A Separation

This Iranian film (2011, MC-95, FC#4, NFX) certainly deserved its Academy Award as best foreign film, and its high critical ratings.  With Kiarostami, Mahkmalbaf, and Panahi in exile or jail, it’s heartening to know that there is still a tradition of bold serious cinema in Iran.  Asghar Farhadi cannily dodged the censors to complete a film of truth, daring, and complexity, as domestic differences escalate into social conflict and near-tragedy.  The wife wants to take advantage of a limited exit visa and leave Iran with her 11-year old daughter, but the husband insists on staying to take care of his father, who is declining into dementia.  Granted neither divorce nor custody, the wife moves in with her parents.  The daughter, who is perpetually caught in the middle (and affectingly portrayed by the director’s own daughter), chooses to stay with her father and to act as go-between.  The family is well-off and secular, but the man hires a poor religious woman to look after his father.  Difficulties ensue, which involve legal proceedings that leave the viewer with ever-shifting perceptions of truth and morality.  It’s an ordinary situation that gathers extraordinary dimension and suspense of judgment.  The film is very foreign to Americans, and yet familiar and intensely engaging, really a model of the moral force of cinematic art.

Leading ladies

Parker Posey, Parker Posey, Parker Posey -- there are three good reasons to watch Broken English (2007, MC-61, NFX), Zoe Cassavetes’ debut bid to join the ranks of independent writer-directors with her father and brother.  Yeah, you could just call it a downbeat Sex & the City, but then there’s Parker.  She’s a thirtysomething Sarah Lawrence grad working in guest relations at a Manhattan hotel, while begging for love with one hand and pushing it away with the other.  The foolish choices of this smart woman include drinking and abuse of prescription drugs, along with generalized social dysfunction.  She should just be a pain in the ass, but Parker makes her face a map of ever-changing emotions, and it’s impossible not to feel with her, as annoying as her character may be.  Ms. Cassavetes lines up an impressive cast, starting with her mother Gena Rowlands, to play -- in a real stretch – the protagonist’s mother.  Reminiscent of minor Sofia Coppola, this film stands on the basis of the central performance, and if you’re going to cop an ending directly from another film, then Before Sunset is a good one to steal from.

Michelle Williams is similarly the best reason to watch My Week with Marilyn (2011, MC-65, NFX).  She offers a highly plausible impersonation of Marilyn Monroe, while somehow remaining her own adorable self.  Kenneth Branagh also makes an amusingly spot-on Laurence Olivier, in this true-ish story of the making of The Princess and the Showgirl in 1956, told from the perspective of the third assistant director, played with freckled awe by Eddie Redmayne.  He becomes Marilyn's keeper and confidante of sorts, and of course falls madly in love, worshipping that goddess of ripe femininity.  Simon Curtis’ film is not a chore to watch, but it never caught fire for me, remaining more truthy than truthful.  Nonethess Michelle as Marilyn is charming.

As is Felicity Jones in Like Crazy (2011, MC-71, NFX), a Sundance audience award winner.  Directed by Drake Doremus, this film is a largely-improvised account of the joys and sorrows of young love.  Anton Yelchen as her male counterpart is appealing too, and together they bring a genuine ache and fire to proceedings that are a bit thin and unconvincing dramatically, carried by pop song montages rather than the authentic playing out of emotions and life choices.  Still I didn’t mind spending time in the company of these young people and their romantic dilemmas.  She’s in LA on a student visa from Britain, when she meets a cute furniture designer, and overstays her visa to spend the summer with him, which prevents her from returning to the U.S. and sets up the kernel of conflict, since neither lover can join the other on native ground.  Will they go their separate ways, or are they truly meant for each other?  For an hour or two, I was willing to see such questions from their youthfully self-important perspectives, reliving the familiar formative experiences of love and loss.  In the moment the emotions loom larger than the fairly flimsy construct does in retrospect, but in the right mood you won’t mind the lovebirds’ company and the feelings they evoke.

Charlize Theron is anything but charming in Young Adult (2011, MC-71, NFX).  She’s the “psychotic prom queen bitch” who returns to her hick hometown in Minnesota, where she sets out to reclaim her high school boyfriend, who is married and newly a father.  She’s gone on to mini-celebrity in the “Minni-Apple,” where she ghostwrites a series of young adult novels, but her home life is a series of drunken one-night stands and neglect of her little handbag pooch.  In town she meets another of her high school classmates, played by Patton Oswalt, whom she had totally ignored back then, but now bonds with over the taste of bourbon.  While she was prom queen, he was beaten and maimed by a gang for being gay, which he wasn’t.  Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody re-team after Juno, but drain their protagonist of any sweetness and light, leaving a comically discomforting she-devil.  Charlize gets her comeuppance, but thankfully learns no life lessons, in this tart little farce.  Don’t hate her for being beautiful, hate her for her noxious personality.

Varieties of television experience

Recently I’ve been keeping up with the just finished seasons of two satisfying TV series, the second of Downton Abbey on PBS and the third of Justified on FX.  (And now I’m avidly into new seasons of Mad Men on AMC and Game of Thrones on HBO.)

There’s no possibility that you haven’t heard of Downton Abbey (MC-84, NFX, PBS), if you have any interest at all in lavish English heritage productions.  The series is an entirely codified crowd-pleaser, but I’m among the crowd who understands and enjoys the code.  It’s no accident that the show is named for its location setting, and what a stately old pile it is!  And then the clothes!  And even the characters who wear them!  The acting is topnotch across the board.  As for many viewers, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is my favorite – you expect to hate her, but can’t help loving her.  Then there’s Maggie Smith, doing her Maggie Smith thing, but perfectly so -- and so many other characters, upstairs and down.  All a pleasant fantasy, even when aspiring to tragedy, but like a soap opera or telenovela, the proceedings are highly addictive.  The second season is too plot-driven, to the detriment of leisurely character development, but otherwise all a fan of British aristocratic period pieces could ask for. 

Justified (MC-89, NFX) is something quite different, a humorous crime thriller set in Harlan County, a modern day Western transposed to Kentucky, and perhaps the best translation to the screen of Elmore Leonard’s brilliant and inimitably witty writing.  Timothy Olyphant is Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshall who grew up in one of the three dominant criminal families in the hollers, and has now been sent home for his sins, even if his numerous homicides all turn out to be “justified” in the line of duty.  Lots of good acting, lots of action, lots of laughs, a vivid sense of place and character – what’s not to like, as long as you can handle the violence?  Catnip to the ladies, with his cowboy hat. wry smile, and laconic wit, Raylan also has a perverse attachment to the bad guys he pursues.  Hate him or love him, you can’t take your eyes off him, or keep your hands off him.  If you’ve ever enjoyed an Elmore Leonard novel, you ought to give this a try.

Canceling DirecTV satellite service has necessitated slight adjustments in my home viewing habits, so I no longer watch PBS Newshour or Stewart & Colbert while eating dinner each night, but online at odd times.  So lately we’ve been starting the evening by going through whole runs of sitcoms we neglected while they were being broadcast, but now available through Netflix streaming.  I’d finally heard enough recommendations of Parks and Recreation (MC-83, NFX) to give it a try, and now will add my own.  Amy Poehler is excellent, witty and touching, as the local government go-getter in Pawnee, Indiana, who rallies her solid supporting cast for one civic initiative after another.  I particularly like Rashida Jones, but even the off-putting characters endear themselves over time.  It’s all a pleasant blend of the sweet and the tart, the smart and the silly.

When we’d run through the first three seasons of P&R, I took a couple of suggestions from my kids, and wound up enjoying both.  Better Off Ted (2008-09, MC-84, NFX) had a short two-season run on ABC, but I definitely could have watched more of Jay Harrington and Portia de Rossi (even better here than in Arrested Development) as marketing managers in a soulless conglomerate, whose lab keeps turning out products of dubious utility or safety, a parody of modern business that has a lot more bite and sass than you expect, along with an endearing silliness. 

I watched all seven of the six-episode seasons of the British sitcom, The Peep Show (2003-to date, NFX), and am now in the cult that eagerly anticipates the promised eighth season.  I definitely get my daily jollies from Jon & Stephen on Comedy Central, but I don’t know when I’ve laughed at a pair of comics as much as Mitchell and Webb.  They play an odd couple of college chums who find themselves living together years later, Mark a maddeningly uptight and self-loathing credit company employee, Jez a blithely self-delusive free spirit and would-be musician, in a collision of pessimistic introvert and optimistic extrovert, such an antithetical pair of guys, neither of whom ever manages to do the right thing.  The particular delight of this series is the subjective camera angles and voiceover stream of consciousness, so you hear what the characters are thinking as they say or do something quite different.  If you enjoy British comedies of discomfort, such as The Office in the original Ricky Gervais version, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.  If laughter is truly the best medicine, then I prescribe The Peep Show.

And if you can’t get enough of British TV costume dramas, then Bramwell (1995-98, NFX) is also worth a look.  Jemma Redgrave lives up to the acting dynasty from which she came, with the slightest hint of Aunt Vanessa, as a young woman doctor in late Victorian England, who opens her own clinic in the East End of London, while her doctor father continues to practice among the posh.  It is universally acknowledged that the series went seriously off the rails in the fourth season, but for 29 hour-long episodes, it presented interesting characters in authentic situations, with a sometimes grisly truthfulness about medicine in the period.  If not as opulent as some BBC productions, it had an authentic and atmospheric approach to scene and setting.

In a different vein entirely, I conclude this interim survey with mention of two European TV miniseries that were also released as films in the U.S.   I didn’t remember the film version with any special enthusiasm, but with the Criterion Collection release of Ingmar Bergman’s preferred 6-hour televised version of Fanny and Alexander (1982, NFX, Criterion), I was more than ready to revisit the flamboyantly theatrical world of the Ekdahl family at the beginning of the last century, as seen through the eyes of the children named in the title.  A languorous and opulent late-life departure for Bergman, it is also a summation of his autobiographical themes: theater, magic, religion, art, sex, death, terror.  While Bergman in his prime was stark and spare, his swansong is lush and rich in color and emotion.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2011, MC-82, FC#6, NFX) is the final work of Raul Ruiz, a Chilean director who worked mostly in France and adapted this mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese novel for European television, which was then slightly abridged to four-plus hours for theatrical release in the U.S., where it was received with eulogies and critical acclaim (see Film Comment ranking).  This is not really like a BBC adaptation of a Victorian novel, but it does have some of the same pleasures of costume and décor.  It’s a multi-generational saga, set adrift in time, flowing back and forth, with bewildering stories nested within stories, beginning, in what is probably not a coincidence, just as Fanny and Alexander does, with a young boy and his toy theater.  From there it spirals in a way that is barely comprehensible but always captivating.  As long as you are content to be mystified, this is a magical tour worth taking.