which of course they were, but that introduces a highly divisive political ingredient to this film that remains a contentious issue even after all these years and obviously influences how an audience views and/or accepts this manufactured landscape, an unending psychedelic phantasmagoria of color saturated, magnificently designed moving set pieces that illustrate what amounts to a simple 60’s love story, which is also a metaphor about kids yearning to be free and a country that still barely recognizes the voices of its own children.
Across the Universe (2007), directed by Julie Taymor | Film review Dave Calhoun from Time Out
Quite a trip this new musical from celebrated Broadway director Julie ‘The Lion King’ Taymor, and of the sort you might experience if you locked yourself in a room, mixed LSD with domestic bleach and put your entire Beatles collection on shuffle on your iPod while two televisions simultaneously played Milos Forman’s ‘Hair’ and some old episodes of ‘Bread’. What Taymor has done, along with former ‘Porridge’ writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, is take a bunch of Beatles songs and spin a narrative around them which is set in Liverpool and the US in the late ’60s and which takes its prompts from those same songs’ lyrics, characters and themes. The result is a weird, loud and colourful mix of the literal and the lateral that is often so embarrassing to watch that you’ll be checking over your shoulder to check that no one’s looking.
Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a good-looking Liverpool lad who’s bored of his job in the docks and hops on the boat to America, where he hooks up with Princeton drop-out Max (Joe Anderson) and falls for Max’s sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). This being 1968, the wind of change soon blows over them all and Max is sent to Vietnam, Jude struggles as a painter in Greenwich Village and Lucy joins a protest group that morphs into the Weather Underground. Again and again, spirited singing bursts out of banal dramatic sequences, and you’ll be chewing your fist at the dialogue: ‘Where did she come from?’ ‘She came in through the bathroom window?’ God help us. Taymor has mistaken a deeply clichéd view of the late ’60s for a radical slice of the zeitgeist. Let it be.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe," is a sprawling, hugely ambitious musical epic that follows its characters through the formative events of the '60s counterculture: the flowering of hippiedom, the rock explosion, psychedelia, the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement and more.
And what makes it different from its predecessors in this overplowed field is that its story is told largely through the lyrics of some 33 Beatles songs, which are sung by the cast members in a rock operatic style, often with a semireligious reverence.
Clearly, if you're not a Beatles buff, this is no place for you, and anyone else who has grown weary of the pop-cultural mythologizing of that long-ago decade is liable to dismiss this enterprise as a collection of silly musical and visual cliches.
But for die-hard fans of the Fab Four -- and anyone who was touched by the magic of the '60s -- the film is a strange, nostalgic, suitably outrageous ode to a very real revolution in consciousness.
More specifically, it's the saga of a
As boy loses girl, and they and their circle of friends drop in and out of the defining events of the era, the movie becomes a succession of imaginative, grandly staged music videos in which the characters express themselves through Beatles lyrics.
For instance, "I Want To Hold Your Hand" is sung as a slow, plaintive dirge by the protagonists' pal, Prudence (T.V. Carpio), expressing her lesbian longing for another girl and thus symbolizing all the closeted sexuality that would be unleashed by the '60s.
In the film's most rousing sequence -- and what has to be the most realistic movie acid-trip of all time -- Bono, playing a psychedelic visionary with a touch of Timothy Leary, sings "I Am the Walrus" with the same self-inflated pizzazz that John Lennon gave it.
When Jude loses Lucy to anti-war radicalism, he communicates his feelings through "Revolution"; he longs for her through "Girl"; and his awakening as a pop artist (painting strawberries) is counterpointed by "Strawberry Fields Forever." And so on.
Some of the sequences (particularly the more surreal ones) fall a bit flat, but others sweep us away with their power and panache. All told, the movie works: Taymor ("Titus," "Frida") brings her bold concept to life with just the right mix of audacity and respect.
Across The Universe - The AV Club Tasha Robinson
From its opening
scene onward, Julie Taymor's troubled Beatles musical Across The Universe
unavoidably recalls Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!—even star Jim Sturgess
seems to have been cast as much for his resemblance to Ewan McGregor as
anything else. But where Luhrmann's soundtrack stitched together fragments of
Madonna, David Bowie, and Elton John into giddy mash-ups, Across The
Universe digs deep into Sony's Beatles catalogue and lets more than 30
songs sprawl out, often at full length. Even tunes that zip by too quickly on
an album can feel overlong when they're being used as shallow illustrations of
teen angst in the all-too-often-explored tumultuous '60s.
Taymor (Titus,
Frida, Broadway's The Lion King) has traditionally gone for
spectacle over subtlety, which holds emphatically true in a too-obvious
storyline where even the protagonist names and characterizations come from
Beatles songs. The story has Liverpool dockworker Jude (Sturgess) traveling to
New York City, where he and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) pursue a relationship.
Meanwhile, Lucy's brother Maxwell (Joe Anderson) copes with the draft, in a
plotline (and a series of montages) straight out of Hair. But Wood has
her consciousness raised and gets radical, while Sturgess just wants to make
art and enjoy the counterculture's wild vibe.
Taymor and her
co-writers (scripting team Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) pepper the film
with references to Beatles songs they didn't use, and with parallels to New
York bohemia: Supporting characters Martin Luther and Dana Fuchs, as JoJo (from
"Get Back") and Sadie ("Sexy Sadie") stand in for Jimi
Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and the whole film pointedly ends—like The Beatles' career—with
a rooftop concert. It's all very clever and thought-through, but all the
allusions don't much bolster the bland central romance or the paper-thin
treatment of '60s social issues. Neither does the excessive psychedelia—Sony
honcho Joe Roth publicly feuded with Taymor over the run time, and the many
songs included only as druggy visual romps makes his desire for edits seem
entirely reasonable. (Eddie Izzard's awful, babbly performance of "Being
For The Benefit Of Mister Kite!" against a frantic animated background is
the film's worst sin.)
Ultimately, Universe's
saving grace is its reckless energy and Taymor's typically gorgeous imagery,
whether she's filming a straight-up dance sequence to "With A Little Help
From My Friends" or a trippy surrealist nightmare in which the Army
processes Anderson to "I Want You." The film wavers between
exhilarating and gimmicky, and the cast's interpretations of the Beatles
catalog vary between passionate and rote, but Across The Universe is
consistent in one aspect: Its crazed ambition. When it falls, it falls far, but
at least that means it's reaching high.
Film Journal International (David Noh)
Julie Taymor begins Across the Universe, her highly
anticipated Beatles musical, with affecting simplicity: Her hero Jude (Jim
Sturgess) merely faces the camera and, in close-up, sings “Is there anybody
going to listen to my story/all about the girl who came to stay” in a
beautifully impassioned, husky voice. What follows is decidedly less simple,
and while it’s overlong and not without problems, there can be no denying that
Taymor has made an impressive, distinctive and unforgettable contribution to
the musical genre.
Jude is an illegal alien in
That’s about it, as far as the libretto goes, and Taymor fills in the
expositional blanks with a surging succession of set-pieces using The Beatles’
immortal catalogue. They provide the beating, vivid heart to her film, never
more so than when Joe Cocker pops up to magnificently rasp “Come Together,” a
rousing “Welcome to New York” anthem that kicks the movie into high gear. Bono
also makes a striking cameo, singing “I Am the Walrus” with appropriate druggy
fervor in a psychedelic party scene. You’re struck once more by the genius of
the songwriting: The familiar tunes absolutely bloom, given the terrifically
soulful style in which they are voiced by the entire cast.
Wood has a lovely plangency on “If I Fell,” and has a nicely delicate chemistry
with Sturgess.
Taymor keeps the screen filled with inventive notions a-brim with color and
energy, most of which are successful, like a brilliant draft board sequence,
with Uncle Sam posters coming alive to bray “I Want You,” hapless recruits
subjected to medical exams in Joseph Cornell-like boxes and the refrain “She’s
so heavy” ingeniously grafted onto a scene of soldiers carrying the Statue of
Liberty through Vietnam war fields. The eye-seducing, jaw-droppingly versatile
work of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, production designer Mark Friedberg and
costumer Albert Wolsky must be saluted.
The movie is pitched very high, however, and Taymor’s efforts to ground it
through all the wild numbers wobbles. The thinness of the plot, after some
amusing initial family sequences set in suburban Jersey, becomes obvious as the
director piles on ever more footage of student uprisings and overseas battle,
while her characters’ dramatic arc gets somewhat frayed. There was much
controversy in the press about Taymor’s battle for final cut and, although the
official story now is that she got what she wanted, certain plot strands, like
that between Sadie and Jo-Jo, feel disjointed, and the character of Prudence
(T.V. Carpio, appealing on a football field-staged “I Want to Hold Your Hand”),
a waifish stray the boys take in, goes nowhere. Perhaps less extraneous footage
of Taymor’s signature oversized puppets (which don’t fit in here as well as
they do in her Broadway production of The Lion King) and more personal
interaction might have helped to allay a certain feeling of repetitiveness and
enervation which sets in towards the not particularly strong finale, set, of
course, to “All You Need is Love.” But there’s no refuting the impressiveness
of her artistic eye and overall achievement: She would have been ideal for the
films of Rent or Hair, but, hell, she’s made her own highly admirable version
of both those works right here.
Across the Universe | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
The
Year in Film: 2007 [Erik Beck]
Across the
Universe - Reviews - Reverse Shot Joanne
Kouyoumjian, September 18, 2007
Across the Universe (2007) – Deep Focus Review – Movie Reviews ... Brian Eggert
ACROSS THE
UNIVERSE - Ruthless Reviews Matt
Cale
The
Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Across the
Universe | Reelviews Movie Reviews
James Berardinelli
Across The Universe | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jason Clark
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
Confessions of a Pop Fan [Jamie S. Rich]
Help! Ella Taylor from The Village Voice, September 4, 2007
Film
Review: Across The Universe | rosslangager
TIFF07
REVIEW: Across the Universe [2007] | www.jaredmobarak.com
Across
the Universe Blu-ray Ben Williams
Across
the Universe Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Peter Bracke
Big
Picture Big Sound - Blu-ray Review [Brandon A. DuHamel]
DVDizzy.com
- DVD Review with Pictures (2-Disc Deluxe Edition) Aaron Wallace
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
The Film Reel [Will Brownridge]
Public Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
Across
The Universe (2007) Movie Review from Eye for Film Tony Sullivan
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Across
the Universe - Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
filmcritic.com (Jesse Hassenger)
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
Across The Universe Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Across the
Universe | Hollywood Reporter
Stephen Farber
Review:
'Across the Universe' - Variety
Justin Chang
Across
the Universe - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Review:
'Across the Universe' recycles songs, offers great visuals ... Peter Hartlaub from The San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles Times (Jessica Reaves)
Across the
Universe Movie Review (2007) | Roger Ebert
Across the Universe - Movies - Review - The New York Times Stephen Holden
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review [Gary W Tooze]
Across the
Universe (film) - Wikipedia
These our actors, as I
foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air, and,
like the baseless fabric of vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous
palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit,
shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack
behind. We are such stuff as dreams are
made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.
—Prospera (Helen Mirren) from The
Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1
Outside of the casting of Felicity Jones as Miranda, who is the picture of innocence and beauty, and perhaps the whimsical CGI imagery in expressing the flying, magical spirit of Ariel (Ben Whishaw), nothing else in this complete misfire works at all, as everyone else is utterly miscast, creating a mood of confusion from start to finish where the director simply loses her audience. Taymor is without question one of the great theatrical artists working today, where her dazzling visual contributions to the spectacle of the stage overshadows her less successful work in film, where she has a history of producing uneven works. But this is nothing less than a complete fiasco, altering the play to a feminist’s perspective, changing Prospero to Prospera (Helen Mirren), switching the role of an aging wizard (the Duke of Milan) into a vengeful yet protective mother (the Duchess), where the film divides its time between those Prospera wishes to inflict her wrath upon and her own daughter Miranda’s introduction to the art of love, having never met a man before.
Exiled to an isolated island with her daughter, tricked by her own brother Antonio (Chris Cooper) who claims she’s a demented witch, she has had plenty of time for emotional family wounds to fester while she stews in her anger, vowing one day to exact revenge and return to her rightful place on the throne. On the island, she is a sorceress with magical powers who commands a spirit Ariel that enacts many of her magical spells, and who ruthlessly rules over the only islander living there, Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), who rues the day he became enslaved to this evil woman. Once she sees her chance to shipwreck the royal family, sending a typhoon where all miraculously survive on her island, the characters, unaware that the others have lived, then neatly plot to take over the throne. Caliban, given the taste of alcohol for the first time, swears his allegiance to this new “god,” anything to rid himself from the powers of Prospera, but once they all have a chance to sober up, reality is not what it seemed.
The most extraordinary aspect of this story is not the summoning of all the magic spells, which has an amusing A Midsummer Night’s Dream feel to it, something we’ve seen before in Shakespeare where characters are made to look foolish and ridiculous, but is instead something we haven’t seen until this final Shakespearean play, which is Prospera’s decision to abandon her powers of wizardry in order to resume her rightful place as the Duchess of Milan in the world of humans. Much of the play is spent agonizing over this decision, which is a kind of farewell to the arts and a sense of invincible immortality to resume one’s place in the world as a mere mortal, where death itself is not far away. What’s missing in Taymor’s film is any sense of how agonizing that decision must be. Instead, it’s as if Prospera’s mind has been made up from the outset, as if she’s a mindreader who can see into the future and knows what hand fate has dealt her. This kind of cocky, Macbethian assuredness is how Mirren plays the role, all knowing and all seeing, where there’s never any sense of doubt or regret that she might be making the wrong decision.
After the near unintelligible shipwreck sequence, Prospera is so quick to give her daughter away to the undeserving Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), who never for a second seems to comprehend anything out of the ordinary, where anyone else would be dumfounded at discovering a land ruled by a sorceress with strange and magical powers, but this guy doesn’t think twice about taking the hand of a near Goddess’s daughter, never once questioning the source of her power, not for a moment comprehending the enormity of the moment. Unfortunately, the same goes for everyone else, as there’s little happening onscreen that connects any of the characters to one another, or offers any clue why the audience should be interested. Instead it falls flat into an indiscernible potpourri of disparate parts, none having much to do with the other, despite Taymor’s visual enhancements, where even that falls short of the mark. Any Taymor film is a must see experience, but this is easily her weakest effort. My guess is she ran out of time and got distracted by her next project, the $65 million dollar Broadway extravaganza, the most expensive (and dangerous) Broadway production in history, Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark.
The Village Voice [Ernest Hardy]
In Julie Taymor’s hands, Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” becomes a listless feminist parable. The duchess Prospera (Helen Mirren) has been forced into exile, stripped of wealth and position by her scheming brother, Antonio (Chris Cooper), who’s branded her a witch by using her prodigious smarts against her. But her maligned gifts roar back with a vengeance. From the isolated island where she and her daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones) found both refuge and the slave Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), Prospera works her talent for magic to bring her foes to her for comeuppance. The visuals are alternately inspired and horrible (dated CGI), never approaching the giddy anachronism of Taymor’s cinematic debut, Titus (another Shakespeare adaptation). Mirren’s fierce intelligence illuminates Prospera, and Ben Whishaw’s Ariel has a skittish puppy quality, but Hounsou’s awful line readings flatten the impact of his casting, which was seemingly meant to underscore the colonial tensions in Caliban’s tale (for instance, the slave is plied with booze by white simpletons he mistakes for gods). Seventies-rock aesthetics run wild—Russell Brand, as Trinculo, in tight striped pants and a flowing scarf, looks like a Led Zeppelin refugee; Ariel, an androgyne with small breasts, evokes gender-fuck glam; and Reeve Carney’s Ferdinand comes off like a hipster doing retro. For all that, the film lacks a pulse. There’s sound and fury, but the result is more drizzle than tempest.
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
The Tempest is Shakespeare for Dummies—but I mean that in a good way, for the most part. Shakespeare always played to the cheap seats as well as the intelligentsia, and Julie Taymor's production picks up on his populism, dialing the romance, buffoonery, sorcery, and soulful suffering up to 11.
The opening scene is a bad omen: The roar of the waves and the fire on the king's sinking ship drown out most of Shakespeare's words. But the language is almost always rendered faithfully and delivered clearly and well for the rest of the film, and the colors and sounds Taymor wraps around Shakespeare's dialogue add more than they detract.
The anchor to this Tempest is Helen Mirren's titanic performance as Prospera. Changing Prospero's gender changes surprisingly little else, other than a few pronouns and the vowel at the end of the name. Mirren's Prospera may project a more nurturing love than usual for Miranda and Ariel, but then maybe it's we who are doing the projecting there, reading maternal love as more tender than paternal. Either way, what makes her performance memorable is not the novelty of her gender, but the greatness of her soul, as she rides Prospera's outsized emotions like a champion jockey to a moving finish.
Just about everyone else plays second fiddle to the costumes and
set design that are Taymor's trademark. As usual in her films, these sometimes
amplify themes and emotions nicely and sometimes degenerate into cliché.
The best use of CGI is the androgynous Ariel, who whooshes about like the airy spirit he/she is. Often popping up in two or more places at once, he/she trails wispy traces of afterimage. Ben Whishaw underplays the part, letting his hair gel and body paint do most of the talking, but most of other performances are broader, stretching to fit Taymor's larger-than-life canvas. As Caliban, Djimon Hounsou scuttles like Gollum, roars like a wounded bull, and sucks up Uriah Heep-style to Stephano (Alfred Molina, excellent as always), making Shakespeare's victim of colonialism more fool than tragic figure. Russell Brand fits into this company surprisingly well, with his colorful scarves, waggling ass, and anti-RSC accent, as one of the fools who provide comic relief. Like the movie as a whole, Brand made me wince now and then, but not nearly as much as he made me smile.
Julie Taymor's new film version of The Tempest isn't as disastrous as it could have been, though it does fundamentally fail Shakespeare's play. The tale concerns the wizard Prospero's decision to leave a remote island in order to resume his role as the Duke of Milan—and, in the process, give up his magic powers. Prospero possesses a particularly male quality of imperious tediousness, speaking far more than the other characters in his scenes and often lecturing them with stories they've already heard. To give up his magic is also to abandon his power over them, including his own daughter, Miranda; he waves his staff practically as a phallic symbol, and the choice to disempower himself is among the most touchingly self-humbling that a Shakespeare character makes.
Here, Helen Mirren plays the wizard, now changed to Prospera. The decision to cast a woman in the part changes many of the dynamics between Prosper and others (a father-daughter relationship versus a mother-daughter one, for example). Yet it's not an implicitly wrong choice. In fact, the sight of a woman acting as powerful as the most powerful man before relinquishing herself could have been quite moving.
Judie Dench might have been remarkable, but Mirren isn't, because she plays Prospera as though having already given her power away. Mirren, like Laurence Olivier, tends to give performances while simultaneously commenting on them; her Oscar-winning part in The Queen was a piece of careful construction in which she showed you every brick. Here she tends, with wide, open eyes and a vulnerable voice, to stress Prospero's fear and uncertainty, loading meaning into the way she delivers her lines rather than into the lines themselves. This contrasts with John Gielgud's great performance as Prospero in Peter Greenaway's Tempest adaptation, Prospero's Books. Gielgud derives meaning primarily from the words themselves, which are good enough on their own to show Prospero crumbling. When Mirren tries to lay a sense of psychological torment onto Prospero's later speeches, she's making a less interesting choice than simply speaking the lines.
Several of the other actors also give mistaken performances, whether because they're overwrought and incomprehensible (Djimon Hounsou, Russell Brand), miscast (Chris Cooper), or simply wasted (Alan Cumming); in small roles, Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, and Tom Conti escape with dignity. Taymor directs her actors away from the play, whether through encouraging them to hit themselves while speaking important lines or by cutting to their feet. You keep questioning why aesthetic choices are being made, why that close-up or that edit, and meanwhile note how Taymor tends to ride the emotion of a scene for its duration, rather than find nuance within it. This worked in her previous Shakespeare film, Titus, by creating an unbearable spectacle of mounting violence, but flops for a piece whose power comes from noting subtle character shifts. Since actors are so busy laughing and shouting the jokes, the comedy in particular suffers.
Taymor's brutal literalism is a shame, since the play is stunning. In particular, Prospero's line about his powers ending, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on/And our little life is rounded with a sleep," is among the most beautiful Shakespeare wrote, perhaps Prospero is accepting how his time onstage will end too. Taymor has said that The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's visually richest plays. This is true, but literalizing Prospero's magic powers as she does with loud thundercracks and big, malevolent black birds proves dangerous—in contrast to both Greenaway and Derek Jarman's film versions of the play, which mainly suggest magic rather than show it. The play was likely Shakespeare's last, and a testament to the power of theater; it is also, among other things, a thank you to his audience for loaning him its imagination. It ends with Prospero asking for it once more. "Now I want/Spirits to enforce, art to enchant," he says, but also requests to "Let your indulgence set me free." In a sense, the audience takes Prospero's place. Their eagerness summons a play's world into being, and only they can let it go.
Taymor cuts this last speech, though, and simply ends the film with Prospera breaking her staff. Shakespeare's character asks the audience to free him; Taymor's frees herself. The difference proves a metaphor for the entire enterprise, which is stuffed so full of the director's imagination that it doesn't need ours.
Review: The Tempest - Film Comment Violet Lucca from Film Comment, November/December, 2010
What makes Julie Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest so audacious—unforgivably so, it would seem, judging by initial reviews—is that it opens up space inside Shakespeare’s play to reveal themes that the text might otherwise not have room to accommodate.
Eschewing the motif of magic as a metaphor for the illusionism of theater, The Tempest instead foregrounds issues of power. Foremost is the switch from Prospero to Prospera, fiercely played by Helen Mirren. Other textual changes are small yet pointed: pronouns are flipped, but the address of “Master” (which connotes more power than “Mistress”) is retained; Prospera is still robbed of her Dukedom by her brother, but here he does so by accusing her of being a witch. The acid with which she delivers the line, “knowing that others of my sex have burned for far less” lingers long after it is hissed. Bellowing just as convincingly as when she delivers quiet, quick lines of iambic verse, Taymor’s Prospera is the female role that never was: a powerful woman who has not used her sex to achieve or maintain her power, confident in her decisions, and motherly only with her daughter. Prospera relinquishes that power without tears, though the heavy sigh she breathes as Ariel (the excellent Ben Whishaw) tightly laces her corset—the physically deforming embodiment of European female subservience—says more about the reality of motherhood than all the weeping in Stella Dallas ever could.
Costuming is key to understanding Taymor’s interpretation of Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), whose appearance contrasts with the semi-translucent Ariel and the buttoned-up conquistador garb of Alonso’s men. Taking its cue from the derogatory language with which he is described in Shakespeare’s original, he is monstrous by virtue of being a mélange of diverse elements (“fish” with webbed fingers and scales; “of the earth,” covered in mud, naked; a “mooncalf,” with a circular patch of vitiligo on his face), and as racial Other. The primal scene of white sailors encountering natives—and failing to recognize their humanity—is made more telling since first contact is made by the drunken Stephano (Alfred Molina) and the boobish Trinculo (a perfectly cast Russell Brand). Hounsou plays Caliban with roaring bluster, furious at Miranda’s romantic involvement with Prince Ferdinand. The scenes involving this would-be usurping trio are hilarious and maintain a campy, frenetic energy that moves the film forward, complicated by the sinister undercurrent of colonialism that is subtly allowed to bubble up from time to time.
The splintered insurgency that threatens Prospera’s dominion—Caliban and company, Alonso and his treacherous men, and the unfolding romance between Miranda and the shojo-tastic Prince Ferdinand—are manipulated through the sorceress’s control of time, not space. As such, The Tempest is less visually lavish than Taymor’s previous two productions, relying on the inherent spectacle of its location, the volcanic Hawaiian island of Lanai, which encompasses beach, temperate rain forest, desert, and terrain reminiscent of the planet Mars. The director’s usual CGI flourishes are mostly limited to the visualization of the sexually ambiguous Ariel, who, with transient breasts, darts around his master, never quite matching her eyeline (and never fully incarnate). Dispensing with tableau compositions, this adaptation feels liberated from static theatrical and, to a lesser degree, cinematic convention by the overall openness of its staging and camerawork that’s somewhere between handheld and Steadicam. Perhaps most refreshingly of all, the visual strategy goes some way toward addressing the problems of those who find Shakespearean language comprehensible only when read. While you probably couldn’t watch her film in lieu of reading the play and pass a high-school exam, Taymor goes beyond whatever 400 years of literary criticism and Wikipedia have to say about the play to create her own yonic paradise.
Boston
Review — Alan A. Stone: Drowned Out (Julie Taymor, Tempest) Alan A. Stone from The Boston Review, March/April 2011
“The Tempest”: Helen Mirren's
sadly elegant mom-magician - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, December 10, 2010
Julie
Taymor's “The Tempest” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, December 13, 2010
Sound On Sight Christopher Clemente
Review: Julie Taymor's 'The Tempest' Is A Blustery Much Ado About ... Drew Taylor from indieWIRE
The Tempest - AV Club Film Keith Phipps
The Parallax Review [Mark Dujsik]
Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Julie Taymor's The
Tempest Is Your New Late-Night Drunken Pizza ... a series of screen shots, Charlie Jane
Anders, Wired magazine
User reviews from imdb Author: doctorlightning from
United States
User reviews from imdb Author: alexart-1 from
Boxoffice Magazine [John P. McCarthy]
The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]
The
Tempest – review | Culture | The Guardian Philip French
Review:
'The Tempest' with Helen Mirren in first screening at Venice ... Robert Beames from The Telegraph
Movie
review: 'The Tempest' - latimes
Betsy Sharkey
The Tempest Movie
Review & Film Summary (2010) | Roger Ebert
'The Tempest' by
Julie Taymor, With Helen Mirren - Review - The New ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
The Tempest
(2010 film) - Wikipedia
Facets Multimedia: Cinémathèque: The Films of André Téchiné
André Téchiné is one of the most important post New Wave French directors and has distinguished himself through elegant films that delve into the complexities of human emotion and relationships. Known particularly for his ability to draw strong performances out of his female performers, Téchiné has collaborated with some of his country's most respected actresses, and some of the best examples of his work were his collaborations with Catherine Deneuve: Hotel des Amériques (1981), Le Lieu du Crime (1986), and Ma Saison Préférée (1993). Téchiné has subsequently continued to make moody, dysfunctional romantic dramas that are tinged with an element of intrigue or violence. Téchiné had his greatest success to date with Les Roseaux Sauvages (Wild Reeds), for which he won César Award for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
And from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article below,
according to film critic Kent Jones, Téchiné has "a novelistic sense of
story, a musical sense of rhythm, and a filmic feeling for the beauty of people
in motion. I think his toughness is the main reason for his relative
invisibility in
Film
Reference Joseph Milicia
André Téchiné belongs to a generation of French filmmakers, including Bertrand Blier and Bertrand Tavernier among those with an international reputation, who came into prominence in the mid-1970s. Many of his films have been classified as melodramas, though it might be more accurate to say that they play with conventions of melodrama and the thriller while exploring psychological states and social structures, with particular emphasis upon estrangement from home, both family and milieu. Intricately plotted or seemingly improvisatory—it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference—often with bizarre turns of event and unexpected sexual attractions, his films also feature memorable performances of both established stars—Catherine Deneuve above all—and young unknowns like Juliette Binoche and Élodie Boucher. With a trio of films in the mid-1990s— My Favorite Season, Wild Reeds , and Thieves —Téchiné reached what many critics found to be a new power and maturity as a filmmaker.
Téchiné first came into prominence with Souvenirs d'en France. Filmed in the director's native village, it is a highly compressed history of a small-town family from early in the century through the Resistance and on to May 1968. In a series of vignettes Téchiné explores intersections of private life and historical forces—as he would later do in the autobiographical Wild Reeds , though in a much briefer timeframe. Souvenirs d'en France is also densely allusive in regard to cinema history: it "quotes" a great many films and film styles via its own eclectic visual style, its echoes of other family-dynasty movies, and its references to actual films the characters see. At the same time, it provides juicy roles for Jeanne Moreau and Marie-France Pisier as women who marry into the family and become rivals—Moreau a laundress who becomes a matriarch and Pisier a bourgeoise who seeks the glamour of America.
Téchiné's next film, Barocco , set the pattern for several works to follow, especially in its roots in the crime thriller, its perverse love relationships—characters helplessly drawn to dangerously violent people—and its fascination with train stations, including their cafes and the bridges connecting them to gritty neighborhoods. The film could not be more aptly named: it is "baroque" in both its convoluted plot and its elaborate camera movements and widescreen framings which turn the station and the unnamed city itself into a labyrinth. The plot involves a boxer (Gérard Depardieu) who has accepted and then turned down a huge bribe from a politician to tell a lie that will influence an election, a hired killer (Depardieu again, though no one seems to register just how very much the two look alike) who slays the boxer, and the boxer's girlfriend (Isabelle Adjani), who eventually falls in love with the killer while trying to remake him into the image of her slain lover—a sort of bizarre reverse spin on the plot of Vertigo (itself based on a French novel). If one were to judge the film in terms of plausible narrative, it would hardly be worth discussing— Vertigo is documentary realism in comparison—but in its virtuoso photography by Bruno Nuytten and its toying with themes of identity and doubles, not to mention its political critique within a thriller context, Barocco has its compelling moments. The whole train station sequence from Adjani's arrival to the shooting of the boxer by his double is a tour de force of cinematography and editing.
Making a film biography of the Brontë sisters gave Téchiné the opportunity to use an all-star cast (Pisier, Adjani, and Isabelle Huppert) while exploring one of literary history's famed dysfunctional families, but most critics found The Brontë Sisters unable to leap beyond the conventions of movie biography—though there is a memorable scene of the three sisters rescuing their naked, unconscious brother from a fire in his bedroom. Far more successful was Hotel des Amériques , the story of a hopelessly ill-matched love affair between a woman (Catherine Deneuve) recovering from the suicide of a former lover and a man (Patrick Dewaere) feverishly attracted to her, but behaving like a spoiled child in moments of anger and jealousy, and still emotionally attached to a parasitic and bullying male friend. The casting is perfect, with Deveuve's emotional opaqueness and Dewaere's brooding, haunted intensity suggesting dimensions of their characters beyond articulation. And the film has interests extending well beyond its central couple, from the secondary characters with their own mysterious love afflictions to the setting of Biarritz, a formerly glamorous tourist town which the Deneuve character hates for somehow being neither "France" nor foreign, and neither urban nor rural, but all of the characters are partly defined by their relation to it.
Rendez-vous is more flamboyantly melodramatic than Hotel des Amériques , as even a very brief plot summary might suggest. Here a would-be actress (Binoche, callow but already with true screen presence) fleeing her provincial home for Paris is irrationally in love with a sadistic, self-destructive young actor (Lambert Wilson, repellent yet fiercely strong in the role), a former Romeo who caused the death of his Juliet and who is now playing a "Romeo" in a live-sex show. When the actor himself is killed in an accident, or possible suicide, his former mentor/director (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and father of the Juliet, determines to cast the untried Binoche as his new Juliet, though Wilson's ghost (or her own hallucination) tries to stop her. Again a wildly improbable plot serves as a vehicle for exploring the violent intensity of certain emotional attachments and their ability to cause one's life to spin off in unexpected directions. Hardly less extravagant is Scene of the Crime , which begins with a scene between a boy and an escaped convict right out of the opening of Great Expectations , but climaxes with the boy (a highly troubled youth himself) discovering his mother (Deneuve again) having sex with the handsome young convict—one of the stranger representations of Freud's "primal scene" in cinema. But plot summary and performance description do little justice to these films, which share with most of Téchiné's work a restless camera movement and seemingly casual editing that suggest a nervous, intense curiosity, equivalent to an artist's rapid sketching. Scene of the Crime , for example, directs our attention to a gorgeous French countryside (and to Deneuve's lakeside disco, deceptively serene when seen from afar), an ironic backdrop for two kinds of characters: those living repressed lives in a stifling bourgeois environment and those, more uninhibited, who play out a series of violent passions, with the boy caught in the middle.
Les Innocents and J'embrasse pas (seldom seen outside France) show Téchiné moving away from genre pictures while continuing to explore complex sets of emotional involvements, now more centrally concerning homosexual attractions, and in Les Innocents a theme he will take up again in Wild Reeds : repercussions of the French-Algerian conflict on individual lives. The more widely distributed My Favorite Season may be Téchiné's most incisively detailed portrait of an unhappy family, with Daniel Auteuil giving one of his most brilliant performances as an emotionally volatile physician long estranged from his mother and sister (the latter played once again by Deneuve, effortlessly revealing the complexities of middle age). Like many another Téchiné character, the brother is unpredictable in his outbursts, but these are now rooted in a plausible family conflict rather than a baroque plot. Wild Reeds stands apart from Téchiné's other films in its having had restrictions placed upon it from outside—restrictions which paradoxically seem to have allowed the director to make one of his freest, most graceful, and open-ended films. A French television network invited a number of directors to make an hour-long film for an anthology series about adolescence: each film was required to be more or less autobiographical, to give a sense of historical context, and to contain a party scene and popular songs of the day. Téchiné made not only "The Oak and the Reed" but a feature-length version of the same material to be shown in theatres as a kickoff for the series. Wild Reeds is centered upon four teenagers, three boys and a girl, each struggling with far from trivial coming-ofage concerns: for example, François is trying to come to terms with hs realization that he is gay, while Henri, a pied-noir (French-Algerian immigrant), is defensive of the French presence in Algeria. The film never preaches a "correct" position on sexuality or politics, though it is clearly enough in support of a generosity of understanding; but what makes it come alive is what might be called the director's investigative style of camera movement and framing, by means of which he seems effortlessly to evoke the early 1960s and to expand his story to other lives beyond the four adolescents. In the final scenes, when the youths go swimming in a river and walk off to an uncertain future, we see without the point being hammered down that they are the reeds which bend instead of breaking.
For Thieves Téchiné takes up gangster melodrama, constructing a plot around a robbery that goes murderously awry—yet, perhaps through the experience of Wild Reeds and its free-form but not frayed or fragmented narrative, he has come up with perhaps his most accomplished and original film in terms of complex structure and shifting point-of-view. The story is divided into marked sections, each narrated by one of several characters, and each taking us backward or forward over days or months in time. Téchiné reunites Arteuil and Deneuve, playing exceedingly dissimilar characters, a cop and a philosophy professor, who are brought together over their sexual involvement with a much younger and very desperate woman (Laurence Cote) who works for a crime family of which Arteuil is the "white" sheep. One must add that the cop has quite enough hang-ups, sexual and otherwise, to make him far from a simple protagonist; that the young woman has a brother involved in crime like the cop's own brother (another example of Téchiné's love of doublings); and that once again the director features a troubled boy (the cop's nephew) unable to break from a family trap—in this case, too young to know he is ensnared.
In a New York Times interview Téchiné has said that he begins work on a film with a vivid scene or compelling character or two in mind, and only eventually constructs a coherent story and finds an ending. (To be sure, since his plots rarely have full closure, his endings typically suggest a number of alternatives.) This method of development may explain why his earlier films like Barocco and Rendez-vous seem to have dazzling moments and scenes but little sense of a coherent drama evolving toward an inevitable conclusion. But it also suggests how films like Wild Reeds and Thieves can seem so loose in structure and yet so accomplished, each part organically related to every other and drawing us powerfully toward their denouements. It is exciting to see a filmmaker so lavishly talented in youth create films in middle age that seem no less fiery in their passions or incisive in their technique while attaining a new sense of full achievement.
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André Téchiné
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Biography and Film Reviews by James Travers
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Téchiné | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography by Rebecca Flint Marx
Overview for
André Téchiné - TCM.com biography
ANDRÉ
TÉCHINÉ - Films & Bio - French New Wave Director
The
Best Movies Directed by André Téchiné - Flickchart
André Téchiné - Movies, Bio and Lists on MUBI
Are We
Having Fun Yet? | Jonathan Rosenbaum
My Favorite Season, June 7,
1996
Criminal Genius | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 26, 1996, also seen here: Criminal Genius [THIEVES] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI | Sight
& Sound | Alice et Martin (1998)
Chris Drake from Sight
and Sound, December 1999
Bend, Don't Break: André
Téchiné's Wild Reeds • Senses of Cinema
Katharine Thornton, February 7, 2006
Boston Review — stone.php Alan A. Stone on Changing Times, November/December 2006
BFI
| Sight & Sound | The Witnesses (2007)
Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and
Sound, November 2007
André
Téchiné - Film-Philosophy
7-page essay, a book review of André
Téchiné (2007) by Bill Marshall, André
Téchiné: The Subtle Explorations of Identities, by Isabelle Vanderschelden
from Film-Philosophy, December 3,
2007 (pdf)
André Téchiné, Director of 'Unforgivable' - The New York Times June 22, 2012
Roland Barthes, Actor |
Frieze Derek Horton, October 21,
2015
Who
is the Greatest Gay Filmmaker Alive? | Out Magazine Armond White, May 10, 2016
Girl
on the Train: Interview with director Andre Techine | Emanuel Levy Emanuel Levy interview, February 12, 2010
Eye
For Film: Cédric Anger on working with André Téchiné Anne-Katrin Titze interviews screenwriter Cédric Anger about working with Téchiné,
from Eye for Film, March 14, 2015
Being
Téchiné: Five Decades Into a Great Career, the Auteur Opens ... Bilge Ebiri interview from The Village Voice, October 5, 2016
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest
Filmmakers
Andre Techine - Alchetron,
The Free Social Encyclopedia
THE BRONTE SISTERS (Les soeurs Brontë)
France (120 mi) 1979
Post
New Wave Pick: The Brontë Sisters - Film Comment Kristin M. Jones
The lives of the Brontës were marked by ambition, transgression, and tragedy, but André Téchiné’s 1979 The Brontë Sisters is all the more haunting for being stylized and elliptical. The script by Pascal Bonitzer draws on primary sources, and Téchiné elicits restrained but electric performances from Marie-France Pisier (Charlotte), Isabelle Adjani (Emily), Isabelle Huppert (Anne), and Pascal Greggory as the sisters’ beloved, doomed brother Branwell. While the astringent formalism echoes the family’s austere circumstances, the characters’ vivid interior lives emerge through language and gesture. In an illuminating documentary included on the disk, Téchiné describes the film as “like a vampire story,” and indeed, the visuals convey both a sense of unearthliness and a believably enclosed world (windows are a recurring motif), with the moor a brooding presence. Roland Barthes channels Thackeray at the eerie conclusion of this portrait of three literary ghosts and the brother who slipped into oblivion just as their stars began to ascend.
Melissa Anderson on The Brontë Sisters - artforum.com / film
THE INTELLIGENT AUSTERITY that marks André Téchiné’s underappreciated fourth film, The Brontë Sisters (1979), is a rarity both for the director, whose work, at least since the mid-1990s, has frequently succumbed to voluble hysterics, and the literary biopic, a genre prone to melodrama. That this is a serious meditation on the creators of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, classic texts whose screen adaptations have too often devolved into clamorous Victorian bodice-rippers, makes its hush all the more admirable.
The dominant sound, in fact, is the scratching of fountain pen on paper. Téchiné’s rendering of this genius-glutted family in grim nineteenth-century Haworth, co-scripted with Pascal Bonitzer (a frequent collaborator of Jacques Rivette’s, whose 1985 adaptation of Wuthering Heights he co-wrote), might have been more accurately titled “The Brontë Siblings”: Just as significant as Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier), Emily (Isabelle Adjani), and Anne (Isabelle Huppert) is the sole Brontë brother, Branwell (Pascal Greggory). “Unrecognized, my talent cannot grow. But I’ll be famous,” Branwell writes to his sisters, a boast never realized, his talents squandered by too many nights at the Black Bull Inn, poor object choices (he was in love with his tutee’s mother, the wife of an imperious reverend), and too much laudanum.
Though prophetically sensing that his doting sisters would eclipse him—Branwell, who died at age thirty-one, effaced himself from a painting he did of all four siblings, an erasure touchingly depicted by Téchiné—the brother is paradoxically the only Brontë whose talents are saluted by their father (Patrick Magee). “We have an artist in the family,” the paterfamilias beams during the film’s opening moments, as his son unveils his group portrait. The praise stings Charlotte, presented here as the most ambitious—though she desires success not just for herself but her two younger sisters, exhorting Emily, “We’ve always written. You must publish that poem—you must!”
Sensitive to the extreme limits the Brontë sisters faced owing to their sex, Téchiné is careful not to overdramatize the fact that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all published, in 1847, their first novels under male pseudonyms (becoming, respectively, the “brothers” Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell). The director’s insistence on understatement—though never at the expense of diminishing the anguish and thwarted desire the sisters endured during their too-short lives (all died before reaching the age of forty)—clearly guided the performances as well. Assembling three of France’s premier actresses, two of whom— Adjani and Huppert—were in the rapidly ascending phase of their careers, Téchiné, as he reveals in a current-day interview for the film’s DVD and Blu-ray release, demanded a “sobriety of acting,” not wanting the set to be “a competition among stars.” (Perhaps best-known for his later work in the films of Patrice Chéreau, Greggory, also interviewed for the making-of extra, dishes about his on-screen sisters more openly.) While all four siblings are indelibly portrayed, this quartet of exceptionally talented actors is almost overshadowed by one nonprofessional, who doesn’t appear until the last twelve minutes of the film: Roland Barthes, as William Makepeace Thackeray, in his only screen appearance.
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Jordan Cronk]
The work of director André Téchiné is cinema outside the margins. His narratives are unruly, dynamic creations, often melodramatic and more than a little heartrending. In the best of his work (say, Hôtel des Amériques, Rendez-vous, or Thieves), there’s a palpable sense of engaged inertia, of lives colliding and emotions brimming forth unexpectedly. This inclination to portray the most basic human impulses in all their messy glory, this “willingness to court danger,” as Kent Jones put it in an early issue of Cinema Scope, wasn’t always part of Téchiné’s methodology. His early work, no doubt inspired by his time spent as part of that second generation of Cahiers du Cinéma critics turned filmmakers, approached cinema from a more formalist, Brechtian position. The Bronte Sisters, Téchiné’s 1979 dramatization of the English sisters’ tragic rise to literary prominence, then, may initially feel less of a piece with the directors’ wider corpus, and more of a refinement of an initial aesthetic understanding.
Indeed, following The Bronte Sisters, Téchiné, in his own words, no longer worked within the constraints of the genre film. “My inspiration is no longer drawn from the cinema,” he explained. Whether these later films are a more honest realization of Téchiné’s sensibilities, or if the early works were simply exercises in a certain ideological virtue, there’s little doubt that his conceptualization of The Bronte Sisters was a formally appropriate one. Bathed in a muted yet rich palette of dusty interior shades and pastoral exterior strokes, the film is a strikingly evocative sensory experience. In lieu of the tumultuous outbursts which spike his more widely seen work, The Bronte Sisters is a far more internalized effort, certainly befitting his subjects, four troubled siblings—Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier), Emily (Isabelle Adjani), and Anne (Isabelle Huppert), the sisters of the film’s title, alongside doomed brother Branwell (Pascal Greggory)—who suffer quietly, downplaying or, in some cases, completely hiding their talents as dictated by their Victorian milieu.
The lives of the Bronte siblings were ones of secrets and indiscretions, yes, but ultimately also of inspiration. When Emily and Charlotte are forced to abandon their studies in Brussels and return home in the wake of the death of their aunt, they surreptitiously begin work on what would become some of the most celebrated novels in modern literature, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, respectively. The younger Anne, meanwhile, toils away at her own novel before the three decide to submit the results for publication under male pseudonyms, sparking widespread inquiries about the authorial voices behind such unique works. Emily, a tortured and reluctant genius, wants no part of the attention, refusing at first to even allow her work to be published, let alone be identified as her own. She and Branwell grow ever closer, and thus ever apart from their sisters, during this time, his conflicted passions for both his own art (painting) and a clandestine relationship with the wife (Hélène Surgère) of his sister Anne’s employer, Mr. Robinson (Adrian Brine), leading him down a path of self-destruction.
Besides the aforementioned confrontation between Charlotte and Emily over recognition of the latter’s work, Téchiné admirably downplays the dramatics. Extraneous information is elided, multiple deaths take place off screen, visions and dreamy interludes stand in for demonstrative gestures, and, in stark contrast to what was to come for the director, his camera stays mostly stationary, save for a handful of lyrical crane shots, his aesthetic inspiration appearing to be rooted in the lush period work of such masters as Rossellini, Visconti, and Ophüls. But even here one can feel the simmering tensions which Téchiné would later exploit to great effect, the power of the finished product equal to that of the accumulated discord elsewhere—which leaves The Bronte Sisters in a particularly ripe position for reappraisal. In an era particularly skeptical of the ostentatious and melodramatic, and with Téchiné seemingly relegated, along with elder statesmen such as Benoît Jacquot and Bertrand Tavernier, to an unfortunate modern variation on la qualité français, this film feels, perhaps paradoxically considering its self-conscious construction, not only pure but uncommonly engaged with histories both literary and cinematic. And in that sense it feels just as assertive as Téchiné’s more rebellious work.
Les
Soeurs Bronte - The Bronte Sisters - Andre Techine - 1979 - film ... James Travers from Films de France
“THE BRONTE SISTERS” (“LES SOEURS BRONTE”) (1979) Fred Blosser from Cinema Retro
Roland Barthes, Actor | Frieze Derek Horton, October 21, 2015
Cinema
Scope | Global Discoveries on DVD | Mitigating Circumstances Jonathan Rosenbaum
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Lawrence Devoe]
The Bronte Sisters (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Christopher McQuain
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
The Brontë Sisters
- Wikipedia
After an anesthetist in Biarritz (Catherine Deneuve) accidentally runs down a local layabout (Patrick Dewaere), the two edge uncertainly toward romance, though it's periodically blocked by the former's grief over a dead lover and the latter's ambiguous friendship with a self-involved musician (Etienne Chicot). French director Andre Techine has called this 1981 feature his first to break free of film references and explore emotions directly; the bisexual issues and Bergman-esque psychodrama that characterize his later work are all evident here, though the characters' novelistic backstories are less assured than in the magisterial My Favorite Season (1993) or Thieves (1996). The use of 'Scope is resourceful, and Deneuve, in her first collaboration with Techine, is impressive. Techine cowrote the script with Gilles Taurand. In French with subtitles. 95 min.
Hélène (Catherine
Deneuve) is driving at some speed through the narrow streets of Biarritz in
the middle of the night when she nearly runs over a pedestrian who was trying
to cross the road. She stops and apologises; he is all right, but they need to
file an insurance report so retire to a café she knows well where the man
introduces himself as Gilles (Patrick
Dewaere) and makes it clear he only wanted to fill in the report so he
could talk to the very attractive Hélène longer, and possibly get to know her
better. She seems wary, but when she falls asleep at the table and he spends
the rest of the night looking over her, on waking she finds herself warming to
him, but she has a troubled past that may be an issue.
Director Andre
Téchiné had just enjoyed an international hit with his biopic of the Bronte
Sisters so the world's film buffs were looking forward to seeing what he would
conjure up next, which turned out to be this relationship drama starring
Catherine Deneuve, an iconic French actress who would go on to appear in plenty
of his later works right into the twenty-first century. However, whether she
was seen to her best advantage in this was a different matter when it was a
story, like its characters, that never settled, played out in a series of
short, sharp scenes whose brief durations should by all rights have made the
experience fly by yet somehow with a lack of momentum managed to drag
noticeably.
Character and personality were what interested Téchiné, watching them interact,
but you had the impression he was garnering more amusement from placing these
individuals together in their almost but not quite connections than we would by
actually watching these thwarted lives unfold. Gilles thinks he has made quite
a success by wooing Hélène, but she keeps pulling away, probably because her
heart belongs to someone else, so when she takes him out to a house in the
countryside to reveal all, it looks as if this is about to turn into a thriller
where Gilles breathes his last thanks to her intervention. But no, this old
place was the home she shared with her deceased husband, an architect who had
big plans for designing an entire city.
When that didn't happen (more thwarting, do you detect a theme?) he killed
himself by drowning in the sea, making the British cinema's take on its
nation's coastal resorts look positively exuberant in comparison. You could
understand the scepticism in the off season, but positioning Biarritz as a hell
on Earth for its locals was another potentially fruitful line Téchiné failed to
capitalise upon, he was more captivated by setting up these lonely people, some
of them quite objectionable, and having us feel their frustrations to the
extent that the entire film was an exercise in growing irritation, or at least
dissatisfaction. You could take succour in a work that depicted the famed
nation of great lovers as rubbish at romance as the rest of us could be, but
this was not a comedy by any means, it was a heavy-footed melodrama.
For example, Gilles has a friend, Bernard (Etienne
Chicot), who is as much of a wastrel as he is, as with most of the main
players continually promising to leave all this behind and go to Paris though
there's no guarantee they will be happy there since they will be stuck being
their miserable selves, the one person they cannot run away from. Bernard tries
to get together with Gilles' philosophically dissatisfied sister Elle (Sabine
Haudepin), but she's not having it, and anyway he may be homosexual but
disgusted with his impulses which leads him to seek out gay men and beat them
up, landing him in prison. Hilarious, right? Well, it wasn't supposed to be,
but neither was it insightful, with the characters like dogs chasing their
tails and the sole reason we stayed superficially interested in the main couple
was down to who played them (Dewaere would commit suicide the following year,
one reason for his cult following). It could be that this constant whipping
away of any kind of resolution was a point in itself, but why would you do that
to yourself in this context? Music by Philippe Sarde.
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] The 5-film Catherine Deneuve Collection
André
Téchiné: 4-Film Collector's Edition | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill Weber
Andre Techine
Boxset : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov, 4-film Box set
MUBI [Adrian Curry] Deneuve movie posters
Review:
'Andre Techine 4-Film Collector's Edition' - Variety Peter Debruge
CRITICS
CHOICE; New DVDs: Deneuve and Loren Still Haunt the Screen Dave Kehr from The New York Times, June 10, 2008
France (82 mi) 1985 ‘Scope
User Reviews from imdb Author: julievignondecourcy from France, February 9. 2010
There is very mixed opinion on here surrounding Rendez-Vous and I
was unsure how I feel about the film seeing it 15 years after my first viewing.
I needn't have worried I found the film to be an excellent, psychological drama
with riveting central performances.
Released in 1985, today the film looks dated, but its focus and themes remain
as vibrant as ever. Juliette Binoche gives a startlingly memorable debut as
Nina, the provincial actress who in attempting to grasp hold of her destiny is
instead cruelly manipulated by circumstance.
I had to smile at the review criticizing her reading of the lines for Romeo
& Juliet as being absolutely awful. The fact is that they were supposed to
be awful (so in that way the film and Binoche succeed). Nina is a headstrong
young girl, but nothing in the film suggests she has any sort of talent in
terms of acting, until she meets Scrutzer and can find the emotional maturity
necessary to play Juliet. There is of course irony here: Why is there a need
for emotional maturity when playing a teenager? The answer of course lies with
one of the most important themes at play here: that artistic maturity can only
be achieved through real experience - in this case the loneliness and grief
Nina needs to experience to come to terms with the character of Juliet.
That the first part of the film and the love-triangle it establishes and
cruelly destroys facilitates this is where the film finds its strength. It's
through a coincidence of circumstance that Nina and Scrutzler come to meet in
the first place. Had that not happened Nina would not have experienced much of
the misery in her life, nor the maturity she later grasps.
The first part of the film is stunningly tight with Techine tightly creating a
sense of obsession among the three main characters (Nina, Quentin and Paulo).
This sort of focus is missing from Techine's later films such as Les Temoins,
Alice et Martin and Loin and had he displayed the same control on those as he
does here they would have been even better for it.
As the story arcs and Trintignant's Scrutzler comes to the fore the film finds
it's final equilibrium as do the characters. This is not the stuff of happy
endings, but is instead that of realization and in the case of the actress
emotional recollection which empowers her ability to perform.
In her leading debut Binoche is very strong, it's not hard to see why the
French press were so excited by her in this role and why it opened the path to
her (still) magnificent career. She creates in Nina a figure of pathos mixed
with a coarse ignorance that is slowly eroded to reveal a significant intellect
and talent - on stage and off, on screen and off.
I Don't Kiss: Andre Téchiné's Films About Youth | Zimbo Films Robert Curry
Rendez-vous -
Andre Techine's Rendez-Vous - Andre Techine - 1985 ... James Travers from Films de France
'Rendez-vous' - PopOptiq Cody Lang
Can She Act? | Boston Review Alan A. Stone from The Boston Review, June 29, 2015
The Digital Fix [Anthony Nield]
digitallyObsessed! [Matt Peterson]
DVD Savant Review:
Rendez-vous - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
Movie
Reviews : A French 'Rendez-vous' With Love And Ambition ... Kevin Thomas from The LA Times
New York Times [Vincent Canby]
Rendez-vous
(1985 film) - Wikipedia
The Scene of
the Crime, directed by André Téchiné | Film review Tom Milne from Time Out
The scene is the rustic vicinity of a small provincial town, the crime what happens to a small boy disaffected by his parents' divorce and by troubled loyalties when an escaped convict commits murder to save him from harm. His mother (Deneuve) promptly falls ass-over-tit for the convict (Stanckzak), his father (Lanoux) huffs around stockbroker-style, and his grandparents (including the imperishable Darrieux, alas) seem to have wandered in from a yokel movie. As vacuously pretentious as Téchiné's earlier Rendez-vous.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs
Truth is stranger than fiction in André Téchiné’s SCENE OF THE CRIME. Still, thirteen-year-old Thomas lies to everyone: his complaisant grandparents, his own recently separated parents, a disappointed priest, and even the escaped convict who threatens him at the beginning of the film. He tells the young man that his parents are dead, something that’s proven to be untrue mere moments later; his father arrives at the grandparents’ house expressing hope that he’ll soon have custody of the boy, while his mother—Lili, played by Catherine Denueve in one of several collaborations with Téchiné—is elsewhere preparing for a long night at her nightclub on the lake. Téchiné foils the banality of so-called simple living with a pair of criminals and their devoted female friend (maybe lover?), a connection that isn’t explored as much as the relationship between Lili, Thomas, and their family, instead serving as a metaphorical representation of the freedom that Lili, and maybe even Thomas, so desire. Téchiné seems to suggest not only that family life and country living are complex, but perhaps that they’re too complex, almost totally void of the id and all its elemental impulses. Much like his New Wave idols and post-New Wave contemporaries, he frequently references film and literature in his work, though such citations are more speculative than admiring. Something of a domestic noir, SCENE OF THE CRIME borrows the beginning of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and toys with the boy-who-cried-wolf trope born of Aesop’s Fables, though Téchiné's intentions with doing so are unclear. The noir genre, Dickens’ formidable classic, and those famous fables are all canonical; Téchiné uses them as outlines to be filled with his incisive narratives. He similarly uses long shots to frame landscapes and locations before transitioning into medium shots that both bring us closer to and keep us at a distance from the characters. Lili eventually finds her freedom in an unconventional way, leaving us even more confused but just as captivated. Indeed, truth is stranger than fiction, but the truth of this fiction is even stranger still.
Le Lieu
du crime - Scene of the Crime - Andre Techine - 1986 - film ... James Travers from Films de France
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
Scene
of the Crime (1986 film) - Wikipedia
France (96 mi) 1987 ‘Scope
Les
Innocents - The Innocents - Andre Techine - 1987 - film review James Travers from Films de France
I DON’T KISS (J'embrasse pas)
France Italy (115 mi) 1991 ‘Scope
J'embrasse pas,
directed by André Téchiné | Film review - Time Out
He doesn't kiss; nor, according to the subtitles laying down conditions to prospective male clients, does this Paris rent boy (Blanc ) 'suck off or take it up the bum'. The innocent country boy has come a long way since arriving with high hopes of making it in the big city. His only contact (with equally vulnerable middle-aged widow Vincent) provides a bed to sleep in, but under impossible conditions. Film producer Noiret offers 'no sex' overtures of friendship, which he only later realises are more predatory than they seemed. Auditions end in humiliation and flight from his tentative ambition to become an actor. Only tart-with-a-troubled-heart Béart seems honest in this world without pity. Despite odd moments of truth and affecting scenes, Téchiné's episodic film is a downhill racer: what at first seems art house austerity reveals itself to be mere posturing.
I Don't Kiss: Andre Téchiné's Films About Youth | Zimbo Films Robert Curry
J’embrasse pas (1991) is the culmination, in many respects, to a long meditation on the psychological turmoil of youth, a meditation that has undergone a number of revisions from film to film before finally expressing a definitive subjective perspective on “the rite of passage” which has obsessed cinema artists since the early twentieth century. Written by Andre Téchiné (who also directs), Isabelle Coudrier-Kleist, Michel Grisolia, and Jacques Nolot, J’embrasse pas works as a kind of exorcism for the film’s director, who, since Rendez-vous (1985), has obsessively revisited the same motifs time and again, enabling Téchiné to construct a new narrative pattern to probe more deeply and succinctly into his thematic concerns with the masterful and humanistic Wild Reeds (1994). These three coming of age films each represent a dynamic advancement in Téchiné’s directorial style and a further refinement in the articulation of themes that bind these three films together.
Rendez-vous concerns a would-be actress, Nina (Juliette Binoche), who migrates to Paris from rural France. In Paris, she encounters a career minded man bound to society’s expectations named Paulot (Wadeck Stanczack), and his roommate, the free-spirited actor Quentin (Lambert Wilson). Nina quickly falls for Quentin, but when he dies suddenly and her life seems directionless, Quentin’s former mentor and director Scrutzler (Jean-Louis Trintignant) takes her in and gives her a legitimate acting career. This rather simplistic account of the plot to Rendez-vous already reveals motifs that recur in J’embrasse pas, albeit with a more refined understanding of character.
Just in terms of plot points, both of the central characters in Rendez-vous (Nina) and J’embrasse pas (Pierre, played by Manuel Blanc) are native to the more rural French countryside and have migrated to metropolitan Paris to pursue careers as actors. Both also adopt the former mentor of a close companion, whose part is played by a veteran of the French cinema (Jean-Louis Trintignant in Rendez-vous and Philippe Noiret in J’embrasse pas). These two narrative devices are expressive not only of traditional motifs of the coming of age story, but also of the succession of one generation to another and the differences between them. In this respect one can sense the direct influence of Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring (1956) and Tokyo Twilight (1957). Though not just in how Téchiné handles his juxtaposition of generational morality clashes, but in his employment of ellipses in time. In terms of narrative duration, J’embrasse Pas demonstrates a more masterful approach to the Ozu aesthetic, particularly with the film’s brief epilogue. Rendez-vous is more subtle, moving ahead in time out of necessity to perpetuate Nina’s narrative from her grief over Quentin and to the tutelage of Scrutzler. However, Téchiné would master this approach to narrative time in Wild Reeds, employing a number of ellipses throughout the film.
Narrative structure is not the only similarity between Rendez-vous and J’embrasse pas. Both films make use of similar character types, excluding the archetypal mentor figures. These types are manifested in each film in very different ways that speak to Téchiné’s approach to both sexual awakening and sexual identity, two themes that define and unify his entire body of work. First, there is Nina. Nina begins Rendez-vous as a naive yet flirtatious young woman on the verge of her sexual awakening. That “awakening” coincides with the deterioration of her naivety when she is seduced by Quentin. Interestingly, she stays the course, she becomes an actor and follows the guidance of her mentor figure. Pierre in J’embrasse pas varies slightly. His sexual awakening occurs in opposition to homosexuals and homosexuality; specifically the homosexuality of his mentor figure Romain. Pierre does not meet his love interest until forty minutes into the film, and they do not unite as lovers until the film’s final act. Largely this is due to Téchiné’s revision of how he perceived these character types. Pierre embodies the traits of both Nina and Quentitn in Rendez-vous. Thusly, the external conflict of Nina and Quentin becomes Pierre’s internal conflict. So it is not so much a matter of an outside influence affecting or directing Pierre, but an internal force. Time and again Pierre will reject one thing only to be spun off into a collision course with something else that he will later reject.
The supporting characters in each film also undergo a transformation of archetypes as Téchiné progressed from Rendez-vous to J’embrasse pas. Paulot, by the time he encounters Nina at the conclusion of Rendez-vous, is a bitter man, gone are all of his traditional Romantic inclinations, replaced by a base carnal urge. In J’embrasse pas, Pierre’s love-interest Ingrid (Emmanuele Beart) undergoes Paulot’s transformation in reverse. Though first it’s important to note Pierre’s psychological trajectory. His rejection of Romain is indicative of his rejection of his own homosexuality from which the film gets it’s title, J’embrasse pas (English title: I Don’t Kiss). Pierre, determining that he is too “stupid”, gives up on acting and becomes a male prostitute who will only masturbate in front of clients for 1,000 francs. It is as a prostitute that he meets and forms a bond with Ingrid. At this point Ingrid, also a prostitute, is jaded and cold. She warms to Pierre after his demonstration of compassion, having intercourse with a man for the first time without money changing hands. Her awakening, therefore, is a Romantic one. In contrast, Pierre seeks only to posses Ingrid, just as her pimp does, mistaking ownership for love. It is this behavior by both parties that prompts Ingrid’s pimp to intervene violently.
These incidents in J’embrasse pas indicate Téchiné’s own perspective of Pierre as a young man without a clear sense of self who strives, via ownership of other people, to come to a sort of “self-definition”. Nina’s journey to self is the inverse, born out of an acceptance of those around her she slowly grows, existing more symbiotically than parasitical. In the climax of Rendez-vous Nina sleeps with Paulot, prompting his own re-evaluation of self much in the same way Pierre effected Ingrid, stirring the romantic within. This self-martyrdom is absent in J’embrasse pas. After Ingrid’s pimp intervene’s, beating and raping Pierre, Pierre joins the army, like his brother, turning his quest for self into an obsessively cyclical vendetta.
The main theses of both films deals entirely with the relationship one has with the acceptance of one’s self as a means to define that self. It isn’t mere coincidence that the protagonists of Rendez-vous and J’embrasse pas are aspiring actors. Téchiné uses the profession as an allegory, particularly in Rendez-vous, for the emersion of one’s identity in the identity another chooses for one’s self. It is this submissive requirement of Western Society that Téchiné is rallying against; it is why Nina outgrows Scrutzler and why Pierre surrenders unto it. Over time, between 1985 and 1991, Téchiné’s view had clearly grown more pessimistic.
By the time Téchiné made Wild Reeds his entire approach to the subject had changed though his main sociopolitical message and its accompanying motive had not. For unlike Rendez-vous and J’embrasse pas, Wild Reeds is an ensemble film where ellipses in time are as common as the narrative’s shift in focus from one character to another. There is also the very different approach to plot. Where Rendez-vous and J’embrasse pas follow a single character’s emotional and physical journey, Wild Reeds never changes locations and uses the journeys of the films characters as stepping-stones, a cause and effect if you will, from one character to another as one journey begins and another ends. The visuals are also strikingly different. The heavily saturated colors of the Paris nightlife are replaced by cool earth-tones, evoking Wild Reeds‘ pastoral location in rural France. Wild Reeds also uses the camera movements, dramatic pans and tracking shots, to evoke the budding sensuality and sexuality of the film’s characters much like in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929). These aesthetic developments evidenced in Wild Reeds show Téchiné as a more mature and calculated filmmaker, able to move beyond the narrative tropes and character types that he had employed for so long.
J'embrasse pas - I Don't Kiss - Andre Techine - 1991 - film review James Travers from Films de France
André
Téchiné: 4-Film Collector's Edition | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill Weber
Andre Techine
Boxset : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov, 4-film Box set
J'embrasse
pas Blu-ray (France) - Blu-ray.com
derekwinnert.com [Derek Winnert]
Review:
'Andre Techine 4-Film Collector's Edition' - Variety Peter Debruge
I think that one never grows up
emotionally. We grow up physically, intellectually, socially, and even morally
but never emotionally. Recognition of this fact can be either terrifying or deeply
moving. Everyone handles it in their own way.
—André Téchiné
Here is Gallic star power saving a standard domestic drama
from mediocrity. Emilie (Deneuve) is a notary public in a small town in
south-west
Are We
Having Fun Yet? | Jonathan Rosenbaum
June 7, 1996
Happily, I've also been able to see a movie that doesn't equate life with
the experience of old TV shows and comic strips--a family drama by Andre
Techine about not being able to grow up emotionally, My Favorite
Season (Ma saison preferee). (Made three years ago, it's apparently
surfacing this week at the Music Box because of the commercial success of
Techine's more recent Wild Reeds. Still more recent is Techine's Les
voleurs, one of the major films at
In a way I'm ill equipped to deal with these three pictures since I've never followed closely the career of Andre Techine--at least after his first four features (1969-1978), which discouraged me from seeing his next five (1981-1991).
Split into four chapters corresponding to the four seasons but titled
according to the movements of an aging, ailing, illiterate farm widow (Marthe
Villalonga) in southern France as she approaches death--"the
departure," "the false step," "the next step,"
"the return"--My Favorite Season is concerned mainly with her
two neurotic, middle-aged children. Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) is a frigid
married lawyer with two teenage children, and Antoine (Daniel Auteuil) is a
bachelor brain surgeon in denial; both are "modern" overachievers
who've settled in
A central clue to what Techine has in mind is the name Emilie; he's clearly
thinking of the Bronte sister who wrote
This is the center of My Favorite Season, but by no means the entire film or the extent of its curiosity; it's a movie about three generations, not two. Also prominent--and fully fleshed out--are Emilie's estranged husband and law partner (Jean-Pierre Bouvier); their two kids (Chiara Mastroianni and Anthony Prada); and the Moroccan secretary (Carmen Chaplin) Emilie shares with her husband--a relatively untroubled ingenue who's ambiguously adopted or appropriated by every member of her household and who clearly inspires the North African music heard over the beginning and end titles.
All these characters have their own claims to make, on our attentions and on one another, and they're a much too unruly and unwieldy bunch of individuals to add up to an easily digestible or fully accountable movie. Too many unresolved or obscurely defined elements overflow the simple design provided by the dying mother and her two children, and the confounding mysteries and complications of life take over. The sheer immediacy of personal experience intrudes as well; one scene in which the mother faints in the field outside her house has the mystical radiance of a moment in Tolstoy.
As critic Kent Jones puts it, Techine has "a novelistic sense of story,
a musical sense of rhythm, and a filmic feeling for the beauty of people in
motion. I think his toughness is the main reason for his relative invisibility
in America, where we customarily expect cinema to provide us with some sort of
comfort"--the sort of preadolescent comfort that derives from, say, the
helicopter chasing the train in Mission: Impossible or the hero and
heroine leaping from a boat-plane onto a galloping horse in The Phantom.
By contrast, My Favorite Season can provide us only with people, most of
them discomforting to a fault. In other words, not much fun by American
standards. Yet the excitement is such that I feel like I'm back in
Three decades and several lifetimes separate the flawless young Catherine Deneuve of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" from the more real and sorrowful woman she plays in Andre Techine's "Ma Saison Preferee."
And as she is thrown startlingly off-balance, photographed in unkind natural light and forced to confront the troubling emotions of Techine's story, this habitually reserved actress shows her spontaneity, giving a performance of touching complexity and candor. She seems reborn.
So does Techine, the onetime film critic whose more formal earlier work (the 1976 "Barocco," the 1986 "Scene of the Crime") now gives way to an intimate, less composed style.
Made in 1993, just before his equally acute "Wild Reeds," "Ma Saison Preferee" ("My Favorite Season") finds the director probing believable troubles with honesty, intelligence and tact.
This film is about a middle-aged brother and sister facing the strains in their relationship as they cope with their mother's serious illness. None of it covers familiar movie terrain. But virtually all of it is lifelike, sometimes painfully so.
And Techine echoes the emotional fearlessness of a Bergman or Cassavetes
in trying to capture the difficult, unruly essence of his characters' inner
lives. It helps that "Ma Saison Preferee" pairs Ms. Deneuve with
Daniel Auteuil ("Jean de Florette," "Un Coeur en Hiver"),
one of the most accomplished French actors of his generation, and a performer
with a rare gift for humanizing the strange, aloof people he often plays.
The film begins with an event that forces them together: the removal of their 76-year-old mother, Berthe (played with great acerbic authority by Marthe Villalonga), from the French farmhouse where she has spent much of her life. When the shutters close on Berthe's view of the countryside, the film seems to be bidding farewell to all that is natural and comforting in these characters' familiar world.
Berthe is brought to
So Emilie, secretly defying her husband, goes to find her brother and enlists his help. This reunion, which might signal the end of a feud in a more conventional film, is really where "Ma Saison Preferee" begins.
Techine finds three sharply drawn characters in the brother and sister who are drawn intensely together (the opening credits show a painting of Siamese twins) and the mother whose caustic nature has hobbled them both. ("They should take care of me now," she says about her children. "But these days they're all too busy.") And "Ma Saison Preferee" need not do much more than watch long-buried emotions emerge as Berthe's condition grows worse.
The film observes the growing stress in Emilie's household and the rift in her marriage that is provoked by Antoine, but its most wrenching moments are those concerning the love, guilt and anger these middle-aged children feel about their mother. Techine's approach would seem as gently indirect as psychotherapy if it didn't also incorporate the drama of moving, authentic grief.
Much of the film's energy has been achieved through the director's quest for what he has called "disequilibrium." Many scenes show an improvisational energy and are staged in strikingly plain, unglamorous settings, like the highway rest stop where brother and sister have a memorable talk. Hospital and nursing home backdrops, the ordinariness of daily life and the actors' stark, unaffected behavior before the camera also help heighten the film's candid tone. So does the complete absence of panaceas in this painful tale. Bracingly, "Ma Saison Preferee" invites empathy without delivering easy answers.
Sometimes the film's naturalness is allowed to become merely vague, especially where the younger generation is concerned. The daughter of Emilie and Bruno, Anne (Chiara Mastroianni, Ms. Deneuve's visually striking daughter), and her adopted brother, Lucien (Anthony Prada), are both under the sway of a North African beauty nicknamed Radish (Carmen Chaplin).
Radish works in the office shared by Emilie and Bruno, and she would undoubtedly be causing trouble in their marriage if she weren't busy driving their children wild. Interesting as this part of the story may sound, it has little real bearing on the main characters. It also has an arbitrary eccentricity, more like autobiography than artful fiction, that blurs the film's otherwise sharp focus.
Techine directs his expert stars with mostly unobtrusive grace, so his rare emphatic moments have unusual impact. These moments underscore the private yet universal emotions that both Antoine and Emilie are forced to face. So the film pauses dramatically for a deep breath, a slow-motion epiphany, as a woman in a bar stuns the room with a lyric about mortality. In this intense, moving story of loss and renewal, her siren song is always in the air.
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
My Favorite Season (aka Ma
Saison Preferee) - Movie reviews by ... Edwin Jahiel
BAM Honors the Peerless Catherine Deneuve | Village Voice Melissa Anderson, March 2, 2011
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] The 5-film Catherine Deneuve Collection
André
Téchiné: 4-Film Collector's Edition | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill Weber
Andre Techine
Boxset : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov, 4-film Box set
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]
My
Favorite Season | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum capsule review
Review: 'Andre Techine 4-Film Collector's Edition' - Variety Peter Debruge
My
Favorite Season | Variety
Todd McCarthy
Ma
Saison Préférée - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
My Favorite Season -
Wikipedia
aka: Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge... (All the Boys and Girls In Their Time) – made for TV
(Commissioned by French television as one part of a series of nine films entitled Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, including other directors: Patricia Mazuy, Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Dahan, Emilie Deleuze, Claire Denis, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, and Cédric Kahn. Released theatrically, however, before it was shown on TV) France (110 mi) 1994
In school, students are preparing for their futures by studying for their Baccalauréat, or college entrance exams, where one student, Henri (Frédéric Gorny) is singled out for his intelligence, but also his socially detached air of superiority, an Algerian born Frenchman who lost his father to terrorists and detests the Algerian uprising, feeling they should be grateful for what the French have given them, views not shared by Madame Alvarez, her daughter Maïté, or the communist party who are ardently against both the Vietnam and Algerian wars. This was the social divide of the era, as young men upon reaching age 18 were sent off to war, both in France and the United States, causing heightened anxiety both for themselves and their families, especially when the war effort was not going as easily as expected with so many returned killed or wounded in action. Téchiné himself would have been 19 at the time, so this is a subject he is intimately familiar with. Téchiné as the director remains completely nonjudgmental and narrows the focus in this film to the personal relationships between people, which has always been his specialty, targeting shifting adolescent moods and influences, which includes a developing sexual fascination between François and Serge (Stéphane Rideau), the younger brother of the groom, who’s a bit more aggressive and actually initiates the sexual contact, but it turns out he’s more interested in Maïté. François, however, has the floodgates open and he can’t stop thinking about his attraction to guys afterwards, confessing his newfound feelings to Maïté, who accepts him as he is, but may be a bit jealous he had his initial sexual encounter without her. The back and forth interests and attractions here are positively riveting, as these kids are simply exploring their feelings, and remain confused, not really understanding them yet. But the situations they get themselves into are undeniably appealing, oftentimes cruel, sometimes heartbreaking, but always in search of a better understanding about themselves.
There’s a bit of the New Wave exuberance found in Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962), especially the narrative experimentation with continually shifting the focus from individuals to different sets of couples, but also a brilliantly upbeat American soundtrack, from Chubby Checker to Del Shannon or from the Beach Boys to the Platters, but there’s also the near surreal use of Samuel Barber’s elegiac “Adagio for Strings,” used (or mis-used) four years later by Oliver Stone in PLATOON (1998). More important is the idea that love and understanding for one another takes precedence over individual opinions or social divides, that knowledge somehow helps us better understand not only our place in the world, but each other. In class they discuss the genius of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who dropped everything for the love of another man (fellow poet Paul Verlaine) while still a teenager, never to write again, or discuss La Fontaine's fable “The Oak and the Reed,” suggesting a sudden wind may uproot the oak, while the reed simply bends with the wind, where the implication is to not be so rigid or closed minded, to bend but not break. Movies play a part, as François is continually influenced by the impact of Bergman’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961), describing how a girl is caught between reality and a dream and can’t decide which one to choose, or Jacques Demy’s LOLA (1961), where a woman has to decide between two men, while he himself has a helluva time trying to find a non-existent gay role model, futilely searching out the helpless and hapless local shoe salesman who the whole town knows lives with a gay partner, as if there was a magical explanation that could be provided. One of the most affecting moments in the entire film takes place between adults, when Madame Alvarez, after experiencing a profound emotional trauma, is introduced to a fellow instructor’s wife, an unforgettable sequence that offers no explanation, no dialogue, yet is a harrowing moment. After all the acclaim received by Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT (2003), especially what is considered such a realistic portrayal of high school, yet this complex film offers so much more, where life is seen as sometimes terrible, often terrifying, yet also at the same time full of promise and hope. Téchiné surrounds these kid’s lives with a neverending assault to their senses, but never leers or panders, or makes a single misstep, creating a vivid masterpiece of adolescent reflections, completely unpretentious and provocatively real.
"Adagio for Strings"
by Samuel
Barber
"Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring)"
by Johann
Strauß
"Barbara Ann"
Written by Fred Fassert
Performed by The Beach Boys
"Run Away"
Written by Del Shannon and Sam
Cooke
Performed by Del Shannon
"Let's Twist Again"
Performed by Chubby Checker
"Wo die Zitronen blüh'n (When the Lemontrees Blossom
Again)"
by Johann
Strauß
"Smoke gets in your eyes"
by Otto
A. Harbach and Jerome Kern
Performed by The Platters
An intelligent, bitter-sweet account
of teenage life in south-west France in 1962. The Algerian War still rages,
forging alliances and creating divisions between a group of schoolchildren
already confused by issues of class and sexuality: François anguished over his
passion for the briefly responsive Serge, peasant brother of a would-be army
deserter; Maité, daughter of the boys' communist teacher, and François' best
friend; and new-kid Henri, clever, stand-offish and, having been born in
Algeria, virulently against the idea of independence. These four variously fall
out, make up, and edge hesitantly towards adulthood. The film impresses for its
authenticity, careful delineation of mood, and subtle balancing of the personal
and political. Téchiné wins sterling support from his young cast, who give the
kind of quiet, naturalistic performances the French are so good at. A delicacy
to savour.
Wild Reeds: The Film File: The New Yorker Terrence Rafferty
André Téchiné’s
coming-of-age drama, set in a quiet provincial town in 1962, is the best French
film in years. The young characters are all deeply confused about their
political, intellectual, and sexual identities; the director sets up their
conflicts with masterly ease, and, using smooth, complex tracking shots,
carries them toward resolutions that are tentative but real. The movie flows
like a river. Téchiné simply takes his characters from one point to another—from
juvenile ignorance to a place where they can see themselves, and others, a
little more clearly—and he makes that short journey look momentous. Few movies
dealing with teen-agers have been so accurate about the moral and emotional
urgency of adolescents’ attempts to understand their lives, or so forgiving of
their failures. Gaël Morel, Élodie Bouchez, Stéphane Rideau, and Frédéric Gorny
play the main characters, and they’re all terrific. In French.
Wild Reeds | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Though I liked his criticism for Cahiers
du Cinema in the 60s, on the basis of five of his early films I haven’t been a
big fan of Andre Techine. But this wonderful and masterful feature (1994), his
12th, suggests that maybe he’d just been tooling up. It’s one of the best
movies from an excellent French television series of fiction features on
teenagers of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, and it’s the first to be released in
the
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
After seeing many predictable movies about adolescence, it's a
revelation to come upon Andre Techine's Wild Reeds. The film is set in a
boarding school in southwestern
Would it come as a surprise to say that no mainstream American movie could
treat homosexuality so maturely and nonchalantly? Basketball Diaries
actually has scenes similar to those in Wild Reeds, where boys horse
around in their underwear, but Basketball Diaries doesn't dare to
suggest even a glimmer of homoeroticism. Instead, it turns hysterically
homophobic in its portrayal of the gay basketball coach and of the repulsive
old man who gives Jim a blowjob when he's desperate for drug money. Wild
Reeds sees sexuality as far more complex and all-embracing than most
American filmmakers can imagine.
Politically, the movie is just as complex and sophisticated. The
Algerian-born Henri (Frederic Gorny) may be a fascist, but he's intelligent,
seductive, sympathetic, even when he's completely wrongheaded. We're miles away
from the cartoonish neo-Nazis in Higher Learning. Techine finds the
humanity beneath all the political slogans, and the expressive young actors do
a beautiful job of fleshing out the characters. This is a rich, resonant movie
that restores the mystery to adolescence--and to life itself. Wild Reeds
demonstrates why coming-of-age stories continue to fascinate; it summons up a
time when everything seems possible, and reminds us of just how
exhilarating--and terrifying--that sense of limitless possibilities can be.
Bend, Don't Break: André
Téchiné's Wild Reeds • Senses of Cinema
Katharine Thornton, February 7, 2006
André
Téchiné - Film-Philosophy
7-page essay, a book review of André
Téchiné (2007) by Bill Marshall, André
Téchiné: The Subtle Explorations of Identities, by Isabelle Vanderschelden
from Film-Philosophy, December 3,
2007 (pdf)
I Don't Kiss: Andre Téchiné's Films About Youth | Zimbo Films Robert Curry
Only the
Cinema: Wild Reeds Ed Howard
Nathan Wolfson's review of "Wild Reeds"
Les
Roseaux sauvages - The Wild Reeds - Andre Techine - 1994 - film ... James Travers from Films de France
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
we were one man / wild reeds - CinemaQueer / Gay Film Reviews ... Michael D. Klemm
'Wild Reeds' review
by Isaac Lee • Letterboxd
World
Cinema Review: André Téchiné | Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild ... Douglas Messerli
Wild Reeds | Franz
Patrick's Film Archive
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) recommendation
André
Téchiné: 4-Film Collector's Edition | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill Weber
Andre Techine
Boxset : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov, 4-film Box set
DVD Verdict- Andre Techine: 4-Film
Collector's Edition [Brett Cullum]
Karl Rackwitz
retrospective
also seen here: From My Point of View [Karl Rackwitz]
MovieMartyr.com - Wild
Reeds Jeremy Heilman
WILD
REEDS (André Téchiné, 1994) Dennis Grunes
Gay Essential Films To
Watch - Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux sauvages)
Alexander Ryll
User comments from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal
User
comments from imdb Author: alexandre-extra from
Wild Reeds -
Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
Review: 'Andre Techine 4-Film Collector's Edition' - Variety Peter Debruge
Wild
Reeds - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Alison Macor
San Francisco Examiner (Gary Kamiya) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
MOVIE REVIEW : 'Reeds' in Tune With Tentative Teen Years - latimes Kenneth Turan
Wild Reeds Movie Review & Film Summary (1995) | Roger Ebert
4 Teens Enter A New World In `Reeds' - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
The New York Times (Caryn James) review
DVDBeaver DVD review [Gary Tooze]
Wild Reeds (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - Wild Reeds (1994) - François & Serge (1:04)
Les Roseaux Sauvages movie trailer (1:59)
Les Roseaux Sauvages (3:27)
France (117 mi) 1996
Les Voleurs, directed by André Téchiné | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Kicking off with a scene in which a young boy, woken by his mother's scream, discovers that for some reason his father has been killed, Téchiné's ambitious attempt to deconstruct (and put a less generic, more humanist slant on) the crime thriller continues by telling the story through a variety of 'voices', including Auteuil as the dead man's detective brother, Deneuve as a philosophy professor, and Côte as the tortured young woman involved, at one time or another, with all three. Ambitious, yes; successful, no. Though script and direction have their moments, as a whole the film is simply too diffuse to add up to very much, either intellectually or emotionally; notwithstanding the strong performances, it all seems rather academic and, well, pointless.
La
Vie en Rage: Rampaging Women in Five French-Language Films ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, Oxctober 1, 2001
Les Voleurs is the most conventional, with sibling rivalry underlying its thriller and love story elements. The film pivots around Juliette (Laurence Cote), a delinquent verging on big-time crime. She has a cold affair with her arresting officer Alex (Daniel Auteuil), a follow-up to her affair with his now-dead criminal brother. She also continues a taunting romance with her philosophy professor Marie (Catherine Deneuve). Alex and Marie meet occasionally, a truce between rivals, their infatuation with Juliette so addictive that they’re bound to each other. Deneuve and Auteuil convey their solitary, highly intelligent, and self-controlled characters with tiny, precise movements that virtually mirror each other in their scenes together. Lithe and epicene, Cote gives Juliette an erratic energy at once appealing and off-putting; nothing feels predictable, her impulsiveness a perfect foil for her lovers. (The art direction is especially good here, with unwelcoming manmade space the dominant setting – even a potentially snug chalet has a secretive, creepy effect.) Moving among various institutions – the university, the police force, organized crime – Juliette exposes their weakness but for no particular motive. There’s no remedy for her disaffection except to keep going.
THE THIEVES - Gay Today Leo Skir
This film should be put among lists of the Ten Best of the past ten years.
Viewers who saw Catherine Deneuve as a vampire-lesbian in "The Hunger" are in for a big treat. This time round she's a lesbian-teacher, a university professor yet. Teacher, vampire, what's the dif? Right?
The plot is impossibly complex, and in French too! It's centered on a family of crooks, from the points-of-view of four Outsiders (non-crooks).
The first narrator (who also delivers the epilogue) is a ten-year-old boy. Next: a police detective who comes from but has left behind his Mafioso "family." (The action takes place in a city in the South of France which seems to have a Mafioso). And then a young woman, once a druggie and--it's half hinted--prostitute. Finally--and most impressive--Catherine Deneuve as a philosopher, professor, female, who has somehow met the young woman, herself only a half-time thief (her brother being full-time.)
Try and follow this thick-thick plot as the young woman, half-prostitute, half-thief becomes--are you ready for this?--the lover of the policeman and the professor!
There's more. The professor becomes her mentor and finally her collaborator in a book about her, The Child of the Street!
The film moves from one center (the murder of the father of the young boy) to another (the love affair of the two women) to yet a third (the love affair of the detective and the thief), to a fourth--which at the end one feels is going to be the kernel of the film: the relation of the detective to the professor.
Enough? Hold on! There's an epilogue where we see a New Relation: between the 10-year old, now an orphan, and one of the thieves, the brother of the young female druggie who had been loved by both the detective and the professor!
There's enough material here for a thick novel and the director Andre Techine, in a script written by him and three others, carries it off.
One part towers over all: that of the very outside-outsider, the sophisticated university professor, who moves into and through an underworld. As Marie, the professor, Catherine Deneuve here achieves one of the great triumphs of her career. Odd to think that this woman, who has gone to court to prevent a lesbian magazine from using the name Deneuve as its title, has here elected, fourteen years after The Hunger (1983) to again portray a woman in a lesbian situation.
The object of her affections, the girl called Juliette, played by Laurence Cote is rail-thin and very young (played by an actress of thirty!) and very magnetic. She is beautiful in a peculiar way. We believe her capable of loving both the detective and the professor. In the terrible years she has spent in the twin underworlds of theft and prostitution, she has given up everything but her basic honesty, her ability to find and give love.
Most of the action in this film takes place at the criminal family's estate. Other scenes take place in the police station, at the detective's home, and in the apartment shared by Juliette and her brother.
Rabelais once wrote: "In my world everyone is saved in their own fashion," and in this film, rich-as-a-novel, each conclusion is a logical end to the road(s) taken.
To be noted: the beautiful, rich photography, whose landscapes starting with bitter winter, ending with Mediterranean sunlight, are much more than mere backdrop.
Also to be noted: the odd music. The city wherein the action takes place is not named but we see many Arab faces and three of the background songs are in an odd melange of French-Arab-Berber words and tonalities.
They signal the message of this rich, great film: we are all together. There is not black/white, male/female, married/unmarried, legal/criminal, straight/gay. We are all bonded and must live together or not at all.
And a final message, given very late by the "intellectual"--the university professor: "Get it down. Record It!"
See this film.
Criminal Genius | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 26, 1996, also seen here: Criminal Genius [THIEVES] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Les Voleurs -
Thieves - Andre Techine - 1996 - film review James Travers from Films de France
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
[FILM
REVIEW] Thieves (1996) by André Téchiné — Steemit Steem Swede
Thieves (aka Les Voleurs) - Movie
reviews by Edwin Jahiel
Thieves (Les
Voleurs) - The AV Club Nathan Rabin
Overlooked
movies of 1996 · The Overlook · The A.V. Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, August 9, 2016
Movie
Magazine International [Mary Weems]
Film Scouts
Reviews: Voleurs, Les Lisa Nesselson
Thieves |
Variety Leonard Klady
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
Film
review: Thieves (Les Voleurs) | Deseret News Chris Hicks
San
Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
A
Complex Tale of Love and Conflict in 'Thieves' - latimes Kevin Thomas
Thieves (Les
Voleurs) Movie Review (1996) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - Chilly Scenes From Lonely People's Lives - NYTimes ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times
Thieves (1996
film) - Wikipedia
France Spain (124
mi) 1998
Alice and Martin Anthony Lane from the New Yorker
The new André
Téchiné picture stars Juliette Binoche as Alice, a violin player who gives
nothing away—like the movie, she is close to unreadable—and yet gives all for
love.
Alice
and Martin | Jonathan Rosenbaum
As demonstrated by My Favorite Season, Wild Reeds, and above all Thieves, Andre Techine has become the most accomplished novelistic filmmaker in contemporary French cinema. This feature may not be on the same level as those films, but it has much the same tragic and melodramatic view of family, desire, and destiny. The talented (and Oscar-winning) Juliette Binoche plays a violinist who lives with a gay actor in Paris (Mathieu Amalric) and becomes romantically involved with his illegitimate half brother (Alexis Loret), a professional model, after he moves into their flat. Loret’s relative lack of acting experience is the film’s biggest flaw, but it doesn’t pose any fatal problems: the sheer neurotic intensity of Techine’s main characters, which stretches both backward and forward in time, as in a Faulkner novel, holds one throughout, as do Techine’s masterful direction and many of the other performances (including Carmen Maura as Loret’s mother).
Alice et
Martin, directed by André Téchiné | Film review - Time Out
With this unorthodox love story of Alice (Binoche) and Martin (Loret), André Téchiné has produced his most mature film to date. The story traces Martin's history backwards and forwards in time. His mother (Maura) had an affair with stern industrialist Victor (Maguelon), and at ten, their son (the impressive Kreikenmayer) joins his Cahors household with devastating results. Missing since his father's death, the son arrives years later at the Paris flat shared by his sympathetic homosexual stepbrother Benjamin, a struggling actor, and sensitive violinist Alice. He stays, taking work as a model, and Alice's distanced attitude changes subtly from intrigue to love. Téchiné's trademark interests - contrasting examinations of restrictive provincial life and young urban lives - are much to the fore. For all the increasing sophistication of Téchiné's technique, the emotions he deals with are basic, and all the more powerful for it. Loret plays Martin with an almost feral quality: he stalks Alice, his immobile arms making him look like a Bresson anti-hero. Binoche trusts her director and it shows; and Marthe Villalonga, as the stepmother, is superb.
BFI | Sight
& Sound | Alice et Martin (1998)
Chris Drake from Sight
and Sound, December 1999
Ten-year-old Martin Sauvagnac's
mother encourages him to visit his father Victor whom he's never met before.
Although illegitimate, Martin stays and grows up with his half-brothers:
François, Frédéric and Benjamin. Ten years pass. Martin flees the family house
after the death of his father. After living rough he turns up at Benjamin's
Paris flat which he shares with his friend Alice. Martin moves in and becomes a
model. He and Alice become a couple.
While visiting Spain, Alice tells
Martin she's pregnant. He collapses and is hospitalised. They move into a small
cottage by the sea where he recovers. Terrified by fatherhood, Martin reveals
to Alice the cause of his father's death. When François committed suicide,
Martin planned to leave, unable to participate in the family's grief. In a
struggle with Victor, Martin accidentally pushed him down the stairs.
Convinced he's guilty of murder,
Martin has himself committed to a psychiatric clinic. Alice tries to deliver a
letter from him to his stepmother Lucie but encounters obstruction from
Frédéric. Martin decides to hand himself over to the police and asks Lucie to
testify as a witness. Benjamin tells Alice that, because of Frédéric's
political ambitions, the family is obliged to testify and Martin will be tried.
Alice returns to Paris and Martin is discharged from the clinic. He turns
himself over to the police and is detained. Alice waits for the birth of their
child.
With his thirteenth feature, André Téchiné conducts a masterly dissection of male hysteria. From the outset Martin, the illegitimate son of a wealthy provincial bourgeois family, is damaged goods. The short opening sequence sketching his childhood has Martin attempting to persuade his father he's ill. Victor Sauvagnac, the cold, business-like patriarch who sired Martin on a local hairdresser and then denied his existence for ten years, refuses to believe him. From here on in the film charts first the symptoms and then the causes of Martin's frail psychological state.
In fact, most of the major characters are scarred by family histories. After
his father's death – shown in a lengthy flashback – Martin flees into the
countryside where he hides like a hunted animal, eventually making his way to
Téchiné explicitly treats the film as a case study. When
Dense and powerful in its emotional force,
Alice and Martin (1998) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, also seen here: Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs)
Alice et
Martin - Alice and Martin - Andre Techine - 1998 - film review James Travers from Films de France
Images - Alice et Martin
David Ng
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
“Alice et Martin” Charles Taylor from Salon, July 21, 2000
Alice and Martin Gerald Peary
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell]
Alice and Martin Review | CultureVulture - CultureVulture.net Gary Mairs
Alice et Martin
James Bowman, August 1, 2000
Strayed Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club
Alice and Martin
(France, 1998). Movie reviews by Dr. Edwin Jahiel.
Alice and Martin Jeremy Heilman from Movie Martyr
ALICE AND MARTIN | Film
Journal International Bruce Feld
AboutFilm review [Carlo Cavagna]
Alice
et Martin | Film at The Digital Fix
Gary Couzens
Alice and Martin - NYMag Peter Rainer
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Alice
and Martin | Variety Jonathan
Holland
Alice
et Martin | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
New York Times A.O. Scott
A screen adaptation
of the Gilles Perrault novel, “The Boy with Grey Eyes,” this is an exacting
work, very much in the short story mold, as it’s told with a strict
precision. Set at the beginning of World
War II, opening with what appears to be black and white archival footage when
France was invaded by Germany, Emmanuelle Beart loses her husband early in the
war, so she escapes Paris with her two young children, along with many other
families that are also forced to flee, but later they are forced off the road
after an air attack, and with the aid of a mysterious, but miraculously
self-sufficient 17 year old boy, they all take refuge in the woods. In this larger context of war, this is a
small story where sleep deprivation, disorientation, and the world turned
upside down becomes magnified. The
intensity of the film is provided by the always unpredictable performance of
the boy, Gaspard Ulliel, who never disappoints, who provides a stark contrast
from the more controlled Beart, who is mostly seen trying to retain her sense
of balance while the world is spinning out of control. Well crafted, this is an intense and always
interesting film.
June 1940: fleeing Paris for the south with her 12-year-old son
and small daughter, widowed teacher Odile (Emmanuelle Béart) finds it hard
enough sheltering in the forest after Nazi planes bomb the road, but her
discomfort isn’t eased much by her son accepting the help of the slightly older
‘boy’ Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel), a mysterious sort with manners that are rough even
by the rural standards Odile silently patronises. Still, Yvan finds and breaks
into an isolated mansion, where the four gradually begin to make a home for
themselves. But how long will their presence remain undetected?
André Téchiné’s 2003 film is modest, sometimes predictable and in many ways
utterly conventional, except for the expert way in which he slowly but
confidently adds layer upon layer of telling social and psychological detail to
build an emotional, authentically gripping thriller-cum-melodrama. The
performances are sturdy, and that of Béart excellent, while Agnès Godard’s
camera ensures that it never looks less than ravishing. A small movie, then,
but very pleasingly intelligent.
Life
During Wartime - Gay City News Steve Erickson
Although set during World War II, “Strayed” relegates the war’s specifics to the film’s opening and closing15 minutes. The heart of this movie lies in the lengthy central section, a four-character chamber drama. This portion could easily be reconceived as post-apocalyptic sci-fi or worked into any number of other rationales for isolating four people in a country house.
Téchiné uses war as a pretext to examine the breakdown of boundaries. When middle-class family life becomes impossible, possibilities open up. The borders between childhood and adulthood, maternal nurture and sexual attraction, and solitude and community become diffuse. The drama of “Strayed” rests in this zone.
Beginning in 1940, the film notes the beginning of
A tough teenager, Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel), takes the family under his wing. After spending a night outside, the group of survivors discovers an abandoned house. Yvan breaks in, and Odile and her children live there with him. The family grows dependent on Yvan’s hunting and fishing skills, but something seems a little off about him.
Téchiné is generally at his strongest when filming youth—as in “The Wild Reeds,” one of the best films ever made about a queer teenager, and “J’Embrasse Pas”—or middle-aged people—as in the Catherine Deneuve/ Daniel Auteuil films “Ma Saison Preferée” and “Les Voleurs.”
Odile is no longer an ingénue but not yet middle-aged. Yvan is a more typical Téchiné protagonist, a potential peer of the 1960s teens of “The Wild Reeds.” With his nearly shaven head, he looks like a refugee from the army, although he explains the extreme cropping as a response to a lice infestation. Unable to read a wine bottle’s label, he eventually reveals that he’s illiterate.
Yvan seems like the polar opposite of Odile, a proper bourgeois housewife. She’s embarrassed that she wet her pants after the raid. Beart’s performance is quite strong, embodying Odile’s ability to adapt quickly to her new surroundings. At first, she doesn’t realize that her world—especially her relationship with her children—has been upended. She’s wary of Yvan’s break-in, but no one else cares. Her children no longer obey her. Yvan, weapons collection and all, becomes the older brother Philippe never had.
In her one attempt to control Yvan, Odile buries his gun and hand grenade in the garden. Yet this isn’t really a malicious act, as she also decides to teach him how to read. Yvan fulfills several roles for the family, as both a potential lover and a surrogate son.
The pastoral setting of “Strayed” is extremely vivid. It lends a touch of unreality to the film, keeping the war’s violence and despair at a safe distance. The woods are benevolent, full of rabbits for Yvan to trap and frogs for Cathy to tame. Subtly, the film takes on the air of a fairy tale, a common technique for recent French films. Since a radio is hidden and clocks don’t tell accurate time, the story seems to take place out of time.
Téchiné doesn’t deliver on the promise of this portion of the film. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the narrative must bring the characters back to the real world of 1940. In any case, Odile and Yvan play out all the possible permutations of their relationship before leaving the house. Two middle-aged soldiers come by, bringing back the stench of war. The boundaries of “normal” life reassert themselves, ending a lovely, if unsettling, reverie.
However prosaic the conclusion seems, the film’s vision of wide-open space—both physical and mental—cannot be extinguished.
Les Egares - Strayed - Andre Techine - 2003 - film review James Travers from Films de France
“Strayed” (“Les
- Salon.com Charles Taylor from Salon
Surviving Desire Dennis Lim from The Village Voice, May 4, 2004
Film Journal International [Wendy Weinstein]
Alice And Martin Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club
Strayed
(Les Egares) | Reviews | Screen
Allan Hunter from Screendaily
Together Again in the Dark: The 2003 Chicago International Film ... Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2003
Future
Movies [Michelle Thomas]
Les égarés | Franz
Patrick's Film Archive
The Digital Fix [Noel Megahey]
STRAYED (André Téchiné, 2003) | Dennis Grunes
Troy - Strayed - Coffee
and Cigarettes - New York Magazine Movie ... Peter Rainer from New York magazine
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
eFilmCritic
Reviews Scott Weinberg
The 56th Cannes International
Film Festival (2003) - Movie reviews by ... Edwin Jahiel
Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]
Strayed |
Film | The Guardian Philip
French
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
'Strayed':
In War-Torn France, Clinging Together at Arm's Length ... Stephen Hunter from The Washington Post
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Strayed Movie Review
& Film Summary (2004) | Roger Ebert
New York Times Stephen Holden
Strayed (2003 film) - Wikipedia
France (90 mi) 2004
Changing Times
| Jonathan Rosenbaum
After peaking with My Favorite Season (1993), Wild Reeds (1994), and Thieves (1996), French director Andre Techine went into decline with Alice and Martin (1998), Far (2001), and Strayed (2003), often biting off more than he could chew. This 2004 feature also overreaches, especially in its metaphorical moments (a mud slide at a construction site that frames the action), but it’s his strongest film since Thieves, a characteristic effort to juxtapose various cultures, generations, and sexualities as people converge and diverge in Tangier. Volatile and sometimes daring performances by Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Malik Zidi, and Lubna Azabal (as twins) contribute to the highly charged and novelistic experience. In French with subtitles.
Anyone who ever tried to recapture the heart of a woman who closed it to them can relate to this love story that reunites screen legends Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. Andre Techine is in Francois Truffaut romantic mode, making a work that understands humanity and thus knows love can be creepy and baffling to anyone other than the lover(s), and maybe even to them. It's like Antoine decided to try to win back Colette after all these years, except that was early Truffaut and Techine is more in the conventional mode of Truffaut's disappointing later work. Antoine's (Depardieu) personal life halted when he broke up with Cecile (Deneuve) 31 years ago. His career flourished, and he'd be considered a success because he's got plenty of dough, but this was largely because he had nothing else to do with his time but think of Cecile while he worked. Cecile moved on in her love life, having two husbands and one son. She had a modicum of success hosting a radio show, but both are unfulfilled in their own ways. Through the ridiculousness of being so utterly petrified of rejection he just waited and waited, Antoine reenters Cecile's life at a time when she doesn't have much in the way of attachments and obligations to turn him down for. Her marriage to her much younger and totally unfaithful doctor husband (Gilbert Melki) is crumbling, and her son is all grown up. The unapologetic characters aren't very likeable, with Antoine's tactics regularly making the audience uneasy and Cecile being a cruel ice woman threatened by true love. Of course, through much contrivance she suddenly comes around to him. This solid comedy drama about the effects of time passing with everyone doing their part exposes Techine's typical story weaknesses because the style is far from memorable. There are a lot of asides to fill out the run time, which is not a bad thing. The thinness of Techine, Laurent Guyot, & Pascal Bonitzer's main story is certainly a weakness, and perhaps some of the back stories should have been expanded, but everyone is a product of their world so working in trials and tribulations, longings and desires, cultural and religious differences of the day adds depth and dimension. Depardieu is the best thing about the film, playing a character like his Cyrano minus the poetry and charm. His clumsy, uncomfortable portrayal of a man who has a hard time willing himself to act and can't find the words, but nonetheless puts himself in the path of the person he needs some affection from reminds us of what a great actor he was before he contracted Kinskiitis (affliction rendering the subject unable to decline any paying role).
"Changing Times" is the latest film by the well-admired and accomplished director André Téchiné. It is a welcome return to the classic gratifications of French cinema at a time when the Gallic blockbuster has more and more come to resemble the broad sentimentality and facile predictability of its American counterparts.
Here, a successful engineer, Antoine Laveau (played by Gerard Depardieu), arrives in Tangiers after a departure of 30 years to reclaim his first love, Cecile (Catherine Deneuve), who currently lives with her younger Moroccan husband (the dignified Gilbert Melki) and whose family dynamics are complicated enough already with the arrival of their gay son, his Moroccan girlfriend, her drug problem, and their own nineyear-old son. Rather than the mawkish fairytale it would seem at first glance, the film quickly reveals itself to be a surprisingly measured observation on the equivocal nature of our emotions and the irresolution of human action.
The deft touch of Mr.Téchiné, his approach at once sardonic and romantic, is perfectly articulated in Ms. Deneuve; her gift for appearing unsentimental in the midst of florid stories of grand passions has long been her particular talent and an undeniable element in her pervasive chic. Her self-possession and imperturbability, when paired with the lumbering, unexpectedly graceful restraint of Mr. Depardieu, makes this picture oddly compelling despite its rather hoary premise. It is highly gratifying to watch quiet prowess of these two giants of the French screen display their admirable strengths under Mr. Téchiné's excellent guidance.
The film is not without its problems, the most basic of which being a lingering indecision about how to address the social or political situation in Tangiers and Morocco's legacy of colonialism. Whenever the film addresses the relations between the French and the native residents of Tangiers, the impression it gives is paternalistic and slightly discomfiting, while the aesthetic and erotic tribute paid to the environs smacks of a very French love of the exotic. Both Celeste's young husband and her son's native paramour are often shirtless, occasionally wet, seemingly uncomplicated objects of sexual gratification leaving the larger questions of love, destiny, and identity to the Europeans. It is impressive that despite this unfortunate context, Mr. Melki is able to make the character of Natan, Celeste's husband, not only appealing, but perhaps the most sympathetic figure of them all.
Throughout the film, Mr. Téchiné maintains the visual lyricism that will be familiar to those acquainted with his work. By allowing the camera to linger over the sensual richness of the locality, capturing the dissonance of the modern city of Tangiers, he presents a vision of Morocco at once romantic and strikingly realistic.
"Changing Times" is not a spectacular film, but it is a rare opportunity to watch an extremely gifted cast of actors work with a talented director and serves as a pleasant reminder of the pleasures of the distinctly French filmmaking tradition.
Boston Review — stone.php Alan A. Stone, November/December 2006
Changing Times (2004) | PopMatters Emma Simmonds
Les
Temps qui changent - Changing Times - Andre Techine - 2004 ... James Travers from Films de France
Changing Times
| Film Review | Slant Magazine
Ed Gonzalez
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Changing Times Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club
Last
Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]
Changing Times :
DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video
Svet Atanasov
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson
Changing
Times - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
Changing
Times | Variety Lisa Nesselson
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Changing Times -
Review - Movies - The New York Times
DVDBeaver.com
[Christopher Long]
Changing Times (film) - Wikipedia
Despite the relevancy of the subject matter, this feels like a time
capsule from another era, like a dusty screenplay has been lying around
unnoticed for twenty years and somehow Téchiné finally found the funding to
make the film. Set in 1984 during the
initial AIDS outbreak, a time when everything changed, as catching the virus
was paramount to death, when preventative measures were still unknown, and when
so many people died at early ages, this film follows the path of one young man
who eventually succumbs to the illness, providing a portrait of his world and
what it was like at that time, how intelligent minded people were not so quick
to adjust their thinking or their sexual behavior, and how fear became a
prominent part of everyone’s lives. This
is really a film about living with that fear.
The question is: why now? How will this film, which is so completely
wrapped around a specific period of unenlightenment, when the consequences were
enormous, how will that be relevant to our lives today? Politically speaking, one could easily answer
that question, as through a needless war, one might parallel a period of
political blindness, but this is a humanist, not a political film, one that
weaves its way in and out of the lives of a small circle of friends, painting
an intimate and affectionate portrait, among which includes the difficulties
involved in sustaining love interests during these times.
A director that typically shoots in ‘Scope, he adds a novelistic brush to his portraits of human relationships, exploring the complexities usually through his own intelligent screenplays, through superb acting performances, concise editing, and without any extraneous frills. While this film is no different, featuring a terrific ensemble cast, and an engaging lead performance from Johan Libéreau, this film never rises above its own self-imposed limitations, namely that it is a period piece. Emmanuelle Béart is tired of writing children’s stories, but is encountering writer’s block after the birth of her first child, and narrates brief passages of her work, a device that feels sloppy and never once really worked in drawing us into anyone’s inner sanctum. Her husband Mehdi, Sami Bouajila, is a black vice cop whose own promiscuous behavior leaves a moral void. As this is a French film, they both sleep around. Michel Blanc is an older gay physician who has his eyes on young Johan Libéreau, but the young boy has a torrid affair with Mehdi instead, much of it graphically revealed, that is, until he starts exhibiting signs of the virus, at which point all the various relationships in the film recoil and basically have to begin anew. There’s nothing really surprising about this film, no metamorphic moment that stands out, no cinematic novelty, and no driving force behind the making of the film other than nostalgia, recalling what it was like thirty years after the fact. Perhaps few films address this subject in France, or then again, maybe the director feels fortunate to have survived this period, when others didn’t, making a film paying tribute to those that lost their lives. As a well constructed chamber piece, this might play better in a live theatrical stage production, but despite the best intentions of a smart and mature filmmaker who specializes in relationship scrutiny, this is a head scratcher, well made but by the numbers, void of any real emotional power, providing no real sense of urgency or relevancy to the modern era, feeling somehow unnecessary and even passé.
The Witnesses (2007), directed by André Téchiné | Film review Dave Calhoun from Time Out
With its three acts, ever-shifting relationships, a minor character who earns a living as a soprano and significant moments spent at the theatre, André Téchiné hints at an operatic approach in his ensemble drama set in mid-’80s Paris, yet the French director handles a tragic story without ever touching on hysteria, melodrama or sentimentality. We follow a cycle from summer to winter and summer again as Téchiné swiftly examines a turbulent year in the lives of three unlikely friends and an outsider who joins their close-knit group at the time that AIDS is emerging. There are striking and well-explored conflicts of class, sexuality and race, yet Téchiné’s characters are neither models of disharmony nor paragons of friendship; they are a believable and likeable group of friends struggling to handle the entry of a disease into their easy lives.
No character invites more or less sympathy than the other. Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) is a new mother and writer of children’s books who’s married to Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a harried cop from a less privileged background. He appears, at least on the surface, more sensible than his wife, who’s finding motherhood a trial. Trouble brews when Sarah invites her friend, Adrien (Michel Blanc), a fiftysomething, well-heeled doctor, to spend the weekend at her mother’s house on the coast, and he brings with him Manu (Johan Libéreau), a young lad from the Ariège who he met when cruising in the city. Relationships slip and slide, illness emerges and we are presented with a credible, pacy and moving snapshot of sexuality in the mid-’80s.
‘The Witnesses’ is a film about disease and death, but neither appear extraordinary here – instead Téchiné’s story is all too realistic. Nor is Téchiné much interested in the mechanics of dying and grieving; it’s the relationships that matter the most, and the characters never feel as if they’re occupying a treatise on the period. The occasional voiceover from Béart and a slightly mournful score from Philippe Sarde offer some sense of lament, but mostly this unfolds in the moment and is urgent and engaging.
Young and Restless | The New Yorker David Denby
In “The Witnesses,”
the veteran French director André Téchiné has tried to capture the uneasy
moment when the AIDS virus first hit Paris. The year is 1984, and Manu (Johan
Libéreau), a carefree young man from the South, lives at the center of a
sophisticated group of friends: a middle-aged gay doctor, Adrien (Michel
Blanc), who makes Manu his protégé without demanding anything from him
sexually; the doctor’s friend Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), a narcissistic
children’s-book writer who is looking for a grownup subject, and finally finds
one in Manu’s life; her husband, Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a detective on the Paris
vice squad who becomes Manu’s lover; and Manu’s older sister, Julie (Julie
Depardieu), an opera singer whose performance of Mozart suggests a depth of
feeling missing in the others. The older characters have mixed motives and
complicated lives, but Manu is a boy, really, with a boy’s candor, willfulness,
and occasional cruelty. Slender, with a confident grin, he’s attractive but not
a great beauty—it’s his youth that they’re all in love with. When he becomes
mysteriously ill, they gather around to save his life if they can.
Téchiné is unusually
adroit at manipulating a complex set of relations within a very mixed group of
people. This movie is easy to take—chatty and sociable, with a brightly lit,
even sunshiny gloss and an open sensuality. Michel Blanc’s doctor, a
disciplined man who keeps control of his feelings, is established as a kind of
ideal—he’s the one forcing the others to see AIDS as a crisis and to take some
responsibility for fighting it. “The Witnesses” is highly intelligent, but,
still, one wants more out of this particular subject than lucidity and good
sense. Téchiné has made such strong movies as “French Provincial” (1975) and
“Wild Reeds” (1994), but “The Witnesses,” despite some bouts of temper and
bitterness, has a largely placid bourgeois surface: the gay cruising scenes are
almost picturesque in their gentleness; and Manu has a smart, playful
female-prostitute friend who insists on the dignity of her trade and is mildly
annoyed by the way AIDS is disrupting it—she seems like someone out of a
musical comedy. Rawness is a quality that seems to have disappeared from French
cinema with the death of Maurice Pialat. And Téchiné draws on an oddity of
French civility that seems particularly inappropriate here: the older
characters all announce what they are feeling, and what their opinions are of
one another, in perfectly formed, rapidly delivered sentences. They summarize
their emotions rather than living through them. Unconsciously, perhaps, Téchiné
has produced a portrait of a group of people who are determined to show that,
whatever disaster happens, nothing really gets to them.
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Les Wright
The year is 1984. The place is
As the film opens, Adrien (Michel Blanc), a fifty-something gay
doctor and the emotional center of this film, is engaged in conversation with a
young gay man recently arrived in
Meanwhile, Adrien’s friend Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) has just had her first child with her husband Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a Parisian vice cop of Algerian descent. Sarah, an artist and a very immature woman, has no natural affinity to children. She is frequently framed in glowing, searing, burning yellows, framed in scenes similarly saturated with yellows, from nearby flowers, drapes, fabrics, walls, as if she were somehow a part of the very fabric of her environment.
And Mehdi is about to have an emotional encounter with Manu, rescuing the latter in a freak swimming accident. What should have been a happy occasion for the married couple has become the occasion for grave personal and artistic self-doubt in the wife, and an alibi for the vice cop to explore the transgressive erotic side of this unexpected emotional attachment outside his married life.
To complete the scenario, add to this mix Manu’s sister Julie
(Julie Depardieu); Manu is staying with his sister in her room in a
neighborhood brothel. The
Various love stories unfold, at times running parallel, at times jumping tracks, physical passions refracted through increasingly deeper and muddier emotional bonds. As betrayals and alliances mutate (foreshadowing the evolution of AIDS itself), each person will soon find himself or herself an unwilling witness to the ravages that this emergent illness will come to unleash on their hearts and lives.
A highly deserving and thoroughly engrossing dramatist, Téchiné (Wild Reeds, 1994) affords himself the opportunity to reintroduce the most devastating page of the sexual history of the twentieth century to new audiences. The Witnesses makes for a timely and timeless telling of the tale of AIDS, the most political disease of modern times, and how it shattered an innocence no one knew existed until it was gone. Never polemical, freq
French veteran director André Téchiné proves he remains one of the foremost chroniclers of French life and human relationships in general with his haunting new drama Les témoins (The Witnesses), which played in competition at the recent Berlinale. This multi-layered story set in the 1980s focuses on the contrasts between illness and health, sex and romance, friendship and companionship and the fluidity of all these categories in the face of the capriciousness of both life and the humans who get to live it to tell the tale. Despite a disappointing opening on French soil, this highly intelligent drama should connect with arthouse audiences across the continent before finding an even bigger following on DVD.
Téchiné (Les temps qui changent/Changing Times) has long proved to be a master of condensing his preoccupations in such a way that only a few players are needed to bring his universal themes into sharp -- though certainly not unambiguous -- focus. In Les témoins, which the director co-wrote with Laurent Guyot and Viviane Zingg, the motor of the story is the attractive youngster Manu, played by Johan Libéreau, who proves here that his great debut in Douches froides (Cold Showers) was no accident. A plucky and uncomplicated gay boy from the provinces, Manu unexpectedly turns up on the doorstep of his sister’s rented room in a Parisian house of ill repute to move in and enjoy big city life. Julie (Julie Depardieu) is actually an opera trainee but can’t find nor afford anything better to live in and would rather see her brother go. But one flash of Manu’s winning and sincere smile is all that is needed to convince her otherwise.
When cruising for sex in a park late at night, Manu encounters the 50-year-old doctor Adrien (veteran actor Michel Blanc) who offers him company and a place to crash, though, on Manu’s insistence, their relationship remains strictly platonic. In one of the signs of Téchiné’s economic storytelling, a children’s book author working on her first adult novel (Emmanuelle Béart, from Téchiné's Les égarés/Strayed) and her police officer husband (Sami Bouajila, from Indigènes/Days of Glory) are all that is needed to bring the tale to life -- and, later, death and beyond. Béart’s Sarah (who occasionally provides the voice-over narration) is a good friend of Adrien and has just had her first child for whom she cares little (She resorts to writing with her earplugs in place when the child’s crying keeps her out of her concentration.) Mehdi seems to enjoy his role as a father more but barely has any time as his work as a tough Parisian law enforcer is not only a full-time job but really a way of life.
On a weekend at the seaside home of Sarah’s parents, Adrien introduces Manu to the busy couple and his magical smile seems to work its effect on everyone, but especially Mehdi, who is as surprised as anyone to fall for the handsome young man. The exact moment of the proverbial spark can almost be seen literally in a beautifully photographed sequence that starts with Mehdi and Manu horsing around in and under water to the latter’s near-drowning and Mehdi dragging Manu to shore and his shocking realisation that -- while holding him in a position that uncannily evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà -- as a policeman and a fellow human being it is his duty to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
This scene is the pivot on which the story turns. Mehdi and Manu begin a clandestine affair that basically consists of daily meetings for sex (Medhi and Sarah have an open marriage); Adrien finds out and finds the thought that somebody else is having sex with Manu unbearable (but especially the fact that it is Sarah’s husband) and Manu then comes down with a mysterious illness that Adrien tries his best to understand. Sarah, in turn, finally finds inspiration for her work in the turmoil of the characters’ personal lives, though the others are not too keen to see their troubles exposed except for Manu, who realises that there is no cure in sight for AIDS and he is deteriorating quickly. At least his story is something a penniless youngster like him can leave behind.
The same scene also highlights many other important aspects of the film, notably its stunning cinematography by Julien Hirsch (César winner for Lady Chatterley), which uses a slightly larger-than-usual grain that puts everything on screen squarely in the pre-digital era. The shot of the lifeless Manu as held by Mehdi is but one of the film’s many carefully composed images that are not only beautiful but also resonate on a thematic level. Earlier, Manu was shown running along the rocky coast in a travelling shot that ends when Manu runs up into a barren tree and cannot climb up any further, cut off from the ground yet not yet up in the sky.
Another mesmerizing shot shows Manu and his sister in two alternated close-ups in a completely still lake. Both face the camera but are unable to speak because their mouths are submerged in the water. Not speaking would seem fatal for an opera singer and someone who wants to pass on his story, but both seem serene, even happy. The continuous presence of water is important throughout the film and is used as an indicator of fluidity in general and to reflect the passage yet the muteness of time ("one can never step into the same river twice yet the river is a constant presence").
The fluidity of water is also a physical reminder that category boundaries in human relationships are not as clear-cut as they might at first appear. Mehdi, for example, is a revealed to be not only a butch law enforcer but also a loving father and a passionate and caring lover who withers away when Manu refuses to see him when AIDS turns him into a physical wreck. Clearly, for Medhi their relationship was about more than sex alone (Bouajila’s extraordinary performance is a revelation; watch the scene in which he visits Manu at the camping: it feels like a French-language outtake of Brokeback Mountain -- it is that intense). Likewise Adrien is revealed to be more than the forced-to-be-platonic admirer; Sarah is not just a woman with a writer’s block and a form of postnatal depression and Manu is not just an innocent young man hit by adversity. Only Julie is somewhat underdeveloped and could have used some more screentime.
Still, Téchine, aided by his screenwriters and his regular editor Martine Giordano, succeeds in cramming more material into his 112-minute film than in all the 350 minutes of Angels in America combined. More importantly, it is not strictly about AIDS but "just" about human beings trying to get on with life for however long it may last and -- if they are lucky -- bear witness to the strength and complexity of the human spirit.
Comment written
by Matt
Riviera, on 01-05-2007
Great review! You've really helped me pinpoint what it is about
this film I so greatly admire. It has to do with each character being more
complex than they initially appear. While that's not surprising in a Téchiné
film - he loves conflicted characters who struggle with their own sense of
identity - it's surprising for a film (mostly) about AIDS.
Waiting 20 years or so to shoot this film has really made a difference with
many of the titles on the same subject. Most of the early films about AIDS use
different characters to portray different attitudes to (and target populations
of) the disease. This one shows that these different attitudes often cohabit
within the same person. It's a more truthful approach, and therefore perhaps,
it makes for a more poignant film.
As for the later films tackling AIDS, well, there aren't many are there? I actually
think Angels in America (the play, if not necessarily the
mini-series) did have a lot of insightful things to say on the subject, but
it's a mutli-layered piece which demands several reads.
Frequently philosophical, occasionally
saturnine, and beautifully filmed and acted, this film is a minor masterpiece, and
one of the best films about AIDS to date.
BFI | Sight & Sound | The Witnesses (2007) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, November 2007
World
Cinema Review: André Téchiné | Les Témoins (The Witnesses) Douglas Messerli
Les Temoins - The Witnesses - Andre Techine - 2007 - film review James Travers from Films de France
The Witnesses |
Film Review | Slant Magazine Bill
Weber
Unbearable
Lightness: André Téchiné's The Witnesses | The House ... Dan Callahan from The House Next Door
The Witnesses (2007) Review | CultureVulture Beverly Berning
When
Everything Changed | Village Voice Nathan Lee
The
House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
The Witnesses Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
THE WITNESSES | Film Journal
International David Noh
Rambo - The Witnesses - Praying
With Lior -- New York Magazine ...
David Edelstein
Cinemattraction.com [Maxine Harfield]
The Witnesses (2007) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson
Combustible
Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
Witnesses
by Andre Techine | Emanuel Levy
Emanuel Levy interview, January 29, 2008
The Witnesses Movie
Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
San Francisco Chronicle [David Wiegand]
The Witnesses -
Movies - Review - The New York Times
Stephen Holden
THE
GIRL ON THE TRAIN (La Fille du RER) B 88
Téchiné has been among the most adroit social observers in the modern era,
usually writing or co-writing his own films which have an intimate chamber
drama quality with an understated intelligence, accentuating the performances,
both male and female, as well as the entire ensemble cast, is fond of the use
of ‘Scope, and this film is no exception.
Another dense and psychologically complex society exposé brought into
fruition by an expert cast of characters that unfortunately leaves the audience
less than thoroughly engaged, only superficially touching on some of the
subjects raised, such as the role of the next generation blinded by the glare
of media attention and the race to get stories out there before obtaining the
facts, the public’s responsibility, if any, in allowing themselves to become
satiated by superficiality and ever more dramatic headlines where anyone’s
version of the truth depends on whichever side of the political spectrum they
already belong to. Adapted from a play,
this is nonetheless concise and meticulously well crafted, as always, where the
film does gain momentum over time, but does not sustain the needed dramatic
tension throughout. Rosetta’s Émilie Dequenne, luminous onscreen, her face less puffy,
a bit thinner overall, still attractive, alienated and aloof, though she has a
loving and nurturing relationship with her mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve in
her 103rd screen appearance), finally makes it to France, is still
without a job, as co-writer and director Téchiné dissects the restless and
anxiety-ridden human condition by unraveling various layers of modern
society. All is not well, it seems, as
the TV and radio continue to announce reports of random acts of senseless
violence, where people are brutally attacked, seemingly for no reason other
than, perhaps, obvious racial or class distinctions. As we see and hear the constant rumble of
trains cutting their way through urban neighborhoods, Jeanne (Dequenne) remains
oblivious to it all as she rollerblades down the street while listening to her
ipod in her ear. In much the same vein,
Michel Blanc plays a respected civil rights attorney Samuel Bleinstein whose
office overlooks a bustling city street where he tunes out the street sounds to
immerse himself in his work. In this
way, society grows numb as they naturally desensitize themselves to their
surroundings, soon putting those police reports out of their minds as
well. Téchiné interweaves some of these
disconnected parts, and in doing so, reveals invisible connecting strands
holding us together that are barely noticeable, yet vitally significant.
Nicolas Duvauchelle plays Franck, a wrestler of some repute,
who blocks and hovers around Jeanne’s path as she rollerblades down the street
in a somewhat obnoxious display of courtship, as he also reaches for her hand
while displaying the boorish behavior of a stalker. In this manner they meet, and strangely, she
agrees to go out with him, which is wonderfully expressed through a series of
hyper saturated images of video e-mails, where in succession, they appear less and
less clothed. In no time at all they are
a couple, always driven apparently by Franck’s insistent impulses. When we realize he’s parentless with a
brother in prison that he refuses to talk about, where the audience at least
senses a kind of brooding, sulking behavior, which makes it all the more
surprising that such a nice, well brought up girl would get mixed up with a guy
who appears destined for trouble. Her
mother senses this as well, but Franck wastes no time being blunt about his
marriage intentions, and Jeanne immediately moves in with him. A friend of Franck’s offers them a large sum
of money to house sit while he’s away, which they accept no questions
asked. In no time trouble ensues,
trouble of the worst kind. Without
realizing it, Jeanne is naively connected.
Another storyline revolves around the attorney Bleinstein,
where his son Alec (Mathieu Demy) and grandson Nathan (Jérémie Quaegebeur) are
going through hard times of their own, personified by an explosive separation
between Nathan’s parents, Alec and Judith (the ever fiery Ronit Elkabetz),
whose blistering contempt for one another in every waking moment actually
produces some of the best scenes in the film.
But their bickering and constant infighting keeps Nathan on edge, who
escapes through isolation and by feigning disinterest in the world around
him. Of note, Bleinstein was
romantically interested in Louise before she got married, losing her husband to
an accidental death shortly afterwards and she never regained contact with Bleinstein,
but she’s seen him recently make several TV appearances berating the rise in
Jewish attacks in France, which leads her to hope that her daughter could get a
job working for his law firm. We soon
discover she’s nearly talentless and is something of an airhead, yet the firm
gives her an opportunity that she squanders as soon as she meets Franck. Everyone’s life is in turmoil of some kind,
and only Bleinstein displays a professional calm and an objectively detached
demeanor.
The film changes gears often but eventually focuses its attention
on Jeanne, who inexplicably goes through a series of violent physical
alterations in order to report a crime that never happened, yet she blames it
on these roving gangs of anti-Semitic youth.
Her report draws attention and is soon plastered all over the airwaves,
but she has little to say about it to her mother, who immediately suspects a
fabrication. She calls upon Bleinstein
to help sort out the details and the families meet together in the languid calm
of his summer home. Nathan is even more
disgusted than ever as by now his parents have made up and are a couple again,
which confuses him to no end. But it’s
only a matter of time before Jeanne’s story unravels. It’s interesting how it is revealed in the
tenderest fashion between the children, Jeanne and Nathan, where a surprising
trust develops. Their generations are
obviously question marks in French society, as their childhoods coincide with
the explosion of information through the Internet and 24 hour news cycles,
where instant information has unique consequences, resembling an assault to the
senses where at times pressures turn into self-destructive behavior, people
unable to cope with everything that’s thrown at them. Téchiné suggests the cohesive threads that bind us
all together as a society are disappearing, leaving unexplained ruptures,
gaping holes to fill, sometimes expressed through personal acts of violence
that society always seems surprised to discover.
What intrigued me the most in this film was Julien Hirsch’s
exquisite use of close ups which are beautifully blown up in ‘Scope, followed
by quick, nearly uncomfortable hand held camera movements, finding
misdirection, changes of speed, and extreme irregularity in the manner of which
the movie itself is being filmed, also a musical cue by Philippe Sarde that
sounds exactly like the exquisitely tender Michel Legrand opening bars in
Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE (1962), which opens on Ana Karina and lasts but a few
short seconds before coming to a complete stop, a musical fragment in a story
told in fragments, that disappears only to resurface again and again throughout
that film. I have no idea if this was
intentional, but it certainly adds a sensuous layer of unexpected melancholic
ambiguity to this film, a summoning of the past almost like a subliminal
musical memory.
Special Note — cinematography by Julien Hirsch. music by
Philippe Sarde, best actress Émilie Dequenne, best supporting actor Nicolas Duvauchelle, best supporting actress Ronit
Elkabetz, best editing, best ensemble acting
Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel and Kent Turner (excerpt)
Téchiné’s unsettling The Girl on the Train is his best film in years and
already one of 2009’s highlights, freely inspired by a sensational real-life
media furor.
Often the director crams too many themes and characters into his issue-laden
portraits of contemporary
User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from
This Téchiné "issue" film is based on
an actual news story of a young woman who pretended to have suffered an
anti-Semitic attack on an RER (Réseau Express Régional) train that connects
There's much to like, not least of which is a cast that includes Francophone
mega-stars Michel Blanc and (Téchiné regular) Catherine Deneuve (as old
friends) and lively young actors Nicolas Duvauchelle (of 'Les corps
impatients') and Emilie Dequenne (star of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta. This
director is always good at juggling social levels and relationships (see Les
Voleurs). But the subject matter seems forced and not super-relevant, a problem
also of The Witnesses, but this time the issues arise in a way that makes them
seem much less urgent than the AIDS crisis. Why does Jeanne (Dequenne) make up
this story? What are its ramifications for actual Jews victimized by
anti-Semites--and for the level of anti-Semitism in
Jeanne lives with her mother Louise (Deneuve) in a house with a garden in the
suburbs of
Before that, an online meeting: Jeanne connects in a chat-room with Frank
(Duvachelle), a tattooed martial arts champion whose background may be dodgier
than she realizes, but who is clearly more motivated than her because of his
credible pro-sport ambitions. Jeanne and Frank have a roller-blade date and hit
it off pretty fast. Before long Jeanne's not only sleeping over with Frank but
sharing the responsibility of minding a mysterious electronics warehouse whose
owner is away. It turns out the warehouse holds something other than
electronics, and Frank's uncooperativeness with some gangster types causes him
to wind up in the hospital with a potentially fatal stab wound. Frank, who has
already been troubled by Jeanne's habit of lying, decides his involvement with
her isn't good for either of them. It's in the wake of Frank's rejection that
Jeanne cuts herself and paints on swastikas with a felt pen, then goes to the
police with an invented story of being assaulted on the RER. by racist
anti-Semites.
Somewhat to Jeanne's shock, her story arouses an immediate and rapidly
metastasizing media frenzy. She is soon forced to admit her lie. This gets her
in trouble with the law. This in turn leads Louise to call on her old friend
Samuel, whom she's newly aware of from finding the job at his office on the
Internet. We get scenes of Samuel's extended family, a Jewish family, whose
members are debating over the coming bar mitzvah of young Nathan. (The young
actor has a strong presence; I can't find his name in the casting list. But his
father Alex is played by Mathieu Demy and his mother Judith by the vivid Ronit
Elkabetz.) 'La fille du RER' (film's French title) is meant to creep up on you.
Perhaps to avoid being stamped "thriller" or "crime story,"
but also to show how violence can pop up unexpectedly in what seem everyday
lives, it meanders for an hour before Frank's stabbing. Throughout, the film
explores semi-chance interconnections of different people with complex family
ties--and some, like Frank, who're estranged from any family--in a world where
violence can strike all of a sudden, and is so ever-present it becomes a tool
to be used by a young woman to get attention. In her search for
identity--missing perhaps due to the absence of her father and the lack of any
commitment to work--Jeanne seeks an artificial identity in pretending to be
Jewish and a victim of violence. As Stephen Holden notes in his 'NYTimes'
Rendez-Vous roundup, "Mr. Téchiné shows his special empathy for the ways
youthful impatience can trigger impulsively self-destructive behavior."
For young Nathan, identity is being presented on a silver platter in the
traditional coming-of-age ritual of a bar mitzvah.
Julien Hirsch is responsible for the film's bright, beautiful look. Costume
designer Radija Zeggai gets the credit one assumes, for Deneuve's wonderfully
frumpy-chic outfits.
Last
Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Taking as a point of departure the sordid true story of a
young woman's lie about having being attacked on a suburban train by
anti-Semites, André Téchiné's new film spins a vivid, multi-layered yarn will
keeps the viewer hooked from start to finish.
Jeanne (Rosetta's Emilie Dequenne) lives in the
suburbs with her mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve). A self-absorbed dreamer,
she spends her summer days roller-blading from one job-interview to the next,
her quick wit unable to compensate for the holes in her CV. When she falls for
Franck, a young wrestler involved in dodgy schemes, her need to be loved
becomes apparent, as does her naiveté.
Meanwhile Louise decides to get back in touch with an old
flame, high-flying Jewish lawyer Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc), initially
because he can be of help to her daughter, but also because a romantic
re-awakening seems possible. When Franck gets in trouble with the police,
Louise calls on the Bleistein family for help, but events take on an unexpected
turn when Jeanne decides to re-invent herself as the victim of an anti-semitic
act of violence, a claim which places her at the centre of a media storm and
high-stakes political debate.
Despite being divided into two neat halves - exploring first
the circumstances surrounding the central non-event then its ramifications -
the film confounds audience expectations, shifting focus constantly from one
character to the next, adding layer upon layer psychological and political
complexity to its treatment of the real-life news story.
While the unpredictability of the narrative might frustrate
some, it handsomely rewards those willing to go along for the ride. Because the
alleged attack never actually happened, Téchiné chooses to treat it as a
non-event, preferring to focus on his characters as the keys to unlocking his
subtle analysis of class, religious fanaticism, media hype and political
spin.
His generous characterization goes hand in hand with superb
work on the part of the actors. Deneuve gives a warm performance and convinces
as an ageing working class widow while Dequenne is a revelation as the
beautiful Jeanne, eager to take control of her life but unable to fully grasp
the complexity of the world she lives in. Great supporting turns include
French heavy-weight Michel Blanc as the notorious lawyer and Ronit
Elkabetz (The
Band's Visit) as his no-nonsense colleague and
daughter-in-law.
No one in French cinema films men the way Téchiné
does. I've often found French filmmakers uneasy with filming male sexuality
beyond the obvious stereotypes. Téchiné approaches the male form with
the same ease most of his peers tackle female characters: unafraid of the
complexity of the body, its potential for both violence and pleasure. Nicolas
Duvauchelle is perfect as Jeanne's rough but seductive boyfriend and his
raw, layered performance is brought out by Téchiné's fearless eye.
One scene in particular is executed with imaginative
brilliance. Jeanne and Franck's courtship takes place mostly online - reflecting
an increasingly common reality with which cinema has had trouble catching up
with. Téchiné films the internet conversations by blurring the cinema
screen with the computer screen, playing with points of view and placing the
viewer at the heart of a virtual - and therefore difficult to film -
conversation.
Despite its serious subject matter, The Girl on the Train
feels lighter than air. The credit goes to Téchiné's lean,
fluid direction which ensures that everyone is always, quite literally, on the
move. While it may have begun as a stage play, the story makes the most of
its cinematic potential, jumping from one summery location to the next as its
characters travel across town and eventually, to the country, in their attempts
to connect.
In the summer of 2006 I wrote the following
about Téchiné's Changing
Times (Les Temps Qui Changent): Téchiné's characters
share an unstoppable energy, an urge to connect, to ignore psychological
introspection and express their desires in the bluntest of terms, whatever the
cost to others.
The same can be said of the vividly drawn characters in
this film. Bypassing small talk and exposition, the screenwriters let actions
lead the characters forward, going head to head with impactful dialogue. This
enables the storytelling to move along at breakneck speed without sacrificing
on characterization and mirrors the running theme behind Téchiné's later
work, the need for pragmatism at the expense of sentimentality.
The same urgency already fuelled the 66 year-old director's
last film the AIDS drama The
Witnesses (LesTemoins): Téchiné sets the pace
and the editor, the actors and (eventually) the audience is asked to keep up.
The key to enjoying these films is to look at the journey,
not the destination. Because The Girl on the Train is framed by
Jeanne's lie and the issues it raises, it's easy to underestimate to long lead
up to this supposedly key event (which only "happens" an hour into
the film). Doing so means following a red herring: the film is not where you
expect it to be.
That Téchiné doesn't often bother to look behind
his shoulder to see if we're following will infuriate some, but if like me you
rejoice at the idea of a film refusing to insult your intelligence, you'll
count Téchiné as one of French cinema's great contemporary masters.
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Oggs' Movie Thoughts Oggs Cruz
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
The Girl on the Train (Andre Techine, 2009) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Mubi, October 12, 2009
The Girl On The Train Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club
Review: André Téchiné's “Girl on the Train” explores a French anti ... Steve Murray from Artsatl
Cinema365
[Carlos deVillalvilla]
“The
Girl on the Train” and “Under the Shadow” | The New Yorker Anthony Lane
MovieMartyr.com
[Jeremy Heilman]
Screen International review Jonathan Romney
Confessions
of a Pop Fan [Jamie S. Rich]
Film-Forward.com Lisa Bernier
Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Jennie Kermode]
The
Girl on the Train, Human Experience Lathered Into ... - Village Voice Ella Taylor
eFilmCritic
Reviews Jay Seaver
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Variety (Ronnie Scheib) review
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Philadelphia
Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Movie
review: 'The Girl on the Train' goes off the rails - Washington Post Michael O’Sullivan
'The
Girl on the Train' - latimes Mark Olsen
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
New
York Times Manohla
Dargis
UNFORGIVABLE (Impardonnables) B- 80
France Italy (111 mi)
2011 ‘Scope
André Téchiné has
distinguished himself through elegant films that delve into the complexities of
human emotion and relationships. Known
particularly for his ability to draw strong performances out of his female
performers, Téchiné has collaborated with some of his country's most respected
actresses, and some of the best examples of his work were his collaborations
with Catherine Deneuve: HOTEL DES
AMERIQUES (1981), SCENE OF THE CRIME (1986), MY FAVORITE SEASON (1993), and THE
GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2009). Téchiné has
continued to make moody, dysfunctional romantic dramas that are tinged with an
element of intrigue or violence and is among the most adroit social
observers in the modern era, usually writing or co-writing his own films which
have an intimate chamber drama quality with an understated intelligence,
accentuating the performances, including the entire ensemble cast, is fond of
the use of ‘Scope, and this film is no exception. Adapting a novel by Philippe Djian, whose
work 37°2 Le Matin was the basis for Jean-Jacques Beineix's BETTY BLUE (1986), this is a somewhat
disappointing venture of the French culture invading Venice, full of gorgeous
color and picturesque locations on the island of Sant’Erasmo, but bringing with them a pronounced
inability to communicate and a baffling lack of appreciation for Italy. Typically novelesque, there are a host of
interconnected characters, each coming under the director’s scrutiny, but none
that ever connect with the audience, as there’s a thoroughly unengaging sense
of disconnect that prevails throughout, continually offering a foreigner’s
perspective, feeling out of place, where the guiding principle seems to be a
discomfort in one’s own skin and an inability to accept who you are.
Moving the novel from the Basque coast of Spain, where Téchiné filmed HOTEL DES AMERIQUES, to a remote island across the channel from Venice, the story concerns the arrival of a Parisian writer Francis (André Dussollier) looking for a little peace and quiet where he can write, initially locking horns with real estate agent Judith (Carole Bouquet), before being offered a spectacular location a mere boatride away, where of course en route their tiny motorboat runs out of gas midway across just as a giant ship is passing by, immediately suggesting imbalance as well as the lurking presence of danger, but Francis is moved to rent the seaside villa for one year on the condition that Judith live with him. As preposterous as this sounds, the film flashes forward to the following summer where the two are a happily married couple living together on the island, where she’s continually in transit on working assignments, completely independent, with an endless history of lovers both male and female, which leaves him alone, but unable to write, as he has other pressing issues to worry about. After a brief visit from his continually dissatisfied and overwrought daughter, the actress Alice (Mélanie Thierry), and her young daughter, Alice simply disappears, causing Francis plenty of worry, which has a way of coming between he and Judith, as if the bond of trust has been broken. Francis decides to hire Anna Maria (Andriani Asti), a retired detective and former lover of Judith, to search for his missing daughter. Perhaps not unexpectedly, what she discovers is that Alice hasn’t so much disappeared as escaped into the arms of a young love Alvise, Andrea Pergolesi, an aristocrat of noble parentage but currently dabbling in petty crime to cover a continual cash flow problem, where life in Venice is seen as a web of deceit.
Unfortunately, none of these new characters introduce any new life into the film, where instead the drama shifts to Francis all alone on the island, continually brooding about his wife’s excessive absences, always claiming work, but he suspects romance, especially since the intensity of their torrid romance has flickered out. Ridiculously, he hires Anna Maria’s son Jérémie (Mauro Conte), fresh out of jail, to tail her, but his methods couldn’t be more obvious, especially when the trailing boat is following so close behind you could almost touch it. What this really suggests is that Francis is continually driving women away, his wife, his daughter, through his suffocating distrust, unable to accept them as they are, free and independent women, always suspecting the worst. Many of these characters have duplicitous sex lives, offering an undertone of liberal mindedness throughout, but Téchiné seemingly does so little with these characters who drift through their lives barely knowing one another. Something of a relationship study, these relationships are defined by an inability to understand and accept the inherently shifting boundaries which are continually in flux, much like the interconnecting watery canals of Venice, which offer a stark contrast from the rigidly fixed cement and asphalt roadways back home in France, where one’s feet are firmly planted on the ground. Of particular interest is an unexpected flashback sequence showing archival black and white images of Andriani Asti when she was a captivatingly beautiful young woman, offering perhaps the most unusual reflections in the film, the fleeting brevity of youth, all lost in the blink of an eye, where before you know it the adrenal rush of excitement in the physical attraction of love changes to a more mature understanding, older and wiser, where the earth shifts beneath your feet aren’t always a disaster in waiting, a cause for concern, but simply the earth shifting, where the rigid standards for the titled offenses become less severe, accepted as more common, ordinary occurrences.
cine-file.info/forum
Peter Raccuglia
UNFORGIVABLE opens at a press conference, where an older man (André
Dussollier) quotes Schopenhauer into a bank of microphones: “As I sit here, as
the man my friends know, I cannot grasp the origin of my work, just as a mother
cannot grasp the origin of the child in her womb.” The man, we quickly learn,
is a bestselling novelist (“the king of neo-Gothic thrillers”) who is in the
grip of a lengthy dry spell. He has relocated from
User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from
Andre Techine is something of a poster boy on the Academic-Pseud circuit and
clearly they're going to love this in the Senior Common Room and the BFI
Boardroom - expect an article in Sight and Sound any time soon. Clearly it has
something very profound to say about something. What exactly? You tell me,
naval lint. Very possibly. A middle-aged writer is looking for a quiet retreat;
a female estate agent slightly younger (in real life Carole Bouquet is eleven
years younger than Andre Dussollier) gives him details of a house a short
distance from
A veteran stranded in Directors’ Fortnight amongst greenhorns,
André Téchiné surprises with the most digital of films yet seen in
The story moves from Venice to an island outside the main city, and from this vantage point pivots in space so that the rest of the story requires boats, helicopters, trucks and foot travel to get to and from the rest of the world. A writer with a fractured family life holes up on the island to finish a book and spontaneously invites his beautiful realtor, thirty years younger, to live with him. Cut to a year later: writers block and suspicion of infidelity. Thus: binoculars and friends and youths hired to keep track of people, genre brought in via detectives, a missing daughter, runaway Venetian aristocrats. Yet like the coming and going boats, the darker genre elements propelling the plot always come back around, spawning from and returning to the film's center of unhealed family dynamics and romantic relationships as difficult as that of parents and sibling. And each and every one is as much in agitation as the beautiful, unsteady digital imagery, just as incomplete, in question, in the midst of instability.
Short Takes: Unforgivable - Film Comment Chris Chang, July/August 2012
André Téchiné is no Jean-Jacques Beineix (duh). But there is one curious degree of separation: cult Gallic scribe Philippe Djian wrote the books that became Beineix’s Betty Blue and Téchiné’s latest, Unforgivable. The new film’s plot is so complex it’s a bit of a miracle that the director makes it so fluid and breezy—but that’s to be expected from a card-carrying master of the post–Nouvelle Vague.
Novelist Francis (André Dussollier) has come to Venice looking for a quiet place to work. He meets real-estate agent Judith (Carole Bouquet) and informs her he will rent the island getaway she proffers—on the condition that she move in with him. Instant relationship! One year later, Francis’s bombshell/actress/daughter arrives, and then promptly disappears into a subplot involving a deviant aristo, causing Francis to hire a female private eye, who in turn is the mother of a young misanthrope freshly released from prison. Francis, for no real good reason, hires the young misanthrope to keep an eye on Judith, which leads to further complications. Did I mention the private eye is an ex-lover of Judith’s? Does it matter?
“There should be a ban on reproduction,” says Francis. “It’s the only way out of guilt.” He could be referring to the problems caused by his daughter, or his sex drive, or maybe even his writer’s block, a condition that afflicts him whenever he falls in love. Whatever. Francis’s fluster—as evinced by Dussollier and nurtured by Téchiné—makes for a pleasure both subtle and mildly sadistic.
Auteur Techine’s adaptation transforms Philippe Djian’s novel into a
dense, fast-moving film with the director’s unique style and many of his
involving signature themes in place. Its direction is, as usual, obsessively
controlled but fluid, its rhythms always appropriate for the manifold pieces of
the plot.
Add seductive setting (atypical images of Venice rarely seen on film and the nearby remote, verdant island of Sant’ Erasmo, all superbly shot by Hirsch); extraordinary performances (especially Dussollier’s Francis, a famous, womanizing, older novelist out of touch with his feelings, who manages to get writer’s block whenever he falls in love, and Bouquet’s gorgeous, butch, bisexual Judith, a much younger empathetic, tough, and unconstrained model-turned-real estate agent); and a the pitch-perfect pace of a thriller, nicely augmented by Richter’s manic violins.
In Unforgivable (Impardonnables) movement is
inherent in the plot, as in other Techine films. In this film, given its
location, the vehicular dynamics emanate from speedboats. The mix, Techine’s
usual blend of intellectualism and carnality, should make the film a cash cow
on the domestic front, a lucrative acquisition in
Francis is a well-known author of dark bestsellers, a widower whose wife was fed up with his infidelities and died loaded with sedatives in a suspicious car accident. His beautiful actress daughter, Alice (Thierry), remains embittered; a wealthy husband and a cute pre-teen daughter have not helped her bury the hatchet.
A recurring motif in Techine’s films, chance (what the French
call hasard), is instrumental from the very beginning in creating the principal
storyline. Francis leaves
Her boat soon runs out of gas. The humour of the absurd situation breaks the ice (her façade is an extremely cool one in the first place) and provokes him to blurt out, “Move in with me and I sign right now!” This in turn precipitates the first of her several nosebleeds, involuntary responses to events of the heart that her ever-vigilant subconscious has repressed. We already gather that she will eventually relinquish control, and that most likely he will begin to take charge of his own life. Jump ahead a year and a half, and the duo are cosily residing together in the idyllic home, the sea on one side, a lagoon on the other, and vineyards all around.
Life couldn’t be better, except for the way each relates to
others. Francis compensates for his writer’s block with extreme jealousy,
hiring the troubled, violent ex-convict son, Jeremie (Conte), of a retired
private investigator, Anna Maria (
The notion of following runs throughout the film. So does the concept of violence, which gives the movie its title - Francis tells gaybasher Jeremie that violence against others is “unforgivable” - but Jeremie’s extreme physical aggression is the catalyst through which Francis will become aware of physical manifestations of his own temper and frustration.
A lot goes on: Alice is having an extramarital affair with the gangster son of a bankrupt contessa, Anna Maria becomes seriously ill, Francis’s work for Jeremie pushes the youth and an annoyed Judith very close together (probably the older man’s twisted plan in the first place), Francis and Judith break up and get back together, a gay man Jeremie has beaten refuses to be the victim and comes back with his pals and exacts revenge, and Francis starts to write again. For the most part, the pieces come together satisfactorily, although, as usual, Techine comes close to overscripting. Most of the crises depicted end if not happily then potentially promising, so that much of the darkness becomes transformed into light.
Impardonnables
- Unforgivable - Andre Techine - 2011 - film review James Travers from Films de France
Sound
On Sight Edgar Chaput
'Unforgivable':
A Writer in the Throes of Creation | PopMatters Chris Barsanti
Film-Forward.com
[Kevin Filipski]
Unforgivable Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club
DVD
Talk [Christopher McQuain]
Unforgivable Eric Hynes from The Village Voice
Cannes
'11, day six: The Tree Of Life and other things calling themselves movies Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 17, 2011
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Unforgivable
(Impardonnables): Cannes 2011 Review | Hollywood ... Kirk Honeycutt from The Hollywood Reporter
Cannes
2011: Le Havre/Unforgivable/L'Apollonide: The House of Tolerance – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2011
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Charles Cassady, Jr.]
Unforgiveable Movie
Review & Film Summary (2012) | Roger Ebert
André
Téchiné's 'Unforgivable,' With André Dussollier - The New York ... The
New York Times
Unforgivable (2011 film) - Wikipedia
IN THE NAME OF MY DAUGHTER (L'homme qu'on aimait
trop)
France
(116 mi) 2014 ‘Scope
In the
Name of My Daughter, directed by André Téchiné ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
French filmaker André
Téchiné's 'In the Name of My Daughter' is a very watchable drama based on real
events in the 1970s which include the still unexplained disappearance of Agnès
Le Roux, daughter of the owner of a Nice casino. Téchiné's film is notable less
for suspense (there is none) than for a teasing and very rewarding ambiguity
towards the motives of the three highly-driven principle characters.
In fending off
business rivals, Renée Le Roux (Catherine Deneuve) greatly values the
insightful advice of attorney Maurice Agnelet (Guillaume Canet), while her
daughter Agnès (Adèle Haenel), recently divorced, finds him appealing for other
reasons. So how is it that, 30 years later, Renée insists to the police that
her onetime right-hand man be extradited from Panama for her daughter's murder?
Meticulously charting
how the relationships between all three shift steadily from friendship and love
to suspicion, hostility and betrayal, Téchiné displays the cool, clear-eyed
intelligence – though not, sadly, the beady wit – of the late Claude Chabrol.
The performances are solid, too, though the age difference between the two
female leads may strike some as a little disconcerting.
Short
Takes: In the Name of My Daughter - Film Comment Steven Mears, May/June 2015
Five years after The
Girl on the Train, André Téchiné tackles another real-life cause célèbre in
which the central transgression may never have occurred. Like Chabrol, his
concern is less for the crimes, or paranoid accusations, than for the emotional
and interpersonal tensions they incite.
The bulk of the film
recounts events leading up to the 1977 disappearance of heiress Agnès Le Roux
(Adèle Haenel). Her lover Maurice (Guillaume Canet), a lawyer who’d helped
Agnès’s mother (Catherine Deneuve) take control of a casino and then dethroned
her with help from Agnès, emigrated to Panama when she went missing. Agnès’s
body was never discovered, but her fortune found its way into Maurice’s bank
account.
While most directors
would mine a Gone Girl–esque thriller from Agnès’s disappearance, or at
least venture a hypothesis on the cause (and veracity) of her death, Téchiné’s
interest lies in the mechanics of manipulation—in depicting how each person in
the focal trio betrayed one if not both of the others. However, once Agnès
vanishes, the account turns perfunctory, as Téchiné skips forward 30 years to
courtroom scenes offering little more than the sight of a frail, gray-haired
Deneuve, as Madame Le Roux, denouncing Maurice (with Canet unconvincingly
aged).
But for most of the
run time, Téchiné exhibits masterful control, dispensing psychological details
even as he withholds narrative ones. And Haenel’s impassioned performance never
lets us forget the woman around whom the machinations play out.
French
filmmaker Andre Techine revisits the mystery of a vanished ... Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader
In the films of
French writer-director André Téchiné (My
Favorite Season, Wild
Reeds), human nature is a source of endless mystery. His characters
change their lives in ways that surprise even them and, because his stories
typically take place over months or years, often go through multiple changes,
ending up as different people. Téchiné's view of people as inherently volatile
extends to his depiction of sexuality; his characters often have sex—and
sometimes fall in love—unexpectedly, acting on impulses they can't explain. In
a Téchiné film, being alive seems exhilarating and a little scary; one senses
that anything, good or bad, could happen at any time.
The real-life mystery
of Agnés Le Roux, a casino heiress who vanished in 1977 at age 29, seems like
something Téchiné might have concocted himself. In the year before her
disappearance, Le Roux became romantically involved with her mother's lawyer,
Maurice Agnelet, a married man known for his philandering. Acting on his
recommendation, she used her vote on the board of her family's business to oust
her mother from control of the operation, thus leaving it open to takeover by a
mobster then buying up casinos on the French Riviera. As imagined by Téchiné
and his cowriters (who include Agnés's brother, Charles Le Roux), the young
woman was so enthralled by Agnelet that she went mad, driving him to desperate
behavior. He would later stand trial on the charge of having murdered her.
In the Name of My
Daughter focuses on the intense relationship between Agnés (Adèle Haenel) and
Agnelet (Guillaume Canet), presenting the outcome of their affair as an
afterthought. For Téchiné the great mystery of Agnés's story lies not in her
disappearance but in her desire for a cad who didn't return her feelings. She's
driven by a swirl of emotions: sexual curiosity, hunger for self-destruction,
and resentment of her controlling mother (Catherine Deneuve in her seventh
collaboration with Téchiné). Haenel conveys the young woman's mix of
self-confidence and acute vulnerability, and Canet underplays the role of
Agnelet so that one concentrates not on his charm but on the feelings he
arouses in others. What transpires between Agnés, Agnelet, and the mother is
too complicated to be described as a triangle—in this densely realized drama,
it seems more like a gordian knot.
Slant
Magazine [Clayton Dillard]
André Téchiné
consistently brings a tender attention to human suffering throughout his
oeuvre, perhaps best rendered in the 2007 masterpiece The Witnesses. His latest is In
the Name of My Daughter, based on the 1989 book by Reneé Le Roux, an
adaptation that’s too worried about narrative fidelity and formal objectivity
to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film’s
concerns. Téchiné takes the real-life events of a 1976 missing-persons case in
the French Riviera and churns it into a modest presentation of filial betrayals
and realized sexual passions while hedging the film’s aesthetic interests
somewhere between droll and conventional.
The first half
dutifully introduces all of the major players, as Reneé (Catherine Deneuve),
the wealthy owner of a casino, has sent Maurice (Guillame Canet), her lawyer, to
the airport to retrieve her daughter, Agnès (Adèle Haenel), whose life is in
public shambles following a recent divorce. Téchiné has fun with these initial
interactions between Agnès and Maurice, framing them in tight proximity to one
another as they share a cigarette and take a swim, without overtly sexualizing
the encounter. Agnès wants to sell her shares in her mother’s casino, seemingly
as a slight to the woman whom she sees as having shackled her to a forced
identity for the duration of her privileged upbringing. Yet Téchiné takes
caution not to assert explicit psychological motivations, while carefully
having characters either make claims about themselves or others. For example,
when Maurice tells Agnès that he’s “never been one for sporty girls,” the
statement is less an admission than a revelation of Maurice’s capacity for
manipulation, as he’s most certainly interested in Agnès, whether she’s sporty
or not. These details almost wisp away without attention, as does a moment when
Maurice is reading a book by André Gide on a beach. Téchiné seemingly includes
these elements as textures rather than foregrounded points for constructing a
thriller, which In the Name of My Daughter could be called by plot
description only.
Effectively, Maurice
convinces Agnès to sell her shares to Fratoni (Jean Corso), a mafioso with a
beachside townhouse. Through a further bit of manipulation, the entire casino
ends up in Fratoni’s hands, with Agnès and Maurice now full-blown lovers, which
Téchiné depicts with little interest beyond having them run into the woods and
hump against a tree. The lack of imagination in a moment like that is
contrasted with an earlier, lengthy scene, in which Agnès dances to African
tribal music inside of her apartment, with Maurice simply standing and watching
for the duration. Here Téchiné’s demonstrates a capacity for problematizing
gender dynamics, where Maurice’s objectification of Agnès is complicated by a
sense that he may have a sincere and genuine interest in her well-being.
Likewise, a long sequence set at Fratoni’s home, with a single, mobile take
traversing the outdoor dining area, manages to be both kinetic and stabilizing,
as the mobility of the camera is contrasted with the burgeoning certainty of a
bond between Agnès and Maurice.
The final 20 minutes,
however, completely stagnate In the Name of My Daughter’s mysteries
through a “thirty years later” epilogue that operates as if out of narrative
obligation rather than necessity. With the characters standing in courtrooms
and exchanging concerted glances, Téchiné makes little meaning out of this
addition beyond getting to have a verdict read and then, with intertitles, the
further outcomes of the case revealed. For a film finely attuned at times to
ways deceit and sexual passions can be fatefully misunderstood, it tacks on a
“just the facts” ending which has none of that.
In
the Name of My Daughter :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Christine
N. Ziemba
In The Name Of My Daughter is another
truth-based gem from André Téchiné
Adam Nayman from The Onion A.V.
Club
André
Téchiné | Cinema Sight Ed Scheid
Rex
Reed Reviews 'In the Name of My Daughter' | Observer Rex Reed
'In
the Name of My Daughter' has its true-crime fascinations ... Peter Rainer from The Christian Science Monitor
Film-Forward.com
[Caroline Ely]
Spectrum
Culture [Erica Peplin]
The L Magazine: Michael Joshua Rowin
Blu-ray.com
[Jeffrey Kauffman]
Real
Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]
Tabloid
Tale In the Name of My Daughter Is Curiously Flat | Village Voice Marsha McCreadie, May 13, 2015
Melissa Anderson on the
20th “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema ...
Artforum
Day
7: Pretensions and pleasures / The Dissolve
Mike D’Angelo at Cannes
The
Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Anne-Katrin Titze]
Review: In the Name of My
Daughter | Slackerwood Matt Shiverdecker
frenchcinemareview.com
[Judith Prescott]
Rosy
the Reviewer [Rosy Brewer]
In
the Name of My Daughter - The New Yorker
'In
the Name of My Daughter' ('L'Homme Qu'on Aimait Trop'): Cannes ... David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter
'In
the Name of My Daughter' movie review: A family drama revisited ... Stephanie Merry from The Washington Post
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Review:
'In the Name of My Daughter' a frustrating, would-be thriller ... Sheri Linden from The LA Times
Film
Review: French mob story chases emotional truth - LA Times
Andy Klein
In the
Name of My Daughter Movie Review (2015) | Roger Ebert Odie Henderson
Review:
'In the Name of My Daughter,' a Family-Business Scandal ... Nicolas Rapold from The New York Times
In the Name of
My Daughter - Wikipedia
BEING 17 (Quand on a 17 ans) B- 82
France (116
mi) 2016
We
aren’t serious when we’re seventeen,
—One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade,
Noisy café’s with their shining lamps!
We walk under the green linden trees of the park.
The
lindens smell good in the good June evenings!
At times the air is so scented that we close our eyes,
The
wind laden with sounds— the town isn’t far —
Has the smell of grapevines and beer...
—Arthur Rimbaud, Roman
(Novel), first stanza, 1870
I
learned the truth at seventeen,
That love was meant for beauty queens.
In high school, girls with clear-skin smiles,
Who married young and then retired.
The valentines I never knew.
The Friday night charades of youth,
Were spent on one more beautiful.
At seventeen I learned the truth.
—Janis Ian, At
Seventeen, 1975, Janis
Ian- At Seventeen (Original) - YouTube (3:57)
Téchiné’s best works from the 80’s and 90’s are dense and
psychologically complex films he writes himself, though all of them are
collaborations with other writers, most having an intimate chamber drama
quality conveying emotions through naturalism and an understated intelligence, usually concise
and meticulously crafted. Here he teams
up with co-writer Céline Sciamma, some 36-years younger, literally half his
age, the director of her own films Tomboy
(2011) and Girlhood
(Bande de Filles) (2014), known for exploring adolescent youth identity and
gender issues, ending up with something of a mixed bag, feeling overly
contrived and a bit too emotionally distant from any of the characters. Both are minimalists who tend to get the most
out of their performers, with Sciamma usually working with
non-professionals. Téchiné has dealt with this subject before in
what is arguably his best film, Wild
Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), a completely unpretentious exploration of
adolescent curiosities, with a racial dynamic even more provocative as it is
set during the Algerian War, so a similar revisit
to already familiar territory pales in comparison, as the narrow focus of racial
and sexual ambiguity leaves the lives of the two young adolescent protagonists
still left largely unexplored, as the story itself feels overly thin, though
the use of landscape is surprisingly effective and is perhaps the best quality
to the film. The two leads couldn’t be
more different, Damien, played by Kacey Mottet Klein, the extremely affecting
young kid in Ursula Meier’s HOME
(2008) and 2012
Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 Sister (L'enfant d'en haut) , and Thomas, played by newcomer
Corentin Fila, who was discovered while working as a Parisian model. Ostensibly a high school coming-of-age
memoir, the story is set in a rural mountainous community in the French
Pyrenees, with Damien living a comfortable life with his warmhearted mother
Marianne (Sandrine Kiberlain), a local doctor that makes house visits, and an
absent father (Alexis Loret), an army helicopter pilot in an unidentified
Doctors Without Borders war zone seen on regular Skype transmissions, while Tom
is a biracial, adopted son of a farming couple living high up in the mountains,
a treacherous 90-minute journey to school through a combination of arduous
hiking and taking buses. Damien,
pale-skinned and awkward, the more sensitive of the two, struggles with
self-confidence, yet gets excellent grades and takes self-defense classes from
an ex-military family friend Paulo (Jean Corso), while Thomas, introverted and
brooding, seems to revel in his isolation, rarely seen talking to anyone,
performing daily chores with the farm animals and has ambitions to be a
veterinarian, though he’s just scraping by with poor grades. Both are the last ones picked in school when
choosing teams for basketball, suggesting a certain social isolation.
For some inexplicable reason, Thomas trips
Damien in class and starts bullying him, exerting an annoying physical presence
that continually keeps the two at odds.
Part of what Téchiné seems to be
getting at is the inconsistency of youth, doing things without a reason, often
acting on impulse without understanding what’s behind it. Despite the loathing behind the standoffish
behavior of Damien and Thomas, who seem to publicly despise one another,
Téchiné constantly places them in each other’s path. Under normal circumstances, you’d think these
two would go to great lengths to avoid seeing each other. The kicker here is that Thomas’s mother,
Christine (Mama Prassinos), visited by Marianne for a rising fever, but is
discovered to be pregnant. With a
history of miscarriages, her health is paramount, recommending that she be
moved for an extended duration to a hospital in town. Under the circumstances, clueless to the
antagonizing dynamic of the two kids, she also recommends that Thomas come live
in her home to be closer to the school and hospital. What seems like a potential train wreck in
the making does play out unexpectedly, as the two constantly get into physical
altercations, with Damien usually getting the worst of it, where violence
disguises the underlying desires, but they always underplay what happened as
being purely accidental, with each seeming to find their way through the other,
as Thomas’s grades improve while Damien finds himself irrefutably attracted,
but hasn’t a clue how to express it.
Even as they spend more time with each other, they also regularly ignore
the other, alternately aggressive and hesitant, so when they do happen to find
themselves alone, especially in the great outdoors, strange things happen, with
Damien openly confessing, “I don’t know if I’m
into guys or just you.” Here is where
the cinematography by Julien Hirsch is so impressive, as their awkward handling
of erupting sexual desires becomes so incomprehensible to both of them they are
literally muted by the enormity of the mountainous landscape, especially the
overwhelming power of a blinding snowstorm or a thick mountain fog, or another
scene where Thomas strips naked and jumps into a frozen lake, where they are
mere players in a larger natural world that surrounds them. Without ever actually playing out in gay
themes, these guys are still exploring what it means, which is all part of the
coming-out process, as first the confusion needs to be internalized and sorted
out, where it becomes a highly personalized yet individual journey.
Another aspect of the film is racial
fetishization, which at least in France has colonial roots to Algeria and other
colonized African countries, and is so brilliantly explored by Claire Denis in Chocolat
(1988), No
Fear, No Die (S’en Fout la Mort) (1990), and Beau
Travail (1999). While this
underlying aspect of their relationship is apparent throughout, it’s never
actually acknowledged in the script, but remains a subliminal affectation that remains
hidden under the surface, including a dream sequence that becomes an erotic
fantasy for Marianne with Thomas making love to her. As Téchiné so brilliantly addressed this in Wild
Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages), it’s disappointing that twenty years later he no
longer feels a need to explore it openly, as instead the film delves into class
commentary, where Damien is a privileged, middle-class white kid who has all
the advantages while Thomas works in the stables, develops a closeness to
animals and the natural world, where his working class vantage point is
decisively different, including his ability to openly acknowledge his desires. As it is, he’s already worried about his
place in his own family, thinking a biological child may relegate him to second
class status, while Damien is an only child with a nurturing mother, so has
less to lose by being more open about his feelings. The film actually spends more time with
Damien, is seen through his point of view, becoming his personal journey,
though Thomas is easily the more interesting of the two, remaining rugged,
durable, and mostly silent. Perhaps it’s
his aloofness, or the unattainable mystery of his blackness, where even he is
unaware of his physical presence, though it’s not by accident that he is viewed
as a force of nature, seen milking the cows in the morning, brushing cattle,
and pitching hay. For whatever reason,
this is a film where dialogue matters the least, as words are often used to
betray their real intent, where it’s more about the in-between spaces, the
pauses, the lingering glances, where it would be easy, for the viewer as well
as the characters onscreen, to misidentify the actual intent behind so many
silences. While the film meanders
towards the end, among the more excessive moments, something only the French
would include, are the shared studies of Plato, discussing the difference
between need and desire, where the less intellectual, but more emotionally
grounded Thomas uses Plato in a dig against Damien’s advances, “Need is part of nature…desire is not of
natural origin. It is superfluous.” The openness of the explored sexual desires would make a film like this
off limits in America, yet much of it is expressed with poetic restraint, such
as a shared moment of both hiding from a rainstorm in a cave, both lit in
silhouette as they pass a cigarette back and forth. But it also candidly explores physical love,
where they do get into bed together, but not before Thomas refers to a
previously interrupted kiss, “You couldn’t even see I was scared.” The film is not so much about being gay as
discovering one’s initial contradictory inclinations, which only adds to the
already existing anxiety and confusion of being a teenager, where relating to
others is not a strong point, terrified of becoming an adult, yet this is the
undiscovered territory that Téchiné wants to explore, this on-again, off-again flirtation, where it’s more about the fluctuating chemistry between two people at
a certain moment in time.
Festivals:
Melbourne - Film Comment Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 22, 2016
André Téchiné’s Being
17, about a troubled gay teenage relationship in rural France, shows plenty
of evidence of its director-cowriter’s sensitivity and passion, yet for me it
pales alongside such explosive earlier features as Wild Reeds (1994), Thieves
(1996), and Unforgivable (2011). And Asghar Farhadi’s The
Salesman adeptly showcases his commercial skill in extracting moral nuances
from his carefully calibrated storytelling, once again privileging a woman’s
viewpoint without ever quite sharing it or exploring it.
Film
Comment: Olaf Möller April 29, 2016
In fact, more than half of the films competing for the awards were remarkable and worthy of mention, among them Alex Gibney’s Zero Days, which casually turns from a ballsy investigative documentary on cyber warfare and secret service cabals into a rumination on the nature of reality in the digital age; Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special, an essay on paranoia politics and religious extremism in the U.S. hinterland done as a piece of highbrow horror-fantasy; and, in an aesthetically much more classical modernist register, André Téchiné’s tale of teenage passion and nascent gay self-awareness, Being 17.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Scott Pfeiffer
Septuagenarian André Téchiné, co-writing with Céline Sciamma, makes a elegiac, honest coming-of-age film about two gay teenagers, set amidst the splendid changing seasons of the French Pyrenees. I can scarcely imagine an American film being this explicit and natural about teen gay sexuality. At first, though, the boys are at war at school, masking their fear of their own desire with hatred. One is a loner living on a farm in the mountains; the other, insecure, lives in the town below with his mom, a doctor (Sandrine Kiberlain, kind, frank and merry). On a house call, mom meets the farm boy's family and invites him to stay in town. Housemates, the volatile adolescents pummel each other while struggling to find the freedom to drop their defenses. Precisely observant, getting physical with his characters' bodies, Téchiné still resonates with a life force and its joys and heartaches.
Being
17 Review: André Téchiné Delivers A Moving Queer Teen ... David Ehrich from indieWIRE
One of the major problems with many (most) American movies is that characters are always supposed to know what they want. That’s what they teach you in film school — in fact, that’s pretty much all they teach you in film school. Establish a hero with a clear objective. He has to solve the murder, he has to get the girl, he has to win the big game (sadly, not in the same film). Define a “want” in the first act, complicate it in the second, and make good on it in the third. Of the infinite fantasies that can be found in the dark of the cinema, perhaps the greatest and most perverse of them all is that everyone walks around this world with such a clear sense of purpose.
Would that it were so simple. Who the hell ever really knows what it is that they want, and what small fraction of those people are clairvoyant enough to know why? This discrepancy between truth and movies — and the desire to circumvent it — has always been the secret appeal of coming-of-age narratives. These are stories about people who are struggling to sort out the basics of who they are, let alone what they’re hoping to achieve with that information. And yet, so much of the genre is compromised by more concrete goals, eagerly cutting its kids into the same pre-stenciled shapes stencils that life has already traced for them.
When you see something like Céline Sciamma’s “Girlhood,” or André Téchiné’s “Wild Reeds” — French films, made 20 years apart, that both fearlessly confront the volatility of growing up — it becomes very difficult to go back to stories that have been told with the bumpers on. And when you see something like “Being 17,” which Sciamma and Téchiné just co-wrote together (with the latter directing), it becomes virtually impossible. A slow, shaggy, hyper-naturalistic coming-of-age drama that constantly returns to the sheer violence of becoming a man, this is a movie that isn’t the least bit afraid to dwell on how hard it can be to become who you are. Or, in this case, how much harder it can be when you’re a boy who’s in love with his bully.
Not a gay story so much as a queer one (Sciamma’s extraordinary “Tomboy” illustrated her disinterest in strict definitions of sexuality), “Being 17” is shared between two teen boys growing up in the emotionally vivid mountains of the French Pyrenees. Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) is white, reckless and vaguely punchable. Thomas (newcomer Corentin Fila) is bi-racial, reserved and reflexively violent. They don’t seem to like each other very much — Thomas trips Damien in the middle of class for no apparent reason — but their mutual animus is rooted in private self-doubts.
Damien struggles with his confidence, and worries about the absent father who regularly Skypes in from some Doctors Without Borders danger zone. Thomas, who travels for 90 minutes through the tundra to get to school every day, frets that his adopted parents will demote him to a second-class son once his unexpectedly pregnant mother gives birth to her biological child. Thomas’ nerves only get worse when she’s hospitalized due to complications, and Damien’s mom — played with raw compassion by French cinema stalwart Sandrine Kiberlain — obliviously insists that the kid move in with her family for the time being.
It’s both extraordinary and exasperating to watch the two young men grapple with their newfound proximity. Téchiné, understated as always, lets his characters find themselves at their own pace — there’s hardly a hint of attraction between them for the first half of the film, the director allowing the landscape to express all types of tangled lust. The snow dunes absorb their feelings and mute their aggression, and the mountain fog is so thick that it can obscure the full length of their bodies. It isn’t until Thomas strips naked and dives in a moonlit lake that we register Damien’s gaze for the first time.
The film’s hyper-naturalism is its raison d’etre, and “Being 17” is at its best when it leans into that approach. It’s deeply fascinating to watch Thomas and Damien fumble their way towards figuring out whatever it is that’s buzzing between them. They’re always fighting — sometimes with themselves, but more often with each other. Every tender moment or subliminal flirtation is memorialized with a brawl or a wrestling match, and echoes of “Beau Travail” reverberate through the scenes in which the boys submit their bodies to violence in order to disguise their desires. Fila and Klein are both excellent, alternately hesitant and aggressive as they mine real conviction from confusion (Fila’s casting in particular is immaculate, as he’s sufficiently unformed to be a lust object for both Damien and Damien’s mom).
If the ultimate payoff isn’t as satisfying as it should be, perhaps that’s because the film stumbles when trying to bridge the gap between longing and fulfillment. Sciamma’s scripts tend to be more ruthlessly efficient with their time and make use of all the string they gather, no matter how innocuous a beat might seem. But this one meanders a bit, stretching over an entire school year. Individual gestures are still endowed with a rare potency, but taking such a long view of the story makes it easy to lose track of the struggle between need and desire, easy to disconnect from how these characters are weighing the risk of following their hearts.
Sciamma and Téchiné are too smart to let this go unnoticed, but their attempts to course-correct err on the side of overcompensation. They result in scenes like the one where the boys read Plato, discuss the difference between need and desire, and then call out how on-the-nose their conversation is. But when writers are so skilled at crafting lucid, agonizingly honest moments like the ones that stand out from “Being 17,” the patchwork around them doesn’t seem to matter as much. When Damien turns to Thomas and confesses: “I don’t know if I’m into guys, or just you,” his words reverberate throughout the rest of the movie like a gunshot in a canyon. They reverberate because you genuinely believe that Damien doesn’t know — they reverberate because they remind you how normal not knowing can be.
Underrated/Overlooked:
Stephen Cone on Being 17 - Talkhouse Stephen Cone from Talkhouse, November 18, 2016
Way
Too Indie [Nik Grozdanovic]
Poignant
Pangs In The Pyrenees: 2 Boys Come Of Age In 'Being 17 ... Mark Jenkins from NPR
Joshua
Reviews Andre Techine's Being 17 [Theatrical Review] Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast
The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson
The House Next Door: Diego Semerene also seen here: Slant
Magazine [Diego Semerene]
The
Critical Movie Critic [Howard Schumann]
'Being
17': Berlin Review | Reviews | Screen
Jonathan Romney, also seen here: Screen Daily: Jonathan Romney
Let
the Movies Move Us [Ulkar Alakbarova]
Georgia
Straight [Adrian Mack]
French
Cinema [Judith Prescott]
queerguru.com
(Roger Walker-Dack)
An
Online Universe [Andrew Buckle]
Sight & Sound: Geoff Andrew February 26, 2016
Hollywood
Reporter [David Rooney]
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr.
André
Téchiné's 'Being 17' beautifully blurs the line between rage and ... Justin Chang from The LA Times
RogerEbert.com:
Godfrey Cheshire
Review:
In 'Being 17,' 2 Boys Teeter Between Animosity and Attraction Stephen Holden from The New York Times
Being 17 - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
France (103 mi) 2017
'Golden Years': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Allan Hunter
Cannes may be celebrating André Téchiné for his fifty year career but the filmmaker shows little sign of resting on his laurels. Golden Years (Nos Années Folles) is a rare period drama from the director in which true events serve as the basis for a tragic love story. Made with typical sensitivity and craft, it may seem old-fashioned but it is a film that allows events of the past to speak directly to the present.
In many respects, Golden Years is a film about the things we do for love. Paul Grappe ( Pierre Deladonchamps) is completely devoted to seamstress Louise (Celine Sallette) and she will do anything for him. He goes marching off to the trenches of World War I but after a minor injury he decides not to return to the conflict. Desertion is punishable by death and there is no future for him hiding in the cellar of the house owned by Louise’s mother.
The solution is the creation of a female alter ego, “Suzanne”, which provides him with a cloak of invisibility in a Paris. The couple create a character together out of necessity, but ” Suzanne” begins to take on a life of her own as she becomes the toast of a transgressive demi-monde who swirl around the Bois De Boulogne after dark.
Deladonchamps (Stranger By The Lake) has such a lean, lissome frame and delicate features that he is able to successfully transform himself into a woman, and Paul seems to happily reinvent himself through the boldness of “Suzanne”. Indeed, a potent element of Golden Years is the way it explores the creation of identity, the fluidity of gender and the struggle to truly be oneself.
Deladonchamps may have the more obviously challenging role, but this is a film about a couple and Celine Sallette is equally crucial in making their story work. Her carefully understated performance makes us believe in Louise’s devotion to Paul and willingness to adapt to all the changing circumstances of their lives. She makes sacrifices for his love, resisting even the gentlemanly overtures of infatuated aristocrat Charles de Lauzin (played with twinkly-eyed charm by Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet.)
In the 1920s, the story of Paul and Louise was transformed into a stage extravaganza. Preparations for the production, presided over by master of ceremonies Samuel (Michel Sau), allow Techine to embrace a more colourful, theatrical style. It is also a useful device to launch into a less florid version of what really happened. In order to remain with Paul, Louise was obliged to accept everything about the new life he had embraced and she had resisted. When a general amnesty left Paul free to be himself again, he no longer knew exactly who that might be. His struggle to regain a sense of himself pushes the loyal Louise away, and turns a love story into a tragedy.
Techine and cinematographer Julien Hirsch use real depth of focus to create scenes that are filled with visual information and a sense of perspective on the individuals caught up in this story. Unobtrusive in its evocation of the past, Golden Years has an appealing modesty to its execution. The focus is very much on two individuals, the extraordinary events that created their golden years and the shocking unravelling of their love when those years ended.
My Baby Shot Me Down: Techine’s Tedious Period Piece a Drained Chronicle
While perennial French auteur Andre Techine delivered one of his most vibrant narratives to date with last year’s Being 17, the director, now in his fifth decade of filmmaking, makes a rather rigid affair out of a colorful historical episode with his latest, Golden Years. Starring Pierre Deladonchamps (of Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake) as a WWI deserter who masquerades as a woman to avoid the authorities, only to decide he doesn’t want to give up his feminine persona once he’s pardoned, this potentially complex tale may avoid tawdry possibilities, but Techine, who co-wrote with director Cedric Anger, fails to bring any real emotional configuration to the scenario. What’s left behind feels like a dead battery desperate for something to jumpstart it into crackling form, and not even its two lauded leads are able to rock any portion of the film out of a numbing groove.
In 1914 France, Paul Grappe (Deladonchamps) is forced to leave behind his wife Louise (Celine Sallette) to join the frontlines in WWI. Accused of faking an injury wherein he loses a pointer finger, Paul is ordered back to the battlefield despite his injury. With the help of his wife, Paul deserts, and hides in a hidden room in the home of Louise’s grandmother. But one day on the job as a seamstress, Louise comes up with the idea to dress Paul as a woman. Thus, Suzanne is born, a lithesome creature who takes to the woods of the Bois de Boulogne and works as a prostitute who revels in her handiwork. A decade later, Paul is pardoned, but doesn’t want to let the persona of Suzanne go. A stage play about his experience is made, which further solidifies Paul/Suzanne as a news item. Meanwhile, a lusty count (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet) begins to court Louise after meeting the couple during a lusty orgy in the woods, and soon the connection between Paul and Louise begins to deteriorate.
First off, Golden Years is likely to be doomed by comparisons to 2015’s The Danish Girl, which depicts a similar queering of an otherwise heterosexual couple (and worse, this will likely be cause to validate Tom Hooper’s problematic award winner). But these nods are merely superficial, both in similar period settings and the aesthetic of feminizing Deladonchamps.
The largest misstep is the lack of interiority afforded either Paul or his female alternate Suzanne. There’s little difference between his depiction as either, lacking any sort of psychological segue, which only hinders understanding or empathy for Paul/Suzanne when social convention demands he revert to his former self completely.
Techine, who’s often lauded for his queer narratives, such as the seminal Wild Reeds (1994) or Being 17, strangely adheres to the common convention of placing sympathy on the shoulders of the female lead (hardly a surprise considering Techine’s penchant for widely regarded films featuring notable actresses), here Celine Sallette, who walks away with the only semblance of empathy as a woman who rejects her husband’s lascivious pansexual hedonism and decides to keep their child despite a number of apparent warning signs which should indicate otherwise. But, seeing as we’re dealing with an actual event, it seems no time was afforded for ironing out these kinds of snags on the way to the inevitable.
The rhythm of the film is choppy, however, thanks to a framing device concerning a staged play (and eventual cabaret version) of Paul’s incredible story, as directed by the constantly interrupting Michel Fau (entertaining as Catherine Frot’s voice coach in Marguerite but obnoxious here). Past and present get jumbled together haphazardly as we flashback to Paul’s dilemma and flash forward to his eventual denouement. What’s most scandalous about Golden Years is how Techine managed to warp something so compelling into a film so utterly conventional.
Golden Years Review: André Téchiné's Heartbreaker Is Misfire ... Ben Croll from indieWIRE
Golden
Years : Longevity, liberty, Téchiné - Cineuropa Bénédicte Prot
Cannes
Film Festival 2017: Nos Annees Folles (Golden Years ... Joseph Owen from The Upcoming
'Golden
Years' Review: Cannes Film Festival | Variety Jay Weissberg
Actresses (Actrices) | Review | Screen Allan Hunter from Screendaily
Facing 40 becomes a wake-up call for a neurotic self-absorbed
performer in Actresses, the second feature from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
Previously entitled Dream Of The Night Before, the film mines
autobiographical material to explore the eternal conflict between professional
success and personal happiness.
Modest insights and
amusing incidents make for a minor but pleasing work. The strong ensemble cast
should ensure some theatrical life in
The backstage
pressures and intrigue of the theatre have served as a memorable backdrop to
many films, most notably All About Eve (1950) and Opening Night
(1977). Actresses has neither the champagne wit of the Joseph Mankiewicz
classic nor the sheer histrionic intensity of the Cassavetes opus. Instead,
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi seems intent on a more low-key, naturalistic portrait of
an actress at a crossroads.
Sleepwalking through
life, Marcelline (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) almost seems impervious to her own
state of mind. Told by a gynaecologist that time is running out if she wants a
baby, she starts praying to the Virgin Mary for a husband and is beginning to
sense her own desperation when she embarks on a production of A Month In The
Country in which she plays Nathalia Petrovna. Director Denis (Mathieu
Almaric) seems to bully a performance out of her and the film provides some
amusement over the acting process and what it takes for a performer to relax
and find their individual way into playing a character. Visited by ghosts from
her past and vaguely attracted to young actor Eric (Louis Garrel), Marcelline
finds the line between life and art increasingly blurred as events begin to
mirror the developments in the Turgenev play. On her 40th birthday she moves
closer to asserting her independence and discovering what she really wants out
of life.
One of the problems
with Actresses is that Marcelline is not especially beguiling or unique
as a character. She is not the great diva or sacred monster of a Margo Channing
despite the wariness of colleagues and the comments from old friend Nathalie
(Noemie Lvovsky) that she has changed and hardened over the years. Marcelline
always remains sympathetic and vulnerable which makes her ultimate triumph over
her own demons less dramatically satisfying. The conversations with the dead,
including her father, also lend the film something of a wistful flavour. The
theatrical setting, use of jazz music and Glenn Miller's "In The
Mood" contribute to a jaunty air that is vaguely reminiscent of Woody
Allen but Actresses is not in that league. It is amusing rather than
hilarious and perceptive rather than profound which is why its accomplishments
remain minor ones.
review: Actrices (Actresses) (La rêve de la nuit d'avant) (Cannes 2007) Boyd van Hoeij from European-Films
Italo-French actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays an
Italo-French actress in her second film Actrices (Actresses), which is
part of the Un certain regard section here in
Like her good old self, Bruni Tedeschi’s character Marcelline
is an actress of Italian extraction who grew up in
To both complicate her life further and to console her, Marcelline also sees
dead people and even a fictional character, including her father (Maurice
Garrel), her first lover and the incarnation of Natalya Petrovna (Valeria
Golino), Turgenev’s woman in love with a younger man in A Month in the Country
that Marcelline is rehearsing for a series of performances in a theatre in the
Parisian suburbs.
It is during the rehearsals that Marcelline starts to look for a possible
father of her future child. Candidates include the play’s tempestuous and
possibly gay director David (Mathieu Amalric, from Rois et reine/Kings and
Queen); the handsome young actor playing her on-stage lover (Louis Garrel,
Maurice’s grandson) and several men not directly linked to the play, including
a swimming pool supervisor (Arthur Igual) and Arthur (Laurent Grévill), a
colleague and ex-lover. At one point, Marcelline even asks a priest (Pascal
Bongard) if he can’t give her a child, since Christianity is “all about
giving”.
Bruni Tedeschi again co-wrote the screenplay with Noémie Lvovsky (who here
co-stars as the timid director’s assistant who would also like to be an actress)
and she has grown as a filmmaker. Her scope is wider here, giving ample room to
several characters besides her own, though the environment and several touches
(the church visits, the sports sessions as a means of distraction, the opera on
the soundtrack, the conversations with people who are not there) are still
recognisably hers.
Her own mother also plays her mother again and they share the
most hilarious sequence of Actrices, with Marcelline getting into bed with her
mother because she cannot sleep and her mother seizing the moment to tell her
what she really thinks of her daughter. Together with an impromptu birthday
party to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s I will survive and another scene involving
a stray pie, the film’s latter half is clearly a comedy in the semi-neurotic
bachelor tradition. The director-writer-star also properly sets up an
audiovisual gag early on that makes the film go out with a bang.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Vigo Passion for Life (1997) Michael Temple from Sight and Sound, June 1999
France, the 20s. The young
aspiring film-maker Jean Vigo, who has adopted a pseudonym because of his dead
father's reputation as an anarchist, finds himself incarcerated at a
tuberculosis sanatorium in the South of France. There he meets Lydu Lozinska, a
fellow sufferer, and they fall in love. Vigo persuades Lydu to leave the
sanatorium and come with him to Paris, where he intends to make films. They get
married and return to the south where he shoots his first film, À propos
de Nice, and the couple have a baby. Both are still unwell, but Lydu
carries on being a mother, while Jean pursues his art.
He makes Zéro de conduite
but the film is banned. Although discouraged and increasingly sick, he agrees
to make a feature-length love story called L'Atalante. His
condition deteriorates during the filming and post-production. Finally, he
learns the film has been recut and given a different soundtrack and even a new
title. He dies, at the age of 29, but the handful of films he has made during
his brief life are posthumously recognised as classics of French cinema.
"Jean Vigo opened my eyes to
cinema. In telling my version of his story, I hope in some way to repay my debt
to him and encourage others to find their own inspiration in his films."
This message from director Julien Temple appears at the end of Vigo
Passion for Life, his filmic homage-cum-biopic of the near-mythical
French film-maker Jean Vigo, whose short life produced four wonderful films: Àpropos
de Nice (1930), Taris ou la natation (1931), Zéro de
conduite (1933), and L'Atalante (1934) and a
no-less-wonderful cultural legacy of speculation and melancholy.
It is easy to sympathise with
Temple's desire to express on screen his admiration for Vigo's life and work.
Indeed, one could argue that Temple is nobly continuing a cinematic tradition
of films inspired by Vigo which includes indirect tributes such as François
Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and, most famously, Lindsay
Anderson's If.... (1968), a version of Vigo's Zéro de
conduite reset in 60s Britain.
Given the intrinsically risky
nature of the artistic biopic as a genre, one has to applaud Temple's having
the good faith, even a certain courage, to take on such an enterprise.
Unfortunately, one must also recognise that the resulting film, although
absolutely faithful to the facts, is absolutely dreadful. Unlike Vigo's
posthumous career, which has been a series of miraculous redemptions and
restorations, Vigo Passion for Life leaves nothing to be salvaged.
On a conceptual level, the film critically fails to engage with the fundamental
myths and legacy of Jean Vigo, and churns out every imaginable Romantic cliché
of the starving-artist-scribbling-and-spewing-in-garret variety.
This weakness extends to the
film's political content, which is no more than an unthinking rehash of the
hagiographic image of Vigo as a turn-of-the-century anarchist: "Imagine a
world," opines fellow-anarchist Bonaventure (Jim Carter looking strangely
like Kramer from Seinfeld), "in which teachers can learn from
children, in which cobblers can be kings, in which parents can no longer tell
children what to do!" - prompting a nearby child to cry: "Mummy, I
want to be an anarchist!" The ill-conceived script ("based on the
original play, Love's a Revolution by Chris Ward" according
to the credits) is full of such rough-hewn gems. Indeed, the stagy awkwardness
of much of the dialogue and action at length inspires compassion for the
struggling actors, especially the French ones such as Romane Bohringer as Lydu
who are condemned to speak in their native language-school accents while the
remaining cast can use purest British luvvie-speak. There are even points in
the film where the poor thespians seem to fumble their lines, but the show, for
some unknown reason, is allowed to go on.
James Frain as Vigo does his best
to cough and splutter his way through what is a very undemanding range of stock
poses, essentially look-sick, look-inspired, look-angry, look-randy, look-sick
again. The whole wretched project is so awful that even in those moments when
Temple lovingly and faithfully recreates certain scenes from Vigo's films,
transposing them into his own narrative, the effect on the informed spectator
is more insulting than moving.
In the conclusive words of Jim Carter as Bonaventure: "There are times when failure is a mark of virtue. This is one of them." On this evidence, Temple must be a truly virtuous man.
Great Britian
BFI | Sight & Sound | The Filth and the Fury (1999) Mark Sinker from Sight and Sound, June 2000
This documentary features
interviews old and new, film footage shot between 1975 and 1979 and footage
from television at that time to retell the story of the Sex Pistols, the key
outfit in the emergence of UK punk. Narrated primarily in voiceover from surviving
band members John Lydon/Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, the
cultural and political background is sketched. A portrait emerges of the
group's formation, public arrival, combined chart success and media outrage,
and collapse while touring America.
A hitherto-unseen interview with
bass player Sid Vicious (real name John Beverly), who died of a heroin
overdose, is framed by interviews with the other band members in the present.
They discuss how and why it all happened, and how much responsibility their
manager Malcolm McLaren (not interviewed except in archive footage) can be
allowed for the triumphs or the catastrophes of the group.
In late 1976, 20 years after Elvis Presley's worldwide arrival, the Clash
presented their notorious rejectionist manifesto of punk renewal: "No
Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977". Implied here was a
self-removing, rarely honoured promise: "No Pistols or Clash in '78".
This is just one reason why
In fact, despite its much-touted previously unseen footage and video
material, the documentary is little more than a clumsy bid for atonement for
Insofar as
The second event was less Bash-Street-Kids, yet its status as myth remains
just as unaddressed. In 1979, in the wake of his girlfriend Nancy's murder in
the Chelsea Hotel, chief suspect Sid Vicious overdosed on heroin, and this
probable suicide became the instant of the movement's failure on its own terms.
Haunted by the sordid debacle of his best friend's public immolation, Rotten is
allowed by
In an age when subconscious folk memories of 1977 are endlessly mobilised
within the media industry to invoke uncritical tolerance of every new trend,
this documentary needed, at a minimum, to confront its principals with the
history of the last 20 years. Unsurprisingly, gravity and the good life have
thickened up even these once-skinny popstar bodies. But Temple interviews them
in friendly silhouette, daylight streaming past their now somewhat Grundified
outlines, in this context an act of cowardice, especially when long-noted contradictions,
historical inaccuracies, and rock-chat clichés are all allowed to wobble by
unremarked. It's as if the same amber that
A director less compromised by his own wannabe-punk influences might have cut through to fresh insight at any number of opportunities during these interviews. For example, at one point we see images from the Pistols' benefit performance at a party for the children of striking firemen, when their position as media demons had them banned from most orthodox venues. The fact that a smiling Rotten handed out cake to tots had to be hidden at the time, for the sake of establishing the intransigent 'rawness' of punk. Besides, the 'humanising' effect of any such counter-demonisation would have been swiftly sentimentalised.
But sentimentalisation comes in many forms. Much of Filth's feebleness stems from its spavined attitude to class. Where the ex-Pistols continue to cast weird, lurid, revelatory light on the English working-class's mutilated sense of itself, Temple does his best to muddy everything they give him, to represent the chafing inflammation within the band of subtly distinct social layers and tensions - the root of its iconoclastic energy - as mere personality clash. Meanwhile, the banishment of McLaren to the role of deluded bourgeois parasite, effectively reduces punk to just a clichéd "kick up the bum for the music business". Actually, only within the dream-field of McLaren's titanically irresponsible improvisation and self-absorbed utopian carelessness could two such inchoately ambitious, clever and dissimilar prole sensibilities as Lydon's and Jones' have combined, let alone fused, mutated and flared.
The blizzard of marketing which followed Sid's death was a disaster rock-careerwise, but only because it flushed out Rotten's fundamental rock 'n' roll decency, at the expense of his flagellant daring as a performer. Unburdened by such pseudo-situationist game-play, the weary Sex Pistols might well have sunk their differences for a time (with each other, and with their record company). By not splitting, they could have become the next Jethro Tull-style dinosaurs, desexed, artistically 'serious' - and pathetically irrelevant.
Great
Britain (123 mi) 2006
Julien Temple has a way of not inviting everyone to the
party, where he introduces a subject usually with enormously compelling
archival video, where various people discuss the subject, but Temple refuses to
identify who these people are, playing a kind of peek-a-boo game with the
audience where he hides essential information.
It’s anyone’s guess why he uses this method, particularly in documentary
films where the object is usually to convey known truths about a given subject,
but
Strummer himself is hard to pin down, oftentimes changing his name and always painfully aware that his English boarding school education, as the son of a former diplomat, hardly makes him the ideal spokesperson for the hostile reflections of the punk generation, which had a way of despising and violently rejecting the models of the past (cut to the movie clip of Lindsay Anderson’s nihilist 1968 film IF…), captured in the frenetic onstage energy of the barely coherent bands which were all about attitude and little about talent or ability. The early punk bands were worshipped by the audience which could identify with their total defiance of the system. Strummer got his start immersed in this culture but was forced to turn his back on his friends, leaving his original band and home town for a super group chosen by a maniacally eccentric, tyrannical agent, Bernie Rhodes, who humbly alleges that he invented punk rock.
Strummer changed his look, his attitude, and wrote a trunkful of songs while enjoying the spotlight of being the frontman of the infamous group The Clash, which toured the world and became super successful, almost a brand name, exactly what they railed against, where the pressures of spending so much time on the road touring with the band literally wore them down until they began to self destruct from drug addiction and alcohol to petty jealousies and exhaustion, where Strummer literally dropped out of sight for a few years, wallowing in his misery with the bottle. Having to redefine himself, he remained acutely aware of the international music scene, expressed on his radio broadcasts, joining in with other bands, doing various tribute concerts, writing film music, eventually forming another band, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, which went on yet another tour. Strummer is seen as a lost poet, as he died of a congenital heart condition early on at the age of 50, where his musical reach was uncommonly broad and where much of his influence could only be appreciated in hindsight, as he survived and transcended the early punk scene, finding an essential grace through his music.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
The Clash has already been the subject of Don Letts' excellent
documentary Westway To The World, but
Strummer tells a lot of that story himself, through archival
interviews and radio broadcasts, and
And the character it defines is worth knowing. Born into a respectable, world-traveling British family, Strummer became a tube-station busker and communal squatter in the early '70s, then fronted the talented pub-rock outfit The 101'ers before joining up with a trio of restless young punks to form The Clash. The combination of Strummer's experience and his mates' raw power—tempered by Mick Jones' flair for guitar melody and nuance—made The Clash a formidable force, onstage and in the studio.
The Future Is Unwritten is mainly concerned with the way
the band explored a variety of pop and rock styles in its too-brief existence,
and how Strummer drifted after the band broke up, doing a little acting and
becoming a family man.
Joe
Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten Dave Calhoun from Time Out
Joe Strummer
is a hard nut to crack: so many different influences were tugging at the late
rocker’s coat-tails that it was never easy to define where he was coming from.
Strummer – real name John Mellor – was the boarding-school boy who grew up
abroad, did the hippy art-school thing, embraced Ladbroke Grove’s ’70s squat
scene, cut his hair, changed his name from John to Woody to Joe, formed and
disbanded The 101ers and The Clash, appeared in a bunch of hip movies and then,
in the ’90s, became a standard-bearer for world music and a stalwart of the
Glastonbury festival. Identity was a big issue for him: in his younger days, he
was so nervous of his past and fearful that someone might call him a fraud and
not a pure, dyed-in-the-wool punk that he ignored anyone who didn’t call him
plain old ‘Joe’. Of course, his mutating persona only makes him all the more
interesting for any biographer.
Julien
Temple, director of rock films from ‘The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle’ to ‘
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Beth Gilligan] also seen here: Joe Strummer: The Future
is Unwritten
I wasn’t born, so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see
The Clash, “Lost in the Supermarket”
Those familiar with The
Filth and the Fury, director Julien Temple’s 2000 documentary about the Sex
Pistols, should have no trouble getting into the rhythm of his latest film, Joe
Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Using the same rapid-fire editing
techniques – not to mention decibel level – as the earlier film, Temple once
again strives not only to evoke a music legend, but also the social climate in
which he rose to fame. In this case, however, the critique of British life in
the mid-to-late 20th century ultimately takes a backseat to an affectionate,
all-encompassing portrait of a middle-class boy once known as John Mellor.
Born in Turkey in 1952
to a British diplomat father and nurse mother, Strummer spent his early years
moving from place to place with his family until the age of nine, when he and
his older brother David were placed in a boarding school in Surrey. Temple
illustrates Strummer’s lonely childhood with a series of black & white
family photos intercut with archival footage of post-World War II England,
along with a few snippets of the 1954 animated version of George Orwell’s Animal
Farm thrown in for good measure. The early portions of the film include
song and audio clips from Strummer’s BBC radio show, giving the impression of
him narrating the early years of his life, while the latter part includes songs
from the various bands he belonged to.
The pivotal event of
Strummer’s teen years was undoubtedly his brother’s suicide. Though Temple
never makes a direct link between the two, the film implies that David Mellor’s
obsession with Nazism and white supremacy prior to his death may have
influenced The Clash’s defiantly left-wing, anti-Nazi lyrics. The film is
peppered with recollections from those who knew Strummer as a boy as well as
those who became acquainted with him during his early years in a rockabilly
band and his later years as The Clash’s legendary frontman. The picture that
emerges is one of a man who was always a savvy manipulator of his own image,
but who was also wholly invested in living the lifestyle and remaining true to
the politics his lyrics espoused.
Among those
interviewed are fellow Clash members Mick Jones, Terry Chimes, and Topper
Headon (conspicuously absent is Paul Simonon, who declined to participate)
along with his family members and famous friends and admirers such as Bono, Jim
Jarmusch, Johnny Depp, and others. So as not to disrupt the intimate feel of
these recollections, Temple refrains from using captions to identify the
speakers, and interviews all of them in front of a bonfire, which was
Strummer’s favorite setting for gatherings with friends later in life. While
the setting of the interviews takes some getting used to, by the end of the
film it feels – the like whole of the movie itself – remarkably true to the
spirit of its subject matter.
“Everybody wants to be famous,” Joe Strummer once said. “But
fame itself isn’t all that interesting; the way we deal with it is.”
Strummer made that statement in a 1989 interview with the Tribune while he was
trying to deal with his own fame, or what was left of it. He had orchestrated
the rise and collapse of the British punk band the Clash. And now he was trying
to figure out what to do next with the Clash long gone and his future in doubt.
Born John Mellor to a British diplomat, Strummer fled his privileged background
and fractured relationship with his father to pursue a single goal: becoming a
rock star. He ended up leading the most successful punk band ever, but the
Clash outgrew punk and each other. Strummer spent a decade wandering after the
Clash crashed for good in 1985. He finally found new purpose in the anonymity
of another rag-tag band, the Mescalaros, only to die of heart failure in 2002
at age 50.
The singer’s life is compressed into a two-hour montage of interviews, vintage
video snippets and artsy filigree in “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.”
Directed by
Its moving narrative requires little in the way of embellishment, but
Strummer was already in his mid-20s when the Sex Pistols hit, instantly rendering
his rockabilly band, the 101’ers, irrelevant. He joined forces with a genuine
punk band that included Mick Jones and Paul Simonon—lower-class kids who lacked
Strummer’s worldliness but matched his drive. The Clash delivered a 1977
self-titled debut album so vitriolic that the band’s label didn’t even bother
to release it in the
More indicative of Strummer’s future was another song on the Clash’s debut, a
cover of reggae artist Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” a gesture of
solidarity with England’s oppressed Caribbean and African communities. Strummer
was already a student of world music, and “
The Clash toured with
“I couldn’t believe it,” he says in the documentary. “We turned into the people
we were trying to destroy.”
Strummer drifted away to work on movies, tour with the Pogues and record a solo
album designed to sever his ties with the music industry. During this period,
Strummer found something more essential than a career: a life, surrounded by
family and a widening circle of friends. The music returned, and a new band
emerged: the Mescalaros. They played a rocked-up brand of world-beat music,
picking up where “Sandinista” left off. Once again Strummer was making a type
of global folk music, a sound that welcomed all to sit around his campfire.
The Village
Voice [Jim Ridley]
Punk died, the Silver Jews sang, the first time a kid shouted "Punk's not dead!" The words are never uttered in Julien Temple's Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, and maybe that's why you come away from this epic doc feeling hopeful about the health of punk's lingering ideals. Piecing together snippets of everything from Raging Bull to an animated Animal Farm, along with archival scraps, performance clips, and a mosaic of witness testimonies, Temple's engrossing portrait of the Clash's late frontman uses endlessly suggestive montage to show how he kept punk's precepts alive, even after he left the music and eventually the earth itself.
Was there ever any question about Strummer's cred? Yes, children, depressing as it is to say, people have been arguing what is or isn't or wasn't or shouldn't be punk since Green Day was in Romper Room. The '70s start, and suddenly you're not the only one who wears rip-kneed jeans, loves three-chord bubblegum played by knock-kneed Bowery hoodlums, and thinks, "Hey, maybe I could do this, too!" The '70s end—and suddenly the shapeless horde you found by accident is as regimented and exclusionary as any country club.
A musician in a militantly artless movement, a star who was supposed to disdain celebrity, Joe Strummer didn't so much embody punk as transcend it. Sure, the Sex Pistols were the bomb throwers—in The Future Is Unwritten, their arrival on-screen is greeted with an explosion. But in Strummer, punk got an ambitious (and unironic) generalissimo with the stage presence, the songwriting skill, and the rhetorical firepower to take the revolt over the barricades. And in the quantum leap from the self-titled Clash album to London Calling, punk got exactly what it wasn't supposed to have: a future.
The Future Is Unwritten doesn't smooth over the contradictions in Strummer's story: It leads with them, intercutting shots of the singer snarling the classic "White Riot"—that electrifying hoarse barrage of accusatory verbal eighth-notes—with glimpses of a fresh-cheeked lad enjoying his well-off boyhood. A career diplomat's son, the young John Mellor got the best education that posh British schools could provide—in class resentment. He retained the lessons well. Like Bob Dylan, he initially modeled himself on Woody Guthrie, the man whose guitar was a machine that killed fascists.
Temple heralds the awakening of Strummer's political
conscience with the schoolyard uprising of Lindsay Anderson's If . . . and the
meat-grinder chords of the MC5's "Kick Out the Jams"—a juxtaposition
that packs a page's worth of high/low cultural analysis into a few fleeting
frames. In his school days, Strummer says on the soundtrack, he learned
"you either formed a gang or were crushed." After attempts to
reinvent himself as a busker and a quasi-rockabilly cat, he found his gang—and
with it his destiny as the bullhorn for
Temple—who directed Johnny Rotten & Co. in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, then made up for it 20 years later with the superior Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury—has compiled the testimony of adoring fans, from the inevitable (Bono, Jim Jarmusch) to the inexplicable (ahoy, Captain Jack Sparrow!). He's gathered pungent drugs-to-fistfights dish from Clash mainstays Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon; he's found sizzling concert clips that chart the band's bewildered rise to top of the pops, along with their desultory breakup. Factor in the bittersweet triumph that caps Strummer's story—his success with the roots-rocking Mescaleros after years of indirection, and a surprise Clash mini-reunion before his death in 2002—and the film has all the ingredients for DIY pop hagiography.
But that's not what
These campfires continued after his death and give The
Future Is Unwritten its shape as well as its spirit. From
Cinemattraction.com [Ian Macpherson]
Film Monthly (Doc Pedrolie) review
Electric Sheep Magazine Sean Price
DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
The Lumière Reader Simon Sweetman
Filmcritic.com Movie Reviews Chris Barsanti
Film Freak Central Review [Alex Jackson]
The House Next Door [Lauren Wissot]
High and Dry - New York Magazine David Edelstein (Page 2)
Movie Review: Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten - Monsters and ... Maura Reilly from Monsters and Critics
Movie Review 2: Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten - Monsters ... Ron Wilkinson from Monsters and Critics
Jam!
Movies Jim Slotek
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten review Fred Thom from Plume Noire
Sundance Review: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten - The ... Kevin Kelly from Cinematical
Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] at Sundance
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Joe Strummer may have sung 'I'm So Bored with the U.S.A.,' but
American audiences will be anythin...
Turner Classic Movies review tribute to Joe
Strummer by Michael T. Toole
Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten | Vancouver, Canada ... Ken Eisner from Georgia Straight
Movie
Magazine International [Casey McCabe]
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman
BBCi - Films Laura Bushell
Death
or glory Time Out
Joe
Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten Review. Movie Reviews - Film ... James Porter from Time Out
Joe
Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten Review. Movie Reviews - Film ... Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out
Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten | Film | The Observer Philip French
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten | Film | The Guardian Steve Rose
Joe Strummer: the Future is Unwritten (15) - Reviews, Films - The ... Robert Hanks from The Independent
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Matt Ashare
'Strummer' illuminates the man and music - The Boston Globe Ty Burr
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Portrait of turbulent punk star - Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Baltimore
City Paper: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ... Bret McCabe from
'Strummer': In the Spirit Of the Clash's Punk God - washingtonpost.com Desson Thomson from The Washington Post
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Joel Selvin]
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Teng Yung-Shing
RETURN TICKET C+ 77
This is a confusing film and production, supposedly a joint Taiwanese and Chinese mainland film production, with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s name appearing as an executive producer, shot entirely in Shanghai, however, making no references whatsoever to Taiwan. While the direction itself by a filmmaker known only for making commercials is spotty, having a few stellar moments, but also demonstrating clear sentimentalization by the finale, much of the overall confusion can be attributed to the use of 5 screenwriters whose stories together simply don’t mesh. Instead, there’s an untold backstory that’s needed to help identify who the major players are, as instead they get jumbled together and it’s hard to tell them apart. Using a format of no lead character, but several clearly identifiable parts, the central theme is one of returning home, where so many people do exactly that during the Chinese New Year that the cities empty with people all traveling back to their family homes during the festivities. While this is a Chinese variation on a theme of The Help (2011), a portrait of the interior lives of domestic workers in Shanghai, nearly all from Fuyang province looking for a way home during the New Year, Shanghai is seen as a city of cutthroat sharks, where in business, there is no one considered trustworthy, not even your family, as knowing when and how to take advantage of others is a business decision, oftentimes highly profitable. The city is shot, however, teeming with life, where the panoramic skyline oversees streets below that are overflowing with cars, bikes, buses, and pedestrians, not to mention street venders and peddlers of all sorts, creating an impression of a city bursting with life and activity.
At the bottom end of the social scale, there are people willing to do any kind of work offered just trying to survive, where scraping together a living is not always easy, especially considering the competition. One young woman, Cao Li (Qin Hai-lu), arrives from out of town on a bus after a failed clothing venture and is offered a place to stay and a job as a domestic worker, but the middle aged woman who owns the house is nearly beaten up and labeled a foreigner for not being from Shanghai, so they’re looking to steal her share of the property out from under her sometime after the passing of her Shanghai born husband. This kind of mob mentality suggests the Chinese are under relentless pressure to own real estate in choice locations, while the economic revitalization is spurred above and below by equally questionable high finance opportunities as well as black market offers. Cao goes into business with a couple of street hustlers, the fast talking Guo (Li Binbin), an old family friend and his mute partner Jiuzi (Shen Yi-qun). They plan to undercut the regular travel prices by providing a renovated stolen bus to Fuyang offering cut rates over the holidays. This get rich quick scheme sounds tempting to the woman about to lose her home, where she may engage in smalltime theft of her own, stealing her tenants cell phone with stored numbers to available job opportunities.
There’s not much of a story except a driving desperation to get out of town to Fuyang using the cheapest method available, where even if they know they’re being tricked, this at least gives them an opportunity to get home. Business seems to thrive on putting people in this position where they are desperate enough to be taken advantage of, even by friends. There are several tiers of city shots, where the camera observes a view from the skyline, a cat sitting alone on a rooftop overlooking the busy streets below, where indoors pots are filled with steaming vegetables, while the claustrophobic housing quarters themselves are cramped and surprisingly tiny, where there is very little individuality on display except the means to out connive others. Using a mix of street realism and low key comedy from the hustler duo, the music of a lone piano is initially effective for establishing the feeling of loneliness in a thriving metropolis, but by the end the director has added lush orchestration and even a manipulative pop song over the end credits, all of which feels fake and a surprising misstep in a film that has avoided cheap sentiment up until the finale. According to the director, Hou Hsiao-hsien didn’t show up on the set until the final two days of shooting, and helped guide the director away from the camera and from making all the decisions, suggesting the entire ensemble needed to learn to trust each other.
Variety Reviews - Return Ticket - Film Reviews - Hong Kong FilMart ... Russell Edwards
Shanghai Yuancun, THW
Creative production. (International sales: Atom Cinema,
Refined perfs and
atmospheric naturalism offer pleasurable compensations in "Return Ticket,"
an overpacked Taiwanese-Chinese co-production. Pic's solid premise taps into
the overworked, underpaid underbelly of
At the film's center is
failed clothing entrepreneur Cao Li (Qin Hai-lu), who finds herself struggling
in
When Jiuzi finds a
dilapidated bus, Guo plans to use it as transportation for Fuyang expats
wanting to return home for the New Year holiday season. Guo enlists the
increasingly desperate Cao as the chief ticket-seller, while he organizes a
mechanic to make the bus road-worthy.
The premise works well,
and leading thesp Qin offers the right balance of dignity and ingenuity as
someone who's too honest for her own good. Co-thesps are also strong, although
the way Jiuzi's speech impediment is played for laughs and bathos tends to
aggravate.
Helming by commercials
director Teng Yung-shing is both confident and restrained, capturing the action
clearly. His observational shots of day-to-day detail, from steaming vegetables
to a solitary cat sitting on a roof, are genuinely intriguing and have the
Ozu-like poise of Hou Hsiao Hsien, pic's Taiwanese exec producer (Hou's editor,
Liao Ching-sung, handled cutting duties). Pic's biggest failing is its
screenplay (by five different scripters), which sometimes feels muddled and
refers to too much off-camera, pre-film action. A final expositional title card
offers an excessively involved postscript that not only alters film's tone, but
suggests "Return Ticket" is only half the film the director intended.
Tech credits have the
good-enough mark of an Asian indie production. Piano score, though of high
quality, is deployed too insistently, to counterproductive effect.
Camera (color), Hsia
Shao-yu; editor, Liao Ching-sung; music, Deep White; production designer, Hsia
S
Fuyang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Another one of those the South will rise again flicks, inexplicably popular, like crowds at the stock car races, this time a Reese Witherspoon vehicle that offers plenty of good character support, but fails to deliver much more than a typical Saturday night made for TV movie. Witherspoon is her typical charming self, and the story pushes the buttons of a successful New York City fashion designer returning to her poor Southern roots in an attempt to get a divorce from her old high school sweetheart (Josh Lucas), which lays it on plenty thick with that rural Southern charm. That might work, in fact that’s the best part of the story, sort of a return to the land of Winn-Dixies, but when she’s attempting to marry the filthy rich JFK Jr-style son (Patrick Dempsey) of the Mayor of New York City, who happens to be Candice Bergen in a much more arrogant and self-centered version of TV’s Murphy Brown, which pits the Yankees against the old Southern Confederacy, that part of the story just doesn’t fit, as the laughs at this point only come from an automatic laugh track and from a punch in the nose. Witherspoon is always adorable,and the material here is harmless enough, but leaves something to be desired. Try watching Capra’s IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) instead, it’s funnier, with much better dialogue, featuring a priceless performance from Claudette Colbert matching wits with Clark Gable at his cynical best, showing a greater appreciation for observing ordinary people, while also doing a pretty good job of examining the social hypocrisies among the rich and powerful.
Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)
It's all so perfect except for one thing: Melanie, who had been a hellfire in
her youth, is still married to her childhood sweetheart--country boy Jake (Josh
Lucas), still living in her hometown of
But Melanie's real challenge is estranged hubby Jake, who still refuses to put
his John Hancock on those all-important divorce papers. Jake apparently is
still bitter about failing to meet Melanie's standards and being dumped by her.
Slowly, Melanie, renewing friendships with gay Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry) and
others, warms to the simple, friendly and rollicking Southern life she left
behind. Inevitably, she and Jake grow closer just as fianc Andrew pops into
Pigeon Creek. The hometown wedding moves forward, but maybe not to a finality--as
emotions, revelations and the arrival of mother-from-hell Kate alter fate.
Witherspoon again shines, although she's not armed with the level of witty,
funny material that distinguished some of her previous outings. Lucas--this
year's Matthew McConaughey--impresses as the hunky, good-ole-boy hero, and
Dempsey nicely warms up a role that could have been a cold stereotype. Bergen,
as the blinkered politico, gets to show off her comic chops, complete with some
deliciously cynical lines. Other pluses include a handsome production and
toe-tapping soundtrack, and a neat final-act twist.
The laws of
Hollywood pretty much dictate the content of a modern romantic comedy. The
lovers must be young and attractive; they must go through hell and high water
before they acknowledge their love for one another; they must be sweet and
well-meaning; and the audience must always know about two miles ahead of the
lovers that they will eventually get together. There have been a few exceptions
to the rules, like "The Quiet Man," "Harold and Maude," and
"Moonstruck," but usually the conventions hold true.
"Sweet Home Alabama," one of 2002's major entires in the field, has
the distinction of not only sticking close to the accepted canons but of
starring Reese Witherspoon as well. It makes for an agreeable though not
particularly novel experience. If you like Ms. Witherspoon, you'll like the
picture. If you're a sucker for lightweight romantic comedies, you'll like the
picture. If, on the other hand, you're looking for something with a bit more
flesh on its bones, a few more hardy laughs, a little more originality thrown
into the formula, well, sorry. You won't find it here, despite its director,
Andy Tennant, having had experience in matters humorous and romantic
("Anna and the King," "Ever After," "Fools Rush
In," "It Takes Two").
You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of
the girl. That may seem a awfully trite sentiment, but it serves as the basis
for "Sweet Home Alabama." Ms. Witherspoon, who is quickly becoming
the new Meg Ryan of romantic comedies, plays Melanie Carmichael, a woman seven
years removed from her tiny home town of Pigeon Creek, Alabama, and now living
New York City as a fashion designer. As the story begins, she's opening a new
show that has all the earmarks of success, and she's about to marry the rich,
urbane son of the city's mayor. She's come a long way from Pigeon Creek, baby.
There is only one snag: She's still married to her childhood sweetheart whom
she left back in Pigeon Creek those many years ago. So off she goes back home
to get divorce papers signed and then it's the big-city life of comfort and joy
forever. Of course, if that's all there were to it, we wouldn't have a movie.
Consequently, complications occur when Melanie's husband decides he won't give
her a divorce, and then her fiancée shows up for a surprise visit to see where
she grew up and to meet her parents, and I think you get the idea.
Patrick Dempsey plays the fiancée, Andrew, a strikingly handsome John F.
Kennedy, Jr., type, who has so much money he pays Tiffany's to stay open in
order to propose to Melanie there and then tells her to pick out any engagement
ring in the place. It's to the film's credit that Andrew is not played as a
snobby sophisticate but as a caring human being, which makes him a little less
of a stereotypical character than he could have been. Still, Andrew seems more
concerned with defying his mother than in genuinely loving Melanie. Candace
Bergen plays Andrew's mom, the NYC mayor, mostly as a cold, conniving
politician thinking only of her own political future and therefore hoping for a
proper and prestigious marriage for her son. The idea of Andrew's marrying a
hayseed is hardly her idea of a good match.
Josh Lucas plays Jake, Melanie's husband. He's basically a good ol' boy who
stayed in Pigeon Creek doing heaven knows what. He's pleasant, laid back, and
amiable in a part that appears tailor-made for Owen Wilson. But Lucas does well
with the role and generates more sympathy than anyone else in the picture. The
perennial neighbor-next-door Mary Kay Place and the ever-reliable Fred Ward
play Melanie's mom and dad, Pearl and Earl. Ms. Place appears to have just
stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, always fussing about in the kitchen,
and Ward looks like a Depression-Era tough, a prospect made all the more bizarre
by his being a Civil War buff going off to fight the Yankees every weekend in
full Confederate uniform.
Anyway, it turns
out Miss Melanie was a wild child in her youth and takes up right where she
left off once she gets back home. This isn't so bad until we see her drunk, and
then she loses what little compassion we ever had for her. What's more, the
love-hate relationship she has with Jake starts anew. It doesn't take Melanie
long before she's torn between the big-city life she's gotten to know and the country
life she thought she had forsaken.
The movie has a couple of good scenes, mostly with Melanie's folks, a few
implausible coincidences, and a most improbable surprise at the end. The laughs
are few, but, then, a romantic comedy doesn't have to have many laugh-out-loud
guffaws, just a few smiles and least one tender "ahhh." The film does
its best on all counts, but there isn't much for it to work with. The major
conflict is too easy for the audience to see resolved, there aren't any actual
villains to speak of, no one to boo or hiss, and the script leaves little room
for innovation. Let me sum it up this way: Jake goes through the entire movie
with exactly the same amount of stubble on his face. It's that kind of film.
Los Angeles Times (Manohla Dargis)
In the new romantic comedy "
If movies were anything like life (and her ghastly collection anything like
fashion), Melanie would be already divorced and weeping into her Women's Wear
Daily. Instead, the day after her runway triumph, this Dixie Holly Golightly is
driving through her hometown of
Great comedy can be had from putting the wrong person in the
wrong place, but so can great condescension.
Soon after reaching Pigeon Creek, Melanie tracks down her husband, Jake (Josh
Lucas). Pulling up to his house, one of those shabbily chic movie shacks that
looks like it would fetch upward of a million dollars in Laurel Canyon, she
begins waving a sheaf of divorce papers and demanding her freedom. She's still
wearing the same sour look she drove in with, but as Melanie takes in the
howling bloodhound, the art-directed clutter and the engine grease smudged over
her husband's face, something else begins tugging at the corners of her mouth.
The sourness turns to disdain, then shades into full-on disgust. It isn't just
Pigeon Creek, the South or the inopportune husband that's scraping at her so
insistently--it's the poverty.
Forced to stay put in Pigeon Creek, Melanie cuts a careless swath through
family and friends, her every insult played for laughs. When she brags to a
childhood friend that she's a designer and the woman eagerly asks if she knows
Jaclyn Smith, the Charlie's Angel turned Kmart fashionista, the joke is on the
woman betraying her ignorance, not the one betraying her snobbism. Of course
it's easy to knock other people's taste; it's also convenient, especially if
the digs obscure more precarious topics. The film may be named for a Lynyrd
Skynyrd rebel yell, and the locals may dress in Civil War drag to play war
games, but that's meant to be just atmosphere, like the Confederate flag pillow
on the family couch and the black friend who playfully dubs Melanie his
"steel magnolia."
Witherspoon has charmed her way through weak material before, but she's too
inexperienced to save the character from director Andy Tennant, whose main
achievement here is to turn his star's natural twinkling menace into malice.
(If the older cast members fare better, it's because they're either storming
the scenery, like Candice Bergen, or in on some private joke, like Fred Ward.)
Then again, it's hard to imagine what a more seasoned performer could do with a
woman so consumed with her own narcissism that she purposely outs a closeted
male friend at a local bar because, as Melanie later explains, she didn't want
anyone noticing her bad behavior.
The South takes another beating in "
DVD Verdict Dan Mancini
PopMatters Renée Scolaro Mora
Erik Childress (Chicago Film Critics
Association/Online Film Critics Society) one of
the real haters of the film
Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Hiroshi
Teshigahara | Japanese film director and artist | Britannica.com biography
Hiroshi
Teshigahara - Strictly Film School
Acquarello
Woman
in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) on DVD - Bright ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 1, 2000
Hiroshi
Teshigahara, 74, Avant-Garde Japanese Film Director - The ... Obituary from The New York Times, April 20, 2001
Hiroshi
Teshigahara; Broadened Japan's Cinema - latimes Mark Magnier, April 20, 2001
Obituary:
Hiroshi Teshigahara | Film | The Guardian
Ronald Bergan, April 25, 2001
Hiroshi Teshigahara • Great Director profile - Senses of Cinema Dan Harper from Senses of Cinema, May 22, 2003
Japanese
New-Wave Director Hiroshi Teshigahara as Renaissance ... Thomas Michalski from The Huffington Post, June 12, 2012
Zola
Jesus on... the Transportive Wormholes of Hiroshi Teshigahara ... Zola Jesus from Self-Titled magazine, August 1, 2013
Jesse's
Blog: The films of Hiroshi Teshigahara
Jesse La Tour, May 27, 2014
Hiroshi
Teshigahara and the Japanese New Wave - PopOptiq Anthoony Spataro, September 3, 2015
Hiroshi Teshigahara - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hiroshi Teshigahara -
Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
An entomologist finds himself trapped by mysteriously tribal villagers, and forced to cohabit with a desirable but inarticulate woman in an escape-proof sandpit. Leaving aside all the teasing questions of allegorical meaning, Teshigahara's film is a tour de force of visual style, and a knockout as an unusually cruel thriller. It builds on its blatantly contrived premise (taken from Kobo Abé's novel) with absolute fidelity and conviction, which leaves the manifest pretensions looking both credible and interesting, and centres its effects on the erotic attraction between the man and woman, filmed with a palpable physicality that remains extraordinary.
Woman in the Dunes | Chicago Reader Don Druker
Japanese New Wave director Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 allegory on the meaning of freedom and the discovery of identity. An office worker (Eiji Okada) on an entomological holiday spends the night with a widow (Kyoko Kishida), whose shack at the bottom of a sand pit becomes his prison. Gradually he learns to love her and to help her in her endless task of shoveling sand, which the local villagers use to protect themselves from the elements. A bizarre film, distinguished not so much by Kobo Abe's rather obvious screenplay as by Teshigahara's arresting visual style of extreme depth of focus, immaculate detail, and graceful eroticism. In Japanese with subtitles. 123 min. Screening in a restored, 147-minute director's cut.
Woman in the Dunes Acquarello
Hiroshi Teshigahara crafts a spare and haunting allegory for human existence in Woman in the Dunes. An entomologist (Eija Okada) on holiday from Tokyo has come to a remote desert in order to study and collect specimens from the local insect population. As he momentarily rests on the sand dunes, he ponders a fundamental existential question: does a person's recognized achievements validate his existence? Is the value of his life measured by the number of certificates and awards he has received in his lifetime? For the entomologist, the answer is clearly reflected in his latest quest for an unclassified beetle that, if found, would be named after him in all the scientific journals. After lapsing into a daydream, he is awakened with the news that the last bus has left for the day, and the villagers arrange for him to stay with a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives at the bottom of a sand dune. Soon, fragments of the woman's odd existence begin to surface: the pervasive contamination of sand throughout the house, the economy of food and water, the shoveling of the sand from dusk to dawn. She reveals the tragic details of her life - her husband and child buried under the crushing weight of the shifting sand - and alludes to his extended stay as her permanent company. The following morning, his attempt to leave the dunes is thwarted when he realizes that the rope ladder he had used to descend to the woman's house had been retracted, and the sand formations are too amorphous to climb. Eventually, the cyclic, seemingly mindless ritual is laid out before him: the shoveled sand is exchanged for provisions; the sand is hauled away at night and sold in the black market for construction; to stop shoveling would bury the house, and the adjacent house becomes at risk. Given an eternal task similar to the mythical Sisyphus, the entomologist asks the woman: "Are you living to shovel, or shoveling to live?" Resigned to an existence of displacing sand that will invariably be re-deposited by the following morning, can his life have existential meaning beyond deferring the inevitable cascading of the sand? In the barren landscape of the shifting dunes, is there a redemptive purpose in performing the monotonous, uncomplicated task? Or is the meaning of life reserved for only those who pursue the artificial, created cerebral exercises of modern civilization?
MoMA
| Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes
Charles Silver, curator at MOMA
These notes accompany screenings of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s </em>Woman in the Dunes</a> on February 19, 20, and 21 in Theater 3.</p>
Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001) was a latecomer to the movement known as the Japanese New Wave (like his French counterparts, he began as a film critic), preceded by Susumu Hani, Nagisa Oshima, and Shohei Imamura. When the movement began in 1956, Mizoguchi was dying, but Ozu, Kurosawa, and Ichikawa were at their career peaks. Teshigahara’s breakthrough film was Pitfall, adapted by Kobe Abe from his novel, and the two would collaborate again on Suna No Onna (Woman in the Dunes). Abe was a member of the avant-garde who would be nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Unsurprisingly, he admired Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Poe. He was also, like the male protagonist of Woman in the Dunes, an insect collector, and the film makes use of insect metaphors, much as John Steinbeck had done in The Grapes of Wrath.
Teshigahara was a highly diversified member of the avant-garde arts community, a painter and sculptor as well as a filmmaker, and he was also skilled in ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement), of which his father had been a grand master. In the course of his career, he made several documentaries on artists like Antonio Gaudi and Jean Tinguely.
Woman in the Dunes was nominated for an Oscar and is generally considered his masterpiece. (Teshighara was the first Japanese director ever nominated.) It stars Eiji Okada, who had come to international attention in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Kyoko Kishida, who plays the woman, had a long career. Teshighara used her several times again, and she appeared in Ozu’s last film, An Autumn Afternoon (which will be shown again in our Auteurist Reprise series on May 26).
Last week we showed Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (as a Valentine’s Day “treat”) and, inadvertently, we seem to have fallen into a misogynistic film festival, almost like Okada falling into the dunes-woman’s pit. Actually, the ending of Woman in the Dunes could be read as romanticism of a sort. (It would be a while before the phenomenon known as “Stockholm syndrome” was recognized, but I don’t want to give away too much of the plot.) The film, with its desolately ominous landscape, abetted by Toru Takemitsu’s experimental and modern score (the celebrated composer provided the music for Lucille Carra’s recently shown The Inland Sea), is a haunting, enchanting, and otherworldly fantasy. It shares with Repulsion a nightmarish quality—especially in the scene with the masked locals gleefully celebrating the incarceration of their victim—and it suggests a throwback to a strange medievalism. I couldn’t help but think of the Sale pirates who captured and imprisoned Robinson Crusoe. (One day, just before 9/11, I naively wandered alone around Sale, Morocco, unfamiliar with the details of Defoe’s plot. There were no pirates, just some kids on bikes who wanted to know my opinion of George W. Bush.) In an interview with Joan Mellen in her Voices from the Japanese Cinema, Teshigahara comments on the voyeurism of the villagers who force the couple to have public sex, seeing this as a “universal” human instinct. He laughingly recalls an incident from World War II when he observed “an old country fellow peeking at two lovers through the hole in a shoji screen.”
The eroticism and nudity was very un-Japanese for mainstream cinema of the period, although our own former curator, Donald Richie, was already shocking some Tokyo sensibilities with what amounted to “X-rated” underground films. As the critic Gudrun Howarth wrote, “When the woman washing the man reacts to the touch of his skin and to the patterns of soap lather on his flesh, the sensual, almost tactile, participation of Teshigahara’s camera creates one of the most erotic love scenes ever photographed.”
Woman in the Dunes: Shifting Sands Criterion essay by Audie Bock, July 09, 2007
The
Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu Criterion essay by Peter Grilli, July
09, 2007
Woman in the
Dunes (1964) - The Criterion Collection
Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara - The Criterion Collection
Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) on DVD - Bright ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 1, 2000
Midnight Eye review: Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna, 1964 ... Jasper Sharp
Dan Schneider on Woman In The
Dunes - Cosmoetica Daniel
Schneider
notcoming.com | Woman of the Dunes Rich Watts
Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee]
Battleship
Pretension [Scott Nye]
Electric
Sheep Magazine [John Berra]
Woman
in the Dunes - TCM.com Nathaniel
Thompson
Woman
of the Dunes: Existentialism at its disturbing best. | Lisa Thatcher
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Images
Movie Journal [Gary Morris]
DVD Savant Review: Three
Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara - DVD Talk
Glenn Erickson, Criterion
Japanese
Culture Reflections [Stephen O. Murray]
Criterion
Film
Freak Central - Woman in the Dunes (1964) [The Criterion ... Walter Chaw, Criterion Blu-Ray
Woman
in the Dunes Blu-ray Svet Atanasov,
Criterion Blu-Ray
Woman in the
Dunes Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Bruce Douglas, Criterion Blu-Ray
Woman in the
Dunes | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVDBlu
Review [Christopher S. Long]
Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-ray
Review: Criterion's WOMAN IN THE DUNES - ScreenAnarchy Michele "Izzy" Galgana, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Woman In The Dunes
- The AV Club Keith Phipps
247. WOMAN IN THE
DUNES (1964) | 366 Weird Movies
Gregory J. Smalley
The Asian Cinema Blog [Philip Seifi]
The Spinning Image [Daniel Auty]
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]
Electric
Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]
CineScene.com
[Howard Schumann] (capsule review)
Woman
of the Dunes | Film | The Guardian
Rob Mackie
Rereading: The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe | Books | The ... book review by David Mitchell from The Guardian, October 7, 2006
The Independent: Jonathan Romney
MOVIE
REVIEW : Deception in 'Woman in the Dunes' - latimes Mark Chalon Smith
Woman in the Dunes Movie Review (1964) | Roger Ebert
Woman
in the Dunes - The New York Times
Bosley Crowther
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
DVDBeaver.com
- Full Graphic Review by Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver
Criterion boxset [Gary Tooze]
Woman in the Dunes -
Wikipedia
Private Parts (1997) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
On the day I left
So I tore through the book in the bathrooms of Comfort Inns
and Motel 6s in nine different states. And it wasn't a bad read. Oh, sure, it's
kind of scary to think somebody might take Howard Stern's shoot-from-the-mouth
opinions about anything and everything as gospel. Still, the appeal of Private
Parts — aside from the obvious digressions on penis size, hemorrhoids, and
naked girls — was its fairy-tale story of a kid who rose from absolute
obscurity to media superstardom through dogged, singleminded conviction in his
own values. (I could have done without the caustic but unenlightening personal
attacks on celebrities as well as the singleminded celebration of self that
takes over the book's latter chapters.) The movie actually works a lot better
than the book, because it portrays Stern's rise to the top and then leaves well
enough alone, sparing us the masturbatory ego-trip that might have seemed
unavoidable.
In a way, this movie can be read as a lowbrow retort to The People vs. Larry Flynt. Where TPVLF argued that Flynt deserves free speech protection because what he's doing is important in principle, Private Parts argues that Stern deserves it because what he's doing is wildly entertaining. Private Parts is even, I think, interested in seeing what makes Stern tick.
The screenplay by Len Blum (Stripes) and Michael Kalisniko plays like a levelheaded riff on the jazzier Annie Hall, with Stern written as an Alvy Singer without the intellect or the woman problems. The movie opens with a depiction of Stern (yes, he plays himself) making an ass of himself as "Fartman" at the MTV Video Music Awards and then wandering backstage afterward where such comparably high-minded performers as Ozzy Osbourne and Flavor Flav (yes, they play themselves) snigger derisively. He speaks to us in voiceover, explaining how "misunderstood" he is. Who would have thought it -- it's the opening scenes of his own movie, and the king of all media is feeling like a loser. Soft underbelly thus exposed, Stern spills his guts to a beautiful woman (model Carol Alt, apparently not playing herself) who happens to be booked in the first class seat next to Howard's on a cross-country plane flight.
Suddenly we're catapulted back in time to Stern's humble
childhood in
We follow Howard to
The trick here is making the movie hysterical enough that even non-fans will give a toss who this guy is and how he got here. Betty Thomas, whose The Brady Bunch Movie is far funnier than I could have expected, is well up to the challenge. Stern claims to have rejected 20 different drafts of the script (either he's an outrageously gifted mogul or just a control freak), and what he finally approved is a sharp distillation of the book's best moments. But how do you keep this material — which includes Howard's patently offensive stereotypes of blacks, gays, and women, for starters — from seeming merely tawdry and self-serving? Thomas manages. There's an energy to the staging and pacing of the on-the-air scenes that rivals Howard's, and the rhythm doesn't flag much in the "domestic" scenes involving life with Allison. Stern's persona is nearly as outsized as Jim Carrey's, but while movie directors seem unwilling to come within striking distance of Carrey, Thomas seems to have guided Stern into an accomplished performance.
How does Hollywood Howard look compared to the real thing? Well, the real Howard isn't unfailingly funny, and I can't say much for his sense of comic timing. But he is certainly a storyteller. Stern has a gift for taking the lamest schtick and making it, if not fascinating, at least oddly engaging. He's also got a singular talent for making people feel like they belong — witness the legions of fans who phone other TV and radio shows and dupe the poor sucker who pre-screens the calls just so they can shout "Baba Booey!" (the nickname of Stern's producer, Gary Dell'Abate, who also appears in the film) over the air. These folks doubtless have too much time on their hands, but Stern makes misfits feel special. For somebody who's taken pains to offend almost everyone on the planet, Stern's following is surprisingly diverse and annoyingly rabid. Simply put, he's onto something.
Exactly what that something is may be hard to say. You'd probably have to log more hours listening to Stern than I care to in order to take a crack at figuring out just where he's coming from. But there's one scene in Private Parts that seems to have a point of view, and I love it a lot. It comes at the end of Stern's most shocking, no-holds-barred diatribe — the jokefest, both privately with Allison and on the air the next day, following the miscarriage of his baby. Near the end of the sequence, which is likely to offend anyone with a pumping heart exactly because it's impossibly funny, the camera lingers for just a moment on Howard's sunglassed face. The shot is a high-angle close-up, and it communicates very succinctly that Howard's high-intensity bravado has just carried him through perhaps the single most painful event of his life. In this one shot, Private Parts demonstrates, as directly as any movie I've ever seen, the way a twisted joke can be born out of a terrible numbness. And, as always, the show must go on.
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California
Danièle Thompson's third directorial outing (preceded by La Bûche and Jet
Lag/Décolage horaire) flows brilliantly on a grand scale doling out clichés and
pungent acting in equal measure. It could do quite well with the older
generation US art house audience and if the Film Society was looking for French
films unlikely to be distributed here, this and the opener Palais Royal! were
odd choices. Series viewers begin with a big dose of Valérie Lemercier, since
she is prominent in both this and Palais Royal!
Three high-profile lives will meet deadlines on Paris' chic Avenue Montaigne on
the 17th of the month in this story – a famous pianist is going to perform
Beethoven, a popular TV actress debuts in a Feydeau farce, and a millionaire is
going to auction off the great collection of modern art he's spent a lifetime
assembling.
All three are dissatisfied. TV star Catherine Versen (Valérie Lemercier) gets
extravagant paychecks for playing a problem-solving mayor on a popular high
toned soap and runs into passionate fans wherever she goes, but she'd really
much rather be a serious actress and play, say, Simone de Beauvoir in the movie
a famous American director, Brian Sobinski (Sydney Pollack) is in town to cast.
Millionaire businessman Jacques Grunberg (Claude Brasseur) is still enjoying
life, but he knows not much of it remains to him. He is ill, and his relations
with his grumpy professor son Frédéric (Christopher Thomson, the director's
son) are cold. His collection is no longer alive to him either. He makes up for
it with a young trophy girlfriend. Pianist Jean-Francois Lefort (Albert
Dupontel) is managed by his mournful but devoted wife Valentine (Laura Morante,
the mother in Moretti's The Son's Room) and he's booked solid for the next six
years, but the whole concert life feels as constrictive to him as the evening
clothes he must wear for concerts (Dupontel looks like a hunkier version of the
sad pianist played by Charles Aznavour in Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player).
Jean-Francois wants to dump it all, but his wife, whom he loves, may bolt if he
does.
Tying all these celebs together are a couple of charming observers, Jessica and
Claudie. Claudie (Dani) is the theater concierge and she's about to retire.
Claudie has lived her dream of meeting all the pop stars as well as classical
performers of decades past. She had no talent, she announces, so she chose to
be around talent, and she succeeded and feels her life was very worthwhile. The
moments when we see her lip-sync old French pop songs whose singers she's known
through her job are perhaps the film's happiest. As a kind of Ariel and mascot
for the piece there is Jessica (Cécile de France), a naive cutie from the
provinces with a pretty face and charming smile (the Belgian-born Cécile has
been one of French film's most promising young female stars of recent years)
who's just landed a wait job at the old-fashioned Café des Arts – a place that
serves every level of society that works in the quarter – and who, wouldn't you
know it, quickly meets Jacques, Jean-Francois, Catherine, and even Frérdéric,
who's eventually smitten, and Jessica hears them all unload their problems.
Book-ending the piece is the relationship of Jessica and the grandma who raised
her (Suzanne Flon), Madame Roux, whose life foreshadowed Jessica's: she
"always loved luxury" but was poor so when she went to
There's climax, romance, and reconciliation in store at the end for the cast.
This is very glossy mainstream French stuff, good writing by Christopher
Thompson in collaboration with his mother Danièle, smooth directing, good work
by the stellar cast. Lemercider isn't as buffoonish as she was in Palais
Royal!—one begins to see her appeal. The movie doesn't take itself too seriously
even if the scenes between the pianist and his Italian wife are a bit intense,
due to casting. The question is, what's this all about, and why must we concern
ourselves with the "predicaments" of people who from the looks of it
are so singularly fortunate in life?
The daughter of famous French
director Gérard Oury (The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob) and a prolific screenwriter (Queen Margot), Danièle Thompson delivers her third film as a director,
following the acclaimed La Bûche and the half-baked Jet
Lag.
Orchestra Seats falls into the Parisian comedy sub-genre, focusing on that
weird self-centered microcosm that the City of Lights is and, more
particularly, on what we call "le monde du show-biz", which largely
encloses most protagonists here — a soap actor, a pianist, a businessman turned
art collector, a theater concierge, a writer and a girl trying to make it in
the capital.
While this universe is usually pedantic, rather than
embracing it or offering a banal caricature, Thompson prefers to give a
detached look to create a portrait tinged with irony and affection, melancholy
and hope. Most of her characters are disillusioned or live in the shadow of
their past, but despite all their flaws, they can reach a certain level of
redemption by finding their true selves.
While the reflection isn't deep in a Michael
Haneke way, there are
enough interesting dialogues and lines to elevate Orchestra Seats higher than
the level of basic comedy, most of these thoughts coming from the characters
played by Albert Dupontel, Claude Brasseur and Christopher Thompson.
Of course, if the film weren't funny, Orchestra Seats
wouldn't work, but it succeeds at bringing laughs, without going for big gags,
mostly thanks to the presence of Valérie Lemercier, who assures a big chunk of
the comedic relief here while Cécile de France takes care of the cuteness
factor, the opposite of her freaky incarnation in the bloated High
Tension.
With a certain propensity for drama and cheesiness that
sometime borders on Claude Lelouch territory (arrghhh), some might probably
have preferred an acerbic satire of this little Parisian world which seems to
evolves around one single block. But by opting for a light touch, Thompson
manages to bring a bit of poetry rather than bitterness while giving us a
comedy which isn't just satisfied by taking us for imbeciles.
A
Collision of Role Players on the Busy Avenue of Life Manohla Dargis from the New York Times
Australia (101 mi) 2009 official site
Above all else, this is basically a road picture which follows the exploits of two young Aboriginal teenagers from their daily routines in their tiny desert village to the moment they are both ostracized from that community and feel forced to flee, hoping for a better life, but only find more horrors that await them. This is as downbeat a film as I’ve seen in years, but also displays an uncompromising vision as it accurately reflects the poverty, lack of education, boredom, substance abuse, homelessness, social dysfunction, and the lack of any hope that something better awaits any of them, leaving them in a gigantic hole of futility, where their only friend in the world is utter hardship and despair. It’s as if they are both doomed to spend the rest of their lives impoverished, friendless and alone, which is what draws them together, not because they actually like or are attracted to one another, but they are kindred spirits that share the same dim future. Samson (Rowan McNamara) and Delilah (Marissa Gibson) are both victims of their harsh environment, where their elders can be the cruelest examples of the hopelessness that pervades their world. The depiction of the Aboriginal world is so uniquely barren and empty that it feels unworldly, as if there’s no place for it in this world, which by its desolation and devastatingly sad bleakness feels all the more real.
Samson, who utters a single word throughout the entire film, is already a petrol sniffer, where he’s constantly seen inhaling this monstrously addictive substance that literally destroys brain cells on contact. He has violent mood swings where he tends to grow irritable, destroying whatever he sees with a giant stick, just an example of his highly combustible nature. Delilah, on the other hand, makes Aboriginal paintings with her grandmother and otherwise leads a quiet life looking after her. But when her grandmother dies suddenly, all the elders erroneously blame her, as if she wasn’t providing proper care, actually beating her with a stick, brutal acts that make little sense, especially since she was the only one looking after her. Samson, meanwhile, awakens each day to his brothers sitting on the front porch playing fairly rudimentary electric ska music, where they play the same song all day long in an endless session of monotony, so he attacks his brother with a stick one day to get him to stop. But this only leads to retaliation, hostility, and greater community outrage. On something of a whim, Samson grabs the wounded Delilah and heads out of town in the first vehicle he can break into, which happens to be the only village automobile. His problem, however, is that he needs the petrol more to sniff than to run the car, so by nightfall they are stranded in the middle of nowhere, which of course, is where they’ve always been.
The
scenes in the city of Alice Springs are even more hauntingly bleak, as what
money they have is spent on the first day, leaving them stranded and even more
ostracized in an all-white environment based on their racial attributes, which
immediately identifies them as a couple that does not belong. Only a partially sane and eccentric homeless
man, the director’s real-life alcoholic
brother Scott, prone to singing nonsensical songs while living under an
overpass bridge, offers them anything resembling friendship, where he shares
whatever food he has while serenading them with his latest soliloquy, at one point singing
bits of Tom Waits’s alcoholic-tinged “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” Tom Waits - Jesus Gonna Be
Here - YouTube (3:21). Delilah at
least attempts to mingle with the white crowds, also an art store proprietor
that sells Aboriginal art for $22,000 a painting, but is only scoffed at and
ridiculed, leaving her as devastated as Samson, quickly joining in his
addiction of sniffing petrol full-time, leaving them both abandoned and
oblivious to the world around them.
Because the film is etched with such vivid realism, the audience gets a
highly personalized view of their plight, one of the better films at showing
the cultural impact of racism which is so casually embedded in the indifference
of the majority white culture, where an unbridgeable chasm exists between the
two cultures, where whites shoo them away with the same annoying effort as
swatting a fly. But like any good road
movie, this one has multiple possibilities, and the film could take any number
of different directions, where one of its rare qualities is leading us in one
direction while actually taking us somewhere else altogether. This kind of misdirection is highly
appealing, as the audience begins to wonder whether the real world has been
transformed into a netherworld, where what’s happening onscreen plays out in
multiple dimensions, adding to the intrigue about where this is all
leading.
Etched in country ballads, simplicity and a near wordless relationship between the couple, played by two non-actors, yet their tenderness towards one another only increases due to the difficulty of their travails, where all they have in this world quite literally is each other. The hostile world around them never softens or even bends, but somehow they manage to survive against all odds, where even their survival may only be in some metaphorical state, where from their vantage point the world of the whites begins to look dreamlike and surrealistic. The hardcore truths depicted in this picture are drop dead amazing, yet the story unravels with such a naturalistic and effortless grace. There’s a kind of Bressonian BALTHAZAR (1966) at play here, where everywhere this couple goes, they are treated as less than human, yet somehow, they transcend their earthly surroundings, from the boredom of the dead-end village where they were raised to the entrenched hatred of the nation that has no use for them and would rather confine them to undesirable and remote tribal land where they remain out of sight and out of mind. Thornton, who wrote, directed, filmed, played guitar and wrote the music for his first feature-length film, which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 2009 for the best first feature, brings this couple from behind closed doors out into the world, like a modern day Mary and Joseph, where despite the passage of thousands of years in a Biblical sense, there is still no room at the inn.
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) capsule review at Telluride
Precisely because Telluride doesn't give prizes, the festival
is able to augment its program of mainstream attractions with a profusion of
independent, esoteric or classic films that, in many cases, can't be seen
anywhere else in the world. One of them was Jean Renoir's sublime "Toni,"
a romantic drama, made in 1934, about immigrant workers in
Samson & Delilah Cliff Doerksen from The Reader
Samson (Rowan McNamara) and Delilah (Marissa Gibson) are
young aborigines stranded on a godforsaken reserve in the dusty Australian
interior. He huffs gasoline all day, living in a perpetual and wordless stupor;
she helps her disabled grandmother (Mitjili Gibson) paint traditional canvases
that earn the pair hundreds of dollars while selling for five figures in
distant urban galleries. When both youths incur beatings at the hands of their
elders, they set out for the city together but there find even greater
misfortune. This sterling 2009 debut by
The Daily Telegraph review [5/5] Sukhdev Sandhu at Cannes
Set in a remote
desert Aboriginal community, it portrays the relationship between two
teenagers: one, a brash boy who spends much of his time sniffing petrol and
lost in music; the other, a girl forced to take care of her ailing grandmother.
They rarely speak
- the people in this hardscrabble community tend to communicate by blows – but
their teasing, testy exchanges will be familiar to anyone who has ever been
young and in love.
The film is
remarkable for the skill with which it exerts a rich sense of texture and
atmosphere. At the same time, it constantly surprises and even wrong-foots the
audience: are we watching a social documentary, a teen-romance, or an
undercommons comedy? The answer is: all three – and then some.
There are shades
of the Dardennes brothers here, and of Charles Burnett’s classic Killer of
Sheep. Mostly, Samson and Delilah looks - and sounds (its sound design,
both playful and dissonant, is terrific) – like no Australian film I’ve seen.
Timeless and also utterly contemporary, it will leave hearts bruised, but
aching with joy.
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/5]
This debut from young Aboriginal Australian director Warwick
Thornton, a cinematographer and veteran of short films and documentaries,
is a near-silent, sun-bleached love story that plays out delicately between two
teens living in a rundown community in the Australian desert. Barely a word is
spoken between disaffected, petrol-sniffing Samson (Rowan
McNamara) and wary, more sensible Delilah (Marissa
Gibson) from start to finish; they communicate almost solely in looks and
gestures. At first, it’s Samson who does all the chasing, but when Delilah’s
grandma (Mitjili
Gibson) dies and the community blames her, she seeks companionship with
Samson, who himself has fallen out violently with his brother. Together they
steal a car and head to town, where they end up indulging in a worsening
solvent habit that threatens to ruin their lives entirely.
User reviews Author:
brimon28 from
One goes to a drama to suspend disbelief. Whether you are a
believer or sceptic, Samson and Delilah is different. This is true realism, the
director establishing time in a truly cinematic way. The beginning is slow,
with the utter boredom of the characters shown by the repetition of scenes in
which nothing changes. Later in the film a very subtle sequence shows the lapse
of time by the change from a full moon to a crescent. Other viewers seem to
have misinterpreted this sequence. This is true cinema. Samson is a petrol
sniffer. In a community where there is no work, no commercial entertainment,
and no fun, Samson and his brothers try to amuse themselves. The result is
violent, but funny. Delilah is learning to paint with the help of her
grandmother. Painting is a valuable source of income to the Australian
aboriginal. They say: 'You whitefellers have to go to school to learn art; we
know, in here.' Australian film makers have an enviable reputation for
documentary. This is a documentary with a story. We now have a tradition in
photography, cinematography and the graphic arts, particularly amongst
Aboriginal women, that is very significant. It is no surprise that the
Aboriginal woman has brought new weight to feminism. In Samson and Delilah,
Delilah finishes up with the power. She controls the gadgetry - and the
psychology.
We don't need to be told that Samson thought Delilah was dead. He is shown
inspecting the skid mark. This movie is so full of these subtle hints. So
Delilah appears with her hair 'done.' Well, she'd been in hospital for two
weeks, hadn't she?
The Onion A.V. Club review [A-] Sam Adams
The first feature by cinematographer Warwick Thornton, Samson
And Delilah isn’t a silent movie, but it rarely resorts to dialogue when
images will do the trick. The principal characters, both young aborigines from
a tiny village in the Australian desert, rarely speak to each other for reasons
that only emerge late in the film, and the only person with much to say is a
raving drunk who lives under an overpass. (The latter, whom
Pitched somewhere between City Of
Matters only get worse when they escape to the town of
Although
OVERLAID with the
jaunty sounds of Charley Pride singing Sunshiny Day, the opening scene
of the indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton's Samson And Delilah has a
lambent beauty.
As 15-year-old Samson
(Rowan McNamara) wakes, the morning light strikes his bed as if bestowing a
benediction.
Then he sits up and
with a groggy air of purpose, he fractures the image by picking up a can from
the floor and holding it to his nose to take a long, deep breath. He's a petrol
sniffer, and for the next few minutes we're taken through the hazy patterns of
his day, which is spent languidly kicking the dust around the tiny Aboriginal
settlement where he lives in the Central Australian desert.
In this place of
magnificent skies and endless red plains, Samson and most of the others in his
community behave as if trapped in a belljar and starved of the oxygen necessary
to make things happen. Only 16-year-old Delilah (Marissa Gibson) and her
grandmother, Nana (Mitjili Gibson), seem content. Nana is the community's
painter and her work is spirited away to the city by a dubious character who
snaps up each painting as soon as it's finished. And as her grandmother paints,
Delilah watches and sometimes helps, entranced both by the purity of the
pigment and her grandmother's pleasure in the work she does. Nana's happiness
is infectious and as Samson silently studies these two from the sidelines, he
decides that he loves Delilah and wants her for his girlfriend.
It's a demanding film,
so determined to replicate the listless rhythm which governs the community's
routines that you feel a need to slow your pulse beat to adapt to it. Thornton,
who shot the film himself, has the action unfold in long takes which give you
plenty of time to dwell on the desert vastness. But there are bursts of
restless energy, too. Samson's brother has a garage band which Samson is banned
from joining because of his fondness for snatching up the guitar and thrashing
it tunelessly at full volume. So he resorts to his boom box, while Delilah
finds her refuge in the car, where she sits at night, listening to Latin music.
Samson doesn't speak,
for reasons which are revealed much later in the film, and nobody else says
much either. His courtship of Delilah is conducted in gently humorous
pantomime. He carries his bed roll from his brother's house and lays it beside
hers. She tosses it back at him, and so it goes until he eventually wins her
trust. It's a beguiling sequence but at other times you long for the release of
tension to be had from simple conversation. Despite the dusty realism of the
setting, the story's tongue-tied nature gives it the deliberate feel of a
fable, as if stillness were being used as a blunt instrument to impose meaning.
The pace quickens
after Nana dies in her sleep. Despite the conscientiousness with which Delilah
has cared for her, she's accused of negligence and beaten brutally with sticks
by the other women in the community. Profoundly stirred by her injuries, Samson
steals a van and takes her off to Alice Springs, where things inevitably get a
lot worse before they get any better.
The few moments of
cheerfulness come courtesy of Gonzo, a homeless man the teenagers meet while
sleeping rough under a bridge on the town's edge. He's played by Thornton's
brother, Scott, and his breezy if bumbling attempts to make friends with the
couple add a bracing shot of spontaneity.
Thornton has said that
he sees the film primarily as a love story and he's certainly endowed the
relationship between the teenagers with great poignancy. McNamara, 14 when the
film was shot, has a coltish grace and Gibson projects a remarkably mature
sense of resilience. As well, Thornton has a real gift for the transcendent
image. The film's opening is one example. Another has Delilah helping the
spaced-out Samson to bathe himself - a scene filled with intimations of baptism
and regeneration.
Yet like all stories
about addiction, this one is ultimately dispiriting. Despite the flash of hope
that Thornton gives you at the end, he isn't in the business of providing the
kind of cathartic release you get from more conventional storytellers. He takes
you into another world, but finds no obligation to make you comfortable there.
He's made a tender film, and an honest one, but it's tough going.
Samson
and Delilah Warwick Thornton film analysis - Senses of Cinema Tess Fisher, March 2014
Reclaiming
the Wasteland: Samson and Delilah and the Historical ... B. Collins-Gearing from the Journal of Media-Culture, 2010
World
Socialist Web Site (Richard Phillips) review which includes an
interview with the director May 14, 2009: Warwick
Thornton discusses Samson and Delilah with the WSWS
Samson and
Delilah - Film Study by simon bean on Prezi
Simon Bean, September 19, 2001
The
Film Emporium: Review: Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton ... Andy Buckle
Eye for Film (James Benefield) review [5/5]
REVIEW
| Love in the Outback: Warwick Thornton's “Samson and ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
VideoVista review Paul Higson
Slant Magazine (Joseph Jon Lanthier) review
Samson and Delilah (2010) film review | littlewhitelies.co.uk Matt Bochenski from Little White Lies
Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell] (Australia)
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
theartsdesk.com [Alexandra Coghlan]
Daily Film Dose (Blair Stewart) review
Phil on Film (Philip Concannon) capsule review
Screenjabber review Doug Cooper
Variety (Russell Edwards) review
Australian
film wins Cannes first film prize
Garry Maddox and Stephanie Bunbury from The Sydney Morning Herald, May 25, 2009
The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Tim Robey
Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]
Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn
Samson and Delilah: rewatching classic Australian films | Film | The ... Luke Buckmaster from The Guardian, April 11, 2014
The New York Times Neil Genzlinger, also seen here: Wordless and Lost, a Young Couple Flee - The New York Times
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version]
Tian
Zhuangzhuang - Director - Films as director:, Other Film ... Gina Marchetti from Film Reference
Tian Zhuangzhuang began his career as part of what has become known as the "Fifth Generation" of film directors from the People's Republic of China. He is fairly representative of that group for a number of reasons. Like Chen Kaige, for example, he comes from a family already established in Chinese film circles; Tian's mother, a major film star, headed the Beijing Children's Film Studio for many years, and his father, an actor, headed the Chinese National Film Bureau at one time. Also, like many of his contemporaries who were in their teens or early twenties during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he joined the army and traveled extensively, visiting remote parts of China few "city kids" with an intellectual family background would have seen without the political and social upheaval of that period. Tian became a photographer at this time, and it is this period in his life that undoubtedly provided the impetus for many of his subsequent film features.
Marked by a politicized youth, Tian and others of his generation began to search for a sense of themselves as artists, as part of a Chinese culture and civilization, as national subjects, as men and women, when they matured in the post-Mao era. Many, including Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, the late Zhang Nuanxin, and Tian Zhuangzhuang, looked to those remote areas of China, where questions of identity have historically been perceived as more fluid: the dry, barren, western deserts, the forbidding northern frontier at the edges of the Great Wall, the distinct non-Han (not part of the majority ethnic group of Han Chinese) areas of Mongolia, Tibet, and Manchuria, and the lush jungles and wetlands of the southern border with Thailand and Vietnam. Rather than looking for models of exemplary behavior among a revolutionary elite, these filmmakers searched for Chinese identity among the poor, the illiterate, the unenlightened, the dispossessed of these border regions.
Tian Zhuangzhuang is perhaps the best known of this group for reviving and revitalizing a staple of the Chinese film industry—the "national minority" genre. Made to celebrate the solidarity of the Chinese people under the Communist regime, these films, often made by studios based in the minority areas themselves, showcased the songs, dances, customs, and patriotism of the non-Han community. Stories of liberation, they usually contrast the "backwardness" of traditional life before the Revolution with the benefits of Chinese Communist rule. Tian's On the Hunting Ground , made in Inner Mongolia, and Horse Thief , set in Tibet, fall within the rough parameters of this genre. However, Tian's work marks a radical break with the aesthetics of earlier generations of Chinese filmmakers. Rather than placing minority peoples within a narrative of liberation accessible to the average Han Chinese viewer, Tian, in On the Hunting Ground , for example, emphasizes the relationship between the land and the people. Long shots and long takes dominate; the landscape overpowers any identification with individual characters; dialogue, which is minimal, goes untranslated; rituals and social relationships remain unexplained. The Mongolian steppes—exotic, violent, harsh, and picturesque—become the visual embodiment of an unfathomable part of the Chinese nation, a marker of the limits of an ethnic identity. Clearly, this distance signals that this film may say more about Tian as the eye of the camera, an outsider, an intruder, than about the Mongolians as objects of his observations. These films are not about the plight of a downtrodden "minority" (although the people presented in Tian's films are indeed poor and sometimes desperate), rather these are films about the liminality of Chinese ethnicity and, by implication, political authority, within its own borders. After the Cultural Revolution, a generation became "outsiders" in their own nation, stripped of political certainty and a clear sense of an ethnic, national, and gendered self. (It is not coincidental that On the Hunting Ground and Horse Thief are peopled principally by non-Han men engaged in "manly," often violent and bloody occupations like hunting, since political, economic, and cultural uncertainties often play themselves out as a search for a more certain sense of gender—a nostalgia for a time or a yearning for a place where "men are men.")
In Horse Thief , Tian continues to explore the issues he outlined in On the Hunting Ground. However, this film follows a more conventional path, and centers its narrative around the tribulations of Rorbu, the horse thief of the title, who attempts to change his ways after the death of his son. Set before the Chinese annexation of Tibet, the film could be read as a pre-Revolutionary indictment of traditional Tibetan nomads. However, the spectacular images the camera lingers over—from the beauty of the mountains to the grizzly "sky burials," featuring vultures picking the bones of human cadavers, and the other, unexplained Buddhist rites that form the backbone of the film—take attention away from the protagonist and his ethical and economic dilemmas. Rather, like On the Hunting Ground , Horse Thief challenges the viewer with an unexplained and unexplainable "otherness" that defies easy recuperation into a Han sense of self. The analogy to the filmmaker's own predicament again becomes clear. Investigating the Tibetan horse thief, an outlaw from a still recalcitrant "minority" nation, takes on the trappings of an investigation of the filmmaker's own sense of self and otherness, rather than of a call for a "free" Tibet or an enlightened, subdued, "revolutionary" Tibet to cure Rorbu's ills. This is an aesthetic search for a new way of depicting China, and a visual call for a reinvention of Chinese cinema.
Ironically, the free experimentation that Tian's earlier work exemplified has been tempered less by government censorship (although Tian has had some problems) and more by the growing pressures on Chinese filmmakers to fit into the new market economy and make films that make money. Rock 'n' Roll Kids , for example, exploited interest in rock music among Chinese youth. Travelling Players , based on a well-known literary source, followed a more gritty road with its itinerant minstrels; however, Li Lianying, the Imperial Eunuch is, in most respects, a conventional costume drama, made on the coattails of films like Bertolucci's The Last Emperor , to exploit international interest in pre-Republican palace intrigue and spectacle.
The Blue Kite marks another stage in Tian's career. Almost a companion piece to Zhang Yimou's To Live , The Blue Kite takes an epic view of post-Liberation China, primarily focusing on the years of the Cultural Revolution, through the eyes of Tietou, "Iron Head," an innocent who becomes the victim of senseless violence brought on by political turmoil. Although suppressed by the government, The Blue Kite still found its way into the international festival circuit and has enjoyed commercial distribution as an "art film" abroad. After its screening at the Cannes Film Festival without official permission, however, Tian was not able to work in the Chinese film industry again until very recently (as an executive producer rather than director). Given that the Chinese government itself is delighted to decry the excesses of the Cultural Revolution publicly in the international press, the controversy generated by the film must spring from an allegorical reading of Tietou as hard-headed China herself, innocent, tough, but ultimately vulnerable and naive. Perhaps Tietou is too much like Tian's generation as a group, victims of and witnesses to a corruption that may or may not be endemic to a system or an era or an identity, and undeniably, like Tietou's family, complicit in that corruption. Like the minority peoples of his earlier films, the child Tietou acts as a mirror of the preoccupations of a generation, and this film functions as a bridge to the more experimental works of Tian's oeuvre.
Tian Zhuangzhuang - Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture biography
Fajr International Film
Festival | Juries brief biography
Director
Tian Zhuangzhuang - Chinaculture.org
biography
Tian
Zhuangzhuang - Encyclopedias CD
biography from Encyclopedia of Chinese Film
Cineplex.com |
Tian Zhuangzhuang Two photo images
of the director at work
Tian Zhuangzhuang -
Strictly Film School Acquarello
reviews
Tian Zhuangzhuang - Movies, Bio
and Lists on MUBI
The Irresistible Rise
of Asian Cinema 3 - Kinema : : A Journal for Film ... TIAN
ZHUANGZHUANG: A DIRECTOR FOR THE 21st CENTURY, by Yvonne Ng from Kinema (Undated)
Tian
Zhuangzhuang, The "Fifth Generation," & "Minorities
Film" in ... 17-page essay, Tian Zhuangzhuang, The “Fifth Generation,”
& “Minorities Film” in China: A Review Essay, by Dru C. Gladney,
1995 (pdf), also seen as a chapter in
the book, Celluloid China: Cinematic
Encounters with Culture and Society, by Harry H. Kuoshu, 2002, previewed
pages 200 to 212 seen here: Celluloid
China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society
Tania Branigan on the
'Fifth Generation' of Chinese film-makers | Film ... Tania Branigan from The Guardian, March 21, 2008
BFI | Sight & Sound | The Go Master (2006) Roger Clarke, May 2008
Prof.Tian
Zhuangzhuang won Best Director of 10th Shanghai ... July 6, 2008
Fifth Generation directors and their films on Chinese society | gbtimes ... Anniina Koivula, November 15, 2016, originally published September 30 and November 27, 2009, also part two of our article
21st century Chinese cinema - China Policy 44-page essay, Hip Flicks for Sinophiles, brief movie previews, December 23, 2014 (pdf)
The King of
Masks | Cinema of Childhood Allan
Fish, 2015
The Horse Thief Tian Zhuangzhuang film review - Senses of Cinema John Berra, May 20, 2015
19
Chinese Films Richard Peña Recommends January 12, 2016
Poetics
of Two Springs: Fei Mu versus Tian Zhuangzhuang - Springer opening paragraph of James Udden’s chapter
from the book The Poetics of Chinese
Cinema (pages 79 – 95), Poetics of Two
Springs: Fei Mu versus Tian Zhuangzhuang, September 14,
2016
Bérénice
Reynaud on The Greatest Chinese Films Bérénice Reynaud, February 27, 2017
Horse Thief: Tian Zhuangzhuang | Programs - SBS brief Engish subtitled video interview, June 7, 1989 (3:51)
Tian Zhuangzhuang a Rare
Insight Director - China.org.cn
Michelle Qiao interview, June 14, 2004
Tian
Zhuangzhuang: The film world as mafia and commerical models ... Alice Xin Liu interview from Danwei, November 16, 2009
China (88 mi) 1986 co-director: Pan Peicheng
The
Horse Thief | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Tian Zhuangzhuang's 1985 feature, set in the remote wilds of Tibet with a cast of local nonprofessionals, is a breathtaking spectacle in 'Scope and color, perhaps the most personal of all the “Fifth Generation” Beijing films to have emerged from the People's Republic of China (at least until Tian's subsequent The Blue Kite). Tian's originality and mastery of sound and image communicate directly, beyond the immediate trappings of the film's slender plot (a horse thief expelled from his clan) and regional culture (Buddhist death rituals), expressing an environmental and ecological mysticism that suggests a new relationship between man and nature. Tian had said that he made this for the 21st century, yet even today it's a film of the future. In Mandarin with subtitles. 88 min.
Horse Thief, directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang | Film review - Time Out Tony Rayns
This is Zhuangzhuang's dream project: a film about the real Tibet, from the hardship and cruelty of life on the plains to the splendour and mystery of Buddhist ceremonial, a film about life and death in the Buddhist scheme of things. The story is told in pictures, not words. Norbu is a horse thief, expelled from his clan, forced to become a nomad, pitching his tent wherever he can find casual work. He and his wife are devout Buddhists, regularly visiting the temples to turn the prayer-wheels, but their son falls sick and dies. Norbu reaches his lowest ebb when a tribe hires him to carry the death-totem in a ritual exorcism of a plague of anthrax. In desperation, he returns to his clan to beg to be taken back. Filmed on locations in Tibet, Gansu and Qinghai and acted by local people, it offers the most awesomely plausible account of Tibetan life and culture ever seen in the west. It's one of the few films whose images show you things you've never seen before.
The Horse Thief - Toronto International Film Festival James Quandt
One of the greatest achievements of Fifth Generation Chinese cinema, Tian Zhuangzhuang's ravishingly beautiful epic set in the vastness of rural Tibet was famously praised by Martin Scorsese as the best film he saw in the 1990s.
Perhaps the most amazing work of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers (a group that also included Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige), Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief was chosen by Martin Scorsese as the best film of the 1990s, on the occasion of its belated release in North America. ("[It's] a real inspiration to me. It's that rare thing: a genuinely transcendental film.") Radical in both aesthetics and subject — it focuses on a non-Han minority in a contested region (Tibet) — the film is ostensibly set in 1923 (as specified via an enforced, post-hoc title card), but its tale is timeless. Opening with a sky burial — the corpses remain unseen because of state censorship, but the feasting vultures will frequently reappear as portents — Tian's anthropological saga chronicles the banishment of Norbu, a horse thief expelled by his clan after stealing a trinket from their temple's offerings. Seeking reintegration, he, his wife, and their young son undertake rituals of atonement on the road to exile, seeking Buddha's blessings as they rotate banks of prayer wheels, repeatedly prostrate themselves, and attempt (unsuccessfully) to fend off death in religious rites.
The story is stark, the landscape lunar and the dialogue minimal, but Thief is more sumptuous than ascetic, its glorious CinemaScope compositions keyed to carmine: the saffron robes of serried monks, the crimson gold of temple interiors ablaze with banks of candles, the firelit scarlet of Norbu's hut, the red glow of a bonfire around which elaborately masked ritualists madly dance.
The visual pageantry — rendered in a showy array of tracks, pans, dissolves, superimpositions, and one crane shot — is matched by a soundtrack of growling basso chants and eerie modernist choruses, the whir of prayer wheels, peals of tubular bells, the thrum of hand drums, and the rumble of Buddhist dungchen. In this recently struck 35mm print, The Horse Thief should prove resplendent.
Film
Notes - Horse Thief - University at Albany Kevin Hagopian
In the raw landscape of Tibet, a deeply religious man gallops headlong toward a deadly conflict between his responsibilities to his tribe and to his family. This painfully beautiful film is the tale of Norbu, a Tibetan bandit. Theft is his livelihood, but it is also his life: he shares his takings with his temple, and his tribe. The tribe, however, becomes profoundly angry with him for the impact his thieving has on the life of the community, and disciplines him in the sternest terms it can offer. When his family is shattered by death, Norbu swears off horse stealing and robbery, in a ritualized expression of grief and repentance. But poverty instantly looms. Norbu cannot seem to grub a living out of the hard rock of Tibet, and he must decide whether to return to the one thing he is really good at, the one occupation that holds promise of making him any money at all in what amounts to a feral economy. Going straight means starvation and want for his family, but stealing means giving the lie to a sacred promise. What is to be done? For a man whose life has been a cycle of acquisition and sacrifice of worldly goods, there remains one last sacrifice to be contemplated.
Tian Zhuangzhuang had dreamed of making this film for many years. The son of respected film actors, he had been a leader among rebellious fellow students at the state film school. Suspicious of any film made about Tibet, state authorities had banished him from Beijing to lesser, provincial studios. But their plan backfired; deep in the countryside, far from central censorship boards, Tian did brave and path-breaking work, making exactly the sort of films the state dreaded. His 1985 film THE HUNTING GROUND was set in Inner Mongolia, and, at the remarkable Xi’an studios, he found creative coworkers eager to help him bring Tibetan life to Chinese screens. As his dream finally came to fruition, Chinese censors and film industry authorities remained suspicious of any film, which dealt with Tibet, especially one whose richly ambiguous style mocked the pedantic socialist realism favored by the government. Less than ten prints of THE HORSE THIEF were circulated in China; potboiler melodramas and assembly-line martial arts films often shipped upwards of 200 prints. Tian had intended his story to be a timeless one, its parable of conflict between the family and the ideological community perhaps a lesson for modern China. But the government insisted on the addition of the claim that the film takes place in the 1920s, long before the Chinese revolution the annexation of Tibet. (Superimposed titles to this effect are shown as a preface to the film.) The implication is that the harsh pattern of poverty, crime, banishment the film depicts couldn’t happen under Tibet’s benevolent Chinese "protectors." No amount of tinkering, however, could stifle THE HORSE THIEF’s remarkable power to illuminate the hidden inner world of Tibet to Chinese citizens. Perhaps this was why, eventually, the film was banned in China. Shot on location in Tibet, Gansu, and Qinghai, with most parts played by local inhabitants, THE HORSE THIEF was a landmark in the transformation of Chinese cinema into an aesthetically thrilling, emotionally passionate cinema by the "Fifth Generation" of directors, writers, and cinematographers. Tian’s cryptic tale of social struggle and reconciliation in Tibet was a herald of such later Fifth Generation masterpieces as YELLOW EARTH, RAISE THE RED LANTERN, and FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE.
A pictorialist, Tian’s tale is sculpted as sparingly as the chill Tibetan tundra. Like Terence Malick or Andrei Tarkovsky, Tian chooses pictures over speech as his prime medium of narration. And like Andrei Paradjanov and Werner Herzog, his outsider’s observation of an exotic culture never loses its deliberate, off-putting sense of "foreignness," reminding us always how little we can ever know about this distant, desolate land. In the wide palette of Cinemascope, Tian’s iconography is especially unforgettable: documentary footage of the solemn Buddhist rite of the prayer wheel, the nearly experimental sequence of the thief circling the temple, the oddly placid reality of vultures idly tearing at a corpse on a burial scaffold against a frozen sky. Tian’s stoic Tibetans are destitute, scraping subsistence out of a cold and cruel land, awaiting death with a certain eagerness at the transfiguration into long-denied peace and contentment which their religion promises. The Tibetans’ ability to look beyond their pale, wretched lives to a vision of a new consciousness is at the heart of the film’s narrative dilemma, for the thief must weigh the needs of the desperate present against the demands of the misty world beyond. Death is ever-present for him, but so is the everlasting life the presence of his temple asserts so vividly.
Few other films about crime, among them THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE PROFESSIONAL, and THE WILD BUNCH, have explored the nexus between the loyalty of a small band and larger social duty as thoughtfully as THE HORSE THIEF. The meaning of a particular society can often be found in the arbitrary boundary lines it draws between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the licit and the illicit, and the permeability of that boundary. In THE HORSE THIEF, that boundary is a wall dividing Norbu’s soul.
Horse Thief Peter Reiher
Most films, even the excellent ones, fit squarely into an
existing tradition of cinema. You have seen the same sort of thing before, even
though the approach and many aspects of the film are novel. Once in a great
while, more often for adventurous movie-goers than those who see only
I have seen new Chinese films before, three or four of them, and,
while they were largely good films, they were rather conventional. Typically,
they seemed to combine filmmaking techniques from the classic
The story is set in
Practically every action taken by anyone in Horse Thief is
directly related either to survival or religion. The land is harsh, and only
constant effort permits people to live there. The characters only take time
away from this struggle to worship their god. Gradually, as one watches the
film, one realizes that the constant attention to worship is an intimate part
of survival. Life is so hard that only sacred intervention can save the
characters from death. Every turn of the prayer wheel, every ceremonial dance,
every sacrifice and devotion has the practical aim of supplicating for the
divine intervention that alone can ensure survival. The greatest disasters of
the film stem from unluckily angering the deity. One of the most surprising
things about this film from the People's Republic of
But even the unexpected theme of Horse Thief does not capture the importance of this film. The photography and direction are the film's most innovative aspects. Tian Zhuangzhuang, the director, has a unique visual style, favoring long, static shots. The typical presentation of long scenes in most movies is to break the scene into several shots, each taken from a different angle, at a different distance from the subject. Often, the only reason for breaking up the scene is visual interest. The director fears that we will be bored by a single, static shot covering several minutes, so he jazzes the scene up. Taken to the extreme, this approach yields MTV-style films, in which no shot lingers more than a few seconds - editing as rock and roll. Only daring directors will let their camera be still, and then only on the most interesting subjects, as a calculated effect.
Tian takes a vastly different approach. He treats the camera as a
distant viewer, almost godlike in its unblinking perspective. A shot will last
for several minutes, with the action taking place far beyond the foreground.
Camera movement is mostly used to quietly, slowly follow a moving subject, and
cutting within a scene is rare. But Tian is not indulging in cinematic
primitivism. For one thing, the photography is ravishingly beautiful, capturing
the awesome splendor of
If Horse Thief is reminiscent of any other film, it must be 2001: A Space Odyssey. That film, too, made great use of lengthy shots, deliberate pacing, and exquisitely calculated technical flashes. The masterful use of wide screen is also a common element between the films. But Kubrick, either intentionally or accidentally, was forced to sacrifice all humanity from his film. His characters were largely flat and lifeless. The characters in Horse Thief are vitally real, with none of their humanity drained by the distant perspective of the camera.
Horse Thief is decidedly not a film for everyone. It moves slowly, the plot is simple, and the director demands effort from the viewer. Everything you need to know is shown, or told, but the viewer must pay attention to the film, for nothing will be repeated solely for clarity. Tian cares less about explaining to the inattentive than he does about achieving his vision. For serious lovers of film, Horse Thief must not be missed, and must be seen on a movie screen. (A videocassette could not possibly capture the magic of this film, and, on a purely mundane level, would chop off the vital edges of the widescreen images.) I would not be surprised if, a year from now, I considered Horse Thief to be the best film I saw in 1989.
The Horse Thief Tian Zhuangzhuang film review - Senses of Cinema John Berra, May 20, 2015
A Film of the Future | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, September 18, 1987
THE HORSE THIEF review - ScreenAnarchy Matthew Lee
Silent
Volume: The Horse Thief (1986) Chris
Edwards
Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear: 盜馬賊 (The Horse Thief) Nathanael Hood
HORSE THIEF (1986) –
SG NEW WAVE November 12, 2015
HORSE
THIEF (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1986)
Dennis Grunes
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The
Crazily Obscure World Cinema Review : The Horse Thief (1986)
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Preview:
The Horse Thief - Books & Film - Time Out Beijing
The
Horse Thief | The Scene - Detroit Metro Times Richard C. Walls
`Horse
Thief,' `Red Sorghum' Both Stunning, Powerful - tribunedigital ... Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1998
Ebert
& Scorsese: Best Films of the 1990s | Roger Ebert's Journal ... Tops Martin Scorsese’s list of Best Films of
the 90’s, February 26, 2000
Movie
Review - - Film: 'The Horse Thief' - NYTimes.com Janet Maslin from The New York Times
The Horse Thief -
Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
Chinese feminist film criticism Gina Marchetti reviews Dai Jinhua’s book, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003
The Blue Kite,
directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew
About the experiences of a Beijing family - seen largely through the eyes of its youngest member, Tietou - between 1953 and 1967, Tian's epic domestic drama is a direct, honest account of how Mao's policies affected the lives of ordinary people. While the steadily darkening tale makes for a film at least partly about death and absence, it focuses not on those who are exiled or die, but on those left behind. Tian's method is understatement, with the result that the trials faced by Shujuan (Lu Liping), her brothers and sister, her three husbands and her son Tietou become all the more plausible and affecting. There's an immense amount of telling detail, and Tian manages to express both sympathy and righteous anger without once resorting to bombast or sentimentality. A masterly blend of the personal and the political.
A refined, strong-minded political drama, all the more telling for being
so quiet. The director, Tian Zhuangzhuang, is just the kind of casual satirist
that the Chinese authorities could do without; the movie met fierce official
resistance during postproduction, and Tian has now been banned from further
filming. Here, he smiles at a country awash with banners and slogans, and makes
you realize that opposition comes not from more of the same but from the
bemused responses of provincial people too busy with their own lives to be led
astray. The story begins, in 1953, with the death of Stalin, and lasts until
1967; in that time, a young boy named Tietou grows up and goes through three
fathers, each of them laid low by persecution. Tietou may be a pain to his
long-suffering mother, but his misbehavior is just the first stirring of a
rebellious spirit. The movie seems clean and steady, a corrective to the
lushness and extravagance that, for better or worse, has come to be seen as the
house style of Chinese cinema. In Mandarin.
Trauma and History in
Chinese Film: Reading The Blue Kite against Melodrama Ban Wang, page 1 only
from Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 1 (Spring 1999): 125-56
Do films dealing with the past teach us anything valuable
about history? Or do they distract us from a real confrontation with historical
experience by their display of emotion and melodrama? The answer would depend
on what kind of films you are talking about. In this essay, the author places
contemporary Chinese films in a broad context of reconstructing
User Reviews
from imdb Author: Emil Bakkum
from Netherlands, Utrecht, May 16, 2011
The film The Blue Kite is a typical example of the informal censorship of alternative opinions in our modern liberal societies (especially with regard to the competing bolshevist and Islamic societies). Remember that until the seventies the liberal governments prohibited the travel to China. Films and books in favor of those alternative ideologies are (in general) not strictly forbidden, but nevertheless they are not readily available - except for the products of dissidents. The suppression of the diversity of speech proceeds in two stages: at first, the liberal media (press, TV, which monopolize the news) glorify liberalism and give a distorted view of alternative ideologies. Then, after the public is made prejudiced, there is no commercial market for the distribution of the alternative films etc. It goes without saying that the distributors themselves are not particularly eager to sell those antagonistic views. The Blue Kite shows a dissident perspective of China, and thus is highly acclaimed by the liberal lobby. However, in The Blue Kite the critique of Maoism is too one-sided, and it actually backfires. We see the life of small town folks during the rectification movement, the great leap forward and the cultural revolution. Examples of scenes? One of the main characters is present in a meeting of workers that has to identify subversive colleagues. The chairman strives to reach his quota of subversive elements. So, when our main character visits the lavatory, he is quickly labeled subversive and sent to a labor camp. Another scene: a female soldier refuses to return the advances of high party officials and is subsequently sentenced to a long imprisonment. The film is a string of wrong-doings, which were probably fairly common at the time. But still they are incidents, which could have happened equally well here in the Netherlands. This leaves the viewer with the feeling, that The Blue Kite is actually trying to split hairs. I found the critical Chinese film To Live much more humane and credible. An objective judgment should probably call Maoism a twisted ideology, but admit that there are worse alternatives. It should be remembered that a century ago China had been invaded and ravaged by western imperialist powers, and subsequently Japan continued this terrorist intervention. After WWII there was the civil war with the nationalists, which may perhaps be called a peasants revolution. Although it included a restructuring into collectivity, this can definitely not be called a socialist reform. The Chinese economy was and is based on primitive agriculture, with regularly returning threats of famine. Maoism offered a solution, and erected basis health care and educational provisions. In addition it had to reconcile with the former opposition and handle sabotage. The life expectancy under Maoism was always longer than in the democratic India. In fact the cultural revolution is an intriguing phenomenon. A primary aim was to strengthen the bond between the common people and the intelligentsia. Here in Europe this generated admirable examples of self-sacrifice, like a student movement into the factories and working-class quarters, albeit only on a sectarian scale. In the very poor China it was a waste of scarce expertise and efficient labor division. It is estimated that over three million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, which nearly transformed into another civil war. On the other hand, the equivalent in Afghanistan would be hundred thousand killed, which is approximately the factual score due to the Afghan revolution led by Nato. Therefore most Chinese people can still appreciate Mao. And frankly speaking, I can not recommend The Blue Kite, except perhaps for its portrayal of Chinese village life. I am still waiting for the release in our society of the load of Chinese films with a sympathetic message about Maoism.
User
Reviews from imdb Author: Howard
Schumann from Vancouver, B.C. December 2, 2002
"The stories in the film are real, and they are related with
total sincerity. What worries me is that it is precisely a fear of reality and
sincerity that has led to the ban on such stories being told." - Tian
Zhuangzhuang
The Blue Kite, a beautiful and courageous 1993 film by Tian Zhuangzhuang,
describes the ups and downs in the lives of a young Chinese family from the
early 1950's through the Cultural Revolution of 1966. The film, which has not
been seen in China, deals with the social upheavals caused by the Rectification
Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, three events in
recent Chinese history whose effects for good or ill are still being debated.
Narrated by their rambunctious young son Tietou ("Iron Horse"), this
is a political film about ideological excess, but it is also about the strength
of family and the love of a mother for her son. Tietou, played by three
different actors (Yi Tian, Zhang Wenyao, and Chen Xiaoman), tells how the
swirling tide of political events caused uncertainty and disillusionment among
the villagers.
Tietou's mother, Shujuan, brilliantly portrayed by Lu Liping, is a tower of
strength who must care for her son while coping with the sudden death of three
husbands, indirectly due to the political turmoil. As the film begins, the
drafting of citizens for manual labor is shown as part of the party's Rectification
Movement, publicized through the mass media as an effort to remove
"bourgeois" influences from professional workers. Shujuan's first
husband, Shaolong (Pu Quanxin) falls out of favor with the Rectification
Committee for his views (and because he has to go to the bathroom at an
inopportune time). He is sent to a labor camp where he is accidentally killed
by a falling tree. Her second husband, Uncle Li (Xuejian Li), dies of liver
disease after confessing his role in reporting Shaolong and sending him to the
labor camp. Shujuan then accepts marriage from a quiet intellectual named Lao
Wu (Baochang Guo).
During this time (1966-69), high school students, known as the Red Guard or
hong wei bing militants, were organized to promote revolutionary enthusiasm and
political purity by turning against "outdated" values taught by the
teachers in their schools. They soon spread from the classrooms and became
roving gangs, closing shops and schools and parading errant professors through
the streets. Tian depicts the excesses of the Red Guard in bullying and beating
those whom they deemed to lack "political purity". For example, Lao
is denounced as reactionary by the Cultural Revolution and is arrested and
beaten by Red Guards. Some claim that actual physical violence never occurred
during this period. What is certain, however, is that the campaign led to the
emergence of factions that believed they had the right to impose their beliefs
on others.
The Blue Kite is a powerful and involving film that says much about how
ideological self-righteousness can undermine the things that are most precious
-- a mother's love for her son, the strength and resilience of the family, and
the right to speak our minds without fear of repression. The enduring values
represented by the symbol of the blue kite are contrasted with the red banners
and their changing political message. When the kite is caught in a tree,
Tietou's father promises him, "I can make another for you"; by the
end, Tietou makes a similar promise to a small child. And so it goes.
Teaching
China's Cultural Revolution through Film: Blue Kite as a ... 16-page essay, Jin Feng, Spring 2011 (pdf)
The Blue Kite (1993); Dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang | The Sheila Variations Sheila O’Malley, February 3, 2013
Politics
and Film: The Blue Kite - Dialectics of Chronology R. Beltran, E. Gutierrez, and V. Ambrona,
October 1, 2007
The
Blue Kite by. M.R. | History & Film
'The Blue Kite'
review by Jake Cole • Letterboxd
The Blue Kite
(1994) - Vernon Johns Patrick Louis
Cooney, Ph. D.
`The Blue Kite' Won't Fly
in Red China - CSMonitor.com David
Sterritt, March 3, 1994
Blue
Kite, The (1993) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Scott McGee
Blue Kite, The | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
The Blue Kite - Strictly Film School Acquarello
THE BLUE KITE (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993) Dennis Grunes
Rosy the Reviewer [Rosy Brewer]
Bill's
Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Cultural Revolution Drama "The Blue Kite," Once Banned in China ... Huffington Post, December 17, 2011
'The
Blue Kite' (NR) - Washington Post
Hal Hinson
The Blue Kite - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Alison Macor
Movie Review : 'The Blue Kite': An Honest, Powerful Chinese Saga ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
The
Blue Kite Movie Review & Film Summary (1993) | Roger Ebert
Review/Film
Festival; In China, The Personal Is Political The New
York Times
FILM - "The Blue Kite" Sails Beyond the Censors - NYTimes.com Vincent Canby from The New York Times
Springtime in a Small Town.
2002. Directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang ... MOMA exhibit
Far more than a mere classic, Fei Mu's 1948 black-and-white Spring in a Small Town is lauded by some as the greatest Chinese film ever made. Set in the late 1940s, the film depicts a desolate existence, with ghostly figures inhabiting a town in ruin, ravaged by the Japanese invasion and an ongoing civil war. Three people—two men and a woman—are caught in a love triangle, but little is revealed, said, or done, as the three lifelessly dance around each other. Tian Zhuangzhuang's color remake marks a comeback for the director, who was banned from making films after the release of The Blue Kite (1993), which dealt with the political upheavals of the past decades. Lee's cinematography captures a physical and psychological landscape of full devastation. His long takes—sometimes as long as one take per scene and shot under extreme low-light conditions—are mesmerizing, and we witness the characters plunging deeper and deeper into the dark.
Springtime in
a Small Town Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
It's tough to fault a film for
seeming constrictive when, in essence, it's a film about constriction,
the inexorability of social roles, having to come to terms with the choices
we've made. And yet, Tian's claustrophobic Kammerspiel manages to
envelop even the great outdoors in a tight-fitting hairshirt of inevitability. Springtime
operates with suffocating restraint on every level. It's almost completely
tonally static, with a drunken birthday celebration serving as both the
narrative turning point and the sole departure from the film's demure, languid
drift. Its adherence to melodramatic conventions -- silent suffering, repressed
desire, characters as schematic positions on a graph rather than full-bodied
human beings -- is no doubt adopted wholesale from the 1948 Mu Fei original
(which I have not seen). But after the initial title card, explaining that the
producers of the new film aim to pay homage to the greatness of Chinese
cinema's past, it's difficult not to recognize a sense of rote, desiccated
replication permeating Tian's film, a donning of the yoke of history that is so
absolute as to obviate any invention or dynamism. (Considering the fact that
this film represents Tian's return to filmmaking after a nine-year ban by
Chinese authorities, the hemmed-in ambiance almost starts to feel allegorical.)
The film's strongest elements are its gentle, muted performances and its visual
style. Of the five central actors, Jun Wu is particularly affecting as the
sickly, emasculated Liyan -- especially in the final half-hour. (Only Sisi Lu,
as the chirpy Little Sister, hits obviously false notes, although the spike in
tone they provide makes her appearances paradoxically welcome.) And Mark Lee
Ping-bin, the brilliant cinematographer whose images almost always tend to
generate a supernatural internal warmth, is certainly working up to his usual
level here. But compared with the subtle bobbing and weaving of his camera in
Hou's Flowers of Shanghai, or the visual glissandos of his follow-shots
in Wong's In the Mood for Love, Lee feels thwarted here, nudging this
way and that within cramped rooms, all to reframe characters whose movements
themselves tend toward the static. (Only with the exterior tracking shots
across the dilapidated manor does Lee's usual sensuality fully shine through,
and ironically, the dominant feature of these shots is a cluster of barren
shrubs and weeds in the foreground.) There is, without question, a great deal
to admire about Springtime, and I've been questioning my resistance to
it, since it so successfully conveys its desolate emotional state. Despite
leaving me cold, this film is clearly a "masterwork" -- that is, it's
controlled and meticulous and clearly exactly the film Tian wants it to be. But
there's rigor, and then there's rigor mortis. In its style as well as its
theme, Tian's film is pervaded by a downcast, fist-in-pocket need to serve, to
bite the lip and kowtow. I'm confident that Tian's own springtime will come,
and with it, a thaw.
"Then
and Now: Two Versions of Springtime in a Small Town" Artifical Eye essay
Li Tianji’s short
story SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN was first adapted for the screen by director
Fei Mu in 1948. The film was produced by the Wenhua Film Company in Shanghai,
one of the two important production companies formed by left-leaning filmmakers
in the city to spearhead a post-war revival in Chinese cinema. Wenhua specialised
in making sophisticated comedies and social dramas and brought in such talents
as the novelist Eileen Chang, the playwright Cao Yu and the brilliant stage
actor Shi Hui. But Fei Mu’s film (nowadays generally known as SPRING IN A SMALL
TOWN) stood apart from other Wenhua productions in both tone and form. Fei
created a chamber drama to express his ambivalent feelings about the present
and his forebodings about China’s future. Fei made use of some daring
innovations in film language, and drew exceptional performances from Li Wei as
the visitor Zhang Zhichen and from the truly remarkable Wei Wei as the
frustrated wife Yu Wen.
For more than three decades, Fei Mu’s SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN was a forgotten
film. Fei Mu moved to Hong Kong soon after making it, and died there in 1951.
He was later reviled as a “rightist” by the apparatchiks who wrote the official
history of Chinese film for the Communist Party, and none of his films was
deemed important.
This picture began to change only in the early 1980s, when the China Film
Archive re-opened (like other institutions, it had been closed down during the
Cultural Revolution) and made a new print from the original negative of SPRING
IN A SMALL TOWN. The film quickly found a new and admiring audience. Many
Chinese critics – especially in Hong Kong and Taiwan – consider it the greatest
Chinese film ever made.
Fei Mu has since been honoured with a retrospective at the Hong Kong
International Film Festival. Stanley Kwan’s film ACTRESS (aka CENTRE STAGE,
1991), a bio-pic about the 1930s star Ruan Lingyu, features Fei Mu as a
character and goes out of its way to rehabilitate his reputation as a man and
as an artist. And critic Wong Ain-Ling has edited a comprehensive
(Chinese-language) study of Fei Mu’s life and work, published in Hong Kong.
Tian Zhuangzhuang has not directed a film since THE BLUE KITE, shot in 1991 and
completed in 1992. This remake of Fei Mu’s classic marks his return to active
service as a director. During production, the project was visited by the only
surviving member of Fei Mu’s cast: Wei Wei, the original Yuwen. Tian now
presents his film as a homage to Fei Mu and the other great pioneers who gave
China its own cinema.
Chinese films at the 27th Toronto International ... - Senses of Cinema Shelly Kraicer from Senses of Cinema, December 12, 2002
"Tian has abandoned the most
innovative feature of Fei Mu's version - Yuwen's strikingly modernistic
voice-over, a whispered stream of consciousness that complicates and poeticizes
everything that happens - and replaced it with an almost classical film
language, turning a radical commentary on
Tian Zhuangzhuang's Springtime in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun, 2002) was received much more smoothly. The latter film looks, comfortingly, like something we've already seen: a sedate, subtle, elegant, gorgeously crafted mature drama of barely constrained passion concealed beneath an extravagantly crafted shell (think of Flowers of Shanghai [Hai shang hua, 1998], or In the Mood For Love [Huayang nianhua, 2000]). Tian's long-anticipated return to filmmaking (after a three-year ban and several more years of self-imposed inactivity) is a remake of what might be the greatest – certainly the most revered – Chinese film of all time, Fei Mu's 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small Town (also Xiao cheng zhi cheng).
Set just after World War II, the story is almost identical to the original:
a sickly landlord, Liyan, receives an unexpected visit from an old friend,
Zhiwen. Zhiwen was once in love with Liyan's wife, Yuwen, and as former
passions rekindle, modern romance threatens traditional bonds of loyalty. The
remake preserves the long, carefully designed takes, hauntingly dark
atmosphere, and stealthily increasing tension of the original, but there are
critical differences. Tian has abandoned the most innovative feature of Fei
Mu's version – Yuwen's strikingly modernistic voice-over, a whispering
stream-of-consciousness that complicates and poetizes everything that happens.
The new film replaces subversive modernity with a traditional, almost classical
film language. A stealthy panning and tracking camera (derived from the party
scene of the original) oversees everything. Tian turns a radical commentary on
China Now Magazine Shelly Kraicer compares Zhuangzhuang’s 2002 remake to the original, February 13, 2009
Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Springtime in a Small Town heralds the
long-anticipated return of one of
Tian burst onto the new wave Chinese cinema scene in the politically-charged mid-1980s with two difficult, experimental films set among minority communities—a semi-documentary on Inner Mongolia’s nomadic hunters On the Hunting Ground (1985), and a Tibetan mythical-religious paean Horse Thief (1986). He went on to make a series of inconsequential commercial pictures—a disco-craze dance musical Rock ‘n Roll Kids and a stiff international costume epic Li Lianying: the Imperial Eunuch.
Soon after the 1989 Tiananmen Incident Tian Zhuangzhuang clashed
with Mainland film authorities over his semi-autobiographical The Blue Kite
(Lanse Fengzheng), a daringly bold tale of a family’s survival through the
horrors of Mao’s
Springtime in a
Fei Mu’s original film activates this melodramatic premise with a
daringly modernist style, deploying avant-garde techniques in a subtle and
entirely original way. The film’s most innovative feature is Yuwen’s strikingly
modernistic voiceover, a half-whispered, half-incanted stream-of-consciousness
that complicates and poeticizes the entire narrative. This narrator’s voice,
though clearly identified with Yuwen, is not fixed in any particular time;
sometimes it anticipates action about to occur, sometimes it looks back
omnisciently, sometimes it wonders, uncertainly, what is about to happen.
Moreover, the film presents a split perspective, its text and its gaze often at
odds. Though the voiceover is Yuwen’s, the gaze seems to be Liyan’s. The camera
generally observes the action from a very low angle, identifying it with
Liyan’s (mostly bedridden) point of view. Fei’s editing also draws attention to
itself: he often prefers dissolves to cuts, going so far as to dissolve between
shots within scenes. These techniques all destabilize what might otherwise be a
theatrical, melodramatic text: Fei’s use of actors from
The remake preserves the long, carefully designed takes, hauntingly dark atmosphere, and stealthily increasing tension of the original, it rejects every element of Fei Mu’s avant-garde style. No narrator, no dissolves, no fixed low camera. Tian replaces these with an almost continuously mobile, gently gliding camera that tracks and pans laterally (the film’s cinematographer, Mark Lee, used a similar but more flexible version of this style in Flowers of Shanghai). This technique is derived from the central party scene of the original, where Fei used carefully planned camera movement to specifically isolate different pairings of characters as the complex dynamics of the scene unfolded. But Tian and Lee generalize the style to cover all of their interior scenes, creating elegant surface effects rather than anything specifically expressive. The new actors, too seem a bit constricted by the classic outlines of their characters, and rarely dig as alarmingly deeply into their roles as the cast of the original.
In purely stylistic terms, Tian replaces the subversive modernity
of 1948 with a traditional, almost classical film language. The absence of a
chronologically mobile narrator and the suppression of the original’s multiple
points of view pushes the film’s genre from psychological drama to romantic
melodrama. Tian seems to be turning a radical commentary on
But there is much more than simple nostalgia behind the
director’s invocation of this key classic of Chinese cinema. I would suggest
that Springtime deserves to be read as an active, urgent intervention into a
contemporary Chinese political dilemma. It engages at a thematic and symbolical
level to try and heal a violent rupture in Chinese culture: the chasm that
Liberation (1949) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) opened between
contemporary Chinese culture and its traditional past. The PRC’s double
revolution was radically disruptive: ideologically and in everyday life, it
proposed a complete break with the thoughts, culture, and practices of
Springtime takes on the project of reattaching the present to the
past by bridging chasms, healing wounds. Several kinds of painful ruptures mark
the film’s text: the gulf in the original story between pre- and post-war
Images of separation permeate the new film’s symbolic structure. The massive ruined city wall haunts the new film as a visual leitmotif. In Springtime’s most strikingly beautiful image, a very low camera views Yuwen and Zhiwen high above, silhouetted on top of the city wall, teetering on the edge of a fearfully huge barrier, contemplating the courage to cross it. At its dramatic peak, Yuwen, locked in a room, cuts her hand while smashing through the glass panel of a door: a barrier is violated, at great cost.
In autobiographical terms, Springtime is Tian’s successful gesture of artistic renewal, by which he forges a connection between a creative present and his past interrupted career. On the first day of shooting, cast and crew witnessed the director pause and embrace the tree built on the set of the old house’s courtyard. As he burst into tears, he cried out “I’ve come home, I’ve come home.” In Springtime’s final scene, Liyan nurtures the same tree, pruning away an old branch to prepare for the growth of the new, nurtured from the same roots. Tian’s radical devotion to the value of continuous tradition is precisely what leads him to abjure the avant-garde stylistics of the original in favor of a self-consciously classicizing style, one that asserts a continuity with past Chinese film culture and, on a personal level, represents a rhapsodic homecoming.
Love
Among the Ruins [SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, July 9, 2004
BFI | Sight & Sound | Springtime in a Small Town (2002) Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, July 2003
Spring
(and Springtime) in a Small Town | The House Next Door ... Andrew Chan, May 29, 2007
The Scenic
Route | Village Voice J. Hoberman,
May 11, 2004
Oggs'
Movie Thoughts Oggs Cruz
Springtime in a
Small Town Ian Haydn-Smith from Kamera
SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL
TOWN | Film Journal International
Daniel Eagan
Springtime
In A Small Town | Film at The Digital Fix
Noel Megahey
dOc DVD
Review: Springtime in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun ... Matt Peterson from digitallyOBSESSED
Springtime
In A Small Town - Film - The AV Club
Scott Tobias
38th
Chicago International Film Festival (2002) - Bright Lights Film ... Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2002
SPRINGTIME
IN A SMALL TOWN (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 2002 ... Dennis Grunes
Springtime in a Small Town Acquarello from Strictly Film School
Springtime in a Small Town | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Talking
Pictures [Howard Schumann] also seen
here: Waves of Longing - Cinescene
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Combustible Celluloid Review - Springtime in a Small Town (2002 ...
Shadows
on the Wall [Rich Cline]
Springtime
in a Small Town (2002) - Tian Zhuangzhuang | Review ... Josh Ralske from All-Movie
SCREEN
| 介面: The Look of
Restraint – by Beatrix Chu Pictures of Love from Mark Lee Ping Bing,
July 30, 2016
Springtime
In A Small Town Movie Trailer, Reviews and More - TV Guide
Review:
'Springtime in a Small Town' - Variety
David Stratton
Springtime in a Small Town | From the Guardian | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, June 12, 2003
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los
Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]
FILM
IN REVIEW; 'Springtime in a Small Town' - The New York Times Stephen Holden
Springtime in a
Small Town - Wikipedia
TEA-HORSE ROAD SERIES: DELAMU (Cha ma gu dao xi lie)
China Jpan
(110 mi) 2004
Delamu (Tibetan for “Peace Angel”) is a heartbreakingly beautiful record of the ancient Tea-Horse Road. Connecting southwestern China (Yunnan Province, known in the past mythologically as Shangri-La) to the outside world through Tibet, Bhutan, India, Western Asia, and through to Europe, the remote route has been traversable only by pack animal caravans. That is, until recently. New roads are being built, bringing automobiles and tourists into extremely remote provinces. Breathtakingly gorgeous portraits of landscapes and the indigenous people of the upper reaches of the route are accompanied by an exquisite music score and sound design, creating a sumptuous journey for the viewer. A heartbroken young Tibetan lama, a 104-year-old woman with generations of stories within her, two brothers who contentedly share one wife, a once-persecuted priest, a mule driver distraught over the loss of a beloved companion, and others whose lives have been shaped by their remote habitat emerge out of the mountain crags and river valleys. Directed by the highly revered Tian Zhuangzhuang (Horse Thief, SFIFF 1988; Li Lianying, the Imperial Eunuch, SFIFF 1991), this is a time capsule of a place and time soon to be altered by encroaching technology.
Delamu
| Tribeca Film Festival
With this ravishing new film, Tian Zhuangzhuang returns to the
pastoral cinematic territory of the documentary-based ethnographic explorations
of his earlier masterpieces, On the Hunting Ground and The Horse Thief. Shot
along an ancient trading route that is etched on the mountainside from the high
plateau in Western Yunnan to the trading outposts of Tibet, above the roar of
the Nujiang Rive, Delamu is animated by a series of portraits of people along
the way. An old Protestant pastor has returned to his church and his fellow
Lisu tribesmen in his parish after years of exile and imprisonment during the
Cultural Revolution; a young Tibetan describes his life with his older brother
and the wife they share; an old woman from the Nu minority recalls the days
when soldiers of the Kuomintang sought out her hand in marriage; and a young
wrangler speaks tenderly of the sure-footed mules and ponies who help him make
his living. The range and utterly compelling humanity of these and other
intimate sketches are as awe-inspiring as the plunging gorges and the soaring
mountains that form the backdrop of this work of measured beauty.
'Delamu', a new documentary by fifth generation film director Tian Zhuangzhuang, shows the lives and culture of people living on the remote border of Yunnan and Tibet and opened in cinemas last month in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
A beautiful account of the lives of people living along the old Nu river, the film took five years to shoot and is the first installment of the series the ‘Southern Silk Road’. Delamu is the Tibetan word for peace and also the name given to a mule in the film.
Until modernity, China’s connection to the outside world basically consisted of the more famous Silk Road to the north, and the southern Silk Road, or tea-horse trail as its known in Chinese. The latter was a dangerous route taken by horse caravans carrying tea, food, salt and other goods and has been in existence for around 2,000 years. The route took horse-caravans through cragged mountainous areas eastward into Tibet and even further to Nepal and India. While the northern Silk Road is the more famous of the two routes, in recent years the southern Silk Road has attracted more and more interest.
The film follows a horse caravan of over 30 men and 70 horses. As the team travels on the narrow path, at times only wide enough for one person to pass at a time, we come across people of different ethnic groups and different religions. A 104-year-old blind lady tells of her tough life and says one should be firm and brave in the face of hardship. A 19-year-old young man recounts how he and his brother share a wife. The head of a small village recalls his wife who ran away. One of the men in the caravan weeps over the death of his mule after being hit by falling stones. A young Tibetan lama bashfully recollects the girl he loved.
These fascinating stories, told as they are against breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, gives one a rare sense of serenity. Here in a land of almost untouched culture, everything continues naturally and smoothly. Change is very slow and barely noticeable. We see smoke from the chimneys drifting up at supper time, kids playing basketball after school and religious villagers praying in a small church. It’s a restrained picture of an idyllic life.
The film certainly requires patience as the life of local people proceeds little faster than a snail’s pace. Sometimes the camera fixes on one scene for a while. Tian Zhuangzhuang doesn’t provide the audience with any voiceovers. What can be heard is only the voice of nature and the narrators.
“When we got there, we found our prepared plans or fabricated ideas about shooting the film were unnecessary. We didn’t need to do anything except listen and talk with them,” said the director.
“These people give you strength, a feeling of happiness and delight from the bottom of your heart, yet they won’t change the way they are simply because of your praise and admiration.”
The acclaimed director’s first documentary received a good reception at the recently concluded Tribeca Film Festival. So far the documentary has done reasonably well at the box-office in Beijing.
The Ancient Tea Horse Road | China Heritage Quarterly The Ancient Tea Horse Road: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in Southwest China, by Gary Sigley, March 2012
Tibet in Debate: Narrative
Construction and Misrepresentations in ... Tibet in Debate: Narrative Construction and
Misrepresentations in Seven
Years in Tibet and Red River Valley, by Vanessa Frangville, 2009
Tibetan Films by Exiles an - David
C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies
30-page essay, Reconfiguring
Chinese Diaspora through the Eyes of Ethnic Minorities: Tibetan Films by Exiles
and Residents in People’s Republic of China, by Kwai-cheung Lo, December
2009 (pdf)
Becoming
Chinese, Being Subaltern: Minzu vs - RUcore - Rutgers ... 242-page Doctoral Thesis, Nation, Ethnicity, and Cultural
Strategies: Three Waves of Ethnic
Representation in Post-1949 China, by Jie Chen under the direction of Ban
Wang, October 2008 (pdf)
Cinema
Scope | Global Discoveries on DVD: Auteurist and Non ... Jonathan Rosenbaum
Tea-Horse Road Series: Delamu (2004) directed by Tian ... - Letterboxd
Delamu | Variety Ronnie Scheib
THE GO MASTER (Wu Qingyuan)
China Japan (104 mi) 2006 ‘Scope
THE GO MASTER | Electric Sheep Pamela Jahn
Back in 1992, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s bleak and controversial The Blue Kite, which follows the daily lives of an ordinary Beijing family in the times of Mao’s Cultural revolution, fell victim to the hypersensitive Chinese authorities who pulled the plug after seeing the first cut of the film. The raw footage was smuggled out of China and post-production was completed without the director having seen the final cut. In this form, the film found its way into the international festival circuit where it became a major critical and commercial success. Meanwhile, the blacklisted Tian was sent to the countryside for ‘re-education’ and it was feared that he’d lost interest in filmmaking until he made a triumphant return with the excellent Springtime in a Small Town in 2002. Tian Zhuangzhuang’s latest film to date, The Go Master, is now opening at the ICA as the centrepiece of the China in London 2008 film programme, which features a long overdue retrospective of Tian’s small but ground-breaking body of work.
The Go Master, in contrast with his earlier films, which mainly focused on ethnic minorities in China, portrays the legendary master of the ancient board game ‘Go’, Wu Quingyuan, and his struggle to cope with life as a prodigy. The film traverses some forty years of turbulent Chinese-Japanese history, from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s through the Second World War and into the 1960s, bringing to life the political and social upheavals of the time through the details and circumstances that shape Wu’s extraordinary existence.
Born in China in 1914, Wu moves to Japan at a young age and is soon identified as a naturally talented Go player, establishing his reputation through a long competition against a Japanese master. Tutored by a harsh mentor while also battling tuberculosis as a young man, Wu is not driven to play Go merely by his love of the game but also by a search for inner peace, which also leads him to join a Buddhist sect.
The narrative charts Wu’s turbulent life, going backwards and forwards in time as though one were browsing through his diary, which is sometimes confusing. Audiences expecting the lush imagery that is associated with contemporary Chinese cinema might be disappointed and some might find its extremely slow pace boring. However, the film is a moving, intimate domestic drama, played out with subtle intensity on the characters’ faces. Perhaps Tian’s smartest move is to focus not on the wartime turmoil or on the nature of the chess-like game, but on the immense psychological struggle the master of Go faces every time he enters a new game. Chang Chen as Wu gives an outstanding performance of quiet power and brilliantly conveys the strangeness of being a prodigy. When not confined to the game board, he maintains an almost conspicuously low profile with his pale looks and introverted temper, whereas in competition he shows the intensity of a world champion, with a laser-sharp stare and a completely unshakeable concentration. In the film’s most startling scene, when the game is interrupted by an explosion after the atomic bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima, Wu’s only concern is to resume the game without delay.
Just like his central character, Tian maintains an even mood throughout the film. The characters may not all be well shaped; and the power of the images is undermined by the sometimes confusing sequence of events; but his strategy is one of understatement and it wonderfully complements the carefully elaborated visual style to create a beautifully shot and coherent whole.
While it seems a little odd that the China in London film programme features no films by Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou, who are usually ranked first among China’s Fifth Generation film directors, the season is an opportunity to screen Tian’s lesser-known films together with other recent Chinese films. One wonders what Tian would have been able to achieve if he had not been banned from filmmaking for a decade; although The Go Master is not his masterpiece, it is an elegant biopic with sufficient psychological complexity to draw audiences deeply into the characters’ lives.
The Go Master (Wu
Qingyuan) - blog - onderhond.com
Niels Matthijs, also seen here: onderhond.com
[Niels Matthijs]
On paper, The Go Master [Wu Qingyuan] isn't the type of film that should appeal to me. Biopics aren't really my thing, Go isn't really my sport (if you can even call it that) and pre-WWII Japan isn't my favorite place and time in history. On the other hand, Zhuangzhuang built up plenty of credit with Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun and Lang Zai Ji and with Chen Chang leading the film I didn't have to think twice to give it a go. Watching the film a second time around, I'm still incredibly happy I made that jump all those years ago.
Go isn't the most exciting of games, but it is a perfect embodiment of some very typical Asian mental models and ideals. There's the obvious contrast between the simplicity of the rules and the complexity of the actual game (it is said that no two games of Go have ever been the same), then there is the tranquil, almost spiritual disposition of its players, almost in trance and sometimes stretching out a game over multiple days. It's a very pure game, played with honour and urging the players to test their strategic limits.
The film is named after the biggest Go player that ever lived, Wu Qingyuan (or Go Seigen if you prefer his Japanese name) who just passed away last month at the respectable age of 100. As a young kid he was named a prodigy by the local Go players, but Qingyuan was born in China and all the important Go competitions were held in Japan. Qingyuan persevered and travelled to Japan to master the game, but with World War II approaching his social position wasn't an easy one.
The film follows Qingyuan on his travels throughout Japan. About a quarter of the it is spent on actual Go-related matters, the rest zooms in on Qingyuan's love life, his struggles with faith, the way his frail physical condition saved him from going off to war and the friends he made as a Go player. There's quite some jumping around in time, but that's to be expected from a biopic. Those expecting a rare insight in Qingyuan's private life will be left disappointed though, as the film's subject remains quite vague and enigmatic throughout.
The visuals mimic the film's peaceful, zen-like core. The camera moves slowly, deliberately and meticulously through the sets, observing the world in a very rigid, stern yet respectful manner. But there's also a grim and gloomy side to the cinematography. Even though there are some brighter outdoor scenes, colors are often muted, hanging over the film like a dark veil. This is a reflection of Qingyuan's inner struggles as he tries to find a good balance between his passion (playing Go) and the personal issues he has to deal with.
The soundtrack is the perfect companion to the visuals. It's more outspoken compared to Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun (but then every soundtrack is), yet it remains a very introverted, subtle selection of tracks, surfacing only when it's able to add something substantial to a particular scene. The rest of the film is accompanied by slightly accentuated ambient noises, more in line with stilted Japanese dramas.
Chen Chang (Yi Dai Zhong Shi, Zui Hao De Shi Guang, Soom) is without a doubt one of the best Asian actors of the moment and it's always a joy to see him in a challenging role like this. Qingyuan isn't the most emotive character and even though Zhuangzhuang isn't out to unravel all his mysteries, the person you see on screen is someone who makes perfect sense. The supporting cast is commendable too, but this really is Chang's moment of glory.
The Go Master differs from more traditional biopics in the sense that even though Zhuangzhuang allows you to get close to his main subject, the audience still has to do most of the work. Apart from some more direct quotes appearing onscreen, Zhuangzhuang prefers to show rather than tell. Qingyuan remains a somewhat opaque and mysterious character throughout, even though by the end of the film I felt a very clear and strong connection to the man. It's an approach that many other biopics could learn a thing or two from.
Go really isn't the most exciting of sports, but even the matches are filmed with enough integrity and mystery to make them appear tense and interesting. Zhuangzhuang Tian may not have made the most coherent biopic here, but when it comes to capturing a person as a whole he did a splendid job. The Go Master is a rather slow and moody film, but there's beauty pouring from its seams. With the real Qingyuan passing on just last month, it's a shame not more was heard from this film.
BFI | Sight & Sound | The Go Master (2006) Roger Clarke, May 2008
The Go Master Movie Review - The Diva Review
Cinemattraction.com
[Sheila Cornelius]
VeryHelpful.net
[Stephen O. Murray]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]
The Go Master (Wu
Qingyuan) (2006) directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang ... Cornelia from Write Words
A movie about
Go (with Go Seigen) : The Go Master. • Life In 19x19 Film discussion forum, March 8, 2011
Kisei Go Seigen at Sensei's
Library
Tian
Zhuangzhuang: “Life and faith in the game of Go” | Fondazione ...
"The Go Master" Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang | The Japan Times Mizuho Aoki
The
Go Master | Film | The Guardian
Andrew Pulver
Review:
The Go Master | Film | The Guardian
Philip French
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
New York Times A.O. Scott
China Hong Kong Singapore Japan USA (101 mi) 2009 ‘Scope
The Warrior and the Wolf (狼災記) (2009) - Love HK Film Kozo
In many ways, Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Warrior and the Wolf turns out as one might expect that it would – which could be considered a problem. Tian's vision is uncompromising, cerebral and yet beautiful, fitting the Fifth Generation director's elegant, observational style. Exposition is sparse if not completely absent, and much of the film is internalized, with Tian never really showing why his characters or their situations overtly matter. For a historical biopic like Tian's The Go Master, that deliberate, hands-off storytelling is a workable choice, as history and a true-life subject can close the gap with the audience. However, for a period epic combining fantasy, romance and visual effects, a little more emotion or theatricality would be welcome.
Japanese actor Joe Odagiri subtly smolders as Lu, an ancient Chinese warrior who passively gives into a damned, yet oddly appropriate fate. As detailed in a time-jumping and rather confusing first act, Lu’s employment in the army has led to a decreasing sense of happiness in, well, just about everything. One winter, he and his squad camp out in tribal village, where Lu takes over a shack belonging to a mysterious widow (Maggie Q, radiating dirty, distant sensuality). He first rapes the widow, but over time a connection takes hold, their forced relations begetting deeper affection. Then she reveals the tribe’s curse: sexual affairs outside the tribe will result in both parties becoming wolves(!) within seven days. He ignores her, leading to continued consummation of their new love and a presumed lupine fate. Cue four-legged adventures and a final confrontation with Lu's former commanding officer (Tou Chung-Hua).
Warrior and the Wolf was based on a short story by Japanese author Yasushi Inoue, and one can see the film's prose roots in the screenplay. Conflict is largely internal, and Tian mirrors that with the acting and storytelling, which are far from forthcoming. The language here is visual; the film's art department and technical personnel (save the visual effects guys, whose work is noticeably unimpressive) turn in superlative work, helping make up for the distant characters and abstruse storytelling. Nobody in Warrior in the Wolf is likable, but their lives do take on a certain resonance when placed in these barren, beautiful environments. The characters are fatalistic and also lost, their souls seemingly damaged by the harsh, unforgiving lives they lead. It's understandable and even appropriate for these two characters to fall in love amidst their daily despair, with some of the images managing to carry more weight than any dialogue could.
But is the film enjoyable? For many audiences, likely not. The Warrior and the Wolf has many commercial elements, not least among them its stars, but this is not a commercial film. Unlike Zhang Yimou with Hero, Tian Zhuangzhuang has not adjusted himself to his genre's expectations, resulting in a costume epic that's so cerebral and morose that it will likely not connect to most viewers. The director's choices aren't necessarily wrong, and the film ultimately feels consistent with its presumed goals. However, when everything plays out, the end really doesn't feel like it justifies the means. There's stuff worth appreciating in Tian's technique, thought and themes, but the whole is so utterly distant that it never truly moves. Perhaps that was the intention - to create a cold epic with a tragic and completely internalized romance - but then it shouldn't surprise the filmmakers if audiences are polarized or even unhappy. Film art enthusiasts who enjoy interpretation above all else may find this the perfect antidote to the bombastic opulence of recent costume epics. For mass audiences, however, Warlords is probably more their cup of tea.
BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge
The Warrior and the Wolf (Lang Zai Ji) | Reviews | Screen - Screen Daily Dan Fainaru
ScreenAnarchy
[Niels Matthijs]
Thoughts
on Films Kenneth Lu
The
Warrior and the Wolf (2009) – flickfeast
Tue Sorensen
NextToTheAisle [Jamie Garwood]
The
Warrior and the Wolf -- Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young
The
Warrior and the Wolf | Variety
Derek Elley
The Warrior and
the Wolf - Wikipedia
THE BIG FIX
The
Big Fix Dan Fainaru at
Picking up where last year’s Inside Job left off, this documentary revealing the
corruption, graft and massive cover up of one the greatest man-made ecological
calamities in recent times, should make a lot of people uncomfortable. Given
the system in which they operate, though, they are most likely, just like the
culprits in Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning essay on the collapse of the
American economy, to wipe away the tears of shame from their eyes while rushing
all the way to their banks.
For those who might have forgotten the details, an offshore
drilling rig in the
This was followed by another 7000 tons of chemical dispersants which were poured into the sea, supposedly to limit the damage caused by the oil but actually even more harmful than the oil itself. British Petroleum (BP), the company operating Deepwater Horizon, took the blame for the entire affair and was officially made - by no less an authority than President Obama - to assume the responsibility and compensate for the major losses incurred by this disaster.
One year later, it turns out the wells haven’t really been capped and oil is once again visibly dribbling into the Gulf’s waters, but obviously it has become old news, other catastrophes pushing it off the front page.
Louisiana-born Josh Tickell, brought up under the shadow of the almighty oil industry ruling over this state, and his wife Rebecca Harrell, had already dealt with the issue in their earlier The Fuel (2008), and dedicate the entire first half of their new picture not only to the dimensions of the disaster, the health hazards and the ensuing economic collapse for the people living along the coast, but also on all the erroneous reports and mysterious deaths that accompanied every serious attempt to evaluate the damage. Harrell herself became sick due to the oil and the oil dispersants she had been exposed to through the shoot, and is still suffering the consequences.
For the picture’s second half, Tickell’s film joins Ferguson’s Inside Job theme in pointing out the tremendous influence of corporate money in American politics, republican and democrats alike, offering overwhelming evidence of the sums invested and the spectacular results achieved through those investments, such as systematically blocking all propositions to investigate alternative sources of energy, while regularly supporting the demands of the oil industry.
If buying out local politicians, like the ones in
Though tending to repeat its arguments sometimes, and provide data and information at such rate and abundance that it risks confusing and eventually exhausting the audience’s attention, Tickell has a solid case against the American political system and the religion of profit which overrules any other factor in establishing the morals of the country. Whether anyone will be affected by it or not - Tickell himself points out that none of the BP executives have been actually penalised up to now - remains to be seen. Spelling the facts as they are remains, however, a top priority.
Filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Harrell Tickell present history, conspiracy theories and a real-life health problem in their investigation of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its aftermath.
The problems with The Big Fix though are threefold: One, judging by the poor attendance of journalists and film critics at the film’s Palais press screening, few people other than fellow activists are seeing to these doom-and-gloom movies anymore. Two, little here is really new as much of the Tickells’ findings have been reported elsewhere, even by some of those they interview, especially Jeff Goodell, who spent months in the Gulf for his well-researched Rolling Stone article.
Finally, the Tickells describe a “fix” is so vast and powerful, the film can only throws its hands up over any realistic solution other than to install solar panels to heat up your toxic household water.
Then again, the Tickells may have all this right.
The movie begins with history lessons about BP, Iranian oil,
BP, which was unable to stop the flow of crude oil for months, infamously was able to stop much of the flow of information about what the British-based company was doing to solve the leak. So first the Tickells bring along a couple of celebrities, activist-actors Peter Fonda and Amy Smart, in the hope that this will help loosen tongues. Local fishermen and other locales do chat a bit but none of the crew can penetrate those areas and beaches now suddenly “off-limits.”
So covert activities, with appropriate musical accompaniment, are employed which result in scary footage of dead fish and thoroughly misguided nighttime spraying of the disbursement chemical Corexit, which makes the health risks for fish and humans all the worse. Or at least that’s the opinion of the scientists consulted.
This leads to lessons in science and medicine, then further
lessons in corporate financing of political campaigns, lobbyists, deregulation
and the
The upshot of all these lessons is a bleak picture of a world virtually colonized by Big Oil, which in turn is funded by Wall Street with the acquiescence of both the White House and Congress. O.K., that’s a lot to swallow and perhaps the movie crams in too many subjects, heroes and villains for one 112-minute movie.
Interestingly, all the talking heads, on-screen charts and flow of information aren’t as poignant or damning as the serious health issues Rebecca Tickell now suffers as a result of her exposure to Gulf air and water for only a limited time. This brings home the real consequences of BP’s inadequate, tardy and wrong-headed response to the tragedy.
The film ends on a Howard Beale note where it admonishes us all to open up our windows and scream out “We Have Had It!” Judging from the fiercely entrenched and pitiless power structure the movie portrays, somehow those words don’t sound like they would have much effect.
Deepwater
Horizon Oil Spill Documentarian Braces for Backlash ... Scott Roxborough interview with director Tickell from The Hollywood Reporter, May 17, 2011
"The Big Fix" co-director Josh Tickell tells THR,
"We're exposing something that the
Billed as an Inside Job for the oil industry, the doc,
from director Josh and
co-director Rebecca Tickell
(Fuel), exposes a network of corruption surrounding the spill and its
supposed clean up. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Josh Tickell said
that litigation could follow the
“We are taking on the oil companies, the
Tickell is careful not to mention the name British Petroleum but
BP looms large over The Big Fix and will likely play a center role in
the reaction to the movie here in
Rebecca Tickell has herself joined a class action suit against the oil companies involved in the spill after exposure during the shoot left her with an extreme case of photosensitivity. She is now unable to go out in the sun without breaking out in a severe rash.
Controversial docs have a long tradition in
To ensure maximum exposure for the film, the Tickells will be joined on the red carpet Tuesday by Peter Fonda, who is an executive producer on the film, singer Jason Mraz, who composed a new song, "Collapsible Plans," for The Big Fix soundtrack, and actress Michelle Rodriguez, who will be a key figure in the film’s promotional campaign. Tim Robbins has also recently joined the film as an executive producer.
UTA is repping The Big Fix in
Killing Time: The Economical Diversity of Johnnie To - Cinema Scope Christopher Huber, 1981
In the beginning was the hairy mole, and the hairy mole belongs to Lam Suet. For the last decade it has been one of the most hypnotic fixtures in the work of Johnnie To (Kei-Fung), and it never looked so hairy as in To’s frankly rather silly 2001 sequel Running Out of Time 2 (co-directed by his frequent editor Law Wing-cheong in which Lam lends his distinctive short stature to his role as a gambling-addicted cop, spending most of his subplot losing at heads or tails. (Unsurprisingly, the coin is rigged.) More importantly, at some point Lam’s head is shaven, as if in penance for his Mad Love of coin-flipping, establishing with Dr. Gogol-like precision that we are looking at the Peter Lorre of Hong Kong cinema—or at least, of Milkyway Image, the production company founded by To (then usually called Johnny) in 1996, and crucial to his belated appreciation as self-conscious genre auteur, usually privileging his often exquisitely stylized thrillers.
Many of which are indeed quite stunning, but it would be a disservice to narrow the focus: What makes To’s work fascinating is its diversity, including aspects often overlooked in favour of his formalist bravado. One of which is his iconic use of actors (which, ironically, has much to do with the elegance of his mise en scène), such as the Lorre-like doggedness of Lam Suet, be it as one of the stoic hitmen in The Mission (1999), silently kicking a ball of paper to kill time, or as the battered carrier in Election (2005), tirelessly repeating the triad vows while being bludgeoned with a piece of wood or—in a rare leading part—his even unluckier, sweaty, bandaged cop in search of his gun in PTU (2003), one of To’s two recent riffs on Kurosawa Akira. Similarly, To has had the nerve to put handsome superstar Andy Lau, one of his more frequent leads, in a fat suit twice, in the very likeable romantic comedy Love On a Diet (2001) and the Buddhist madcap masterpiece Running on Karma (2003). (In between he also cast him profitably as an off-his-rocker, film-savvy hitman in 2001’s Fulltime Killer.) Even the masterfully choreographed, but ultimately minor Macao mannerisms of To’s recent gangster western Exiled (2006)—a deft, but not exactly deepening cross of the perfect ironic poise of The Mission and the frenetic heroic-bloodshed-swan song-as-spaghetti-serenade, A Hero Never Dies (1998)—is enhanced considerably by Anthony Wong, that most important Wong of Hong Kong cinema, who is not so much channeling, but through some miraculous alchemic process seems to have become that most effortlessly towering of presences, Lee Marvin.
Factoring in that despite a proudly Asian fecundity—as of writing, 26 films as a (co)director since 1997, not counting numerous producer credits—To’s work has been remarkably consistent. He is deserving of any retro, especially given that unpretentious, assured filmmakers reminiscent of the classical Hollywood tradition are a dying breed. This assures that even the occasional dud like Running Out of Time 2 has its pleasures, and not just because of Lam Suet. So why was the selection of To as Filmmaker in Focus for this year’s Rotterdam film festival a disappointment? There are two reasons. Firstly, like his (no less deserving) colleague Abderrahmane Sissako, the other Filmmaker in Focus, To is a firmly established figure, and most of his films were (and are) not hard to see: Remember when Rotterdam retros were about (re)discovery and not about fêting guys whose films played Out of Competition in last year’s Cannes? Secondly, there’s the selection of the films themselves: Although Gertjan Zuilhof’s catalogue intro rightfully insists on the diversity of To’s work, pointing out that although he “has acquired a reputation of largely making gangster films,” he “was and is a master” working all genres, the program itself consisted of an overwhelming majority of crime films, and mostly those which successfully made the rounds on the festival circuit in recent years. (Plus Running Out of Time 2, oh well.)
More disappointing was the rest of the selection, which might as well have been made by Lam Suet’s inspector flipping his coin. Missing was To’s debut The Enigmatic Case (1980), maybe because the young director was unhappy with the result and returned to television for the better half of the decade. But it’s an interesting work, and not just because it shows a director crossing over from TV to cinema productions simultaneously with the emerging Hong Kong New Wave. Born in 1955, To is only five years younger than that New Wave’s closest key representative Tsui Hark, and The Enigmatic Case shares elements with Tsui’s cinematic debut The Butterfly Murders (1979), not least a decidedly arty treatment of the martial arts film, although To is less successful in wringing philosophical ideas from a deliberately obscure narrative. Still, the use of lush widescreen compositions and an uninhibited, funky electro-score hint at future hallmarks.
Indeed, that irresistible staple of ‘80s Hong Kong cinema —melodramatics pitched to Cantopop extremes—plays a major role in To’s next career phase, when he churned out crowd-pleasers for the proudly populist company Cinema City, beginning with Happy Ghost 3 (1986). Roundly ignored in the Rotterdam line-up, these films prove To’s willingness and ability to work on any material with élan and efficiency, the latter undoubtedly consolidated in years of adhering to TV’s even more pressing finishing schedules. His Chow Yun-fat collaborations alone run the gamut from competent tearjerker (1988’s All About Ah Long, in which Chow sports unforgettably bad hair) to the sweet, funny fast-food trifle (The Fun, the Luck and the Tycoon, 1989). Yet at the same time To co-directed (with Andrew Kam) one of the most relentless action thrillers of the nihilism-prone decade, The Big Heat (1988), a punishment park steeped in handover dread. The use of sentimentality and violence in these films may be more shameless, but they certainly do predict strategies that To will use in his more celebrated phase from 1996 onwards. His mostly neglected popular comedies will stretch formulas still mostly adhered to here, the escalating violence and political fears of The Big Heat re-emerging in his masterful one-two punch about cycles of retribution, crime-as-economy (and vice versa) and Chinese control, Election and Election 2 (2006).
Rotterdam’s selection from the ‘90s was less ignorant, but more decidedly half-assed. It contained the most welcome entry overall: The Story of My Son (1990), a truly rare, early collaboration with constant Milkyway partner Wai Ka-fai, but—despite some twin auteur mumbling in the introduction—the programming of later To co-works was reliably spotty. To’s connection to one box-office king, Wong Jing, that most entertaining of Wongs of Hong Kong cinema, is given short shrift, yet the grand, bloody pier tragedy played out against fireballs and Cantopop in extremis in the midst of the heartfelt hawking and tricky gambling in Casino Raiders 2 (1993) alone is a nucleus for the slo-mo pageants of To’s firemen epic Lifeline (1997), not to mention a blunt harbinger of unexpected reversals in To’s later romantic comedies, climaxing in the refined elegance of another, decidedly more luxurious gambler’s delight, Yesterday Once More (2004). The other box-office king was presented: Justice, My Foot! (1992) may be the more consistent (whatever that means in the nonsense world of mo lei to) of To’s two Stephen Chow vehicles, but the unselected Mad Monk (1993) certainly has the more demented scenes, including those played out in a psychedelic studio-heaven very reminiscent of the most colourful of Chor Yuen’s Shaw fantasy films. Another descendent of the old days was present in The Heroic Trio (1993), long enshrined as a cult item among Western action fans even before Olivier Assayas referenced it in Irma Vep (1995), but the sequel Executioners (1993) was nowhere to be seen—though its apocalyptic overtones make it the more pronounced precursor of Milkyway’s cool, nocturnal thrillers.
And this is actually the point at which it should have gotten really interesting, but it didn’t: The first years of Milkyway—in which To tellingly did more work as a producer than a director—clearly were about collaboration, the emergence of a house style, and the search for a market niche. The spectrum was diverse, from the first production, Patrick Leung’s hitman romance Beyond Hypothermia (1996), a visually alluring film, but one still unsure in its fluctuation between icy cool and dark romanticism, to Wai Ka-fai’s daringly scrambled po-mo-thriller Too Many Ways to Be Number One (1997), a film loaded with visual experiments that were reused imaginatively in later comedies. But instead of allowing newcomers to explore a convoluted genesis, Rotterdam just dished up To’s somewhat atypical Lifeline, which is still all empathy in its portrayal of community, although the second hour—basically one long firefight with frightening stunt work—is close to the formalist excellence of the other three pre-millennial Rotterdam selections, all established classics, all showing To securely building diverse variations on a by-then established Milkyway genre basis: flamboyant and romantic in A Hero Never Dies, flamboyant and comedic in Running Out of Time, and masterfully distilled to some kind of essence in the static tableaux of The Mission, which are nevertheless full of tension. Despite its visual priorities, The Mission is also a model of careful construction, opening with a scene in a video-game parlour (a favourite To location) that presages the pattern of positioning that is crucial to the film’s original gunfights. (It also establishes the most unforgettable synth riff since Assault On Precinct 13 [1976].)
From this artistically secure situation, by the beginning of new millennium To’s gangster films started to alternate with popular comedies (more often than not made for that box-office splash at the Lunar New Year)—the token presence in Rotterdam being the first in the cycle, the perfectly serviceable Needing You (2000, co-directed by Wai), starring the preferred couple Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng, both of whom are given more interesting things to do in the follow-ups, reaching a culmination with the unselected romantic caper Yesterday Once More, which starts off in Thomas Crown territory, then elegantly multiplies items, meanings, and feelings, only to end on a resonant, elegiac, inwards note. So does another Wai collaboration, the magnificently wild genre-bender Running on Karma, whichisn’t short on comedy either, but must have looked like a one-off in Rotterdam, with no other works of the possible co-auteur on display: neither the POV-shifting meta-meta genre extravaganza Fulltime Killer nor any of the crazier comedies, including the fantastic historical fantasy Wu Yen (2001), which picks up on the three-ladies model of The Heroic Trio and again stars Anita Mui, radiant as always in To’s films, and, in one moment of minor madness, chiding herself for dressing up as a man—although she plays two . Even more directly, Wai’s wonderfully wacky solo effort Himalaya Singh (2005) elaborates on the Buddhist equanimity with which Running on Karma hurdled from slapstick to a beheaded love interest. The apotheosis of the postmodern awareness typical of the Wai collaborations is achieved earlier, when the naïve Himalayan bumpkin is “taught” the world via faulty DVD, then in one of the most jaw-dropping show-stoppers of cinema starts to behave as if he himself were in a malfunctioning player jumble, movements back-forwarding, stuttering syllables for what may only be a minute, but for what seems like an eternity.
Far from Wai’s surreal headbutts, To’s work after Running on Karma comprises an elegant succession of stylized set pieces, as anticipated by PTU. The most single-mindedly personal work is probably Throw Down (2004), To’s second Kurosawa tribute, explicitly dedicated to that “greatest filmmaker,” a homage to his incredibly assured debut Sanshiro Sugata (1946) and an amazing directorial showcase for To himself, who throughout applies a totally relaxed and confident approach to almost associatively structured and lovingly treated low-key-material, be it quotes from the master (a man singing in the high grass to judo bouts) or just personal favourites (various types of humiliation in an arcade, some considerably less amusing than others; finding closure in a concerted effort, in this case trying to catch a glowing red balloon). Actually, To’s virtuoso riffing serves the seemingly light material better than both the (however perfectly mounted) retread of Exiled or the hostage pyrotechnics of Breaking News (2004), enjoyable for its athletic execution, but really shooting past most of its possible new themes. (Most complained about is the dropping of the media angle, although that is a characteristically shrewd decision, given its general overexposure and its head-on treatment here.)
Still, To is usually interesting even when he’s just riffing because of the directorial intelligence, integrity, and economy of his choices, but the densely plotted, uncompromisingly dark Election diptych of dirges suggests he’s strongest when working with a carefully calibrated script, not to mention one whose real-world implications are razor-sharp: Some 70 minutes into the first part it all seems over, but the film rolls on superbly—the editing in To films is reliably fluent, but Patrick Tam’s hypnotic rhythms here are something else—towards a merciless conclusion that more than justifies the narrative extension: it actually enhances the political meaning, positing a Hellhole Hong Kong next to Sam Fuller’s Underworld U.S.A. (1961). And the unsuitably happy whistling tune that threatened to be end credits music reappears finally in melancholy orchestration, much like the chants of the mind-boggling triad ritual midway are prefigured in the opening credits: the complex interweaving of motifs and details warrants repeated viewings. Election 2 is even tighter and more stripped down, though what it loses in richness of canvas it gains in intensity and aggressiveness: its vicious cycle of violence is more cruel and efficient (thus even crueller), and the constraint enhances the claustrophobic feel that whole world has become triad territory, not to mention its economic system. And then all torture is eclipsed by two dialogue scenes that are tantamount to a punch to the face of the Mainland government. In the first dialogue it turns out that corrupt Chinese officials are pulling the strings and see the triad as potentially beneficial, to help them exert economic and social control; the gang survivor realizes that he’s misjudged the present severely, and by fighting his way to the top in order to attain power and respectability, he has sentenced himself to a future life of crime. The second, even shorter scene, proves with dry finality that he has forfeited the future of his family as well.
(Thanks to Lisi.)
t than the reflection of the disgust he inspires. What? He couldn’t say. He takes the height of artifice for the truth and of course he’s not wrong—since we are at the theatre.
For the elephant man cultivates two dreams: to sleep on his back and to go to the theatre. He will realize them both the same evening, just before dying. The end of the film is very moving. At the theatre, when Merrick stands up in his box to allow those who applaud him to see him, we really no longer know what is in their gaze, we don’t know what they see. Lynch has then managed to redeem one by the other, dialectically, monster and society. Albeit only at the theatre and only for one night. There won’t be another performance.
(1) In English in the text.
This text first appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, n° 322, Paris, 1981, and is reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, Volume 1 « Le temps des Cahiers 1962-1981 », Editions P.O.L, Paris, 2001, pp. 266-269. It appears here with the permission of the publisher Editions P.O.L (www.pol-editeur.fr). Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.
Johnnie To |
Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography by Jason Buchanan
Hong Kong Cinemagic Profile biography by David-Olivier Vidouze, March 2000
Johnnie To's Top 10 - Explore - The Criterion Collection
The History of Cinema. Johnnie
To: biography, filmography, reviews ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
Hong
Kong Ethics: A Johnnie To Primer | Cinepunx
(Undated)
Local and Global Identity: Whither Hong Kong Cinema? • Senses of ... Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, June 7, 2000
Hong Kong Cinema
Books Reviewed • Senses of Cinema Steve
Erickson from Senses of Cinema,
September 12, 2000
The Belated Auteurism of Johnnie To • Senses of Cinema Andrew Grossman from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2001
The Code of The
Mission (Johnnie To, 1999) • Senses of Cinema Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, November 20, 2001
Fulltime Killer (2001)
| PopMatters David Sanjek, June 9,
2003
Running out of
Time • Senses of Cinema David
Sanjek, November 5, 2006
Exiled/Fongchuk • Senses of
Cinema David Sanjek, May 12, 2007
Johnnie To In Charge | The Brooklyn Rail David Wilentz, September 4, 2007
Sergio Leone,
Hong Kong Cinema and Johnnie To?s Exiled :: Stop ... Mark Asch from Stop Smiling, September 4, 2007
PFA: HONG KONG NOCTURNE—ScreenAnarchy on To Michael Guillen from Screen Anarchy, May 10, 2008
Film
Essay: Johnine To | ACMI
Andrew Grossman, October 1, 2008
Stephen Teo, Director in
Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action ... book review, Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action
Film, by Stephen Teo (294 pages) in 2007, reviewed by Kristof Van Den
Troost from China Perspectives, April
1, 2009
E
L L I P S I S - The Accents of Cinema: VENGEANCE (Dir. Johnnie ... Omar Ahmed at Ellipsis, December 25, 2009
Mad Detective: Doubling Down David Bordwell, November 2010
Hong Kong
Cinemagic - The Rise of Johnnie To
excerpt from Marie Jost, February 28, 2011, entire 92-page essay seen
here: The
Rise of Johnnie To - Hong Kong Cinemagic (pdf)
A Hero
Never Dies: Johnnie To's Throwdown
A Hero Never Dies, March 27,
2011
James' Top 10 Johnnie To Films That Should Be In The Criterion ... James McCormick from Criterion Cast, June 18, 2011
Observations
on film art : Mixing business with pleasure: Johnnie To's ... David Bordwell, July 8, 2013
King
of Hong Kong « - Grantland Hua Hsu,
October 17, 2013
20 Essential Johnnie To Films You Need To Watch « Taste of Cinema ... Emilio Santoni from Taste of Cinema, April 22, 2014
Ushering In A New Regime: Johnnie To, Crime Films and Dissent Carol Borden from The Cultural Gutter, May 22, 2014
On Johnnie To At Age 60 |
Movie Mezzanine Jake Cole, April 22,
2015
The
Mission (1999: Johnnie To: Hong Kong) - Martial Arts & Asian ... Master of One Inch Punch from Kung Fu Fandom, May 20, 2015
Hong
Kong Crime Cinema #1: PTU
(HK 2003) Roy Stafford
from The Case for Global Film,
February 12, 2016
Hong Kong Crime Cinema #4: Vengeance (HK-France 2009) Roy Stafford from The Case for Global Film, March 14, 2016
First
look: Johnnie To's Office (2015) | Sight & Sound | BFI Adam Cook, March 18, 2016
Johnnie
To delivers a rollicking thriller with Three - AV Club Film Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, June 23, 2016
Review: Johnnie To's Three Is A Dazzling Hong Kong Action Drama ... David Ehrlich from indieWIRE, June 24, 2016
Like
Clockwork: Heartbreak and Economic Collapse in Johnnie To's ... Like
Clockwork: Heartbreak and Economic Collapse in Johnnie To’s Post-Handover
Cinema, by Glenn Heath Jr. from Cineaste,
Summer 2016
Johnnie
To, Hong Kong cinema and the mainland – China Policy ... Yiu-wai Chu, September 7, 2016
Review:
Johnnie To's THREE, And The Intricacies Of Character CS Farmer from Film Combat Syndicate, March 16, 2017
20
Years of Hong Kong Cinema: Part I | China Film Insider Daryl Chin, July 26, 2017
20
Years of Hong Kong Cinema: Part II | China Film Insider Daryl Chin, July 27, 2017
20
Years of Hong Kong Cinema: Part III | China Film Insider Daryl Chin, July 28, 2017
Time Out Hong Kong - 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films [Edmund Lee] #72 PTU, #52 The Mission, #32 Mad Detective, #9 Election 2, March 29, 2017
Interview: Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai • Senses of Cinema Shelly Kraicer interview, December 29, 2001
Interviews
| Johnnie To Henry Sheehan
interview, March 2003
Fulltime Cinema: An Interview With
Johnnie To – Offscreen
Charles Leary interview, June 2004
The Reeler > Features > <em>Exiled</em> on Sixth Avenue Steve Erickson interview from The Reeler, June 20, 2007
Q&A:
Johnnie To - The Hollywood Reporter Patrick
Frater interviews Johnnie To at Cannes, May 15, 2009
Johnnie
To: A Hong Kong action master adapts to a changing China ... Noel Murray interview from The Dissolve, July 22, 2013
TIFF
2013: Director Johnnie To on the future of Chinese cinema ... Barry Hertz interview from Maclean’s, September 11, 2013
Johnnie
To’s gritty crime noirs Douglas
Parkes interview from Time Out Hong Kong,
July 14, 2016
Johnnie To - Alchetron, The
Free Social Encyclopedia
THE HEROIC TRIO (Dong fang san xia)
Brooklyn Magazine: Tanner Tafelski
Before founding his lucrative film production company, Milkyway Image, and before receiving critical praise for his crime films, musicals, and romantic comedies in the 2000s and 2010s, Johnnie To was a journeyman director deep in the trenches of the Hong Kong film industry. The Heroic Trio sees To in the second decade of his career.
A commercial hit in Hong Kong and a cult movie in the US, The Heroic Trio is a whacky pastiche of superheroes, comic book violence, and martial arts (directed by Ching Siu-Tung of A Chinese Ghost Story). Three superheroes (the powerhouse team of Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh, and Anita Mui) unite to fight a Chinese eunuch hellbent on snatching babies in the hopes that one of them will be the future king of China. The Heroic Trio has more verve, invention, and fun than the dour, bloated, and straining seriousness of the Marvel Craptastic Universe.
Heroic Trio (or "Dung fong saam hap" if you speak Cantonese) is a manga style martial arts epic staring three of Hong Kong´s most illustrious women (Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung,and Anita Mui).
Michelle Yeoh plays Ching, a highly skilled martial artist whose alter ego is the "Invisible Woman" (Not the one you are thinking about- she has a robe that makes her invisible). Ching´s Master (an evil eunuch with mystical powers) has instructed her to guard the scientist who is developing the invisible cloak, and kill him when he is finished.
Maggie Cheung is Chat, also known as "Thief Catcher". She is a mercenary and "bad girl" with a thing about leather, and explosives. Anita Mui is Tung, the wife of a police inspector whose secret identity is "Wonder Woman"(no not that wonder woman). She is a crime fighter who regularly helps out the local police, but her husband has no idea that she has a secret life.
When our story begins, Ching is using the invisible robe to steal
babies from the hospital for her master. All of the babies are in line to the
throne of
The police have no idea who is stealing the babies, and are really freaked out when an invisible intruder tells the police chief that his son is next. Wonder woman tries to save the child, but the thief escapes. The Thief taker is hired by the Police Chief to get his son back, and she has figured out who is behind the kidnapping.
She decides to kidnap the next baby herself to draw the real kidnapper out. Wonder woman arrives at the scene, and there is a great fight between the three women. But during the fight, the baby is badly wounded and the Invisible Woman gets away. The baby dies, and Thief taker, struck by guilt, decides to turn over a new leaf. She and wonder woman join forces to get go after the Evil Master.
Of course, as the title suggests, the invisible woman is not as bad as she might seem. During the course of the film, we learn that she has fallen in love with the scientist who developed the cloak, and that his discovery is killing him. We also find out that the invisible woman was a close friend of both the Thief Catcher and Wonder Woman when she was younger, and soon the Master finds himself facing the heroic trio.
I love this film for many reasons. Heroic Trio is a superhero
extravaganza in the
Evil Underworld Demon Master is stealing babies to facilitate a
plan to take over
Mondo-famous
Anita Mui is Wonder Woman (No, not that Wonder Woman), who's married to cop Damian Lau by day. By night, she straps on a mask and takes to the rooftops. Maggie Cheung is Thief Catcher, a tough-as-nails mercenary who offers to find the bad guys for bucks. Michelle Yeoh is Invisible Girl, who starts off as a lackey of the eunuch but eventually sees that she doesn't have to follow such a dastardly fellow. And besides, if she didn't turn on the evil eunuch, then the film would be called Heroic Duo vs. Invisible Girl, which sounds like the title of a Marvel Team-Up comic book. Also starring Anthony Wong as the mute, beast-like Kau.
The Heroic Trio has great action courtesy of Ching
Siu-Tung, and the story and cinematography are enjoyable in an urban fantasy
sort-of-way. However, the film detours near the end for some disturbing
violence that's far from necessary. What happens to kids and babies is sure to
grab you, but calling this film "fun for all ages" might be pushing
it. Fandom sings its praises, but this isn't my favorite
Someone is kidnapping all the male babies in the city and the
police have no clues. It turns out that a Dark Master of the Underworld lives
in the sewers and is taking them. He needs them because they were all born as
potential Emperors, and he needs the future Emperor if he plans to take over
Against the two heroes is Invisible Girl (Michelle Yeoh), who's working for the Master and is assigned to watch over a young scientist (James Pax). The scientist is trying to create an invisible robe and Invisible Girl is supposed to kill him when he's finished. It turns out that the three women have a previous connection. Thief Catcher and Invisible Woman knew each other when Thief Catcher lived in the underworld but ran away ten years earlier. Wonder Woman and Invisible Girl knew each other as children but were separated when Invisible Girl left to live in the underworld. It turns out that Invisible Girl is not as bad as she seems. She's actually a good soul who's simply taken the wrong path. To redeem herself, she decides to help out the scientist and joins with her fellow superheroes to defeat the Dark Master.
The supernatural fight sequences choreographed by Ching Siu Tung
(A Chinese Ghost Story) are dark, violent and bursting with creative
energy. Of particular note is the train station scene, which features the most
creative decapitation weapon ever to be wielded by a demon (played via grunts
and growls by Anthony Wong). The production design is also worthy of note, as
the city is not necessarily
The artificial trappings tend to make the film feel set-bound and it's clear that there was a limited budget involved, but none of that takes away from the overall entertainment value of The Heroic Trio. There is also a sequel to the film titled The Executioners. (Magicvoice 2002)
@ Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
DVD Review Guido Henkel
The Spinning Image [Andrew Pragasam]
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Doc Ezra
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Year in Film: 1993 [Erik Beck]
Austin Chronicle [Joey O'Bryan]
Lifeline (十萬火急) (1997) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Hong Kong’s answer to Backdraft is a good, solid flick that seems to contain most of Johnnie To’s favorite actors and themes. Thankfully, he neglects to add montages. Lau Ching-Wan is the risk-taking boss fireman of the “ill-fated jinxes,” a notoriously unlucky squad of lifesavers. They’re known for futility and things just going wrong, i.e. failing to save lives or saving the wrong ones (like pets, for example). However, through teamwork and perseverance, they gain each other's trust and the respect of others.
There’s no real plot here, just a lot of incidents as the characters find themselves among all the goings on at the firehouse. The first hour of the film is a lot of back of forth, as the characters move forward, fall back, experience doubt, pain, elation, and all sorts of other recognizably human emotions. Finally, in a harrowing forty-five minute rescue sequence, they tackle one of the most amazingly staged fire sequences put on film. Despite a massively smaller budget than Ron Howard's Backdraft, To outdoes its Hollywood counterpart with realism and sheer bravura storytelling.
It helps that his leading man is Lau Ching-Wan, who strikes the perfect pitch for To's ode to common heroism. Alex Fong is equally well-cast, though his personal subplot (a reunion with his long-lost daughter) is probably the film's most trying. Carman Lee is attractive but sadly underused as Lau’s doctor love interest. This is a very character oriented firefighter flick that doesn’t succumb to the serial killer theatrics of its U.S. counterpart. The only thing the firefighters are fighting for is their own reputation and simply to stay alive. A very worthy picture that's laudable for its humanity.
Lifeline is a film with multiple-personality disorder : the first
two-thirds feel like TV-soap opera, but the last half hour is pure poetry.
Stick with it: it's worth sitting through an hour of lives and loves of
A laborious set up introduces us to Lau Ching-wan's "Yau Sui",a
stubborn-minded
After a seemingly endless hour of this, the climax: an extended action-escape sequence, in which Lau Ching-wan's team (known among their colleagues as the "ill-fated jinxes") becomes trapped in a giant fire in an abandoned factory. They have to fight their way out, rescuing trapped civilians and blasting their way out of the ground (!) in the process. The real business of Lifeline is firefighters-in-fire photography, and Johnny To and his team (director of photography Cheng Siu-Keung, editor Wong Wing-ming, action director Yuen Bun) let their artistry rip. I have never been seensuch intoxicatingly beautiful images of pure energy like this in film. Huge sheets of flame, like they were living things, erupt over the team. Fire is filmed, in scenes that have the beauty of abstract, moving light-painting, like a vital force. It has a visceral, animated presence that is as alluring, as charismatic and as terrifying as even the most vividly characterized film villain (I'm thinking of Francis Ng in his various Young and Dangerous roles).
Within this nightmare vision, To injects close, murky, claustrophobic shots of the firefighters in action. Their fear of being engulfed in flames is compounded by the team's repeated loss of escape routes: one by one, they reach exits, only to find them blocked, impassable. Finally, they are driven underground, in a nightmarish tunnel sequence that might just as well belong to a prison-escape film. The smoke, the tightness of the space, the sense of being trapped, in terror, in an isolated and imminently explosive space are so immediately palpable that I wasn't even aware of having taken a breath until the film reached its final (overly corny) scenes of triumph.
And I wasn't aware, until late in the film, of how this pure nightmare of claustrophobia, whose emotional grip Johnny To has so brilliantly evoked, resonates with what it must be like today, in early 1997, on the ground,in Hong Kong, for those who have reason to fear the coming transition toChinese rule.
This is how filmmaking works on many interlinked levels. At its best,in much
of the great work of the
The only thing marring Lifeline's final sequence is To's cop-out of an ending. A film which upholds the value of courageous self-sacrifice, if necessary, should itself have the courage to exact some sort of price from its triumphant heroes. But Lifeline backs down, and succumbs to the temptation of the uniformly upbeat finale (just as Armageddon backs away from the apocalypse at its end).
If these films are deeply involved with
But the sheer glorious spectacle at the core of Lifeline can't be
wiped out by either its feeble opening or its compromised ending. This film
should end up as one of the signal achievements of this last year of
independent
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
A Hero Never Dies (1998) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Milkyway Image ’s latest is a welcome addition to their stellar ranks. This is another trip to the Milkyway gangland hell: a stylized version of John Woo’s Better Tomorrow world where the violence is more sudden and the atmosphere much darker. Leon Lai and Lau Ching-Wan are Jack and Martin, two ace hitmen in the midst of a gang war. Despite being on opposite sides, the two share a competitive bond that’s akin to friendship.
Sadly, they also expect one to die by the other’s hand—and they get their chance during a botched assassination in Malaysia. Unfortunately, neither can do the deed properly and before they know it, their bosses have joined forces and left them for dead. It’s only through each killer’s sense of honor and perseverance that payback can be achieved, and if revenge requires two graves, then these guys need a whole cemetery.
The incredible sense of loyalty and honor that these characters display is what makes them “heroes.” The themes are hammered home so relentlessly that the film nearly enters the realm of parody. Only in a gangland fantasy would characters enjoy a friendship but have no qualms about killing one another later. Ultimately, the narrative of the film is simple: two guys get betrayed and eventually band together to gain vengeance. The plot holes are annoyingly gaping; logic is sometimes forgotten to continue the story.
Still, this is still a well-made, gripping picture that contains all the Milkyway Image trademarks. Johnnie To, Wai Ka-Fai and Patrick Yau have managed to create their own distinctive universe populated by hard-boiled characters who find themselves through their roles as either cop of criminal—or sometimes even both. As Milkyway’s official actor, Lau Ching-Wan turns in another charismatic, layered performance. Sky King Leon Lai is suitably intense as Jack, though still somewhat blank. However, the real star of the film is director Johnnie To, and he performs admirably.
cityonfire.com | A Hero Never Dies
I don't know what I was thinking the first time I watched this movie, because I didn't think much of it. But, when I watched it for the second time a year later it struck me as being a brilliant film and one of Johnny To's best. It's a story of rivalry and friendship, betrayal and justice.
Martin (Lau Ching-Wan) and Jack (Leon Lai) share a unique friendship. They don't necessarily get along, but they seem to have an unspoken respect for one another. Each is their own Triad boss' right hand man, because they are smart, loyal and as good as it gets doing what they do. When Jack and his gang protect their boss, Mr. Yam, from Martin and his gang, it leaves all but Yam, Jack and Martin deadŠ with the latter two full of bullets and near death. After this bloody confrontation between the two gangs, The General orders the two opposing bosses to go back to the way things were a year before. They agree, and form a new gang, with both bosses in charge. Unfortunately, Jack and Martin are no longer needed, and are ignored and left to rot in the hospital and then on the streets with no jobs, Martin with no legs, and eventually with both their women dead. But, can their friendship be enough to get them the justice they deserve?
The acting on all fronts was quite good. Lau Ching-Wan and Leon Lai were perfectly cast in the leads, each displaying perfect arrogant, steely attitudes. Martin dresses almost like a cowboy/pimp, with a wild cowboy hat and boots. I'm not sure anyone BUT Lau Ching-Wan could have pulled this off without being laughed at. He really is to Johnny To what Chow Yun-Fat is to John Woo.
There were a few scenes that I didn't care for tremendously. One such scene was a shootout on a dark bridge, and this was because the only lighting in the entire scene came from the headlights of the cars on the bridge. It was just a little too dark to see what was happening. Another was in a bar, which plays an important role in their friendship, where Martin and Jack are shattering each other's wine glasses with a coin. It was a little far fetched, however the important part was really the back and forth challenging of the two characters which displayed the friendship/rivalry perfectly.
The action scenes were, however, all really well done; lots of shootouts, lots of bullets, lots of bodies. This movie is the epitome of a heroic bloodshed or a bullet ballet movie.
Any fans of good movies about friendship or movies with lots of action should love this one. Do yourself a favor and check it out.
Johnnie To's A Hero Never Dies Review
A Movie A Day Keeps... [Robert Lopez]
A Hero Never Dies | Variety Derek Elley
FILM
REVIEW; Bullets Fly and Egos Clash In an Assassin Showdown ... The New York Times
Hong Kong (93 mi) 1999
Running Out of Time (1999) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
The latest Milkyway film dips just a bit more into convention, but the result is predictably pure gold. Lau Ching-Wan is Inspector Ho, a police negotiator who’s led into a game of cat-and-mouse by ace thief Cheung (Andy Lau). Cheung robs a Hong Kong high-rise, but his motive is in doubt. Did he do it for money? Or fame? And why is he letting Ho in on all of it?
Ho begins his investigation, and as he discovers what Cheung is up to, so does the audience. Not to give too much away, but Cheung is actually dying of cancer, and is using his final days to avenge his father. It isn’t what he’s doing that’s interesting here, it’s how he’s doing it. The set up for his ultimate scam is a joy to watch, and Andy Lau relishes his role. It’s probably his best acting in quite a while as he restrains himself from doing one of his two Andy Lau things: either overacting the charm or overdoing the bitterness. Credit director To with reining in his Sky King star.
There are some truly delicious genre moments in Milkyway’s latest sublime effort. The little bits with bumbling police captain Hui Siu-Hung are a little overdone and there are some major plot holes, but it’s really hard to fault this richly entertaining action thriller. This is probably the best commercial film Hong Kong has produced in quite a while. It tends towards pleasing the masses with its built in star-power and sometimes cheesy dialogue, but the total package (style, pacing, acting, direction) all add up to a rich and satisfying genre experience.
The
Angriest: Running Out of Time (1999)
Grant Watson
A robber (Andy Lau) holds a Hong Kong finance company at
gunpoint, but when police detective Ho Sheung-Sang (Lau Ching-wan) the thief
seems more interested in playing a game of cat and mouse than in getting away
with his money. Over the next 72 hours the game progresses, with Ho always one
step behind the thief while slowly piecing together the truth behind his
motives.
1999 was a great year for Hong Kong director/producer Johnnie To. His
production company Milkyway Image, which he founded three years earlier, had
suffered a string of commercial and critical failures. In 1999 To's one-two
punch of The Mission (shot in 18 days) and Running Out of Time (shot
intermittently over two years) revived Milkyway's fortunes and re-established
his career as one of Hong Kong's finest and most idiosyncratic feature film
directors. They cemented a specific house style for Milkyway's crime flicks and
thrillers, one that highlights small moments of character and embraces the
absurd in among all of the plot twists and shoot-outs. Running Out of Time specifically
also re-directed the career of co-star Andy Lau, then a popular but critically
unappreciated star of romantic comedies and dramas. Under To's direction Lau
stretched himself considerably, and earned a Hong Kong Film Award for Best
Actor as a result.
Perhaps the biggest surprise about Running Out of Time is just how
comedic it is. There is a wonderful sense of play between Andy Lau's mercurial,
deeply ambivalent thief Cheung and Lau Ching-Wan's laconic, relaxed inspector
Ho. They have a light banter that plays out through much of the film, which
turns the whole film into a rather charming romp rather than a tense,
edge-of-the-seat thriller. As director Johnnie To has always had a fairly
off-kilter and unusual approach to narrative and tone, and this results in some
absolutely brilliant and unexpected sequences. One in particular sees both men
surviving a head-on car crash, and then racing each other while barely able to
walk to reach a plot-vital briefcase. It's ridiculous stuff, but knowingly
ridiculous, and it's a testament to To's direction that it comes across as well
as it does.
Andy Lau's acclaim for his performance here is very well deserved. He plays
Cheung with a great amount of depth and mystery, revealing multiple emotional
layers but never resting long enough for any of them to be seen in full. In one
striking moment Cheung hides on a minibus to avoid the police, and winds up
using a young woman (Yoyo Mung) as cover. She does not alert the police, and
gets off the bus with him by own volition. It is a strange yet completely
believable scene, and both actors underplay the sexual frission beautifully.
It's a perfect example of what makes Johnnie To's film so effective: perfectly
composed, unexpected and yet wholly relatable scenes.
As Inspector Ho, Lau Ching-wan provides yet more evidence why he is Hong Kong's
most underrated and reliable male actor. Ho is a great protagonist: a former
SWAT commander who has taken a deliberate step back to safer territory.
Nowadays he does not even carry a gun. He is a calm, cheery sort of character
yet carries a dogged persistence in bringing Cheung to justice. Given Lau's
success here it is not a surprise he returned two years later to play Ho in a
sequel.
The other cast stand-out is Johnnie To regular Lam Suet as a credulous and
fairly incompetent triad lackey. Lam has a wonderful gift for comedy, and it is
exploited perfectly here. He is a near-permanent fixture in To's movies, and a
welcome one every time.
Running Out of Time is a smart, funny and twisting little crime caper.
While not among Johnnie To's very best films, it was at the time a bold
indication on his developing style as Hong Kong's premier director of crime
films and thrillers. If you have never seen To's films before I would still
recommend you begin with more iconic works like The Mission, Exiled or
the Election duology, but from there Running Out of Time is well
worth checking out.
Running out of
Time • Senses of Cinema David
Sanjek, November 5, 2006
AsianMovieWeb [Manfred Selzer]
Varied Celluloid Josh Samford
Hong Kong Digital - DVD Review John Charles
DVDAnswers.com [Stephen Cowgill]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Hong Kong Cinema - Running Out of Time (1999) - Andy Lau
Running
Out Of Time (1999) | Heroic Cinema
Alison
Albuquerque Alibi [Devin D. O'Leary]
Running
Out of Time (1999 film) - Wikipedia
When Boss Hung's life is
threatened, he hires five retired bodyguards as protection. Their deadpan cool
and chic black suits characterize one of the most interesting revisionist takes
on the male bonding film yet filmed. The Mission seems to have aimed for
and found an international audience in a very self-conscious way. A case for
brilliantly realized self-fetishization, perhaps? This is manifested in its
concentrated, craft-based stylistic perfectionism, and its clearly readable
references (or homages, if one is attributing intent to the filmmaker) to
recent "hot" filmmaking styles. For those who expect more of a film
than a pure exercise in style, The Mission might seem thin, empty, a
formalist exercise. Although it is heartening to see a Milkyway Image film with
an international profile (it has certainly caught the eyes of many
international film festival programmers), the film doesn't concern itself with
servicing an audience's desire for pleasure, as do Running Out of Time
and Johnnie To's huge domestic hit Needing You. Those had
style plus heart, a richness that extends beyond the power of the images right
into the films' stories. The Mission beguiles with its bravura stylistic
set-pieces. But open it up, and what's inside? A gangsters and gunplay film
distilled to its essence, The Mission reaches for the sublime. A celebration of
pure form (think Seven Samurai refracted through Takeshi Kitano, via
Melville), To's version of
The Mission (鎗火) (1999) - Love HK
Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Johnnie To’s latest treatment of the crime genre arrives is yet another top-notch Milky Way production. Five different triad members are brought together for one mission: to protect Brother Lung (Eddy Ko), who has unknown assassins out for his hide. Roy (Francis Ng) is a minor boss who’s brought into the group along with his right-hand guy Shin (Jackie Lui). James (Lam Suet) is the resident gun expert, Mike (Roy Cheung) is a parking boy who’s an ace marksman, and Curtis (Anthony Wong) is the cold-blooded killer of the group.
Despite their disparate styles and personalities, these five guys turn out be quite a team. They form a bond of brotherhood amidst the triad underworld, and that’s pretty much all this movie is about. Sure that sounds hackneyed, but this is a Milky Way picture, where the themes are unexplained, the emotions bottled, and the context paramount. Basically we just watch as these guys wander through these situations, revealing bits and pieces of their individual characters. What occurs in the film makes complete sense despite the lack of overt exposition. The characters are revealed so well that we're able to understand who they are and what they're doing through minor emotion, or even just the slightest physical action.
The rest of the film is all extraneous but utterly essential minutiae about the day-to-day of the mission. Johnnie To puts his fingerprints all over the movie, and it shows in the controlled directorial style, which yields some of the most interesting action sequences put to film. This is a great genre piece that succeeds with casual moments of sacrifice, honor, and silent brotherhood. Johnnie To has cited The Seven Samurai as an influence, and a connection between the two films can easily be seen. In both films inaction and stillness are as riveting as kinetic action, and the internal lives of the genre character take on extraordinary meaning. Maybe The Mission will be too slow for some, but for the fans it’s an engaging bit of pulp fiction.
Hong
Kong Film Critics Thomas Shin
In The Mission, five mobsters with different backgrounds
are called together for a special assignment. Director Johnnie To approaches
the story as a stylish "action film" that finds the action in
stillness and the offense in defense. This is a continuation of his experiment
in the past two years, showing off his high-handed mastery of film language
through a determination to breakthrough genre constraints. Every thing is kept
unsaid, yet all is clearly understood.
The power of To comes not just from the three gun-play scenes, which, by
themselves, manage to redefine the staging of such scenes (the one at the Tsuen
Wan shopping mall is a text-book study of how to film gun fights). It comes
mainly from the brand new situation (the passiveness of the assignment) and
unique atmosphere (the discipline when facing tough opponents, the rapport
between the men but also the conflicts between them) created from a purely
formulaic premise (mob boss is targeted and his men try to protect him). The
result is a total turn-around of a triad film's expectations (five men are brought
together to finish a job and go their separate ways when it's done; no more, no
less).
Director To unfolds his plot in ways that only a man with supreme confidence
about himself dare to employ. Much of the story is implied, such as the tight
surveillance the mob boss keeps over the men. Important developments take place
off screen, such as the affair with the boss's wife. Some details are
understood, for instance the conflict between Anthony Wong and Francis Ng.
Others are conveyed through projection, like the secret of the bullet. The
elliptical nature of the narrative is a far cry from the obviousness of Hong
Kong films or even Hollywood films. It re-posits the power of cinema to tell
stories with images and also displays a trust of the audience's ability to
understand as well as demanding from them a certain level of appreciation.
The Mission is therefore infused with a feeling never before felt in
films. There is a satisfaction and surprise to being outsmarted by the film
(you win if you guess it right). This is not unlike To's earlier work, Expect the Unexpected (HK,
1998), which also offers a wonderful marriage between structure and elliptical
storytelling.
Looking at the past two years, Johnnie To had been going through an experiment
in which form and content brings out the best of each other. From The Longest Nite (HK, 1998) toThe
Mission, we can see him pacing back and forth, searching for that balance.
In this struggle between form and content is a journey through which craft,
ambitions and visions are perfected and realized.
What's good about The Mission is its final realization of balance and
breakthrough. The first part is only a prologue, a warm-up. The tone, rhythm
and clues it set up are only realized later on. But then more clues are being
established (the clever move in which Anthony Wong borrows the phone from Lam
Suet is a subtle illustration of friendship) and the pace picks up even more
(the negotiation in front of the convenience store, the escape and the handling
of the gun are all depicted with a few simple strokes) and the design becomes
bolder still (the stand-off in the restaurant takes place at the same time of
the woman's killing, witnessed through the eyes of Lam Suet and bringing out
the message of an inevitable death). Through it all, the film builds towards its
climax while at the same time delivering an unexpected but also convincing
irony that rounds off the film on a thematic level. It's a technical knock-out.
Discarding the burden to speak with weight, To says plenty without spelling it
out. In so doing, he unleashes the pleasures of his broadened vision. He
leisurely outlines the fuzzy relationship between the men, somewhere between
companionship and friendship, with scenes like the men kicking a paper ball
around or pulling pranks with trick cigarettes, moments that linger with
suggestiveness. At the end, he brings out his theme – that of finding new life
in the face of death, one that informs all of his 1999 films, starting with Where
a Good Man Goes (HK, 1998). He brings it out ever so lightly, yet it's a
theme that lasts a long while. The Mission is an end-of-the-millennium
masterpiece from Johnnie To.
The Code of The
Mission (Johnnie To, 1999) • Senses of Cinema Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, November 20, 2001
The 24th International Hong Kong Film Festival – Offscreen Peter Rist, July 2000
The Gangster as Hero in Hong Kong
Cinema – Offscreen Michael Vesia,
August 2002
Sordid Cinema [Thomas O'Connor]
The Mission (1999: Johnnie To: Hong Kong) - Martial Arts & Asian ... Master of One Inch Punch from Kung Fu Fandom, May 20, 2015, also seen here: HKMDB
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Varied Celluloid.net Josh Samford
The History of Cinema. Johnnie
To: biography, filmography, reviews ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
MovieMartyr.com - The Mission Jeremy Heilman
San Francisco Chronicle [Bob Graham]
Time Out Hong Kong - 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films [Edmund Lee] #72 PTU, #52 The Mission, #32 Mad Detective, #9 Election 2, March 29, 2017
Help!!! (2000) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Off-the-wall satire from those Milkyway fellas proves to be their most flawed work since Where a Good Man Goes. White-hot Cecilia Cheung is Yan, a neophyte doctor working at Ho Ka-Kui General Hospital. As you’d expect, she’s one of the idealistic types, hoping to make a difference and help people. Sadly, that’s not the case at this hospital, where the higher ups (a strange group of seven guys who hide in the dark) make the budget their primary concern. Their instruction: keep everything cheap, even if it means letting people die.
As if that weren’t dark enough, the doctors and nurses are lazy, self-important, and care nothing for the patients. They’re more interested in lunch breaks and shift changes than anything else. One of them is Jim (Jordan Chan), who actually operated on Yan when she was only a fourteen year-old. Back then Jim and his co-hort Joe (Ekin Cheng) worked extra hard to hide Yan’s appendectomy scar so she could wear a bikini someday.
As if that weren’t silly-sounding enough, Yan was so touched by their zeal and enthusiasm that she became a doctor AND made a promise to herself to marry one of the two someday. Meanwhile, Jim decides to rededicate himself but he can’t do it alone. He and Yan turn to Joe, who’s now an auto-mechanic who works feverishly on cars in an auto body shop that looks suspiciously like an emergency room. He even has his assistants wiping sweat from his brow when he’s hunched over an engine. And that’s just the beginning of the silliness, as we witness toilet cleaning, quintuplets, chainsaws, talking cars, rainstorms, lovestruck beggars, and multiple attacks by lightning - all in the name of medical satire.
This hospital comedy is incredibly frenetic even by HK standards. Jokes and body parts fly fast and furious, and To and Wai never stop to explore the maudlin - even with life and death surrounding everything. Given that, the movie can be seen as a total waste, but To and Wai manage to inject a healthy dose of creativity into the proceedings. Unfortunately, that creativity does little more than throw as many jokes out there that they possibly can. The result, while not as trying or idiotic as a Wong Jing feature, comes off as uneven and muddled. The film certainly is funny, but no payoff truly exists.
On the plus side, the leads turn in fun performances, especially usual co-conspirators Ekin Cheng and Jordan Chan, who finally manage to team up on a movie that doesn’t involve triads or hi-tech spy espionage. This may not be a movie for the people expecting more Milkywaycrime films, but it has creativity, cinematic flair, and effective star turns, which isn't bad for a Hong Kong movie. It's just below the mark for a Milkyway film.
Help!!! is Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai's second
collaboration in 2000, a follow up to their wildly successful Needing You
[Gu nan gua nü]. Both producer/directors are principals of Milkyway Image
film company, a consistent source of some of the highest quality and most
provocative films from
A black comedy with romantic and heroic elements, Help
shows three young dedicated doctors (played by pop stars Jordan Chan, Ekin
Cheng, and Cecilia Cheung) mired in the bureaucratic nightmare of the
Eventually, the selfless heroism of the three doctors makes an impression upon the rest of the hospital staff, who start to rededicate themselves to public service and a sense of professionalism. Fired for their rebellion, though, the young doctors return when a rainstorm and landslide create a vast traffic disaster. The film here veers unexpectedly into disaster-pic land, then flashes sideways to romance, as the developing love triangle between our three young heroes is resolved on a storm-tossed and lightning-swept hospital rooftop.
The film never seems to take itself seriously: the doctors, and the endless emergency room set pieces (think constantly repeated shouts of "clear!", defibrillators in hand, and views of flat-lined oscilloscopes starting to waver with life-bestowing force) come straight out of American and Hong Kong TV medical soaps. But these are mere set ups for deflating gags, cynical commentary, even bloody-gloved romantic groping between doctors inside a patient's chest cavity. Much of this is funny, and much more is just over-the-top silly. The screenplay is not concerned with maintaining anything like an even tone: an excessively slap-dash structure might have benefited from serious winnowing, sharpening, and rewriting. A particularly unfunny bit, for example, involves a street person who will go to any length to woo Cecilia Cheung's character: this is uncomfortable to watch, and paints her character in an oddly harsh light.
Visually, though, Help sustains the Milkyway Image
production crew's top notch, even over-generous level of creativity. For
example, the film is shot in generous wide-screen format (an unusual choice for
wacky satire). Cinematography exhibits the constantly plastic, inventive use of
framing and mise en scène that
As for the performances: well, they are good enough. Jordan
Chan (who once, not too long ago, exhibited such promise as the Hong Kong film
industry's finest young actor) is in overdrive, again, but then so is the film.
Ekin Cheng, largely typecast in pretty boy/heroic roles, does no harm here, and
actually seems to be able somewhat comfortably to inhabit his role (as a young
doctor who's traded it all in for a life as a crack car mechanic). Cecilia
Cheung doesn't coast on her "It Girl" credentials (as some roles
tempt her to do), and makes a creditable effort to impersonate a determinedly
professional young idealist. Supporting roles are played in the very broad and
sloppy
Help is a treacherous film text that mobilizes a number of possible readings, none of which is necessarily consistent with the others. I would like to offer two, here: first, Help as political allegory, and second, Help as self-reflexive text (and this reading will act to destabilize the first).
Several critics have read the
As film writer Steve Erickson suggested to me, Help seems to pose a seemingly irresolvable issue of tone: is it "a humanist allegory about the importance of community", or a film full of "cynical-cum-misanthropic humour"? This is what I found most engaging about the film: the contradictions between reality vs. fantasy and romance vs. cynicism that the screenplay stages.
To pick one example, the film has a coda revealing that what we've been watching is merely another television soap opera: the camera pulls back from the final rooftop scene to reveal that it takes place within a TV set inside a hospital, whose "real" staff comment on the implausibility of what they (and we) have been watching. But this is no mere abrupt trick, cynically toying once again with audiences' expectations. We are prepared for the ending twice. Once, at the film's beginning, when a mock-heroic ER-style montage turns out to be issuing from another TV set, and a doctor (Lam Suet) calls it ridiculously unrealistic. Then, about one quarter of the way into the film, Cecilia Cheung looks ahead to two distinct versions of Jordan Chan's return to the hospital. In the first, he is heroic-competent, and saves someone in the emergency room with the cooperation of his colleagues. In the second, Cheung finds him sitting dejected on the ground. This time his colleagues have sabotaged his efforts: the replay is a satire of the heroism of the original sequence. But which one is "real"? Is the first subjective, in Cheung's mind, and the second "real"? I'm not sure that we are given enough to establish this one way or the other. In which case, both options co-exist: heroic public interest plus its own satire. So the final (third) alternation from romantic rooftop "transcendence" to television's nihilist cynicism mirrors the first, and is set up by the second.
Either this is a confused schema, sloppily constructed by the filmmakers, or it's deliberately planned to provoke and difficult to unravel. I'd opt for the second: Wai Ka-fai, at least, has shown himself to be a brilliant manipulator of standard narrative expectations (see his Too Many Ways To Be Number One, Yi ge zitou de dansheng, 1997), and revels in this kind of brain twisting ontological paradox.
But that does not help to unravel it, completely. If the film's "story" is thoroughly distanced by being enclosed in a wider, more cynical context, then what is the film asking its viewers to believe? What, then, is the status of the direct, point-blank parody of bureauc-rats scurrying behind blue blinds? Is that parodistic effect negated, too? There is something resembling a dialectical set-up here that feels self-reflexively complex. The best Iranian directors know how to do this so lightly that it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Wai Ka-fai and company labour over it intensively, so that the awkwardness shows and becomes part of the method of delivery.
All that Help presents - and it explicitly acknowledges this, with its epilogue - is merely a representation, necessarily false, of what one could naively term "reality". Nothing of substance manages to secure even a toe-hold; nothing is left except for parody, criticism, and self-reference. In political terms, we have a vision of a world in which a regime of bureaucratism, oiled by the complacency of self-interest, necessarily trumps and negates the possibility of optimism, humanism, or self-sacrifice. By stripping away romance as mere ideology, even exposing humanitarianism as mere ideology, Help becomes about as radically critical a statement as anything I've seen on film.
With thanks to Sebastian Tse for his translations and key
suggestions.
Interview: Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai • Senses of Cinema Shelly Kraicer interview, December 29, 2001
A bumbling, dissolute emperor (Anita Mui in a male role) gets mixed up with a scar-faced woman warrior (Sammi Cheng) and a gender-bending fairy enchantress who seduces him (Cecilia Cheung). Directed by Johnny To (The Heroic Trio) and Wai Ka-fai, this 2001 costume fantasy is very loosely based on an ancient moral fable, rendered incoherent by the dizzying pace, frantic slapstick, and nonstop dialogue. The infantile humor deals with flatulence, cross-dressing, swishy ministers, and sexual paranoia—this is Hong Kong cinema at its nadir. In Cantonese with subtitles. 123 min.
Though Anita Mui gets top billing in Wu Yen, the undisputed star of the film is none other than Sammi Cheng Sau-Man, who became a box-office sensation last year thanks to Needing You and Summer Holiday. Now she gets to headline her own Lunar New Year film, co-starring Mui and still-hot Cecilia Cheung. The classic tale of ugly warrior Chung Mo-Yim (or Zhong Wu-Yen) has been told before, most notably by Carol Cheng Yu-Ling in an old TVB serial. Brought to us by new comedymeisters Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, this new flick reimagines Chung Mo-Yim as a costume comedy that channels Stephen Chow's mo lei tau comedies of the early nineties.
Chung Mo-Yim (Sammi Cheng) is a woman warrior who's fated to marry the Emperor (Anita Mui in a cross-dressing role). The two first meet when the Emperor accidentally frees the evil Fairy Enchantress (Cecilia Cheung), who then proceeds to get between Mo-Yim and the Emperor by proffering his/her affections. Mo-Yim spurns the Enchantress, so the Enchantress puts a curse on Mo-Yim. As long as she loves the Emperor, she'll be marred by a hideous mark on her face. Unlike the old TVB series, the mark isn't a half-black, half-white number, it's a simple red mark across one of Mo-Yim's eyes. She still looks pretty, but for some reason everyone in the movie runs like she's the Elephant Man. Undaunted, Mo-Yim swears to become Empress, but not without difficulties.
The Emperor turns out to be a lazy, skirt-chasing ass who has no sense of women, much less politics. Disgusted at Mo-Yim's "ugliness," the Emperor instead turns to a female incarnation of the Fairy Enchantress, who inserts herself into the palace to make things even more difficult for Mo-Yim. Mo-Yim hangs around until she's actually needed, which is whenever a fight needs to be won. When the going gets tough for the Emperor, he calls on Mo-Yim to save the day, which she does though sometimes reluctantly.
And so it goes for nearly two hours, as Mo-Yim attempts to win the Emperor's affections while fending off the overbearing Fairy Enchantress. Right away, this movie plays like a Lunar New Year film. The comedy isn't restrained by the period setting, and the jokes fly fast and furious in a fashion more typified by Wong Jing than Johnnie To. Still, To keeps the shtick grounded by relying less on a frenzied pace and more on his stars. Sammi Cheng inhabits Mo-Yim with a believable inner strength and a comedienne’s slapstick grace. Cecilia Cheung is good, too. However, the strongest performance is probably Anita Mui, who's hilarious as the Emperor. Together, the three women make Wu Yen a dizzy treat, by turns funny and even a little affecting.
A lot of delightful touches round out this Lunar New Year film. To uses puppets and song for exposition, stages mahjong games, and has each of his actresses play both sexes at one time or another. It all adds up to an utterly inconsequential time at the movies. Seeing Wu Yen as a semi-serious film is impossible, what with the multitude of convention-breaking jokes and anachronistic touches. Still, it's all in the name of fun. Wu Yen plays like an elaborate performance piece, and thankfully an enjoyable one.
Wu Yen is the latest collaboration by
director/producers Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai, who set the standard for quality
in the post-1997 HK film industry with their Milkyway Image film
company productions. Their comedy Needing You
was the surprise local hit of 2000. Wu Yen is their first Chinese New
Year film, a period comedy that looks like it should be one of the hits of
2001.
The plot is based on an old Chinese folk legend that has been depicted in
several earlier
The film is set over 2000 years ago in the Warring States era, before
At first glance, Wu Yen appears to be a Stephen Chiau-style movie that
situates Anita Mui
in the typical Chiau role (Chiau was the king of "moleitau" or
verbal nonsense comedy in
Sammi Cheng, a
reigning Cantopop diva of the most glitteringly elegant
persuasion, confirms that she is also a real actress (if more proof were needed
after Needing
You and Killing Me
Tenderly). She trades in her stylish songstress persona for something
much more varied and expressive: she can play romantic, daffy, furious,
petulant (fortunately there's less of this), comic-noble, frenzied-energetic,
swaggeringly heroic... just about anything that the script calls for. Not as
polished a performance as Mui's, perhaps, but in some ways more challenging,
calling for greater range. It stakes out new ground for Cheng, showing off
aspects of her talent that we haven't yet had occasion to admire.
The third lead, Cecilia
Cheung, is somewhat disappointing. She's an actress who can exhibit real
depth and surprising power with the right collaborators (especially in her work
in director Aubrey Lam's Twelve Nights).
But To and Wai seem to not know what to do with her here, and, left to her own
devices, Cheung seems out of place, too one-dimensional. There's no consistent
heft or presence to her character, which should provide many opportunities
(with its triple or quadruple roles, much gender-switching, and moments of
moral confusion) for an actress to shine.
In the technical departments: Raymond Wong Ying-wah provides another superb
musical score. The art direction and cinematography, though, let the film down,
which is extremely unusual for a Milkyway Image production. Sets looked rather
cheap, colours seemed subdued, and the whole production had a rather "shot
for television" look about it: too many routine medium close-ups and
shot-reverse shot patterns. There were rare moments of beauty, such as Cheng's
return to her forest hide-out, as she walks through a field of shimmering
moonlit grass. Most striking, though, were the delicately realized shadow
puppet scenes. Set to a woman's chorus, these superb interludes narrated plot
background and enacted the magical and battle sequences that demonstrated Wu
Yen's heroism. What a wonderful way to save money and do something artful, at
the same time. I can't think of anything in a Chinese film quite like it.
[caution: the next paragraphs discuss the film's ending: readers who have yet to see the film might want to check out here]
Despite Wu Yen's obvious nods to the Chinese New Year film -- a
comedy of high spirits, laced with Rabelasian "lowbrow" humour,
suitable for the whole family (i.e. designed for maximum box office success),
culminating in a romantic "happy ending" -- the screenplay is far
from complacent about its participation in that genre. A complex structural
underpnning reveals itself most clearly in the radically anarchic-gender mixing
at play in the story. Mui portrays a man who momentarily takes on a female
disguise; Cheng is a sword-wielding woman hero (a nuxia) who, in a comic
episode, finds herself with beard, mustache, low voice, and rather more primary
male sexual characteristics. Cheung is situated between them: she plays a
female fox fairy whose screen time is equally divided between male and female
personas. Borders are dissolved, gender rules stretched beyond the breaking
point. Much of this might be comfortably contained in a routinely well-designed
Chinese New Year film.
So might the rather pointed political satire that Wai Ka-fai and Johnnie To use
to spice up the film. So, hapless HKSAR Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's lame
slogan "
But lines like Wu Yen's eloquent denunciation of romance ("Love is
destruction and sabotage, motivated by self interest and greed, so that it
leads to hatred, revenge, and war") point towards a more troubling, less
playful conclusion. Wu Yen's ultimate rebellion against the strictures of
closure mark her journey -- from acceptance of fate to the edge of renunciation
-- as the film's core. "But I want to leave!" is her final line, just
as she and the Enchantress, both pregnant, are about to be accepted as equal
wives of the now reformed Emperor. Although opening the ending of a traditional
New Year comedy might seem to twist the genre too far for comfort, it is not
surprising to see the darker critical vision of To and Wai's earlier Milkyway
Image films reasserting itself here. But this time, with an anti-cynical twist:
the female hero Wu Yen has, for perhaps the first time in a film by this
company, the vision and power to triumph over complacency and cynicism. A
"happy Milkyway ending", after all?
with thanks to Sebastian Tse for his contributions
: RevolutionSF - Wu Yen :
Review Amy Harlib
Cinespot - All About Asian Cinema Kantorates
Wu Yen Richard Scheib from Moria
Wu Yen | Variety Derek Elley
Hong Kong (102 mi) 2001 co-director: Wai Ka-fai
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe)
The opening sequence of Jonnie To and Wai Ka Fai's latest film, Full Time Killer, is a classic set-piece for establishing action: a lean young man, clad in slick black leather, trench coat swirling around him, enters a train station, selects a target, coolly lifts his revolver, kills the victim, turns around and makes his getaway in a swift but relaxed manner, indifferent to the fact that he hasn't even bothered to conceal his identity. Tok (Andy Lau), is a hit man on the rise, renowned for his reckless and extravagant gestures (see above), all of which are borrowed liberally from his favorite action films. His other obsession revolves around O (Takashi Sorimachi), a hit man whose retiring nature are entirely at odds with his profession; his main interest is collecting Snoopy figurines from each of the countries that he has "visited." O is at the top of his game, the one with the highest fees, and Tok is eager to depose him as soon as possible, although his motivations may not be entirely financial. There's also an Interpol Police Inspector (Simon Yam), who wants to arrest both of them. A showdown between Tok and O is inevitable, after one of them discovers the common link between them that the other has known from the first frame.
Directors To and Wai (the latter also co-wrote the screenplay), borrow liberally from the common elements between American gangster and western films, as do many Hong Kong filmmakers. There are countless films that revolve around the concept of the established gunfighter, tired of living up to his professional reputation, but who must face a young upstart who won't allow him to walk away (the most typical being Henry King's 1951 classic, The Gunfighter, in which Gregory Peck is endlessly harassed by Stephen MacNally). Yet, Killer also addresses the contemporary issues now influencing organized crime in Hong Kong. The film's title is the first clue that not all is as it used to be; like the Italian Mafia's loss of influence and power to their Russian counterparts, the old-style Hong Kong gangsters and their codes of honor have been overthrown by more ambitious and ruthless types, such as the Chinese Triads, who specialize in greater and more indiscriminate forms of violence. O and Tok are the obvious symbolic stand-ins for this shift, and they, like other workers, have now fallen prey to the mob equivalent of "restructuring"(without the severance pay). There is no sense of loyalty or identity, and no protection, however limited it might have been in the past; they have become contractors in both the definition of their employment and the conditions under which they work. The sequences of exquisitely choreographed violence in Full Time Killer cannot even compare to the level of sadism in Ichi the Killer; the staccato-like editing style, when coupled with the insouciant slinging around of black witticisms by the protagonists (antagonists?) renders the violence more cartoon-like in sensibility; just like Wile E. Coyote, the two protagonists will get up again to undergo more madness in the next scene. The directors keep this madness going until the very last minute, until a pull-all-the-stops-out finale caps this funny, intentional and otherwise, "Chop Socky" film.
eFilmCritic Reviews Ultimate Dancing Machine
FULLTIME KILLER was Hong Kong's official entry for the Academy's Best Foreign Film of 2002, and I admire the optimism of those who thought this over-adrenalized action film might be Oscar material. The film presents a souped-up, cartoony view of the underworld that might be termed Tarantinoesque--except, of course, Hong Kong was here first with this sort of movie; indeed, they were pumping out these things back when the auteur of PULP FICTION was still a video store clerk.
And they do it quite well: the action scenes here are often
splendid--impressively propulsive and balletic, though in a rather unbelievable
manner. Characters routinely jump through hails of bullets without getting a
mark on their clothes. Realism, though, is not what FULLTIME KILLER is about.
To understate wildly.
Consider the plot: We have two hitmen, one an experienced assassin considered
the "Number One" killer in Hong Kong (nicknamed "O"), the
other a brash youngster who hopes to unseat him (called "Tok"). They
play an elaborate cat-and-mouse game around the city, which includes competing
for the affections of the woman they both love, O's housekeeper. If this sounds
contrived, consider also that O keeps a collection of Snoopy toys representing
all the people he's killed, and Tok sometimes whacks people while wearing a
Bill Clinton Halloween mask. They are, basically, comic-book thugs.
Directors Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai are "hip" to a fault; the movie
is loaded with action-film references (Point Break and Leon are name-checked),
and the film's climax takes place in a warehouse designed after O and Tok's
favorite video game. Silly? Yes, but at least the silliness is intentional.
This is not the sort of movie that you have to believe in to enjoy properly.
The action sequences are often clever, the pace is kept comfortably swift
without lapsing into monotony.
But sometimes the directors fail even on the comic-book level; key narrative
information is sometimes presented in a maddeningly elliptical manner, causing
needless confusion here and there. They're so addicted to the hopped-up action
sequences that they try to get the exposition over in the same way.
It's utterly implausible from beginning to end--and I didn't even tell you about the brain-tumor subplot. But here, that's just part of the fun.
Fulltime Killer (2001) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
As Milkyway crime thrillers go, this big budget hitman saga leans toward being their most pretentious and bloated yet. Based on a best selling novel, Fulltime Killer gets a glossy big screen push by actor and producer Andy Lau. The result is a bit too self-referential and overblown, but director Johnnie To stages excellent set pieces which help redeem whatever self-importance the script attempts.
Andy Lau stars as Tok, a low-rent hitman who kills with theatrical flamboyance and acts like a rock star. His goal is to be the "Gold Medallist of Assassins," a self-proclaimed title which he, and everyone else in Asia, believes belongs to the silent assassin O (Takashi Sorimachi). In contrast to Tok, O is quiet and efficient. He exists only to kill and then fade away, as if he doesn't exist. However, Tok won't let O kill quietly. Through a series of escalating encounters, the two find themselves both allies and enemies. The goal of all of this is one fateful showdown where Tok can claim the title - or O can retain it.
This homoerotic battle of the bad guys is an overused plot even for Milkyway films. However, Fulltime Killer attempts to surpass all those other films by referencing its own genre as a sort of post-modern springboard. Tok is a killer who likes to emulate his favorite action films because he likes their style. The obsessed Interpol agent Inspector Lee (Simon Yam) ends up deifying his quarry in a novel. Kelly Lin plays Miss Chin, O's housekeeper, who suspects he's a professional killer and tries to get close to him instead of calling the cops. She ends up being charmed by Tok, who shows up at her job wearing a rubber mask like Patrick Swayze in Point Break and flat-out telling her that he's a bad guy. Miss Chin is probably the ultimate genre cliché, the "good girl" who finds soulful release in the arms of a professional killer.
Thankfully, the film grounds itself in the more cathartic conventions of the genre. Johnnie To's set pieces are exciting and appropriate, and the actors are engaging despite the sometimes overblown script. Andy Lau goes over the top and seems to be having a ball. What's great about his performance here is not the performance itself (which is entertaining but unoriginal) but the fact that he plays up his own pop star image to do it. Simon Yam and Cherrie Ying (as Lee's assistant) both manage their performances well, though Yam does one-up Lau in the overacting department. Kelly Lin is convincing and effective as Miss Chin, which is a surprise since her earlier acting efforts couldn't really be called acting. And Takashi Sorimachi is charismatic in his HK acting debut. As O, he's required to be impassive and reticent, but he has a strong physical presence that's well suited for a Milkyway Film.
In the end, all the elements manage to coalesce nicely and we reach an appropriate and even haunting finish. Johnnie To's best films have been those whose pretensions are silent. Fulltime Killer puts its pretensions on its sleeve, and the effect can be as alienating as it is interesting. Still, To clearly believes in the over-the-top emotions and sometimes embarrassing drama of this film. That's a credit to his assured directorial hand, and reason enough to keep watching.
Fulltime Killer (2001)
| PopMatters David Sanjek, June 9,
2003
Criminal
Movies: Full Time Killer Brent
Allard
The
Hateful Debate: Brothers, Guns, & Doves - Fulltime Killer (2001) Zach Nix
Hit Parade | Village
Voice Dennis Lim, March 18, 2003
Full-Time
Killer (2001) Movie Review | BeyondHollywood.com Nix
Fulltime Killer – The Pinocchio Theory Steven Shapiro, December 8, 2003
Fulltime
Killer (2001) Review | cityonfire.com
Fulltime Killer - AV Club
Film Scott Tobias
Cinespot
- All About Asian Cinema Kantorates
FULLTIME KILLER | Film
Journal International Daniel Eagan
Varied
Celluloid Josh Samford
Hong
Kong Digital - DVD Review John
Charles
Needcoffee.com
- DVD Review Doc Ezra
Qwipster's
Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Fulltime
Killer Review (2001) - The Spinning Image
Graeme Clark
Plume-Noire.com
Movie Review [Fred Thom]
Fulltime
Killer - Beloit's Global Enemies: A Website Devoted to ...
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Shadows
on the Wall [Rich Cline]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Secret
life of Johnnie To - latimes
Scarlett Cheng
New
York Times Elvis MItchell
Hong Kong (88 mi) 2003 ‘Scope
Nitrate Online [Carrie Gorringe]
Johnnie To's latest work, PTU (Police Tactical Unit), is a Hong Kong crime thriller that starts out strongly but ends up running out of gas by the midway point. When a gang leader is murdered under mysterious circumstances, it falls to Sargeant Lo to investigate. However, in the pursuit of a suspect, Lo loses his service revolver, and this slipup could cost him a pending promotion. He sets out on a double mission: to find the killer and his gun. One intriguing lead occurs at the crime scene: there, he locates the victim's cell phone, still functioning, with an unknown caller trying desperately to leave the victim a message. All of this is compounded by the obvious contempt that other investigative branches of the police force have for Lo; corruptible and clumsy, he's the local equivalent of the Keystone Kops, but he does have enough friends on the force to help him get by. The problem with PTU lies in its overdependence upon the situational humor engendered by Lo's attitude toward himself and the investigation; his buffoonery is supposed to act as a clever foil – and cover – for his obvious skill as an investigator. The problem is that its charming nature has a very limited range; watching Lo stumble through various leads soon becomes irritating. The irritation is compounded by a plot line that meanders aimlessly, weighted down by Lo's obsession with saving himself. Even the payoff – in the form of a truly bloody shootout between rival gangs that lasts over fifteen minutes – is more of an anticlimax. This is no way to treat a crime thriller.
Electric
Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
Johnnie To’s stock has been rising steadily in the West ever since his two Election films garnered critical acclaim and brought the Hong Kong action director to the attention of mainstream audiences. His latest, Exiled, a smart, energetic and dazzlingly stylish actioner, was unanimously and deservedly praised, cementing that success. Following a short run at the ICA, one of his earlier efforts, the 2003 PTU (Police Tactical Unit), has now been released on DVD in the UK.
PTU takes place over one night in Hong Kong, during which the eponymous Tactical Unit led by Sergeant Mike Ho, tries to recover the gun lost by their goofy colleague Sergeant Lo during a scuffle with a gang of thugs. They have until dawn to find it and avoid a scandal that would cost Lo his promotion. A race against time ensues as the team trawl through a deserted, glacial Hong Kong, resorting to violent tactics to get the information they need. The situation becomes even more desperate when another team of police officers, working on the related case of the thugs’ murdered leader, start to view the Unit in general, and Lo in particular, with growing suspicion.
Opening with a brilliant set piece of slapstick power games that involve Sergeant Lo, the thugs and an apparently hapless kid fighting over a diner table, PTU offers a satirical view of police cynicism and incompetence. The satire is never too serious, though, and the film is less about flagging up social issues than about the humorous absurdity of fate. The random laws of chance rule and neither Lo’s dubious old-school tactics nor Ho’s scarily ruthless professionalism bring them any closer to the misplaced gun. Interestingly, as this is after all an action movie, action is shown to be futile and pointless here, and the plot is resolved only by a series of chance happenings and freak coincidences.
Famed for his stylish virtuosity, To certainly does not disappoint in PTU. His Hong Kong is all slick urban spaces and metallic surfaces, entirely deserted but for the police and the gangsters, so sanitised as to be slightly unreal. The cold, hard blue light of the streets at night contrasts with the reddish tones of the chilling game arcade scene, in which Ho forces a thug to remove a tattoo on his neck by rubbing it until it’s sore. The director creates an exquisitely over-stylised world that is at least as captivating as the gratuitous convolutions of the plot.
PTU has been criticised for its tonal shifts, but the mixing of registers – in this case satire, light-hearted humour and intense violence – is typical of Asian filmmaking. More problematic is the plot, clever and tightly scripted in the first half, but losing all sense of direction and fizzling out like a damp squib in the second half. As a result, although PTU provides enjoyable, intelligent Hong Kong action fun, it’s one for To fans only.
PTU (2003) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
It took a year to make thanks to numerous starts and stops, but Johnnie To's long-awaited PTU is finally upon us. This return to the crime genre is long overdue for To. Since The Mission in 1999, his filmography has consisted almost exclusively of comedies, the only two exceptions being Fulltime Killer and Running Out of Time 2, though the latter could have been considered a comedy too. PTU promises a return to the films that made Milky Way productions: tough crime flicks mired in and critical of their chosen genres. For awhile there, it seemed that Johnnie To's Milky Way crime films were the only thing worth seeing out of Hong Kong.
Simon Yam is Mike, the leader of a Police Tactical Unit (or PTU, duh) that patrols the streets of Hong Kong. One night, he and his squad (including Maggie Siu and Milky Way regular Raymond Wong) happen across Officer Lo (Lam Suet), an anti-crime detective who's been beaten by a group of young triad regulars. Lo's gun is missing, which should be reported, but Lo is fearful that the oversight will have heavy consequences for him. Without hesitation, Mike offers to help Lo find the gun, with the coming dawn as their deadline for success.
Unfortunately, the circumstances are more convoluted than they first appear. Lo was beaten by men belonging to gangster Ponytail, but Ponytail has just been assassinated by another party. The obvious culprit would be rival gangster Eyeball, but the accusation is denied. Still, Ponytail's father Bald Head wants revenge, and will use Lo's missing gun to get his way. Meanwhile, Mike and his team conduct their own investigation into the missing gun, but Mike's motives are questioned by various parties, including fellow PTU member Maggie Siu and the obligatory rookie cop. The local members of CID (led by Ruby Wong) begin investigating Ponytail's murder, and soon begin to question Lo's involvement. Plus, a series of broken car windows and some guy at a telephone booth add intrigue to the evening. All these seemingly separate plot threads circle each other before coming together in grand cinematic style. Shots are fired, lives saved or lost, and heroism attained in the most unlikely of ways. Were it not a Milky Way film, this could be the blueprint for your typical noir potboiler.
But this is a Milky Way film, which means things are never quite what they seem. Johnnie To explores a variety of genre themes—camaraderie, righteousness, and the nature of heroism—but stops short of being definite on anything. Like his most sublime crime film, The Mission, To uses a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of cinematic staging to explore the subjects of PTU. Actions speak more loudly than words, and the criminal world is home to both a stunning ridiculousness (there's actually a hierarchy for seating at hot pot restaurants) and a sudden danger (death, and even life, could be hidden just out of reach). At the same time, the just and the pathetic can exchange places in a matter of minutes, and heroism can be found by sheer luck. Without dialogue or even an overly dominant theme, all of this seems blissfully random, but there is a geniunely enthralling edge to this noir tilt-a-whirl of a movie. Johnnie To keeps things moving with a steady—and deceptively still—pace, and even when the film seems to go nowhere, nuggets of satisfaction are easily gleamed.
Which isn't to say that the film is perfect because it really isn't. Perhaps it's unfair to do so, but when comparing PTU to The Mission, it becomes all to easy to recognize one as superior to the other. The Mission found genuine character and drama in the underplayed relationship between five guys, and the amount that was unsaid in that film carried remarkable emotional weight. On the other hand, PTU takes a few compelling characters (Lam Suet's Officer Lo) and some not-so-compelling ones (Ruby Wong's CID officer, and pretty much every PTU officer not played by Simon Yam) and creates little that is more than superficially interesting. Some questions are raised, but more often than not, the absurdities and amusing minutiae provide only momentary chuckles. Rarely do we discover more about the characters through their quietest moments, and some sequences (like when Mike and his PTU team explore a dark building) are only interesting as minor gags.
Still, PTU works tremendously as an iron-handed exercise in cinema style, and Johnnie To and company should be commended for their exquisitely realized production. To (and cinematographer Cheng Siu-Keung) create an almost alternate reality for PTU, a nighttime Hong Kong so quiet and empty that seemingly almost anything could happen. The Hong Kong streets one normally associates with bustling crowds are rendered as clean, dark spaces with fixed intervals of stark brightness. It's the perfect setting for the nominal characters of PTU to run around in, and their simple existence in this empty world seems to impart great thematic significance. What that significance is (Right? Wrong? Heroism? Dumb luck?) can be debated endlessly, but it's worth celebrating that a Hong Kong film gives us anything even remotely substantial to chew on. PTU succeeds as an entertainingly minor noir, and though it may not amount to much more than that, the ultimate ride is well worth the trip.
P.T.U.: Police
Tactical Unit | PopMatters Bill
Gibron, March 23, 2008
PTU - Far East Films Andrew Skeates
AsianMovieWeb
[Manfred Selzer]
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
PTU Review | CultureVulture - CultureVulture.net George Wu
PTU |
aka Police Tactical Unit (2003) Review | cityonfire.com
Draven99's Musings [Chris Beaumont]
Hong Kong Digital - DVD Review
PTU | Film Review | Slant
Magazine Ed Gonzalez
PTU Jeremy Heilman from Movie Martyr
EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson
PTU |
Variety Derek Elley
Time Out Hong Kong - 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films [Edmund Lee] #72 PTU, #52 The Mission, #32 Mad Detective, #9 Election 2, March 29, 2017
New York Times Elvis Mitchell
What the hell's happened to
Johnnie To? This film has a few engaging moments (mostly in Mr. Yip's
apartment), but overall it's incredibly lazy. How about that opening sequence,
which advertises its own presumed virtuosity, while ruining its effect
completely with herky-jerky camera movements. What, there's no WD-40 for the
crane? The whole media angle was a pointless conceit, and even though the
occasional bit of inspired gunplay would peek through the blinds, it would be
squelched by the farting cop or the convenient character inconsistency hot on
its heels. (So the little boy won't eat with criminals, but he'll hop on the
Internet to patch in their webcam?) Remember when we got to see Tsui Hark films
at festivals? That was awesome.
To Toes Action-Film Line With a Publicity-Savvy Police ... - Village Voice Ed Halter, January 17, 2006
Well executed but ultimately unsatisfying, Breaking News centers its cops-and-robbers plot around a clever meta-media twist that nevertheless fails to transcend gimmickry. After photos surface of two Hong Kong policemen getting gunned down during their bungled melee with an armed gang, Inspector Rebecca Hong (Cantopop dance diva Kelly Chen) decides to feed the local news industry a taste of its own glossily packaged medicine; not only will the force capture these crooks, it will put on a “great show” for reporters in the process. Hong fits policemen with pinhole cameras to stream video of the raid, refits a surveillance truck as PR war room, and hires an ad agency spin-meister to help frame their responses. Soon shutter-clicking paparazzi cluster around police trucks en route to the crime scene as if they were celebs heading down the red carpet. Once the raid is under way, the bad guys strike back in kind: When the police hire a film director to re-edit a bungled first attempt as a success, the criminals distribute contrary digital photos via the Internet.
Despite some split-screen shoot-outs and a kids-and-dad hostage situation, Breaking News never develops the level of intensity or suspense its premise promises. Declining an intriguing cinematographic opportunity, director Johnnie To ( Fulltime Killer, Heroic Trio) withholds the cop-cam footage, and given such a high-tech tit for tat, the film’s visuals are surprisingly flat. There’s also a Bush-age allegory lurking beneath the script that’s never fully realized. The police become their own embedded reporters, tap cell phone transmissions, and hack into computers, Hong issues prefab news reports to suit her agenda, and the crooks pull an embarrassing Abu Ghraib via online leakage. In the end, however, Breaking News has nothing to say about this continuation of crime-stopping by other means; it just happens that way, and with little excitement at that.
Breaking News (2004) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
The fact that Johnnie To's latest film Breaking News got an invite to the Cannes Film Festival should tell you something about the director's international reputation. Basically, that reputation exists, but it's also inexorably tied to the crime genre. Films like Love For All Seasons and even the award-winning Running on Karma don't usually get international fans salivating, and this even goes for the Hong Kong Cinema-faithful who'll watch everything that To directs - and who probably gnash their teeth over the latest Johnnie To-Sammi Cheng romantic laffer. All those lingering fears of Johnnie To-lite should be put to rest with Breaking News, an entertaining crime thriller with a few interesting satirical nods. Still, the cast is a bit surprising: popstars Richie Ren and Kelly Chen, and usual funnyman Nick Cheung (!) play the suave cop/criminal types in this film. Was Lau Ching-Wan busy?
Richie Ren is Yuan, a cool Mainland professional thief who sets the Hong Kong streets on fire in the film's first eight minutes - an amazing steadicam sequence that details the beginning of a pitched gunplay battle and its subsequent fallout in a single take. On Yuan's tail is Inspector Cheung (Nick Cheung), a slightly goofy-looking version of the standard "Cop Who Breaks All the Rules™". The cops' stakeout goes bust, leading to a firefight and finally a media-covered sequence of an average beat cop actually raising his hands and surrendering to Yuan and his three comrades. The televised display of cop cowardice sets the public against the police, a sentiment furthered by the fact that Yuan and his gang gets away. The Royal Hong Kong Police Force have likely never had a poorer Q-rating.
Enter Inspector Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen), who suggests to her superior officers (including Simon Yam in a cameo) that the cops regain face by putting on a "big show". That show will include unprecedented media access to the apprehending of Yuan's gang - once they catch up with them. Fong has her crew scouring the streets for info, which leads them to Yuan's apartment building hideout at nearly the same time as Cheung and his team, who brazenly disobey orders by staying on the case and invading the building. Once Fong gets wind that the planned primetime bust is going down, she assembles the cops and media for her big show, and begins to orchestrate events to make the cops seem like the heroes they're supposed to be. Meanwhile, Yuan catches on to the media manipulation, and starts finding ways to debunk the cops' media spinning. All the while, Cheung stays in the building, and strengthens his personal resolve to bring down Yuan.
Breaking News charges forward like a barrelling freight train, which can be credited to Johnnie To's solid direction, as well as his unparalleled ability to work minor quirks into otherwise generic crime films. Inspector Cheung may be a hard-nosed cop cliché, but his interaction with the frustrated Fong, who wants him off the streets pronto, and his sometimes dopey subordinates (including To regular Hui Siu-Hung as a flatulent cop) is handled efficiently and entertainingly. Similarly, Yuan is revealed to be a suave, honorable thief who frowns on killing kids, and has the charisma to defuse tensions between his gang and the men belonging to Chun (Yao Yong), a Mainland hitman who happens to be caught in the building too. Yuan takes hostages (Lam Suet and his two kids), but treats them extraordinarily well, even cooking dinner for them and delivering footage of their meal to the media to show up the cops.
The satirical element of Breaking News offers some rich ground to cover. The cops are trying to put on a show, but their media machinations are countered by Yuan's intelligence and gamesmanship. Yuan is portrayed as a smart guy who puts his principles first, and is perhaps better at handling the media than the cops are. Indeed, he would probably get away with the whole shebang if it weren't for Cheung's Rambo cop ingenuity, or some minor happenstance involving the ultra-photogenic Inspector Fong, who's seemingly admired by every male cop (and even male thief) within 100 yards of her. Yeah, even though this is a tough thriller/media satire combo, it's all too apparent that there are screenwriters at work. The pointed media satire provides some good narrative fodder, but there are more obvious screenwriting conceits - like the forced attraction between Yuan and Inspector Fong - that seem like remnants of a marketing meeting.
There's also a weird male bonding subplot that goes to an illogical extreme, and seems to exist only to end the film on a self-referential note. Odd existentialism in Hong Kong crime films is nothing new, but their presence in Breaking News only seems to weigh the otherwise sleek narrative down. Screenwriters Chan Hing-Kai, Yip Tin-Shing, and the Milkyway Creative Team (Woohoo! Screenwriting by committee!) spend too much time crossing their thematic wires, and the result is not a film that really seems to say much. The media satire is there, but not fully played out. The male bonding, and existential thoughts of professional criminals are explored, but the ultimate payoff seems forced. And the attraction between Yuan and Fong is too undeveloped and uninteresting to be anything other than movie screenwriting.
Also problematic is the film's casting, which is totally odd for a Johnnie To film. Richie Ren gets the Andy Lau role, and is sufficiently charming and even charismatic as the intelligent thief Yuan. What he doesn't seem to possess is the requisite edge of a killer, which Yuan plainly is from minute one of the film. Nick Cheung fares slightly better as the hard-boiled Cheung, if only because he's not really required to carry the film. Cheung is suitably intense for a light media satire/action thriller like Breaking News, though he would still be all wrong for either the Lau Ching-Wan or Andy Lau roles in Running Out of Time. On the lower end of things is Kelly Chen, who no matter how you slice it, does not look or act like she belongs in this film. Inspector Fong's intensity and intelligence aren't adequately conveyed by Chen, nor does there seem to be much lingering beneath Fong's gorgeous exterior. At the very least, Chen's icy screen persona seems fitting for her character, but that doesn't really make her seem interesting.
But despite all the above gripes, Breaking News does provide one major, major bonus: it entertains, and not in a dumbed-down, unintelligent way. The media satire, while not fully explored, does give the film a few sly laughs, and Johnnie To paces the cat-and-mouse "Die Hard in a Hong Kong apartment building" storyline with enjoyable tension and appropriate bursts of action. Aside from the astounding one-take opening sequence, Breaking News provides a climactic minibus chase also shot in one take, and effective split-screen moments which bring the characters and their situations closer together. Even if marketing botched some aspects of Breaking News, Johnnie To handles the actual storytelling with admirable cinematic panache. It's not a perfect film by any means, but for Hong Kong commercial cinema, Breaking News is still better than we probably deserve.
Shuqi.org - Asian Cinema David Bjerre
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
16mm Shrine Ash Karreau
HK Neo Reviews Neo (Andrew)
Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Daniel Kasman
BREAKING NEWS | Film Journal
International Daniel Eagan
Breaking News |
Film Review | Slant Magazine
Ed Gonzalez
Breaking News - AV Club
Film Noel Murray
LoveAsianFilm.com Martin Cleary
breaking news -
review at videovista Paul
Higson
CinematicAddiction.com [Jonathan S]
Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Michael Wong
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Breaking
News Review (2004) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
Blood Brothers [Matt Reifschneider]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Breaking
News | Variety Derek Elley
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
New York Times Manohla Dargis
Throw Down | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Johnnie To’s films are becoming increasingly genre-defying—avant
garde almost—and 2003’s Throw Down evokes the woozy sensation of being
trapped inside a smoke-filled Karaoke bar listening to people sing in a foreign
tongue. It’s strange, funny, intimate, and irritating, which is probably why To
has the show clock in at less than 90 minutes. Though it’s dedicated to Akira
Kurosawa and claims allegiance to Sanjuro, this film about the “world of
Judo” may as well have been inspired by Singin’ in the Rain, not just
because most of the action—or, rather, non-action—is impeccably timed to its
incessant score by Peter Kam but because To’s fluid direction is slippery when
wet. The film’s three main characters—a judo-champion-turned-nightclub-owner,
Sze-To (Louis Koo); an eager upstart, Tony (Aaron Kwok), itching for a fight;
and an aspiring singer, Mona (Cherrie Jones), attempting to evade
prostitution—converge almost wordlessly, each introduced as if they were chords
in a song working their way through a captivating crescendo of smoky
encounters, recurrent dramatic and comedic refrains (a scene with Tony and Mona
hiding inside a bathroom stall typifies To’s heady sense of humor), and
building toward some impossible climax—one, in this case, that I’m not sure ever
comes. The film is something of a love story, not just between the three leads
but between To and his actors: From Sze-To reaching out to wipe Tony’s brow to
Mona fleeing from a nightclub and picking up Sze-To’s lost shoe, every gesture
evokes buried emotions and To’s camerawork not only jives with the hesitancy,
frustration, and affection implicit in these movements but echoes them as well.
When they don’t appear to be sliding off of To’s sometimes oblique angles,
these characters are guided by the trippy female grunts frequently heard on the
soundtrack. The story itself is oblique to the point of distraction, but even
as it begins to sober up sometime past its midway point, Throw Down
remains a compelling remix of aesthetic showmanship and human movement.
As the title card announces just
before the closing credits, Throw Down is To's tribute to Akira
Kurosawa, "the greatest filmmaker." (I always enjoy when folks are
capable of circumventing the usual hand-wringing over hyperbole that keeps
critics in check, and just haul off and make a statement like that.) To's film
is a direct tribute (not sure, but I don't think it's a remake) to a
lesser-known early Kurosawa picture, Sugata Sanshiro. Although I
haven't seen the earlier film, it strikes me as an inventive place for To to
stake out his homage, since it is an underexplored work by a revered master
that is itself a judo picture -- that is to say, a martial arts film about what
may be one of the least obviously cinematic of the martial arts. I haven't had
much use for recent To, finding Breaking News shallow and
by-the-numbers, PTU far too pleased with itself and its
"evocative neon" and "striking compositions." But it seems
that working in deference to Dojo Kurosawa agrees with To. Instead of
struggling to impress, Throw Down drops the viewer into a world of
inscrutible alliances, former judo masters and the whippersnappers ready to call
them out, mentally touched manchildren and reluctant hookers with pop-star
dreams. In fact, in a manner oddly reminiscent of (don't laugh) Claire Denis' L'Intrus,
Throw Down is so confident in the mnemonic power of its genre tropes
that it leaves a lot of conventional exposition untapped. So, I guess what I'm
saying is, often this picture makes no sense, at least immediately, but it
moves you pleasurably through its paces with enough offbeat details and
unobtrusive style until you become acclimated to the specifics of the
narrative. At times Throw Down is as random as a Takashi Miike picture
(gangster heavies kicking ass and then declaring it "tea time;"
interlacing conversations staged and edited for repetition and musicality, like
a bizarre form of verbal Bressonianism; impromptu classical Japanese singing
while nighttime judo transpires in a cornfield), but in keeping with the
Kurosawa-derived tone, the nonsense is proffered gently, lending it a dignity
and an appositeness that belies the WTF factor. Points are deducted for the
fact that To stages a gorgeous final scene for Throw Down's three
central characters (the balloon in the tree), only to let the picture drone on
for another ten minutes. But in the end, the film's somber treatment of
mano-a-mano grappling points outside the film to possible auteurist concerns.
To is calling Kurosawa out, knowing full well the master will have him on the
ground in no time flat.
Throwdown (2004) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Johnnie To acknowledges his idol Akira Kurosawa with Throwdown, a winning tribute to the late director's life-affirming works. Throwdown features human themes that would resonate with Kurosawa, and takes care to give its myriad genre characters individual personalities and inner lives. At the same time, the film satirizes samurai film iconography and martial arts films, and is chock-full of sequences which dazzle or charm on a pure cinematic level. The end result is questionably groundbreaking or even completely noteworthy, and on some level the filmmakers seem a little more satisfied with their own arch sense of humor than anyone else in the room. That may be nitpicking, however. The sum totality of parts in Throwdown may not add up to much, but the parts themselves are enough to make the film well worth recommending.
Louis Koo is Szeto, a down-and-out nightclub manager who spends his days in a drunken, barely coherent state. He owes a ton of money for mismanaging the club, and attempts to make it back by gambling illegally and stealing from triads. At the same time, people are after Szeto for an entirely different reason: Judo. A drifter named Tony (Aaron Kwok) shows up asking to fight Szeto, and various oddball characters (a triad played by Eddie Cheung Siu-Fai, and even Szeto's boss) all seem to be versed in the underground jiang hu of Judo. Tony's visit is actually a precursor to a bigger event: a Judo tourney is coming soon, and Szeto's Master (Lo Hoi-Pang) wants Szeto to represent the dojo. Even more, there's Kong (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), a too-cool Judo master who's still smarting from Szeto's no-show at a tournament two years ago. Everyone wants Szeto to fight, but he doesn't seem to have it in him.
Enter even more circumstances that put Szeto's self-imposed exile into question. Szeto hires a sexy would-be singer named Mona (Cherrie Ying) to sing at the club, and her desire to chase her dreams is a minor inspiration to him. Tony's presence is another factor, as he's basically a roving fighter who desires to prove he's the best, and his reasons for doing so strike home with Szeto in a very important way. Kong is the same, having desired to fight Szeto for so long, and is denied his desire when he discovers that Szeto is nothing more than a washed-up ex-golden boy who has absolutely no upward mobility. All these factors contribute to Szeto's growing acknowledgment of his own complacency, and his gnawing desire to fight once more. But to get to that point, Szeto must conquer his own demons, which have everything to do with why he stopped fighting in the first place. Plus there's plenty of Judo, fought on streets, in bars, and finally among stalks of waving grass.
If it cannot be inferred from the above description, here it is directly: Throwdown is one weird movie. For one thing, this is a modern movie about people who challenge each other to Judo matches at the drop of a hat. Even more, the challenges are not met with the "Huh?" that you'd expect to hear. It's like some wacky Judo culture powers the lives of these varying individuals, who all manage to show up at Szeto's club for a screwball series of negotiations, followed by a sudden free-for-all brawl that involves every Judo practitioner around—and there are a lot of them! Nobody bats an eye when Judo is invoked as the big factor in their lives, and even the most random of people (like Jordan Chan, in a brief cameo as Mona's sleazy manager) seems proficient in the sport. The "everybody knows Judo" conceit is an odd one, but it works. This is mostly due to Johnnie To, who directs the film with a droll matter-of-a-fact acceptance, where nothing seems to surprise anyone. Emotions are delivered and lives changed without dialogue or overt epiphany. Basically, this is the weird world these people live in. Accept it and move on, or don't and not enjoy yourself for ninety minutes. It's up to you.
If you didn't pass the "world of Judo" test then you can forget about enjoying the rest of Throwdown because it's not a movie that works for you. Unlike nearly all commercial film made in the whole wide world, Throwdown is a movie of that asks the viewer to pretty much absorb what's happening and to draw their own conclusions. Thankfully, the film has multiple levels on which to find enjoyment. Lovers of chambara flicks might like some of the nods to the Japanese swordplay genre, and fans of quirky comedy might like the oddball characterizations and matter-of-fact absurdities going on. Louis Koo and Aaron Kwok provide enough homoerotic screen presence to satisfy their fans, Cherrie Ying is alluring, and Tony Leung Ka-Fai is coolly charismatic. Johnnie To provides plenty for his fans too, from his exacting pacing, moments of maudlin lyricism, and the dialogue-free opacity with which the film unfolds.
Unfortunately, that same opacity can prove frightfully alienating to casual viewers. Again, Throwdown does not do much work for the audience, but the sheer amount of work it doesn't do could be overwhelming for someone who really enjoyed, say, Moving Targets. Szeto's history and conflicts are dispensed in a slow, overtly quirky fashion that seems to be enjoying its own cleverness far more than the audience does. Through this process, the truth of Szeto's character is revealed without actually saying anything about it. The revelations themselves are nothing worth writing home about, nor are the actual emotions and themes presented. Basically, much of Throwdown can be summed up with mottos such as "keep trying," "don't give up," and perhaps even "Judo can be fun." You can substitute your own personal passion for Judo, but this is relatively tame stuff thematically. Basically, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And, if a red balloon caught in a tree is too high for you to reach, have Louis Koo and Aaron Kwok give you a boost, and maybe you can reach it. There could be more challenging stuff happening in My Wife is 18.
Still, saying that the ends are no big deal really disregards the means, and in Throwdown, the means are pretty damn good. Throwdown is loaded with cinematic set pieces and moments of offhand coolness which simply leap from the screen, and Johnnie To dispenses much of it with layer upon layer of keen storytelling style. Watching Aaron Kwok challenge everyone and his brother to Judo matches can be fun stuff, as is the sight of Tony Leung Ka-Fai owning all comers in a Judo brawl, or Cherrie Ying chasing after Louis Koo's shoe simply so she can help him put it back on. The wordless actions and small moments in Throwdown help bridge relationships between characters, and relate the film's somewhat maudlin themes in involving cinematic style.
Johnnie To seems to understand the latent power of cinema more than most Hong Kong directors could ever dream to, and those that appreciate his prowess might find Throwdown to be another worthwhile effort in a filmography littered with similar accomplishments. There are also a lot of moviegoers who will probably find this movie to be disappointing, and it's not hard to see where they're coming from. Despite its adherence to certain generic themes and structures, Throwdown is not an action film, nor a comedy, nor a drama. It's just a Johnnie To movie. And quite frankly, that's enough for me.
ScreenAnarchy [Niels Matthijs]
A Nutshell DVD Review [Stefan S]
AsianMovieWeb [Manfred Selzer]
Throwdown (2004) Movie Review | BeyondHollywood.com Nix
THROW DOWN | Film Journal International Daniel Eagan
Throw Down
| Film at The Digital Fix
Matt Shingleton
Throw Down Jeremy Heilman from Movie Martyr
Throw Down |
Variety David Rooney
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis, also seen here: FILM IN REVIEW - Throwdown - Review - NYTimes.com
Election | Culture | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Here is a film from
It looks great, with a very lurid gallery of Hong Kong villains fighting, drinking and gambling on English Premiership football, and the location work in the city is terrific. But there is a strange lack of life in the story itself, a baffling absence of dramatic charge in any of the principals and no urgent sense of what is at stake between them. The chief gangster is Big D (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), frantically handing out bribes to sway his criminal constituents. He is furious that the popular vote goes to Lok (Simon Yam), a calmer sort of business and family man, more amenable to those who believe the triad should be working more smoothly and discreetly with legitimate commerce and the law. We are plunged into this dispute, but with insufficient time to get to know any of these players, they never fully come to life.
This is far and away Johnnie To's
best film in years, a diamond-sharp actioner that miraculously keeps having it
both ways. It's a fairly simple B-picture about a power struggle within the
Hong Kong Triads, but To delivers the goods with an expansive, almost epic
feel. Election is a genre picture that unfolds into both more and less
than meets the eye. To's best films in recent years, such as Where a Good
Man Goes and A Hero Never Dies, seemed designed to take John
Woo's operatics to the level of Baroque absurdity, with their florid
homoerotics and swooping camerawork. But in recent years To has made some
clunkers (PTU and Breaking News especially) which have met
with inexplicable success on the festival circuit. The failure of these films
has been attributable to a shift in To's approach, toward an overweening,
almost po-faced formalism. Like a grand master trying to tone it down during a
game of street chess, To was too obviously striving to make perfect films that
seemed to think of themselves as modest pop entertainments, deliberately
dappled with neon and grit. Election actually takes these oppositions
and runs with them, makes them productive. The plot could hardly be more basic:
cautious Lok (Simon Yam) is voted in as the new Triad chairman, and flashy
moneyman Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai) doesn't accept his defeat. While the result
of the election is ostensibly binding, the real outcome is traditionally
sanctified by the passing down of a scepter, so thugs on both sides race to
secure this stubby carved MacGuffin. And that's it. To's achievement here is a
thorough commitment to this simplistic material on a formal and a thematic
level. Technically, To has seldom produced work with this level of balance and
panache. Election almost functions like a hypothetical
Johnnie-goes-to-Hollywood crossover, his visual pyrotechnics largely harnessed
in the service of a coherent aesthetic whole. (For once, there really aren't
that many "Moments Out of Time." It's all of a piece.) But To is
still To, and so when we see precision touches like the late night hijacking of
an 18-wheeler, or the long shot of the principal players in adjoining cells,
they deliver a different sort of surprise. Our eyes don't pop out of our heads.
Instead, we experience the cool, enveloping pleasure of shrewd directorial
decisions harmonizing completely. This is also the case on the level of theme,
since Election is all about two very clear sides becoming muddier and
muddier, until this most reductive of plots becomes a study in the whiplash of
shifting allegiances. (The beatdown in the field, interrupted by cellphone
calls, is essentially Election in microcosm.) So, we get the clash of
democracy vs. patrimony and tribal custom (allegory alert!), the conflict
between familial duty and self-interest, and finally, crucially, a laying-bare
of these contradictions for the purpose of demystifying the Triads,
undercutting their rhetoric of honor. They're scum in expensive suits, and
holding a little vote every two years certainly doesn't make them anything more
than that.
Election
(Hak Seh Wui) | Review | Screen Lee
Marshall in
Election sets out to do for the Hong Kong Triads what The Godfather did for the New York Italian mafia: enter into the mindset of a close-knit criminal and social brotherhood, and set its members’ respect for ritual and tradition against the bloody brutality of their methods. But in trying to combine the star-driven HK action genre with a more reflective exposition of Triad power-mongering, To overreaches himself.
One of the weaker competition titles to have screened in Cannes
so far, Election is an uncomfortable hybrid that risks alienating both
To’s original action fanbase and the new arthouse following he has attracted
since 2003, when PTU and Breaking News worked the festival
circuit. Stars Simon Yam and Tony Leung Ka Fai, and pop idol Loius Koo always
have some leverage on the domestic box office, but To’s half-hearted arthouse
lurch is unlikely to satisfy Hong Kong audiences, who prefer their action
straight. Set partly in mainland
Every two years, the senior members of the Wo Shing society –
As always in To’s work, there are moments of black humour – notably when a brawl between two rival triad lieutentants for possession of the baton is interrupted by mobile phone calls from their respective bosses... to tell them that they are now on the same side. Tony Leung Ka Fai plays to the gallery in his stylised performance as rebel boss Big D, whose defiance of Wo Shing tradition is signalled by his spiky hairdo and the loud, stripey boating jackets he likes to wear. Simon Yam is more impressive as the impassive, perfectly groomed Lok, a family man who seems, at first to be too mild-mannered to be a convincing underworld godfather – but whose single-minded pursuit of power will gradually be revealed.
The scene of the Triad chairman’s investiture is shot to reflect the quasi-religious nature of the society, and there are moments when the message of the film becomes decidedly ambiguous. It’s as if the director is inviting us to admire the loyalty and unity of this criminal family, its ritual trappings and formulae, its members’ respect for tradition and for the old. A shocking final scene set in a bucolic lakeside idyll reveals that this was actually a deliberate decoy on To’s part: by feigning his own approval and courting ours, he makes the climactic revelation of the ugly brutality that underpins such picturesque brotherhoods all the more effective. But this bludgeoing finale – To’s equivalent of Coppola’s horse’s head – is not enough to lift Election. Shot uninspiringly, with a number of underlit night scenes, the film never resolves the central genre dilemma of whether it wants to be an action romp, a choral underworld saga, or the tragedy of a man who for all his family values and calm, businesslike veneer is as steeped in blood as Macbeth.
Mean
Streets: Johnnie To interview - Film Comment Grady Hendrix interview from Film Comment,
May 6, 2005
Johnnie To is currently shooting The
Sparrow, a look at a gang of pickpockets working the
How did this movie originate?
It's a film I wanted to shoot for a long time.
But the movie is set in modern day
Yes. And the triad society has always changed, based on the political situation
of the era. There were the riots of the Fifties and Sixties, then there were
the negotiations between the British and Chinese government in the Eighties,
and then the handover in 1997. All these things have had an impact on triad
society. The British government tried to crack down on the triads, and they
destroyed the Walled City of Kowloon. Today, the societies are dealing with the
Mainland Government. There has always been a close relationship between
politics and triads.
There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of triad films shot in
In the past,
Election (黑社會) (2005) -
Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
TIFF Report: Election Review Todd Brown from Screen Anarchy
The Violent Ballad of the Triads - The New York Sun Grady Hendrix, also seen here: Election (Gangsters Inc's: Mobbed Up Forum)
Johnnie To In Charge | The Brooklyn Rail David Wilentz, September 4, 2007
'Election'
(2005-2006): Review | Express Elevator to Hell The Celtic Predator
Benefit
of the Doubt: Gritty February movie discussion: Johnnie To's ... Jesse M. from Benefit of the Doubt
TO, JOHNNIE | Film Journal
International Daniel Eagan
Culture
Wars [Helen Birtwistle]
The History of Cinema. Johnnie To: biography, filmography, reviews ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
Public Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
Election Noel Megahey from The Digital Fix
Election John White from 10k Bullets
Varied Celluloid Review Josh Samford
DVDTalk [Joshua Zyber] Special Edition
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Notes of a Film Fanatic [Mat Viola]
Daily
Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Election
| Variety Derek Elley
Los Angeles Times [Robert Abele]
Election - Movies - Review - The New York Times A.O. Scott
aka: Election 2
The New York Film Festival passed up
“Triad Election” distinguishes itself from the many over-the-top gangster films that emerged in John Woo’s wake in two ways—the sincerity of its revulsion with violence and its combination of brutality and beauty. No filmmaker except Michael Mann has such an eye for nocturnal cityscapes. The ending sets up a third part in the saga—I can’t wait for To, who’s one of the world’s most prolific directors, to get around to making it.
Election 2 (Hak Sewui: Yi Wo Wai Gwai) | Review | Screen Shelly Kraicer
The second part of Johnnie To's contemporary gangster saga, Election
2 will be a treat for fans of last year's original, eager for more from
its black-as-pitch
The first Election was last year's surprise hit at home: for a local film with no A-list box officedraws and a Category III rating (no one under 18 allowed) for explicit triad-related content, it managed an astonishing HK$15m-plus, placing it among the top five homegrown films.
Election 2, which opened the 30th annual Hong Kong
International Film Festival earlier this week, rolls out in
International sales may be tougher, given the film's specific
local ethos and reliance on the original. Festival exposure should naturally
follow in the wake of Johnnie To's now-consolidated international reputation,
which has moved well beyond niche Asian- and action-themed events after
successive appearances at Cannes - where Election competed last year -
as well as Berlin and Venice. Election 2 plays in the
The story picks up some time after smooth, business-like Lok (Simon Yam) has won election as the Wo Shing society's godfather for a two-year term. A new election looms - this triad society, unlike the city in which it is based, democratically votes in a new chairman/godfather every 2 years - and Lok is bent on an unprecedented second term. But his affable demeanour conceals a core of psychopathic cruelty and he determines to eliminate the other candidates that stand in his way.
Prime among them is Jimmy (Louis Koo), a model-handsome 21st century gangster with an MBA, who admits that he entered the triads merely as a fast track to financial success. Jimmy's election would consolidate his Mainland land deals. The film's plot follows in meticulous and increasingly byzantine detail the machinations, duplicitous alliances and acts of brutality that mark this underworld election campaign.
To has a fair claim to the title of modern master of the gangster film. Current comparisons to Coppola's Godfather trilogy are inapt. Those films are grand opera; To makes chamber music. His radically low-key lighting, precisely designed widescreen mis-en-scène, and meticulous direction of fine ensemble casts are hallmarks of his post-1997 style.
Noone can extract more tension from still, sculptural friezes of actors innon-motion. A scene in Election 2 typically opens with actors in a frozen tableau pulsing with potential energy, with a sense of cataclysmic violence ready to erupt just beneath the surface.
Tonally, the film is typical To, with a range extending from moments of goofy visual humour (To regular Lam Suet clowning around) to an absolutely chilling, relentlessly extended torture sequence whose sickening specificity (it evokes the horror of the tortured more than their actual physical abuse) echoes, perhaps unconsciously, Abu Ghraib.
What is unexpected is the film's narrative unbalance. The first hour is a hard slog through complex exposition without an accompanying crackle of tension. Acts of violence that lurk just behind the laconic, sometimes obscure, negotiations between gangleaders - and which constitute the kinetic energy that give this kind of To film its palpable excitement - are held back, buried inthe deep shadows that define the film's cinematographic palette. When To unleashes his hounds (literally) it's almost too late.
Audiences accustomed to reading post-handover
While a form of democracy (the Wo Shing family's senior gangsters vote in the new chairman) may have been good enough for the old (colonial) Hong Kong, the new (Mainland-dominated) HK Special Administrative Region needs something more from its "patriotic" triads.Thus the gangsters come under pressure from their would-be Mainland business partners (cops and corrupt officials alike) to set aside these open contests for something more stable and controllable.
The ending is open enough to suggest that it will probably be seen best, in retrospect, as an intermezzo between the formally brilliant original and the saga's presumably upcoming grand finale.
To's usual stable of (almost exclusively male) actors carry off their roles with appropriate restraint and stylishness. As with most of To's more personal works, the Election films show more interest in social structures than inindividual psychology. The cast correspondingly gives clear but somewhat uni-dimensional performances, though Simon Yam and Nick Cheung are standouts at suggesting the chilling tensions lying deep within their characters.
Election 2 (黑社會2 以和為貴)
(2006) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross
Chen)
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
TIFF Report: Election 2 Review Todd Brown from Screen Anarchy
The Violent Ballad of the Triads - The New York Sun Grady Hendrix, also seen here: Election (Gangsters Inc's: Mobbed Up Forum)
Johnnie To In Charge | The Brooklyn Rail David Wilentz, September 4, 2007
Triad
Election: Mob rule - Creative Loafing Curt Holman, July 11, 2007
AsianMovieWeb
[Manfred Selzer]
Public
Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
Election 2 [Triad
Election] Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
A
Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, April 19, 2007
TO, JOHNNIE | Film Journal
International Daniel Eagan
Triad Election |
Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed
Gonzalez
Triad Election - AV
Club Film Noel Murray
Election 2 Noel Megahey, Special Edition – 2 discs
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Election 2 Graeme Clarke from The Spinning Image
The Defeatist Completist [Mike Maguire]
MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]
Election 2 | Variety Russell Edwards
Time Out Hong Kong - 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films [Edmund Lee] #72 PTU, #52 The Mission, #32 Mad Detective, #9 Election 2, March 29, 2017
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marrit Ingman]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]
Los Angeles Times [Robert Abele]
New York Times Manohla Dargis, also seen here: Read the Full N.Y. Times Review
Part of the reason may be timing. To started working during
Additionally,
To has little interest in making a generic "Chinese" cinema. Most of
his films deal with what it's like to live in
As other
Set in 1998, "Exiled" brings together the cast from To's 1999
"The Mission," although it's not a sequel and the actors are playing
different characters. Blaze (Anthony Wong), Tai (Frances Ng), Cat (Roy Cheung),
and Fat (Lam Suet) are four gangsters who joined the Chinese mob together with
Wo (Nick Cheung.)
After a failed assassination attempt on Boss Fay (Simon Yam), Wo now lives in
the Portuguese colony of Macau, which is about to be handed over to China.
Still angry, Fat sends Blaze and Fat to kill Wo, while Tai and Cat defend him.
Despite the tension among the four men, their initial confrontation doesn't
lead to anyone's death, and their friendship is reignited.
"Election" and "Triad Election" are exceedingly uninviting
depictions of the criminal underworld. As critic Michael Sicinski noted,
they're
On the surface, "Exiled" is much more conventional. Its characters
look as if they just returned from a GQ magazine photo shoot. Subtly, that
undercuts their macho posturing. After the film's first shoot-out, the
gangsters stick around to repair furniture- a necessary task after bullets
fly, but not one often depicted in the movies.
When they pose for a group photo, dressed to the nines and waving around
cigars, one man stumbles over and ruins the second shot. The photo that does
come out is eventually used against them.
The violence in "Exiled" is exciting to watch, far more stylized and
unrealistic than the brutality of "Election" and "Triad
Election," most of which only a sociopath could find fun. To pushes his
action scenes, captured with a constantly moving camera, toward an abstract
dance of light, color, and shadow.
In one of the most striking product placements ever, a Red Bull can flies
through the air during a shoot-out. His sets are burnished to a golden glow,
often filled with smoke and dust to vary the texture. Even the exteriors are
filled with sand and yellowing, burnt-out grass. The film is punctuated with
several massive shoot-outs, each more excessive than the last, but all are
preceded by an extremely effective spell of dread and tension.
Amidst all this, "Exiled" doesn't neglect the human cost of
bloodshed. Wo's wife Jin (Josie Ho) is seen on-screen relatively briefly. At
first, her role seems horribly stereotypical- she cowers in a back room during
a shoot-out, breast-feeding her baby. This film's universe is unabashedly a
man's world.
That said, Jin eventually becomes an avenging angel powered by a
raw anger that "Exiled" takes quite seriously. The image of her
desperately firing a gun without bullets, clicking on empty chamber after empty
chamber, is unforgettable. Without giving her much screen time or even many
lines of dialogue, "Exiled" nevertheless develops her character
further than most of its men, who let their trench coats and vests do their
emoting for them.
Less substantial than To's best work, "Exiled" is still one of the
most stylish and entertaining films he's made. However, it feels a bit like a
"greatest hits" package, down to the echoes of "The
Mission." It makes a great case for his talents, without stretching them
very far.
Despite faint but unmistakable political commentary about the
Exiled/Fongchuk • Senses of Cinema David Sanjek, May 12, 2007
Exiled (2006) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
The
Good, the Bad, and the Set-Pieces | Village Voice J. Hoberman, August 21, 2007
"Review of Exiled for the Chicago Reader, by Fred Camper" Fred Camper, September 7, 2007
“Exiled” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, August 31, 2007
Johnnie To In Charge | The Brooklyn Rail David Wilentz, September 4, 2007
AsianMovieWeb [Manfred Selzer]
Exiled Andrew Skeates from Far East Films
New
York Sun [Darrell Hartman]
Oggs' Movie Thoughts Oggs Cruz
Sergio Leone,
Hong Kong Cinema and Johnnie To?s Exiled :: Stop ... Mark Asch from Stop Smiling, September 4, 2007
The
Last Thing I See [Brent McKnight]
Exiled | Film Review |
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
TO, JOHNNIE | Film Journal
International Daniel Eagan
The
Illuminated Lantern [Peter Nepstad]
A
Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Public
Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
Exiled - AV Club Film Noel Murray
Flipside
Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella
eFilmCritic
Reviews Jay Seaver
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
A HK Neo Reviews [Andrew Chan]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los Angeles Times [Kevin Crust]
Exiled Movie Review &
Film Summary (2007) | Roger Ebert
New York Times Manohla Dargis
Exiled - Review -
Movies - The New York Times
Matt Zoller Seitz, August 31, 2007
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review by Leonard Norwitz
TRIANGLE
(Tie saam gok) C+ 78
A trilogy of Hong Kong
directors (Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnny To) contribute to a single
storyline that unfortunately feels overly convoluted from the outset, like it’s
offering more than it can handle, and remains indifferent and nearly
incomprehensible throughout. There is no
break between the sequences, with separate writers for each director and one
editor and cinematographer throughout, but the focus of the story changes with
each passing of the baton. Tsui Hark
opens the film in an adrenaline rush where three near cartoonish characters commiserate
over their money woes and are easily lured into a get rich quick scheme to
cover their debts, where the police and the underground mafia seem to
infiltrate their every move. With this
set up, it’s always hard to distinguish who the players are or tell the good
from the bad, as it’s all a blur. While
Tsui establishes a dark, menacing mood that foreshadows a completely immoral
universe, the characters are never fleshed out and feel like a bunch of
bumbling idiots who have gotten themselves in over their heads in some
lamebrained heist that goes awry.
Ringo Lam shifts the
attention to a deeply troubled couple, where the wife Ling (Kelly Lin) suspects
her introverted and supposedly impotent husband Lee Bo Sam (Simon Yam) of foul play,
of trying to poison her after possibly killing his first wife, but she’s
excessively paranoid to the point of being delusional, claiming she’s pregnant
as she slinks under the protection of boyfriend police officer Wen (Lam Ka
Tung), forming another triangle. In
keeping with the film’s double-crossing motif, characters switch sides with the
ferocity of whiplash, as the cop nails the husband red-handed with the loot,
but as the husband is a former race car driver, he soon turns the tables and
through daredevil driving techniques quickly has the cop in handcuffs, luring
his wife to the scene, an abandoned warehouse where she immediately swears her
allegiance to her husband. In perhaps
the most peculiar moment in the movie, out in the middle of nowhere he
mysteriously plays an LP record, which turns into an exotic dance between the
husband and wife, both armed to the teeth, in what appears to be a dance of
death, as her face switches to that of his previous wife who actually died in a
horrific car crash. The question
remains: which one is going to die? But rather than turn on one another, as is
assumed, they are quickly hoodwinked by another corrupt cop, who himself is
soon the object of an underworld manhunt.
By the time Johnny To
arrives on the scene, the film starts to resemble a farce, as the entire cast
is brought together in pursuit of the loot, which is wrapped in newspaper like
THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), then carried around in a non-descript, white plastic
bag. To choreographs several all-important
shoot out scenes, one at a local bar where the lights continually go on and
off, where several white plastic bags are inexplicably exchanged in the chaos,
where our thieves try to make a run for it but are trapped by a crazed
amphetamine pill-popping man (Suet Lam) who flattens all four of their getaway
car tires, luring everyone into a vacant field where all the principles meet
followed mysteriously afterwards by a traffic cop on a bicycle (Yong You) who
somehow feels its his obligation to bring order into this chaotic universe, as
all hell breaks loose in a blaze of gunfire.
To turns this anarchy into a bloodless ballet of shots in the dark and
bodies falling in the high grass one by one, all with a great deal of ironic
humor, with the original thieves outmaneuvered and left to observe empty-handed
on the sidelines like a disillusioned Greek chorus, completely indifferent to
who wins or loses, as it’s all the same to them, as they’re inevitably
losers. While the sleek look of the film
is always beautifully shot by Siu-keung Cheng, from the opening scenes in the
rain filled with shadows and solitary images of emptiness and vacuousness, to a
murky atmosphere of unresolved romantic tension mixed against the impending
threat of underworld connections, to a few unusual Johnny To set pieces. But overall, it lacks depth and never rises
above a standard entertainment piece of
Time
Out London (Trevor Johnston) review
[2/6]
Okay,
In the event, aficionados will peg that Hark’s staccato rhythms make a complex
set-up even more opaque, Lam’s surprisingly restrained mid-section restores an
even keel (though there’s a bit of hairy stunt-driving too) and To’s climactic
showdown blends wry humour and poised compositions, while lagging short of his
best work. Little of it however, is genuinely striking enough to suggest a
welcome reception beyond the already converted.
NewCity
Chicago Ray Pride
A gangster film “exquisite corpse” from three leading veteran
directors of Hong Kong action movies, “Triangle” (Tie San Jiao, 2007) is
directed in a “tag team” style by Tsui Hark (”Once Upon A Time in China”),
Ringo Lam (”City on Fire”) and Johnnie To (”Election,” “Triad Election”), who
together concocted the story of three down-on-their-luck drinking buddies who
go on a get-rich quest for a lost treasure. To sets the theme of the movie
well: “What price do you pay for your desire and obsession?” Like the best of
the trio’s work, “Triangle” is a visual delight from its first fog-shrouded
images of gleaming
Ringo Lam, Johnnie To and Tsui Hark decided to play
a game of exquisite corpse. It's one of those great auteurist experiments. From
a production standpoint, TRIANGLE is a "Johnnie To movie": made
through his company, Milkyway Image, starring his regular actors (Simon Yam,
Louis Koo, and Kelly Lin), shot by his cinematographer, Siu-keung Cheng, and
cut together by his regular editor, David M. Richardson (those who believe the
quality of a film's editing depends on the editor should look no further than
Richardson's resume; the man who works on the brilliant editing of To's films
is the same one who edits Uwe Boll's movies). The plan: Hark will begin a
story—a heist gone wrong—which Lam and then To will continue. Hark's episode is
full of clever conceits and twists; Lam jettisons the heist in favor of its
results: the loot and fear, both equally dangerous. So if Hark imprisons the characters
and Lam shows us how they imprison themselves, it's up to To, then, to set them
free. For To, the essence of a person, maybe their soul, is visible in what
they choose to do when compelled to do nothing, in the choice they make when
they can just run away or betray. It's no surprise that, like James Gray's WE
OWN THE NIGHT, it all ends in reeds and fog. It's the sort of emotional
wilderness that brings To closer to André Téchiné than either of his two
co-directors here. (2007, 93 min, 35mm)
Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) capsule review [3.5/5] Melbourne International Film festival
The point of interest
behind this Hong Kong heist film is that it was made in three different parts,
by three different directors and production teams, with each part continuing
from where the previous part had left of. Tsui Hark sets the story off with his
trademark frenetic and often bewildering style where the audience has to keep
up with him in order to follow what is going on. However Hark nicely sets the
scene of desperate men planning to steal a mysterious artefact, a cop who is
sleeping with the wife of one of the men and a trio of impatient Triads who are
waiting in the wings. Ringo Lam then continues the story in the most
sophisticated section of the film where he sets up a complex web of torn
loyalties, betrayals, double crosses and secret agendas. Finally Johnny To
finishes things off by stylishly bringing a degree of farce and fun absurdity
into the proceedings. The divides between the three sections are not marked but
anybody familiar with the three directors should be able to spot the divisions.
Triangle would have perhaps been more successful if either all three
parts remained consistent with each other or if they all radically differed.
Instead, Hark and Lam’s segments are very close to each other in style and tone
while To takes the film off onto a completely different tangent. What To does
would have been highly entertaining in its own right but in this case it is
slightly frustrating that To’s chose to deviate so much away from the
groundwork laid out by Hark and Lam.
User comments from imdb Author: Simon Booth from UK
A novel idea, originating in Tsui
Hark I believe, to make a film based on the old game of incremental
story-telling, passing the baton between 3 of Hong Kong's (once) top directors
(they should have swapped Johnnie To for John Woo and called it "The
Victims of Jean-Claude Van-Damme Rehabilitation Project"). The result is,
sadly, almost as incoherent as a nay-sayer might expect it to be.
The first third of the film (Tsui) is kind of scatter-shot, throwing ideas out
there for the other directors to pick up on, centred around a heist movie setup
with 3 main protagonists (Simon Yam, Louis Koo and Sun Hong-Lei) - setting up a
triangle that clearly hints where he really wants the movie to go. This section
does suffer from that amphetamine-high lack of focus that sometimes afflicts
Tsui Hark when he has too many ideas for a movie, and can't decide which ones
are really important.
Ringo Lam takes over just before 30 minutes in, and the mood shifts - he
evidently wants to create a psychological horror instead of a crime movie, and
shifts the focus more to the characters played by Kelly Lin and Gordon Lam.
This part is eerie and oblique, a little surreal at times but much more
focused.
Then Johnnie To comes in for the final act, and decides that the film should
really be... a farce! Perhaps it's his way of commenting on the baby he has
been left holding. Every character that's been introduced so far is brought
back into play, along with a couple of new ones (notably Lam Suet), and the
plot plays itself out in an elaborate comedy of errors hinged upon a series of
entirely implausible coincidences. The finale is a gun battle vaguely
reminiscent of those in THE MISSION or EXODUS, but with a more comical coating.
It's a bit Shakespearean, but falls short of The Bard's wit.
The shifting of tones, and the diverting focus of the narrative, is exactly the
sort of problem you'd expect a movie with three directors and three
script-writing teams to have. Perhaps that was the point, and each director
deliberately took the movie into their own favourite territory when they took
the reins. I guess that's how it usually happens when people play the game
amongst themselves (I forget the name of it, never really saw the appeal), but
they perhaps failed to factor in that the game is more fun for the people
playing it than for somebody who simply gets handed the end result. The
production process may be interesting to talk or think about, but probably
makes for a less enjoyable film than a more conventional collaboration would
have.
I did enjoy Ringo Lam's section though - hopefully it's a sign he's going to be
doing more work in
User comments from imdb Author: K2nsl3r from Finland
Fear not: the juicy premise of putting three masters of HK
violent cinema in one movie delivers one of the most entertaining action movies
of 2007.
The film is a palpable thrill-ride, with an air of unmistakable cool and sheer
brassiness of style. With scarcely time to slow-down, the silly and initially
confusing but heavily entertaining and ultimately straightforward plot runs
through a hundred twists and turns on its way to the seat-gripping finale that
is the last third of the film.
The three segments directed by Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnny To (apparently
in that order, although it was not indicated in the film) are distinct in style
and mannerism, but near-seamlessly integrated into a single experience. Not
only did they use three directors, they also used multiple script-writers. Do
not expect any section-markers here, though: it is not three stories, but one
story told in three consecutively more elaborate segments which represent the
vision and prowess of one director each - without, however, appearing
needlessly patched-together or unfocused. So, to compare this to that other
Asian 3-in-1 package, the excellent Three Extremes (with Takashi Miike, Fruit
Chan and Park Chan-Wook), is to miss the point. Here we are dealing with a
unitary experience, one not divisible by three.
Fans of each director will find much to comment on the stylistic differences
between each section. Best known perhaps for his kung-fu productions (at least
in the West), the multi-talented Tsui Hark delivers a cool, crafty ambiance in
his piece. Ringo Lam, a long-line police action-drama director, likewise
carries the torch with a surprisingly mellow and tactful show-of-hands. It is
really the last segment of the film, under the steady hand of the
miracle-worker Johnny To - the brilliant director of gems such as Election I
& II and Exiled - that really puts this work in the category of must-see
cinema. It would be impossible to describe just what makes the last act so good
without giving something away, but suffice to say the success lies in its
mixture of suspense, action and black humour in a dazzling tour-de-force. And yet,
To's section makes sense only in the context of the whole; it would not be
possible to appreciate the finale without going through the first and second
acts. The third act is the charm, but only because the first two acts lead to
it and suggest it with force and clarity. By its combination of three geniuses,
the impeccable thrill of the film gets multiplied by three, making the end
result something greater than the sum of its parts.
The actors are adequate and the chemistry between them works well. This is not
an especially 'deep' thinking-man's movie by any stretch -
character-development especially is among the real weaknesses of this movie -
but for what it's worth, the characters deliver their lines and express their
emotional range quite convincingly (with a few notable exceptions). The
fraternal chemistry between the main characters saves much of the hapless
script. But really, this film is about action, violence, crime, morality and
love - the stuff of entertainment. Maybe not serious or tight enough for some,
the over-the-top story proves highly entertaining as a backdrop for the stylish
visual work emanating from the three great directors.
I'm willing to forgive this movie its obvious shortcomings: its unexplained
plot-ends and side-tracks, its focus on action and shine over drama and
substance, its use of three writers in the seemingly impossible task of writing
a single storyline. Bottomline: It works! Sometimes heckling about details
seems petty when what is iffy in ideation is saved in execution. Minor script
is turned into a major movie.
Absolute entertainment, with a touch - or two, or three - of genius.
Cinematical James Rocchi
Triangle is hard to explain -- you could call it the
Hark, Lam and To have all made great
Triangle isn't about pure action, though; Sam, Fai and Mok aren't
kineticized supermen, just regular guys. As in most good heist films, Triangle
focuses more on the crew and less on the score; When the great whatsit goes
missing, Fai quizzes Mok about how well they really know Sam. Mok's
matter-of-fact: He doesn't really know Sam. "I don't know you all that
well, either; sometimes, I don't even know myself." There's a little bit
of clumsy storytelling about the resolution of the love triangle between Sam,
Ling and Wen -- apparently, getting bounced off the grill of a four-door sedan
at high speed is a cure for marital discord -- but it's nothing like the
muddled misogyny of many Hong Kong action films, where women are either set
dressing or entirely irrelevant. The leads are for the most part terrific --
Koo's Fai is a bit too broad, but Lam and Lei get to put a few shades onto
their characters. And there's more than a few laughs in Triangle, too -
from a runaway score to an ecstasy-addled tire salesman with a unique business
model. Triangle wouldn't be a good film to show an initiate to
The Belated
Auteurism of Johnnie To • Senses of Cinema
Andrew Grossman from Senses
of Cinema, February 13, 2001
Tsui Hark • Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Grady
Hendrix from Senses of Cinema, July
25, 2003
Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild - Directors - Ringo LAM Hong Kong Film
Triangle (鐵三角) (2007) -
Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Now Playing: "Triangle" (Tsui / Lam / To, China) on Notebook | MUBI Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at Mubi, August 14, 2009
AsianMovieWeb
[Manfred Selzer]
Oggs' Movie Thoughts Oggs Cruz, November 20, 2007
Triangle; Shanghai Express; Morocco Noel Vera from Critic After Dark, January 15, 2011
Triangle - Far
East Films Andrew Skeates
Electric Sheep Magazine Joey Leung
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
The Storyboard 2-disc Hong Kong Edition DVD, by Allan Koay
hoopla.nu Stuart Wilson
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
TRIANGLE Facets Multi Media
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
DVDBeaver dvd review Pat Pilon
Triangle (2007 film) - Wikipedia
MAD DETECTIVE (San Taam)
Hong Kong (89 mi)
2007 ‘Scope co-director: Wai Ka-Fai
Mad Detective -
AV Club Film Noel Murray
Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai's co-directed policier Mad Detective has a lot on its mind, though a certain baseline ludicrousness keeps it from being as effortlessly entertaining as To's best. Lau Ching-Wan plays a master sleuth whose working methods require him to reenact crimes from the perspectives of the perpetrator and the victim. After a decade or so of cracking impossible cases, Lau has become an unreliable nutcase, booted from the force because he won't stop talking about how he can see the multiple personalities inside everyone. Then young cop Andy On enlists Lau to help track down a missing cop, and the two of them enter a weird cat-and-mouse game complicated by the fact that the veteran, the novice, and their mutual prey all spend a lot of time talking to their "inner ghosts."
To and Wai illustrate those ghosts by having separate actors play them, which means at times, the screen is filled with 10 or more people, all representing two or three actual characters. Once viewers figure out what's going on—which takes a scene or two—the gimmick isn't that hard to follow, but it always looks strange to have, say, a 12-year-old boy, a middle-aged woman, and an old fat guy all yelling back and forth and pointing weapons at each other across a tight, shadowy room. (The psychology also seems a little suspect.)
Fleeting confusion and bizarre literalization aside, though, Mad Detective is an effective mystery story, with an oddball hero—like TV's Monk, but far crazier—and some moments of visceral violence that raise the stakes. Mad Detective is short and lean, and has a point to make about the different reasons why personalities fragment. For Lau, it's a function of trying to solve crimes and effect justice. For On and everybody else, it's all about the petty ways they try to cover their asses and save their jobs: by lying, making excuses, and generally becoming something other than the best version of themselves.
MAD DETECTIVE | Film
Journal International Daniel Eagan
A reunion of sorts for Johnnie To, Wai Ka Fai and Lau Ching Wan, Mad
Detective opens with a bang. Bun (played by Lau), a mentally unbalanced
Hong Kong cop, takes a knife to a pig hanging from the ceiling of police
headquarters. An associate then stuffs him inside a suitcase and throws him
down several flights of stairs. Bun emerges bloody, but with the solution to a
murder mystery. Later, at an office party, he hacks off his ear and presents it
as a gift to an officer who is retiring.
Bun's trances, his ability to inhabit the minds of suspects to reenact crimes,
and his tendency to speak to the inner devils of passersby, have proved too
much for the police department and his wife, May (Kelly Lin), to deal with. He
has been hiding in his apartment for five years when his former partner, Ho
(Andy On), asks for help with the case of a cop who disappeared during a
stakeout. Somebody has been using his gun in a series of increasingly violent
crimes.
Clues point to the missing cop's corrupt partner, Chi-wai (Lam Ka Tung), but he
has a seemingly airtight alibi. However, Bun can see that Chi-wai's destiny is
controlled by seven separate devils, including a cowardly glutton (Lam Suet)
and an icy killer (Jay Lau). The problem for Ho is that Bun sees devils
everywhere and is too hot-headed to follow standard police procedures. Will
tailing Chi-wai solve the case, or is it another insane delusion?
Mad Detective lacks the formal rigor of previous To films like Triad
Election and Exiled, offering instead a freewheeling narrative that
twists around its central themes with manic intensity. Key incidents are played
out up to a half-dozen times, each version adding another layer of complexity
to the characters and the story. Several films have toyed with the concepts of
reality and fantasy, of sanity and madness; the directors here quote from A
Beautiful Mind, for example. But few have tried to portray the world as
shifting planes of existence in which identities can assume any shape. By the
time Mad Detective reaches a hall-of-mirrors climax straight out of The
Lady from Shanghai, the screen is overflowing with demons and alter egos.
The directors addressed similar themes in the romantic comedy My Left Eye
Sees Ghosts, which also starred Lau; Mad Detective is not nearly as
optimistic. Fans of To's recent solo work may be disappointed as well by the
lack of prolonged action scenes. But the film does offer an expert character
sketch of a gifted man slipping into insanity, as well as a puzzling,
unpredictable story line that leads to a brilliant pay-off.
Typically for these directors the acting is first-rate, with Lam Ka Tung
especially impressive as a cop who is a victim of his seedy appetites. And from
the vibrato-laden score to the low-key cinematography and crisp editing, Mad
Detective is as technically polished as any film you are likely to see this
year.
FANTASIA:
MAD DETECTIVE Review - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown
And the hot streak continues for Johnnie To. While the latest from the prolific action auteur lacks the blistering intensity of the Election films and the extreme high style of Exiled it reunites him with a pair of favored collaborators - screenwriter and co-director Wai Ka Fai and star Lau Ching Wan - and the result is an entertaining, surprising piece of work anchored by a powerhouse performance from Lau.
Bun (Lau) was a legendary cop in his day, his techniques were unusual but incredibly effective. He claimed to be able to "see" the inner personalities of people and would use that ability to crack cases nobody else could get a grip on. Because he was so successful his odd behavior was accepted as a necessary eccentricity but on the day Bun presented a retiring chief with one of his own ears, freshly carved from the side of his head, as a going away present, people realized something was very, very wrong. His eccentricities recognized as a form of mental illness Bun was put out to pasture, fired from the force and left to live a solitary life accompanied only by the voices within his own head.
Jump forward five or so years. Ho (Andy On) has been assigned an uncrackable case, the case of an officer missing for eighteen months after simply disappearing while chasing a suspect through a forested area, his gun since used in a number of crimes. The missing officer's partner is the obvious suspect but nobody has been able to turn up any sort of clue. When Ho is issued one of Bun's old guns with his equipment he takes it as a sign that he should look up the eccentric genius detective who he served with for the two brief days following his graduation from the academy and prior to Bun's forced departure. Bun's ability to "see" may be their only hope to crack the case but Ho quickly learns that, if anything, Bun's illness has progressed in the intervening years, leaving him highly erratic, irrational and unpredictable.
Lau Ching Wan has been mysteriously absent from serious dramatic roles for some years now and his absence has been entirely baffling. When on his game Lau is an absolute giant and he is very much on his game here. His portrayal of Bun neatly balances the comic with the tragic, his certain belief in what he sees rocked by the occasional moment of lucidity where he recognizes his own illness. In contrast to Ho's carefully reasoned approach, Bun is a seething mass of competing impulses, his behavior governed entirely by the whims of the moment. "Don't use logic to investigate", he argues, "use your feelings!" He does exactly that, frantically reenacting crimes, the supposed death of the missing man and the behavior of his quarry in an effort to get inside the moment and better understand it. To and Wai keep the perspective of the film fluid, constantly shifting from Bun's warped perspective to that of those around him and in doing so capture both Bun's own confusion at the shifting realities around him and everyone else's at Bun's erratic behavior. The one great trick of the film - using multiple actors to portray different aspects of a single person's personality when viewed from Bun's perspective - is not only immensely clever but also immensely effective and the duo of To and Wai pull it off flawlessly.
Compared to the fire that drove the Election films and the pyrotechnics of Exiled the far more character oriented Mad Detective can feel much smaller than it really is. The emphasis here is not on style, camera tricks or action - though there is a healthy dose of that - but on the portrayal of a man lost in his own mind and taken on those terms Mad Detective is a resounding success.
Mad Detective (神探) (2007) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Mad Detective:
Doubling Down - davidbordwell.net : essays November 2010
easternKicks.com [Andrew Heskins] July 14, 2008
AsianMovieWeb [Manfred Selzer]
Mad Detective - Far East Films Andrew Skeates
Mad Detective (2007).
Directors - Johnnie To & Wai Ka Fai. Stars: Lau ... Richard Scheib from Moria
Foreign Objects: Mad Detective (Hong Kong) - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter
The
Storyboard Allan Koay
Mad Detective |
Film Review | Slant Magazine
Nick Schager
Mad Detective | The Asian Cinema Blog Muhamed Sultan
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Mad Detective from Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai | Village Voice Jim Ridley
MyReviewer.com Blu-ray Review [David Beckett]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Andrew Robertson]
Mad Detective Graeme Clark from The Spinning Image
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
Blood Brothers [Matt Reifschneider]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Time Out Hong Kong - 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films [Edmund Lee] #72 PTU, #52 The Mission, #32 Mad Detective, #9 Election 2, March 29, 2017
Review:
Mad Detective | Film | The Guardian
Xan Brooks
New York Times Manohla Dargis
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review [Gary Tooze]
SPARROW
(Man jeuk) B 87
Hong Kong (87 mi) 2008
‘Scope
Hardly a festival caliber film, as this has such commercialized roots,
but there will be those admirers who call this a masterpiece. Johnny To has created an endearingly
appealing work by tapping into copycat Wong Kar-wai lite, as the musical
numbers and production designs are unmatched by anyone else, except perhaps the
outrageous imagination of Tsai Ming-liang.
The oversensuous romantic soundtrack is so luxurious from the opening
notes that I suspected someone would break into song at any moment, but rest
assured, Johnny To has not lost his marbles.
However, as Tsai has demonstated more than once, it might make for a
more stunningly original work. This film
unfortunately remains within the comic book genre, which means the characters
all play to a certain stereotyped adolescent appeal, which many might find
appealing, graphic novels are everywhere these days, but it limits the depth
and potential complexities of the film.
Instead it goes for the cool element and stays there, using jazzy
staging techniques that are so digitalized that they’re near subliminal,
perhaps designed for the slow motion repeat button on the remote. The cast is terrific, especially Simon Yam as
Kei, the leader of his band of pickpocket brothers who meet at the same noodle
dive every morning and who are so goofily happy that the four of them on a
bicycle together resemble the giddiness of early Godard.
Enter Kelly Lin as the femme fatale, Chung Chun-Lei, a stone fox who’s
as entrepreneurial savvy as they are, who’s full of suprises, not the least of
which is her mysterious secrecy. There’s
an intriguing moment when Kei is out with a camera and randomly films her
before she makes one of her many escapes into the busy streets of Hong Kong,
glamorously highlighted in nearly every scene, where as he’s developing the
photos one recalls BLOW-UP, but rather than remain elusive, she boldly
tantalizes him with a fierce sexuality that’s hard to resist before turning the
tables on him once again and flyng away as quickly as she appeared. Surprises are in store. It’s impossible to
overestimate the significance of the end to end soundtrack music by Fred Avril
and Xavier Jamaux, which feels so 50’s and could be appreciated on its own even
without a movie. There’s an obligatory
Mr. Big character, old school with a constant cigar in his face who finds Kei
and his gang a bunch of upstart petty amateurs.
Violence is dialed down to only one scene, which has its humorous
overtones, and there are memorable rain sequences, one of which is the
signature scene at night, brilliantly choreographed using slow mo, that Sergio
Leone stern eye close up, and a blackened rendition using umbrellas that are in
complete contrast to the bright candy colors in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
(1964). There’s a certain charm to this
style of film, as it pays homage to the past, yet has an overstylized
glossiness to it, shot in ‘Scope, that’s nearly impossible not to like.
Ich bin ein Berlinaler -
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek,
February 14, 2008 (excerpt)
Even though no one actually sings in Johnnie To's
"Sparrow," it's more a musical than an action movie, borrowing the
mood, color and vitality of pictures like "Singin' in the Rain" and
"The Band Wagon" and "An American in Paris" -- and maybe
even "The Young Girls of Rochefort." In "Sparrow," a group
of rapscallion pickpockets led by Kei (Simon Yam), a smoothie who dresses like
an old-Hollywood matinee idol, make their way through
These guys take great pleasure in their craft; for them, stealing is artistry, as well as a way to make a living. And then a knockout femme fatale, Chun Lei (Kelly Lin, who appears in Olivier Assayas' "Boarding Gate"), infiltrates their circle and upsets their routine. The picture's beautifully orchestrated finale -- one that harnesses all the visual poetry of twirling umbrellas and rain-slicked streets -- is, again, more a dance routine than an action sequence. "Sparrow" is lighter, more buoyant, than To's last feature, the extraordinary (and moving) "Exiled." But it may be the better film: To uses plenty of standard film references here, and still, what he has come up with is quite unlike anything I've seen before. "Sparrow" is so pleasurable that I can't wait to see it again.
Face it: The idea of crossing an ocean to look at movies for six or eight or 10 days isn't just luxurious; it's absurd. Even so, a purely enjoyable picture like "Sparrow" can make you feel you've crossed that ocean for good reason. And it reminds you that Blanche DuBois was right.
User comments from imdb Author: Harry T. Yung (harry_tk_yung@yahoo.com) from Hong Kong
Somehow, when I walked in to the cinema, I had the
impression that this is a movie about
Quite obviously, this movie belongs to the "style over substance"
genre (if there is one) and I feel sorry for critics who have nothing better to
say than the feeble "feeble plot" verdict. The story is simple: four
buddies in the pickpocket profession find their life disrupted as they are
approached separately by a mysterious, alluring femme fatale. It turns out that
she is the mistress of a retired kingpin to whom she still feels gratitude and
respect, but longs to be reunited to her sweetheart in the Mainland. She wants
them to steal from him her passport that he keeps locked in a safe. The kingpin
turns out to be a top-notch pickpocket himself and beats the four buddies every
time at their own game. In the end, we find that old man has a heart and
although he holds every card, he let the girl go free, even though he cries in
his limousine like a baby after she has gone.
The entire movie is light as feather. "The group of four", while
their professional skill is obviously not top-notch, seems to have an easy time
doing their day's work, and spend the rest of the day shooting the breeze in a
charchantang (Hong Kong style café for the masses) or riding on the leader's
ancient bicycle (yes, all 4 of them) – a languid lifestyle and an existence
that can almost be described as idyllic. The various shades of emotion – among
the buddies, the girl with each of them, the girl and the old man – are only
gently discernible. The movie is about mood. If Wong Ka-wai's mood is love,
this one is delightful romance.
For people who have lived in
Simon Yam is at his easiest best playing the leader, and gets good support from
the other three. Kelly Lin does very little, which is exactly what is needed to
create the mysterious lure of the girl. LO Hoi-pang is appropriately animated
for his role of the kingpin.
I think director To mentioned in an interview, partly jokingly, that this is
the third of his buddy-group trilogy – "The mission", "PTU"
and "Sparrow". While the buddy aspect is only one of the elements of
"Sparrow", that is one way of looking at it.
A
Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Taking almost 3 years to make, and finally making its way
to our shores, Sparrow is worth every moment of waiting, and again cements
Johnnie To's reputation as a living maestro who conjures up magical cinematic
moments from the tired
Clearly this movie plays up on the sparrow motif, of a bird trapped in a cage,
and one from the avian family associated with, as this story goes, ill fortune
that will soon befall. The figural bird here refers to Kelly Lin's Chung Chun
Lei, a mysterious, statuesque beauty who baits our gang into unlocking the cage
that's trapping her in a life of misery. The first act plays out like a little
mystery, weaving in a deeper introduction of our gang of pickpockets, played by
Lam Ka Tung, Kenneth Cheung, Law Wing-cheong and led by their leader Kei (Simon
Yam). Thinking they got lucky individually when they each encounter Chun Lei,
they soon realize the hard way about who they're dealing with, and realize that
they stand a better chance as a group, with unity in strength rather than
playing individual lone wolf.
Here's where you'll find the quintessential To movie dripping with camaraderie
and brotherhood, written by Chan Kin Chung and Fung Chi Keung. The story
unfolds in a rather unconventional manner that leaves you guessing, before it
even keels into a mid-section, all the while avoiding big sets and big action
sequences. They allow for Yam to play up on his well known photography hobby by
working it into the story, and Yam delivers what audiences and fans would have
expected, that of a charismatic leader.
Unlike To's previous movies like Exiled and the Election series which were
rather heavy in nature and tone, Sparrow, like the bird, is very much light and
breezy. It doesn't try to cram too many subplots into its close to 90 minute
running time, and provides you a main thread to focus your thoughts on. As
mentioned, it is like a short film idea extrapolated effectively into a feature
film length, allowing moments of To's signature style of stand-offs to enter
the fray, building much needed anticipation, with good natured humour. Some
however, might want to draw parallels with Feng Xiaogang's World Without
Thieves given its subject matter and its core one-upmanship challenge.
There are two gems in Sparrow that makes its ticket price more than worthwhile.
First, the wonderful original music and score by Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux,
whose theme for Sparrow will definitely linger in your mind for quite a while
after the end credits roll. With a jazzy feel and a combination of western and
eastern musical instruments, the score has a life of its own, and elevates
Sparrow to a higher plateau with something memorable to take away, emphasizing
the lightness the general tone of the movie takes.
The other gem, will be its fantastically designed major action piece that
occurs in the last act. Probably the only "action" you'll see in the
movie, it decompresses normal time into slow- motion, in order to exaggerate
the lightning quick reflexes all the operatives in the movie possess. The rain,
the umbrellas, action designed around them and all done at a single traffic
light crossing, remains a cinematic marvel which deserves a second, third
helping, and more. Just thinking how it's done technically will already send
you into a frenzy, and this likely served undoubtedly as a showpiece for
Sparrow.
Sparrow is an elegant movie, which reminds us that while To might have his
off-days with movies like Linger, he's back at the top of his game again
delivering a movie with deftness in skill, and adding to his already glowing
repertoire of movies defining the new wave of crime genre stories that speak
volumes of his signature style.
Like
Clockwork: Heartbreak and Economic Collapse in Johnnie To's ... Like
Clockwork: Heartbreak and Economic Collapse in Johnnie To’s Post-Handover
Cinema, by Glenn Heath Jr. from Cineaste,
Summer 2016
Despite our best efforts, time always marches on. The high-functioning worker bees of Johnnie To’s glitzy 2015 musical Office are reminded of this fact every day by a massive open-faced clock dominating their wall-less workspace. Seconds glide away as looming deadlines and fluctuating market trends help to create a culture of frantic normalcy. Characters alleviate stress by breaking out into song, the lyrics of which concern everything from accounting practices and corporate hierarchy to individual purchasing power. Within this razzle-dazzle simulacrum of Hong Kong, where greed and ambition are seemingly filtered through the ventilation systems, it’s no longer possible to separate the rigors of work from the joys of expression. This is life without boundaries.
One could imagine similar feelings of unease permeating through the steel corridors of Hong Kong leading up to and immediately after 1997, the year Britain transferred sovereignty of its former colony to the People’s Republic of China. In his 1998 text Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Ackbar Abbas discusses the contradictions of Hong Kong and China’s brokered relationship after the “Handover”: “When sovereignty reverts to China, we may expect to find a situation that is quasi-colonial, but with an important historical twist: the colonized state, while politically subordinate, is in many other crucial respects not in a dependent sub-altern position but is in fact more advanced—in terms of education, technology, access to international networks, and so forth—than the colonizing state.”
Pervasive complications have always underlined Hong Kong and China’s relationship status, and they can be felt throughout many films released in the last twenty years. To’s diverse string of genre efforts cultivates this tension organically within a specifically sleek and chaotic worldview. Since 2005’s Election and 2006’s Triad Election (see “One Country, Two Visions: An Interview with Johnnie To” by Martha P. Nochimson and Robert Cashill in Cineaste, Spring 2007, Vol. XXXII, No. 2), the director has shifted focus from underworld criminal politics and alliances to the tumultuous emotions of business professionals and public figures—people such as Louis Koo’s disgraced superstar in Romancing in Thin Air (2012), for example, who decides to grapple with tabloid embarrassment through prolonged dramatic distraction and seclusion. He’s just one of many yearning characters whose perspectives are warped by Hong Kong’s newly misshapen identity, caught between the ghosts of British colonial rule and the realities of China’s global expansion.
Abbas addresses this unsettling overlap and how it concerns the arts in general. “Culture in Hong Kong cannot just be related to ‘colonialism’; it must be related to this changed and changing place, this colonial space of disappearance, which in many respects does not resemble the old colonialisms at all.” To’s films respect this ongoing evolution, the cinematic space between aged and new, revealing China’s thorny influence on Hong Kong by subverting gender dynamics and relishing in subtext. While the movie DNA may resemble archetypes made popular by Classic Hollywood (gangster, musical, screwball comedy) and Seventies and Eighties Hong Kong cinema, each of To’s recent films feels jazzy, sincere, and conceptual in its own unique way. Fueling such an improvisatory spirit is the clash between divergent financial practices and political ideologies, providing a perfect nesting ground for personal stories about unhinged romantic relationships in the postmodern era.
Here, snake-bit characters, their deeply felt emotions, and their manic professions are all interconnected. Stock markets could be crashing in the background and a swooning couple will be falling in love in the foreground. A startling economic rebound might be superseded by a devastating revelation in an ill-fated affair. The illusion of professional and emotional control remains palpable in both situations, as certain as the romantic volatility in the Don’t Go Breaking My Heart films or the institutional coldness that envelops Drug War (2012) like gray smog. Call it the duality of rising and falling—this sometimes happens in the same frame.
To views Hong Kong as a singular urban space where human interaction produces frazzled miscommunication. Getting stuck between commitments and codes happens on a daily basis. There are very few villains but more than enough weak men. Women desire both individual success and fairy-tale endings to their romantic pursuits. The LGBTQ experience is criminally underserved. All the while, Chinese economic, cultural, and political influence lingers like a mischievous ghost, helping to promote an invisible havoc in the lives of Hong Kong’s beautiful citizens.
Starting with 2008’s Sparrow, To’s filmography contains markedly similar interests in the inevitability of heartbreak and economic collapse in Hong Kong and China. Despite the prevailing sense of mounting pressure, To ably reminds his characters that happiness is just a fleet-footed camera movement or breezy musical choice away. Narrative twists and turns feel predetermined, yet all roads lead toward an obscured future. Certain recurring themes help confirm this bond between personal and professional, only complicating these matters of the heart further…
Sparrow (文雀) (2008) - Love HK
Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
"On Bird-Catching" Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Sounds, Images, September 6, 2010
New York Asian Film Festival, 2008 on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman, June 19, 2008
Electric
Sheep Magazine [Richard Badley]
The Storyboard Allan Koay
Screen International review Lee Marshall in Berlin from Screendaily
ScreenAnarchy [J Hurtado] 3-Disc Special Edition
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
MUBI [Adam Cook] [John Lehtonen] December 17, 2013
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3.5/5] Mariko McDonald
Asia
Pacific Arts: Best of 2008: Asian Films Brian Hu’s Top Ten
MySpace.com - Sparrow Soundtrack - HK - Chinese traditional ...
Hong Kong France (108 mi) 2009 ‘Scope
Vengeance - Time Out Hong Kong Geoff Andrew
Though he’s been making films for nearly three decades, it’s only in the last five years that the work of Johnnie To has become fashionable at the major European film festivals. His latest, therefore, looks like a somewhat deliberate attempt to court the French market, given that it stars ageing pop-idol-turned-movie-star Johnny Hallyday, a man who arrives in Macau to visit his daughter (Sylvia Testud), who lost her husband and children when gangsters burst, guns blazing, into their apartment during the brief pre-credits sequence. She, having survived the carnage with appalling injuries and barely a single scene left to appear in, asks Costello (for such, a tad unsurprisingly, is his name) to wreak vengeance on the culprits, a task which he, as someone who worked (again a little unsurprisingly) as a hitman before setting himself up in the Champs-Elysées restaurant business, is unusually willing and able to take on.
If indeed there is anything surprising about this cliché-packed genre fare, it’s the degree to which To and his screenwriter Wai Ka-fai are prepared to indulge their flair for the ludicrous. As Costello employs the services of three (purportedly) likeable hitmen (Anthony Wong, Lam Ka-tung and Lam Suet) to help him track down and kill the men who offed his son-in-law and grandkids, the film steers consistently clear of anything remotely realistic or gritty, revelling instead in plot developments, dialogue and action sequences as flagrantly absurd as they’re ‘stylish’. Nothing whatsoever rings true: not the cheap Chilean plonk Costello (apparently a great chef and wealthy bon vivant) serves up when he hires his trio of goons, not the bizarre means (involving scouts and stick-on paper flags) by which the villainous Mr Big is entrapped, not the shoot-outs… and most definitely not Hallyday’s face, a strangely elongated, unevenly wrinkled, tiny-eyed affair that barely resembles the appearance of your average human.
That said, Vengeance is far from unenjoyable. At a fairly pacy 109 minutes it doesn’t outlast its welcome, especially when you can feast your eyes on such marvellously idiotic imagery as Hallyday praying (altogether incredibly given his actions throughout the movie) first on a beach and then up to his neck in water. It also looks quite good in a trite, glossy and bombastic kind of way, and there are even a number of funny moments that were actually intended as such.
Cannes 2009: High Midnight ("Vengeance," To) on Notebook | MUBI David Phelps at Cannes from Mubi
Vengeance
| Reviews | Screen - Screen Daily Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily
E
L L I P S I S - The Accents of Cinema: VENGEANCE (Dir. Johnnie ... Omar Ahmed at Ellipsis, December 25, 2009
Hong Kong Crime Cinema #4: Vengeance (HK-France 2009) Roy Stafford from The Case for Global Film, March 14, 2016
REVIEW: Exquisite Vengeance is Trademark Johnnie To - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek, August 4, 2010
Vengeance (復仇) (2009) - Love HK
Film Kevin Ma
PopMatters [Brent McKnight] November 17, 2010
Slant Magazine [Glenn Heath Jr.]
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
Vengeance (2009) Movie Review | BeyondHollywood.com Nix
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Vengeance
(2009) Movie Review | BeyondHollywood.com
James Mudge
ScreenAnarchy
[Niels Matthijs]
Foreign Objects: Vengeance (Hong Kong) - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter
Electric
Sheep Magazine [Richard Badley]
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Filmstalker (DVD) Richard Brunton
Slant Magazine DVD [Chuck Bowen]
Vengeance - Film - The AV Club Noel Murray
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
AVForums (Blu-ray) [Cas Harlow]
Memento-Lite
in Macao: Johnnie To's Vengeance | Village Voice Nick Pinkerton
Plume
Noire Moland Fengkov
2009
Hong Kong Movies that I didn’t review - Part 2 Kozo (Ross Chen) from Love HK Film
Cannes
'09: Day Five Mike D’Angelo from
The Onion A.V. Club, May 17, 2009
James Rocchi at
Alison Willmore at
Sean
Goes to the Movies [Sean Canfield]
Vengeance
David Hudson at
Q&A:
Johnnie To - The Hollywood Reporter Patrick
Frater interviews Johnnie To at Cannes, May 15, 2009
Hollywood
Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]
Geoff
Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Where Art Trumps
Industry Manohla Dargis at
DON’T GO BREAKING MY HEART
(Daan gyun naam yu) B- 80
Hong Kong (115 mi)
2011 ‘Scope co-director: Wai Ka-fai
What’s a film festival without a Johnny To tribute to romanticized love stories featuring plenty of eye candy, an over saturated color scheme, young up and coming professionals in love, and enough ongoing silliness to recall the days of Love American Style, a popular early 70’s TV show that featured an ongoing rotation of celebrities, or some variation like MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE (1964) with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni? What’s not to like, as this is as sugar coated as movies get, a light and breezy love triangle that features two guys trying to get the same girl? Louis Koo showing his best Bruce Lee profile is a playboy seen in the opening driving his Mercedes convertible (later a Maserati) through the streets of Hong Kong as Shen Ran, the CEO of his own investment company, who spots the adorable girl of his dreams riding on a bus, Zixin (Gao Yuan Yuan), but loses her in the crowd. Instead, she’s immediately helped by a street drunk Qihong (Daniel Wu), an overly friendly helpful guy who offers her a hand just after she’s been dumped by a Video game loving, toy collecting, and frog-possessing former boyfriend who’s moved on with a pregnant and overly hysterical new girlfriend. Zixin unloads all her unwanted ex-boyfriend’s possessions on Qihong, including his entire liquor supply and pet frog which are most appreciated, pretty much dumping the rest. It turns out Qihong is a former architect who’s actually designed several buildings in Hong Kong, so Zixin asks him to stop drinking and design another, agreeing to meet in a week, which of course, never happens, as life takes some crazy turns.
Wouldn’t you know, Shen Ran’s skyscraper office faces the desk of Zixin in the neighboring building, where he starts plastering notes and pictures in the window to get her attention, which actually works, also attracting the attention of another buxom office worker, Angelina (Larisa Bakurova), who works a few stories below thinking all the attention is directed at her. When he suggests they meet, he gets smothered by the sexualized Angelina, who takes his mind off Zixin, who sees them together the following morning, posting “asshole” on the office window. This turns into a game of hard to get as she never wants to see him again, set in the financial turmoil of the international economic crisis, where each company was forced to make big cutbacks, but Shen Ran eventually buys Zixin’s company, becoming her boss, where he immediately finds ways to make her busy and keep her close at hand. He orders her to pick out a new luxury car, a penthouse suite, as well as the interior furnishings, all ultra-stylish examples of extreme wealth on display, where he attempts to buy his way into her heart. And it nearly works, until she realizes why she doesn’t trust the guy. Incredibly, a cleaned up Qihong reappears in the office across the way, as he’s back designing buildings, including one in Zixin’s home town of Suzhou, where he’s forced to compete in this office window charade of attracting the girl’s attention through playful originality, and the guy’s a born natural, featuring a sentimental singing frog.
What to do, what to do, as she’s got her heart falling for
two gorgeous guys, each one loaded, where Hong Kong is back in the flush of
money and success, where the city is once again a showpiece on display in a
Hong Kong film which is fortunate to have such a panoramic skyline and backdrop
for movies. Despite all the love and
silliness, the film doesn’t sustain the interest throughout, lagging somewhat
as the game gets prolonged, as the competition just elevates to the ridiculous,
as these guys are like super characters with the money and power to accomplish
just about anything. Zixin’s talent is
her joyful optimism, as she’s a cheerful addition to any room, where even in
her most gloomy state, she continues to radiate warmth and affection, though
her playfulness is a bit girlish. Koo
exudes his playboy charm, still something of a snake at heart, while Wu also
has a boyish and trustworthy nature, the kind of guy who’s not nearly as
interesting, but is reliable and dependable - - hint: marriage material. Who would you rather be married to, the
charming, James Bond style international playboy who commands instant respect
wherever he goes, or the likeable guy adored by your family for all the right
reasons, as he’s never full of himself, placing her interests first, but he’s
also not nearly as much fun to be around as the snake? As for the sexual sizzle, which guy? Her indecisiveness takes forever, which can
get annoying, where you might start to root for a third option, like dump the
girl and let the guys have a go at it, which would at least be a surprise. Whatever happens, expect all is right in the
ever invigorated
User
reviews from imdb Author: james_lee46 from
Romantic comedies need to fulfill two criteria - provide some romance that
the audience can lose themselves in, and to make the whole affair lighthearted
enough to have a couple laughs. Don't Go Breaking My Heart does succeed in
constructing a romantic triangle and a couple of laughs to go along the way,
but as far as being realistic, it is not.
Gao Yuanyuan plays Cheng Zixin, the female in the love triangle along with
Louis Koo as Cheung Shen-Ran and Daniel Wu as Fang Qihong. In this world that
the movie constructed, Shen-Ran is an affluent CEO of an investment company
that operates in the building opposite Zixin. After noticing her on the bus,
and seeing her have an incident with her horrible ex, he later tries at work to
cheer her up by sticking a smiley face post it note on the window for her to
see. This works, and they begin to communicate across buildings visually.
Concurrently, after Zixin's incident on the bus, she was distraught and walked
through the streets without noticing her surroundings. Just as a car was about
to hit her, Qihong saves her. They part ways, with Qihong continuing to drink
his alcohol. Later, Zixin sees him at the supermarket buying alcohol, and she
proceeds to give him all her ex's things. After selling those things, Qihong
encourages Zixin to spend the money on herself. At the end of their night,
Zixin gets Qihong to promise to quit drinking and return to his architectural
work.
With this stage set, the movie progresses to develop the relation between the
characters. The actors' chemistry works, and situation, while corny, do seem to
work. However, it is a little too obvious which guy she should pick, so her
indecision makes her a little more unlikable as the movie goes along. The fact
that it appears she is seduced by money (one guy buys her a Maserati, an
apartment) adds some realism to the movie, but its not what we want to see in a
romantic comedy.
There are some comedic bits, particularly with Qihong's interactions with the
frog, and with Zixin's boss.
This movie creates a world full of attractive people and money. The men in the
movie act like men in the real world (lust, love, etc.) but the young females
in the movie except Zixin seem to be a little whorish (easily seduced,
seductively dressed).
But, as a romantic comedy, it provides the romance and the comedy.
User
reviews from imdb Author: changmoh from
This romantic-comedy was shown at the 35th Hong Kong International Film
Festival recently and the big deal among the media was that the movie was in
Mandarin instead of the usual Cantonese. Obviously an attempt by the
film-makers to penetrate the Mainland box-office. For viewers elsewhere,
however, "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" will probably be a long-drawn,
meet-cute and act-cute love triangle that stretches for almost two hours.
Thankfully, the movie somehow manages to maintain its charm (even if it looks
contrived and phony) throughout the proceedings - thanks to the chemistry of
the three leads.
When the movie opens, we find Zixin (Gao Yuan-yuan) getting dumped by her
boyfriend (Terence Yin) who is married. We can understand her subsequent
caution with men, especially when she tries to recover from this heartbreak
that makes getting rid of her past (those photos, gifts and even a pet frog)
rather difficult. Helping her to turn over a new leaf is a street drunk named
Fang (Daniel Wu) who is actually a disillusioned architect. Fang helps Zixin
'get rid' of her ex-beau's mini-bar collection and even take cares of her
"ugly" pet frog, while she helps him get back to drawing.
Zixin is also attracted to Cheng (Louis Koo), a fund manager who works in the
building opposite her office. She watches him through the glass wall daily and
they 'communicate' by sticking Post-It notes on their respective windows. Soon,
Cheng, a playboy at heart, takes over the troubled company she works for - and
starts wooing her in earnest. Will she forget Fang, the friend waiting in the
wings, or will she keep a promised date with him? Ultimately, the big question
is: who will she pick, Cheng or Fang? It takes a long long time for Zixin to
decide - and the title is rather apt. Having had her heart broken, Zixin is
definitely going to break the heart of one of her suitors. We are kept guessing
which one. This is the most demanding role yet for Gao Yuan-yuan and it is
evident that she has what it takes to be the leading lady. She makes us root
for Zixin throughout the movie, even if we find her indecisiveness irritating.
Koo and Wu are veterans in their role and they pull it off easily. However,
Koo's Cheng seems rather implausible. The writers have gone overboard, having
Cheng buy an apartment and a Maserati car as gifts for a girlfriend at a time
when the economy (during the 2008 downturn) calls for prudence and
accountability. Wu is the more pathetic of the two and his Fang even cooks!
Chalk these up as the film-makers' attempts to wow the women in the audience.
This chick flick makes for an entertaining date movie, though. (limchangmoh.blogspot.com)
I have to admit there was
a little bit of apprehension going into the movie because Johnnie To's recent
effort Linger continues to linger in my mind as one of the worst romantic films
seen in recent years. No doubt I'd prefer To's gangster flicks, but sometimes
market forces and demand dictates opportunity that cannot be passed over. So
with his usual Milkyway crew and regular cast such as Lam Suet, Louis Koo and
Daniel Wu, To and frequent collaborator Wai Ka-Fai make another attempt at the
romantic genre with this film that proves, thankfully, to be notches up from Linger.
And perhaps one of the positives coming out from the film which aided in its
enjoyment, was the fact that the language track was left unmolested here by the
powers that be. It's in a smattering of Cantonese, Mandarin and some English,
which in all likelihood reflects the cosmopolitan nature of Hong Kong society
with its foreign base from the occasional Indian, Caucasian, and of course the
influx of Chinese from Mainland China. In the past all utterance of spoken
Cantonese would have been dubbed over, so this is yet again another small but
successful push of the envelope in our local cinema scene.
One of the two opening films at this year's Hong Kong Film Festival, Don't Go
Breaking My Heart tells of a love triangle between three characters brought
about by the indecision of the girl Zixin (Gao Yuan Yuan), who journeyed from
Suzhou to Hong Kong to follow her boyfriend, find herself being dumped, and
becoming the object of affection of both a drunkard bum Qihong (Daniel Wu), and
a self-made finance industry CEO Shenran (Louis Koo). Her budding relationship
with Qihong comes from the latter saving her from an accident while in her
post-dumped, delirious state, and becoming the surrogate owner of her
ex-boyfriend's frog. Qihong soon disappears for the most parts of the first
hour, and here's when Shenran becomes her target. Yes, you heard that right,
because the lass does what you can do in today's Internet age, and discovers
he's a mighty fine catch with the kind of money in his possession.
Set about the time of the Lehman Brothers debacle, Shenran becomes Zixin's
boss, and a relationship with a subordinate is nothing to frown upon, having to
fast forward their relationship through the throwing of a Maserati and a luxury
condo penthouse at Zixin. Impressed, her mind's almost made up if not for the
re-entry of Qihong into her life, now reborn into a new lease of life going
back to the architectural profession he turned his back on, in an office
located opposite Zixin's. And this is perhaps one of the brilliance of the
story, with the trio able to engage in romantic shenanigans through their
office windows, and this is something that is extremely plausible given the
close proximity of buildings in
Is the modern relationship defined by material wealth, with no money being
having no honey? It certainly seemed so in this romantic tale, where Zixin
doesn't even bat an eyelid at Qihong at first given his bum like appearance and
lack of prospects, and her obvious delight when discovering Shenran is an
alpha-male who rock climbs and having riches beyond her wildest dreams. And
even though Shenran's been proven a playboy and a cad time and again with the
amount of cleavage that he can't take his eyes off from, leaving him becomes
that impossibility given the opportunity costs that goes along with it. As for
Qihong's, he's a little bit of a softie and a nice guy that tries really hard
to get the girl, being that sentimental man hanging onto every sliver of memory
from the past, taking care of a frog for companionship, and the perfecting the
art of cooking mussels from a restaurant that he shared a meal with Zixin once.
What made this film work is the chemistry amongst the trio, that while you may
not like their characters, they're made believable through the actors'
performances, except perhaps for parts when you know Zixin's behaviour in the
real world would lead to her being fired from her job. Lending supporting star
power are JJ Jia as Qihong's assistant and Shenran's temporal dating
distraction, and Lam Suet (this is Milkyway after all) as the atypical office
kay-poh to provide some much needed comic relief as the film propels toward the
third act that relied on plenty of cheesy moments to try and wrap it all up.
But being made for the Chinese market would mean toeing a very conservative
development, and providing that air of affluence to target trap its intended
audience - overnight roundtrip flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai, anyone?
At least the film had the courage to resolve this messy triangle, unlike its
easternKicks.com [Andrew Daley] June 19, 2015
Don't
Go Breaking My Heart (單身男女)
(2011) - Love HK Film Kozo
(Ross Chen)
San
Diego Asian Film Festival 2011: Don't Go Breaking My Heart ... Glenn Heath Jr.
Don't
Go Breaking My Heart: Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Maggie Lee
Don't Go Breaking My Heart | Variety Boyd van Hoeij
Don't
Go Breaking My Heart (film) - Wikipedia
Hong Kong China (107 mi) 2012 ‘Scope
At his best and most personal, in films like PTU and LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE, Johnnie To exudes a supremely relaxed strain of formalism enriched by his intimate knowledge of both the physical and social textures of Hong Kong. To's latest film, his first produced with mainland money, shot on mainland locations, approved by mainland censors, and geared toward the mainland market, is a more mercenary affair, possessed of a severity of design and efficiency of execution bordering on the mechanical, but never less than spellbinding. The film opens with a plume of sickly green smoke smudged against a blue-gray haze of industrial smog. In its stark moral clarity, this image recalls a similar moment from Akira Kurosawa's classic 1963 thriller HIGH AND LOW, a black and white film where a crucial turn of events is likewise signaled by a column of smoke, this time rendered in brilliant pastel pink (the only splash of color in the entire movie). In both works, the smoke doesn't signify so much as embody a social rot that none of the characters seems able to perceive. Where Kurosawa sought to expose the corrosive effects of systemic inequality, however, To lays bare the violent contradictions of a system founded at once on unrestrained capitalism and totalitarian state control. In narrative terms, this dialectic manifests itself in the border war between a Hong Kong meth cartel and a Chinese drug task force, the former led by Cantonese star Louis Koo, the latter by Chinese character actor Sun Honglei. To deftly works these two performers' contrasting styles of performance into the structuring counterpoint of the film. Where Koo is an embodiment of the individual survival instinct taken to a mercenary extreme, Sun is a paragon of dutiful self-sacrifice, watchful and ultimately inescapable.
Electric Sheep Magazine [Richard Badley]
Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To has attacked the crime genre from all sorts of angles. In Election the focus was Triad leaders vying for power in a Shakespearean saga, and in Sparrow it was the incidental, often comedic lives of small-time pickpockets. He’s explored good guys, of course, if you can count the barmy, supernatural methods displayed by Mad Detective’s Inspector Bun as being on the right side of the law. By comparison, Drug War will no doubt be regarded as To’s most straightforward, ‘normal’ crime thriller to date, but it is still a pretty intense affair.
Fans of the director might be saddened to learn that this isn’t as overtly experimental as his previous works, but at its core it remains a gamble. Drug War is a big-budget co-production between Hong Kong and mainland China, and making an action-packed crime movie to get past the notorious Chinese censors was never going to be easy. Already out of the frame are classic To themes like honour among thieves or any glamorisation of drugs or guns, but To’s personality still shines through in the carefully composed camerawork and the vicious shoot-outs that ramp up in the final third.
The plot is standard super-cop versus super-criminal stuff. A relentless policeman, Captain Zhang (Honglei Sun), has mid-level meth manufacturer Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) land right in his lap. The penalty in China for cooking meth is death – so, with little coercion, Choi is ready to bargain for his life. Soon the pair are brokering deals to tease out the real king pins behind a gargantuan drug smuggling operation.
For the most part, Zhang is stony-faced; the only glimpse of personality comes out when he has to impersonate a chuckling drug runner named HaHa and mainline cocaine to prove his worth to someone higher up the food chain. Like the rest of the cops, Zhang is dogged and incorruptible, focused on the job at hand, only allowing himself a few hours of sleep a day. A line at the beginning is telling: after arresting someone he befriended while undercover, who then accuses him of betrayal, Zhang simply responds, ‘No, I’m a cop, I busted you.’ This is someone who does not ‘go native’ while on the job.
Choi is equally driven, but only to serve, or rather preserve, his own existence. At first he seems compliant, but as the drug network gets more and more shaky, he becomes increasingly slippery, guarding vital secrets in case he needs a bargaining chip later on. Choi’s mounting desperation is constantly prodded by Zhang’s blind ambition to snare the bigger fish, inevitably leading to a bloody, drawn-out showdown that allows To to break free of the hard-nosed realism of a police procedural, with all guns blazing.
It’s obvious that in a Chinese-produced cop film justice will prevail, but in To’s world it comes at a huge cost. This is a war of attrition on both sides. Imagine Heat but with none of the family soap operas, friendship, back-stabbing or macho posturing. It might sound boring, but Drug War’s intention is to portray stark reality over theatrics. Taking on the drug trade is a war fought through hard work and sheer luck, with no one turning the tide through a rousing speech or superior firepower. To has crafted something bleak yet compelling, and proves he can do mainstream crime tales just as well as edgier ones.
This year we have two Johnnie To films hitting our screen - well
at least I'm hoping Blind Detective does so soon after its bow in Cannes - and
what would be striking in Drug War is that it's done with Chinese
collaboration. After all, being shot in the Mainland, with a production partner
and a majority of the cast hailing from China, it's a trend that won't see
itself buckling anytime soon, and even Hollywood sees China as unexplored
territory for opportunities from production right down to distribution. But the
murmuring about having different versions for the Chinese audience, or
self-censoring, cannot be more pronounced, so how does that affect Johnnie To's
crime flicks?
Quite a bit I must say, with pros and cons which Drug War seem to be caught
under that crossfire. There are a few rules that the Chinese play by, and chief
to that is the morals imposed where the bad guys cannot go scot free. So even
without stepping into the cinema, or hear what this film is about, the ending
is already cast in stone, which takes a little shine off the fun in being able
to follow through the story, and waiting to be surprised at the finale. No matter
how tight one's writing can be, it leads to that inevitable finish, so that
expectation is quite the bitch.
Otherwise, China presents itself a new playground in which filmmakers can go
and get their vision presented through landscapes yet to be familiar
playgrounds. The filmmakers here have ventured beyond the bigger and well known
cities, and opted for smaller second tier ones to present that small town,
rustic look where one supposes a crime syndicate could thrive under, and
operate without too much attention being paid to it. Until Louis Koo's Cai is
seen driving a car in haphazard fashion, suffering from injuries yet to be
explained, and setting the stage for something special from the imagination of
To and long time collaborator Wai Ka-Fai. That, and a trailer that's making its
rounds for a delivery of its cargo, made up of ingredients necessary for the
big time production of ketamine.
Then we must be introduced to the cops, where the anti-narcotic department is
given the spotlight for the film's focus on a drug syndicate. Chinese actor Sun
Honglei leads the charge here as the division chief Inspector Zhang, getting
introduced as a no-nonsense, hands off type of leader who walks the talk, and
never shying away from being in the thick of the action when the need calls for
it. In many scenes, it is Sun Honglei's charismatic presence and superb acting
that made this watchable, since his character dabbles in a little bit of role
play while undercover, utilizing a vast array of skills within his ability to
make it convincing not only to the other characters he deals with, but to the
audience as well.
The crux of the story lies in the power and cat and mouse play that both Zhang
and Cai engage in, with the latter under the former's custody, and facing the
mandatory death sentence if convicted. Wanting to survive, he strikes a deal
with Zhang to allow him access to the bigger fish in the pond, and for Zhang,
this is too big an opportunity in his career, and for the wider group of
population he serves, to give up. So together with his team, they form an
uneasy partnership with Cai, since trust is yet to be earned, suspicion always
round the corner that Cai will bolt, and whether they're walking into a known
trap set up by him. The story's kept at a steady pace by Johnnie To, keeping
things quite cerebral in leaving you wondering about Cai's motivation for the
most parts, especially since having to reveal that Cai is quite the slimy,
street smart person going all out to ensure his survival.
And I suppose a Milkyway crime thriller isn't a Milkyway crime thriller if the
usual suspects don't turn up in any capacity. With a relatively fresh faced
cast from the Mainland, and with recognizable faces such as Huang Yi playing
Sun Honglei's able deputy, it never really feels quite right without To's
stable of actors tossed into the mix, and thankfully this is one formula that's
being kept. Better yet, this version screened here kept their Cantonese
dialogue intact - even Louis Koo was undubbed - and that serves as a more
authentic presentation. There's Lam Suet, Eddie Cheung, Lo Hoi Pang, and Lam Ka
Tung amongst others who make an appearance, and contribute where it mattered
most, allowing reason for fan boys to cheer.
There's a wider subtext in the film though, dealing with Hong Kong and China,
where the former group sees opportunities in making money in the Mainland, but
the message is that collaboration and mutual trust is key. Should one group try
to breakaway from an alliance, it serves nobody any advantage, and the outcome
may be dire straits. It's an unfair alliance to begin with since there's a
larger body involved compared to the smaller partner who's not given a level
playing field or too much of a bargaining power, but to play within the rules
set will ensure survival.
Not since Election
2 has a Johnnie To film been so direct with its metaphors and allegories,
and this is what sets Drug War apart from other run of the mill crime thrillers
done by other filmmakers. The Milkyway team has ventured into China with their
romantic comedy to some degree of success, and they've now shown the way that
crime capers also have an avenue in the mainland despite having to play by the
rules set by others. This is well worth a watch despite an extended sequence
that vaguely resembled something out of MI:4
Ghost Protocol, which is just as gripping as it was opportunity for Sun
Honglei to showoff some acting chops, and the expected moans and groans about
the ending where To delivers his usual shoot out spectacle to outgun and
outlast any John Woo picture. Recommended!
Johnnie To Drug War film review and trailer | easternkicks.com Fausto Vernazzani, May 31, 2013
Drug War (毒戰) (2012) - Love HK
Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Pick of the week: China's dark and dirty “Drug War” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, July 25, 2013
On Johnnie To At Age 60 |
Movie Mezzanine Jake Cole, April 22,
2015
BeyondHollywood.com [James Mudge]
Drug War Is an Action Film That Prizes Concision and Clarity Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice, July 24, 2013
Review: Drug War
(2012) | Sino-Cinema 《神州电影》 Derek Elley
AsianMovieWeb [Manfred Selzer]
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Public Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
DRUG WAR (Johnnie To 2012) - FilmLeaf Chris Knipp
Indiewire: Celluloid Liberation Front
onderhond.com [Niels Matthijs]
Tiny Mix Tapes [Micah Gottlieb]
NYAFF 2013 Reviews: 'Cold War,' 'An Inaccurate ... - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter
MUBI's Notebook: Daniel Kasman February 2, 2013
Drug War - AV Club Film Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chuck Bowen]
10,000 Bullets - Blu-ray [Michael Den Boer]
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] Blu-Ray
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Tyler Foster]
KPBS Cinema Junkie [Beth Accomando]
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
A Better Tomorrow [Peter Martin]
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
The House Next Door [Oscar Moralde]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr.
Drug War Movie Review & Film Summary (2012) | Roger Ebert Simon Abrams
'Drug
War,' Moving Fast and Furious in China - The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Hong Kong China (129 mi) 2013 ‘Scope
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich] Keith Uhlich at Cannes from Time Out New York
A few quick words on another regional effort: Johnnie To's Blind
Detective, far from being the martial-arts ass-kicker promised by its
marketing, is actually a broader-than-broad comedy about a retinally-damaged
cop (Andy Lau) who teams up with a policewoman (Sammi Cheng) to help solve a
few cold cases, one of them very personal. Its screechy, nails-on-blackboard
tone is clearly pitched at a
There's still something fascinating about the relentlessness of the humor,
which manages to make light of murder, cannibalism and oversexed grandmas among
other wild targets. It also helps that To treats the proceedings like a
master-goofing-off lark, and that Lau and Cheng have an alternately aggravating
and ingratiating chemistry that suggests Nick and Nora Charles as played by
Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. A Looney time, alright.
Blind
Detective | Reviews | Screen - Screen Daily Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily
It’s obvious that Johnnie To and his cast had a lot of fun making this
over-long meld of the
Played for laughs, in the broadest sense, the film is little more than a local-box-office-oriented procedural rom-com workout for ultra-bankable local stars Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng, who last teamed up on To’s big 2004 hit Yesterday Once More. But perhaps Blind Detective – unlike the director’s enjoyable and well-crafted Mad Detective of a few years back – was never meant to travel much beyond Asian markets. In the last few years,
To has set a pattern of making two or three films a year, only
one of which is an obvious crossover festival pleaser. It’s a mark of the
increasing reverence with which the
Lau plays Chong (‘Johnston’ in the English subtitles), a brilliant but tetchy retired detective who despite having gone blind four years earlier continues to use his other senses and formidable deductive powers to solve crimes, thus eking out his disability pension with bounty payments. Cheng is Ho, a junior crime squad cop who is keen to learn from a man she idolises – not only as a detective, it’s clear from the get-go.
The two come into contact when Chong solves an acid attack case; in order to keep him close, Ho tells her sightless love interest the story of a childhood friend, Minnie, who disappeared one day years before, and hires him to find her. It’s not long before he’s moved into her swanky apartment so he can give more attention to the case.
However, Chong and the audience both get distracted by the other cold cases he’s still chasing for the bounty money – one being a morgue murder which provides one of the film’s few genuinely hilarious sequences involving a hammer, a motorbike helmet and a TV set.
Most of the time, however, the acting is overdone and the humour grating, particularly in a cringe-worthy scene involving a flirtatious grandma. Chong is also distracted from Ho and his investigations by his love of food: this is a film so in love with the preparation and consumption of tripe, Wagyu beef, sharks’ fin soup, noodles and teppanyaki that it makes one hungry just to watch it.
Chong’s blindness provides much of the film’s comic momentum. It’s mostly predictable stuff: after Ho boasts of her athletic and combat skills, for some reason never thinks to use his hands to check her figure and face until the end.
The production values provide some comfort, especially the atmospheric lighting, Lau’s smart suits and Cheng’s frequent changes of outfit, and Hal Foxton Beckett’s swoonily retro sixties-style soundtrack. But these are meagre consolations in a film that, despite its culinary obssessions, is more tiresome than tasty.
easternKicks.com
[Harris Dang] May 30, 2016
Blind Detective (盲探) (2013) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Cannes 2013. Night Snack: Johnnie To's "Blind Detective" Marie-Pierre Duhamel at Cannes from Mubi, May 20, 2013
VIFF
2013 Preview: Blind Detective – The End of Cinema Sean Gilman, September 26, 2013
Running
Out of Karma: Further Notes on Blind Detective – The End of ... Sean Gilman from The End of Cinema, October 11, 2014
We Got This Covered [David Baldwin]
Cannes
2013 Review: Tone-Deaf Comic Thriller ... - Film School Rejects Shaun Munro
The House Next Door [Jordan Cronk]
Review: Blind
Detective (2013) | Sino-Cinema 《神州电影》 Derek Elley
onderhond.com [Niels Matthijs]
At HK Neo Reviews [Andrew Chan]
Cannes 2013, Day Five : Takashi Miike schlocks it up, in a good way Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club
Cannes
2013. Dialogues: Johnnie To's "Blind Detective" Adam Cook and Daniel Kasman discussion on the
film from Mubi,
Daily | Cannes 2013 | Johnnie To’s BLIND DETECTIVE David Hudson at Fandor
Blind Detective: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Neil Young
'Blind
Detective' Review: Johnnie To's Madcap Mystery-Romance ... Justin Chang from Variety
Action, Laughs, Beauty: Cannes Report, May 20 ... - Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres
Blind Detective -
Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
China Hong Kong (119 mi) 2015 ‘Scope
Amy Taubin on Johnnie To's Office 3D Artforum, March 25, 2016
A 3-D MUSICAL BY JOHNNIE TO, Hong Kong master of balletic gun battles to the death: Who could ask for anything more? To’s Office (2015) is certainly the most kinetically entertaining, ingeniously staged spectacle in town, and the splendid projection at the new Metrograph theater is bound to do it justice. But as a movie about the capitalist greed and corruption that has replaced communist greed and corruption in China, it lacks the satiric bite and inspired insanity, not to mention the moral complexity, of The Big Short’s vision of greed and corruption, American style. Nor does it have the energy and noir elegance of To’s signature movies, PTU (2003) and Triad Election (2006). I’m sure there are nuances which I lack the cultural background to parse, but for me Office is less than the promise of its parts.
Adapted by Sylvia Chang from her stage play Design for Living, the film is set in 2008 just before the unraveling of Lehman Brothers. A mainland Chinese trading company, Jones & Sunn (the name suggests the film’s mix of cute and ham-fisted) is preparing for its IPO. Not only is the company’s timing a disaster in terms of the approaching financial tsunami, Jones & Sunn itself is collapsing, the result of exploitative relationships and mendacious financial practices.
Office opens not in Jones & Sunn headquarters but in a hospital room, where the company’s chairman, Ho Chung-ping (Yun-Fat Chow), is at the bedside of his comatose wife, clipping her fingernails. This show of tenderness is the only emotion manifested by the character in the entire film, and it soon becomes evident that To’s great star is either too tired or bored to turn in a performance, and one can’t really blame him. Ho is a thankless role. The chairman owes his position to his wife’s family fortune, but far from a faithful husband, he’s carried on a twenty-year affair with his CEO, Winnie Chang (Sylvia Chang), who is now desperate to hold onto her status in the face of her lover’s waning affections. To complicate matters, Ho has hired his Harvard MBA daughter Kat (charming ingénue Lang Yueting) for a plum entry-level job but stipulates that she keep her identity secret lest he be accused of nepotism.
But enough of the plot. Although Office is a musical, the less said about the vaguely Brechtian score the better. What makes the film dazzling to watch is the combination of To’s camera movement, Yun Ng’s choreography (the office workers’ routines suggest Busby Berkeley combined with Maoist Red Army film musicals, which, ideologically speaking, is precisely the point of the entire enterprise), and, the biggest surprise, William Chang’s production design. Celebrated for his sensuous, tactile sets for Wong Kar-wai, Chang has created a steely, spikey opposite. The multilevel Jones & Sunn Tower looks as if it is made entirely of oversize pick-up sticks. The double metaphor: The new Chinese capitalism is anything but solid, and its secrets and lies take place in plain sight of everyone on the take and also those left out in the cold. It’s nice that the set has meaning as well as style. What counts however, is that when the moving camera sets those struts and fluorescent sticks awhirl, the pleasure is purely cinematic, and 3-D seals the deal.
First
look: Johnnie To's Office (2015) | Sight & Sound | BFI Adam Cook, March 18, 2016
Hong Kong virtuoso Johnnie To taps his toes in the musical with a Brechtian adaptation of Sylvia Chang’s hit play, set in the abstract enginery and moral warren of a high financial corporation.
It seemed inevitable that Johnnie To would make a musical. His films have become increasingly known for their classical craftsmanship, and 2008’s Sparrow, about a band of pickpockets who fall for the same femme fatale, had the grace and whim of a great Minnelli or Demy.
What couldn’t have been so easily predicted was that To’s take on the musical wouldn’t further embrace his classical instincts, but would take him to post-modern extremes beyond what was hinted at in his recent (and masterful) rom-coms Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and Romancing in Thin Air and merge that with the venomous social critique of his recession thriller Life without Principle. And it’s in 3D.
The film takes place mostly in a corporate high-rise (on the 71st floor), on a set that would make Jacques Tati proud: it’s a completely artificial gridlock of metal, plastic and computers, prison-like in its oppressive modernist design of intersecting lines. The epicentre of the office is a gigantic gyro clock, the cogs of which suggest a metaphor for the rapidly typing employees sat in rows around it. The soundstage’s black floors and background are visible at all times. It’s a playful choice, one that may simply seem in step with the exuberant ambitions of a workplace musical, but which additionally creates a sense of isolation around the players and their playground in this financial sector, removed from reality.
The plot concerns two new assistants who start new jobs at the financial firm Jones & Sunn. Lee Xiang is an earnest young man who naively enters the world of high finance with noble intentions. Kat on the other hand has a secret: that she’s the daughter of the boss (Chairman Ho Chung-ping, played by Chow Yun-Fat). Meanwhile her mother is in a coma, and the Chairman’s affair with his fellow office honcho Miss Chang (Sylvia Chang, whose play Design for Living is the basis for the film) is one of the main conversation points amongst their colleagues. As sparks begin to fly between Lee Xiang and Kat, they must balance their budding romance with their own Ayn Randian self-interest. Strategic allegiances and ruthless ladder-climbing encroach on the would-be sincerity of the film’s various couplings.
The handful of tunes in the film are hit or miss, but it’s hard not to admire their uncoolness (they’re the least modern part of the film). The songs’ subjects however are always fascinating. In one memorable sequence workers in a crowded restaurant ask themselves: “Are you willing to be a corporate slave?” amidst other woeful expressions of the life of survival in a competitive capitalist society.
In another sequence our protagonist irons his work clothes at home, singing about how he wants to rise in the business world and be a productive member of society, his bedroom the only illuminated part of the frame – but where its walls should be, we see through to the surrounding soundstage, where at the end of the scene the silhouette of a hunched-up homeless person slowly pushing a shopping cart comes into view.
From this point on To really lets rip, skewering the moral ignorance and existential bankruptcy with which his characters flirt as they plunge deeper into a world purely made of dollar signs.
easternKicks.com [James Mudge] October 12, 2015
Office (華麗上班族)
(2015) - Love HK Film Kozo
(Ross Chen)
The House Next Door [Jake Cole]
3 Brothers Film [Aren Bergstrom]
Vague Visages [Josh Slater-Williams]
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South China Morning Post [Edmund Lee]
Seattle Screen Scene [Jhon Hernandez]
Office
(2015 Hong Kong film) - Wikipedia
Hong Kong China (88 mi) 2016 ‘Scope
Johnnie To's Three takes place pretty much entirely in a singular
location - a hospital in Hong Kong. When the movie begins, a man named Shun
(Wallace Chung) is wheeled into the emergency room, a bullet lodged in his
brain. Accompanying him are a few cops, led by Chief Inspector Ken (Louis Koo).
It seems he was one of a few culprits who just recently tried to pull off the
armed robbery of a jewelry store and he was shot in the ensuing crossfire.
Put under the care of Dr. Tong Qian (Wei Zhao), Shun is surprisingly calm for a
man with a bullet in his head. The doctors agree to operate in just a few
hours, but Shun pushes back. We know early on that something isn't quite right
here. The cops are acting suspicious, getting pushy with Qian and taking a very
antagonistic stance with Shun, while the patient himself seems to be waiting
for something. Ken knows that the other members of Shun's gang are still out
there, and he figures maybe he should play along and hopefully take down the
entire gang in one fell swoop.
The first hour of this eighty-eight minute feature is devoid of any action
whatsoever. It's a series of mind games with Ken, Tong Qian and Shun all
playing against one another for their own specific reasons. There are
supporting characters here - a few other doctors and nurses, a few other police
officers and of course, some eccentric patients, each one as needy as the next
- but maybe not so surprisingly the movie focuses on its three core inhabitants.
We don't get to know the three principals as well as we should, however. The
performances are decent - Koo is the tough and stern top cop, Chung well cast
as the sly criminal who may actually hold the upper hand here and Wei Zhao
perfectly solid as the doctor trying to do the right thing - but the characters
are not particularly deep. Still, there are moments in the first two thirds of
the film to keep our interest: some gory surgery, some ominous foreshadowing in
the form of a character whistling some Beethoven, some quirky comedy and just
the basic knowledge that, this being a To movie, it's probably going to hit the
fan before the end credits roll.
And it does. It hits the fan in a big way. To's abilities as an action movie
director are impressive and here he goes all out with a finale that delivers
well over fifteen minutes of straight, non-stop action. When both sides are
left with nothing to lose and all bets are off, the guns come out and both
sides go at it with seemingly unlimited ammo. The crossfire takes its share of
casualties while everyone else in the hospital it completely caught in the
middle. It's an impressive concept, though the execution is not perfect. It's
so heavy on CG and green screen work that the slow motion bodies flying through
the air with gritted teeth and bullets flying about seem like a cut scene from
a video game. There's definitely an artisanship to what's done here, but it's
undercut by some poor musical choices and some unnecessarily melodramatic
moments. Still, well practical effects and proper stunt work would have made
this sequence mind blowing, it's still good enough to make Three worth checking
out, particularly for those with an affinity for To's visual and storytelling
styles.
Casey's Movie Mania [Casey Chong]
Set entirely in the hospital, THREE revolves around three main characters: One is a young neurosurgeon named Tong Qian (Zhao Wei), who's been wrestled guilt over bad medical judgment to her two patients. Another one is Inspector Chen (Louis Koo), a hardened cop who just break the law upon trying to apprehend a wanted criminal. The wanted criminal in question is the third character named Shun (Wallace Chung), a robber who has a bullet lodged in his head. In order to survive, Tong urges him to perform a brain surgery but Shun refuses treatment. Soon, the clock is ticking as Shun patiently awaits his gang members to rescue him while Chen and the rest of the police are on standby for the eventual confrontation.
REVIEW: Of late, Johnnie To has been exploring his
newfound obsession with chamber piece. Otherwise known as a genre that usually
involves a number of characters confined in a limited space, To has already
tested the waters earlier on in last year's musical dramedy OFFICE. This year,
he chooses to continue exploring the same genre for the second time in a row
with THREE, on which he combines chamber piece with his signature blend of
crime drama.
In THREE, this movie also marked the second time To uses a hospital as the
primary setting after HELP!!!, on which he co-directed with Wai Ka-Fai back in
2000. Scripted by Yau Nai-Hoi, Lau Ho-Leung and Mak Tin-Shu, THREE sees To
taking his time building the tension as well as suspense through a series of
riveting characters interplay between Tong, Inspector Chen and Shun.
Speaking of the three main characters, the cast is a mixed bag. Louis Koo, who
last collaborated with To in 2013's DRUG
WAR, delivers a suitably tense and no-nonsense performance as Inspector
Chen. Wallace Chung fares better as Shun, whose sneaky mannerism as well as the
playfulness of his character is downright fun to watch for. But Zhao Wei turns
out to be quite a disappointment. Even though she is given a meaty role as a
guilt-stricken neurosurgeon, Wei spends most of the time looking lost and
emotionally detached to the point it's hard to feel sorry for her character.
While the primary tone of THREE is mostly serious, To never forget to balance
the movie with his signature inclusion of eccentric supporting characters. That
include Lo Hoi-Pang, who plays a childish elderly patient, Timmy Hung as the
IT-obsessed nerdy patient who refuses to leave the hospital and Lam Suet as the
clumsy yet absent-minded cop.
Then, of course, no To's crime movie would be complete without his brand of
gunplay and violence. Unlike his last crime movie in DRUG WAR, the action is
kept to a bare minimum. Even so, To ensures all the deliberately-paced buildup
is well worth the wait once the climax kicks in. Easily the most memorable
scene in the movie, To employs a slow-motion tracking shot that lasted about
four minutes as the shootout begins between the cops and the criminals. What's
even more interesting about this particular shot is To's unique approach of
shooting the slow motion done in a manual simulation! An act that
reportedly took three months to rehearse and perfect every single move, it was
nevertheless a sight to behold.
But shortly after the aforementioned shootout scene, the movie quickly
nosedives with a disappointingly anticlimactic finale. If that's not enough,
the subsequent ending that sees Inspector Chen confronting Shun is ruined from
a shoddy mix of fake-looking CG and bad green-screen work.
Comparing with his superior work in DRUG WAR, THREE may seem like a lesser
entry for Johnnie To. However, despite some of the shortcomings, the movie
still proves that To always has his unique ways to blend his favourite crime
genre with a new and interesting idea on display.
THREE is far from Johnnie To's best work but remains a fascinating, if uneven chamber piece packed with a showstopping four-minute shootout scene filmed in a slo-mo tracking shot.
easternKicks.com [James Mudge] October 27, 2016
Three (三人行) (2016) - Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Review: Johnnie To's Three Is A Dazzling Hong Kong Action Drama ... David Ehrlich from indieWIRE
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Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Andy Crump
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Johnnie
To delivers a rollicking thriller with Three - AV Club Film Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
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Johnnie
To's 'Three': Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Clarence Tsui
Film
Review: 'Three' - Variety
Maggie Lee
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Three Movie Review &
Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert
Simon Abrams
Review:
'Three' Asks, Any Mozart Aficionados in the House? - The ... Glenn Kenny from The New York Times
It was both awkward and revealing
to see Fingers a few days after having seen Audiard's clumsy remake, The
Beat That My Heart Skipped, since certain scenes are copied almost
word-for-word. This only shows just how difficult Toback's and especially
Keitel's balancing act really was. Whereas Audiard can't keep the thug and the
musician together in the same frame (apparently believing them antithetical,
therefore betraying a lack of conviction about the original's premise), Toback
keeps them both present at all times, a slippery continuum resulting in both
psychological and narrative instabilities. Fingers is a film that
"doesn't work" in most traditional senses, since it fires on all
cylinders and works overtime to maintain a frazzled, discomfiting response on
the part of the viewer. Keitel's character is like something out of
Dostoyevsky, a man whose passions and impulses, sexual as well as intellectual,
send him flying in all directions, barely able to function in the most banal
circumstances. (Hard to think of him managing to shave or eat a steak without
throwing an elbow at some assailant, real or imaginary.) And yet, Toback
doesn't romanticize him like a noble savage. Even though the film is completely
in empathy with its protagonist, it tends to pin him down like a specimen,
watching the pierced wing flail.
Robert Downey Jr
and Natasha Wagner are terrific, but the story has a gaping flaw which defies
plausibility, women who discover they have the same boy friend, who has lied
and cheated on them both, and mysteriously, both want him back, despite his
true exposed nature of being a cheating, egotistical, pathological liar. This is a male adolescent fantasy.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Two Girls and a Guy (1997) Liese Spencer from Sight and Sound, February 1999
In 1987, Robert Downey Jr played a compulsive womaniser in James Toback's
sunny romantic comedy The Pick-Up Artist. Over a decade later, actor and
writer/director return to the same territory in Two Girls and a Guy,
which sees
A more sombre and dramatic treatment of infidelity than their former
collaboration, Two Girls and a Guy plays on the off-screen notoriety of
both director and star. Toback is a legendary womaniser,
In fact, the film is not so much a critique of male narcissism as a product
of it. When he wrote him the role, Toback may have believed he was modelling
the feckless Blake on Downey (it's certainly impossible not to view Blake's
smug amorality and little-boy charm in a harshly ironic light given Downey's
history), but the character is closer to his own. What's more, despite its
acute observation, Toback's film is less an apology than a celebration of the
romantic, male egotist. Sure Blake is weak and ridiculous while the women are
strong and dignified, but the bottom line is that they (and we) are supposed to
forgive Blake because he's charming. Whether you do or not depends largely on
whether you're prepared to indulge
In a way,
Powered by Toback's fizzing dialogue and strong performances from all three stars (Heather Graham's cool Carla and Natasha Wagner's streetwise Lou prove more than a match for Downey's showboating charisma), the film sustains its comedy of ideas surprisingly well, working best in a light, comic register. "I'm talking about Mormonism," Wagner's Lou says earnestly, when hinting at a ménage à trois. "I think you mean bigamy," Blake replies.
But somewhere along the line the dramatic tension evaporates. Listening to
Toback's solipsistic characters relentlessly chewing over their desires becomes
an enervating, confessional experience. In the end, Two Girls and a Guy
is a bit like watching a cross between a Harvard student review and a highbrow
edition of Oprah with studio sofas replaced by the Japanese-style
screens of a fashionable
New York City, the present. Black
hoodlum Rich Bower decides to ditch crime in favour of a new career as a rap
artist. In doing so, he finds himself surrounded by white businessmen and a
crop of wealthy white Manhattan teens in thrall to African-American culture: among
them Charlie, whose father is an investment banker, and Will, the estranged son
of the district attorney. These youngsters become the subject of a documentary
by eccentric married film-makers Sam and Terry.
Meanwhile, Rich's childhood
friend Dean, now a successful college basketball player, is offered $50,000 by
a white gambler, Mark, to throw a game. Dean complies but the arrangement is a
sting: Mark is an undercover cop intent on using Dean as a way to prosecute
Rich. Dean confides in his anthropologist girlfriend Greta, who promptly
betrays him to Rich, with whom she has sex. After consulting with boxer Mike
Tyson, Rich decides to have Dean killed and orders Will to shoot him in the
gym. Will completes the job but is photographed leaving the building by Mark.
Mark presents the evidence to
Will's DA father and the pair hatch a deal. The DA will throw a case out of
court that may otherwise damage Mark's career. In return Mark will destroy the
evidence in order to shield Will from justice.
A film about racial politics in
modern-day New York, Black and White hurls itself at the screen
with such abandon that it's in danger of breaking up on impact. What we have
here is a picture of its time; a study in cultural blurring; a tale of the
disintegration that follows integration. If Black and White
sometimes comes over as too undigested to be fully successful, that may be
because its subject matter is itself too confused and volatile to be ordered
into a neat dramatic framework.
As a result, writer-director
James Toback's flawed, fascinating rhapsody gives the impression of discovering
itself as it goes along. Largely improvised by an ensemble cast, the film
starts out as a social portrait of a crop of wealthy uptown white adolescents
who "wanna be black" (aping the dress code, accents and mannerisms of
the ghetto) before switching guises into a noir thriller full of stings and double-crosses and eventual murder. The
transformation is initially jarring, but there is a method to it too. In
involving us in the tale of a black basketball player Dean who is forced to
shop his gangster friend Rich (played by Power, of rap act Wu Tang Clan fame)
to a white NYPD cop Mark, Toback provides the film with its cautionary pay-off.
The end result of white meddling with black culture, he implies, is the death
of a young African-American. The venal, shifty whites (represented here by Ben
Stiller's unstable cop and William Lee Scott's rich-kid killer) get off
scot-free. Push this doctrine to its logical conclusions and it verges on
separatism.
Except that Black and White
is never that blunt. Instead, as with Toback's other notable works (Fingers,
1977; Two Girls and a Guy, 1997), the film is a study in greys: a vérité
whirl that's too close to the meat of its subject to draw any lofty analytical
conclusions. Its dynamic is an indistinct jumble of the real and the fake, of
improvised stylings and subtle plotting. Toback casts his actors against type
(Brooke Shields as a dreadlocked documentary film-maker, model Claudia Schiffer
as a graduate student). He ropes in celebrities (Mike Tyson, Rush Hour
director Brett Ratner) to play what one assumes to be themselves and lands his
characters with non-gender-specific names (married couple Sam and Terry). It
all adds to the sense of pose and artifice, of people who are not what they
seem. This ploy reaches its giddy climax in a scene in which Robert Downey Jr's
bisexual film-maker comes on to Mike Tyson at a New York party. Toback has said
that he had deliberately left Tyson with no idea as to which direction the
conversation would take. Judging from the man's reaction, Toback might just as
well have detonated a bomb beside him.
Black and White is full of such explosions, such moments
of rough-hewn ingenuity. By the same token, it also has scenes where it ambles
or hits flat notes. A study in multiculturalism, Toback's film is something of
a melting-pot itself: mixed-up, messy and teeming with vitality.
Black and White Gerald Peary
Neve
When Will I Be Loved Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Though not as personal as his Black and
White, James Toback's When Will I Be Loved is every bit as visually
curt. The pacing is like that of a screwball comedy, but the film's commentary
is obscenely vicious. The writer-director has always struck me as the seemingly
uncool white dude with the balls to stand alongside brothers and sisters at
poetry slams. Critics have questioned his conflation of black and white
culture, but I can't think of another white director who is as interested in
studying the sociological zones where black and white lives intersect. An
Indiewood version of Indecent Proposal, When Will I Be Loved is a
riveting spoken word experiment about a young hustler, Ford (Frederick Weller),
intent on renting out his girlfriend, Vera (Neve Campbell), to a rich Italian
count (The Sopranos' Dominic Chianese). The film gets off to a rocky
start with Vera and Ford each making their way back to her apartment from
different parts of
When Will I Be
Loved Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
There is a scene near the end of
the second act of Toback's latest in which Vera (an often naked Neve Campbell)
is lolling around her gorgeous
BFI
| Sight & Sound | Muscular Contractions
Peter Biskind interview from Sight
and Sound, February 2005
James Toback is one of
the few true film mavericks. Here Easy Riders, Raging Bulls author Peter Biskind talks to him about
sex scenes in his new When Will I Be Loved.
James Toback is one of the
best-kept secrets in a film world that loves novelty and newbies. Toback is
neither: he was making indie films - real ones, with no money, no time and no
distribution deals, that he both wrote and directed and that speak with the
voice of the film-maker - when most of today's indies were in short pants. He
was a latecomer to the feast of the 1970s. By the time he arrived, with his
1977 masterpiece Fingers, the bones had been picked clean, and the
film, though lauded by Pauline Kael, is only now getting the attention it
deserves.
To a degree, Toback has always
lived in its shadow, a problem compounded by the fact that his films are walks
on the wild side. They aren't 'nice', aren't life-affirming, don't offer
characters to 'root for', don't provide 'life lessons' at every turn. But when
other 1970s directors gave up or drifted into studio production, Toback kept
working, always on his own terms, and by now he has produced a body of work
that includes such electrifying pictures as Two Girls and a Guy
(1997), Black and White (1999) and Bugsy (1991),
which he wrote. He has displayed a genius for discovering young or
underappreciated talent - most conspicuously Robert Downey Jr - and for
bringing out the best in journeyman actors, and has never lost his ability to
offend, to surprise and to venture where others dare not go. His latest, When
Will I Be Loved, is very much a 'Toback film', which is to say it opens
with Neve Campbell masturbating in the shower and goes on from there. But it is
also a departure. Although Toback has created many strong female characters,
including Tisa Farrow's in Fingers, Annette Bening's in Bugsy
and Heather Graham's in Two Girls and a Guy, here he gives us a
woman who plays the tune to which the men dance. And in the process he has
transformed Campbell from just another pretty face into an actress.
Mike Tyson, after
his last losing fight, suggests his life is not all about boxing, that his
heart was no longer in it, and that he didn’t wish to do a disservice to the
sport of boxing by fighting mediocre second or third rate fights any more. But after watching this film that attempts to
get up close and personal to the man, as if the camera is a roving eye and ear
to his own inner conscience, I would have to conclude that it is all about
boxing, as without it, his life is the same shambles as a million other guys,
all of whom end up in prison or dead.
While Tyson reigned in the ring, the youngest heavyweight champion in
history at age 20, and seemingly invincible with that rare combination of speed
and power, not to mention his ferocity in the ring, he rightly acknowledges
that he won most of his fights before they ever started, as his opponents lost
before they ever entered the ring. The
montage of boxing footage where he impressively knocked people out early and
often continues to be impressive, as he won 26 of his first 28 fights by
knockout, 16 of those in the first round, as is his added commentary about what he was thinking when he was
pummeling people. What we witness
afterwards is like reading the history of the fall of the Roman Empire, as the
strongest becomes the weakest simply by not caring anymore, so he allows
himself to feel invincible and grow complacently comfortable, surrounding
himself by what he calls “leeches,” calling himself a leech, as their behavior
resembles blood suckers, eventually sucking the blood out of themselves until
they move on, like parasites, and find a new source of fresh blood.
While there’s not
likely to be a more personally confronting examination of the man, it’s still
sad to see that he confoundingly continues to rationalize away a good portion
of his life, calling it inexperience or stupidity, but still not owning up to
what he did, never even mentioning the impact it had on others or the sport of
boxing. While he’s highly conscious of
that rare company of heavyweight champions, and was extremely proud of his
accomplishment, but he was also well aware of his responsibilities to
“represent” the belt, a subject he never decides to touch upon. He does mention that his fight mentor and
trainer Cus D’Amato revealed to him that what separated Mohammad Ali from the
other great fighters was his character, claiming he didn’t understand this when
he was young, only later in life, yet he never decided to apply this same
character principle to himself. Tyson is
at his worst when he’s describing his view on women, which is so painful to
hear in its adolescent infancy, his male fantasy of complete domination, that
one fears this describes him more completely than any other trait, yet it’s the
one he’s least sorry for, as he remains completely non-repentent about his
3-year prison stint following a rape conviction of a young beauty queen. If he was truly sorry, he might have
considered donating a huge some of money for counseling rape victims, but this
is not how his mind works. He strangely
reveals how it works when he describes the kind of childhood he had, with no
parent around, where all he thought about was himself.
Unfortunately,
Tyson never reveals the kind of insight that is redemptive in quality, where in
admitting his failures, his stature rises as he wants to serve as an example to
others. That’s not happening here. Instead, the level of self-platitudes he
lauds on his personal boxing skills remains boastful, living in the past where
he never comes to terms with what he had or what was lost. Instead he plays the blame game, blaming his
own stupidity, the criminal business practices of others, namely boxing
promoter Don King, who stole a good portion of his millions, or his hangers on
who took advantage of his temporary wealth, but never does he reveal the
reasons why he felt the need to have these hangers on around him at all times,
even after his prison release, which is more likely due to his own insecurities
and low self-esteem, where like a drug he needed the boost from delusions of
grandeur. Interesting that on the night
of the second Evander Holyfield fight when he bit not just one but both ears of
Holyfield, supposedly in retaliation for a series of intentional head butts in
both Holyfield fights that bloodied his face, he went home that night and
smoked weed and drank plenty of alcohol to sleep it off. Tyson, it seems, has had a lifeling battle
with weakness, or perceived weakness, his entire life, and built his initial boxing
career on the motivating belief that he wouldn’t allow anyone to humiliate him
physically, as people had done in the past.
But in doing so, he achieves boxing notoriety, but bypasses the
development of strength of character, which he is still obviously lacking. So rather than be seen as a stronger,
repentent individual in his adultlife who’s learned from his mistakes, he’s
seen instead as a pathetic former addict that still doesn’t know how to fight
his way out of a paper bag.
In
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.
And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
—The Ballad Of
Reading Gaol, Stanza VI by Oscar Wilde, on
the death penalty, written after his release from Reading prison, May 19, 1897
It was a two sport film day for me, the other “Tyson” by James Tobeck, playing in the Un Certain Regard category. Both director and star were on stage to introduce it. Tyson received a standing ovation. The film covers Tyson's career from his day as a kid thief to his final fight in 2005 not avoiding any of the unseemly events in his career--his marriage to Givens and the Barbara Walters interview with the two of them, his three-year prison term for rape, beating up Don King, biting the ear of Holyfield and his great promiscuity. Tyson is a garrulous interview subject. Tobeck embellishes the film with artistic flourish. There are a handful of other films in the market on boxing, including a feature film on Sonny Liston starring Vince Rhymes.
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [3/6]
Mike Tyson
is in a reflective – even tearful – mood in this documentary made by his friend
James
Toback, in whose ‘Black and White’ the boxer appeared in 1999. You could
describe the film, which marries archive footage with a new interview with
Tyson, as a ghost-written autobiography expressed with a post-analysis tone
– a tone that may or may not be linked to the fact that Tyson spoke to
Toback soon after he left rehab.
Tyson is the film’s sole voice and he talks freely through the good and bad
times, from a criminal childhood in Brooklyn to the messy end of his career,
via the death of his elderly trainer Cus D’Amato, his failed marriage to Robin
Givens and his conviction for rape. He comes across as mellow and apologetic
but reserves anger for the woman he was accused of raping (‘a wretched swine of
a woman’) and Don King (‘a slimy, reptilian motherfucker’). Toback steers Tyson
through every triumph and disaster you want to hear about, never pretending
that the platform belongs to anyone but the man they used to call Iron Mike.
Mike Tyson Excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates’ essay on Tyson from her website, Celestial Timepiece, originally published as "Kid Dynamite: Mike Tyson is the most exciting heavyweight fighter since Muhammad Ali" in Life magazine, March, 1987, reprinted in full here: Joyce Carol Oates - Mike Tyson and also here: (Woman) Writer : Occasions and Opportunities
Mike Tyson, a boy
warrior, has become legendary, in a sense, before there is a legend to define
him. And never has the collective will of a crowd—the very nearly palpable wish
of a crowd—been more powerfully expressed than it is tonight in Las Vegas. With
his much-publicized 27-0 record as a professional boxer, of which twenty-five
victories are knockouts (fifteen in the first round, several within sixty
seconds), with so much expectation centered upon him as the “new hope” of
heavyweight boxing, Tyson recalls the young Jack Dempsey, who fought his most
spectacular fights before winning the heavyweight title. Like Dempsey in the upward
trajectory of his career, Tyson suggests a savagery only symbolically contained
within the brightly illuminated elevated ring, with its referee, its resident
physician, its scrupulously observed rules, regulations, customs, and rituals.
Like Dempsey he has the power to galvanize crowds as if awakening in them the
instinct not merely for raw aggression and the mysterious will to do hurt that
resides, for better or worse, in the human soul, but for suggesting
incontestable justice of such an instinct . . .
Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [3/6]
The mostly
first-person documentary Tyson isn’t
a dud, exactly, but it does feel like a missed opportunity. Director James
Toback exhibits his subject, boxing legend Mike
Tyson, as a man of world-weary depths. Yet the multipaneled split screens
and overlapping audio used to illuminate Tyson’s inner conflicts come off as
stylistic gloss on an emotional void (or, better, lipstick on a pit bull). The
film is all calculation, though that doesn’t make it any less of an engrossing
talkathon.
Something draws us near—perhaps Toback’s own fascination, at once self-serving
and empathetic, with his soft-spoken protagonist.
Tyson’s effeminate
voice has always made for an odd pairing with his brutish bulk, an inborn
contradiction that he seems to revel in and expand upon in life. His
Maori-inspired facial tattoo is key to both his persona and the film: It’s
fashion statement first and self-expression second, about as believable in its
overall genuineness as Tyson’s conversion to Islam during his early-’90s prison
stint for rape.
One of Toback’s
more blatantly ridiculous visuals shows a pensive Iron Mike standing at sunset
on a windblown beach, a PR-positive evocation of a misspent life. Yet the
sentiment strangely takes hold, and one can’t help but want to toss this
bruised and battered underdog a redemptive bone.
James Toback has always seemed
like a documentary filmmaker trapped in a narrative filmmaker’s body. The most
exciting parts of his films have always been those moments when reality
intrudes: Mike Tyson suddenly punching out Robert Downey, Jr., in Black and
White immediately comes to mind, but there are others. So it comes as
little surprise that the maverick director’s documentary portrait Tyson
might just be the best thing he’s done to date. Featuring an extended interview
with the former heavyweight champ at his most candid and eloquent, Tyson
is unafraid to just put its subject center stage and let him go.
Toback does give us archival footage of Tyson’s famous fights, as he should,
and the sight of Tyson at the height of his powers, like a small hurricane of
anger let loose in the ring, still carries with it an extraordinary charge. And
this is where Toback’s narrative skills come into play: Archival footage plays
out almost as if we’re watching Iron Mike’s own memories, and it helps give his
journey shape.
Tyson admits that he’s a recovering addict, and one wonders to what extent
Toback, a man who’s famously struggled with his own addictions over the years,
is using the film as a kind of exorcism of his own demons. But there’s
something genuinely confrontational about the way Toback films the champ. Tyson
talks about all the ways in which he’s changed, and insists on a newfound
humility, but Toback’s direct style suggests that the filmmaker doesn’t see him
as a fallen, broken soul at all. With this film, Mike Tyson becomes yet another
of the unapologetic fuck-ups that people Toback’s films. Iron Mike may be
repentant, but Toback seems to suggest that it was all worth it for the story.
He might just be right.
In resaponse, reader Steve Lott said:
As the assistant manager of Mike Tyson from 1985 - 1988 I was shocked at the lies and fabrications Mike told in this movie. 1. He said he was always an addict - 2. He was always an alcoholic - 3. He always had demons - 4. Managers Jacobs and Cayton were "slave masters" and signed him when he was underage. - It is obvious that Mike's new manager, Harlan Werner, is just as devious as Robin Givens, Don King and Shelly Finkel. Mike completely ignored the period 1985 -1988 when he was hired to do network TV commercials for Pepsi Cola, Nintendo Video and Kodak Film. Not enough - he was hired by the New York City Police Department, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration to do PSA's. The Police and FBI do not usually hire addicts, or those who have demons, as role models. Regarding Robin Givens, he said simply they were too young to get married. He must have forgotten that he has already gone on record that she lied about being pregnant. My entire correspondence with Werner, the film's producers, as well as documents and photos proving Mike's huge hero status with Cayton and Jacobs may be found at this website: www.cyberboxingzone.com/.../00004333.htm
Steve Lott, Tyson Assistant Manager 1985-1988
filmcritic.com
(Jay Antani) review [3/5]
As James Toback's Tyson opens, what hits you first is
the technique. The idea behind the project is pretty simple -- essentially,
this is an extended interview with infamous boxer Mike Tyson as he
reminiscences about his roots, and on the highs and lows of his career and
private life. But in crafting what is otherwise a straightforward personal
testimony by the former (and disgraced) heavyweight, Toback opts for a dynamic,
eye-filling presentation: He employs split-screens that balance the interview
with archival photos and video footage that together form a mosaic of one man's
recollections. Sometimes the audio behind those recollections is layered together,
one track echoing away, then replaced by another that offers a revised version
in its place.
The overall effect is the cinematic equivalent of the vagaries of memory, less
a conventional biography and more a scrapbook of sorts unfolding on the screen.
The boxer often chokes back tears, acknowledging his mentors, or spews vitriol
as he confronts unresolved resentments and bitterness towards those he feels
wronged him. Tyson's most engrossing moments occur when Toback
juxtaposes the boxer's own blow-by-blow of a fight in sync with the fight's
actual footage -- it's a brilliant example of the subjective and the objective
smashed together.
Tyson begins at the beginning, recalling what it was like growing up in drug-
and crime-infested
D'Amato's death in 1985, just as Tyson's boxing trajectory was taking off, set
up the central and tragic irony in his life story -- that Tyson went on to
enjoy the fruits of D'Amato's mentoring, but, without the moral counterbalance
that his trainer provided, he rapidly fell victim to his own worst tendencies.
We're all familiar with Tyson, the media sensation, but Tyson takes aim
at the shadow side of fame: the steady attrition of discipline, the reckless
dissipation, the disastrous marriage to Robin Givens, his rape conviction and
prison term, the subsequent slide of his record, the emergence of his status as
a pop culture joke and cautionary tale, ahead of his retirement from boxing in
2005, and, now, a chastened figure eager for redemption.
For its stylistic and psychological ambitions, Tyson is an easy enough
film to appreciate, but not an easy film to embrace. Toback intends to humanize
his subject, to distill the "real" Tyson from the media distortions,
but something about this exercise feels disingenuous and, worse yet, rife with
sports-movie clichés. Were it not for Toback's inventive filmmaking, Tyson's
interview -- his insistence on explaining himself, to express remorse for his
past and readiness to live cleanly from here on out -- smacks of
self-promotion. Parts of Tyson feel, almost amusingly, like a trumped-up
infomercial for the man, meant to brighten his public image.
Connect the dots that this documentary lays out, and you've got the
beat-by-beat of every run-of-the-mill sports movie ever made in which the
superstar athlete, undone by vanity and hubris, finds himself broken, alone,
and humbled. True, you can't change the "script" of Tyson's life, no
matter how predictable it is, but where "real" life differs from
"reel" life is in the depth, wisdom, and humility that a worthy
subject can bring to the table; Tyson may be the case of a subject not
quite ready for primetime, a man still smarting from his past wounds, too
narcissistic, frankly, to be very interesting.
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
No filmmaker I know has gotten as close to a professional athlete as James Toback gets to Mike Tyson in his new documentary. Early in Tyson, Toback uses split screens to show different parts of his subject’s face, and the effect struck me as too flash until I grasped the connection between those boxes and the urgency of Tyson’s mission: to rearrange the pieces of his life, bring order to his turmoil—tell his story. Tyson is all Tyson, an 88-minute stream-of-consciousness monologue that has you by turns sympathetic, perplexed, appalled, and enthralled. Even when Toback cuts to interviews from 25 years ago, there’s no loss in fluidity: The pieces are joined. The film is a pipeline into Tyson’s inner world—a dangerous place that all at once makes sense.
At the heart of Tyson is a contradiction: Its subject, who grew up in a fractured home in a violent neighborhood, trusted no one, confided nothing, and learned to channel childhood humiliation into “outsmarting and out-timing” people—into what he calls the “art of skulduggery.” Yet here he is in close-up pouring out what he thinks and feels and thought and felt in a high, gentle, lisping voice. It’s as if he’d been waiting for Toback to come along—Toback the effusive, brilliant, pickup-slash-bullshit artist who cultivates in himself the Maileresque White Negro, who revels in public humiliation as if convinced it makes you stronger.
In 1999, Toback invited the disgraced boxer to play himself in a party scene in the polarized and polarizing Black and White, then directed Robert Downey Jr., as a gay producer, to sidle up and proposition the champ—who went after Downey for real. Toback, who loves controlled chaos, rejoiced at this improvisation, and Tyson—who always had a touch of the drama queen—must have had an inkling that one day he’d be able to bare his soul in the care of this primal therapist. Can this really be Tyson—the man who nearly bit off a boxer’s ear, twice—describing himself as a shy weakling adolescent scared of bullies, putting all his emotions into raising pigeons? The punch line of the story (literally) is when a neighborhood thug wrings the neck of a beloved bird and Tyson scores his first-ever knockdown. After that, everyone must have seemed a potential pigeon-murderer. Juvenile detention liberated him. It introduced him to boxing, as well as to Cus D’Amato, the surrogate father with the rambling upstate house who taught him to be a “spiritual warrior,” and whose death would set the stage for Tyson’s infinite emotional regression. Footage of his fights in those days evokes primal terror: You’ve never seen such hard punches thrown so fast. Tyson’s narration knocks the wind out of you, too. It’s driving and incantatory; it puts you inside his head as he performs the sacred ritual of breaking in his gloves and then locks eyes with his opponent. (“They make a mistake when they look down for a tenth of a second …”) You hardly believe what you’re hearing: “I aim at the back of my opponent’s head … fantasize going through the head … Every punch is thrown with bad intention.”
Women are his Achilles’ heel: Great men, Tyson avers, conquer famous women and realize too late “how much they take from you.” The issue remains a source of confusion to the champ, who longs for a strong woman, perhaps a CEO, to take care of and protect him and also let him dominate her sexually. Of the legendary interview in which his then-wife, Robin Givens, told Barbara Walters that her life as a newlywed was “pure hell,” Tyson wonders how he could have sat there in silence, thereby implying assent. He was “a pig,” he admits, but adds: “We were just two kids. The whole world was in our business … Just kids … Just kids.” As for his rape conviction, Tyson continues to plead not guilty—and given his confessions in Tyson of other bad behavior, I believe he believes that. I also believe he’s too damaged to feel much empathy. Perhaps he’s so brilliant at bringing us into his head because he hasn’t yet learned to see himself through anyone else’s eyes.
Toback’s Tyson has a different energy than the fighter we see in flashback. His face, even adorned with Maori warrior tattoos, is wide open. There is no hint of the man once caught on camera yelling at a heckler, “I’ll fuck you in the ass, you faggoty white boy … I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.” This Tyson is the one seen telling a TV interviewer after losing his final fight that he only did it for the money and he’s sorry to have let people down: “I don’t have that ferocity. I’m not an animal anymore.” What he is at the end of Tyson is unformed, a father looking forward to being a grandfather. Toback’s camera holds on him, as if asking, “What is a man who defined himself by acting out when he sheds the role of his life?” He is back to thinking about pigeons, waiting for the release of this movie and a new kind of celebrity.
Alone
in the ring at Cannes Chaz Ebert at
The film is fascinating because Tyson recalls and analyzes his
life from childhood in
Toback sits him in front of the camera and lets it roll, or at least he gives the impression of letting it roll. You wonder how much of it is edited, but Tyson comes across as articulate and reflective. He is mainly calm and thoughtful as he dissects aspects of his life and career. He even expresses remorse for some of it, but not in the case of Desiree Washington, for which he spent three years behind bars for a rape conviction he denies. "I was abusive to some women, but not to her," he claims in the film.
"Tyson" is also fascinating for the history shown in the footage from Tyson's first knockout to his crushing defeat at the hands of Buster Douglas. One scene shows Muhammad Ali whispering to Tyson to get revenge on Trevor Berbick for defeating Ali. And of course there's footage of the infamous ear-biting incident with Evander Holyfield. Interspersed with the boxing footage is his take on his relationships with women, including that train wreck of an interview by Barbara Walters of Tyson with Robin Givens.
The film is an unflinching look at brutal prizefights and out-of-control press conferences where Tyson was full of rage. When asked why he allowed Toback such unfettered access to him, he replies, "I was in rehab and was on my way to an AA meeting when Toback called and said he wanted to make this movie about my life. I didn't have anything else to do. I wasn't going anywhere." He said he had known Toback for 20 years and trusted him, but had no idea the film would be so personal. Tyson says it made him feel "vulnerable."
Can a person be trusted to fully analyze the lessons of his own
life? Or does that take some interpretation by others? At the press conference
following the
The film is shot on digital video; Toback uses too much split-screen for my taste. But you don't watch this movie for the aesthetics. Some of Toback's films seem to be more about Toback than anything else, but they also offer a glimpse of redemption. You can see why the arc of Tyson's life interested Toback. Some of the boxer's life mirrors the director's his own excesses, his fall from grace, and his redemption in sobriety.
So what are we left with at the end of the film? Tyson says, not very helpfully, "Yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery." We're left wondering who and what Tyson is today. When he walked into the theater here last night, he looked puzzled to even be here. Today I asked him how he would write the rest of the script of his life if he had that power. He said the answer to that is more complicated than he could give.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Tyson (0) Sight and Sound, April 2009
Little White Lies magazine Matt Bochenski
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review
The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Nathan Rabin
Slant Magazine review Andrew Schenker
And now, Mike Tyson the movie! Tim Dahlberg, national sports columnist for The Associated Press, at Fanhouse
Karina Longworth at
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Cinematical (James Rocchi) review
Tyson Allan Hunter at
'Tyson': A
Charismatic Ex-Champ - TIME
Richard Corliss,
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3.5/5]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Whitney Borup
Salon.com
[Andrew O'Hehir] at
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B] also seen here: DVD Talk
Mike Tyson Just Wants To Be Loved Henry Stewart from The L Magazine
Shadowboxing With Mike Tyson John Jurgensen from The Wall Street Journal
Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
The Independent (Toby Green) review [3/5]
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Didn't
seem him fight? Now's your chance to buy a ticket to see ... Tim Dahlberg from The Chicago Tribune,
Director
extends trip with Tyson -- chicagotribune.com Lauren Viera from The Chicago Tribune,
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Mike Tyson Film
Takes a Swing at His Old Image Tim
Arango from The New York Times,
Seduced And Abandoned Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily
The glorious clash between commerce and culture that is the very
definition of the Cannes Film Festival (and market) comes into wonderfully
stark focus in the entertaining, amusing and occasionally insightful
documentary Seduced
And Abandoned, which tracks director James Toback and actor Alec Baldwin as they try
and raise money for a new film project.
The pair claim to have plans to make an updated variation of Last
Tango In Paris, starring
Seduced And Abandoned – taken from Alec Baldwin’s comment
that “the movie business is the worst lover you’ve ever had, in the sense that
you are seduced and abandoned over and over again” – is a delight for movie
insiders, not least for the access and interviews that the pair manage to get.
It was picked up by HBO prior to its
Toback – whose credit list includes The Pick-Up Artist, Fingers
and documentary Tyson, which played at
After a bit of background about the Cannes Film Festival itself –
with contributions from the festival’s artistic director Thierry Fremaux and
Positif critic Michel Ciment – they head into the market for meetings with
various sellers, including Nu Image’s Avi Lerner as well as Mark Damon and
Jeremy Thomas. Pretty quickly their budget aspirations are knocked on the head,
with the pairing on
Much of this stuff is played for laughs, though the film gets more interesting and insightful as they sit down with Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Francis Ford Coppola (who is thoughtful and moving) to talk about directing and making artistically driven projects. Perhaps more surreal are the amusing but ultimately useless meetings they have with millionaires such as Taki Theodoracopulos and Jean ‘Johnny’ Pigozzi.
Equally fascinating are the scenes of them pitching the project to the likes of Berenice Bejo, Diane Kruger and Jessica Chastain, while a long chat with Ryan Gosling confirms how smart, funny and savvy he is. He tells great stories about the tough and funny realities of breaking into the acting business.
Some great clips help the engaging pace of the film, and while a
little scattershot at times with the sidetrack into the nature of film-making
with Scorsese, Coppola and Bertolucci clearly more fascinating to Toback and
Baldwin than the trawl through the marketplace…amusing though that aspect it.
For
Cannes
2013: Seduced and Abandoned - first look review Peter Bradshaw at
Director James Toback is preaching to the choir with this one:
it's hard to think of a movie which would be more eagerly gobbled up at
His leading player here is a man who is becoming one of the most intriguing figures in showbusiness: Alec Baldwin, who is suffering from career-anxiety of his own.
Taking as their cue Orson Welles's remark about 95 per cent of
his life having been about chasing the money to make films, rather than
actually making them, Toback and Baldwin tour around Cannes taking meetings
with the biggest players with the biggest wallets, soliciting serious cash for
a movie idea: Last Tango in Tikrit (inspired by Last Tango in Paris). Set in
However, there is an ungallant suggestion that Ms Campbell could be ditched for someone more bankable, if some high-roller came through with enough wonga. The pair have some intriguing conversations about the business with people like Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorsese, Jessica Chastain and an exceptionally articulate and forthcoming Ryan Gosling.
Is Toback serious about Last Tango in Tikrit? Or is it just his sneaky metaphor for getting screwed by the movie business, without butter? A more pertinent question is: does Alec Baldwin seriously think Last Tango In Tikrit has a snowball's chance of getting made? Or is this whole film just a 100-minute showreel presentation for his projected career re-entry into the serious business of movies, after a triumphant run in the hit TV comedy 30 Rock, which made him a brand name once again.
The intense glamour and glory of film success makes failure, or just anything short of success, or indeed the memory of former success, feel like a living death. Fascinatingly, Toback asks people ranging from Diane Kruger to Jeff Katzenberg what they think about death and if they are prepared for it. The question is good-naturedly laughed off, but the respondents look astonished to be even asked. It could well be the first time they have seriously thought about it in their lives.
For Toback, this moment in the Cannes sun (or rather, given the
current weather, rain) might well be his calling card back to the big time -
although it is a measure of how mortifying the business can be that a director
like him needs a calling card. As for
David Thomson The New
Republic,
Richard and Mary Corliss from Time magazine
Kevin Jagernauth at
Eric Kohn at
Jada Yuan from The Vulture
Cannes
2013, Day Four: The Coen brothers return to the festival with a folk-rock
flashback Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes
2013: Dark mirrors | British Film Institute
Geoff Andrew from Sight &
Sound,
Anne Thompson
Thompson on
Daily | Cannes 2013 | James Toback’s SEDUCED AND ABANDONED David Hudson at Fandor
'Seduced and Abandoned' Director James Toback on Turning the ... Greg Kilday interview at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 19, 2013
Matt Mueller interviews Toback for Thompson on Hollywood, May 21, 2013
Seduced
and Abandoned: Cannes Review
Jordan Mintzer from The
Leslie Felperin at
Tobia,
Drew
SEE
YOU NEXT TUESDAY
USA (82 mi) 2013 (Walk-out)
I walked out of the film after about a half hour, after the mother
called her mentally ill pregnant daughter a bitch, disowned her, and told
her she hoped she had her baby in a ditch, finding it a complete waste of
time. There wasn't a single scene that
held my interest or gave me any reason to watch further, as I found it an ugly
and hateful film that uses a mocking and derisive tone towards the exaggerated
caricatures that inhabit the film, each one a sorry excuse for a human
being. That people found this funny only makes it more offensive. Only lovers of Todd Solondz will appreciate
this thoroughly obnoxious film, one of the more vapid and emptyheaded films
seen all year.
See
You Next Tuesday | Chicago Reader
Ben Sachs
American movie comedies invoke taboo subject matter so blithely now that the genre seems to have lost its ability to shock, which makes this genuinely discomforting debut feature (2013) by writer-director Drew Tobia all the more remarkable. A mentally ill, socially inept young woman in her third trimester (Eleanore Pienta in a fearless performance) goes off the rails after falling out with her mother, a recovering alcoholic who's only slightly better adjusted. Evicted from her apartment, the daughter barges into the life of her estranged younger sister, an obnoxious lesbian art-punk mired in an unhealthy relationship with an older black woman. The tone veers unpredictably (though never sloppily) between grotesque farce, sensitive chamber drama, and psychological horror, communicating the characters' loose grip on reality and making us confront our conflicted feelings toward people who seem beyond redemption.
Trailer Watch: See You Next Tuesday | Filmmaker Magazine Scott Macaulay from Filmmaker magazine, August 11, 2014
A real treat, a genuine discovery, a whirling dervish of a movie, some kind of roiling central-Brooklyn freak show, a film so searing with rip-your-throat-out and spit-on-your-grave anger, the indignity of mental illness, the messiness of race in this fast-gentrifying strip of American near-coastal land that it seems to have a pulse all its own; it feels alive in the ways only superior works of art can.” That’s Filmmaker‘s Brandon Harris on Drew Tobia’s See You Next Tuesday, a film that has multiple fans here at the magazine. There’s me, for one — I was on the jury at Indie Memphis that gave it the screenplay and acting awards. Sarah Salovaara likes it too. Here’s what she wrote when introducing her interview with writer/director Tobia, actress Eleonore Pienta and producer Rachel Wolther:
Once in a while, a film comes across your radar that plays so perfectly to your sensibilities, it seems someone handcrafted it with you in mind. These sorts of films are usually small, personal endeavors, that — preference-pending — are too niche for mass audiences, and struggle to find the complimentary festival or forum that will realize their loaded potential. Drew Tobia’s See You Next Tuesday is the lastest entry in this unjustly underground canon. A cult hit in the making if there ever was one, See You Next Tuesday concerns Mona, a pregnant, loudmouthed, lonesome and unhinged grocery store cashier, inhabited by the utterly uninhibited Eleanore Pienta.
As Mona spirals toward her nebulous due date, her relationships with her negligent mother May (Dana Eskelson), megalomaniacal sister Jordan (Molly Plunk), and Jordan’s do-gooder girlfriend Sylve (Keisha Zollar) coalesce and crumble in alternate measure. For all the film’s hysteria, Tobia never loses sight of the bonds between Mona and the three other women, as well as situational practicalities, like how on earth Mona is fit to care for a child when she herself is still defecating on the bedroom floor.
See You Next Tuesday | Film Review | Slant Magazine David Lee Dallas
If the quasi-genre of "uncomfortable comedy" has been around for long enough now that it's become fairly normalized (especially on television, with shows like Girls and Louie racking up Emmy nominations and wide demographic appeal), See You Next Tuesday is a confident step into a new frontier of what could be called "unbearable comedy." Drew Tobia's film is an aggressively bleak study of poverty, addiction, mental illness, and family trauma. It's also uproariously funny, but its laughs don't come with an aftertaste of cynicism so much as they are the aftertaste of cynicism.
A good example of this is a scene between insufferable faux-artist Jordan (Molly Plunk) and her girlfriend, endlessly patient writer Sylve (Keisha Zollar): Jordan tries to persuade Sylve from going to work by getting in her pants; Sylve counters with a jab at Jordan's privileged joblessness; Jordan responds by initiating some seriously uncomfortable Mammy/Miss Scarlett roleplay that the African-American Sylve acquiesces to surprisingly quickly. This is first and foremost a pretty damning micro-thesis on the interplay between sexual, racial, and class boundaries: Jordan can manipulate the former system to such an extent that she not only perpetuates lingering damage from the latter two, but makes Sylve complicit in her own shaming. Or does she? The ambiguity of the scene, in terms of consent and the characters' own self-awareness, results in a shuffling from disquieting to darkly humorous and back again.
Jordan and Sylve aren't the protagonists of See You Next Tuesday; that would be Jordan's sister, Mona (Eleanore Pienta), an abrasive and friendless young woman who works a demeaning job as a grocery store cashier and is pregnant to the point of bursting, though neither she nor anyone else ever mentions a father. Mona's only close relationship is with her mother, May (Dana Eskelson), a recovering addict with a sailor's mouth, and even that friendship is tenuous at best: Mother berates daughter more than she encourages her, then quivers with need as soon as Mona steps away. Mona begins the film just barely getting by, and when things quickly go from bad to worse, she becomes increasingly reliant on her semi-estranged sister, eventually making the disastrous decision to move into Jordan and Sylve's apartment.
The setting of Greenpoint, Brooklyn serves an important function in Tobia's story; the context of gentrification hovers over the screen like a cloud, but just when it seems like the filmmakers are going to side-step the issue altogether, a hipster-house-party sequence arrives as a late-film centerpiece. Previous understandings of Mona, Jordan, and Sylve are simultaneously affirmed and dissolved in this new setting. The former's behavior reaches a horrific nadir (antagonizing every person who tries to make conversation with her, drinking to oblivion with her baby due at any hour) while also becoming more legible, even justifiable. In a world where she's condescended to by the ever-expanding intelligentsia and antagonized by the rest of her community (from the trash-talking girls she works with to her apartment's masturbating vigilante), self-abnegation and psychosis are Mona's only survival tools. Similarly, humor is the balm that keeps See You Next Tuesday from devolving into mere misery porn.
The
Comic See You Next Tuesday Nails the Broke-Ass Life ... Calium Marsh from The Village Voice
Hammer To Nail [Mark Lukenbill]
So So Gay [David William Upton]
See
You Next Tuesday and the underground among us ... Ben Sachs from The Reader
kalafudra.com [Lena Lisa Vogelmann]
Cinema
Head Cheese [Greg Goodsell]
Indie Memphis Prizes Unheralded Indies in 16th Edition ... Brandon Harris from Filmmaker magazine, November 10, 2013
Facets : Cinematheque Schedule: See You Next Tuesday
Why the Fuck Didn't You Laugh, Then? - The L Magazine Mark Asch interview August 13, 2014
“I Can't Hate Anyone Unless I Love Them:” Drew Tobia ... Sarah Salovaara interview from Filmmaker magazine, December 5, 2013
The Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]
Toronto Film Scene [William Brownridge]
'See You Next Tuesday,' a Brooklyn Indie - NYTimes.com Nicolas Rapold
See You Next Tuesday (film) - Wikipedia, the free ...
This is a surprisingly moving film, told in the manner of a
sports documentary, but having a much more personal and complex message. Narrated by Vlade Divac, he takes us through
the rousingly successful early years of playing for the Yugoslavian National
basketball team (Dražen Petrović, Vlade Divac,
Toni
Kukoč, Dino Rađa, Žarko
Paspalj), where in the late 1980’s they began to resemble the “Showtime”
Lakers teams in the NBA, as they literally walked over their opposition with a
skillset second to none, putting on a clinic every game in becoming the best
national team from Europe, taking second in the 1988 Olympic games, beating the
USA, the last all-amateur team sent, before losing to the Russians, the
eventual gold medal winners. But after
that, for three years in a row, they were the winners in
After the season was over, they’d return to Yugoslavia and
reassemble the national team, where their success was legendary, bringing the
teammates closer together as friends, as they instinctually communicated on the
court in an effortless manner. But by
1990, something happened to change all that, as different factions were
breaking away from the Yugoslavian Federation, some declaring themselves
independent republics, where ethnic tensions surfaced in the form of
nationalistic flags that began appearing at sporting events instead of the
national flag that they played for.
After they won the 1990 World Championships, people rushed on the floor,
one of whom was carrying a Croatian flag.
Divac was captured on film taking the flag away from the guy and
throwing it away, which became propaganda fodder for the Croatians, as it did
with the Serbs, while Divac has stated he had no political motives and thought
it was insulting after they won a championship playing for the flag of the
entire nation. Both sides amped up the
rhetoric and eventually went to all out civil war in 1991 after the fall of the
Soviet Union, which had a permanent effect on his relationship with is former
teammates, as Petrović refused to
speak to him after the flag incident.
Despite several attempts by Divac to heal the wounds and repair the
damage, their friendship effectively ended.
While they continued to play together in the NBA, they refused to speak,
even with the Lakers going to the NBA championship in 1991, eventually losing
to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, and after Petrović was traded to the New Jersey
Nets where he became an instant star and the league’s best 3-point
shooter. In 1993, however, Petrović was killed in an auto accident, where
the hatred between Croats and Serbs was still so pronounced, Divac was not
welcome at the funeral. This obviously
weighed heavily with Divac, as he is seen years later returning to
Once Brothers ESPN 30 for 30
Yugoslavia national basketball team - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Plymouth, England, the 40s. Jazz
trumpeter Max sells his horn to a music-shop owner who lets him play it one
last time. The tune reminds the owner of a record he has come by. Max
recognises the music, and tells the owner the tale of the greatest pianist who
ever lived: 1900, whom Max met aboard the USS Virginian.
Named for his birth year,
foundling 1900 was raised aboard the ocean liner and never left it.
Miraculously able to play piano from a young age, 1900 became the ship's
entertainer. In 1927 Max came to work on the ship, and during his time aboard
Max saw 1900 beat 'Jelly Roll' Morton in a jazz duel, got him recorded and watched
as he fell in love with an unnamed girl. 1900 smashed the one copy of the
recording; Max hid the pieces in the ship's piano. Later 1900 considered
leaving the ship, but turned back. Max left the ship in 1933. In the present,
the now-derelict Virginian is due for dynamiting; the shop owner
had bought the piano at the port. Max searches for his friend on the ship.
Finally, 1900 appears and explains why he cannot leave. Distraught, Max leaves
and the ship is blown up. The shop owner gives Max his trumpet back.
This first English-language movie
by Giuseppe Tornatore, director of Cinema Paradiso, has been
dubbed already by wags Ship of Fool: it centres on a solitary man
ship-bound for almost 50 years, even though he's supposedly the greatest
pianist who ever lived. Touting itself as a fable, this blodged, peculiar,
overloud post-Titanic epic hints it has a compelling metaphor
somewhere in it, but the more we try - striving to be agnostic about
Tornatore's humour-free sentimentality and leaden ear for English speech
patterns - the less we find.
Star Tim Roth coolly junks the
unplayable notion of 1900 as a placeless genius and goes for a watchable
performance as an unassuming murmur of a fellow - which unfortunately shows up
the graceless mugging everyone else gets away with. As Jelly Roll Morton, who
claimed to have invented jazz, Clarence Williams III at least brings real
dignity to his cameo (which demands a genuine historical black figure be
humiliated by a pasty white fiction). However, this implicit racial slur is
dwarfed by the broader contempt the film seems to have for the music at the
story's core.
Since it costs 1900 no effort to
gain his musical gift, it never feels as if it matters to anyone whether it is
preserved. Certainly the record we hear of 1900 playing is highly anachronistic
- deeper and plusher than any hi-fi reproduction the real-life Morton had
access to. Pre-electric recording today has immense force through our sense of
the dead all but physically caressing these objects. To amplify or boost such
documents is to dilute their power as mementoes - so paradoxically this story
about music could perhaps only have worked as a silent film. Instead, 1900's
disc blares out at us in full Dolby surround-sound. Give or take dabs of
post-production crackle and wobble, it's not different enough from the film's
live performances to convey any sense of loss. Besides, how is it that, of all
the people who heard 1900 play, his 'legend' only haunts one listener, Max?
Only three moments of phantasmagoria
puncture the platitudes. The first is when Max meets 1900 during a storm at sea
and they careen together on an unmoored piano around the ballroom and down
corridors, past shoes set out to be shined which shuffle and slither on the
plunging deck. The second is the vista of New York 1900 sees when he's about to
leave the ship, a matte which is no 20s sprawl but a sinister H. R. Giger
Babylon, with seagulls like pterosaurs menacingly circling.
The third haunting vision is the engine room of 1900's infanthood, a firelit Tartarus. If 1900's piano-playing had been imagined so as to encompass this Dantean hell, 1900's first apprehended soundworld, only someone like black free-jazz titan Cecil Taylor could possibly have performed the soundtrack. And Taylor, a world-historical legend with a genuine claim to the greatest-ever title, is a pianist even Jelly Roll Morton might have taken defeat from, honour unsullied.
Australia (52 mi) 2001
Whispering In Our
Hearts Adrian Martin from Rouge, May 2005
One of the immediately striking things about Mitch Torres’ Whispering In Our Hearts: The Mowla Bluff Massacre (2001) is the rich variety of types of imagery in it: lyrical landscape photography, experimental techniques, archival footage, home movies, ‘dramatic reconstruction’, talking-heads interviews and testimonies, alternation of colour and black-and-white, still photographs, documents and maps. Isn’t this mixture par for the course in most documentary these days, particularly historical inquiries of the sort that appear weekly on television?
Whispering In Our Hearts is different. It is as if the subject of the film forced Torres to question the very form of documentary, encouraging her to open this form out in a fresh, probing, heterogenous way.
The film is about a shameful and tragic episode in Australian
history: the Mowla Bluff Massacre of 1916, near Broome in
The challenge Torres faced was: how to make an investigative documentary about a case such as this? In the era of Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and of current affairs television programs like Real Crime, there is an enormous, almost phantasmatic investment in the business of nailing down hard evidence in a word, a sight, an idly recorded ‘moment of truth’. But what can count as evidence in the case of Mowla Bluff? What materials can we place on the table in our accounting of this history, or indeed any history?
Over the haunting landscape shots which open the film, we hear the words, and read them subtitled in English: ‘The rib bones are scattered all around. A lot of people were killed here.’ The poignancy of the project comes from the fact that, although few viewers would be inclined to doubt the powerful veracity of this testimony, there is nothing to, in whitefella terms, ‘back it up’. The past is covered over by denial, suppression, forgetting, as well as the natural oblivion wrought by time on the landscape. There is no evidence that Torres can simply go out and film. The recent important book by Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, Australian Cinema After Mabo (Cambridge University Press, 2004), posits the prevalence of a psychic and political ‘aftershock’ that today accompanies the sight of the ‘haunted’ Australian landscape – but the dispute around the Mowla Bluff Massacre, like all similar cases of systematic extermination, raises the question of who, exactly, is in the position to intuit and receive this salutary shock, as opposed to those who register nothing of the sort.
At the centre of Whispering In Our Hearts are two men, Johnny Watson and Peter Clancy. They are gripped by a compulsion to, in a sense, beat the whitefellas at their own game: to find and establish the evidence of the Mowla Bluff Massacre. ‘My feeling is, it’s still there’, says one; ‘I’m searching, really searching, to find evidence,’ adds the other. We see and follow their journey through the land: in a car, on foot, eventually in a helicopter. We enter into both their mission and the rhythms of their daily lives. With enormous affection and respect, Torres records both the admirable and the comical aspects of their quest – as when they signal to the cameraman, ‘Put your gun down please, you’re shooting me all the time.’ And we cannot also fail to note the quixotic, impossible, hopeless character of their own investigation. The land yields – in concrete, physical terms – nothing, no sign of the distant, traumatic past, no matter how truly haunted it is.
The film could have ground to a halt at this tragic impasse. But its accounting for, and recounting of, history is far from over. When there is no evidence, what remains to be done? Precisely the story, the legend – and the constantly renewed, precious process of its retelling. It is to this process that Whispering In Our Hearts so richly contributes – as much in its restless investigation of different visual and aural textures or modes, as in its cinéma-vérité observation. It builds to the very moving scene of a community memorial, where the solemnity of the spoken testimonies, and the quiet monumentality of the plaque erected, is balanced by the quotidian lead-up of shopping for materials (in daggy fast-motion) and the intricate detail of concrete-mixing.
Just as the film asks what counts as evidence, it also asks: what is a memorial? A memorial is an act of remembering and retelling that is also a necessary act of honouring. How different is this code of honour to the prevalent ‘not our business’ ethos of John Howard’s Australia when faced with the genocides of the past and the traumas of the present – an ethos devastatingly exemplified by the official letter from the WA Police Department which Torres received during the making of the film: ‘We have reason to believe the massacre allegations are false.’ Armed with this letter – an irrefutable piece of evidence if there ever was one – Torres does what any self-respecting independent filmmaker would do: she puts it in the film. It is a great, if deeply circumspect, moment in Australian cinema.
It should be no secret by now that most of the best work in Australian cinema occurs not in the narrative feature realm, but in short films, documentaries, animation and experimental work – although this knowledge remains secret in official tomes like the Oxford Companion to Australian Film. Whispering In Our Hearts is a little-known and little-seen film, confined to a few television screenings and marginal distribution. It would be an enormous pity if, in future, it is cited (if at all) only as a footnote within the History Wars debate – for the film stakes out vital ground within the ongoing rapprochement between cinema and history.
Ultimately, Torres’ film puts me in mind of a recent film-world story. When Bertolucci wanted to use a clip from Bande à part (1964) in his The Dreamers (2003), he naturally approached Jean-Luc Godard to secure the rights. Old JLG took the opportunity to impart a gnomic lesson in an aphorism: ‘There are no rights, only responsibilities.’ Whispering In Our Hearts is a tremendous film about the responsibilities of remembering.
Jarlmadangah Burru Aboriginal Community: The Mowla Bluff ... Jarlmadangah Burru
Curator's notes Whispering in Our Hearts (2001) on ASO ... Romaine Moreton from Australian Screen
Mowla Bluff memorial signals new beginning - ABC Claire Moodie interviews various participants in a radio broadcast from ABC News and The World Today, October 30, 2000
Closing the circle on a bloody chapter - smh.com.au Tont Stephens from The Sydney Morning Herald, May 20, 2002
Torres
Leiva, José Luis
THE
SKY, THE EARTH, AND THE RAIN (El Cielo,
la tierra, y la lluvia) C- 68
A near wordless film of form over content, where there’s little to no
narrative to speak of, challenging the viewer to provide their own complexity
from this series of spare, beautifully photographed images shot by Inti Briones. Set in a small, isolated
Chilean coastal town surrounded by giant forests, the camera follows a single
character throughout the film, Ana (Julieta Figueroa),
as she walks to and from various jobs crossing through pastoral fields or quiet
pathways through the woods. Accentuating
time spent alone where the established mood literally consumes the individual,
the camera shoots through doors or window panes or dilapidated ruins, always
finding inventive ways to beautifully frame the shots. Occasionally Ana and her friends take a ferry
ride, where one day, like L’AVVENTURA (1960), an unstable friend turns up
missing. Unlike Antonioni, however,
there’s no Monica Vitti caliber performance and no emotional connection
anywhere to be found. Instead it’s a
quietly contemplative film with understated, minimalist performances that have
the feel of nonprofessionals, where one has to make the best of the situation
gazing upon an exaggerated, experimental series of images that doesn’t offer a lot to contemplate.
User comments from imdb Author: Film_Biff from Australia
This film is a futile exercise. I often wondered what it
would be like to track a woman repeatedly while she is walking. I have my
answer.
It does not have the ethereal qualities of a masterful director at the helm
like Tarkovsky to sustain such tiresome activities and inject life into the
mundane. The film fails to forge an identity as a result of this. Most seems
random and is deliberately slow to put the viewer into a reflective daze but
this could have been equally achieved by turning the lights out for two hours
and sitting in darkness.
Leiva wants the audience to escape and break the conventional shackles of
modern cinema but, in doing so, his original vision is compromised. The mind
needs some form of narrative to care and Leiva knows this too well. He feeds
this a little with what can only be described as a 'fractured' narrative thus
compromising his original vision. However, Leiva does deserve praise for his
effort and he does show promising signs of being a director to look out for in
the future as he has his moments of aesthetic delight.
Jigsaw
Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival
Pure cinema, apparently casual
in its story, image and sound, about ordinary, lonely people who live on a
remote Chilean island. Who are we to contradict the film maker: 'I would dare
say that it is a film of "strolls": mental, virtual, on foot, in
automobiles, aboard ferries...'
NY : Torres
Leiva's documentaries (including No Place Nowhere) augured well for
his transition to the fictional format - but on the evidence of this
feature-film debut, the sooner he crosses back, the better. It's is the kind of
thing that gives arthouse cinema a bad name in certain circles: plot is largely
dispensed with in favour of simply watching the characters in their
environment. We can discern
certain elements which may or may be assembled into a narrative, but Torres
Leiva seems to go out of his way to dissuade us from doing so. Trouble is, he
doesn't really provide anything to take the place of plot: and this kind of
dead-slow sub-Dardennes, sub-Tarr anomie has sadly become the default mode of
expression for the world's young pseudo-auteurs. This variation is just a damp,
numb exercise in self-consciously poetic/enigmatic ominousness - one that makes
us work very hard for meagre reward.
THE PIROGUE
The
Pirogue Dan Fainaru at
Given the dearth of African product on the international market, The
Pirogue is bound to be assiduously courted by every single film festival and
event. Neither the theme nor its treatment are new or original, but it is
compact, well shot and effectively put together, successfully combining Western
story-telling with plenty of local colour. And if theatrical audiences may balk
at yet another film on immigration to
The plotline is familiar. A group of 30 Africans, picked from
different ethnic origins to underline
Part an ongoing African, exodus, driven away from their homes by misery and unemployment, they leave their wives and children behind, holding on to dreams and promises that more often than not do not materialize, refusing to believe that Europe in crisis could possibly be worse than their own country, convinced that in a year or two they will either bring their families over to join them or start sending money home to build their own mansions, out of the fortunes that should be waiting for them overseas.
An experienced seaman, Baye Laye (expressively played by Souleymane Seye Ndiaye) reluctantly agrees to lead journey after the smugglers organising the trip offer him a considerable sum of money for the job. The journey itself is marked with the typical list of predictable hardships, from claustrophobia and sea-sickness to minor skirmishes between the passengers, from the discovery of a stowaway woman whose presence may be a bad omen to the encounter with another pirogue adrift in mid-sea which they can’t help short of endangering their own trip all leading to a climactic storm that threatens to put an end to all their hopes and dreams.
In between the incidents, the all too familiar plans of each individual person come up one after the other, from the humblest to the fanciest, from working the fields in Andalusia, to joining a band in Paris or becoming a soccer superstar. The downbeat ending clearly suggests how faint the chances are that any of these things will ever happen.
While the script doesn’t go much into characterizations and is mostly happy with instant labeling, intelligent casting has managed to fill the screen with the performers whose strong facial features and physical presence compensate for occasional lack of acting ability. An experienced European crew provides high technical standards all through.
La
Pirogue: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen
Moussa Touré's drama chronicles a group of West African
immigrants who attempt a hazardous illegal crossing to mainland
Illuminating the desperate and moving human stories behind lurid
headlines about illegal immigration, La Pirogue is a colorful and
compelling drama about a boat full of would-be economic migrants attempting the
perilous weeklong Atlantic crossing from
Named after the brightly painted wooden fishing vessel that
serves as the film’s non-human star, La Pirogue has the feeling of an
issue-driven TV movie at times. It should do well in Francophone territories,
where West African immigration has a strong colonial back story. Foreign
interest will be limited, but this universal story could easily serve as a
dramatically gripping primer on topical immigration issues to schoolchildren
across the globe, from
Baye Laye (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye) is an
experienced fisherman and family man who is being forced by economic and moral
pressures to reluctantly captain a refugee boat for a Dakar-based
people-smuggling operation. After some tense negotiation, Baye Laye and his
human cargo of around 30 souls set out from
A female stowaway (Mame Astou Diallo) causes
friction among the otherwise all-male group, while minor tensions simmer across
ethnic and religious divisions. Passengers sicken and die, others are washed
overboard in storms. A harrowing encounter with another pirogue, floating on
the high seas without food or power, becomes an ominous portent. Soon Laye’s
boat itself suffers a similar fate, its engines shutting down, its course
pulled out into the mid
Handsomely shot in fairly conventional style by a mixed
Senegalese and French crew, La Pirogue is a well-crafted melodrama in
classic issue-movie mold. The cast are capable, the dramatic conflict punchy,
and the soundtrack sprinkled with the pretty, sinewy, laidback sounds of
The film’s flaws lie in its predictable narrative arc and too many sketchy, two-dimensional characters. Immigration tales have been told on screen countless times before, often with more subtlety and depth than this. But the urgency of the subject in these straitened economic times lend Touré’s local story an extra kick of topical, universal power.
The Director's
Chair - Jacques Tourneur - DVD Beaver
Not to be simply brushed off as the work of a generic 'cult director', Jacques Tourneur's oeuvre demonstrated an indelible importance in the history of American cinema. Born in 1904, the son of the great silent film director Maurice Tourneur, Jacques began his career in France before emigrating to America in 1934 where he took on an apprenticeship as a second unit director at MGM. It was not until his fruitful collaborations with producer Val Lewton on films like The Cat People (1942) that Tourneur would establish his unique presence. It was here he would fashion his craft and remodel many of the themes and techniques that would go on to characterize his cinema for the next 30 years. In a Tourneur film atmosphere supersedes the narrative. His use of light and shadow with interplay between foreground and background could evoke a foreboding atmosphere often within the proximity of supernatural elements. Whether he was making a film noir, horror or a western, there is a distinctive metaphysical quality to his work. This surfaced not only in his approach to the mise-en-scene but appeared deeply entrenched in the actors and quite visible in their performances. Watch a Tourneur film, and you will be immediately struck by the subtlety of expression and how prescient his understated visuals can cause a viewers imaginative juices to flow. It could elevate a limited production feature and secure it with a timeless quality, prominently signifying his masterful command of the medium. It is the subtlety in Tourneur's films that also gives them their poetry, ranking him as one of cinema's true originals and foremost stylists. — Adam Lemke
Jacques Tourneur - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... DeWitt Bodeen from Film Reference
The first director Val Lewton hired for his RKO unit was Jacques Tourneur, and the first picture made by that unit was Cat People , an original screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen.
When Tourneur's father, Maurice, returned to Paris after a number of years in America, Jacques had gone with him, working as assistant director and editor for his father. In 1933, he made a few directorial solos in the French language and then returned to Hollywood, where he became an assistant director at MGM. It was at this time that he first met Val Lewton, and the two young men worked as special unit directors for Jack Conway on A Tale of Two Cities ; it was Lewton and Tourneur who staged the storming of the Bastille sequence for that film.
Tourneur remained at MGM, directing over 20 short subjects, and Lewton eventually went on to become David O. Selznick's story editor. When Lewton left Selznick to head his own production unit at RKO, he had already made up his mind that Tourneur would direct his first production. Tourneur came to RKO, where he served as director for Lewton's first three films— Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie , and The Leopard Man. The front office held his work in such esteem that he was given the "A" treatment—solo direction of a high-budget film called Days of Glory , which was Gregory Peck's first starring film. It was not held against him that Days of Glory bombed. Tourneur immediately turned to another high budget picture at RKO— Experiment Perilous , starring Hedy Lamarr with Paul Lukas and George Brent. Under Tourneur's skillful direction, it became a suspenseful mood period film, certainly one of his and Hedy Lamarr's best.
Tourneur stayed on at RKO to direct Robert Mitchum in one of his finest pictures, Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High ), as well as an excellent melodrama, Berlin Express , starring Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan with Paul Lukas. Filmed partially in Berlin, the work was the first Hollywood picture to be made in Germany since the end of the war.
Tourneur then directed three excellent westerns for his friend Joel McCrea— Stars in My Crown, Stranger on Horseback , and Wichita , which featured McCrea as Wyatt Earp. He also directed The Flame and the Arrow , starring Burt Lancaster, and Great Day in the Morning , another RKO western with Robert Stack and Virginia Mayo. He then went back to make another horror picture in England, Night of the Demon , with Dana Andrews. This film is rated as highly as those he made for Lewton.
Television direction occupied the greater part of Tourneur's time for the next decade, but he retired in 1966 and returned to his native country, where he died in Bergerac on December 19, 1977. The best pictures which he directed were those of suspense and genuine terror, though he also did well with those that had a great deal of action. He wisely resisted scenes with long patches of dialogue. When confronted with such scenes, he typically frowned and said, "It sounds so corny."
Film Comment Geoffrey O’Brien from Film Comment
Jacques Tourneur could figure as a test-case for auteurism. A director who said that he never turned down a screenplay; “ I did my best with whatever they gave me”; Tourneur produced a succession of films of which almost every one belongs to a clearly defined, often formulaic genre: the Western, the horror movie, the noir thriller, the pirate movie, the spy movie, the medieval adventure movie, the jungle movie, all the way down (as the studio system collapses around him) to Timbuktu (59), with Victor Mature lending able-bodied support to French colonialism in the Sahara, and The Giant of Marathon (59), with Steve Reeves fending off hordes of invading Persians. His filmography suggests the workaday artisan, an identity Tourneur was happy to claim for himself. When a French critic asked him what place he thought his films would occupy in the history of cinema, he replied: “None.” To find profundity among the frames of Appointment in Honduras (53) and Great Day in the Morning (56) might strike some as the ultimate expression of auteurism as mystical cult, perceiving revelation in what to the unreceptive looks very much like standard industrial product, more or less pleasing but singularly devoid of any obvious ambition. The spectatorâs question becomes: Is there really something there at all, or am I imagining this? That question, as it happens, leads directly into the heart of a lifework that, however unassuming, has over time surrendered none of its power to fascinate. Can there be a durable will-oâ-the-wisp, a monumental glimmer? Maybe only in the movies, and most particularly in the movies of Jacques Tourneur.
If the classical
The Fearmakers, in the light of retrospect, turned out to be an extremely low-budget late-Fifties anticommunist melodrama based on a Forties antifascist novel, full of wooden speeches about subversive forces trying to influence public opinion, taking place (mostly) on a couple of office sets that would not have been out of place in an Ed Wood movie and filmed in a style verging much of the time on TV-perfunctory, with a cast of almost indigestible oddity (a brainwashed Dana Andrews doing battle against sinister Red agents Dick Foran, Mel Tormé, and Veda Ann Borg). By the standards of Out of the Past (47) or I Walked with a Zombie (43), it wasn’t much to look at. Yet once again the movie began to work its effect: there was that crucial encounter with a stranger sitting next to Dana Andrews on an airplane, with its grungily accurate evocation of the claustrophobia of plane travel; that unsettling boardinghouse where Andrews spends a sleepless night; that persistent mood of insomnia and restlessness: all so many points of incursion into the ordinary, to the point where even the banal desks and corridors started to take on the quality of a distracted reverie.
Was this the movie I had remembered seeing, or had my imagination in the interim between viewings created a sort of phantasmal Fearmakers, like those Tibetan gods that the devotee sees come to life in the swirling abstractions of a mandala? There is often a sense, with Tourneurâs films, that space is being created for precisely such an alternate movie; where other directors close in on an explicit point, Tourneur makes room for an indeterminate openness. The collaborations with Val Lewton that established him as a director, Cat People (42), I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man (43), were built explicitly around the notion that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do, an idea sufficiently high-concept that it even found its way into the screenplay of Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, as the brilliant gimmick that launches Kirk Douglas’s career: a rare instance of film theory becoming a plot point in a Hollywood movie.
Yet to speak of openness is not to suggest mistiness. The effects, moment by moment, are exactly defined, so much so that at times Tourneur’s cinema seems nothing but a flow of etched surfaces, to be savored in somewhat the same spirit as cloud-drift at dusk, or ebb tide on the shingle. The technical mastery is obvious, the deeper question being toward what end it is deployed. His films leave a tantalizing sense that the next time you see them they will have changed; and, indeed, years of returning to them have convinced me that their apparent resistance to the jadedness of overfamiliarity is not an optical illusion. The best of his work remains curiously unfixed in the mind even after many viewings.
Their precise details fade from memory more than those of other directors; you remember an effect but have trouble recalling precisely how it was achieved. If with other directors you can mentally evoke compositions, assertive camera movements, shock cuts, moments of emotional crisis or sudden revelation or jazzy byplay, with Tourneur you cling in memory to a vivid but uncapturable sense of place and mood, like a scene from early childhood or from a dream that even though only half-remembered lingers stubbornly in mind. They come in, so to speak, under the radar, carrying a suggestion of infiltration and concealment, a pervasion of unseen forces; and this is as true of an upbeat, wholesomely spiritual story like Stars in My Crown (50) as of Night of the Demon (57). Happiness and faith are no less mysterious, in fact no less troubling, than the outer reaches of anxiety and occult possession.
The directorial touch is exact but disconcertingly light. He makes everybody else look overemphatic. As Chris Fujiwara points out in his superb study Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, Tourneurâs films have a way of beginning in the middle, with characters making obscure references to previous events. With many of his movies, for instance, I Walked with a Zombie, Out of the Past, Canyon Passage (46), you have the sense that no matter how many times you see them you can never altogether untangle the storyline. Crucial things happen offscreen or before the movies start; motivations and backstory are never quite made explicit; minor characters turn out to have complicated stories of their own that we never quite learn about. He makes time mysterious. We move backward (the return to childhood in Stars in My Crown) or find ourselves seemingly stalled in an endlessly prolonged moment (the trek through the jungle in Appointment in Honduras) or forget who is supposed to be telling the story (the shifting viewpoints of I Walked with a Zombie) or lose track of sequence (the disorienting narrative turns of Out of the Past and Nightfall, 57). To find out all we want to know we would have to break through the screen, entering that space that we can perceive only as a stream of two-dimensional configurations. If the movies perpetually suggest a crossing of boundaries, the ultimate boundary is the uncrossable one closing the spectator off from what he watches.
Tourneur gives you the drama and at the same time a distance
from the drama, establishing a strange calm even in the heart of violent or
unnerving circumstances. This has nothing to do with an aestheticization of
violence or horror. Anne of the
Tourneur’s pleasures are in some sense obvious; you can think of Canyon Passage as an exercise in the contemplation of appearances, a sheer appreciation of space and color, of live glances and movement flickering in the corner of the frame, all the mysterious random choreographies of everyday life. Returning to the film simply to indulge again in those appearances, on closer look you find a world apart, a place with its own peculiar rhythms and modes of behavior. Yet it’s a world that in its way seems more real than that of other movies, as if the characters didnât know they were characters or that anyone was looking, a world, and this is what makes Tourneur’s B-pictures so unusual, without histrionics. As many have remarked, vocal delivery in his films is unusually low-pitched, approximating the level of ordinary conversation, and he is thus able to create an air of unlikely verisimilitude even in the context of backlot adventure movies. You might call it a sort of neorealism of the imaginary. Perhaps that’s why, in Berlin Express (48), the cutting between staged scenes of noirish intrigue (complete with a scary clown to rival Lang’s Spies) and documentary footage of war-ruined German cities is far less jarring than it ought to be.
Tourneur’s life appears to have been almost as understated as his art. The major determining aspect of his biography precedes his birth: he was the son of the silent film director Maurice Tourneur, and thereby had the inestimable advantage of learning all about movie technique as a matter of course and at a very early age, working as bit player, script clerk, cutter, assistant director. Tourneur père (he had changed his name from Maurice Thomas because, according to Fujiwara, the latter sounded “too English”) was an evidently flamboyant character who had been an illustrator and designer, an assistant to Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes, an artillery officer, a stage actor, and ultimately a successful filmmaker who by 1914 had migrated to America. He declared to Motion Picture Magazine in 1917: “We are not photographers, but artists. . . . We must present the effect such a scene has upon the artist-director’s mind, so that an audience will catch the mental reaction.”
In one of his rare interviews Jacques states simply, “I learned everything with my father.” He also suggested in more ways than one that his father’s character was marked by coldness and cruelty, and it’s possible to read his own approach to direction as a mix of emulation and criticism. He disparages the notion, which his father seems to have embodied , of director as dictator, expressing a particular aversion for the bullying of actors. Indeed, Tourneur speaks more often about the problems of actors than his own problems as a director: actors must be treated gently, he insists, the director must understand how traumatic their job is. He emphasizes matters of gentleness and delicacy, whether in handling actors or light sources.
He likes to speak of himself as lazy, spoiled, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Indeed, he credits whatever success he has had to a sublime passivity: “All my life, everything has come to me by itself, and I think itâs because I made no effort to bring things to me; if I’d made an effort, maybe I would have harmed myself; everything came by itself.” It isn’t clear whether by “everything” he means the yachts and Cadillacs and fine wines on which he spent the money that finally wasn’t there anymore, or rather the professional career about which he is not in the least apologetic: “I’m a director, it’s my profession. I believe it’s a profession that takes all your time; you can’t be producer and director and writer all at once. To be an honest director, you have to devote all your time and all your energy to it.” He was there on the set from seven in the morning until eight in the evening, he tells us; he gave the cameramen a hard time because the lighting had to be exactly the way he wanted it; he did everything he could to make the actors feel free and relaxed. “You have to like what you do, because a person who likes his work makes life pleasant, and if a person doesn’t like his work, itâs painful.” If most of those who master directing come to it from the outside, as a castle to be stormed, Tourneur was the odd case who stayed in the place where he started out, for whom filmmaking was simply the only thing he had ever learned how to do.
The son’s legacy is a comfortable technical command, further polished in the second-unit work with Val Lewton on A Tale of Two Cities (35) and in a long series of MGM shorts on everything from harness racing to the discovery of radium, with a special emphasis on strange tales of uncanny prediction and unaccountable coincidence. By the time he gets to Cat People, he’s a technician who can afford to be calm and to obey his dictum that “it’s bad to think too much, everything should be instinctive.” For a range of studios and with widely varying budgets, and despite the fact that he almost never had much say about scripts or casting, Tourneur would continue to exercise a remarkable degree of control over the feel of his films. He complained about a few instances (most famously the close-ups of the slavering monster in Night of the Demon) where producers interfered with his conception, but for the most part his accommodating approach seems to have enabled him to preserve an enviable freedom in the matters that concerned him most.
His best films, and it should be said that, until the misbegotten final features for American International, none is without interest, have a quality like fin-de-siècle symbolist painting, and are effective, like the best of such paintings, to the extent that the symbols resist final interpretation. Out of the Past, long since accepted as perhaps the paradigm of film noir, looks more and more like the supreme visual poem of an extraordinarily rich period of American filmmaking: a supernatural film so uncanny that it doesn’t even need the supernatural, and an American vernacular work so un-American that sometimes it feels like the greatest film that Jean Cocteau never made. They couldn’t all be sustained on that level, not all actors were Robert Mitchum, and not all cameramen were Nicholas Musuraca, and few scripts were so full of opportunities, but as you watch them unreel you are constantly being surprised.
We might take as a kind of self-portrait the alcoholic ship’s doctor so beautifully played by Herbert Marshall in Anne of the Indies, philosophical advisor to Jean Peters (magnificent in the title role), who tells her: “Long ago, my dear, I gave up all beliefs.” Tourneur, sybarite and aesthete though he may have been, did apparently cherish a few beliefs: in more than one interview he spoke of parallel worlds, sources of signals that we would pick up on if only we were on the same wavelength: “There is another world, and if only we could . . . .” If only we could, what? The enduring charm (and I mean the word in its more ancient and forceful sense) of his films is to suggest an answer – not quite visible yet, but almost perceptible beyond the next frame – to a question that cannot even be formulated.
Geoffrey O’Brien’s most recent book is Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle (Counterpoint Press).
Jacques Tourneur |
French-American director | Britannica.com
biography
Jacques Tourneur
| Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography by Bruce Eder
Overview for Jacques Tourneur - TCM.com biography
BFI
Screenonline: Tourneur, Jacques (1904-1977) Biography biography by Geoff Brown, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film
Directors
Jacques Tourneur - NNDB brief bio and filmography
The Films of Jacques Tourneur - by Michael E. Grost
The Best
Movies Directed by Jacques Tourneur - Flickchart
Jacques Tourneur Brief synopsis of all of Tourneur’s films
The History of Cinema.
Jacques Tourneur: biography, filmography ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
Way
of a Gaucho (1952) Jacques Tourneur
Screen shots
Spiritual Terror: The
Horror Films of Val Lewton Brad
Linaweaver from Mondo Cult,
originally published in Wonder magazine,
Summer 1995
Jacques
Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall
author Chris Fujiwara (344 pages), much of it is viewable online, 1998
Fujiwara, Chris thoughts on Fujiwara’s recent book, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, by Gerald Peary, October 1998
High
Gallows: Revisiting Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past - Bright ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2000
Halloween Horror Recommendations 25 greatest horror films, which includes two Tourneur films, by Gerald Peary, October 2001
Book reviews:
Jacques Tourneur, George Cukor, John Ford, White ... Gary Morris reviews several film books from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 16,
2002
Jacques Tourneur: Whispers in a Distant Corridor | Feature | Slant ... an overview by Ed Gonzalez, August 30, 2002
<em>Jacques
Tourneur.The Cinema of Nightfall</em> book review of Fujiwara’s book by Geoff
Mayer from Screening the Past,
September 20, 2002
Wilson on Fujiwara/Tourneur - Film-Philosophy book review of Fujiwara’s Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall — The Auteur of Darkness: Jacques Tourneur, by Ronald W. Wilson, January 2003
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005
The
Leopard Man - Bright Lights Film Journal “What It Takes to Make a Softie”: Breaking
Noir Tradition in The
Leopard Man, by Erich Kuersten,
November 1, 2005
Le
Corbeau - Bright Lights Film Journal
Les Fleurs du Mal: The
Leopard Man and Le Corbeau:
Tourneur and Clouzot Deliver Homefront
Perversity, Paranoia, and Subversion, by Roderick Heath from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2005
Cat People • Senses of Cinema (1942 film) Brad Weisman essay from Senses of Cinema, August 27, 2007
I Walked With a
Zombie • Senses of Cinema (1943 film) Martha P. Nochimson essay from Senses of Cinema, August 27, 2007
The
Past Becomes Past by Chris Fujiwara - Moving Image Source Chris Fujiwara, September 15, 2008
Jacques
Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 1): Cat People (1942) - The ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, July 30, 2009
Jacques
Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 2): I Walked With A Zombie ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, August 4, 2009
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 3): Stars In My Crown (1950 ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, August 11, 2009
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 4): Curse Of The Demon ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, August 13, 2009
Philosophical Film: Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur's Out of ... 32-page essay, New Literary History, Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, by Robert Pippin from Philosophical Film, 2010 (pdf)
Lessons
of Darkness: Jacques Tourneur's The Leopard Man : Open ... Brecht Andersch from Open Space, February 21, 2010
Goodfella's
Movie Blog: #13: Jacques Tourneur
July 5, 2010
Directors
We Love: Jacques Tourneur | Moviefone
Jeffrey M. Anderson, July 10, 2010
Jacques
Tourneur Obituary - Katy, Texas | Legacy.com September 17, 2010
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD: Jacques Tourneur's westerns ()
Tim Lucas, July 2011
What Do You Think? (1937, Jacques Tourneur) | The Stop Button Andrew Wickliffe from The Stop Button, October 15, 2013
How
I learned to start screaming and love the horror movie | The ... Peter Hoskin from The Spectator, November 2, 2013
The Glitter of
Putrescence - Val Lewton at RKO - Harvard Film Archive March 30, 2014
Stars in My Crown Nicholas Chennault from Great Western Movies, May 16, 2014
Jacques Tourneur – HiLobrow David Smay, November 12, 2014
From
Jacques Tourneur to Humphrey Bogart, What to See at LA's Noir ... Ryan Lattanzio from indieWIRE, March 30, 2015
Canyon Passage Nicholas Chennault from Great Western Movies, September 12, 2015
Wichita
Nicholas Chennault from Great
Western Movies, September 12, 2015
Episode 118: Jacques
Tourneur — Director's Club
2-hour podcast discussion between Robert Reineke and Nat Almirall,
October 25, 2016
The Joel McCrea Blogathon: Stranger On Horseback (1955) By Guest Blogger Allen Smithee. 50 Westerns from the 50’s, November 4, 2016, as part of a Joel McCrea blogathon, also seen here: Jacques Tourneur | 50 Westerns From The 50s.
Locarno Festival to Be Dedicated to Director Jacques Tourneur ... Ariston Anderson from The Hollywood Reporter, January 19, 2017
The
2017 Retrospective is dedicated to Jacques Tourneur - Locarno… February 2017
Why
Jacques Tourneur is a filmmaker for our troubled modern times Justine Smith from Little White Lies, February 2017
19.
Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) | The 75 best British ... The Telegraph, June 12, 2017
Jacques
Tourneur (1904 - 1977) - Find A Grave Memorial
Jacques Tourneur. Cat
People. 1942 | MoMA Publication
excerpt from Steven Higgins, Still Moving: The Film and Media Collections of
the Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006
Val Lewton was already a published author of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry when he began his film career as a publicity writer for MGM in 1928. In the mid–1930s, he took the job of story editor and assistant to producer David O. Selznick, then left MGM in 1942 when RKO offered him his own unit to produce low-budget horror films. At the time, RKO was in dire financial straits and hoped that a series of cheaply made films would turn a quick profit and keep the studio afloat. Lewton's first film, Cat People, did just that, earning several million dollars (estimates vary between $2 and $4 million) against a production cost of just under $135,000. Director Jacques Tourneur worked closely with Lewton to overcome the possible objections of industry censors by creating a sense of terror through the implied threat of violence, as well as keeping costs down by using expressive (and inexpensive) lighting techniques and oblique camera angles to compensate for their minuscule budget. The pair worked so efficiently that, by the time the box office returns had been reported for Cat People, they had already completed the second film in the series (I Walked with a Zombie, 1943), and were virtually finished with the third (The Leopard Man, 1943).
The Music Box launches its new weekend series of Jacques Tourneur films (curated by C-F's own Doug McLaren) with CAT PEOPLE, maybe Tourneur's best-known work. The film was the first release from Val Lewton's legendary B unit at RKO Pictures--which, through nine films made over five years (1942-1946), more or less created psychological horror as we know it today. Making the most of low budgets, Lewton turned screen horror inward, focusing on the lives of frail men and women who end up the victims in horror-movie plots. He found his greatest collaborator in Tourneur, a gifted director of actors capable of drawing rare psychological nuance from his players. CAT PEOPLE stars Simone Simon as a timid young Serbian émigré who fears she will become a predatory cat if she consummates her marriage. For Martin Scorsese, who featured it prominently in his PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (and paid muted tribute to it in his recent SHUTTER ISLAND), the film was a breakthrough for its integration of subtext into genre storytelling. In this regard, it's "as influential a movie as CITIZEN KANE." Even though this is quite clearly "about a woman's fear of her own sexuality" (Scorsese again), it remains evocative as horror--in part because Simone is so believably vulnerable that we fear for her no matter what happens. (1942, 73 min, 35mm)
Jacques Tourneur: Whispers in a Distant Corridor | Feature | Slant ... Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine reviewing the Val Lewton Horror Collection, August 30, 2002
Born in Russia in 1904, Val Lewton came to the United States
with his family at the age of five. In the early '30s he became an assistant to
David O. Selznick and for 10 years was a jack-of-all-trades around Hollywood,
working on the revolutionary sequences from A Tale of Two Cities with a
then-unknown Jacques Tourneur and story editing no less than two of the most
popular Best Picture Oscar winners of the era, Rebecca and Gone With
the Wind (he was responsible for scripting the latter's famous
sea-of-wounded-soldiers overhead, which he thought was unfilmmable). In 1942,
Lewton was made the head of RKO's horror unit, which came to be known as the
Snake Pit, and the rest, as they say, is history. Blowing the auteurist model
wide open, the nine horror films the Sultan of Shudders and his factory of
revolving creative talent cultivated at RKO—collected here on Warner Home
Video's The Val Lewton Horror Collection—are all models of efficiency
and reveal their producer's very personal connection to their sinister
goings-on.
It's easy to imagine Lewton screaming "more shadows!" on the sets of
these films. And shadows he got, none more hieratic than the ones supplied by
Tourneur, whose reputation still struggles to free itself of Lewton's legacy.
Today, Cat People remains both Tourneur and Lewton's most popular
production, in which Simone Simon, whose death in February at age 95 scarcely
made news, stars as Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian-born fashion artist who believes
she's being held under the spell of an ancient curse. The film's infamous pool
sequence has been cribbed countless times (most famously by Argento for his
classic cult shocker Suspiria) but it's the provocative
reflection Tourneur and Lewton give the lonely Irena's sexuality and obsession
with her otherness that truly haunts, most memorably when Irena receives a
sinister hello from someone from her past while dining with her American
friends.
Film
Noir of the Week Steve-O
Cat People from 1942 is a film noir disguised as a horror
film. Filled with the same visual style and sense of fatalism that dominated
film noir during the classic film noir (that would peak four or five years
later especially at RKO), Cat People is the ultimate horror-noir.
When Val Lewton was made head of RKO's horror division, he
immediately set out to make movies that were initially just attempts to cash in
on Universal Pictures horror film resurgence during the late 1930s. Cat
People was Lewton's first assignment.
With only a title "Cat People" and a limited budget to work with
Lewton crafted a story based a short he had published in Weird Tales years
earlier called The Bagheeta. Lewton isn't
credited with writing Cat People (Dewitt Bodeen is) but Lewton's similar short story combined
with rumors of the producer hard at work writing and rewriting the script after
nearly every day of shooting on the RKO lot has convinced many that he was the
most dominant creative force behind Cat People. Collaborator and writer
Bodeen would go onto write (or more than likely help write with Lewton) other
noir-tinged horror films including the sequel Curse of the Cat People.
Of course not all credit can go to Lewton. Jacques Tourneur is known today for helming the greatest film
noir, Out of the Past. Almost ten
years before that Tourneur struggled to work his way up the ranks in Hollywood.
In 1934 Tourneur was hired to run the second unit for David O. Selznick's A Tale of Two Cities (1935),
where he first met story editor and jack-of-all-trades Val Lewton. When Lewton
was put in charge of RKO's horror unit years later he hired his old friend
Tourneur. After the critical and commercial success of Cat People
Tourneur was now viewed as the serious director that he envisioned himself
after years of throw-away celluloid.
Cat People, starring Simone Simon and Kent Smith, is brilliant. Using some of the same crew members
Orson Welles used before nearly bankrupting the company, Cat People was
crafted with the same sort of shadowy brilliance seen in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons -
but for far less money. Cat People - with it's entrapping shadows and
cage-like imagery - is stunning to watch. Knowing that most of the film's
expensive looking sets -including a zoo set from a Bette Davis film and a
staircase from Magnificent Ambersons – makes the small film look much
more expensive that it actually was. Every scene works. I think it was Roger
Ebert who wrote that if a movie has three great scenes and no bad ones then it
can be considered a great movie. Cat People passes that test. A stalking
scene at a public pool, the first "bus effect" scene, and Irena
(Simon) locking herself in the bathroom to keep her husband away -and safe-
stand out as some of the best parts of the film.
Notoriously difficult and scandal-plagued star Simone Simon gives her best
Hollywood performance as the European woman with a mysterious secret. She was
cast by Lewton specifically because she looks so feline. Another cat-like
actress Elizabeth Russell (Bela Lugosi's zombie bride in The Corpse Vanishes the same year) confronts Simone during
an engagement party that is appropriately chilling – not to mention
embarrassing for the young man in front of his co-workers.
Notice how Irena and Alice (played by Simon and blonde Jane
Randolph) are still friendly at this point. It's clear that the two don't like
each other. Their hatred for each other - apparently shared off camera between
the two actresses - pays off later in the film.
Smith - highly effective in Nora Prentiss- plays Simon's
husband and Randolph as his girlfriend. He's
responsible for many of his troubles (just like in Nora Prentiss) in Cat
People even though he is married to a “monster.” After finding out his new
sexy young wife doesn't want to sleep with him he almost immediately starts an
affair with the willing Randolph. To make matters worse for the young bride
(Simon) her doctor seems to be more concerned with bedding his patient than
finding out what's wrong with her. Tom Conway - who I last saw at Noir
City 7 in Two O'Clock Courage - plays
the duplicitous psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd - a role he'd return to in The 7th Victim.
The film is one of the early noirs but it feels more modern than some. Simon
and Randolph are strong working woman in the big city – something rarely seen
in 1942 films. The horror elements are there – eventually you do see a giant
cat attack late in the movie. However, this only happened because of the
insistence of RKO that it had to be in there. Interestingly, when Simon does
turn into a leopard you don't see the transformation (unlike Dracula or The
Wolf Man). Also notice when Irena turns into the large cat her fur coat and
high heels are also morphed into the jungle cat as well. One scene shows Simon
returning after turning into the animal and you see her fur coat torn and
dirty. In the 1980s remake Nastassia Kinski would bare all after the transformation back
to woman (which turned out to be the only highlight of the film and one I am
grateful for).
Film noir fans should check out all Lewton's RKO “horror” films. The Leopard Man (based on a story
by Cornell Woolrich), The Ghost Ship and The 7th Victim may have been
marketed as “horror” but they're really suspenseful noirs years before the
“film noir genre” had a name. I have no doubt in my mind that Cat People
inspired the film noir style that would dominate RKO during the 1940s.
Cat People: Darkness Betrayed Criterion essay by Geoffrey O’Brien,
September 20, 2016
Jacques
Tourneur on Val Lewton and Cinematic Escapism Two brief videos with the director, September
22, 2016
Cat People (1942) - The
Criterion Collection
Cat People • Senses of Cinema (1942 film) Brad Weisman essay from Senses of Cinema, August 27, 2007
Cat People (1942) - Filmsite.org Tim Dirks
Cat People | Jacques Tourneur 1942 - CeltoSlavica
The Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Cat
People - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton
People & Culture: Feminism in film and the cat people Alisa Hummell, November 3, 2010
The Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]
Spiritual Terror: The
Horror Films of Val Lewton Brad
Linaweaver from Mondo Cult,
originally published in Wonder magazine,
Summer 1995
Val Lewton - Famed RKO Producer from golden age of
Hollywood
Val
Lewton's, CAT PEOPLE – Once upon a screen…
Aurora, October 24, 2012
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 1): Cat People (1942) - The ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, July 30, 2009
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Screen Sequel [Ingrid Oliveira]
The Collinsport Historical Society Sara Shiver McBride
Cat People (1942) – HORRORPEDIA
Horror Film
History — Horror Films in the 1940s
The
Horror Incorporated Project [Michael Popham]
Cinematropolis Remembering Jane Randolph and ‘The Cat People’ by Nathan Bartlebaugh
Ruthless Reviews [Devon Pack] (Potentially Offensive)
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
Cat
People - TCM.com Frank Miller
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
366 weird movies [Alfred Eaker]
Of
Love and Other Demons: 'Cat People' (Jacques Tourneur, 1942 ... Justine Smith from Vague Visages
Krell
Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Classic-Horror.com [Nate Yapp]
Saturday Editor's Pick: Cat People (1942) & Cat People (1982)
Fandor: Duncan Gray There
Are CAT PEOPLE and Then There Are CAT PEOPLE, October 25, 2016
Serendipty Merge Divide on CAT PEOPLE and THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, from Serendipity, December 12, 2007
Signal Bleed Cat Peoples, Josh Bell compares Lewton’s 1942 version of CAT PEOPLE to Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake, January 14, 2008
Flickfeast [Kevin Matthews] also comparing both versions, December 7, 2010
The Glitter of
Putrescence - Val Lewton at RKO - Harvard Film Archive March 30, 2014
Val Lewton Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary, July 27, 2008
JACQUES
TOURNEUR | Horror Amino
The
Telltale Mind the Motherlode
of posters and Screen Shots, May 3,
2016
The
Telltale Mind More Than She Seems? – Cat People (1942), May 3, 2016
The Digital Fix [Gary Couzens]
Blueprint: Review [David Brook] Criterion
Monsters in a Box | Village Voice J. Hoberman on The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
The Val Lewton Horror Collection - AV Club film Keith Phipps, The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
DVD Verdict Review - The Val Lewton Horror Collection Brett Cullum extensive review from DVD Verdict Review, October 2005
A Salute to Val Lewton Dick’s Picks from DVD Classics Corner
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray
ScreenAnarchy.com (Peter Martin) Criterion Blu Ray Criterion Blu-Ray
Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw- Criterion Blu-Ray] Criterion Blu-Ray
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chuck Bowen] Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD
Verdict Criterion Blu-ray [Clark Douglas]
Criterion Blu-Ray
Bloody
Disgusting [Chris Coffel] Criterion
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Film Forno » Blog Archive » Val Lewton, Cat People, Martin Scorsesce Joe D’Augustine from Film Forno, January 15, 2008
Cat People (1942): Another sound – the panther – it screams like a woman Tony D'Ambra from Films Noir.Net, November 17, 2007
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Cat People Movie Review & Film Summary (1942) | Roger Ebert
New York Times [Bosley Crowther]
'Cat
People' and a Gallery of Horror Predators - The New York Times J. Hoberman, October 27, 2016
Cat People - Original Trailer 1942 on YouTube (1:11)
Cat people
(Il bacio della pantera)_shadowing and pool scene (
I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur ... - Time Out Tom Milne
The most elegant of Val Lewton's low budget horrors for RKO, an imaginative updating of Jane Eyre which anticipates Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea by transposing the action to the Caribbean, with Rochester's first wife not mad but the victim of a voodoo spell. The script, weaving a delicately intricate web of local superstition around a litany of oblique references to the relativity of good and evil, does wonders in creating an ambiguously unsettling atmosphere. But it is Tourneur's caressingly evocative direction, superbly backed by Roy Hunt's chiaroscuro images, that makes sheer magic of the film's brooding journey into fear by way of voodoo drums, gleaming moonlight, somnambulistic ladies in fluttering white, and dark, silent, undead sentries.
Jacques
Tourneur: Whispers in a Distant Corridor | Feature | Slant ... Ed
Gonzalez from Slant magazine
reviewing the Val Lewton Horror Collection, August 30, 2002
Lewton's contemplation of multi-cultural conflict is also
felt throughout Tourneur's masterpieces The Leopard Man and I Walked With a
Zombie. Who else but Tourneur could tell a story entirely in shadows? In Leopard Man, a runaway leopard grips a New
Mexican town in fear, killing three young women in the course of a few days.
The women may seem anonymous, but Tourneur daringly uses sound to both scare and
complicate them. It may be a horror film, but because of its startling aural
rhythms, it could also be read as a musical. Similarly, I Walked With a
Zombie is a master class in sight, sound, and suggestion from beginning to
end. Jane Eyre's gothic romance is transplanted to the
I Walked With a Zombie - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Betsy, a nurse from Canada, travels to an island in the West
Indies to take care of Jessica Holland, a woman who appears to be the victim of
some unexplained mental paralysis. In the course of her stay, Betsy's attempts
to cure Jessica prove futile and she considers a more extreme approach - a
visit to the local voodoo priestess. In a climatic scene, Betsy discovers the
cause of Jessica's death-in-life state and some disturbing secrets about the
Holland family.
Visually elegant, I Walked With a Zombie (1943) is a very loose adaptation of Jane
Eyre, transposed to a Caribbean setting. Ardel Wray, one of the
screenwriters, recalls the preparation for I Walked With a Zombie in Val
Lewton: The Reality of Terror by Joel E. Siegel: "We were all plunged
into research on Haitian voodoo, every book on the subject Val could find. He
was an addictive researcher, drawing out of it the overall feel, mood, and
quality he wanted, as well as details for actual production. He got hold of a
real calypso singer, Sir Lancelot he was called....He, in turn, found some
genuine voodoo musicians. I remember they had a 'papa drum' and a 'mama drum,'
that the crew on the set were fascinated by them, and by one particular scene
in which a doll 'walks' in a voodoo ritual...I particularly remember that doll
because Val sent me out to find and buy one 'cheap.' Everything had to be cheap
because we really were on a shoestring. That was another thing about Val - a
low budget was a challenge to him, a spur to inventiveness, and everyone around
him caught the fever. Anyway, I got a rather bland-faced doll at a department
store, cheap, and by the time she had been dressed in a soft gray robe, and her
hair had been combed out to the appropriate 'lost girl' look, she too, was somehow
transformed."
I Walked With a Zombie was said to be Val Lewton's personal favorite among his
films, even though he despised the title. It was forced on him by RKO studio
executive Charles Koerner who liked exploitive titles for purely commercial
reasons. Nevertheless, the end result was anything but lurid and remains one of
the most poetic films in the horror genre.
I Walked With a Zombie • Senses of Cinema (1943 film) Martha P. Nochimson essay from Senses of Cinema, August 27, 2007
Spiritual Terror: The
Horror Films of Val Lewton Brad
Linaweaver from Mondo Cult,
originally published in Wonder magazine,
Summer 1995
I
Walked with a Zombie - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 2): I Walked With A Zombie ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, August 4, 2009
Richard Van Busack I Walked With a Producer, on Val Lewton by Richard Van Busack from Metroactive Movies, November 2, 2000
Val Lewton - Famed RKO Producer from golden age of
Hollywood
I walked with a Zombie
1943 - Frances Dee - Val Lewton
The Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Sarah Boslaugh]
Lessons from the School of Inattention [Oggs Cruz]
The Girl with the White Parasol [Aubyn Eli]
A Few Great
Pumpkins XI - Features - Reverse Shot Adam Nayman, October 31, 2016
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Criticwire
Classic of the Week: 'I Walked With a Zombie” | IndieWire Vikram Murthi
366 weird movies [Alfred Eaker]
Old
Ass Movies: Know the Horror of ‘I Walked with a Zombie’ Scott Beggs from Film School Rejects
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Classic-Horror.com [Nate Yapp]
The
Lucid Nightmare: REVIEW: I Walked With A Zombie Jay Shatzer
I
Walked With A Zombie is a moody melodrama, not the ... - AV Club Film Sam Adams
Behind the Couch [James Gracey]
Catching the Classics [Clayton L. White]
I Walked With a Zombie | Cinema de Merde
The Glitter of
Putrescence - Val Lewton at RKO - Harvard Film Archive March 30, 2014
The Reeler's Miriam Bale I Walked with Val Newton, by Miriam Bale from The Reeler, December 12, 2007
Val Lewton Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary, July 27, 2008
JACQUES
TOURNEUR | Horror Amino
The Telltale Mind the Motherlode of posters and Screen Shots, January 28, 2016
The Telltale Mind Once Upon a Time… – I Walked With a Zombie (1943), January 28, 2016
Cinefantastique Online [Steve Biodrowski] DVD Review
The Digital Fix [Gary Couzens] also reviewing THE BODY SNATCHER
I Walked With A
Zombie - DVD review for VideoVista at videovista.net Andrew Darlington
The Val Lewton Collection on DVD Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Paul Sherman, The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
The Val Lewton Horror Collection - AV Club film Keith Phipps, The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
DVD Verdict Review - The Val Lewton Horror Collection Brett Cullum extensive review from DVD Verdict Review, October 2005
A Salute to Val Lewton Dick’s Picks from DVD Classics Corner
DVD Times - The Val Lewton Horror Collection in October - Full ... Dave Foster from DVD Times, June 20, 2005
eFilmCritic Reviews Doug Bentin
Journeys in Classic Film [Kristen Lopez]
The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Lewton's Calypsonian: Sir Lancelot I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, by Michael McMorrow from Cult Film Confidential, January 14, 2008
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
I
Walked with a Zombie | Variety
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Val Lewton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I Walked With A Zombie - Original Trailer 1943 on YouTube (59 seconds)
I Walked With a Zombie 1/9 (9:19)
I Walked With a Zombie 2/9 (8:14)
I Walked With a Zombie 3/9 (7:50)
I Walked With a Zombie 4/9 (7:42)
[TRANSLATED] I Walked With a Zombie 5/9
I Walked With a Zombie 5/9 (8:37)
I Walked With a Zombie 6/9 (6:42)
I Walked With a Zombie 7/9 (7:22)
I Walked With a Zombie 8/9 (7:33)
Ehsan Khoshbakht's notes on cinematograph [Manny Farber] August 16, 2009
"The Leopard Man", a reissued "B" (1942) showing with the rickety "King Kong", is a nerve-twitching whodunit giving the creepy impression that human beings and "things" are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny. A lot of surrealists like Cocteau have tried for the same supernatural effects, but while their scenes still seem like portraits in motion, Val Lewton's film shows a way to tell a story about people, that isn't dominated by the activity, weight, size, and pace of the human figure. In one segment of the film a small frightened senorita walks beyond the edge of the border town and then back again, while her feelings and imagination keep shifting with the camera into the sagebrush, the darkness of an arroyo, crackling pebbles underfoot, and so on until you see her thick dark blood oozing under the front door of her house. All the psychological effects -- fear and so on –were transferred to within the non-human components of the picture as the girl waited for some non-corporeal manifestation of nature, culture, or history to gobble her up. But more important in terms of movie invention, Lewton's use of multiple focus (characters are dropped or picked up as if by chance, while the movie goes off on odd tracks trying to locate a sound or suspicion) and his lighter-than-air sense of pace created a terrifically plastic camera style. It put the camera eye on a curiously delicate wave length that responds to scenery as quickly as the mind, and gets inside of people instead of reacting only to surface qualities. This film still seems to be one of Hollywood's original gems -- nothing impure in terms of cinema, nothing imitative about its style, and little that misses fire through a lack of craft.
--Manny Farber (September 27, 1952, The Nation)
10 Key Moments in Films (4th Batch) Jonathan Rosenbaum
1943 / The Leopard Man – Teresa walks home at night in a Mexican border town.
U.S. Director: Jacques Tourneur: Actors: Margaret Landry, Kate Lawson.
Why it’s Key: It’s the most terrifying sequence in Val Lewton’s oeuvre.
A five-minute sequence occurring only eight minutes into a 66-minute feature, this sequence terrifies, above all, because of the way it prods our imagination. The story has just strangely shifted focus from a nightclub dancer in a border town — who unwittingly caused a rival’s rented leopard to break loose — to Teresa, a teenage neighbor whose house she passes.
Sent out by her mother to buy corn meal for her father’s tortillas, Teresa doesn’t want to go because of the escaped leopard, but her unsympathetic mother dismisses her fears even after her kid brother teases her about them. Her mother even locks the front door after her, saying she can’t return without the corn meal. But the nearest shop she visits is already closed, so she has to walk across the dark, wind-swept town, dodging tumbleweeds that suddenly sweep past her, to a larger store, where the shopkeeper remembers her as a girl afraid of the dark. Then, on her way home, our dread is stoked by the sound of dripping water and a pair of shining eyes under a railway trestle, then by the sudden scream of a train speeding past, and finally by close-ups of the snarling leopard. She flees, and when we next hear her hammering on the door of her home, pleading for her mother to open it, the lock jams, and we hear rather than see what ensues —- until a trickle of blood appear under the door. Imagining the awfulness rather than seeing it only makes it more upsetting.
Jacques
Tourneur: Whispers in a Distant Corridor | Feature | Slant ... Ed
Gonzalez from Slant magazine
reviewing the Val Lewton Horror Collection, August 30, 2002, also seen
here: The
Leopard Man | Film Review | Slant Magazine
Some consider the three low-budget films Jacques Tourneur made
with iconic producer Val Lewton—head of RKO's horror unit from 1942 until his
untimely death in 1952—the greatest works of the B-movie genre, but many
theorists remain hesitant to use the auteurist model when discussing the late
director. After The Leopard Man, Tourneur went on to make a successful
string of film noirs (most significantly Berlin Express and Out of
the Past) every bit as ambiguous and unassuming as any of the
Lewton-Tourneurs: Cat People, Leopard Man, and I Walked With a
Zombie. Though the director was forced to show the titular monster from
1957's Curse of the Demon (a.k.a. Night of the Demon), the film's
legendary storm sequence was proof that Tourneur's cinema was about what lurked
implicitly in the dark shadows of his aesthetic.
Mario Bava is often credited as the father of the giallo, a sub-genre of
Italian horror films known for their extreme and unsettling spectacles of
violence. Though Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Luis Buñuel's fetishistic
cinema had an insurmountable influence on Bava, no discussion of the origins of
the slasher film would be complete without mention of Tourneur's 1943 classic Leopard
Man. Tourneur was less concerned with bloodshed than the very
suggestibility of violence, which is probably what has made him so difficult to
place on an auteur grid than Bava or Argento; not only was he overshadowed by
Lewton, but by his own images. In his book The Cinema of Nightfall: Jacques
Tourneur, Chris Fujiwara says, "Tourneur's compositions and lighting
schemes insistently involve the characters with their surroundings, creating a
sense of human interaction as a tapestry." Who else but Tourneur could
tell a story entirely in shadows?
In Leopard Man, a runaway leopard grips a New Mexican town in fear,
killing three young women in the course of a few days. Tourneur was able to
deliriously evoke the presence of the film's killer cat with as little as a
darkened alleyway and with no more than a swaying tree branch. Three women are
killed during the course of the film: Teresa (Margaret Landry), a girl sent to
fetch cornmeal by her mother in the middle of the night; Consuelo (Tula Parma),
a young woman locked inside a cemetery (a sequence that anticipates a set piece
from Argento's Four Flies on Grey
Velvet); and Clo-Clo (Margo), a dancer at a local nightclub.
In Argento's Suspiria,
a series of murders at a boarding school serve to push the plot along—in the
end, there's a sense that the innocent are merely expendable. Tourneur's
approach appears equally mischievous. Though characters are still being
introduced halfway through the film, they still engender our sympathy via the
constant cross-cutting between the story's mini-narratives.
There's a certain multi-cultural conflict that distinguishes the
Lewton-Tourneurs. In 1942's Cat People, the director's most famous film,
the exotic Irena Dubrova (Simone Simon) embraces her cultural past as her
sexual urges begin to overwhelm her. In 1943's superior I Walked With a
Zombie, Betsey Connell (Frances Dee) similarly acknowledges the power of
tradition inherent in
Tourneur's use of sound is perhaps as well regarded as his shadowplay. The
women of Leopard Man may seem anonymous, but Tourneur uses sound to both
scare and complicate them. Leopard Man may be a horror film but
it also has the texture of a musical. There's the train that clamors above
Teresa's head on her way back to her mother's home, evoking her distance from
home; the dripping water inside a tunnel that summons her fear of the dark; and
the sound of ever-clinking castanets, an example of culture turning against
itself. When Clo-Clo (even her name is rhythmic) strides down a street sparsely
populated by friends, gypsies, and lovers smooching within darkened doorways,
it's only natural to assume that she will be the film's first victim. But
Tourneur courts such expectations, subverting them and using them to his
advantage; Clo-Clo won't die until the audience understands that her castanets
(symbols of comfort and femine wile) will be her undoing.
Two years after Leopard Man, Tourneur made the gaslight melodrama Experiment
Perilous. Set in 1903
The Leopard Man - TCM.com Bret Wood
By the time of their third collaboration, producer Val Lewton and
director Jacques Tourneur (pioneers of the psychological horror film) had
solidly proven their theory that the unseen can be more frightening than the
obvious. Rather than relying on elaborate makeup and special effects, films
such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
situate their horrors in the dark shadows and the mounting paranoia that slowly
engulf the films' characters.
The Leopard Man (1943) stars
Dennis O'Keefe (T-Men, 1947) as Jerry Manning, a theatrical agent who
convinces his songstress client Kiki (Jean Brooks) to incorporate a black
leopard into her nightclub act. The publicity stunt backfires when the cat
breaks free and later kills a girl in a New Mexico village. Soon thereafter,
another woman (Tula Parma) is mysteriously killed while locked inside a
cemetery, apparently mauled by the escaped cat. Manning, however, begins to
suspect that the culprit is human rather than feline... a psychopath "with
a kink in his brain," who is using the leopard as a sort of alibi.
Meanwhile, Kiki's fellow performer Clo-Clo (Margo) is faced with omens of her
own doom, and begins to wonder if perhaps she will be the Leopard Man's third
victim.
Based on Cornell Woolrich's hard-boiled novel Black Alibi (1942), the
screenplay was given a name change by RKO head Charles Koerner, who hoped The Leopard Man would capitalize on
the popularity of Cat People, Lewton and Tourneur's first film together.
Several of Woolrich's stories and novels were adapted to the screen by such
filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window, 1954), Mitchell Leisen (No
Man of Her Own, 1950) and Francois Truffaut (The Bride Wore Black,
1968). But only Lewton and Tourneur succeeded in capturing the grim brutality
of Woolrich's prose and the oppressive night that is such a vital ingredient of
his work.
Screenwriters Ardel Wray and Edward Dein made many changes in Woolrich's text
in order to keep costs low and sidestep the censors. The castanet-playing
Clo-Clo was a part-time prostitute in the novel, and the killer was unmasked as
a police inspector who adorned himself in animal parts cut from the carcass of
the escaped jaguar (not a leopard) -- clear violations of the Production Code.
The novel was set in South America, in "the third-largest city south of
the Panama Canal," and the climax occurred in the abandoned tunnels and
cells that were once used as torture chambers during the Inquisition.
With a budget of less than $150,000 and a tight four-week shooting schedule,
there was little time for experimentation and extravagance on the set of The Leopard Man. Filming scenes on
location was out of the question. To help flavor the film with authenticity,
Lewton recruited screenwriter Wray to take an excursion to New Mexico to gather
local color and make snapshots of settings and buildings she found interesting.
"First day there I took pictures frantically, of anything and everything,
and took them to a shop for development," said Wray, a talented
screenwriter but an inexperienced photographer. "Miraculously, probably
because it was a nearly foolproof camera, it was all right." These amateur
photos were then given to staff of the RKO art department, who incorporated
certain architectural features into the modestly budgeted set designs.
"Another instance of Val's genius for improvisation."
Much credit for the Lewton/Tourneur successes is owed to the talented craftsmen
of RKO -- under the guidance of cinematographer Robert de Grasse and art
directors Albert D'Agostino and Walter Keller -- who were adept at transforming
cheap underlit sets into the stuff of nightmares, where every darkened nook
housed a potential menace. Some of these same technicians had sharpened their
cost-efficient skills two years earlier on Orson Welles's Citizen Kane
(1941), a textbook example of how shadows can conceal budgetary limitations and
a testament to the resourcefulness of the RKO art department.
The only scene of The Leopard Man
that clearly betrays its B-picture status is its one attempt at spectacle: the
pursuit of the killer into the midst of an ominous religious procession. What
was a brilliant concept could not possibly have been done justice in the
confines of a studio soundstage. The images of monks garbed in black robes and
pointed hoods, bearing candles and crucifixes as they march into the desert was
most likely inspired by the controversial Penitente religious cult of New Mexico,
which was also the subject of the exploitation film Lash of the Penitentes
(1936).
The Leopard Man succeeds best
when it relishes the mysterious power of darkness, as was the case with its
most memorable sequence. In an unsettling dramatization of childhood fears, a
teenage girl (Margaret Landry) is forced to go on a late-night errand to buy
cornmeal for her family. After a terrified walk to the distant store, through
empty streets and a pitch-dark riverbed, she returns home only to be attacked
by the leopard on her own doorstep. Surprisingly violent for a film of 1943,
the murder is depicted from inside the house, with the sound of the girl's
screams outside, pounding at the locked door, the mother desperately trying to
unlock the rusted bolt, and finally silence...and a trickle of blood flowing
beneath the door. Tourneur never shows the cat or the attack, but the scene
couldn't have been more terrifying.
The Leopard Man marked the end
of the Lewton/Tourneur partnership, as RKO thought it wiser to double their
productivity and assign them to separate projects, a bit of logical reasoning
that failed to take into account the unique way in which the producer and
director's talents complemented one another. Tourner recalled, "We had the
perfect collaboration -- Val was the dreamer, the idealist, and I was the
materialist, the realist. We should have gone right on doing bigger, more
ambitious pictures and not just horror movies."
Working together, Lewton and Tourneur made three timeless horror films in quick
succession. Separately, they only occasionally ascended to such heights of
cinematic inventiveness. Lewton followed up The Leopard Man with The Seventh Victim (1943), a moody
thriller directed by editor Mark Robson that almost equals the Tourneur films.
Two years later, Lewton made several films with Boris Karloff at RKO: The
Body Snatcher (1945), Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam
(1946). Tourneur, eager to escape the horror genre, went on to direct the
legendary film noir Out of the Past (1947), but later returned to his
roots with the supernatural thriller Curse of the Demon (1957).
Spiritual Terror: The
Horror Films of Val Lewton Brad
Linaweaver from Mondo Cult,
originally published in Wonder magazine,
Summer 1995
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005
The
Leopard Man - Bright Lights Film Journal “What It Takes to Make a Softie”: Breaking
Noir Tradition in The
Leopard Man, by Erich Kuersten,
November 1, 2005
Le Corbeau - Bright Lights Film Journal Les Fleurs du Mal: The Leopard Man and Le Corbeau: Tourneur and Clouzot Deliver Homefront Perversity, Paranoia, and Subversion, by Roderick Heath from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2005
The
Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
The Leopard Man - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton
Lessons
of Darkness: Jacques Tourneur's The Leopard Man : Open ... Brecht Andersch from Open Space, February 21, 2010
Riding
the High Country [Colin McGuigan] December 15, 2011
Behind
the Couch [James Gracey]
366 weird movies [Alfred Eaker]
Changing
Metaphors: On I Walked With a Zombie
(1943) Brit Mandelo from
Tor.com
Journeys in Classic Film [Kristen Lopez]
Have you seen The
Leopard Man? Richard Harland Smith from Movie Morlocks,
The Glitter of Putrescence
- Val Lewton at RKO - Harvard Film Archive
March 30, 2014
eFilmCritic
Reviews [William Price]
JACQUES
TOURNEUR | Horror Amino
The
Telltale Mind the Motherlode
of posters and Screen Shots, January
25, 2016
The
Telltale Mind Beware
the Darkness – The Leopard Man (1943), January 25, 2016
The Digital Fix [Gary Couzens]
DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
The Val Lewton Horror Collection - AV Club film Keith Phipps, The Val Lewton Collection, 5-discs
DVD Times - The Val Lewton Horror Collection in October - Full ... Dave Foster from DVD Times, June 20, 2005
Cinetarium [Jack Gattanella] also reviewing THE SEVENTH VICTIM
Junta Juleil's Culture Shock [Sean Gill]
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Leopard
Man | Jonathan Rosenbaum
capsule
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The Val Lewton Blog-a-thon: The Leopard Man » THE LEOPARD MAN essay by Peter Nellhaus at Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee, January 14, 2008
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Menswear Moments: The Leopard Man Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The New York Times Bosley Crowther
Val Lewton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE LEOPARD MAN TRAILER 1943 VAL LEWTON (1:19)
USA (92 mi) 1946
Canyon Passage,
directed by Jacques Tourneur | Film review - Time Out
Oregon, 1856: pioneering days. Andrews is the ambitious, self-reliant hero around whom move the weak friend (Donlevy), the sworn enemy (Bond), the more or less right woman (Hayward), and the more or less wrong one (Roc, on leave from J Arthur Rank). The film's unevenness and its fitful progress are characteristic of Tourneur. Hayward looks neglected, Donlevy seems disinclined, Carmichael's songs are pleasant but disruptive, and, at a guess, the writer tried to pack in far too much of a discursive novel (by Ernest Haycox). Against all that is the director's talent for the eloquent vignette, the way his characters from time to time convey an unexpected delicacy of feeling and the sense, coherently organised and expressed in the movie, of life as an affair of the temporary and the uncertain. In other words, less for Western buffs than for auteurists and those with a taste for curate's eggs.
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Jacques Tourneur at work in color on Western landscapes is something to behold. The credits roll over a matte of a damp day in Portland (slanting rooftops, a ship’s half-seen mast, boards over a muddy street) that’s practically a Grafström, the Oregon Trail that follows is finely-drawn watercolor. The nascent commune of Jacksonville would be Fordian, except that Dana Andrews’ negation of piety ("A man can choose his own gods") and Andy Devine’s acknowledgement of Indian rights ("We’re on their land. They ain’t likely to forget that") challenge Manifest Destiny. Overlapping triangles -- Andrews-Susan Hayward-Patricia Roc, Andrews-Hayward-Brian Donlevy, Andrews-Roc-Victor Cutler, and Hayward-Donlevy-Rose Hobart. Hoagy Carmichael with mandolin amid the ramblers and settlers is wastrel, commentator, mediator, and voyeur ("...a little store and lots of time"). The cabin-rising sequence tips its hat to Hathaway’s Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and was studied by Weir. The wedding bash celebrates wholeness but these are forces in tenuous balance, Donlevy voices Tourneur’s ambivalence ("The illusion of peace is upon it") moments before the Indians materialize via a single reverse shot that seems to introduce a parallel world. Another space-expanding reverse shot, this time embodying tensions from within rather than from without, takes place right before Andrews’ brawl with Ward Bond, cutting from a medium-shot of the two at the saloon counter to another revealing the townspeople in the wings, waiting for the spectacle. (The fight, remarkably bloody and ugly, hinges on the image of the disoriented Bond smashing his fist into a wooden pole. Hayward cheers with the crowd.) A film of "thin margins," the saloon doubles as a hanging courtroom while the garden becomes an inferno. The view of a dazed Roc wandering in the woods after the slaughter is from I Walked with a Zombie, and finds its way into Demme’s Beloved. Stars in My Crown revisits the territory with hope for harmony, but Wichita and Great Day in the Morning know better. With Fay Holden, Stanley Ridges, Lloyd Bridges, Halliwell Hobbes, Onslow Stevens, and Dorothy Peterson.
Canyon Passage - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
On its surface, Jacques Tourneur's first western, Canyon Passage (1946), is a solid but
conventional frontier drama of ambitious entrepreneurs, determined settlers,
gamblers, gold miners and Indian tribes. But under the familiar trappings of
cabin raisings, poker games, saloon brawls and frontier combat is a remarkably
dense drama where the tensions between individual enterprise and communal good
are often strained and the line between hero and villain is not a matter of black
and white, but shades of gray.
Set in the Oregon territory in 1856, a time when the city of Portland is merely
a growing boom town with streets so muddy they're more like creek beds, and
adapted from the novel by Ernest Haycox (whose western fiction also became the
basis for John Ford's Stagecoach [1939] and Cecil B. DeMille's Union
Pacific [1939], among many other films), the story travels out of the
"city" into a more untamed land, a small settlement in the inland
mountains. Dana Andrews is Logan Stuart, who runs a thriving freight business
with strings of pack mules and horses, the only conveyance through the passes
and forest trails. After a business trip to Portland he escorts Lucy (Susan
Hayward), the fiancée of his best friend George (Brian Donlevy), through the
beautiful but dangerous mountain trails back to Jacksonville. These three form
a romantic triangle of sorts, but Tourneur avoids the emotional melodrama of
friends-turned-rivals to offer a more measured portrait of friendship tangled
up in jealousy and competition, and loyalty that trumps everything.
Canyon Passage isn't one of
those simple little town laid out on the prairie around a main street with a
grid, building out as the town grows but a rough-hewn collection of businesses
and saloons in a community that looks literally hacked out of the wilderness.
Surrounded by emerald green forests and dramatic mountains, this is different
from the more conventional communities seen in frontier westerns up to now.
Jacksonville is a beautiful little town striving for maturity but caught up in
the growing pains of free enterprise and new settlements in a place without a
marshal or a judge. Roughneck outliers (notably a brutal bully played by Ward
Bond), mob justice, and the threat of an Indian uprising are the flip side of
the frontier idealism of the new settlers and established families pulling
together in the face of adversity.
Through it all rides Hi Linnet (Hoagy Carmichael), the laid-back proprietor of
a small trading post and the town's troubadour who offers a wry commentary on
the drama playing out. Though not exactly the town's conscience, he is a man to
speak his mind and say his piece in every situation. And while he manages to
miss all the heavy lifting in a cabin-raising for a young couple (which
culminates in their wedding), Hi arrives in time to enjoy the banquet, lead the
band and, when the celebration is invaded by the local tribe upset at yet
another white settlement in their hunting grounds, defuse tensions with quick
thinking. The film, quite unexpectedly, acknowledges the threat that the
growing community of settlers poses to the original inhabitants of the land (as
well as the threat they pose to the white settlers), and those tensions finally
snap when Bond's backwoods thug sets off a war between them.
A lavish color film with a $2.6 million budget and a sturdy cast, Canyon Passage was a major production
for producer Walter Wanger, a former independent producer now working for
Universal. Along with Dana Andrews (fresh off The Best Years of Our Lives,
1946), Brian Donlevy and rising star Susan Hayward are such supporting players
as Hoagy Carmichael (who also wrote and performed four songs for the film,
including the Oscar®-nominated "Ole Buttermilk Sky") and John Ford
favorites Ward Bond and Andy Devine.
Jacques Tourneur was not Wanger's first choice for director - Stuart Heisler
and George Marshall, two western veterans, were both attached before Tourneur
was signed. Canyon Passage was
not only Tourneur's first western, it was his first color film and the biggest
budget of his career up to that point. The son of respected French director
Maurice Tourneur, Jacques apprenticed in Hollywood on short subjects and
B-movies before making his name directing some of the moodiest and most stylish
horror films of the forties - among them Cat People [1942] and I
Walked with a Zombie [1943]. He made the most of this new opportunity,
capturing stunning outdoor scenes during a month-long shoot on location around
Diamond Lake and Medford, Oregon and putting the lush color, stunning forests
and dynamic mountain backdrops on screen. The bucolic shots of homesteads on
lazy rivers or overlooking green meadows are contrasted with shadowy forest
scenes, where ambushes and hunting parties lurk amidst the wild majesty of the
landscape. Tourneur suggests rather than shows the most brutal violence, but he
reminds us of the cost of settlement in human terms when some of the most
beloved members of the community are killed in the attacks.
Producer Wanger fought with Tourneur over the director's pictorial approach to
the film, which emphasizes group shots and characters within the landscape, and
repeatedly asked for more close-ups. It was a star vehicle, as far as Wanger
was concerned, as well as a story of the settling of the west and the frontier
spirit. Tourneur delivered a much more complex story about the tensions between
individualism and communal good and the ambiguities of the heroes who settled
the west, where personal loyalty at times collides with the communal good. It
became Wanger's most successful post-war film, according to biographer Matthew
Bernstein, but the frustrations of working within the studio system proved too
great for the producer and he left Universal, bringing his new star, Susan Hayward,
with him. Tourneur went back to RKO to direct one of the masterpieces of film
noir and arguably the greatest film of his career: Out of the Past
[1947]. Canyon Passage has too
often been overlooked in the face of his defining horror classics and films
noir. It remains one of his most interesting and satisfying films: complex,
visually stunning and full of characters with rough edges and contradictions.
No black hats and white hats in this western, just the colors of the new world.
The Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Canyon Passage Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Jeremy Arnold
DVDTalk [Paul Mavis] Classic Western Round-Up: Vol. 1
Happyotter [Dymon Enlow] plenty of screen shots
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
20/20 Movie Reviews [Richard Cross]
Washington Monthly [Keith Humphreys]
I
never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the
day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn't know where she
lived. I never followed her. All I ever had to go on was a place and time to
see her again. I don't know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the
world would end. —Jeff
Bailey (Robert Mitchum)
You're
no good, and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other.
—Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer)
Considered the quintessential noir film, this is without question one of the best film noirs, one of the best films of the 1940’s, and one of the best films ever made, as the film, which was viewed as a B-movie when it was released, is a standout in every artistic category. Only Robert Mitchum’s first starring role, and Kirk Douglas’s 2nd film in a supporting role, Mitchum as Jeff Bailey commands the screen with a rare confidence and defines the standard for the role of masculinity in a noir film, as he’s strong, broad-shouldered, handsome, and smart while retaining that casual air of indifference and nonchalance, as if he’s his own man who can’t be bought or sold, yet when faced off against Jane Greer’s Kathy Moffet, the smoldering femme fatale beauty of every man’s dreams, the moment he sees her striding confidently out of the sunlight into the darkened shadows of a Mexican cantina he melts like butter in her hands and is willing to do anything to have her, even though he knows it will likely destroy him. This is before they’ve ever spoken a single word, where one look says it all. This kind of onscreen chemistry and display of raw sensuality is exactly why cinema was invented, and in this film it delivers in every respect, as it’s also one of the more eye-poppingly luminous black and white films ever made. But it’s the dramatic power of these two performances that makes this film so unforgettable, as other than CASABLANCA (1942), another so-called B-movie released during the war, rarely are audiences treated to this kind of searing intensity between characters, made especially intriguing by the noirish lure driving them both into the seedy underworld of lies, deception, murder and criminality, a place both seem to relish so long as they can have each other. Only one problem, however, as Moffet is actually the girlfriend of Whit Sterling (Douglas), a mafia-style lowlife gangster who sends Bailey to Mexico to find her and bring her back, a ruthless and unforgiving man who takes exception to another man stealing his girl who also absconded with $40,000 dollars that belongs to him, adding a decisively fatal element to their budding romance, where their future is perpetually cast under a dark cloud of uncertainty.
Nicholas Musuraca, who also shot Tourneur’s atmospheric CAT
PEOPLE (1942) from the Val Lewton school of horror, was the cinematographer on
the film, constantly finding inventive ways to offset shadows and light, using
this not only to establish a dark mood or motive, but even as a device to
develop character, as Mitchum often finds himself hiding in another room,
behind a potted plant, even in a closet, or just lurking in the shadows,
spending a great deal of time in the dark, continually lost in his thoughts,
thinking about one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen,
especially her gorgeous eyes, yet she’s also smart, deceitful, conniving and
completely untrustworthy. Mitchum’s
ongoing inner monologue is full of wisecracks and clever personal observations,
as much of the film is told in flashbacks, where the scintillating dialogue
mixed with his narration leads us through a myriad of strange and eventful
occurrences where clever people continually try to get the upper hand and
outsmart others who seem to know someone is on to them, playing a cat and mouse
game of showing only the tip of the iceberg while carefully concealing what
matters in a safe place, only there aren’t any safe places left in the world
that can’t be found out, and in this film, sharks are lurking everywhere. Set in
Opening with the pristine beauty of nature, showing a quiet
world in perfect harmony before it becomes infected with the corruption that
people bring to it. Even rumor and
gossip are spread in a local diner with the assurance of a news report, no one
doubting the evidence or lack thereof, as these are the laws of human beings
who carry with them a need to share and bond with their fellow humans, even at
the expense of the truth or those whose lives might be shattered or hurt by
this kind of thoughtlessness. As if in
response to this kind of scatterbrained gossip mill, Jeff is a mysterious guy
who doesn’t talk much about his past, who runs a service station with the Kid,
but prefers to go fishing every day with Ann (Virginia Huston), who has the
kind of role Eva Marie Saint would later discover in ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)
or Julie Harris in EAST OF EDEN (1955), morally upright women who have a
saintly quality of forgiveness about them, not only because they take a special
interest in and have rare insight into the damaged souls of men, but where they
are not afraid to jump without a net, wagering all on the kind of flaws and
imperfections in men that others stay clear of.
When someone arrives from out of Jeff’s past, the present and the past
intersect, where he’s much the wiser now, but the people dragging him back into
the sinkhole of their morally bankrupt world keep getting better at it as well,
so even when he thinks he’s being careful, he can never be cautious
enough. What’s so remarkable about
Mitchum is how he’s such a straight shooter and throws caution to the wind,
fearing no one, but he can’t predict the desperate measures and outrageous
means humans use to protect themselves, which includes murder. Of course, as is typical in noir films,
Mitchum is being framed for crimes he never committed. In that regard, Mitchum expresses just the
right touch of down-to-earth cynicism, as he knows he’s being used as a sap and
it makes him sick to his stomach, expressing a kind of world weariness that we
might equate with wisdom. Still it never
feels like it’s enough, as the uncaring, unforgiving world expressed by the
disturbingly dark fate of
The way Mitchum and Greer grow intertwined in sin is quite stunning, as the initial pangs of love are replaced by panic and moments of desperation, where unconditional surrender turns to a mutual distrust, but still they reach out for one another on occasion, even when they know they are getting double crossed. It’s Mitchum whose feelings turn to disgust, more at himself that anyone else, because he can’t stop himself, or her, from being used in other people’s dirty little schemes, from continually falling into the muck and mire of criminal enterprise. Rhonda Fleming has an interesting role as an on-the-take ice princess working for Whit, tough as nails, and even more unscrupulous, but her brief screen time is riveting. These women are as dark and amoral as the criminal mind of any man, as outright greedy, and certainly as liable to sell out or double cross their best friends. It is in the company of this band of thieves that Mitchum must find his way out, imprisoned in a labyrinth of unending deceit, clawing his way back to a clean conscience and that majestic and untarnished fishing hole shown at the beginning of the film, an oasis of innocence and purity that is itself eventually stained with human blood. Adapted from the Geoffrey Homes novel Build My Gallows High, a pseudonym used by the screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, who would later write The Phenix City Story (1955), the screenplay, with an assist from Frank Fenton on getting the superb dialogue right, is pitch perfect in its tone of realism and reserve and never for a moment lags. Tourneur’s exquisite behind-the-scenes choreography blending all the elements together puts this under consideration for the greatest noir movie ever filmed, as it’s well-written, artfully staged, beautifully acted and shot, and deliciously malevolent when it needs to be, never once compromising its principles. This film stands in the rare air of the best of the Hitchcock films, many of which would come afterwards in the 1950’s, but the blend of intelligence and suspense in this hard-boiled murder mystery, along with iconic performances, the likes of which we never see anymore, puts this in the pantheon of best films ever.
Tom Gunning from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
On an
Jacques Tourneur’s Out
of the Past, adapted from Daniel Mainwaring’s novel Build My Gallows High, may be the masterpiece of film noir. All the
elements are there: the woman who lies,
but is so beautiful that one could forgive almost anything, or at least die at
her side. The bitter past that rises up again and destroys the main character.
The private eye, the man of wit and know-how who makes the mistake of giving in
to his passion—more than once. Mitchum perfectly embodies this figure. Like
Humphrey Bogart, he possesses a calm interiority that expresses independence
and confidence. As once character says of him, “he just sits and stays inside
himself.” But unlike the cautious Bogart, Mitchum literally slouches into his
role as Jeff, his heavy relaxation making his vulnerability not only believable
but tragic.
Is Kathy’s passion for Jeff real? In spite of her inability to endure difficulties for his sake and her fatalistic attitude about love, does she really love him? For that matter, is Jeff’s ardor for her sincere? Although he phones the police to convert their final getaway into an ambush, is he surrendering to her allure once again? This is the question that Jeff’s small-town girlfriend Ann (Virginia Huston) asks The Kid (Dickie Moore), Jeff’s deaf mute companion, at the film’s end. The Kid nods yes. Is he telling the truth? We feel that this gesture will free Ann from any future entanglement with Jeff’s fatal world. But does that mean it’s a lie? Out of the Past, like film noir generally, leaves us with the enigmas of fatal desires, the ambiguities of loves laced with fear.
Kathy Moffet in Out of the Past remains the gold standard for fatal femmes. You can have your Barbara Stanwycks and your Jeanne Moreaus, Jane Greer is a dame to kill for, and she devours Robert Mitchum AND Kirk Douglas. From the moment she appears, backlit by the Mexican sunlight, she's every promise ever made by duplicitous women. Men? They're pawns to her, and she plays them mercilessly. Here's the touchstone, though. One of my problems with Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity is that I have a hard time believing that sad sack Fred MacMurray would kill for her. With Kathy Moffet, though, you believe it from the instant you see her. Kill, sell your soul, anything she asks.
Hidden Treasures of Film - CineScene Chris Dashiell
A tough ex-private eye (Robert Mitchum) tries to start over and escape his past mistakes, but someone finds out where's he hiding, and in the flashback that takes up most of the rest of the movie, he tells about his fateful encounter with a beautiful, dangerous girl (Jane Greer) and her gangster boyfriend (Kirk Douglas). With its brilliantly allusive dialogue and dark visual sheen, this is one of the smartest, saddest, and most poetic film noirs - impeccable style combined with postwar American dread. The characters are finely drawn, yet mysterious - their lives seem to extend beyond the film into places unknown. Tourneur's technique was never more elaborate - the pace, atmosphere, camera placement and movement, along with the top-notch acting, pulls you in and never lets go. Yet the film was considered a B-picture at the time, was dismissed by most critics, and was generally ignored until its rediscovery by noir aficionados years later.
Out Of The Past | Artists | The A.V. Club
A collective of B-movie stalwarts—director Jacques Tourneur (Cat
People), writer Daniel Mainwaring (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers),
and unproven leading man Robert Mitchum—were thrown together in perfect alchemy
for 1947’s affecting film noir Out Of The Past. Drawing on his own
troubled, persistently self-destructive history, Mitchum plays the owner of a
small-town gas-station whose attempts to stake out a new life fail when his
past comes back to haunt him. When he’s summoned by Kirk Douglas, a menacing
gambler with an old score to settle, Mitchum recalls his days as a private eye,
when
Out of
the Past Time Out
The definitive flashback movie, in which
our fated hero Mitchum makes a rendezvous with death and his own past in the
shape of Jane
Greer. Beguiling and resolutely ominous, this hallucinatory voyage has two
more distinctions: as the only movie with both a deaf-mute garage hand and death
by fishing-rod, and as one of the most bewildering and beautiful films ever
made. From a traditionally doomed and perversely corrupt world, the mood of
obsession was never more powerfully suggestive: Mitchum waiting for Greer in a
Mexican bar beneath a flashing neon sign sums it up - nothing happens, but
everything is said. Superbly crafted pulp is revealed at every level: in the
intricate script by Daniel
Mainwaring (Phenix City Story, Invasion of the Body Snatchers),
the almost abstract lighting patterns of Nick
Musuraca (previously perfected in Cat People and The Spiral
Staircase), and the downbeat, tragic otherworldliness of Jacques
Tourneur (only equalled in his I Walked with a Zombie). All these B
movie poets were under contract to RKO in the winter of 1946, and produced the
best movie of everyone involved - once seen, never forgotten. (The source novel
was by Mainwaring writing as
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Warner Bros.' modestly priced five-pack retrieves five nifty
noirs from the RKO vaults. The pick of the litter (available separately, like
the other four) is Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur
and starring Robert Mitchum as an ex-detective who gets sucked back into the
underworld by a temperamental gang boss (Kirk Douglas) who won't take no for an
answer. Though descriptions of his onscreen persona inevitably involve the word
"laconic," Mitchum shows how he could be both slow-moving and quick-witted,
spitting out some of the tartest one-liners in Hollywood history (the work of
uncredited screenwriter Frank Fenton). Hard to beat this exchange between
Mitchum and Jane Greer,
The way Mitchum delivers the line, it's more than cheap bravado, combining hope for the future with the gnawing certainty that there may come a time when his death is the only thing a man can control (though in the end, even that is denied him). There's a kind of decaying poetry to Tourneur's approach that carries over from his background in Gothic horror (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie and so on), and yet Out of the Past is one of the few noirs that seems to offer a real possibility that good might triumph — and not just in the perfunctory sense of fulfilling the production code's requirement that criminals always meet a bad end.
Out
of the Past - TCM.com Felicia
Feaster
Bitter, cynical, fatalistic and peppered with some of the best
crackling, tough-guy dialogue in the genre, Out of the Past (1947) is a
consummate example of film noir made during the movement's golden age in the
'40s and '50s. Robert Mitchum stars as Jeff Bailey alongside Kirk Douglas as
Whit Sterling, two shrewd, rock-hard individuals enthralled by the same
mysterious, danger-courting woman, Kathie Moffett (played by Jane Greer).
Jeff is working anonymously as the owner of a small-town gas station in
A savvy, world-wise but financially strapped
The son of French-born director Maurice Tourneur (The Last of the Mohicans,
1920), Jacques made his own memorable mark on the noir genre with a string of
inspired choices, from the casting of the film to the use of real locations to
enhance the film's gritty realism. Tourneur had handled equally macabre subject
matter, though in a different genre, in such horror films as Cat People
(1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). The cynicism of Out of the
Past was also well served by the taut, acerbic script by gifted
novelist/screenwriter
Mitchum and Kirk Douglas are - despite some actorly competitiveness behind the
scenes - beautifully matched in Out of the Past. As with many films
noir, the relationship between the brutally cynical Whit and Jeff, who share a
woman and a cynicism about human behavior, turns out to be more honest and
affectionate than either man's love for Kathie, a woman with the face of an
angel and the impulses of a viper. The two actors, who both became known for
their idiosyncratic, combative temperaments, reportedly engaged in an extended
power play for attention in their scenes together, with Mitchum cracking funny
faces to disrupt
Out of the Past is most often remembered for capitalizing on Mitchum's
uniquely laconic sexual allure and for transforming the actor - in his second
starring role after The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) - into an instant star.
Though the role was initially offered to Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield and
Dick Powell, all of whom turned it down, the gritty, stylish performance by
Mitchum has become a classic in the noir canon. But
Out of the Past - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Leland Poague
Though his filmmaking career spanned over 30 years and two continents, the name of Jacques Tourneur is still encountered chiefly in discussions of the Val Lewton unit at RKO, where Tourneur directed Cat People , I Walked with a Zombie , and The Leopard Man , the first two (at least) distinguished and distinctively poetic contributions to the horror film genre which has its roots in European folklore and the literature of English and German Romanticism. Even his auteurist partisans generally agree that Tourneur's gift for mise-enscène was nourished by and flourished in the collaborative atmosphere Lewton established; Tourneur's subsequent career, apart from Lewton, exhibits a hit-or-miss pattern which seems to confirm that Tourneur was more than usually dependent upon his collaborators for inspiration.
The great exception to the "Lewton" rule is Out of the Past , produced by Warren Duff from a script by Daniel Mainwaring, adapted from his 1946 novel Build My Gallows High . Whether the exception proves or disproves the rule is probably beyond settlement. The film's exceptionally complicated structure, part flashback narration, part linear narrative, argues for the importance of the scriptwriter; the film's sustained pattern of self-reflexive visual metaphors argues powerfully on behalf of Tourneur as metteur-en-scène. In any event, there is little dispute that the particular combination of talents displayed in Out of the Past —significant among them the iconic screen presences of Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer— resulted in a distinguished contribution to another genre tradition, film noir , for which Out of the Past has become, especially since its remake as Against All Odds , a primary measure of excellence and source of resonance.
Latter-day (often feminist) analyses of film noir often assume that representational style can be taken to oppose or undermine the "male" vantage point typical of the genre. Many films noir , for example, are presented as flashback narratives of a voice-over (and sometimes on-screen) narrator; the middle sections of Out of the Past are often cited here. And even those films which eschew the direct representation of a point of view are presented, as it were, "over the shoulder" of a central male identification figure, typically the hard-bitten detective. A surprising number of films noir are nevertheless readable as "female centered" at the level of film style, the camera favoring the central woman even while the story favors male agency. Style and narrative are thus read as opposing each other at the level of interpretation in a manner analogous to the deadly conflict of male and female which tends to motivate the sex and money intrigues typical of noir .
The degree to which Tourneur's camera centers on and favors the Jane Greer character (Kathie Moffat) in Out of the Past has been elaborately and convincingly documented by Marshall Deutelbaum. Though at various times both Jeff Markham (Mitchum) and Whit Sterling (Douglas) assume Kathie is theirs to control or "protect," what each discovers is that Kathie's power is the greater. Indeed, Jeff and Whit repeatedly agree on deals which seek to undo or retrieve the past—to retrieve Kathie after she shoots Whit, to retrieve incriminating tax records, to assign blame to Kathie for the death of Jeff's expartner—yet every attempt to undo the past only does it over again. And Kathie's importance as a figure of repetition is underlined in Tourneur's mise-en-scène by an elaborate series of visual allusions to Botticelli's Birth of Venus which serves to cast Kathie in the Venus role, god-like in her power, though perpetually (if imperfectly) "framed" by male views of her.
This association of Kathie with "frames" and "framing"
has several important consequences. One is to call attention to Kathie's status
as a screen, as something to look at. The issue is first raised when Jeff
questions
The temptation to see Kathie as a receptive screen should not blind us,
however, to the degree of her agency, to the sense in which she actively takes
on the attributes directed at her. And the world she mirrors (frames) in her
actions and gestures is the male world of financial power and masculine
brutality typified by the aptly named Whit Sterling. Early on Kathie's black
maid reports that Whit was in the habit of battering Kathie about; when Whit
closes his last deal with Jeff (agreeing to trade Kathie to the cops in
exchange for the tax documents) he again resorts to battery and death-threats
to enforce his will, to erase the past by rewriting it. But Kathie deconstructs
Whit's project by rewriting her own past, shooting Whit a second time, and
ordering Jeff to accompany her to
And just like Whit's, Kathie's last power-gesture is fatal. Just like
Kathie, who in first fleeing Whit left an unmistakable trail for Jeff to
follow, and who left her incriminating bank book behind after shooting Fisher,
as if signaling a desire to be caught, so too does Jeff, suddenly in the Kathie
position, the female to her male, the guy with the knitting needles just like
the gal with the gun (to paraphrase one of Fisher's sexist wisecracks)—so too
does Jeff call down his own destruction by calling the cops. Being "a
woman" in a world of Whit Sterlings offers a choice, really no choice at
all, between the stifling domesticity of Ann Miller's
‘Out
of the Past’: The Quintessential Film Noir that Launched Robert Mitchum and
Kirk Douglas’ Careers Cinephilia
& Beyond
Philosophical Film: Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur's Out of ... 32-page essay, New Literary History, Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, by Robert Pippin from Philosophical Film, 2010 (pdf)
Out of the Past (1947) HalOOOO
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
High Gallows: Revisiting Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past - Bright ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2000
The
Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Jacques
Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947): The weight of history ... David Walsh and Joanne Laurier from The World Socialist Web Site, September
5, 2015
Out of
the Past (1947) - Articles - TCM.com
John Miller and a series of articles from Turner Classic Movies
Out of the Past Michael Mills from Modern Times
Film Noir of the Week Steve-O
Film
Noir of the Week
The Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Out of the Past Michael E. Grost
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
An
examination of 3 films noir set in Mexico, including Out of the Past. Shades
of Black and Brown: Visions of
Projections Jon, responding to the Enders essay
Movie House Commentary (Spoilers) Johnny Web, comparing the original to the remake
Mystery*File [Dan Stumpf] comparing the film to the book
Jerry's Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts] taking a look at Robert Mitchum losing Best Actor
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
digitallyObsessed! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton
DVD Verdict Mark Van Hook
Film Noir Classic Collection | DVD | DVD | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Film School Rejects [Loukas Tsouknidas]
Few There Be That Find It Person X
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
MyFilmReview Reinier
Verhoef
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Jonathan M. Caryl]
Out of the Past (1947) Classic Film Guide
TSPDT - The 1000 Greatest Films: The Top 500 Films (101-150) Listed as #119
DVD club: Out of
the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur | Film | The ... Philip French from The Guardian
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
San Francisco Examiner [Bob Stephens]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Movie Review - Out of the Past - Movies - New York Times Bosley Crowther
Out of the Past - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
USA (89 mi) 1950
Stars
in My Crown | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
This somber black-and-white drama (1950) about a small-town preacher (Joel McCrea) in the postbellum south, narrated by the boy he raised (Dean Stockwell), is one of the most neglected films in the history of cinema as well as Jacques Tourneur's favorite among his own pictures. (Best known for Cat People and Out of the Past, Tourneur often seemed to thrive in obscurity, and by agreeing to direct this picture at MGM for practically nothing he reportedly sabotaged his own career.) A view of the American heartland that's emotionally engaged but still charged with darkness (a typhoid epidemic and a near lynching are among its key episodes), it recalls some of John Ford's best work in its complex perception of goodness, and I can't think of many films that convey a particular community with more pungency. Margaret Fitts adapted a novel by Joe David Brown; with Ellen Drew, James Mitchell, Juano Hernandez, Amanda Blake, Louis Stone, and Alan Hale. 89 min.
10 Key Moments in Films (4th Batch) Jonathan Rosenbaum
1950 / Stars in My Crown - Josiah Doziah Gray reads the imaginary will of Uncle Famous Prill.
U.S. Director: Jacques Tourneur. Actors: Joel McCrea,
Juan Hernandez, Dean Stockwell.
Why it’s Key: Jacques Tourneur illustrates his credo–that nothing is more powerful than people’s imaginations.
Stars in My Crown was Jacques Tourneur’s favorite among his own films. But he’s commonly viewed as a genre director, and if this uncharacteristic and low-budget MGM item about a small-town parson in the post-bellum South belongs to any recognizable genre, it’s the inspirational religious picture. Yet Tourneur clearly believed in the audience’s imagination and its innate decency more than any religion. And Josiah Doziah Gray (Joel McCrea) pretending to read the imaginary will of Uncle Famous Prill (Juano Hernandez), a black man who refuses to sell his property, to a band of neo-Klansmen with torches preparing to lynch him, is a beautiful illustration of the wisdom underlying both beliefs. What Gray accomplishes in his performance to the masked men he accomplishes with us as well, because we only discover that the will is imaginary at the scene’s end. “You can have him now,” Gray says melodramatically, after reaching the end of Prill’s thoughtful bequeathments to his neighbors — knowing or at least hoping that these reminders of Prill’s generosity and his many links to this community will ultimately save his life, as it does.
“There’s no writing here —- this ain’t no will,” says Gray’s adopted son John (Dean Stockwell), the film’s narrator, when he sees the blank pages on the ground. “Yes it is, Son —- it’s the will of God,” says Gray, which might be taken as a concession to Tourneur’s designated genre. But in fact, it’s the collective will and conscience that Tourneur is speaking to, stirring, and celebrating.
Stars
in My Crown - TCM.com Andrea Foshee
The gentle drama Stars in
My Crown (1950) centers around the residents of a small 19th-century town
in the American West and the country parson (Joel McCrea) whose presence makes
their lives better. Told through the nostalgic eyes of the parson's adopted
young nephew, John (Dean Stockwell), Stars
in My Crown is an engaging slice of Americana. Adapted from Joe David
Brown's popular novel, it examines the ups and downs of early small-town life,
including a typhoid epidemic, the threat of the Ku Klux Klan and the budding
romance between a doctor with a bad bedside manner and a pretty schoolteacher.
Director Jacques Tourneur made a career out of his association with producer
Val Lewton, which led to work on several creepy horror films for RKO such as Cat
People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). He established a
unique visual style based on his use of moody, ominous lighting schemes. Stars in My Crown, however, was a
departure from Tourneur's usual dark style and subject matter. Instead of conveying
a sense of foreboding and suspense, it exudes a warmth and optimism not often
found in his work.
The central role of the levelheaded Parson Grey who thumps a Bible and carries
a gun at the same time was not such a departure for actor Joel McCrea. This
dependable leading man made his mark mostly in Westerns like Ride the High
Country (1962) and Preston Sturges comedies like Sullivan's Travels
(1941). For Stars in My Crown,
McCrea had established enough star power to earn a salary of ten thousand dollars
a week.
Popular 1940s child actor Dean Stockwell is poignant as the young narrator of
the story - John - and he was one of the few child actors who managed to make
the successful transition into adult roles. His childhood roles included parts
in The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and The Secret Garden (1949).
While he always worked with some degree of regularity throughout his career,
Stockwell enjoyed a return to prominence as an adult actor in the 1980s with a
string of memorable character roles in films like Blue Velvet (1986), Tucker:
The Man and His Dream (1988) and Married to the Mob (1988), for
which he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. He also
had a long, successful stint on the science fiction TV series Quantum Leap
as the holographic image contact Al.
Some other recognizable faces grace the community of Stars in My Crown. A young Amanda Blake, most famous for her role
as saloon keeper Miss Kitty on the long-running Western TV series Gunsmoke,
plays the new-doctor-in-town's love interest, Faith. James Arness, who
co-starred with Blake in Gunsmoke as Dodge City Marshal Matt Dillon,
also appears in a small role as one of Jed Isbell's sons.
Farmer and friend to Parson Grey, Jed Isbell, is played by veteran character
actor Alan Hale, who starred in hundreds of films over his five-decade-long
career. Incidentally, he was also known as the father of actor Alan Hale, Jr.,
who bore an uncanny resemblance to his famous dad. Hale, Jr., gained fame
playing The Skipper on Gilligan's Island. Stars in My Crown was one of the last films the senior Hale
completed before his death in 1950, the year the film was released.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD: Jacques Tourneur's westerns () Tim Lucas, July 2011
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 3): Stars In My Crown (1950 ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, August 11, 2009
The Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Cagey Films [kgeorge] Kenneth George Godwin, August 24,2011
DVD of the Week: Stars In My Crown | The New Yorker Richard Brody, March 16, 2011
DVD Savant Review: Stars
in My Crown - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman
Stars in My
Crown (film) - Wikipedia
'Everything Goes in Wichita' boast the signposts. The railroad has put the town on the map, but those businessmen set to become rich off the influx of hungry, thirsty, rowdy cattlemen are also concerned that their property should be protected against the cowboys' worst excesses. They persuade the reluctant Wyatt Earp (McCrea) to accept the marshal's badge, but have second thoughts when his civic law and order policies contradict their commercial instincts. This smooth, unassuming Western fits in neatly between the idealism of Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and the cynicism of Dmytryk's Warlock (1959). It ends optimistically enough, with Earp and his new bride leaving for a date with destiny in Dodge City, but not before the loss of at least two innocents, and many more gunmen.
Buffalo hunter Wyatt Earp (McCrea) has a run-in with some cowboys
movin' a herd not too far outside of the lawless town of Wichita. Earp
moves on into Wichita and within just a few hours he stops a bank
robbery. The mayor hits him up to be the sheriff, but he's not
interested. He just wants to open up a business and live a quite
life. Things change though when those same cowboys ride into town, get
properly boozed up and start shooting at anything and everything...including a
5 year old boy standing at his window. Earp takes the job.
Some people might complain (and rightfully so) that 50 year-old McCrea was too
old to play the role of a young 27 year-old Earp, especially since his love interest
is the strikingly beautiful 26 year-old Vera Miles, but when it's all said and
done...I really enjoyed McCrea's performance. He's always been one of my
favorite actors and he does another excellent job here. In fact everybody
does an excellent job, the only weak link in the entire film was that goofy
song sang over the opening and closing credits. It was painful, but still
really funny. Sorry Tex Ritter fans.
Fast pace, impressive supporting cast full of familiar faces (including Lloyd
Bridges, Wallace Ford, Peter Graves, Jack Elam, Edgar Buchanan, Walter Coy,
Walter Sande and others including a brief on-screen appearance by a young Sam
Peckinpah), nice photography, solid direction by Jacques Tourneur. All
said and done WICHITA is a nice little western. Recommended.
One interesting thing I found out after watching the film was in 1959 there was
a spin-off WICHITA TV show called "Wichita Town" that featured not
only McCrea, but his real-life son Jody McCrea. It aired on NBC and the
network was so confident in it's success they didn't even have a pilot episode,
they just aired it! Unfortunately it had a bad time slot and there was
already a glut of westerns on the air so it was cancelled after only 24
episodes. I'd be interested in seeing an episode.
Film Review: Wichita - Native American Homepage Chris Smallbone
"Saloons my friend, they are the profitable
enterprises".
"Here come the history makers" - Editor of the Wichita newspaper,
referring to the cowboys.
"I've lived in the West all my life. I've seen dozens of these trail
towns, the violence troubles me." Wyatt
The film opens with a cattle drive, which is nearing its end as
it is close to Wichita, a newly built railhead where the drive has been
heading. Wyatt Earp (McCrea ) rides into the herders' camp, carrying the spoils
of buffalo running. Having enjoyed his welcome and meal he retires to his
bedroll. While he is asleep a couple of cowboys, one played by Lloyd Bridges
try to relieve him of his profits, but Wyatt wins out and travels on to Wichita
in advance of the cattle drive. There he witnesses the celebration of the
arrival of the Railroad - the brainchild of Sam McCoy, another character who
really existed, except his forename was Joseph. Incidentally I remember
Alistair Cooke saying that this man was the origin of the phrase "the real
McCoy".
While Wyatt is depositing his savings in the bank a raid takes place which he
averts by quick and effective gunplay. Although asked to become the town's
lawman Wyatt resists as he says that he is a businessman. Later he elaborates
that the lawman is always under threat from those seeking to prove them selves.
The early theme of the film is whether or not he will take the job, given his
obvious suitability for it. Wyatt is determined not to get caught up in the
struggle to contain the cowboys from the Big W who cause trouble by their rowdy
behaviour and by shooting up the town.
When the drovers go on a drunken shooting spree late at night Wyatt shows
restraint but when a child is shot he cannot hold back any longer. He
intervenes to the drovers' amusement since he is on his own. But unbelievably
he singlehandedly re - establishes order.
The issue is raised of the town depending on the cattlemen's money as a
commercial proposition - the tension between what is "right" and what
is profitable. It was this problem that led to Abilene plummetting from grace
as the centre of the Cattle Trade. Its residents decided they would not put up
with the lawless behaviour at the end of the trail, but since they depended on
the cattle drives for their wealth they shot themselves in the foot. For those
interested in the veracity of the subject matter, Earp spent time as a law
enforcer in Wichita before moving to Dodge. Wichita took over, with Elsworth,
Newton and Dodge from where Abilene left off.
Wyatt is "overdoing his job a little bit". The resolution of the film
depends on "a difference of opinion about how the town of Wichita should
be" Wyatt. But perhaps the real worth of the film is that the crime and
violence which threatens to undermine the community of "decent folk"
is always there, threatening in the background. "Civilised" society
sometimes hangs by a thread.
This is an archetypal western with archetypal themes. It is superbly acted and
wonderful throughout. The only surprise is that this Western is not looked upon
as a classic.
Art of Darkness Jonathan Rosenbaum, initially published in the Reader, December 5, 2003
One reason why Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977) remains a major but
neglected
A case in point is
After the opening credits, for instance. They’re accompanied by Tex Ritter belting out the hokey title tune, which seems to recount the entire plot in advance–as good a way as any of making us feel we’re in familiar territory. Then we’re out on the range with the cattlemen, whom we have no reason yet to see as villains. The first glimpse we get of Earp is as a tiny speck on the horizon, immediately seen by them (and therefore us) as an eerie potential menace. But they wind up inviting him to join them for dinner, and later two of the cattlemen–brothers named Gyp (Lloyd Bridges) and Hal (Rayford Barnes)–-try to steal his money when they think he’s asleep.
Gyp, Hal, and the other cattlemen seem to be the bad guys from this point on, and soon Earp seems to be not only a law-and-order man but an implacable killing machine and angel of death. Jacques Lourcelles describes the setup succinctly in his excellent Dictionnaire du Cinéma: “In Wichita, a city without law and without ‘values’ in the midst of a full economic boom, Wyatt Earp, the incarnation of these absent values, appears like a being from elsewhere, a sort of extraterrestrial.”
A Goody Two-shoes who’s also a little creepy because he’s an outsider, Earp seems solid only in comparison with the cattlemen, all-too-human louts who can’t help themselves, and with the local businessmen, who change their positions so often we can’t be sure what side they’re on. They’re confused in part because as soon as Earp gives up the idea of starting his own business and becomes marshal, he outlaws all guns in town except his own. This strikes most of the businessmen as too much of a good thing, because they fear the ban on firearms will be bad for trade (one of many details that feel up-to-the-minute). In the end no one’s really in control–not even Earp, who seems trapped in a destiny he’d rather avoid. To confuse matters further, Earp turns out to have a couple of brothers, who enter the film as potential villains before we realize who they are and why they’ve come to town. They create a disturbing rhyme with Gyp and Hal as we gradually discover that the main difference between “good” and “bad” is the direction in which the guns are pointed.
Two shocking accidental deaths from the cattlemen’s gunfire represent turning points in the plot, yet Tourneur’s staging of them is so quick, so dedramatized, and so peculiar that we can’t view them as ordinary climaxes. Instead they come across as incongruous quirks of fate, throwing both us and the characters off balance. This prompted whoever wrote LaSalle Bank’s blurb to remark, “The scene where the kid gets shot in the window could’ve used a retake.” That’s certainly true in terms of conventional dramaturgy: the boy immediately crumples and slides out of frame without any visual evidence that he’s been struck by a bullet. The staging might provoke derisive laughter, yet it also helps make us more queasy about the boy’s senseless death–something we might not feel if the action were more legible and pointed, the way John Ford might have filmed it. This death and a later one reminded me of the messy, absurdist deaths from gunfire in Jim Jarmusch’s 1996 antiwestern Dead Man, which also tend to provoke uneasy titters.
In the second part of the video documentary A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) is a nine-minute stretch devoted to Tourneur that focuses on the first two horror films he directed for producer Val Lewton, the 1942 Cat People (made for only $134,000) and the 1943 I Walked With a Zombie. “In its own way,” Scorsese says, “Cat People was as important as Citizen Kane in the development of a more mature American cinema.” It seems an extreme statement, but it’s actually reasonable, because Tourneur and Lewton brought subtlety and poetic suggestion to B movies, while Welles brought a kind of intelligent bombast to A pictures. Both movies startled audiences–-Cat People ran longer at some venues than Citizen Kane–-but only Citizen Kane gained cultural prestige.
A short list of Tourneur’s best films would have to include those
two pictures as well as the 1943 The
Leopard Man (his final picture for Lewton and, in spite of a
flawed ending, his most frightening), Out
of the Past (1947), Stars in My
Crown (1950), and Night of the
Demon (1957–cut and retitled Curse
of the Demon for its U.S. release)–-all black-and-white chamber pieces.
My second tier of favorites, mainly in color, would include the westerns Canyon Passage (1946) and
All eight of these films have some noir elements, and the literal as well as metaphysical darkness helps define Tourneur’s stamp. (Chris Fujiwara’s definitive 1998 critical study, one of the best pieces of auteurist criticism I know, is aptly called Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, with reference to the expertly made 1957 thriller Nightfall.) Other defining traits include an insistence on showing realistic light sources in interior scenes; a slightly surreal manner of lighting and filming exteriors that makes them feel like interiors; an emphasis on doorways, windows, and other thresholds in sets that are thoughtfully constructed and furnished; direction of actors that encourages underplaying and generally reflects the nuanced sensibility of an unostentatious humanist; and, more elusively, a preoccupation with death and a general sense that the universe is ruled by irrational elements. Tourneur believed to some extent in the supernatural and the paranormal but was too intelligent to come across as a crank; his interviews suggest he was more interested in the notion of parallel universes than in ghosts.
In short, what identifies a Tourneur picture isn’t strictly speaking a style, a manner, or a group of themes, but rather a way of perceiving the world-–one that perpetually finds ambiguities and leaves troubled impressions. This sensibility often works wonders in his genre films–-suspense, horror, fantasy–-and even when he focuses on spirituality, as in Stars in My Crown, with its small-town, late-19th-century preacher. But it may have hurt some of his other films commercially, even if they linger longer in our memories as a consequence.
Tourneur was the son of one of the most distinguished and cultivated filmmakers of the early silent era, Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), who made films in France and the U.S. after working as an assistant to sculptor Auguste Rodin and as an actor. The son, by most accounts, had a difficult and somewhat lonely childhood in both countries, serving a protracted apprenticeship as a script boy, actor, editor, production assistant, and second-unit director, and throughout his career he regarded his own work with self-effacement-–though he was proud of his unusually respectful treatment of nonwhite characters.
Another thing that differentiates Tourneur from directorial grandstanders like Hitchcock and Welles is that he almost never chose his own material. He was notorious for almost never turning down an assignment, and his thoughtful rationale was that directors can’t be sure in advance whether they have something to bring to a project. He did fight to make Stars in My Crown, his first film with McCrea and understandably one of his favorites. He wanted to make it so badly he finally agreed to direct it for a pittance–-inadvertently lowering his salary for the remainder of his career. Apparently the only other time he took an active role in deciding what to direct was at the same studio, MGM, the same year, 1950, when he rejected Devil’s Doorway, saying the script was awful.
Tourneur is one of the few important American directors of the 50s who welcomed CinemaScope, arguing that “it reproduces approximately our field of vision,” “obliges the director to work harder,” “makes it possible to create interesting relationships between characters in the foreground and those in the background,” and “makes it necessary to compose.” Wichita, his first film in CinemaScope, is also, as Fujiwara points out, his major work in CinemaScope, though lamentably it’s almost impossible to see the film in that format. Turner Classic Movies, which generally letterboxes all widescreen films, cropped it horribly when screening it in 1999. The closest I’ve ever come to seeing it in the proper ratio was on a copy made from a British TV broadcast that showed the film in wide-screen proportions but trimmed both sides of the frame. I’ve been told that LaSalle Bank is screening a 16-millimeter ‘Scope print, but I don’t know how much of the original format will be visible and undistorted. [2008 postscript: Gabe Klinger, who attended that screening, reported back that it was a “reduction print”.]
This format matters, partly because
Wichita superficially resembles some John Ford westerns because of Earp (a character in Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Cheyenne Autumn), because the romantic interest is played by Vera Miles (who would later turn up in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and because the town has a newspaper run by an idealistic but ineffectual drunk (like Edmond O’Brien in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). But this shouldn’t lead one to suppose that the characters in Tourneur’s films belong to the same universe. The world of Ford is ruled by community, and everyone has a place. The world of Tourneur is ruled mainly by fear and terror, and nothing and no one remains fixed.
As Earp first approaches and then enters the town, we see three
times in succession a placard and banner that reads, “Everything Goes in
BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD: Jacques Tourneur's westerns () Tim Lucas, July 2011
The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]
The Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
DVD Savant Review: Wichita - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
20/20 Movie Reviews [Richard Cross]
NIGHTFALL
USA (78 mi) 1956
Nightfall
| Chicago Reader Fred Camper
This 1957 noir masterpiece by Jacques Tourneur stars Aldo Ray as a man fleeing a private investigator and Anne Bancroft as the barroom acquaintance who agrees to help him. Ray's past is revealed gradually in a series of flashbacks, which are intercut with the couple's flight and the investigator's pursuit; by developing each narrative in a parallel space or time, Tourneur movingly articulates the theme of a character trapped by his history. The images have a smooth, almost liquid quality, the high-contrast lighting of most noirs replaced by a delicate lyricism that takes the natural world as the norm. Tourneur links this naturalism to Ray's growing observational skills ("I know where every shadow falls," he says), but it also contrasts with the story's acute paranoia.
Nightfall, directed by Jacques Tourneur | Film review - Time Out Tom Milne
In this superb adaptation of David Goodis' novel, a man (Ray), evidently on the run in California, befriends a girl (Bancroft) in a bar, but thinks (wrongly) she has set him up for two men on his tail. Dogging his footsteps for some months now, an insurance investigator (Gregory) wearily mulls over the case with his wife (Brando): the man is wanted for murder back in Chicago, but... 'he grows on you; it's almost like he needs protection'. A series of flashbacks, as beautifully placed and paced as in Out of the Past, prove the aptness of this description of the characteristic Goodis hero, perfectly incarnated by Ray as a large, friendly dog baring its teeth under threat. He was, we learn, an innocent bystander framed for murder by two bank-robbers - one sadistically trigger-happy (Bond), the other curiously ambivalent (Keith) - who think he knows the whereabouts of the $350,000 which went astray somewhere in the mountains of Wyoming. With nicely unforced symbolism (Burnett Guffey's camerawork is terrific throughout), the dark urban streets give way to wide open snowscapes as he embarks on a desperate quest for his lost innocence. A minor film compared to Out of the Past, perhaps, but no less gripping.
For the Love of (Film Noir): Nightfall | HuffPost Kim Morgan, February 14, 2011, also seen August 29, 2007 here: Nightfall (1957) | Film Noir of the Week
“Mixing fear and the ridiculous can be very exciting.” — Jacques
Tourneur
Nightfall is a work of striking juxtapositions and tones that by
picture end, come off like a wonderfully disarming person—you’re charmed, even
a bit disturbed, but you’re not sure what to make of it all. It opens at night,
in the neon lit, Los Angeles jungle shimmering with welcoming Hollywood haunts
like Miceli’s, Firefly and Musso and Frank and ends within the blinding white
snow of the more foreboding Wyoming Wilderness. It pits an older doctor and his
much younger, artist friend against two thugs, one an over-eager,
violence-lusting psychopath and the other a casual, smarter killer whose
relaxed approach borders on the likable. It features a chic fashion show with a
modern looking Anne
Bancroft as a “mannequin” followed by a cuddly rural bus ride during which
the lovers express their romantic feelings after waking up to (decidedly non
chic) whiskers. There’s cruel violence committed against good Samaritans mixed
with quippy one liners and a surprising amount of dark humor. And did I mention
Anne Bancroft falls in love with Aldo
Ray? They seem mismatched, but then, perfect together—and their moments are
exceptionally romantic. In short, Nightfall is a trip. But a great trip, and a
noteworthy addition to noir innovator Jacques Tourneur’s
oeuvre (which includes, among other splendid pictures, the horror/noir classics
Cat
People and I
Walked With a Zombie and his key noir, Out
of the Past).
Adapted by Stirling
Silliphant from hard boiled writer David Goodis's 1947 novel
and brilliantly shot by Burnett
Guffey (who also shot Nicholas
Ray’s masterpiece In
a Lonely Place and Arthur Penn’s ingenious Bonnie and
Clyde),the picture is considered by some, a minor film noir, something
that’s always baffled me. Made in the later cycle of the genre (released in
1957), the picture skillfully weaves a convoluted story, harsh violence,
existential angst, naturalistic acting and sweet romanticism without ever
feeling forced. And as stated earlier—it’s very funny—something Tourneur always
intended. And though the theme song seems a bit overheated (Al Hibbler crooning
“Nightfall…and you!”—a tune that really ought to grace a Ross Hunter
production) even that works when looking at the film in its entirety. Akin to
the startling laughs spiking the movie, it echoes Tourneur’s own sly sense of
humor.
The story is structured much like Out of the Past, with our hero
(who's not guilty, unlike Mitchum), Rayburn Vanning (Ray) relating his
complicated story to a woman. Only in this instance, the lovely lady, Marie
Gardner (Bancroft), is a bit confused. Pulling a damsel in distress act for the
benefit of two thugs waiting to jump Ray (she thought they were police officers
after a wanted man), she sets up the poor lug. Vanning is then accosted by Red
(Rudy Bond) and John (Brian Keith) and taken to a
deserted oil derrick (an unsettling yet weirdly amusing scene) where he’s set
to be tortured. They want to know where that money’s hidden, something Vanning
continually states he doesn’t know. Vanning escapes, finds his way to Marie’s
apartment and gives her the skinny. Or rather, the thick skinny. He explains
the convoluted predicament that’s left him understandably paranoid. While on a
pleasant camping trip in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with best friend Dr. Edward
Gurston (Frank Albertson)
in which the two men will hunt, and in a more uncomfortable moment, near the
sticky subject of Doc’s much younger wife (whom we learn later has a thing for
Vanning and sent him letters saying so). The conversation is cut short when a
car crashes off an embankment and two shady characters (Red and John), emerge.
Doc fixes John’s arm but they soon realize they're unlucky witnesses (the men
just robbed a bank). Almost shockingly, Doc is shot dead and Vanning is left
injured. The crooks blaze off, only, they make an enormous mistake—they grab
the doctor’s bag instead of their own bag of money. Vanning is able to rise
from his injury, hide the dough and take off. Moving from town to town under
suspicion that he killed Doc, Vanning ends up in Los Angeles, where he’s being
tailed by insurance investigator Ben Fraser (James Gregory)
who confesses to his wife that Vanning just doesn’t seem the type.
And as played by Aldo Ray—he doesn’t seem the type. One of the more striking
aspects to Nightfall is its casting, and the barrel-chested, thick necked Ray,
who was a natural born actor (watch his first and largely unschooled leading
role in George Cukor’s The
Marrying Kind and you’ll see how immediately gifted the man was. Also
in Anthony Mann’s brilliant Men in War). Ray is the perfect good guy
in-over-his- head. With his raspy voice, yet boyish appeal (he looked like he
literally walked off a football field, which is why Cukor made him take ballet
before The Marrying Kind) Ray always exuded a different kind of mystery than
say, Mitchum or Ryan or Widmark—men who rarely appeared “normal.” Ray, an ex
Frogman who fought in Iwo Jima, was a brawny man’s man certainly, but he always
looked to be hiding a secret. That inside he had the soul of a poet or artist—a
man of depth beyond his tough exterior. And so, appropriately, in Nightfall,
he’s an artist.
Brian Keith is another standout and like Ray, an actor I always wished was my
father (and not merely for the TV show Family Affair).
He’s so agreeable here—and his delivery manages to be both distracted and pithy
rather than rat-a-tat. When he humorously claims that Red’s homicidal kicks
stem from his lack of childhood play (“When Red was a kid they didn’t have
enough playgrounds. He’s sort of an adult delinquent.”) he’s both revelatory
and teasing. And his banter towards Red is cleverly berating: “The top of your
head never closed up when you were a kid. Neither did your mouth.” Cracking
wise with Red, the two spar like men who are ready to kill each other, but also
who are simply getting on each other’s nerves (preceding some of Tarantino’s
talky criminals). But talking aside, deadlier fates await them including a
fatal gunshot and death by snowplow.
And wild, almost ridiculous fate was something Tourneur excelled at, not
surprisingly. Based on the bizarre treatment at the hands of his filmmaker
father, Tourneur developed a dark sense of the absurd. As written in John
Wakemen’s “World
Film Directors Vol. 1 1890-1946,”Tourneur believed that the childhood
he endured—one of “grotesque punishment” lied at the root of his cinematic
obsessions. Relating that he was sent to a poor school and teased unmercifully
for his square suspenders, Tourneur claimed: “I think this is what prompted me
to introduce comic touches into the dramatic moments of my films…Mixing fear
and the ridiculous can be very exciting.”
Indeed. As Red can’t wait to torture a terrified Vanning, he sinisterly and
bizarrely sings: “The tougher they are the more fun they are tra-la.”
At
the Cinematheque: "Nightfall" (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) on ... - Mubi Daniel Kasman, June 9, 2010
Where
Danger Lives: NIGHTFALL (1957) Mark
Fertig, September 24, 2010
The
Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
'Nightfall' Ramps Up
the Tension and Subverts Expectations ...
Brent McKnight from Pop Matters,
May 21, 2013
Wednesday
Editor's Pick: Nightfall (1957) & The Burglar (1957)
Nightfall -
Jacques Tourneur - 1957 - film review - Films de France James Travers
Making
the Master of Suspense Proud in Nightfall | Village Voice J. Hoberman, June 8, 2010
Nicolas Rapold on Jacques
Tourneur's Nightfall - artforum.com / film
June 11, 2010
The
Delicate Flavor of Ozu Family Drama and Thick Meaty Cuts of ... Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II, by
Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, July
13, 2010
Nightfall (1957) - Articles - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Columbia
Pictures Film Noir Classics Vol. 2 Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Glenn Erickson
DVD
Talk [Casey Burchby] lumbia Pictures
Film Noir Classics Vol. II
Popdose
[Robert Cashill] Columbia Pictures
Film Noir Classics Vol. II
Junta
Juleil's Culture Shock [Sean Gill]
Nightfall:
Noir As Fast, Cheap, Out-of-Control Sweat-Session - The L ... Michael Atkinson from The L-magazine
eFilmCritic.com Jay
Seaver
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
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Nightfall
(1957) | St. Louis News and Events | Riverfront Times Bruce Eder, All-Movie Guide
Movie
Review - - 'Nightfall' - The New York Times
Nightfall (1957
film) - Wikipedia
aka: Curse of the Demon
Great Britain (95 mi) 1957
One of the finest thrillers made in England during the '50s, despite the fact that the final cut was tampered with against the director's wishes. Tourneur had used MR James's short story Casting the Runes as the basis for a marvellous cinematic dialogue between belief and scepticism, fantasy and reality. His intrepid rational hero (Andrews) is a modern scientist who is gradually persuaded that his life is threatened by a black magician. The director employed a number of e normously skilful devices to ensure that the audience experiences the hero's transition from confident scepticism to panic, and the process is observed with such subtlety that, in the original version at least, the interpretation of the plot was left open (i.e. the hero may simply be the victim of a conspiracy and/or his own imagination). The producer decided that the film lacked substance (in fact it was far more terrifying than most horror films), and added special effects of the 'demon' very near the beginning, which of course missed the whole point of what Tourneur had been attempting. Even so, the rest is so good that the film remains immensely gripping, with certain sequences (like the one where Andrews is chased through the wood) reaching poetic dimensions.
BFI
Screenonline: Night of the Demon (1957)
Ronnie Hackston from BFI
Screen Online
Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957) largely continues the director's subtle, suggestive approach to horror. Despite being book-ended by appearances of a crudely animated demon (whose brief appearances were insisted upon by the producers), the film is mostly an exercise in understatement. Just as in Tourneur's Cat People (1943), it is what the audience does not see which causes a sense of unease.
This is in marked contrast to another couple of British horror movies filmed at around the same time, namely The Curse Of Frankenstein (d. Terence Fisher, 1957) and Dracula (d. Fisher, 1958). These first two outings in what was to become Hammer's 20-year domination of the genre eschew supernatural mystery, in favour of florid Gothic melodrama and (for the times) an excess of Technicolor bloodletting. Night of the Demon, on the other hand, is filmed in black & white, and owes more to M.R. James's suggestion than explicit gore.
Scenes such as the storm invoked by black magician Karswell (Niall McGinnis), dressed in clown's makeup, are genuinely unsettling. This scene of a children's garden party suddenly interrupted by demonic intervention anticipates The Omen (US/GB, d. Richard Donner, 1976). As in that film, Night of the Demon's lead character, Dr John Holden, is an American, coming to terms with what he initially sees as 'old European' mumbo-jumbo. As Holden, Dana Andrews is initially somewhat wooden, but his performance improves as the character becomes more convinced of the reality of what he is up against. This theme of the modern, rationalist American adrift in a world of superstition can be traced through several films, including An American Werewolf In London (US, 1981) and "The Ninth Gate" (US, 1999). Even in Universal's famous horror cycle of the 1930s and '40s, the settings were often in a generic 'old Europe', were often made by European directors such as James Whale and Carl Freund, and starred European actors such as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
Unlike the hammy histrionics of those films, Niall McGinnis's satanist is a sinister yet affable figure, ultimately aware that he is out of his depth in his occult dabblings. His fear is believable, even if the depiction of his fire-breathing nemesis is not. Although slightly marred by some creaky effects, this remains an engaging, frightening and influential film.
Curse
of the Demon - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Ancient curses, black magic, poltergeists, and the supernatural
world have been favorite subjects for the cinema of the fantastic but only a
handful of movies have succeeded in convincing an audience to suspend disbelief
and believe in the unbelievable. The titles that come immediately to mind are
genuine classics of the genre - Cat People (1942), Dead of Night
(1945), The Innocents (1961) - films that subtly convey a sense of the
paranormal through mood and atmosphere. Curse of the Demon (1957), which was
released in England as Night of the Demon, also belongs in this select
group though it has had a much harder time eluding its reputation as a B-movie
horror film - an accusation brought on by the producer's insistence on making
the demon a highly visible presence on-camera. Nevertheless, its cult status is
assured thanks to references to it in "Science Fiction Double
Feature," the opening theme song to The Rocky Horror Picture Show
(1975, "Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes, but passing them used
lots of skill".) and the Kate Bush song, "The Hounds of Love"
which begins with a quote from the movie, "It's in the trees! It's
coming!"
Based on Montague R. James' short story, "Casting the Runes," Curse
of the Demon goes beyond the conventions of most supernatural thrillers by
engaging the viewer in an intellectual debate over two opposing philosophies -
belief in the occult and a total refutation of it. Dr. John Holden (Dana
Andrews) is a debunker of paranormal occurrences and beliefs who travels to
England for a scientific conference. Upon his arrival, he discovers that a
colleague, Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham), has recently died under
mysterious circumstances. Harrington's daughter Joanna (Peggy Cummins) is
convinced that Doctor Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) was somehow involved
with her father's death. Holden's own investigation reveals that Karswell is
indeed a believer and practitioner of the black arts who placed a curse on
Harrington. Yet, Holden's rational scientific mind cannot accept the possible
explanation that Harrington was killed by supernatural forces, even when he is
secretly slipped an ancient parchment with runic symbols and begins receiving
warnings and signs about his own impending demise.
If Curse of the Demon seems like a throwback to the Val Lewton-produced
thrillers for RKO in the forties, it's because Jacques Tourneur, the director
of Lewton's Cat People,I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The
Leopard Man (1943), has imbued the film with the same sense of dread and
menace he brought to those evocative thrillers. "I detest the expression
'horror film,' Tourneur once stated. "I make films on the supernatural and
I make them because I believe in it." Unfortunately, producer Hal E.
Chester, who also made unwarranted changes to Charles Bennett's screenplay,
insisted on shooting and inserting an opening scene featuring the demon and an
explicit final appearance at a railway station. This was completely counter to
Tourneur's wishes who wanted the viewer to decide for himself whether the demon
existed or not. In his own defense, Tourneur said, "The only monster I did
- and this is how I wanted to do the whole thing - was the scene in the woods
where Dana Andrews is chased by a cloud. Then I wanted, at the very end, when
the train goes by, to include only four frames of the monster coming up with
the guy and throwing him down. Boom, boom - did I see it or not? People would
have to sit through it a second time to be sure of what they saw."
The appearance of the creature in Curse of the Demon still generates
controversy among the film's admirers today, splitting them into two camps.
Those that believe the film's effectiveness is seriously damaged by showing the
demon and those who believe the creature is a welcome and terrifying addition.
Among the naysayers are Carlos Clarens, author of An Illustrated History of
the Horror Film, who proclaimed the special effect "atrocious"
and a "monumental blunder" and the film's original screenwriter
Charles Bennett who was so outraged by Chester's creative changes that he once
said, "If [Chester] walked up my driveway right now, I'd shoot him
dead." On the other hand, Danny Peary, in the first of his three Cult
Movies books, wrote "I believe most critics dislike the demon for no
other reason than they know it was studio-imposed...I am in favor of this vile
creature as big as a house and ugly as sin...It's the scariest monster in film
history as far as I'm concerned (no matter that others think it
ludicrous)." Even respected film historian William K. Everson approved of
the demon's appearance, calling it "such a lulu that it lives up to the
fearsome descriptions of it." And, in all fairness, the dragon-like
creature was modeled on 3,400-year-old woodcut prints from demonology books
according to Tourneur.
Yet, regardless of whether one is pro or con on the visualized demon, it is
hard not to be seduced by Tourneur's depiction of a shadowy fantasy world where
perceptions are often shaped by a fear of darkness; Ted Scaife's cinematography
certainly exploits this with scenes framed in pitch black darkness illuminated
only by passing car lights or flashlights. The suspenseful unfolding of the
plot and Karswell's true nature is also sustained by Charles Bennett's witty
and intelligent script which often bears comparison to characters and
situations in Alfred Hitchcock films, which is no surprise when you realize
Bennett penned some of the master's best early work: The Man Who Knew Too
Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935) and Foreign Correspondent
(1940) to name just a few.
Most people agree that Curse of the Demon is Tourneur's last memorable film and
the same could be said for Dana Andrews who uses his somewhat rigid and
intractable style of acting to his advantage here playing a stubborn, not
easily intimidated protagonist. Peggy Cummins, who is best known for her
trigger-happy vixen in Gun Crazy (1957), makes a plucky heroine but the
real scene-stealer is Niall MacGinnis as Karswell, a mercurial and complex
character who can be an urbane and charming host as well as a threatening and
sinister presence. The scene where he is dressed as a clown at a children's
party on his estate and conjures up a storm for Holden's benefit is one of the
film's highlights.
One last comment about Curse of the Demon: the film has existed in two versions
ever since its release in 1957. The British release, entitled Night of the
Demon, had a running time of approximately 95 minutes. The U.S. version,
released as Curse of the Demon, was trimmed by some thirteen minutes, reducing
its length to 82 minutes, and placed on a double bill with The Revenge of
Frankenstein (1958), a Hammer horror production. Both versions of Demon
are currently available on the Columbia-TriStar DVD release. Like Chester's
imposed "improvements" on Tourneur's film, his U.S. cut of the film -
Curse of the Demon - has generated an equal amount of controversy. If you saw
this version first you might not immediately notice what was missing but in
viewing the longer cut you'll see that Chester trimmed scenes and dialogue,
sacrificing nuance, plot details and character development, in order to create
a breathless, fat-free narrative. The trim 82 version is certainly an
entertaining funhouse ride but the "fat" that Chester pared away
makes the original British release a much richer and satisfying experience.
Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski, February 28, 2008
Monsters from the Id Christianne Benedict, October 12, 2006
The Girl with the White Parasol Aubyn Eli, July 30, 2011
Why I love ... Night of the Demon | BFI Vic Pratt, February 9, 2017
The Films of Jacques Tourneur [Michael E. Grost]
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 4): Curse Of The Demon ... Ron Reed from The Other Journal, August 13, 2009
Night
of the Demon – Jacques Tourneur (1957) – Celluloid Wicker Man Adam Scovell
And
You Call Yourself a Scientist! Lyz Kingsley
Night
of the Demon (1957) aka Curse of the Demon. Director ... Richard Scheib from Moria
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The sort of nerve
required to produce an excellent screenplay like Chinatown seems to have
deserted Towne in this, his directorial debut. A hesitation in dealing fully
with the central relationship, coupled with an over-reliance on slow-motion
photography, finds the film losing momentum almost before it leaves the
starting blocks. Having set up a lesbian relationship between two athletes
preparing for the Olympics (Hemingway and Donnelly) which promises to explore
the effect of competition and rivalry in the context of physical surrender and
gentle intimacy, it trickles away, foundering on such scenes as a first evening
spent arm-wrestling, boozing, belching and farting, too reminiscent of the
rugby locker room to be a convincing prelude to any sort of love affair. The
thesis collapses into banal presumptions as jarring as the superfluous
close-ups of undulating thighs and quivering crotches.
PopcornQ Review Jenni Olson
Like it or not, Personal Best was a landmark film. Robert
Towne's 1982
The lesbianism of Hemingway's character is treated as a phase (she goes off with a male water-polo player in the end); while Donnelly's character (who is at least portrayed as a "real" lesbian) gets to utter some really great lesbian lines, such as, in response to Hemingway's reluctance to define the true nature of their relationship: "We may be friends, but we also happen to fuck each other every once in a while." And, on meeting Hemingway's new boyfriend: "He's pretty cute, for a guy."
A memorable love scene, consisting of tickling and nervous giggling and Mariel Hemingway saying, "This isn't so bad, I kind of like this."
Roger Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times
Robert
Towne's PERSONAL BEST tells the story of two women who are competitors for
pentathlete berths on the 1980 U.S. Olympics team--the team that did not go to
What distinguishes PERSONAL BEST is that it creates specific characters--flesh-and-blood people with interesting personalities, people I cared about. PERSONAL BEST also seems knowledgeable about its two subjects, which are the weather of these women's hearts, and the world of Olympic sports competition.
It is a movie containing the spontaneity of life. It's about living, breathing, changeable people and because their relationships seems to be so deeply felt, so important to them, we're fascinated by what may happen next. The movie stars Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly as the two women track stars, Scott Glenn as their coach, and Kenny Moore as the Olympic swimmer who falls in love with Hemingway late in the film. These four people are so right for the roles it's almost scary; it makes us sense the difference between performances that are technically excellent and other performances, like these, that may sometimes be technically rough but always find the correct emotional note.
Mariel Hemingway plays a young, naive natural athlete. We sense that she always has been under the coaching thumb of her father, a perfectionist, and that her physical excellence has been won at the cost of emotional maturity. She knows everything about working out, and next to nothing about her heart, her sexuality, her own identity. She loses an important race at a preliminary meet, is sharply handled by the father, gets sick to her stomach, is obviously emotionally distraught.
Patrice
Donnelly, as a more experienced athlete, tries to comfort the younger girl.
In a dormitory room that night, they talk. Donnelly shares whatever wisdom she
has about training and running and winning. They smoke a joint. They kid
around. They arm wrestle. At this point, watching the film, I had an
interesting experience. I did not already know that the characters in the film
were homosexual, but I found myself thinking that the scene was so erotically
charged that, "if
This is a very physical movie, one of the healthiest and sweatiest celebrations of physical exertion I can remember. There is a lot of nudity in the film--not only erotic nudity, although there is some of that, but also locker room and steam room nudity, and messing around nudity that has an unashamed, kidding freshness to it. One scene that shocks some viewers occurs between Mariel Hemingway and Kenny Moore, when he gets up to go to the bathroom and she decides to follow along; the scene is typical of the kind of unforced, natural spontaneity in the whole film. The characters in PERSONAL BEST seem to be free to have real feelings. It is filled with the uncertainties, risks, cares, and rewards of real life, and it considers its characters' hearts and minds, and sees their sexuality as an expression of their true feelings for each other.
Personal Best Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Jay Carr
One thing that makes Robert Towne’s Personal Best (1982) one of the great sports movies is that it
isn’t just about sports. Part of the pleasure of watching it lies in
writer-director Towne’s deceptive ease in breaking out of several genre boxes
at once, and making his envelope-pushing look almost offhand. Least of all is
it about the heroics that typically go with the sports movie genre. Its focus
is not the finished product that makes stadium audiences cheer, although nobody
will complain that it doesn’t have a rousing ending. It’s the dynamic – several
dynamics, really – of what has to happen to get Olympic-caliber athletes to the
starting blocks day after day, and keep them going.
It’s almost thrilling to watch Towne dare himself in several ways. First, by
making a picture centered on the world of women’s track and field events – not
one of America’s great spectator sports. We see a lot of pounding feet and
pumping leg muscles, a lot of sweat, a lot of doggedness, as Mariel Hemingway,
Patrice Donnelly and their Cal Polytech teammates drive themselves past their
limits, competing with themselves as much as other athletes, honing their
skills, chopping off hundredths of a second here or there to excel. It’s a
microcosm in which everything is heightened, with a palpable physical
component.
The physicality in which the film is immersed – you can almost hear the
adrenaline rushes and the slosh of hormones -- provides the underpinning for
the double-edged meaning of the film’s title. Much was made at the time of the
film’s release of its lesbian love story between Hemingway’s Chris and
Donnelly’s Tori. The latter is more seasoned, more focused, more competitive.
She not only recognizes the potential in Hemingway’s raw talent, but is
physically attracted to her protégé-to-be. She talks Scott Glenn’s tough coach
into giving the newcomer a shot at joining the team after he had passed her by.
And Personal Best in the stadium
and workout field also becomes Personal
Best between the sheets for the two women. Can they juggle the fact they
they’re on-field competitors and just the opposite in bed?
There’s a real sensuality in their bedroom scenes, a heightened sexual tension,
a sense of genuine pleasure as they touch one another lightly in a room lit by
multiple candles. Coming, as it did, early in the climate of Hollywood films
made with a sense of sexual freedom not seen since before the Production Code,
it allows us them to seem immersed in pleasure, not tormented by deviance. When
Chris is tormented, it’s because she worries about how the moody Tori is
feeling. Meanwhile, as Chris’s athletic skills become more apparent, there’s
some reservation that she lacks the killer instinct. We also begin to wonder
how the power dynamics of the personal relationship are playing out. Even
before a bad piece of advice from Tori leads Chris to injure her knee, we
wonder if Tori isn’t playing mind games with her.
How much is tough love? How much has competitiveness invaded love? How much has
love diluted competitiveness? The questions play out on a secondary level when
we realize Glenn’s coach has his own agenda and that it supersedes what any of
his athletes may be feeling. As Chris begins to come of age, she begins to
toughen up inside as well as outside. It’s no accident that Chris’s best event
is, metaphorically, running the hurdles. As she vaults over one after another,
knocking down a few en route, she gains confidence and self-acceptance. One of
the strengths of Hemingway’s performance is her ability to make us feel Chris
discovering things about herself as she stumbles forward.
All this proceeds in oblique ways, conveyed in shards of conversation, embedded
in the laid-back style that goes with
Driven by the vitality and responsiveness in the performances of Hemingway and
Donnelly, the film is frank but not sensationalized. The sexuality is always
connected to what we’re convinced are real feelings. Personal Best also contains some of the best sports photography,
camera placements and editing since Leni Riefenstahl wrote the book on filming
athletic events in her Olympiad, focusing on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. There’s
more than a bit of resonance between Riefenstahl’s militaristic wedding of
bodies, athleticism and politics and Towne’s removal of geopolitics from the
picture (the US team boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, making the athletes’
feats here strictly for personal fulfillment, not gold medals). But then
Towne’s way of keeping the emphasis on the personal and even the mutually
supportive here is one of the things that makes Personal Best the sweetly iconoclastic, sweat-soaked genuflection
to human effort and the human heart that it is. Towne wrote 16 films before he
finally directed one here, and he never puts a foot wrong.
Personal Best Women in Love, by Linda Williams from Jump Cut, July 1982
Personal Best Lesbian/Feminist Audience, by Chris Straayer from Jump Cut, February 1984
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Toyoda,
Toshiaki
UNCHAIN
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Toyoda's excellent documentary plays like a rock'n'soul lament for the limits of a testosterone-driven life. Toshiro Kaji nicknamed himself 'Unchain' after the Ray Charles song 'Unchain My Heart'. He became a pro boxer in 1988 and had just seven bouts (lost six, drew one) before nerve paralysis in his eyes forced him to stop. He went on to drive trucks, work as a radio DJ and help disabled kids, but a bizarre raid on an Osaka job centre landed him a spell in a mental hospital. He's fiercely devoted to Sachiko, but while he was in hospital after a road accident she married his Korean-Japanese friend Nagaishi. Toyoda is obviously close to Kaji and his circle of equally unsuccessful friends; the film is a group portrait without condescension, sentimentality or prurience. These people may, objectively, be losers, but this glimpse of lives on the bottom rung is remarkably heartening.
BLUE
SPRING
Time Out review Tony Rayns
High-school delinquent Kujo (Matsuda, evidently trying to
erase memories of Gohatto by playing macho) becomes top dog in class and
is idolised by his buddy Aoki. But as graduation approaches he turns away from
his likely future as a yakuza, leaving Aoki bereft and increasingly unstable.
Very disappointing after Toyoda's non-fiction Unchain, this is an object
lesson in how not to adapt a manga. The director flails around for the
right blend of realism and stylisation, and ends up staking everything on
scenes of hyperbolic (and pitifully unconvincing) violence.
Bright Lights Film Journal review Little Stabs of Happiness (And Horror), by Gary Morris, August 2004
Based on a popular manga, Blue Spring is a satisfying variation on the ever-popular theme of Japanese schoolboys who spend their time disobeying authority (they actually run the school) and beating the hell out of each other. Director Toshiaki's critique of Japanese society begins immediately with the image of a stylized school that looks exactly like a prison, and it just keeps going from there with one of the more intriguing bands of malcontents in recent memory. Ryuhei Matsua, famed for his role as the queer, murderous samurai boytoy in Gohatto (1999), plays Kujo, stylish gang leader, teenage nihilist, and occasional gardener. Kujo's high status — which he's almost entirely indifferent to — depends on his skill at the "clapping game," a deadly activity that determines the leader by whoever can be dangled off the school roof and clap their hands the longest without falling to their death. (It doesn't help that this psycho-ritual must be constantly re-enacted to maintain his power.) The film wisely de-Miike-fies the proceedings, managing to impart a sense of blood and gore without actually showing that much. Don't look of severed hands, heads, or feet on display, though imaginative gorehounds will relish the teeth smashing, head stomping, and baseball bats to the balls that are happening just offscreen. Blue Spring has been compared to Lord of the Flies (and of course the notorious Battle Royale), but it has its own charms thanks to strong performances and a scorching attack on dehumanizing Japanese consumer culture.
Monsters At Play (John Kostka) dvd review
Every once in a while a person will see a movie that just
leaps out and grabs him. Bluntly stated, Toshiaki Toyoda's Blue Spring is such
a film. It's a wonderful, powerful, shocking, tragic, poetic, spellbinding
movie, and it's coming to the
Blue Spring presents us with a gang of seniors at a Japanese high school. We meet them in a breathtaking opening sequence as they climb to the school's roof to play a game. A railing runs around the edge of the roof, and those-who-dare climb over it so that they now stand on the other side, feet on the ledge, hands on the railing, facing the rest of the clan. The game starts. They clap once and then catch themselves before they fall. Round two. They must clap twice before catching themselves. The game continues until everyone but one boy has quit out of fear. This boy is Kujo; he now runs the gang.
The boys while their days away in the concrete box of a school. Bored learning algebra and Japanese history, they fearlessly cut class to play soccer and mahjong. When three boys insult Kujo's diarrhetic right-hand-man Aoki, the gang administer swift justice, crushing one boy's genitals with a baseball bat and beating the others severely.
Time passes. One of the gang members murders another and is dragged away to prison. Another leaves to join the yakuza: the school's baseball team can't possibly make the finals; he has no reason to stay. Aoki becomes disillusioned with the gang under Kujo's disinterested command. He hijacks what little of the gang is left and begins bullying everyone in the school in order to establish his dominance; however, there is one boy whom he can't intimidate - Kujo. In order for social order to be restored, one of the two will have to assert his dominance once and for all.
What is fascinating about Blue Spring is what effective use it makes of its storytelling. In an interview on the disc, director Toyoda comments that he makes his films in a documentary style. Indeed, the above description seems to corroborate this statement: the story drifts from character to character, and, while things happen, they don't serve as plot points or devices that simply drive the story forward. Toyoda examines all of his characters and lets his audience get inside their heads. He makes us understand why these characters are so disillusioned and how this disillusionment leads them down various dead-end paths toward perceived escape or self-actualization. This choice of characterization over simple hierarchal posturing among the gang members is what makes the film so surprisingly effective. Its conclusion is sudden, bold, shocking, emotionally-shattering, and most definitely well-earned. I was surprised to find how much I cared about these characters by the film's end, and I was even more surprised that Toyoda had managed so deftly to sweep me into the film that I had not for a second noticed him broadening these personages in my mind. At the end I was shocked not only by the sudden, yet strangely inevitable twist of events, but I was powerfully moved by it as well. Do Monsters cry? A little bit, yes.
Still, even if all the artistic brilliance is put to the side for a moment, we are nevertheless left with a wonderful slice of Japanese cinema that is just tailor-made for the drooling fanboy. It's all here: the uber-cool slow-motion walking, the shocking (though tastefully off-camera) violence, etc. This is a school where almost everyone is cool as hell: even the tulip buds in the garden look hip with cigarettes. The music, by Japanese punk chart-toppers Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, is, appropriately, sublimely cool, and should send anyone who digs this kind of stuff rushing to the internet to find more of this fine group's work.
All in all, Blue Spring is both an artistic and aesthetic masterpiece that should please both art cinema fans and those simply looking for a cool good time. But how, you ask, is Artsmagic's release of this fine film?
Presentation-wise, we get Blue Spring in its 1.85:1 aspect ratio with anamorphic enhancement. The image is nice: clear, clean, and crisp; good color; etc. Audio, presented in a Japanese-language stereo track, is effective, with the occasional blasts of Thee Michelle Gun Elephant's guitar-thrashing ringing out wonderfully well. The optional English subtitles are clear and easy to read, though there are two instances where they run off the screen. Aside from this unfortunate occurrence, the disk is, technically, a bang-up job.
As for supplements, what we get, while more limited than on previous Artsmagic releases, is nevertheless good. Starting with the simplest stuff, we are given some nicely-written biographies and filmographies for the principal actors and for Toshiaki Toyoda himself, along with three pictures of the covers of upcoming Artsmagic releases (great news: they're for all three installments of Miike's Black Society Trilogy!).
Next up are two interviews with Toshiaki Toyoda, both of which run about 8 minutes long. In the first, Toyoda explains some of the background behind Blue Spring, talks about its genesis, discusses his philosophies about film, etc. The second interview has Toyoda discussing his first feature, Pornostar. It's a little confusing as to why this was included, since it really has nothing to do with Blue Spring, but it is interesting in its own right, so I suppose its inclusion isn't hurting anyone.
Wrapping up the disc is an invaluable commentary by Tom Mes, a quiet but extremely knowledgeable man who shares a wealth of great information: he explains the film as a reflection of Japanese society and culture, analyzes Toyoda's message, and even explains Japanese customs for all the confused Westerners out there (count me among them, I found these parts of the commentary invaluable). It's a great track that's well worth a listen whether you want to gain a deeper understanding of the film itself or you simply want to know why some of the characters are doing what they're doing.
No one makes movies about disaffected, angst-ridden teenagers like the Japanese do (no, not even Larry Clark), and, judging by the example I've just seen, few people make them quite as well as Toshiaki Toyoda. Blue Spring is an excellent film that's been given great treatment by Artsmagic. I promise you, this is one of the best cult DVD releases of the year so far, and it's definitely something that's not to be missed. Blue Spring will be available on July 27th. Swarm the stores.
Midnight Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Tom Mes
Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge
gotterdammerung.org Branislav L. Slantchev
Asian Cinema Drifter Tarun
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review
Film Monthly (Alexander Rojas) review
DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]
VideoVista review Peter Schilling
Digital Retribution dvd review CJ
DVDActive (Malcolm Campbell) dvd review [8/10]
Hong Kong Digital - DVD Review John Charles
Extraordinary Movie & Video Guide
Variety (Dennis Harvey) review
The Japan Times
[Mark Schilling]
Trachtman,
Ilana
PRAYING
WITH LIOR B 85
A film that tugs on the
heartstrings, but also offers so much more by pretty much filming the life
story of a child with Downs syndrome, where the camera is rolling on every
aspect of this kid’s life leading up to his all important bar mitzvah at age 13. What’s fascinating is not simply Lior’s
enthusiasm for life, as he’s a genuinely happy kid, but the nurturing
environment of his family who has adored him from the day he was born. While his youngest sister is jealous at all
the attention he receives, claiming that’s the attention she would otherwise be
receiving, his next older brother Yoni is a godsend, as he has been the loving,
protective brother since birth, who states without a hint of artifice “I don’t know if there’s a God, but if
there is, Lior is closer to him than anyone I know.” About to graduate high school, Yoni has taken
Lior under his wing and looked out for him like a second parent, an
extraordinary gesture of sacrifice and responsibility developed so young, as he
can’t conceive of attending a college or living his adult life where he’s very
far away from Lior. I would vote for this
kid for President in a second, as he has already demonstrated all the moral qualities
anyone could possibly hope for, but Yoni, for the most part, sits back and
allows his little brother all the attention and all the glory. Lior’s father is a rabbi who is attempting to
teach him the lessons of the Torah, but like any rambunctious 12-year old, he’d
rather go watch television than have to get serious, but over time we come to
realize the painstaking attempts to get this child to settle down and think
about the shape of his own life. Lior’s
mother (also a rabbi) died when he was six, but every image we see of her is
one of absolute generosity, an affectionate woman who simply exuded motherly
love, who is seen in home movies singing loudly with Lior or dancing with her
children, always bringing a smile to his face.
One of the sweetest lines in the film is a comment that Lior is most
like his mother.
Lior surprises everyone with his no holds back singing and praying,
where he’s louder and more dramatic than the others, prancing around and
swaying as he sings, but he genuinely believes this is what makes God happy so
he is perfectly in tune with the spirit of prayer, praying as often as he can
and enjoying leading others in prayer.
What’s surprising about Lior is how there are no layers around him, how
he doesn’t hide anything from anyone, how he exudes pure joy or sadness with no
filter to detract from his feelings. He
is sent to an Orthodox Jewish school where he is spiritually accepted as a
member of the community and receives a surprising amount of tolerance from the
others who are well aware that this kid is responsible for the movie cameras in
the classroom. One observant young boy
believes God doesn’t err, that God must believe Lior can accept the challenge
of living with
All of this brings us back to the bar mitzvah, as Lior has expectations
that the Messiah will return as well as the spirit of his mother. As we see the extraordinary efforts that go
into preparing him for this day, where initially his father expected him to
give a 4 or 5 minute speech, it’s hard to speculate on all the things that
might happen, as it could be an embarrassing disaster or it could be a
genuinely uplifting day. What we really
learn is that a warm, nurturing family begets a warm, nurturing child, one who
is filled with the spirit of joy around others so long as they are willing to
accept him. Yoni’s reaction to his
little brother alone is worth the price of admission. Neither are typical children, that much is
clear, yet both remind the adult world around them that sometimes children are
the best teachers. Lior obviously challenges
those around him, as evidenced by the shoe store where he bought his bar
mitzvah shoes and nearly walked out of the store while just trying them on, but
this film suggests the world needs these kinds of challenges to jolt us out of
our built in complacency and comfort zones where it’s otherwise all too easy to
dismiss young men like Lior.
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
Growing up in Philadelphia, Lior Liebling had two strikes against
him: he was born with Down syndrome, and his mother, Rabbi Devora Bartnoff,
died when he was only six. As this lively video documentary makes clear, Lior's
loving, supportive family helped him function at a high level and fired his
devotion to God and Torah study, which culminate in his bar mitzvah. Veteran TV
director-producer Ilana Trachtman creates a deep sense of intimacy, though her
budget constraints are visible in some shots that feel staged (e.g. the
multiple-angle setups when Lior and his father visit Bartnoff's grave). Still,
Lior is an irrepressible character as he works a room, doing exactly what a bar
mitzvah boy should: challenging, instructing, and, in his own way, healing the
world. 87 min.
Praying with Lior Facets Multi Media
The act of praying with Lior is indeed a special one. This tender documentary focuses on the profoundly special relationship Lior Liebling, a boy with Down syndrome, has with prayer and God. While some consider Lior, also known as "the little rebbe," to be a "spiritual genius" because of his fervent desire and enthusiasm for prayer, the camera also captures the incomparable impact Lior has on his family, friends and religious community. Although he is a high-functioning child with Down syndrome, whose humor and wit, and passion for life are an inspiration to those around him, Lior still faces many roadblocks along the way. Filmmaker Ilana Trachtman presents an intimate, emotionally charged portrait of Lior and his family as they prepare for Lior's greatest achievement to date - his Bar Mitzvah. Directed by Ilana Trachtman, U.S.A., 2007, BetaSP, 87 mins.
In the Oscars of my mind there exists a category for Cutest Performance, and Lior Liebling just took home the golden statuette. Born with Down syndrome to rabbi parents, Lior took to davening—traditional Jewish prayer accompanied by a swaying motion—at a young age, a practice that soon became the predominant trait of his character. Praying With Lior begins with the recent planning of his long-anticipated bar mitzvah, a day on which he has been doting for years, expecting nothing less than the presence of the messiah and the spiritual return of his now-deceased mother. Subject matter notwithstanding, the film stands as essentially the most finely made home video ever released into theaters, and though budgetary limitations were likely the cause for the film's low-rent aesthetic, its nature is one perfectly complementary to the material. Though excellently shot and framed, it maintains a feeling of casual familiarity, bringing us closer to the subjects when other, more polished documentaries would be erecting an invisible wall between the two. Lior himself is as much cause for celebration: truly, as his older brother describes, the cutest thing you ever did see, a child of endless affection completely dedicated to a higher cause (knowledge of fundamentalist behavioral patterns might be cause for alarm for some of us, but one senses that if the world were run by people entirely of Lior's attitude and mindset, we'd all be living in some kind of utopian paradise). "We need your presence in this world," says Lior's stepmother after a dinner prayer, and it's a fact truly felt in the film's effortless showcasing of his formulating personality and profound interactions with others. One can only hope that his is a persona that will return to the camera in time so to provide us with an update on how things are going. Michael Apted, meet Lior.
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
Lior, the subject of Ilana Trachtman’s haunting, bittersweet documentary Praying With Lior, is a 13-year-old boy with Down syndrome and a fervent love of davening—the evocative Yiddish word for praying. In his prayers he is so bright-eyed, so joyful, that some congregants consider him a spiritual genius; his mother, Devorah, the rabbi of a Reconstructionist synagogue, says she rushes home from chemotherapy to daven with him. She hopes she’ll be there for his bar mitzvah, but this is footage from the nineties; she died in 1997. Seven years later, his rabbi father, Mordechai, works to prepare Lior for the coming-of-age ceremony—and for what he fears will be a life of disappointment.
Mordechai plays the role of party pooper: It falls to him to warn people against projecting things onto his son, who is, he says, no rebbe. But is Mordechai, hyperconscious of his son’s failings, going too far in the other, skeptical direction? I ask that with no disrespect: Mordechai emerges as a thoughtful and loving father, and he’s probably right. The mystery at the heart of Praying With Lior is just how much this beatific young boy understands. Has he fully digested the meaning of his way of life, or is he parroting his father and devoted older brother? On the other hand, doesn’t all prayer come down to parroting—to endless repetition that leads to a sense of transcendence?
Praying With Lior engages us on so many levels it transcends its middle-class Jewish milieu. It touches on the weird dynamics of family: Lior’s little sister has not only lost her mother but she can’t be the baby of the house—that’s his role. It depicts a warm and nurturing community that gathers around Lior, both to protect him and to be transformed by his miraculous presence. It’s about cruel limitations and sudden, blessed freedoms.
The
Onion Scott Tobias
To some members of
his religious community outside Philadelphia, Lior Liebling, a bright
13-year-old with Down Syndrome, is considered a rebbe, a Jewish leader whose
devotion to davening (praying) speaks to a close relationship with God. It's
easy to see how this spiritual savant, with his ecstatic davening and singing,
could inspire the people around him, but Ilana Trachtman's intimate, moving
documentary Praying With Lior takes care not to anoint him as a vessel
for God's word. Lior is a special boy, but the film remains refreshingly
down-to-earth about his abilities and limitations, and in the four-month
buildup to his bar mitzvah, it wonders openly about where this rite of passage
might take him. What will his life be like at 16? 20? 35?
Ultimately, Praying
With Lior is a film more about family dynamics than spiritual ones, though
the two can't really be separated in the Liebling household. Born to two
rabbis, Mordecai and Devorah, Lior grew up with religion at the center of his
life, so it's only natural that his love for his family would find expression
in his relationship with God. Devorah died of breast cancer six years before
the film opens, but she made such a profound imprint on him that his prayers
seem as much a communiqué to her as to God. Though his stepmother seems up for
the challenge, the film picks up on a slight hint of discord as the
family—which includes a college-aged sister, an older brother, a younger
sister, and another brother who doesn't appear in the film—continues to
function without Devorah. But there's mostly joy as Lior approaches his bar
mitzvah with unabashed enthusiasm, and his siblings, parents, and community
rally around him.
Trachtman pursued
the project after encountering Lior at a religious gathering in the Catskills,
and Praying With Lior occasionally goes soft in trying to inspire when
it might have plumbed deeper into the Lieblings' complex family dynamic. It
doesn't help that the jaunty score—which is a little like klezmer music written
for acoustic guitar—puts a cute gloss on material that might have been more
profound. Yet the film gains in power as the big day approaches, perhaps
because Trachtman grew closer to the Lieblings as the shooting went on, or more
likely because she was present to witness extraordinary scenes like the one
where Lior's father takes him to visit his mother's grave. A fictional film
could never replicate their raw grief, and it says everything about the heart
of a family that has embraced Lior as a singular blessing.
Chicago Tribune Maureen M. Hart
Rabbi Devora Bartnoff died in 1997, when her son Lior, who
was born with Down syndrome, was 6. A few months earlier, while fighting breast
cancer, she had written an article for the Jewish Exponent about Lior's love of
davening—or praying—his anticipation every week of Sabbath services, the hugs
he bestowed on the Torah and on members of the congregation.
"Praying With Lior" shares the article's title and its subject.
Filmmaker Ilana Trachtman follows the Liebling family—Lior; father Mordechai,
also a rabbi; stepmother Lynne; and siblings Reena, Yoni and Anna—as they
prepare for Lior's bar mitzvah, something his mother had tried to imagine in
her essay.
Trachtman's cameras follow Lior from home to synagogue to Orthodox day school,
where his filter-free emotions and off-kilter sense of humor (he's a master of
"April Fools'," no matter the date) win him admiration, love and,
from his classmates, tolerance. (Says one classmate of Lior's davening:
"It counts double.") Home movies help fill in the blanks left by
Devora's death.
Some see him as a religious savant, a "little rebbe," but as he
prepares for his big day with his father, it's obvious that his religious
revelations are not of an intellectual variety but come from the heart. When
asked what he expects on the day of his bar mitzvah, he confidently predicts
the coming of the Messiah and his mother's spirit. "I really want my mom
to come back," he says.
Trachtman doesn't downplay the challenges of a family with a
Down syndrome child, even one as high-functioning as Lior. His younger sister,
Anna, complains that Lior gets all the attention, and Yoni snaps at his dad
about having to do more than his share of parenting his brother. And there's a
feeling of unease watching Lynne attempt to fill some pretty big shoes.
Trachtman says she made the film to illustrate the plight of disabled Americans
who must contend with houses of worship that lack handicapped access, but her
documentary itself isn't always so sensitive. Trachtman's questions for Lior
can be annoying (right before the bar mitzvah, she keeps asking him whether
he's nervous, so much so that the viewer gets the yips). And Mordechai and Lior
take a trip to Devora's grave that borders on exploitive, especially when both
begin sobbing while Lior hugs her headstone.
But those are small quibbles compared with the film's climax, when the bar
mitzvah boy comes through. It's hard to have dry eyes as at least part of
Lior's wishes for that day seem to come true.
Cinematical Nick Schager
New York Sun [S. James Snyder]
ShortEnd Magazine [Noralil Ryan Fores]
The Village Voice [Julia Wallace]
Variety Dennis Harvey
TimeOut Chicago Ben Kenigsberg
Washington Post Rachel Beckman
New York Times Jeanette Catsoulis
BFI | Sight & Sound | At the Height of Summer ()
Hanoi, the present. Lien (Trân Nû
Yên Khê), the youngest of three sisters, works in the café run by her eldest
sister Suong (Nguy Nhû Quynh) and shares an apartment with their brother Hai
(Ngô Quang Hâi), an aspiring actor. On the fourth anniversary of their mother's
death Lien, Suong and the middle sister Khanh (Lê Khanh) gather at the café to
prepare dishes for the memorial ceremony and reception. While they work,
Suong's photographer husband Quoc (Chu Hûng) shows his work to Khanh's husband
Kien (Trân Manh Cuông), a writer having trouble finishing his novel. Later the
sisters discuss the idea their mother had a lifelong crush on a classmate.
Quoc leaves on a field trip to a
remote bay - where he is reunited with a woman who has borne his son. He
resolves to tell Suong at last about his second family. Meanwhile Suong herself
meets a secret lover in the afternoons. On a trip to Saigon Kien is attracted
to the glamorous Ngan (Doan Viét Ha); aware of his interest, she invites him to
her hotel room at night. Lien, whose relationship with Hai verges on the
incestuous, looks for a potential husband who resembles her brother; but Hoa
(Lê Vu Long), the boy she likes best, is turned off by her domineering
character.
Quoc tells Suong about his lover.
She is initially distraught but soon proposes an accommodation: he can keep his
second family as long as he remains a husband to her. Khanh finds a note from
Ngan in the pocket of Kien's jacket, but says nothing. Lien scares her sisters
by suggesting that she's pregnant - with no foundation. One month after the
commemoration of their mother's death, they prepare to mark the anniversary of
their father's death.
Born in Vietnam but educated in France,
Tran Anh Hung uses his dual-culture identity more productively than any other
émigré Asian film-maker. His Vietnam films, balanced between romanticised
memories from his childhood and present-day social observation, are so deeply
rooted in the culture - so at ease with it - that they could never have been
made by a foreigner. But Tran's way of thinking about characters and
relationships, his fetishistically precise imagery and his elliptical narrative
structures are all quintessentially French. The two strands meshed to
fascinating effect in The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) and Cyclo
(1995), but At the Height of Summer is a slightly less satisfying
hybrid: a film in which the strain of imposed ideas begins to show.
The film's central concern is
clear, and clearly eastern: it's about 'face', the primary need to maintain
appearances no matter what disruptive currents run beneath them. It's also a
film about sexuality in a Confucian climate: the unequal struggle between
libidinous impulses and the superego, which demands a façade of harmonious
propriety. The theme emerges naturally enough from the plotting (the film
offers a panorama of adulteries, all of them hushed-up to preserve the image of
harmony) but Tran characteristically uses a symbolic mystery to frame his
analysis. The action spans the month between the anniversaries of the deaths of
two parents; the punctilious observance of the dates and ceremonies, like the
matching portraits symmetrically hung above the family altar, represents both
Confucian orthodoxy and the integrity of the family. Early in the film, though,
Tran plants the suggestion that the sisters' late mother may have had a lover
named Toân - and shows the sisters running for cover in the thought that the
man was more likely an adolescent crush than an adult affair.
Since the idiom is anything but
social realist, the plotlines unfold in sequences of limpid artifice. The
setting is a largely imaginary Hanoi with brief interludes in Saigon (a luxury
hotel) and the countryside (a pristine bay with a wise old fisherman, a village
clearing scenically dotted with grazing water buffalo). The apartment of
Suong's lover is a symphony of drapes, veils and objets d'art; the spacious
apartment shared by Lien and Hai is a virtual gallery of neo-primitive
paintings by Tran Trong Vu. Even the interior of a Vietnam Airlines plane is
modernised and gentrified. It's hard to be sure why the film is so determined
to give its characters lifestyles so redolent of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Is
Tran again countering western expectations of 'Third World cinema'? Is he
placating the Vietnamese authorities by over-compensating for the depictions of
squalor in Cyclo? Or is he tapping into a Sirk/Fassbinder tradition by
dramatising emotional problems in terms of material well-being?
Whatever, the film is at its
weakest whenever it succumbs to the same designer tendencies in the scripting
of individual scenes. Suong's wordless afternoon liaisons with her lover are
mannered and unconvincing, while Lien's equally silent break-up with a
potential boyfriend (both of them in virginal white) seems ludicrously
contrived. Conversely, the film is most assured and affecting when it allows
its actors' faces and bodies to articulate the heart's filthy secrets without
needing to detach them from the rhythms and cadences of everyday life. And many
of Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee's individual images are powerful and
resonant, from close-ups of water on hair and skin in the tropical heat to the
vignettes of Kien at his low table trying to deal with writer's block.
Although the film has a very keen
sense of female solidarity and complicity, it's ultimately obsessed with the
conundrum of heterosexual relations as experienced in a culture which considers
it 'ignoble' for a woman to touch a man's head but quite OK for her to touch
his penis. Beneath the placid facades of married life it finds knots of
frustration, desire, impotence and castration-wishes. The entire schema is
brilliantly sketched in the opening scene: Hai, the marginalised (and
presumably gay) brother, wakes and starts working out while Lien sleepily
taunts and flirts with him, eventually stepping on his six-pack, the whole
choreographed to Lou Reed singing 'Pale Blue Eyes'. It's the best scene of its
kind since Jane Russell sang 'Anyone Here For Love?'.
Vibrant
Expressionism and Muted Melodrama: The Vertical Ray of the Sun Elizabeth Wright from Senses of Cinema
NORWEGIAN
WOOD B+ 91
Japan (133 mi) 2010
‘Scope
Tran Anh Hung is the only Vietnamese filmmaker to ever receive an
Academy Award nomination in the Best Foreign Film category, received for his
first film, THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), though the filmmaker emigrated to
France at age 12 following the fall of Saigon.
Known for his lush visuals and languorous pace, this film is no
exception, adapted from the Haruki Murakami novel which is interestingly set
during the student protest movement of the 1960’s along with the accompanying
air of sexual liberation. Feeling almost
like two separate films, the first half establishes the characters and sets the
tone for the rest of the film, beautifully shot by Hou Hsiao-hsien’s
cinematographer Lee Ping-bin, a visual extravaganza narrated by Watanabe
(Ken’ichi Matsuyama), a socially aloof but conscientious and bright college
student in Tokyo whose boyhood friend commits suicide, where he falls in love
with the dead boy’s emotionally fragile girlfriend Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) who
mysteriously disappears after their initial sexual encounter apparently brings
back painful memories, leaving no trace of how he can find her, so he writes
letters to her known addresses hoping they would be forwarded to her. Through the letters we get an understanding
how deeply he feels for Naoko, believing he’s somehow responsible for her
pain. Living in a college dormitory, he
is dragged along with others where he meets other girls, namely Midori (Kiko
Mizuhara), who actually pursues him, where initially the audience feels this is
a much better match for him as she’s so outgoing and confident, where the pair
actually seem happy together, but in a startling confession, they each claim to
love another, which places their aspirations on the back burner, which gives
rise to letters from Naoko, who is living in a remote retreat of some kind in
an attempt to heal her wounds.
Throughout the film is a remembrance and lavish tone poem to first love,
where the extraordinary visual beauty interweaves with the irrationality
of obsessive longing, where Watanabe and
Naoko feel a desperate need for one another, both clinging to hopes of
reuniting, yet there is an overriding sense of futility that accompanies their
feelings, as if weighted down by the death of their friend. There is also plenty of sexual
experimentation, where much of the dialog attempts a kind of abrupt
confessional honesty. Featuring another
superb musical score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, this is one of the
quietest and youthfully tender film experiences in recollection, exceeded
perhaps only by Naomi Kawase’s SUZAKU (1997) which is even more fragile, but
both of these two lovers remain damaged goods throughout, where initially there
is a spirit of hope, accelerated by the gorgeously optimistic presence of
Midori, which offers Watanabe an option, but one he fails to recognize, as he
insists he will not abandon Naoko as her deceased lover did. This road is a perilous journey, as Naoko
hasn’t recovered, needing the spiritual guidance of others to get through each
day, where Watanabe can visit her, but only in the presence of others, as she
still loses herself in her troubles, falling ever deeper into psychological
turmoil. One of the best scenes of the
film is when her friend plays the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” on the guitar,
where Naoko is sitting on the floor with Watanabe lying next to her in a moment
of quiet relaxation, but to Naoko the lyrics are simply crushing and
overwhelming, creating a hyper-sensuous personalized moment, like an acid rush,
where her past traumatic recollections come streaming into her head all at once
leaving her devastated and alone.
As the audience begins to realize the seriousness of Naoko’s condition,
this leads us into the second half of the film which could otherwise be called
the descent, taking on maudlin, melodramatic aspects that will likely turn off
many Western viewers as lengthy, over the top, and unnecessary, bordering on
pretentious, as it remains bathed in such a luminously beautiful setting,
featuring plenty of walks through green fields or forests in natural
landscapes, also including similar ventures in the wintry snow, where every
shot glows in an idealized light.
Despite the downward trend, a meandering turn towards futility and utter
pointlessness, which becomes the pervasive theme, happening suddenly, like
dropping off the edge of a cliff, this remains faithful to Japanese
sentiment—when honor has been soiled, suicide remains a noble option—where
Naoko waffles back and forth between appreciation for the attention paid by
Watanabe, and her hints that it’s all a waste of time and that he should get on
with his life without her. The initial
pangs of romantic love have evolved into pathos and paternal obligation, where
he has a highly developed sense of responsibility which continually paints him
in a good light, but he’s aboard a sinking ship, and while valiantly trying to
stay afloat, he remains lost in a cloud of death and denial, where his life is
a charade of pretense and make believe, putting on a happy face for the ever
dour Naoko. When the two talk of the
happiness they bring each other, there’s simply no sign of it any more,
drowning in a sea of sorrows and regret.
The exaggerated sense of doom has a heightened sense given this artful
design, as it perfectly matches youthful idealization, where disappointment can
be catastrophic when hopes and dreams are undone by the sheer inadequacy of
reality, leading to an emotional paralysis, where one remains in a permanent,
near catatonic state of heartbreak.
The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce] capsule version
Tran Anh Hung's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's languid-erotic novel provides another trip to Japan's past, namely the late '60s when students took to street protests and the titular Beatles ballad seemed to throb for every doomed lover. The central triangle concerns a pair of bashful sweethearts (Rinko Kikuchi, Kengo Kora) and a friend (Kenichi Matsuyama) who all reject the political upheavals around them in favor of a private, morbid sort of rebellion that would have received the approval of the Romantic poets from last year's Bright Star. Fascinated by the pale light silhouetting largely monosyllabic characters in embrace while Jonny Greenwood's guitar gently weeps, the picture finds the lush eye and sensual intuitiveness of Tran (Vertical Ray of the Sun) seamlessly in synch with the wry moodiness of the author of Tony Takitani. The fusion of these two miniaturists may be at 133 minutes too much of an emo orgy for some, though there's no escaping the swoony stateliness of the film's melancholy, where loss and phantoms move like clouds over endless verdant fields.
Parallax View [Sean Axmaker] also seen here: Norwegian Wood | The House Next Door
Making its U.S. debut is Norwegian Wood (Japan), directed and adapted by French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh-hung from the novel by Murakami Haruki, with a Japanese cast, cinematography by Hou Hsiao-hsien favorite Mark Lee Ping-bin (also of In The Mood for Love), songs by Can and a hushed score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood).
The setting is the youth culture of late sixties Tokyo, where student protests erupt on college campuses and sexual liberation is in the air. Tran, a director all about quiet intimacy and graceful, approaches the social rebellion with a delicate touch. Watanabe (Ken’ichi Matsuyama, Death Note), a teenage boy who leaves his hometown for college in Tokyo after his best friend’s suicide, narrates with the same restraint, even when the dialogue heads into the realm of intimacy and sex (not, I should add, at his instigation). While he avoids the political and social upheaval with his escape into books, this pretty, shy boy is quite the chick magnet and, even when he makes a point of joining his ladykiller buddy Nagasawa in hopes of a little action, he just passively accepts what comes his way, sex included. Except when it comes to Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel), his childhood friend and girlfriend of the dead boy, now a fragile thing unable to relate to most people. It’s hard to tell if its love, the emotional anchor of shared emotional trauma or anxious protectiveness that draws him to her, and Watanabe is no more clear about it himself. Meanwhile there is Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), a confident, forward, flirtatious young woman whose sudden appearance is full of surprises and potential that she both encourages and retreats from.
This is a film suffused in melancholia and disconnection. Where Naoko retreats from society at a secluded sanitarium, Watanabe simply retreats into books, school and work, with the occasional date. Matsuyama plays the part as if a spectator rather than a participant in his life, too afraid to engage after the pain of his friend’s suicide. Except when he’s around Naoko. Lee’s photography, even at its most intimate, picks Watanabe and Naoko out of their world, always apart from others and even from one another. The imagery is as delicate as the lives it presents, atmospheres so fragile they look like they’d shatter under too much emotional pressure.. It’s almost suspended out of time even as Watanabe weaves through student marches and slips in and out of one night stands. It’s not that nothing touches him, it’s that he refuses to allow anything or anyone close enough to allow that. Tran’s portrayal of the fragility of emotionally devastated teens and young adults afraid to open themselves up again makes for lonely portrait, more touching than engaging but masterfully painted throughout.
Norwegian Wood Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins
Vietnamese director Tran Anh
Hung has a distinct curiosity about the significance of music, both in
everyday life and in cinema. A recurring scene from his gorgeous 2000 film ‘At
the Height of Summer’ saw a young couple waking each morning to the strains of
the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and engaging in a ritualised
early-morning ballet of stretches and ablutions. At a pivotal moment in his
wistful and agonisingly poignant new work – a thoughtfully abridged adaptation
of Haruki
Murakami’s lilting 1987 chronicle of late-teen neurosis in 1960s Tokyo – a
young woman, Naoko (Rinko
Kikuchi), who’s still traumatised by the suicide of a schoolyard
sweetheart, breaks down when a friend casually strums through a rendition of
The Beatles’ torch song ‘Norwegian Wood’. The idea that something as ephemeral
as a pop song could release a storm cloud of sorrows encapsulates the
objectives of this film. It asks: how can we ever really be sure of love
without understanding the hidden impulses of others? And what’s the point of
love if death’s cruel hand can swipe at any moment?
The film is set during a period of revolutionary upheaval, but Tran does not
dwell on context, as if to say that this story transcends all links to broader
society. Kenichi
Matsuyama plays Watanabe, a bookish student struggling to figure out
whether his love of Naoko is born of the need to save her from herself, or
whether the suicide of Kizuki (her boyfriend and his best friend) has gifted
them with a unique perspective on each other’s fractured emotional state. Much
of their anxiety derives from sex, his sense of selfish pleasure-seeking, and
her need to explore her own sexual incompetence. Matters get more complex when
sex-savvy Midori (Kiko
Mizuhara) enters the fray, and Watanabe must weigh up his sense of
responsibility against his more base desires.
It’s an unhurried and precise film, but approach it on these terms and you’ll
find a sensitive, profoundly perceptive and life-affirming study of what it
means to develop a bond with someone else. And as an unblinking portrait of the
abject, sometimes self-destructive, almost unendurable distress suffered after
the loss of a loved one, the movie recalls no less a masterpiece than Bergman’s
‘Cries and Whispers’.
The performances of the young cast attain an affecting blend of reticence and
hope, but it’s Tran’s fastidious technique that nudges the film into the realms
of greatness. His prowling Steadicam circles the protagonists from behind
curtains and shelves, giving both interior and exterior scenes an added sense
of intimacy. His bold use of colour, too, emphasises the volatility of the
characters by oscillating between warm browns, fulsome ochres and chilly blues
or sharp whites. The swelling Arvo Pärt-like score by Radiohead’s Jonny
Greenwood offers subtle hints rather than obvious cues to how we should read
these intense situations. But it’s the clever use of Can’s Krautrock
tear-jerker ‘Mary, Mary So Contrary’ that best captures the mood of this
remarkable and devastating work.
BeyondHollywood.com [James Mudge]
As all supposedly unfilmable novels inevitably seem to, a cinematic Murakami Haruki’s “Norwegian Wood” finally arrived in 2010, some 23 years after its original publication. Given the book’s incredible popularity, it’s perhaps somewhat of a mystery why no-one decided to take up the challenge before, though the wait seemed to have been worthwhile when it was announced that Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung (“Scent of the Green Papaya”) would be the brave soul in question, along with acclaimed Taiwanese cinematographer Lee Ping Bin (“In the Mood For Love”). Despite the obvious narrative difficulties faced by Tran, Murakami himself gave his seal of approval, and apparently stepped in to advise on the script, giving the film a major official boost. With a fine cast of young Japanese talent, headed by Matsuyama Kenichi (“Death Note”), Kikuchi Rinko (“Babel”) and model Mizuhara Kiko as the iconic protagonists, the film unsurprisingly enjoyed a high profile run at international festivals, playing in competition at Venice and screening at various other events around the world.
The film’s plot is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, taking place in 1960s Japan and beginning with a young man called Watanabe (Matsuyama Kenichi) heading to Tokyo to attend university and get over the suicide of his childhood best friend Kizuki. While there, he meets Kizuki’s girlfriend Naoko (Kikuchi Rinko), and ends up spending the night with her. Unfortunately, this seems to bring back painful memories for the tortured, unstable girl, and she checks herself into a remote forest sanatorium. Although Watanabe still attempts to build a relationship with Naoko, he also finds himself involved with his lively classmate Midori (Mizuhara Kiko), pushing him towards a life altering choice.
Although bringing “Norwegian Wood” or indeed any of Murakami Haruki’s works to the screen was always going to be a difficult prospect, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting choice of director than Tran Anh Hung. The Vietnamese helmer’s languid, atmospheric style fits the novel perfectly, managing to nail the bittersweet nostalgia and quiet emotional turmoil far effectively more than might have been expected. As with most of Tran’s efforts, the film primarily has the feel of a mood piece, driven by ambiguity and atmosphere rather than narrative. This approach works very well indeed, and whilst the film inevitably does lose some of the book’s details and richness, it’s impressive just how much of it Tran is able to faithfully retain, especially given its relatively short running time.
To a large extent this is down to some truly gorgeous visuals, which not only bring the book to captivating life, but which are used skilfully to reflect its themes, primarily the conflict in Watanabe’s heart that finds him longing for the painful past whilst reaching for a brighter future, symbolised by the two women in his life. Boasting a wholly convincing recreation of the time period, the film switches between vivid colours and pale, bleak compositions during the later stages as Naoko’s condition worsens. Cinematographer Lee Ping Bin is on top form, and the film does bear comparison with “In the Mood for Love”, showing the same kind of melancholic beauty and eye for detail. Through this, Tran is able to successfully evoke an impression of fading memories, the confusion of love, and the ominous presence of death. The soundtrack also plays a vital role in this, with Greenwood’s superb ambient score perfectly complimenting the drama.
Given the popularity of the book, the casting was always going to be a key factor. Thankfully, Matsuyama Kenichi does a very serviceable job as the male lead, just about managing to convey inner turmoil and complexity whilst still remaining sympathetic. Although Mizuhara Kiko doesn’t have a great deal to do as Midori, with her character being the one most significantly trimmed, Kikuchi Rinko is excellent as Naoko, arguably the film’s most important role. As a result, the film does carry a considerable emotional punch, though it’s a little too distant and cold to have quite the same impact as Haruki’s multi-layered novel.
Still, this would perhaps have been a little too much to ask for, and “Norwegian Wood” is certainly the very best adaptation of the book possible. Tran Anh Hung proves to have been an inspired choice of director, and backed by some amazing visuals and laudable efforts from the cast as a whole, the film is by far one of the more complex and mature relationship dramas of recent years, and one which should be enjoyed by Haruki fans and newcomers alike.
Midnight Eye review: Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori, 2010 ... Lindsay Nelson, also seen here: Norwegian Wood
Laura Minor Cinespect
This ‘Norwegian Wood’ is a very pretty if sparse place to visit Edgar Chaput from Sound on Sight
Norwegian Wood: Rubber Souls Bilge Ebiri from They Live By Night
The Diva Review [The Lady Miz Diva Vélez]
iSugoi.com [M. Douglas] Miguel Douglas
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Owen Van Spall]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Electric Sheep Magazine [Sarah Cronin]
Movie Review - 'Norwegian Wood' - Love And Loss, And Memory ... Mark Jenkins from NPR
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce] longer version
NORWEGIAN WOOD Review James Marsh from Twitch
Norwegian Wood | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Alex Preiss
REVIEW: Meticulous Murakami Adaptation Norwegian Wood Does Everything Right, and Still, We Snooze Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline
Joshua Reviews Tran Anh Hung's 'Norwegian Wood' [Theatrical ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Film In Japan [Humphrey Morgan]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
Norwegian Wood - The Japan Society Susan Meehan
Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
SubtitledOnline [Patrick Gamble]
Little White Lies Magazine [Martyn Conterio]
Sound On Sight Robert Simpson
Tran Anh Hung's 'Norwegian Wood': Intimacy Manifested « Word ... Kristin Fritz from Word & Film
Norwegian Wood Directed by Anh Hung Tran Robert Bell from Exclaim!
a page of madness [Nicholas Vroman]
The Film Pilgrim [Kevin Knapman]
Elina Mishuris L magazine
Spectrum Culture [Jesse Cataldo]
Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]
Critic's Notebook [Maggie Glass]
NextToTheAisle [Jamie Garwood]
HK Neo Reviews - Blog Edition [Andrew Chan]
Screenjabber.com Gareth James
Tran Anh Hung's "Norwegian Wood" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson with all the links from Mubi
Adapting Murakami's NORWEGIAN WOOD: Tran Anh Hung Interview Dustin Chang interview from Twitch, January 2, 2012
Scott Macaulay video interview with the director from Filmmaker magazine, January 12, 2012 (4:14)
The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]
Time Out New York [David Fear]
Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood to score film of Haruki Murakami novel Sean Michaels from The Guardian, March 8, 2010
Bated breath as Norwegian Wood film opens in Japan Justin McCurry from The Guardian, December 10, 2010
Tran Anh Hung enters Norwegian Wood – and emerges to tell the tale Nosheen Iqbal from The Guardian, March 3, 2011
Norwegian Wood – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, March 10, 2011
Norwegian Wood – review Philip French from The Observer, March 12, 2011
Norwegian Wood, review - Telegraph Sukhdev Sandhu
The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]
Washington Post [Stephanie Merry]
Norwegian Wood - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times [Stephen Holden]
DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Norwegian Wood (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Traoré,
Salif
FARO: GODDESS OF THE WATERS C+ 76
Not in the upper echelon of African films, as other than the setting,
there’s poor use of naturalism, creating ever more convoluted tribal customs
that become completely trivialized when there’s no attempt to respect these
traditions, to show why people are relying on these customs in the first
place. Without that integration into the
culture, much of this film feels contrived, like the director is forcing
cultural ritual into his film. This is a
colorful entry, set in a small village on the banks of a gently flowing river,
where the villagers are having difficulty making the transition from the
rituals of the past, based on folklore and rumor, where any modern approach
outdates those customs as pure superstition.
But as the tribal chief and patriarchal elder system are based on
knowledge of these old rituals, modernization would make them irrelevant, as
they have little education. The twist in
this film is introducing a completely modernized man back into this village, a
kid who grew up there and was scorned as a “bastard,” the lowest rung of the
ladder who is blamed when things go wrong, occasionally actually banned from
the villages. Zan
(Fili Traoré) is an educated engineer who drives an SUV and carries a digital
camera, but he is not welcomed back when he returns home, not even by his aging
mother, as once again, he is blamed for the angry river, which the chief orders
off-limits because Faro, the river Goddess, is angry, effectively banning
fishing, the village’s source of food and income. Zan, of course, finds this ridiculous, but
when one of the most beautiful young girls, Penda (Djénéba Koné) has a fainting
spell, nearly drowning in the river, the village blames him, where some of the
younger men threaten him with violence.
Penda grows delirious after awhile, much of which seems brought on by
the village hysteria that Faro is angry with her. This backwards thinking thwarts every attempt
Zan makes to educate and improve the village’s economic standing by using the
water more effectively, as the elders suspect he wants to take over as
chief. Like Sissako’s WAITING FOR
HAPPINESS (2002), locals educated elsewhere are treated as outsiders, leaving
traditional-minded African societies in a state of flux, as they’re afraid to
modernize and they’re afraid to lag behind, effectively remaining in a state of
limbo.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson
Modern African cinema tends to have an epic feel, with a reliance on lush cinematography coupled with aspects of myth and fable evident in everything from Berlin Golden Bear winner U-Carmen to the more recent Buried Dreams. Faro – Goddess Of The Waters is no exception, this time taking on the conflict sparked when a traditional way of life is confronted with modernity, or more simply put a man of science taking on a culture of faith.
Zan (Fly Traoré) is the science guy, returning to his home village to talk to the tribal elder about the possibility of building a new dam to bring prosperity. He believes the village – whose fishermen are utterly dependent on the waters of the title – is caught in a timewarp: “the world evolves but nothing changes here.”
His mind may be focussed on progress but in returning to the village he must also confront his past. Since his mother Niele (Rokia Traoré) stubbornly refuses to tell him who his father is he is considered a bastard and, by extension, bad luck. Equally abhorred by the villagers is Kouta (Helene M Diara) who has earned the wrath of her neighbours by refusing to mourn her husband in the traditional fashion.
The scene is set then for a clash between the old and the new and, after an accident in the waters, the locals conclude that Faro – the all-knowing goddess of the title – is angered and must be appeased.
The water rippling around the village mirrors the ebb and flow of relationships within Salif Traoré’s film. This is an exploration of the undercurrents of humanity as belief and fact, dream and prophecy become jumbled together. The film has a mythical air about it, although rooted in reality, as the power of suggestion is quickly seen to be as strong as the authority of science. Beautifully shot and cleverly using the sounds and rhythms of nature to underpin its epic themes, this has a slow pace that rewards the patient viewer.
Modernity is greeted with fear and trepidation, while the
traditional is exquisitely captured in contempo African fable "Faro --
Goddess of the Waters." Pic reps an impressive feature bow by Malian docu
and short filmmaker, Salif Traore, and from the opening frame the helmer's
command of filmmaking is masterly. Radiating authenticity and authority, this
effort is assured wide fest exposure. Commercial prospects also beckon with
arthouse niche in
The camera traverses the surface of the river near the Malian
town of
Soon after trained engineer Zan (Fili Traore) returns to the village of his birth, the bush telegraph announces the bastard son of Niele (Rokia Traore) has returned. In a place where the progeny of unmarried women are seen as a curse, this is not good news.
While Zan is in town, he implores his mother to reveal the identity of his father. Bound by some unexpressed secret, she refuses.
Also breeding ill will in the village is the outspoken Kouta (Helene M. Diarra), whose refusal to endlessly grieve her husband's death in the time-honored way has upset the township. While the same obligation does not weigh upon her beautiful daughter Zan (Fly Traoré)the young woman still acutely feels the loss of her father.
After Penda nearly drowns in a river accident, the village is traumatized by what is taken to be a sign that Faro is angry. Village consensus is that the return of the technology-wielding Zan (video cameras, SUV, surveillance equipment) is the wellspring of the goddess' rage.
Village chief (Sotigui Kouyate) and his all-male council declare Faro's wrath will not dissipate until a sacrifice is made. All villagers are forbidden from entering the river until further notice -- a considerable obstacle to everyday life.
Pic gives equal weight to traditional and modern values. In the opening credits and the scenes in which the river takes life rather than gives it, Faro is presented as a living entity rather than a mere superstition. Likewise, when a ritual is enacted to determine who has fathered illegitimate children, the procedure is not only perceived by Zan and the rest of his community as truth, but is later revealed to be unfailingly accurate.
In its embrace of the old and the new, Traore's vision is tolerant, wise and forward-looking. From the very beginning, pic exudes a cinematic confidence that assures aud it is in good hands, and while some aspects of the narrative may be unconventional for Westerners, Traore never betrays that trust.
Thesps, some of whom are amateurs, are strong across the board. Fili Traore gives an excellent portrayal of a man caught between his head and his heart, his past and his future.
HD lensing shot at 24 frames per second is a colorful joy to behold and, in a fest landscape dominated by shoddy digital images, reps a rare example of how bright the future of digital cinematography really will be.
Jean-Pierre Gauthier makes full use of the earthy textures of the African landscape and delivers several memorable vistas and magnificent closeups with equal aplomb. African soundtrack by Bassekou Kouyate is smartly applied. All other tech credits are decidedly pro.
Camera (color, HD-to-35mm), Jean-Pierre
Gauthier; editor, Laure Budin; music, Bassekou Kouyate; sound (DTS Stereo),
Jean-Sebastien Roy. Reviewed at
Faro:
Goddess of the Waters Ferdy on
Films
A film with an interesting look, a nice, gritty, natural style, with some terrific music, especially that men-shouting-over-the-guitar gaucho music that plays over the credits, and continues even after the credits are over - wonderful stuff. There are some interesting scenes about this uninspiring, small-town locksmith turned petty criminal, turned cop in another district out of town, turned corrupt by the "El Bonaerense" police district, which leaves him little choice, as he has no real police or social sense, so he gets mixed up in a world he knows nothing about, and the film drifts a bit other than the few frantic sex sequences and the Christmas party sequence where rockets are shot into the air accompanied by some terrific music. The music and the atmosphere is the thing here, the story itself is purely secondary.
El Bonaerense Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
I’m sad that I saw this one only on video, but glad to have seen it at
all, given that it has no proper distributor.
(It played at NYC’s Film Forum courtesy of sales agent / semi-distrib
Menemsha Films.) In a more intellectual
cultural climate, Trapero’s second film wouldn’t be such a hard sell. It’s offhandedly funny, like a
played-straight
EL BONARENSE - Film Comment Michael Rowin, 2003
A subtle, melancholy investigation of working-class hardship and
police corruption, Pablo Trapero's El Bonaerense reaches into the grey
areas of life in a decaying urban center. Calling to mind the poetic realism
and unassuming existentialism of TV's Homicide: Life on the Streets, the
film's distinctly Argentine flavor is rooted in the country's recent political
and economic crisis. Like Homicide, El Bonaerense (slang for
"the police" as well as "provincial") has an absorbing
rhythm and edgy handheld camerawork but it is decidedly detached in tone,
particularly when it comes to its not-quite lovable protagonist. Trapero is
more interested in following his character within an unstable, threatening
environment, his experiences captured less through dialogue than atmosphere and
setting. In only his second feature Trapero shows the command of a director who
respects his characters and story enough to not resort to manipulation and
clear-cut narrative solutions. The result is a film of quiet urgency.
The plot is deceptively simple: Zapa (Jorge Román), a none-to-bright small town
locksmith, nonchalantly goes along with a safe-cracking scheme, finds himself
first arrested, then bailed by his uncle, a retired policeman, who sets him up
with a job in the
El Bonaerense takes a straightforward (but never dull) realist approach
toward its subject, a nonjudgmental investigation of the role of the police in
modern society. Trapero wisely steers clear of a sensationalist, leering
portrayal of corruption and violence, and the beauty of El Bonaerense
lies in the small details, accumulated in crisply edited sequences that proceed
with almost dreamlike inevitability. Although the overall mood of the film is
in accord with Zapa's aimlessness and weary duplicity (making him a direct
descendant of Céline's antiheroes), Trapero knows when to go with scenes that
function dialectically. Thus, after a chaotic Christmas Eve at headquarters,
Zapa and his fellow officers join in an exhilarating yet somewhat pathetic
bacchanal, punctuated by sparklers and celebratory gun fire. Similarly, Zapa's
fling with colleague Mabel (Mimí Ardú), his superior in the department, is
alternately passionate and empty, loving and estranged. Zapa's failure to
connect with Mabel's young son hints at the failure of authority haunting the
film, which extends beyond its characters to encompass the problems at the very
heart of
Along with Trapero, who elicits striking performances from Román, Ardú and
Darío Levy as the corrupt Det. Gallo, cinematographer Guillermo Nieto deserves
credit for providing El Bonaerense with its unique look. Nierto captures
daytime
I liked the half of Crane
World I saw on TV, and really dug El Bonaerense. Here, Trapero
pretty much flies off the deep end. I give it grudging props, I suppose, for
its technical skill. It's the most spot-on evocation I've ever seen committed
to celluloid of what it's like to be trapped in a closet-sized space with your
yammering, idiotic extended family. And you know what? It's a sensation I
really didn't want evoked. The comedy is what I'd call
"hyper-middlebrow," all claustrophobic camerawork and rapid-fire
dialogue and endless yelling and cacophonous interruption. It's like a cross
between Agnes Jaoui and a skewer through the eyeball, and all your favorite National
Lampoon's Vacation moments are in full attendance. Oops! Kissin' cousins .
. . Yikes! In-laws gettin' frisky on the sly . . . Ouch! Rural dentistry . . .
Whoops! An encounter with the asshole boyfriend, and on and on and fucking on.
The last shot, which retroactively turns the whole preceding film into a set-up
for a grand-summation punchline, thinks it's redemptive when it's really just
stupid and obvious ("'cause it feels so good when they stop"). Half
the audience was rolling in the aisles, the rest of us were banging our heads
on the backs of the seats in front of us. When this opens commercially -- I
guarantee Miramax or Fox Searchlight or somebody is snapping it up as I write
this -- avoid it like the cinematic psoriasis it is.
Cannes:
"Blindness," "Waltz With Bashir," "Leonora,"
"Four Nights With Anna."
Glenn Kenny at
You've seen women's prison films before. But have you ever seen a film set in a women's prison for mothers...and their children? No, me neither. Martina Gusman stars here as Julia, who wakes up one morning a bloody mess, with two male bloody messes in the apartment with her, and subsequently winds up accused of murder. And she's pregnant. The film follows several years of her life, chronicling her finessing of prison politics, the fierce bond she creates with her son, her fraught relations with her wealthy mother (Elli Medeiros), and more. Gusman's performance is what most critics would call a "powerhouse" (unless somebody's pulling my leg, she was pregnant for real during the part of the shoot in which her character was) and Pablo Trapero's direction is what you would call "remarkably assured." Few directors (and unless someone's pulling my leg, this one is married to his lead actress) would open a picture with a rollicking sing-a-long over the credits, then eschew music entirely for the better part of an hour, and then throw in another rollicking song for a "March of the Prison Mothers" sequence. For all that, your response to this picture is definitely gonna have quite a bit to do with whether a women's-prison-for-mothers picture is your precise cup of meat.
Cannes
2008 diary: ‘Lion’s Den’ and 'Three Monkeys' Geoff Andrew at
Only a couple of days into this year’s
It’s a fairly simply story, though Trapero makes the most of it by only
revealing salient facts at sporadic intervals and by focusing so closely on
character: not just the superbly played Julia, but also her mother Sofia and
Marta, a fellow inmate who helps the novice adjust to prison life, As the film
slowly zooms in not so much on what exactly happened in Julia’s apartment but
on how she’ll respond to the child and its future, Trapero teases out the
various social, psychological and ethical strands of a morally complex
situation with commendable clarity; and as in his ‘Familia
Rodante’, what can sometimes seem a fairly straightforward film of
no particular originality or consequence is transformed by an ending that is at
once pleasingly ambiguous and almost unexpectedly affecting. This man certainly
knows how to finish off his movies.
In his breakthrough film Crane World (1999), Pablo
Trapero displayed his mastery at depicting wide open urban spaces and
liberating patches of sky in his native
In recent years there has been a spate of prison movies from
Trapero has said that the starting point of the project was
learning about laws in
Besides the extraordinary visuals, with pans and tilts and traveling shots serving to emphasize the oppressive enclosed feel of the institutions, central to the success of Lion's Den is the performance of Martina Gusman. Trapero's wife, she has executive produced all of his films since El Bonaerense (2002), but has never before taken the top acting credit on a film. On paper such an arrangement smacks of a possible vanity production, even an irrational obsession with a partner that has, in the past, ruined many a film. Yet Gusman is perfect.
Early on she is withdrawn, without affect. As prison life, and the men who have ultimate power over her fate, begin to wear her down, she rises to the occasion. Now that she has a child, she has begun to develop a personality, and uses it to manipulate anybody who would take advantage of her plight, especially those who want to separate her from her young son, Tomas. They include her selfish mother, Sofia (Medeiros), who tries to trick her. Julia hides her uncanny ability to overcome considerable odds to get what she wants.
What propels Julia's plight is a bit simplistic: her murdered lover, Nahuel, had brought his male lover, Ramiro (Brazilian actor Santoro), to live with them. Once the police get involved, the narrative becomes a somewhat facile "he said/she said" conflict. Naturally neither Julia nor Ramiro cares to stay in prison. For all her faults, Julia is truthful; Ramiro is a slick opportunist and concocts a false tale implicating Julia in the killing. The court, comprised only of males, finds Ramiro innocent and Julia guilty, with a 10-year prison sentence hovering over her. Of course this means she will lose custody of Tomas.
It is a testament to Trapero's social conscience that he applies his aesthetic know-how to a subject as tragic - and unaddressed - as that of kids growing up in cellblocks. Had a documentary film-maker deploying talking heads and some assorted prison scenes taken it on, the impact would be slight. Few who see Lion's Den will forget its harrowing atmosphere, its sets full of barbed wire, railings, and other constraining barriers.
Matt Noller at
CARANCHO C+ 78
What is it with the
Argentines and their familiarity with American TV? First Juan José Campanella is the surprise
foreign film winner at the Academy Awards for THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2009),
where the story resembles his American directing experience on Law & Order:
Special Victims Unit television
episodes, while now Trapero writes a script that appears like it originated
with the ER TV series. The director broke into the world cinematic
landscape with EL BONAERENSE (2002), a gritty, naturalistic
slice-of-life film that is drenched in the hard corps social realism of corrupt
cops. A decade later, now part of an
independent production company, Matanza Cine, that produces films by Lisandro
Alonso, among others, this film is also grounded in real life, as Argentina has
an incredibly high vehicle death and accident rate, 22 deaths per day, where
cut-rate service lawsuits are the norm.
Trapero returns to the same neighborhood where he shot his earlier film
and continues to use a similar style, this time following a midnight shift team
of paramedics on their rounds, from arriving at the scene of an accident to the
bloodied and mutilated bodies that lay helplessly around the hospital emergency
rooms. Ricardo Darín, the lawyer from
THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES, is Sosa, a lowlife ambulance chaser attorney who
hangs out in emergency rooms and feeds off of unfortunate injuries to make a
living (the title translates into vulture), which includes staging accidents
for quick cash settlements. Martina
Guzman, the director’s wife, is Luján, the drug addicted doctor on the
While ambulance chasers are reviled by the hospital community, Sosa helps Luján cut through layers of red tape by helping her get faster service instead of wasting time desperately waiting for someone to to sign off on her patients. A casual acquaintance soons turns into more, as both have unsavory secrets, but supposedly out of respect for her, Sosa makes promises that he’s getting out of the racket. No sooner does he say that but he gets mired even deeper into the criminal underworld that controls the behind-the-scenes operations, which includes the money handling, as these companies take anywhere from a 50 – 80% cut of the settlement awards. Trapero continues to use long takes as well as an in-your-face camera style, also occasional signs of brilliant editing, but the romantic entanglement really bottoms out and becomes a sordid and pathetic affair that continually degrades itself lower and lower, where the hysterical tone of desperation more closely resembles the world of drug addicts and heroin addiction. Trapero missteps here with an all too predictable descent into a nightmarish hell, losing more credibility from the audience with this seemingly improbable relationship, as the once confident Luján grows weak and helpless while Sosa is a shell of his former self, falling deeper into the clutches of the seedy world of organized crime, whose imprint is all over this film. Whatever intrigue was initially established by the intense use of realism is lost by the punishing avalanche of blood and violence, which gets overdone and overused, throwing the film off course into a near Hollywood downward spiral of endless cruelty and punishment.
Chicago International Film Festival: Week Two Andrea Gronvall from The Reader
A
disbarred attorney (Ricardo Darin of The Secret in Their
Eyes) and a drug-addicted medic (Martina Gusman) get in over their heads
in the underbelly of
Time Out Online (Geoff Andrew) review
Rooted in
real life – injury and death from car accidents are now alarmingly common in
Argentina – Trapero’s film feels almost like a documentary in its early scenes
outlining the mostly nocturnal work of ambulance medic Luján (Gusman), on the
one hand, and ambulance-chasing lawyer Sosa (Darin), on the other. But as Sosa
tries – partly out of self-respect, partly to impress Luján – to dissociate
himself from a company that exploits accident victims by fleecing them of most
of the proceeds of insurance claims, the film turns steadily into a taut,
suspenseful noir thriller, alert to the psychological needs and doubts of its
clearly star-cross’d lovers and to the visceral physicality of both hospital
work and criminal violence alike. Darin and Gusman, each of them excellent,
receive sterling support from the rest of the cast, while superb camerawork and
editing create a mood of tense immediacy from the attention-catching start to
the spiralling chaos of the extraordinarily gripping finale.
Todd Brown at Cannes from Twitch, May 17, 2010, also seen here: TIFF 2010: CARANCHO Review
We are
all familiar with the concept of the sleazy lawyer, the vulture who lurks on
the outskirts just awaiting his chance to swoop in and profit on others'
misfortune. Pablo Trapero takes that image as the center of his stellar, genre
defying, latest effort Carancho.
The always-stellar Ricardo Darin is Sosa, a man with a hidden history who now
ekes out a living working as a personal injury lawyer, scanning the police
radio and chasing ambulances to find poor people caught in misfortune and
handle their insurance claims - always being sure to skim a healthy percentage
for his employers.
It is while working his nightly rounds that Sosa first meets Lujan (Martina
Gusman) a young doctor who, like Sosa, carries an awful lot of weight and
history in her eyes. Sosa knows seemingly immediately that Lujan is the woman
for him. She needs some convincing, but the two are nevertheless drawn
inexorably together.
And this is when we learn that Sosa's sleaze goes beyond an unfortunate
profession and into outright criminal behavior. A job goes wrong, someone ends
up dead and Sosa's life - so close to achieving happiness - crumbles.
A film that fuses stellar character work and intimate drama with larger thriller
and heist moments with a few elements of shocking violence thrown in for good
measure, Carancho is a masterful piece of work from writer / director /
producer / editor Pablo Trapero. Trapero serves notice here that he is one of
the very best film makers int he world today. Period. The complexity of his
characters, the technical quality of the film work, his ability to balance
intimate emotion with realistic and brutal action sequences, his obvious skill
in working with actors - though that is made easier when you have actors the
caliber of Darin to work with - Trapero is at the highest level in all of
these. Flawless? Carancho comes pretty damn close. With one day left for me
here in
A corrupt society eventually infects even its decent, noble-minded
citizens in Carancho, the most commercial film
to date from Argentinean director Pablo Trapero whose Lion’s Den was in competition at
A predictability to the fatalistic events may diminish its appeal for some audiences but it has a viability in most markets with the Oscar-winning success of Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret In The Eyes adding to the allure of Ricardo Darin in the lead role.
Opening titles inform us that road accidents have become an
epidemic in
Sosa is the one man in the foundation still troubled by a conscience and desperate to recover his licence and return to the legitimate side of the law. Lujan (Martina Gusman) is a young doctor working all the hours she can to build a career. Her work in the emergency services brings her into constant contact with Sosa and sparks a tentative romance that will be tested to the limits by the consequences of his well-intentioned actions.
Shot in cinemascope, Carancho has the look and feel of classic post-War film noir. Sosa and Lujan inhabit a shadowy, twilight zone of events that happen when the rest of the world is asleep. There is a lemony, neon tone to Julian Apezteguia’s cinematography that offers an atmospheric sense of night in the city. If this was 20th Century Fox in the 1950s you might expect to find Richard Widmark and Susan Hayward in the main roles.
The main characters would seem to fulfill the archetypes of a shop-soiled Galahad and an angel of mercy but part of the film’s appeal lies in the complexity of the characters and the believability of the performances. Sosa commits all the wrong acts for all the right reasons and Lujan is not as blameless as she first appears.
A tale of moral dilemmas and doomed romance, Carancho keeps you rooting for the central couple to escape their fate that is one of the surest signs of just how involving it becomes.
Deborah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 18, 2010, also seen here: The Hollywood Reporter review
CANNES --
When young director Pablo Trapero shot "El Bonaerense" in 2002, he
pushed the frontiers of socially realistic cinema in Argentina; with
"Carancho"he returns to the same nitty-gritty terrain (the film is
even shot in the same neighborhood) where police corruption is a given and survival
depends on beating your rivals to a pulp before they hit on you. Inspired by
the sultry smooth atmosphere of
Low-key is far from Trapero's esthetic, of course, and as co-editor he injects
the film with the pummeling rhythm of a heavy metal session. Punishing for
some, it could be just the cup of tea for the young male demographic.
Added value comes from leading star Ricardo Darin -- whose "The Secret in
their Eyes" won this year's foreign-language Oscar -- as a legal vulture
who wants to get out of the business after he meets straight arrow Martina
Gusman (the film's executive producer) in the role of an ER medic. It's a nice,
modern twist on the flatfoot who falls for the blonde of yore, and Trapero's
muscular filmmaking keeps the love story fast and fresh.
It's the
film's dark violence, however, that will either sell tickets or turn viewers
away, and those who enjoyed the morbid atmosphere of David Cronenberg's
"Crash" should take a look. The film opens with a beautifully edited,
stop-motion sequence of a car accident and the information that 8,000
Argentines die on the road each year. They don't all have decent accident
insurance, and that is where Hector Sosa (Darin) comes in. His craggy face,
made even tougher wearing a crew cut, reacts to police radio reports of a crash
and he speeds off in pursuit to help the survivors land their claims with their
insurance companies.
The "Foundation" he works for is charitable only to themselves,
appropriating the lion's share of the claims they handle. The dark, seedy
office is right out of the 1940s, like the hard-nosed bruisers who run the
joint. It would be interesting to count the number of times Sosa gets brutally
beaten up in the film, afterwards pretending nothing happened as he wipes the
blood from his face.
Complications arise when he meets Lujan (Gusman), an innocent-looking young
doctor who works the night shift on ambulance duty. She brushes him off but he
won't take no for an answer. Their relationship is earthy and real, grounding
the violent story in believable human emotions.
Crash after crash, CPR after IV, the victims of road accidents keep pouring
into the run-down hospital where Lujan works, littered with garbage and smeared
with blood. She keeps herself on an even keel shooting up in the bathroom; when
Sosa finds out she's a junkie, he takes it in stride. His heart of gold makes
him want to help some of the accident victims, while earning a little money on
the side. This leads to a conflict of interest with his employers and to a
dramatically over-the-top finale that goes too far to be satisfying.
The Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman] also seen here: TIFF 2010. Day 3
User reviews from imdb Author: abisio from Miami
User reviews from imdb Author: CarlosFacundoCornejo
from
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
From Soy Cuba to Soy
Turista: the 7 Days In Havana portmanteau project
features seven directors who have more in common with the Cannes Film Festival,
where the film premiered, than the Caribbean political hotspot where it is set.
The result is a bouncy and uneven bop through this most seductive of cities,
which should attract the curious but won’t rehabilitate the somewhat bruised
reputation of the film anthology. It’s also arguable how well
But Havana, capital of the self-described Socialist Republic of
Cuba and now run by Fidel Castro’s brother Raul, is a survivor; a city with an
enduring global cachet, a magnetic fascination which should exert a pull on
audiences which have already responded to the Paris and New York anthologies.
Running at 128 minutes, 7 Days In
With each piece set on a consecutive day of the week, some, in particular Cuban native Juan Carlos Tabio’s Bittersweet and The Fountain by Laurent Cantet, successfully dig under the surface to convey a little of what it means to be Cuban today. Gaspar Noe’s contribution is the most contemporary and cinematic. Elia Suleiman’s schtick may be as deceptively simple as ever, but his warmly familiar routine helps underscore some of the film’s more perceptive points. The longest, Julio Medem’s Celia’s Temptation, adopts a bafflingly cheesy tone, however, which sets it at jarring odds with its colleagues.
El Yuma, which is slang for yankee, casts Hutcherson as a visiting actor caught up in a drunken night in the city with taxi driver Angelito (Vladimir Cruz). Del Toro’s opener sets the look of the film, all brashly jeweled tones and smoky orange interiors, and cinematographer Daniel Aranyo takes credit here and on the shorts made by Medem, Suleiman and Tabio. Diego Bussel took over on Cantet’s and Trapero’s films while Noe memorably works his own camera.
Trapero’s Tuesday film, Jam Session, stars Emir Kusturica
as himself, a drunken Serbian film director arriving in
Medem’s Cecilia’s Temptation, meanwhile, with its lounge-lizard
soundtrack and overdone soft-focus colours, tells the story of a chanteuse torn
between the
Tabio and Cantet finish the piece with their closely-linked
domestic dramas, pulling 7 Days In
Cuban writer Leonardo Padura and his wife Lucia Lopez Coll are
credited with co-coordinating the screenplay for the entire piece, and he
collaborated on most of the shorts (except for Suleiman, Noe, and Cantet, who
wrote their own). Viewers looking for a hard political view on
7
Days in Havana: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter
Josh Hutcherson stars in the Cuban film directed by Croisette alumni including Laurent Cantet, Gaspard Noe and Elia Suleiman, as well as Benicio Del Toro.
Like a mojito that overdoes it on the lime juice, the omnibus
film 7 Days in
Oscillating between a sightseer’s tour of the island (now in its
53rd year of Castro rule, with Raul having officially replaced Fidel
as of 2008) and a more intimate portrait of some of its denizens, the ensemble
of short films are structured to fit in a single week, with one movie per day
and a handful of characters who reappear in several of them. If the patchwork
of stories captures the many layers of life in
The more touristy fare kicks off with Del Toro’s El Yuma, which follows a young American actor, Teddy (Hutcherson), during a wild and crazy night that includes plenty of beer, rum, girls, hookers and eventually a transvestite that he unwittingly takes back to his room. If there are no major surprises in the short – whose title is Cuban slang for “American” – the long and drunken trip is an easy enough ride, especially since Teddy seems to remain fairly aloof to all the poverty and prostitution around him.
A similar premise is proffered in Pablo Trapero’s Jam Session, which follows two-time Palme d’Or winner Emir Kusturica as he accepts an honorary prize from the Havana Film Festival in between bouts of drinking and schmoozing with local musicians. While nothing really special happens throughout the romp, it features some catchy handheld footage, including an extended sequence-shot that follows the Serbian director from the pits of a down and dirty nightclub to the city’s breathtaking shores.
Of all the Lonely Planet-esque works, the strongest one is Elia Sulieman’s Diary of a Beginner, in which the Palestinian filmmaker applies his trademark combination of Keaton and Tati-style humor to explore the world in and around his upscale hotel. There’s plenty of irony and some powerful compositions in these telling vignettes, and the one where the director watches tourists and prostitutes mingle beside a life-size bronze of Hemingway is perhaps the most memorable in the whole series.
As for the more socially conscious fare, things initially take a turn towards pure kitsch in The Temptation of Cecilia, where Spanish director Julio Medem (Sex and Lucia) tackles the dilemma of a local singer (Cristela de la Caridad Herrera) with all the subtlety of a Telemundo series. A decent cameo by Daniel Bruhl can only partially redeem the only short to specifically deal with Cubans trying to flee their homeland, but the overlit photography, slow-motion sex scenes and weepy ballades don’t do the story any service.
Native Cuban Jean Carlos Tabio (Guantanamera) fairs better with Bittersweet, in which his favored actress Mirta Ibarra plays a mom working overtime as both a baker and a shrink, trying to make ends meet during one disastrous afternoon. Likewise, French director Laurence Cantet (The Class) offers up a more realistic view of local life in The Fountain, a very documentary-style portrait of the residents in a ramshackle Havana building who team up to build an altar to the Virgin Mary.
Never afraid to raise eyebrows, Gallic bad boy Gasper Noe dishes out the most edgy entry with Ritual, where a teenage girl is subjected to the freaky mojos of a local witch doctor after she’s caught in bed with a girlfriend. Featuring an opening sequence that depicts the sort of booty-bopping usually seen in a Sean Paul video, and an extended voodoo scene where the underage victim is stripped down in a swamp, this provocative exercise provides minor aesthetic thrills.
Songs and on-screen performances by talented local musicians, including Kelvis Ochoa (Habana Blues) and trumpet player Alexander Abreu, supply a welcome musical backdrop to what’s ultimately a pleasant but somewhat forgettable Havana holiday.
The title of Pablo Trapero's new film is the nickname given in
The movie takes as its starting point the real-life case of Father Carlos Mujica, a priest and Marxist activist who in 1974 was shot dead, evidently by a gunman working for an anti-communist group. In the present day, there are two fictional priests in this community. Father Julián, played by Ricardo Darín, is dedicated and severe, working tirelessly despite fading health. Father Nicolás (Jérémie Renier) is French, and agonised with guilt at his failure to stand up to murderous bandits at an earlier village project he had been running in the jungle.
Nicolás and Julián take radically different views on the drug wars that are tearing the people apart. Nicolás wants to engage with the gangsters, get involved, even mediate their turf wars. Julián believes this inevitably will make the priests combatants, and liable to be killed. Julián's superiors are telling him that if he can promote stories of miracles caused by the memory of Father Mujica, they can get political support for building a new hospital. Meanwhile, Nicolás is beginning to fall in love with a beautiful social worker, Luciana, played by Martina Gusman.
White Elephant is a muscular, heartfelt movie, and Darín brings
to the screen his presence and authority. There are moments that bring to mind
Fernando Meirelles's City of
By taking an insider perspective on the slums of
Unlike its Brazilian counterparts such as City Of
Fr Julian approaches his mission in the “villa” through social programmes - mainly the construction of a hospital on the site of an abandoned “white elephant” building which is now occupied by teeming families, its environs a network of corrugated tin shacks where rival drug dealers violently ply their trade. Fr Nicolas, meanwhile, is a troubled soul, attracted to social worker Luciana (Gusman) and scarred by the violent failure of his mission in the Amazon jungle. They are at once at odds with each other and with the more conservative “official” arm of the church, which has mired the building project in red tape.
After the action of Carancho, Trapero also starts White Elephant with a bang - a raid in the jungle that slowly leads to the shantytown. Julian has brought his old compadre Nicolas here to, he hopes, one day take over his life’s work. It’s a 15-minute intro before the camera pulls back to reveal the Hidden City and its 30,000 inhabitants with an involving tracking shot from Fr Julian’s quarters through the slum.
White Elephant works best tackling these surrounds, with a clear-eyed, seemingly authentic take on the villa and its problems, and the priests feel real as well - from Darin’s middle-class social activist to Reinier’s “gringo” traveller, a man who cannot take the long view. Their faith is sorely tested, and the film makes heavy reference to the “martyred” Father Mujica, killed in the 1970s, as if to signpost the way. Once Fr Julian makes a fatal mis-step of meeting with the drug kingpins, White Elephant is set on a dramatically inevitable course, but Trapero plays out his points to the closing frame.
White
Elephant: Cannes Review Deborah Young at
aka: Blue Express
It’s not often that you can see a film that advocates armed insurrection, but this is certainly one of them, the first feature film by Soviet filmmaker Ilya Trauberg who began as a film critic before venturing into making films. His documentary LENINGRAD TODAY (1927) caught the eye of Sergei Eisenstein who hired him as an assistant on his 1928 film OCTOBER (TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD) commemorating the tenth anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution in which the Bolsheviks seized power, a film noted for using striking juxtapositions of symbols to comment on the events. Cinema was still in its infancy during the 20’s when the new Soviet state headed by Vladimir Lenin understood the medium could be used to communicate with the masses, a position later copied by Joseph Stalin. The State Film Institute in Moscow, aka VGIK, was established in 1919 to train a new generation of filmmakers, the oldest film school anywhere in the world, where Bolshevik Newsreels by Dziga Vertov were the major form of earliest Soviet cinema, but they also created agit-prop films where they attempted to educate the populace about the goals of Communism, using young emerging filmmakers to send the message. Lev Kuleshov taught a promising group of film students in the early 20’s, including Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, who then began their own filmmaking careers in the middle 20’s, where Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) brought Russia international acclaim, heralding a new style of Soviet cinema, heavily propagandistic, preaching the party line about the virtues of a worker state, using shorter scenes, quick cuts, and a rapid-fire editing technique to produce a rhythmic style of accumulating dramatic tension, paying particular attention to close-ups in what became known as Soviet montage. To illustrate the burgeoning industry, in 1923 the Soviets released just 38 feature films, but by 1928 that figure was up to 109. As it turns out, the greatest creative achievements of the Silent era in Soviet cinema, where noted directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Vertov produced their most acclaimed works, came from a brief period of film prosperity from the mid 20’s to the end of the decade.
While CHINA EXPRESS is blatant propaganda, very much in the cutting edge style of early Soviet cinema, it begins with tugging sentiment, where the happy greeting of two Chinese brothers quickly turns to sorrow with the realization that their sister has been sold into servitude to a corrupt capitalist merchant who hideously treats her as his own property. Both mired in poverty, neither can lift a finger to help the girl, who is forced to endure the cruel and degrading treatment of her new owner. This sets the stage, and the train, in motion, becoming one of the earliest unstoppable train movies, like Buster Keaton’s THE GENERAL (1926), where nearly all the action takes place on the train, ultimately a coming of consciousness picture where people slowly rally to her defense, not just a young girl, but fighting for the plight of all exploited workers across the nation. To make things easily understood, the coach fare is divided by social class, where first class contains the white European dignitaries and the wealthy Chinese aristocrats, second class contains the professionals and merchants, while third class are the poor and slaving workers. Like POTEMKIN, there is an incendiary spark that produces instant outrage, when a pair of inebriated Englishmen decide to brutally molest the Chinese girl, threatening her with rape until her brother intervenes and kills one of the white men, which sends a shock wave into each coach. The brother along with his rescued sister return to the protection of his Chinese comrades in third class, while first class erupts in enraged fury, immediately sending in armed troops to apprehend the offender. But the Chinese passengers, a stand-in for the Russian masses, stick up for one another and rather than be shot down like dogs, decide to arm themselves with guns and ammunition from a munitions shipment on the train. This is one of the few films you’ll ever see that encourages Asian minorities to arm themselves against the corrupt power of the white ruling class, who are guided by their deplorably racist intentions.
Within the train itself, the spirit of revolution is in the
air, with both sides armed to the teeth with plenty of innocent bystanders who
just happen to be there. The first wave
of militia sent in are shot, so the imperialists and their bought-and-paid-for
Chinese associates send an entire army to attack the coach class car which
holds its position and refuses to be bullied by armed oppressors defending
imperious white men who think they can rape Chinese girls with impunity. With fighting inside and outside the train,
with more offensives to gain control of the engine, and still more battles
going on outside to control the railway switches, the train is a bloody
battleground of the political ideologies of good and evil. Featuring a steady stream of close-ups and
nearly non-stop action, the film has been citied as the main inspiration of
Josef von Sternberg’s SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932), a film that helped transform a
not-very-successful German actress into an international sex goddess, Marlene
Dietrich as the world-weary courtesan Shanghai Lily, known in the film as the
“White Flower of the Chinese coast.”
CHINA EXPRESS is hardly subtle, but it is notable for staging a worker’s
revolt on a speeding, out of control train, where the train itself becomes
synonymous with the fiery, yet unstoppable revolutionary movement surging
across the lands of Mother Russia. It’s
a bit ironic, as the Chinese are depicted as a metaphor for the Russian people
in the film, but seen some 80 years afterwards, the Russian Revolution fizzled
out with glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, unable to
meet the needs of the extended empire, where the ideology of Communism never
took root in the hearts and minds of its population, leading to severe economic
stagnation, where the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen
separate fiercely nationalistic countries that couldn’t wait to kick the
Russians out. On the other hand,
the Chinese Communist Party remains the founding and current ruling party of
The People’s Republic of
China Express | Chicago Reader | Movie Times & Reviews
Chinese workers seize control of a train in this silent 1929 drama from Soviet director Ilya Trauberg.
China Express - Time Out Chicago
Supposedly an unsung gem of Soviet silent cinema, the debut fiction feature from documentarian Trauberg takes place almost entirely aboard a train, where Chinese workers fight back against a pair of boorish English soldiers. Josef von Sternberg called the film an influence on his Shanghai Express.
Humanities at Northwestern Calendar - Events -- Kaplan Institute for ...
One of the great, if little known, films from the rich era of
Soviet silent cinema, Ilya Trauberg brings a documentarian’s eye and a visual
dynamism inspired by Sergei Eisenstein (with whom he worked on October) to his
first fiction film. China Express is a riveting tale of Chinese workers who
commandeer the train they are traveling on, which is also carrying an English
general and a number of Chinese elite. An influence on Josef von Sternberg’s
Shanghai Express, Trauberg capitalizes on the potent symbolism of trains for
revolutionary movement while creating a rousing action film. Live musical
accompaniment by David Drazin.
Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema - Page 190 - Google Book Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, by Lynne Kirby
China Express is the
story of the coming-to-consciousness of a man whose sister is sold to a
merchant, sets the tale on a train traveling from
From the Lumières' Train Entering a Station (1895) to Ilya Trauberg's China Express (1929), the train is one of the central iconographic figures in silent cinema, and Porter, perhaps more than anyone, made it so. Trauberg's train is divided into first, second, and third class compartments, with the principal conflict between the workers in third class and the imperialists and their Chinese associates in first. Porter's train has no such differentiation. Although the film's principal characters are skilled members of the working class, the conflict is not between classes or different social groups, but against an external threat, a cause around which society can rally all its members. With order finally restored, a romance between the engineer and the switchman's daughter, introduced at the beginning of the film, resumes. Society is able to return to its proper preoccupations.
Goluboi Express Hal Erickson from Rovi, also seen here: Goluboi-Express - Movies - The New York Times
A thrilling melodrama with pronounced propagandistic overtones, China
Express (aka Blue Express)
is set on a passenger train bound from Suchoow to
Read the New York Times Review » Mordaunt Hall
The Soviet film,. "The China Express," now at the
Cameo, deals with the down-trodden Chinese in a rather original and clever way.
It tells virtually of a mutiny of the coolies aboard a train running from
There is the railway station and the grinning policeman. His
risibles are tickled by the misfortunes of others. The train is in the
The fireman of the train recognizes his little sister among the unfortunate youngsters. He learns that the other members of his family have perished in a flood.
The train waits for a member of the diplomatic corps of a European country and as soon as he has taken his place in what is called the International Car, the train glides slowly out of the station.
The comfort and revelry of the first class in the International Cat are contrasted with scenes in the third class compartments. A blind, old poet refers to the life of the happy past. He pleads with his comrades to resent the tyranny of the wealthy classes. The fireman is presumed to hear the moaning of his little sister who is suffering with fever. The merchant who had bought her says that he has made a bad bargain. European overseers ignore the child's request for water and one of these drunken white men treats the girl cruelly. The fireman, who has wandered from the locomotive, asks another of the overseers to protect his sister. When he finds that his pleas fall on deaf ears, he stabs the drunken European.
This ends in the military guard coming forth with their bayoneted rifles to quell the disturbance and punish the slayer. The coolies, however, hold their own and soon they open up cases of firearms and fire upon the guards.
The train speeds on its way and a white man climbs over to the locomotive and with a pistol forces the driver to keep at his post for a while. Finally there is a tussle and the driver is thrown off the train.
It is a jumble of incidents in the end, devoted to showing the reprehensible conduct of the Europeans and the uniformed Chinese and in the last scene, the Chinese Express, after a switch has been turned to stop the train and then turned back again by a revolutionary sympathizer, continues on its way.
Except for the two Europeans, the players are Chinese. They have been competently directed. The film is another Soviet argument, in which the Russians this time take up the cudgels for the Chinese.
Full text of "Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film" pages 272 and 285
The New Babylon & China Express - BAM/PFA - Film Programs
The Movies Creighton Peet from The Outlook (pdf format)
User
reviews from imdb Author: Mozjoukine
(Mozjoukine@yahoo.com.au) from
GreenCine | Early Russian Cinema Andrew James Horton
Revolutionary period: 1918–1929 - Russia and Soviet Union - film ... Film Reference
Cinema of the Soviet Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Soviet montage theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fall of the Soviet Union (December 1991) - Cold War Museum
Ilya Trauberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Illya Trauberg: Information from Answers.com
What could have been an interesting idea, a film about a
simultaneous kidnapping and assassination attempt of the President in the United
States as seen through more than half a dozen different viewpoints, rewinding
and showing the exact same scene in the exact same place all over again through
a different character’s eyes, which instead becomes nauseatingly repetitive,
turning into a Hollywood blockbuster action flick with fairly predictable
results. Instead of challenging the
audience offering Hitchcockian clues, or using only pieces of the puzzle
instead of the entire scene all over again, the different segments aren’t
really that intertwined, and the big finale turns into an endless car chase
sequence that simply defies belief, so any established credibility factor is
quickly thrown out the window and turned into a jingoistic, feel good, American
popcorn movie. Although filmed in
Good thing there was an earlier trailer for the next Adam
Sandler movie, YOU DON’T MESS WITH ZOHAN (2008), where he’s the baddest of all
the Israeli Mossad agents, which warmed the audience up for the simply
remarkable actions of a trapped Israeli Mossad agent who is blackmailed into
aiding the terrorist’s cause or his kidnapped brother will be killed, where
this guy single-handedly blows away about a dozen or more of the President’s
best security detail. Dennis Quaid plays
Agent Barnes, an FBI security ace who previously took a bullet protecting the
life of the President and now he’s back on duty, perhaps a bit jittery, but a
man with roving eyes who contacts a secret control team by talking to his
hand.
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Rob Tregenza Cinema Parallel
TALKING TO STRANGERS (1988) by Rob Tregenza has been considered by
some as one of the most stylistically audacious and critically praised dramatic
feature debuts in North American independent cinema. It consists of only
FESTIVALS:
SYNOPSIS: TALKING TO STRANGERS , 90 mins, 35mm stereo, 1 to 1:85
Jesse a would be artist is cast adrift in the urban sprawl of a decaying East Coast city. The "strangers" he encounters are windows into that existence in all its humor, anger and violence.
Dave Kehr,
"TALKING TO STRANGERS is a true independent film...
In his first feature film Tregenza has accomplished an astonishing thing, TALKING TO STRANGERS blends the kind of formal experimentation associated with directors on the farthest fringe of the avant-guarde (Michael Snow and Jean-Luc Godard) with a genuine interest in drama and character. It is a narrative film, but it builds its narrative in a new and provocative ways.
TALKING TO STRANGERS offers the viewer an unusual degree of freedom---the freedom to decide the tone, to construct the lead character, to invent a plot that might connect the different episodes-- but with that freedom comes a moral responsibility. It's up to us to designate the heroes and the villains, the victims and the aggressors, and the decision is never a simple one.
Films as unsettling as this seldom find commercial distribution, and TALKING TO STRANGERS alas, is no exception."
Jonathan Rosenbaum, THE CHICAGO READER --- ****--- "a masterpiece" (If you are interested in knowing why... the entire review is reprinted in J. Rosenbaum's excellent new book of film criticism "MOVIES AS POLITICS" published by University of California Press c. 1997 ISBN 0 520-20614-2)
"Capsule Review" in the Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
"Rob Tregenza's excitingly new Baltimore-made independent feature, shot in wide-screen 35-millimeter and Dolby sound, consists of only nine shots, each a ten-minute take. Each shot features the same character (Ken Gruz), a young man whose identity appears to shift somewhat from one sequence to the next (in terms of his occupation and whether he is a local or a drifter); in the first and last shots he is alone, and in the seven intervening sequences--the order of which was determined at random--he encounters one or more strangers. The existential suspense underlying this remarkably open work is a function of many factors operating at once.
The sequences range from dramatic (a female potter who has slept with the hero the previous night provokes his ire by admitting that she used to be stripper and, possibly, a prostitute) and action packed (a nihilistic, punkish gang takes over a bus and rapes a passenger) to enigmatic (the hero tries to engage in conversation with fellow passengers on a taxi boat) and minimalist (the hero walks for several city blocks, and almost boards three separate buses). Each sequence was shot only once, so the possibility of accident and error hovers over every moment suspensefully, as in a jazz improvisation. The virtuoso camera movements and stereo sound lead to gradual and unpredictable expositions of physical space; the variety of acting styles creates a feeling of perpetual uncertainty about the registers of reality underlying each sequence. And the philosophical content of certain scenes--e.g., in a soup kitchen and in a confessional--raises additional questions. Alternately comic, disturbing, challenging, and demanding, this is a galvanizing, high-level game for adventurous spectators, and a truly remarkable first feature."
Lies of the
Mind [TALKING TO STRANGERS] | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 4, 1988
Talking to Strangers: A
Look at Recent American Independent Cinema ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, excerpted from a lecture given on June 15, 1989
Tregenza’s 1988
film, TALKING TO STRANGERS, was told with a would-be writer speaking into the
camera in nine 10-minute takes. The
result was one of the most critically praised feature debuts in American
independent cinema, distinguished by intriguing wide-screen compositions and
complex camera movements, perhaps in some way comparable to Hitchcock’s ROPE,
but more experimental. This is a very
provocative and experimental film as well, allegedly produced by Jean-Luc
Godard, photographed and edited by the director, usually in one take, with some
gorgeously effective harp music arranged and performed by Eareckson (Earecka)
Mary Tregenza, the director’s daughter!
Unique in a conceptual style that takes some getting used to, a near
wordless film shot in high contrast Black and White ‘Scope, using extremely
long, choreographed camera shots so elaborately constructed that each can be
seen as a mini-film in itself, each masterfully designed, accentuating sounds
over dialogue, eerily contrasting interiors and exteriors, darkness and light,
freedom and captivity, sanity and madness, violence and passivity,
schizophrenia and silence. Also unique
is the time frame. The entire film is
set at a psychiatric hospital in a remote, snowy forest, truly in a world of
its own, and by viewing cars, the film moves from the 1940’s to the present,
yet the characters remain the same, always stuck in time. I was haunted by the stunning, moving images
of the peeling paint on the cracked walls, ripped up tiles on the floor, a
filthy, deteriorating dark interior of the Asylum where the patients all seem
to move to the exterior windows where they are attracted to the light pouring
in, where there are nearly still images of one person standing at each window,
alone in their solitude staring out, bathed in an aura of outside light, the
camera then slowly encircles the room, perhaps moves to another room and back
again, where time has shifted, yet the patients and their world are stuck in
the exact same place, a singularly unique film experience.
Jonathan Rosenbaum from Cinema Scope (link lost)
If one of the ultimate dreams of an American cinephile filmmaker might be to
shoot an indie feature in ‘Scope and stereophonic sound with Godard as
producer, it’s a little-known fact that writer-director-cinematographer Rob
Tregenza actually realized this precise dream in 1997, on his third feature, a
very strange black-and-white opus shot in the wilds of Maryland with a minimum
of dialogue. Now that it’s out on DVD, available from Tregenza’s own company at
www.cinemaparallel.com, you can judge for yourself. Godard’s name doesn’t
appear in the credits—presumably because he didn’t want to get a slew of
scripts sent to him in Rolle—but two of the lead actors, Bérangère Allaux and Frédéric
Pierrot, come directly from his then-current For Ever Mozart. I don’t
know if Godard has produced any other films, but I can vouch for the fact that
he contributed financing to Marcel Hanoun’s L’authentique procès de
Carl-Emmanuel Jung (1966), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Chronik
der Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), and Danielle Jaeggi’s La fille de
Prague avec un sac trop lourd (1978)—even though you won’t find a word
about this (or about Inside/Out) in MacCabe’s recent Godard biography.
Inside/Out Mike D’Angelo from Time Out
Relentlessly experimental,
audaciously avant-garde, Inside/Out is the kind of film that will either
strike you as utterly sublime or make you want to claw your face off. Because
opinions are likely to be strongly divided, I'm endeavoring to remain neutral.
Ordinarily, critics like to kick a
review off with a brief plot summary; unfortunately, that's not possible in
this case. As Piers Handling wrote in the program for last year's
Anyone who criticizes a film as aggressively artsy as Inside/Out risks
being labeled a philistine, so let me note for the record that I'm not
necessarily averse to snail-paced cinema—for example, I enjoyed Bela Tarr's
seven-hour, arrestingly static Satantango (distributed, as is this film,
by Tregenza's own company, Cinema Parallel) so much that I voluntarily saw it
twice. I confess, however, that I do tend to prefer movies in which meaningful
events occasionally occur. If you don't share my bias, by all means, take the
plunge. But clip your fingernails before showtime, just in case.
Reviews
of Two Terrence Malick Films | Jonathan Rosenbaum After two Malick reviews, Rosenbaum
incorporates an earlier review of Inside/Out
from Cinema Parallel, (a dead link),
May 18, 2011
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In a fascinating review of THE THIN RED LINE by T. Malick, in this week's edition of the CHICAGO READER, Rosenbaum also discuss' INSIDE/OUT. www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1999/0199/01159.html. There was also a short review of INSIDE/OUT in the "Critic's Pick" section Quotes from that review follow. The entire review can be found at www.chireader.com "A person could more profitably compare The Thin Red Line, currently playing at McClurg Court Facets Multimedia Center Yet they're playing to different audiences in radically different venues. Inside/Out--made for a tiny fraction of the other picture's budget, with no stars to speak of--has had too limited and piecemeal a national release since its 1997 premiere at Cannes to qualify even as a minor contender in any present or future NSFC awards, even in the experimental category. No articles about Inside/Out will show up in Vanity Fair or Premiere, no reviews will grace mainstream magazines or TV shows, no qualifying Oscar screenings will be held anywhere. Economically and culturally speaking--which in this country generally amounts to the same thing--the two pictures are never going to be permitted to inhabit the same universe. The fact that Tregenza's distribution company, Cinema Parallel, has allowed us to see Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent, Bela Tarr's Satantango, Jacques Rivette's Up Down Fragile, and several recent films by Jean-Luc Godard locates him in a separate cosmos as far as most critics are concerned. So any context that can accommodate him and Malick has to be created by the audience." Malick's intimate acquaintance with the aesthetics of silent cinema reaches well past Murnau. The punctuating shots of nature in the midst of combat--a wounded bird, a riddled leaf, a hill of waving grass--are pure silent-movie syntax, as is the notion of a collective war hero (often found in films and fiction about World War I; William March's 1933 book Company K is one distinguished example). The poetic and philosophical internal monologues of Malick's various soldiers, often paired with a sustained and soulful close-up of the character, are the structural equivalent of intertitles in silent films of the teens and 20s. This is a precious legacy that most major filmmakers of the 90s(excepting Godard, Tarr, Tregenza, Manuel de Oliveira, and a handful of others who live outside the Oscars sweepstakes) have either forgotten or never discovered in the first place--a sensibility that frees images from the tyranny of the sound track, allowing them to register in all their primordial power--and the major achievements of The Thin Red Line would be unthinkable without it." CRITIC'S PICK OF THE WEEK. " An uncredited Jean-Luc Godard produced this 1997 third feature by the singular American independent Rob Tregenza (Talking to Strangers, The Arc), and along with Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, Godard is certainly a presiding guru over this powerful if enigmatic view of life in and around a psychiatric hospital somewhere in rural, snowbound America. Shot by Tregenza himself (one of the best cinematographers on the planet) in black-and-white 35-millimeter 'Scope--mainly in extremely long, choreographed takes that transpire with a minimum of dialogue but with an extremely inventive and original Dolby sound track--the film offers not so much a plot in the usual sense as a series of interlocking characters and events governed, like the film's title, by polarities: sound and image, interior and exterior, sanity and madness, freedom and institutional captivity, society and isolation. According to clues planted in the clothes and decor (especially the cars), the action begins around 1945 and ends in the present or near future, but to confuse matters further the characters and their behavior remain unaging constants. Tregenza's background in existential philosophy serves him well: every shot comprises an event, and most of them were shot only once, in a single take (as in Talking to Strangers), allowing change and contingency to shape the material. Art conceived as both adventure and confrontation, Inside/Out requires a certain amount of creative energy from the audience but grandly repays the effort. 