Children of Men (& others)

Alfonso Cuaron is among the best of younger directors in the world, and his latest is a visually intense dystopian speculation that imagines a dismal future emerging from the events of today. The projections from contemporary issues of immigration and insurgency are frightfully convincing. The fallen world of Britain twenty years on, last bastion in a world wracked by terror and disease, is densely imagined and brilliantly sketched in the first half of the film, before the blockbuster machinations kick in. The five credited screenwriters are a dead giveaway, and this on top of the original novel by P.D. James; they each seem to contribute a standard Hollywood trope with a twist -- chase, crash, assault, fem-in-jeop, nativity! -- so that the story falls apart if you think about it for a moment. But of course you don’t have a moment to think, as the plot goes hurtling on. Cuaron certainly deserves honors for his editing, and credit for two of most impactful explosions seen on film since Saving Private Ryan -- this is not a guy who blows things up just for the fun of it. But top honors have to go to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki -- paired with his uncanny work in The New World, you must admire his ability to capture the look and feel of any period from 1607 to 2027. The actors are no slouches either -- it may be Clive Owen’s best role since Croupier, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine make the most of limited screen time, and newcomer Claire-Hope Ashitey is effective as the ’fugee “Virgin” Kee, carrying the first child in a world where all humanity has been infertile for nearly two decades. This is a film that aspires to be something more than entertainment, but entertainment imperatives undermine it in the end. (2006, Triplex, n.) *8-* (MC-84.)

No entertainment imperatives intrude on Carl Dreyer. I’ve been viewing or reviewing the work of the famously severe Danish master (if for no other reason than the Critierion Collection set of DVDs sitting on library shelves as I browsed), so you can look forward to a career summary in this space soon. So far, I’ve watched Ordet and Day of Wrath, next up are Vampyr and Gertrude, and of course The Passion of Joan of Arc is always worth another look. Will say more later.

I won’t say more than the titles of the films I’ve been watching to to fill the final slot in my “Documenting Artists: Portraits in Film” series coming up at the Clark in June. I will simply list them in my order of preference, from inspiring to routine. The first title made the cut and I will write it up in upcoming program notes; the rest were all interesting in so far as you are interested in the artist going in (and all are available from Netflix), but only the Frida Kahlo makes a moving movie in its own right:

The Life & Times of Frida Kahlo.
Homage to Chagall.
Mary Cassatt: A Brush with Independence.
Cezanne: Three Colors.
Robert Rauschenberg: Inventive Genius.
Man Ray: Prophet of the Avant-Garde.
Jasper Johns: Ideas in Paint.

Breaker Morant

I didn’t have contemporary relevance in mind when I decided to re-view this classic of military injustice, but it was hard to escape while watching. It may be that the Boer War was the first modern insurgency against the last modern empire. With the Bush-men so bent on resuming the British imperial role in the Middle East, there are lessons to be learned in this film. But apart from that, the film is as well made as I had remembered. It’s an early high point in Bruce Beresford’s up-down-&sideways directorial career, from peaks like Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy, and Black Robe, to troughs like Bride of the Wind, with whole ranges unscaled by me. Edward Woodward was excellent in the title role, indelibly so since I never saw him in anything else. The courtroom drama of the original play is successfully opened out by flashbacks to the incidents of testimony. The true story is apparently legendary among put-upon Aussies as emblematic of British imperial hubris, with themselves as pawns and scapegoats in Big Power machinations. (1979, dvd, r.) *8*

In Dutch

I’ve been engaged in the hard labor of digging some gems out of the Low Country landfill of films from Holland, to show at the Clark as part of this summer’s “NL: A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires.” I’m not going to write about most of them, since you don’t want to see them, trust me. Most recently, I watched back-to-back double features. Alex van Warmerdam’s The Dress (1996) was a watchable progression through the unfortunate events that befall a number of women who own a particular dress in succession, but I’m not sure whether the Dutch title De Jurk refers to that piece of clothing or the writer-director-star of the film. Further down the road of male boorishness was Siberia (1998), which had me pressing the fast forward button. More of same on display, of course, in Teetje Kippel (1975), which nonetheless slipped into the Paul Verhoeven slot in my film series -- more on that later. And finally, the diet was varied with a neat survey of female boorishness in Zus & Zo (2002), about three weirdish sisters who conspire to keep their gay brother from inheriting the family vacation hotel in Portugal, by marrying a woman according to the conditions of the father’s will. Somehow this last was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film, as much a mockery of the Academy as the just-released nominations of this year, or any other. (BTW, this obsession with the Academy Awards horse race has got to stop -- it’s a marketing tool that has been flogged to death, and has become utterly stultifying to film discourse.)

Stolen

This is a documentary that ought to have been better than it is, with a fascinating subject, an impressive array of interesting characters and interested commentators, and the participation of Albert Maysles, godfather of direct cinema. But despite an Audience Award at Sundance, Rebecca Dreyfus’s documentary doesn’t add up to much of anything. It recounts the unsolved mystery of the 1990 robbery of 13 paintings (including 5 Degas, 2 Rembrandt, and one of the 35 Vermeer paintings extant) from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Using archival footage and the voices of Blythe Danner and Campbell Scott, it narrates the collecting efforts of Isabella and her agent, Bernard Berenson. It allows the authors of three novels about Vermeer to wax emotional about the painter’s mystery and magic, and the rare value of the stolen painting, and various hangers-on to enthuse about Mrs. Jack and her museum. It follows the efforts of an aged art detective, in the final throes of skin cancer, to solve the last and biggest case of his career, with cooperation from Scotland Yard and not so much from the FBI and Boston law enforcement, along with the dubious testimony of various con men and admitted art thieves, who point to the presumed involvement of Whitey Bulger and the IRA in the heist. There’s a lot going on here, but it comes to no point of resolution and involves way too much visual filler in its relatively brief running time. The film is available on a Netflix-produced DVD and will soon be shown on PBS’s “Independent Lens,” but will not appeal to those who know too much or too little about the subject. (2006, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-61.)

Double Dutch

I’m still trying to scrounge up a half-dozen good films from Holland to show in conjunction with “NL,” a Berkshire-wide celebration of Dutch culture this summer. I had already ruled out For a Lost Soldier (1992) for its poor DVD transfer, even before the romantic scene where a Canadian soldier buggers a 12-year-old Dutch boy, after removing his wooden shoes and wet clothes. Set primarily at the end of WWII, this is essentially a gay “Summer of ’45,” with the Allied forces bringing sexual as well as military liberation. The story is framed by the boy, grown up to be an English-speaking choreographer, rehearsing teenaged boys and girls in a dance presumably titled like the movie, in remembrance of his initiation into the mysteries of love in the brief interval before the soldier was redeployed, never to be seen again. The film does convey a sense of place and character, but is not particularly well-made and its calm acceptance of pedophilia would be too politically incorrect to show at the Clark. The boy is evacuated from Amsterdam to a seaside fishing family, where a dozen occupying soldiers taking over a German watchpost on the water is the only sign of war, and you do get a sense of why the Netherlands is one of the “low countries,” with the land as flat as the sea.

Simon (2004) on the other hand, while provocatively permissive in its attitudes toward sex, drugs, gay marriage, and euthanasia, is a genuine find and something I would be pleased to show to an unsuspecting audience. It starts as a raucous comedy about the meet-cute-in-a-traffic-accident friendship between a gay dental student and the title character, a drug-dealing, sex-obsessed wild man, and sometime movie-extra in Thailand. They have an abrupt falling out, but meet again 14 years later, again traffic-accidentally. Simon is the successful owner of a chain of Amsterdam coffee shops, living large with his nearly-grown half-Thai daughter and son, and a retinue of old friends and girlfriends. But there is one problem -- he is dying of cancer. The rest of the film is a moving yet still humorous requiem, with hints of Longtime Companion and The Sea Inside (good company indeed!) in its tragicomic acceptance of mortality. Eddy Terstall is fast and funny in his writing and direction, effective and affecting. Independent of its telling take on the Dutch approach to life and death, Simon is a film that I would recommend to the curious, even if I’m a little reluctant to give it an outright rating of *7*.

Deliver Us From Evil

So the Catholic hierarchy is in deep denial about sex in all its aspects, closes ranks against outsiders as much as the Mafia, and maintains corporate lies like a spiritual Enron? Well, yeah. Did you ever doubt it? So Amy Berg’s documentary is hardly breaking news, after endless pedophile and sexual abuse scandals among the priesthood over the last decade or more. And except for a few deeply incisive moments, the film does not tell anything one didn’t know about perpetrators and victims. Nonetheless the subject is important and the film is well-made, even if the situations are a bit manufactured and the case closed before the film begins to roll. The reality is chilling, and needs to be aired, but the film preaches to the converted rather than revealing hidden depths in the subject. There’s no psychological mystery to be unraveled, as in Capturing the Friedmans, from the other side of a similar issue. (2006, Images, n.) *7* (MC-86.)

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America.

This film has an interesting history: made by Kevin Willmott, a professor of film at Kansas U., it debuted at Sundance in 2004 but took a while to achieve distribution, through the offices of Spike Lee, to whose Bamboozled it bears more than a passing resemblance. C.S.A. has been catergorized both as a comedy and as a documentary, so the designation of mockumentary seems made to order. It’s a dog’s breakfast of differing elements -- overall, a Ken Burns-like mix of archival visuals and talking heads, ostensibly made for British television to tell the history of America, from the surrender of Grant to Lee to the present day, interlaced with commercials for Darky Toothpaste and Niggerhair Cigarettes and the Coon Chicken Inn, which a kicker at the end reveals as real products in the pre-Civil Rights era. I don’t suppose there was ever a Slave Shopping Network, however. The history jumps off from the premise that Judah Benjamin’s envoy worked, so England and France came in on the side of the South, which proceeded to win at Gettysburg, leading to a rout of Union forces and the taking of Washington. What follows takes some huge speculative leaps, but still circles back to fact. The South pillages the North, Blacks and abolitionists flee to Canada and develop an alternate culture, while the CSA pursues empire into South America. America is neutral against the Aryan Hitler, but attacks the colored Japs. Kennedy is elected as a reformist president but is still shot in Dallas. The ambition of Willmott’s film certainly exceeds his means; some of the acting is at summer stock level, and while the commercials are acceptably cheesy, the famous film parodies do not achieve the style of the originals. In its scattershot way, however, the film does hit a number of satirical targets. (2006, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-62.)

My Flesh and Blood

An Audience Award at Sundance several years ago, or maybe it was the Oscar nomination, was enough to make me put this documentary on my Netflix queue, but I imagined something excessively heartwarming or icky, so it lingered around the 180th position as newer releases leapfrogged forward. Then one time, running my eyes down the user ratings on my queued films, the four-plus stars for this caught my eye and I moved it up. And thus I finally caught up with Jonathan Karsh’s superbly moving film about Susan Tom and her adopted brood of a dozen special needs kids. The special needs run from horrific diseases to accidents to birth defects. There’s a boy with CF and ADD, and another whose skin peels off from EB while he also battles CA. There’s a bright young girl whose face was burned away in a crib fire and a bouncy tween whose body just happens to be legless. Such damage is hard to look at, but if you force yourself to do so, you will begin to see a glimmer of light, a refracted radiance through the pool of tears in your eyes. The film follows the lives of its subjects in being sad but funny, desperate but hopeful. Susan Tom herself is a great character and not a plaster saint, which is confirmed in the essential extras on the Docurama DVD -- including deleted and additional scenes, and an especially worthwhile dialogue between director and subject. This is a film that cries out for a sequel, like the "7 Up" series. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-78.)