Nine

Everyone told me not to go see this but the stars, so to speak, aligned and I went. After all, Italian cinema is my thing--so it seemed right that I should witness what a mostly American remake of one of the greatest films of all time might offer. While I sat watching the film in the splendiferous Ziegfeld cinema on 54th Street in Manhattan, (this did help matters slightly), at any given moment I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry or leave. This film was so bad it almost became good by the sheer force of how perfectly bad it was. But ultimately it was just an excercise in butchery. In a nutshell, the film is a remake of a broadway musical (luckily I missed this) remake of Fellini's "8 1/2" about a movie director's creative crisis while trying to make his ninth film. Now the hubris and ambition of such a cockamamie idea is impressive, but how is it possible to make a movie about Italians, and about the heyday of Italian filmmaking, and do it without a modicum of irony and with a smothering of earnestness? What were they thinking? The levels of irony in Italian culture and the Italian national character are so deep, chronic and labyrinthine that perhaps we'd do better just to leave that aspect out? Let's not go there? And casting Daniel Day Lewis in the role of Marcello Mastroianni is tantamount to casting casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Casanova, Jim Carey as Einstein. Daniel Day Lewis may be a Great Actor but self-doubt is just not in his repertoire and nor is the boyish charm of a rogue women adore to indulge. And just about everything else was wrong: the script, the set, the direction, the editing, the costumes, the musical numbers (even Fergie was a travesty! And I love her!). Nevertheless, it was diverting to watch so much extraordinary female talent and beauty make what it could out of such dreadful material. And each diva, though painful to watch, acquitted herself well, with Marion Cotillard (playing Giulietta Masina) taking the lead since her role was in many ways the easiest (wronged but stoic wife--who doesn't sympathize with that?). Oh and Judy Dench kept trying to save the day until she was utterly thwarted by her number about the Folies Bergere (and we know just how much the Italians love the French so if anyone had any questions as to the appropriateness of this song choice stop asking them now.) Other more pertinent questions I kept asking myself: Whose face was tighter Sophia Loren's or Nicole Kidman's? Did Penelope Cruz actually sing? (I think not.) How many unmemorable songs can fit into one musical? Could it be that Kate Hudson actually outshone all that Diva power? Wonders never cease. Need I mention that the film was blatently sexist and racist? Oh, I forgot, we're in a post-caring-about-those-things society.

The White Ribbon

This film by one of international cinema's most interesting filmmakers Michael Haneke, (Hidden, Code Unknown), is above all else absolutely stunning to look at. It takes place in a rural German village just before World War I and fulfills all my (facile but workable) beliefs about the creepy, evil nature of small town life, as well as confirms my philosophy that nothing ever changes, you reap what you sew, and truth is a matter of perspective. Unfortunately, his film (intentionally?) also fed into to my pre-conceived ideas about Germany and Germans, (even though I know this story could have taken place in any small village anywhere in the world), which I wish had been challenged not upheld. Luckily, Haneke's filmmaking is so delicate that the potentially worn-out ideas which permeate his film do not weary the experience but essentially become the movie. Filmed in an utterly gorgeous pellucid monochrome (got that from the BFI's film notes, who in turn got it from Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian), the film contains a shot that lasts for maybe three minutes that is an artwork unto itself: a peasant woman dies when she falls through the rotted floor of one of the Baron's farm buildings during the harvest. Her body is brought back to her humble dwelling and laid on her wooden bed which occupies most of a small room. The shot, which occupied perhaps 3 or 4 minutes of the film is made with a steady camera positioned just outside the door to the bedroom. All we can see is the wall on the far side of the room which is a mural of faded and chipped paint, and the lower quarter of the bed with the dead woman's feet which are being washed by another peasant woman. The husband abruptly comes into the frame, obviously seeing his dead wife for the first time, brusquely tells the foot-washing woman to get out, then stares for some time off-screen in the direction of his wife's face. If for nothing else, the film should be seen for this bit of footage alone which, in turn, should be put on a loop, framed, and hung in a museum. It is a trandscendent moment of superior filmmaking where the form reveals itself as capable of the greatest art.
There is a lot to say about this film but I suppose the issue I had with it is really my own--surpise, surprise. Inevitably a film made about creepy, evil German children and their even more creepy, evil elders set pre World War I will link ahead to the Nazis, Nazi youth, the Holocaust. I was not happy about this link--whether Haneke intended it or not--because it is entirely too facile an idea. If he's trying to present some sort of archeology of Nazism then his film, for me fails, on the conceptual level. Evil, perversion, the sins of the fathers (because here it is the men who are predominantly evil, the women complicit only by their passivity which, despite my positive female prejudices, hardly rings true) manifesting themselves even more hideously in the sons and daughters are things not unique to Germany. In the film, Haneke also sets up an opposition between the oppressive German and the more romantic, fun-loving Italian, a spurious and again, facile juxtaposition, (again upholding instead of challenging our preconceived notions of national identity) especially if you remember that Italy's relationship to fascism is long and enduring. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the film felt very masochistic to me, and not in a good truthful way but more as a defense against truth--which is indeed Haneke's point, since the film is told in retrospect from the point of view of the school teacher. The how and why of the Holocaust will eternally evade us, but this film like so much art made about the subject, continues to evade the evasion, even perhaps in its attempt not to do so. Nevertheless, this is certainly one of the best films of the year.

Glorious 39

Romola, Romola, Romola! (Garai) You must get yourself a good film, something to launch you into that international stardom you deserve! This vehicle just isn't going to get you there. You are the best thing about this dreadful doesn't-know-what-it-wants-to-be, entirely-derivative-in-a-bad-way (Hitchcock, Polanski, Merchant & Ivory--what a cocktail!) piece of selloutuloid. Besides you, your clothes are the next most watchable thing about the movie but certainly not anywhere near on a par with, say, those in Broken Embraces or Bright Star. Bill Nighy and David Tennant exhibit the pitiful acting they are capable of but I blame the writer/director Stephen Poliakoff who should stick to tv. (I am not dissing tv. I actually think the best writing is happening for tv in this moment in time. His stuff for tv just works better.) A cameo by Julie Christie threw me for a bit as it took me a while to recognize her (still beautiful but this ageing thing is just too weird and awful) and her perfomance was as good as it possibly could be.
I saw this at the BFI (British Film Institute) with a question and answer session afterwards which couldn't save the evening but made it a little less of a total loss. Romola was articulate and adorable and falsely humble in that wonderfully British way. Poliakoff was terribly inarticulate going on and on about how the UK was a hair's breadth away from being a Nazi state in 1939 due to a strong push by the aristocracy towards appeasement (an excellent point/idea/subject here tragically thrown away to bad art), and Bill Nighy was the sophisticated ham we expect him to be.

Giulia Doesn't Date at Night

This movie, made by Giuseppe Piccioni, an affable guy (he made some remarks before and after the film as part of the film festival perks), had many elements that were almost superb--depiction of awkward early teen love, spoof of what it takes to become a famous writer (the protagonist is a fiction writer whose books are constantly praised yet no one seems to be able to finish one), characters from the writer's stories that vie for primacy by entering "reality," gorgeous underwater shots of swimmers in a swimming pool, multiple direct and indirect references to some of my favorite films and filmmakers--Umbrellas of Cherbourg, A Special Day, Bunuel, and a significant nod to Mimmo Calopresti's excellent film The Second Time. Though it was easy to watch, and I appreciated all these details, the film, alas, did not add up to very much. Characters were never truly developed and too many themes and plot lines were left dangling without it feeling intentional. And about half way into the film, what promised to be a quirky (hate that word but it's apt) story with a honed European film sensibility, became a predictable melodrama.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I very much wanted to love this film and there was so much to love. The foxy foxes, George Clooney's voice, the far out animation, and all of the very thoughtful details, especially the train that every so often shoots through the scenery. But I didn't love this film, I couldn't love this film, because yet again, practically the one female who has any role at all, Mrs. Fox, is not only a passive, risk-adverse, naysayer, but the reason Mr. Fox has spent a lifetime living contrary to his wild animal nature. (Is she not a wiley fox, too?) Roald Dahl was certainly a misogynist but even he didn't blame Mrs. Fox for the animals' predicament. There is another female fox, a friend of the Fox's son Ash, whose only role is to humiliate the boy (who is teased because he wears a cape???), by shifting her affections to his cousin the super metrostud Kristofferson. When Mr. Fox is giving his evolutionary biology/men's movement speech towards the end of the film, asking each creature to tap into his wild inner nature, he identifies only the male members of each species--mole, badger, rabbit, squirrel, weasel etc., the females presumably irrelevant except as offspring reproducers and burrow cleaners. One might defend Anderson and say that he was remaining faithful to the original story, but he didn't remain exclusively faithful to the original story so he could have done any number of things to include a viable, active, female in his story. Why didn't he make the cousin a girl? How interesting would that have been? It astounds me that Wes Anderson didn't make even the slightest attempt to appeal to girls in his film. No girl seeing this film can directly identify with any character in it, and any boy seeing this film gets fed once again the message that girls are not protagonists and if they are their function is to thwart the male. It makes me sick and sad to see someone as talented as Wes Anderson fall into this age-old trap out of laziness or expediency. What's even more frightening is that no one seems to be paying attention, much less thinking seriously about how we represent the female in our stories any more at all.

Mother

Easily the best film I've seen at the London Film Festival 2009, and certainly one of the best films I've seen this year, if not the best. Bong Joon-Ho's filmmaking is some kind of strangely wonderful mix of Almodovar and Hitchcock, with a bit of Cassavetes, Rossellini, Goddard and Melville thrown in, and Satyajit Ray is in there too. Bong Joon-Ho knows his film history and it shows gloriously throughout his movie. The opening credits alone are genius, and later ingeniously figure back into the narrative. The story is simple: a mother tries to prove her mentally-damaged son innocent of the muder he has been accused of. She is fiftyish, attractive but not beautiful, smart but not educated, worn out by life and worries. She is in just about every frame of the film and thoroughly commands our interest in each one. She is a true diva (played by the very popular veteran Korean actress Kim Hye-Ja). The theme of a mother's iron-strong, complicated, perverse bond to her child is an old one, but such is the filmmaker and the actress's talent that the trope becomes new and compelling all over again. But Bong Joon-Ho is interested in more than Greek tragedy and soon echoes of Medea, the Bacchae, Phaedre reverberate through The Wrong Man to Dirty Harry as the mother becomes a ruthless, lawless, justice-seeker. And only then do the real twists and turns begin. Humor, of course, is ever present, lurking, absent, or causing belly laughs. The rich storytelling is in exquisite dialectic with equally lavish and intense images, and with a sublime sound track. For me the height of filmmaking is when image, word, and sound are each of similar mass and brightness, a constant yet constantly shifting constellation. Antonioni and Almodovar are the masters. Bong Joon-Ho's ambition to join their ranks is a joy.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl

In some ways this film should be required viewing for any young filmmaker or short story writer. Made by the now very old Portuguese director, Manoel de Oliveira, it is a primer in basic narrative taken from a worn but still sturdy carpet bag full of tools: image, gesture, word. The film begins on a train with one stranger (handsome young man) telling another stranger (attractive older woman) the "terrible" story of what has happened to him. This scene alone could take a dissertation to dissect, but what it perfectly establishes is a backdrop of irony against which the rest of the film will play out. The story, which of course turns out to be a rather banal love story involving the blonde of the title, then proceeds in cuts back and forth from the train to flashbacks. We are compelled to pay attention to details, juxtapositions, and influences imitated and cited. This last element is perhaps the most significant, and certainly for this filmmaker. His movie is based on a story by a well known Portuguese writer, Eca de Queiroz, to whom the film is also dedicated and within the film there is further homage paid in a formal description of his accomplishments and a shot of a marble bust made in his image. And at the center of the film, a poem by the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is read in full at a salon. Oliveira's film is also an homage to old world cinema, and to that great, decandent European city, Lisbon. The movie unfolds with a loving slowness and joyful simplicity that we are no longer used to, that we no longer really even know how to respond to.