The White Diamond

The documentary form (“creative treatment of actuality” in the classic Grierson formulation) is capacious enough to contain Werner Herzog’s recent films, but truly they are personal essays written on film. He is not looking to record the “truth,” but his own wonderings and wanderings about subjects that attract him. He’s a trippy guy, and it’s a trip to take trips with him. To the Arctic for Grizzly Man and to tropical Guyana here, following the obsessive quest for flight (and “levity”) by the designer of a small airship intended to float over the jungle canopy. The other main character is a local sage called Redbeard, who dubs the contraption, “the white diamond.” It’s not what we would call diamond shaped, but later Herzog takes us to one of the local diamond mines, to see what a diamond looks like straight out of the ground, and sure enough the comparison is apt. I really wish I had seen this film in a theater, for the immersive spectacle of it, the prolonged rapture of something like the climactic shot when thousands upon thousands of swifts fly past the immense waterfall to their nesting place in the cliff behind. The film is random, jottings in Werner’s notebook, but cumulatively revelatory. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-83.)

Read My Lips

Though I wasn’t all that taken with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, it did lead me to Jacques Audiard’s earlier film, which makes fewer concessions to contemporary thriller conventions and hews closer to its Hitchcockian model -- less splatter, more nuance. Intense character study takes the foreground, while the caper remains distant and enigmatic, serving primarily to provoke character revelation. Emmanuelle Devos is a mouse-brown secretary for a major developer, integral to its operation, but blending into the background -- her desk is where everyone’s empty coffee cup winds up. She’s deaf without her two hearing aids, but uses that to her own advantage in tuning out the world. So does the film, with brilliant sound design, as well as stylish and intimate cinematography. When Devos looks sufficiently beset and bedraggled (no mean feat for such an alluring femme), her boss lets her hire an assistant to make copies and send faxes. She wants a man under her, for reasons that seem obvious but are highly complicated, and hires an ex-con scuzzball, Vincent Cassell, for the job. They attract and repel, but have what each other needs. The plot may have twists that don’t quite parse (who really cares about the maguffin?), but the psychology keeps getting deeper and deeper toward a most satisfying resolution. (2002, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-82.)

Duma

This is a well-made and enjoyable mix of real-life nature fable and boy’s own adventure, predictable in its emotional arc but surprising in its details. There are echoes of Twain and Kipling, among others, but director Carroll Ballard has his own vision as well, from The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf to Fly Away Home. Here a South African family finds a cheetah cub that has lost its mother, and raises it to adulthood, when it will need to be reintroduced into the wild. A few plot twists send the boy on a quest to return the cheetah to its natural habitat. Along the way, he meets up with a black man who will become his guide and antagonist. They traverse a desert and the Okavango, encountering all sorts of animals and adventures. The acting is all good or better, with the cheetahs stealing the show ("Duma" is cheetah in Swahili.) It says bad things about the state of moviemaking and distribution today, that Warner Brothers chose not to give this film any sort of launch and dumped it in theaters only at the behest of critics and advocates who had seen it. The dvd comes without significant extras either. This isn’t a great film, but I can recommend it as high-quality family entertainment. (2005, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-82.)

Turtles Can Fly

Set in Kurdish territory on the Iraq-Turkey border in the weeks before the U.S. invasion in 2003, this film by an Iranian Kurd, Bahman Ghobadi, looks at war from the perspective of children, but falls somewhat awkwardly between documentary and fable. Just about the only consumables in this village and adjacent refugee camp are leftover military supplies. Thirteen-year-old “Satellite” keeps squads of children busy digging up landmines (many of them consequently missing arms or legs) and exchanges them for guns, or a television dish so the village elders can watch news of the incipient war. He lives in an abandoned armored vehicle, and also has his troop stacking spent artillery shells. He falls for a refugee girl who lives in a tent with two “brothers,” one an armless teen with a gift of prophecy and the other a blind toddler who may be the product of a rape by Saddam’s soldiers. On the one hand, this is an important view into unfamiliar conditions, but on the other it’s a clumsy and confusing narrative which might be taken as hopeless exploitation of the impossible plight of victimized children. Sometimes humorous, sometimes queasily beautiful, it’s worth seeing but not ultimately sufficient to its subject. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-85.)

Saraband

Ingmar Bergman came out of retirement to direct this made-for-tv film, to revisit the couple from Scenes from a Marriage thirty years later. It’s a bit of a bait-&-switch, however, even though Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson return as Marianne and Johan, now in their sixties and eighties respectively. The focus is on Johan’s grand-daughter, and his hateful relationship with her father, his son by a previous marriage. In the wake of her mother’s death, the beautiful 19-year-old girl is being held as an emotional hostage by her father, who has not only lost his loving -- even saintly -- wife but also his professorship and his leadership of a musical consort. The lovely girl is a cello prodigy, taught by her father, but now due to go to conservatory, and she is in danger of becoming a pawn in the lifelong conflict between her father and grandfather. Marianne comes into this volatile situation when she takes it into her head to drop in on Johan at his wilderness cottage, after years of no contract, despite Johan’s distaste for such “improvisations.” The film is composed of ten blackout duets between the various characters, with a prologue and epilogue by Marianne looking over a table full of photos and speaking directly to the camera. Bergman retains his capacity for intimate, soul-wrenching conversations, but also his grim take on human nature, the human condition, and all human relationships. The character duets are compelling, as is the music, but the visuals are perfunctory -- e.g. the picture postcard view from Johan’s front porch is exactly that, a picture postcard. The whole is well-made, in the manner of the master, but airless and hopeless, though not entirely unsympathetic. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-80.)

Scenes from a Marriage

It’s an ironic result of the advent of DVD and TiVo that television has been revealed as an art with the same or even greater status than film. Freed of its arbitrary push-technology and mind-numbing interruption by commercials, the small screen has become the locus for the best of cinema, while the big screen goes the way of bloated blockbusters and movies that aspire to the condition of amusement park rides or live action comic books, instead of art. Case in point: Ingmar Bergman’s masterful Scenes from a Marriage, which was released to international acclaim as 168-minute feature in the Seventies, and is now finally revealed by this recent Criterion Collection release in its original and transcendent form, as a Swedish tv series of six 50-minute hours. No wonder it became the sort of tv phenomenon that empties the streets of a country for an hour each week. The medium suits Bergman’s style well: interior and intimate, intense and spare. His dialogue retains the sting of documentary veracity while coming across as an artful construction, somehow lofty and pared down at the same time. And if you are going to spend five hours in very close company with two ordinary characters, you could hardly find two better actors than Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. He’s a prematurely stodgy academic gradually realizing the hollowness of his great expectations and wised-up certainties. She’s a divorce lawyer who is also a submissive wife, until her husband walks out on her, giving her the opportunity to become a genuine person. Neither is really likable, but both win our sympathy, however wincing the self-recognition. This is aestheticized talk therapy of the highest order. (1973, dvd, r.) *9-*

Consider the following in appraising my claim for the artistic supremacy of television: Poland’s Decalogue, Italy’s Best of Youth, Germany’s Heimat, Britain’s Bleak House or The Office, America’s HBO series such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood and others, not to mention the various broadcast programs that only reveal their true genius when viewed like a novel, with sustained attention -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freaks & Geeks being two that I am passionate about. Of course the general range of TV is easily as trashy as the movies, I’m merely arguing that the peaks are at least as high.

The New World

Critical opinion is generally divided on philosopher Terrence Malick’s infrequent forays into filmmaking. Metacritic shows a clutch of 100 ratings for this film, but also a number of 50s, including several from critics I normally agree with. In this case I favor the former -- I don’t see how you can have the patience for something like Tropical Malady, and not be willing to stick with Malick and his obsessions. Though criticized for snoozy nature documentary and woozy historical revisionism, this retelling of the Pocahontas story struck me as vivid, lovely, and reverberative. Given its scope, it squeaks past The Squid and the Whale as my favorite American film from last year. Q’Orianka Kilcher makes a striking and moving debut as the Indian maiden navigating between new world and old; by herself she makes the movie worth seeing, much as Keisha Castle-Hughes did in Whale Rider. Colin Farrell and Christian Bale perform well as John Smith and John Rolfe, respectively, though Malick’s focus is less on the actors than the on-location authenticity of the Jamestown and Indian settlements, and in the end on Jacobean England. Malick’s films tend to be more meditation than movie, but the magic and mystery of this New World never lost me for a minute. (2005, dvd, n.) *8+ (MC-69.)

The Intruder

Another challenge to the film viewer’s powers of persistence, Claire Denis’ film riveted my attention for the first hour, but in the second hour the hypnotic spell wore off for me and enigma fatigue set in. As lovely and striking as it was to look at, the film lacked the human or narrative connection to keep me alert. Under different conditions I might have been awake to its delights and provocations through to the end. The first half is set in the mountains on the French-Swiss border, and the latter half in Tahiti. The protagonist is a burly sensualist, whose heart starts to fail while he is swimming, biking and screwing in the mountains. Weird, inexplicable things happen, but he seems to buy himself a new heart on the black market, and then returns to Tahiti on a quest I never really figured out. At least some of the scenes represent his dreams, and the time sequence is fractured. Frankly, I was glad to put the puzzle behind me when the closing credits rolled. To really appreciate the sort of spell that Denis can weave, see her Beau Travail. (2005, dvd, n.) *NR* (MC-84.)

Darwin's Nightmare

Hubert Sauper’s documentary is jagged and not well put together, but startling in its moments of unexpected beauty and painful insight. A bucket of fish dropped into immense Lake Victoria sometime in the ’60s has become an ecological and economic disaster. The voracious Nile Perch has devoured 200 other species of fish and now cannibalizes its own young, creating a monoculture exploited by neo-colonialist powers. The big transport planes fly in empty -- unless they are bringing in weapons from merchants of death to fuel African civil wars -- and fly out to Russia and the EU filled with tons of processed fish. The local Tanzanians are left with fish-heads to process into a vile soup, and plastic containers the kids can burn and huff like glue. There is no longer the basis for a local economy, except working for the man plantation-style or selling your body to pilots or other outsiders with money. Meanwhile international officials go on tv to extoll the economic development betokened by the booming fish industry. The film is doubly hard to watch, because the harsh reality is so grim and stark, but also because its structure is haphazard and elliptical. Important but not great filmmaking. (2005, Sund/T, n.) *7-* (MC-84.) (This is a good point to observe that the Metacritic rating system is far from scientific, since they assign the numerical ratings to reviews that are then averaged, and it’s clear those numbers are influenced by the unknown tabulator’s own appreciation of the film. A New Yorker review, e.g., might read like a 100 rating to you, but only an 80 to me, since my initial enthusiasm does not match yours. But still, subjectivity compounded achieves at least some objectivity, a la The Wisdom of Crowds, and places my own rating in a context of critical consensus.)

Notre Musique

Jean-Luc Godard divides his film like the Divine Comedy: Hell is a montage of clips from movies and newsreels, of warfare in all ages and all places. Purgatory (the bulk of the film) is set in postwar Sarajevo, where a writers’ conference is supposed to aid reconstruction, but mainly serves to offer up the litany of appropriated citations that usually make up a Godard script, some actually delivered by JLG himself. Heaven is a weird construct, sort of a riverside hippie haven guarded by U.S. servicemen (as the Marine Corp Hymn predicts.) It’s been a long time since I considered Godard an essential filmmaker; from Weekend on, my admiration has been distant at best. After ignoring his whole Maoist phase and after, I’ve been struck by how visually lovely, if sometimes horrific or incoherent, his recent films have been. There is an inherent fascination to his window on Sarajevo, and there are snippets of significant comment on the dim possibilities for reconciliation both in the Balkans and the Middle East, but the insights are fragmentary and sometimes preposterous. I wonder whether the heaven sequence betokens Godard’s posthumous reconciliation with Truffaut (my main man), after their split back in ’68, since it is reminiscent of the end of Fahrenheit 451, and the camera lingers on someone reading a novel by David Goodis, the source of Shoot the Piano Player. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-77.)

The Tales of Hoffmann

This Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger follow-up to The Red Shoes did not charm me as much as other work from “The Archers,” but does have its proponents and will fit neatly into a film series at the Clark next fall. An adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta of the poet’s misadventures in love, this film melds music and dance with design and camerawork into a spectacle that will captivate some and impress all. Richard Rounseville is the title character, and dancer Moira Shearer and others reappear from the earlier film. (1951, dvd, n.) *6+*