Two films not worth blogging

John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979, Sund/T, n.) I’d been meaning to see for a long time, for any light it might shed on my own personal pre-history, as the child of an English warbride. Trouble was, way too much light was shed; instead of being lit like Vera Drake for example, whatever effort was made at period restoration was drowned in studio wattage. And the music! In the hands of a Douglas Sirk, melodrama can really appeal to me. But when you just ladle on the strings to goose emotions that aren’t there, it’s oh-so-icky. A period soundtrack might have worked, but this is just orchestral drygoods, sold by the yard. So -- gesamtkunstwerk okay, but otherwise be very abstemious with musical cues that can’t be rationalized as live sound. And the formulaic, sentimental storytelling! How can a telegraphed punch take so long to land. And to tell you the truth, Richard Gere and Lisa Eichhorn did not remind me much of me mum and dad. Gere was a sergeant warming up to be “an officer and a gentleman”; Eichhorn was lovely but not convincingly British. In a parallel story, the always enchanting Vanessa Redgrave is involved with an American air force officer, played unappealingly by William Devane, who does not borrow charm from his frequent JFK impersonations. But I have to admit I only fast-forwarded though a couple of the most ludicrous moments.

Then I watched The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978, dvd, n.) because Time Regained had led me to more Raul Ruiz and this seemed to have potential for future showing at Clark. Maybe so, but someone else will have to second the nomination. This film may be too smart for me. Is it a fascinating critical analysis of a fictional painter, or a parody of fatuous intellectualization? Or both? And how do you tell? Whatever -- it’s very French (though Ruiz became Parisian as a refugee from the Allende coup in Chile.) Six paintings are all the work that is left of a student of Gerome, whose career had been ruined by scandal after one Salon exhibition from which he was forced to withdrawn. An obsessed collector tries to analyze and recreate the scandal, by literally walking through the paintings as tableaux vivants, hypothesizing the missing painting that will explain all the rest. Though I have neither read the book nor seen the film of The Da Vinci Code, Ruiz’s film may come across as a highbrow precursor, in unpacking the esoteric mysteries of painting. Who knows? It’s just the prejudice of an old philosophy student, but I get skeptical the minute I hear the name Nietzsche. Still, this Hypothesis is undeniably well-crafted.