Salacious 17th Century comes to the Clark

Let’s be honest – it’s all about the sex. You could say that about film and art in general, but specifically I’m talking about the upcoming film series at the Clark. Officially the series has the decorous title of “The Age of Claude: Films of Painting & Performance in the 17th Century” – it takes off from the subject of the Clark’s winter exhibition, “Claude Lorrain: The Painter as Draftsman,” noting that the artist was born in 1600 and his life nearly spanned the century. It turns out that era, at least as seen through the lens of the 20th century, was obsessed with sex.

The free film showings run on Fridays at 4:00 pm, starting on March 2nd. The series starts with three English language films, then after two weeks off, returns with three French films, but each of them depicts erotic conflicts in a high-collared, buttoned-up age seething with secret passions.

March 2nd: Rembrandt. (1936, 85 min.) Charles Laughton is magnificent and touching as the great but embattled Dutch painter, and his wife Elsa Lanchester (best know as the Bride of Frankenstein) plays Rembrandt’s beloved Saskia. Directed by Alexander Korda, this is one of the peaks of British cinema.

March 9th: Girl With the Pearl Earring. (2003, 99 min.) Vermeer’s famous painting is brought to life, and the Delft of 1665 is brought to light, by director Peter Webber from Tracy Chevalier’s novel. Colin Firth is the painter, and Scarlett Johansson is the servant Griet, who captures his eye and other organs.

March 16th: The Draughtsman’s Contract. (1982, 103 min.) Director Peter Greenaway is characteristically puzzling and provocative, not to say perverse, in this story of an artist commissioned to do renderings of an English estate in 1694, and the payment he demands from the lady of the manor.

April 6th: Carnival in Flanders (La Kermesse Heroique.) (1935, 115 min.) Director Jacques Feyder emulates Bruegel in visualizing a Flemish town invaded by the Spanish, in which the women try a novel form of homeland defense. This classic film is a sex farce with a premonitory political twist.

April 13th: Cyrano de Bergerac. (1990, 138 min.) Gerard Depardieu bursts to stardom as the tumescently-nosed Cyrano in this highly-acclaimed version of the Rostand play, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and lavishly orchestrated with a real feel for the period, the poetry, and the characters.

April 20th: All the Mornings of the World (Tous les Matins du Monde.) (1992, 115 min.) Gerard Depardieu returns, as court composer at Versailles, and his son plays the same character as the young and randy student of another musician, with a seducible daughter, in Alain Corneau’s melodic film.

Notorious

I am not the sort of Hitchcock idolator who reads profundity into his psychological quirks, but I do appreciate the strangeness of this film as a product of Hollywood. Behind the artifice, sometimes perfunctory and sometimes highly stylized, lurks a quality of twisted obsession that is the Hitchcock trademark. I doubt there are two stars who have ever held the screen more brightly than Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, so those tight two-shots are bound to work. Through back-projection, the Rio setting is no more than stage dressing, and by now it seems a wonder that such feeble fool-the-eye ever worked for film audiences. But those sweeping crane shots up and down the curving marble staircase still work for sure, long after the zoom has been pretty much retired as camera trick, except when combined with a tracking shot in the oft-imitated technique Hitchcock pioneered. He certainly was a master of visual disorientation, and there are many such shots in this film, but the casual filler is disconcerting to me, the tossed-off illusion undermining the magic of the rest. Besides star power and dazzling direction, this film has Claude Rains and a stereotyped but effective supporting cast, but for me it remains superior entertainment, and despite the subtexts, not a serious work of engagement. (1946, dvd, r.) *7*

Infamous

I don’t have the heart to compare this to the film that beat it in the Capote sweepstakes, but it would make an interesting exercise; throw in Richard Brooks’ stark film of In Cold Blood, and you could really examine three different ways of handling the same material. Put aside the comparison and this is a decent little film, with an astounding cast: Toby Jones is Capote to a T, Sandra Bullock is authentically Alabamian as Harper Lee, Daniel Craig is a powerful Perry Smith, and Capote’s NY retinue is impersonated delightfully by the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, Hope Davis, and Peter Bogdanovich. Though egotistical and devious, this Capote is not as big a villain as the other. See, it’s impossible not to talk comparatively about these simultaneously produced and equally effective films on the same small subject, with precedence to the one that made it to theaters first. So this Truman is funnier, less distasteful, and more intelligible to me. By all means, if you have the stomach for it, see either or both. And maybe I’ll get around to reading the book, which I eschewed as off-puttingly popular at the time it was published -- I remember riding a train back to college, and half the people in the car were reading it. I read lots of other Capote, but determined to avoid In Cold Blood. Now it seems that it can’t be avoided. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-68.)

The Last King of Scotland

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a movie go from pretty good to pure crap with such a clear line of demarcation. About two-thirds of the way through, an implausible sex scene leads to one mounting implausibility after another, and what seemed like a serious examination of a real-life situation devolves into a senseless thriller. Kevin MacDonald certainly knows how to direct propulsively, as he showed with two previous documentaries, One Day in September (about terrorism at Munich Olympics in 1972), and Touching the Void (about a mountain-climbing expedition gone horribly awry), but here he repulsively drags his film through the most pointless genre conventions, just when it was getting to the point. Which was about a doctor fresh out of med school in Scotland, who finds himself in Uganda looking for adventure, and finds more than he bargained for when he bumps into Idi Amin at a car accident, and is thereafter seduced by the dictator who has just siezed power, into becoming first the strongman’s family physician and then his closest advisor. Forest Whitaker physically and emotionally inhabits the character of Amin, and deserves the Oscar he appears to be headed for, but James McAvoy is also good as the callow but appealing young medic. Just when the doctor’s tastes for adventure and high living have backed him into a moral quandary and a weighty dilemma, and we are wondering how he will extricate himself, he does something so incredibly stupid that neither the audience nor the movie can take him seriously thereafter, and he becomes a pawn of the preposterous plot and its offensive implications (we’re supposed to be getting our chills by following the escape of the white guy, while barely noticing as the black characters fall like dominoes.) Still, before it goes off the rails, the film does convey a sense of time and place and outsized personality, and poses an interesting moral puzzle, only to blast it off the screen in the race to an utterly unsatisfying denouement. (2006, Images, n.) *5+* (MC-74.)

L'Enfant (The Child)

My admiration for the Dardenne brothers, Jeanne-Pierre and Luc, remains remote though real. To reverse the assertion I made two posts ago, it’s just as worthy to elicit our sympathy for a low-life petty-thief man-child, who sells his infant son on the black market, as for a doomed profligate queen. But while there was a queasy fascination in watching his appalling dead-end behavior, Bruno remains more a specimen more than a person, in a real but excessively arid landscape of industrial waste space in a Belgian factory town. You evaluate his underclass pathologies more than you understand his behavior. As in the Dardennes film I found most engaging, Rosetta, there is a beautiful but bereft young girl, the clueless teen mother of the baby, to draw one into the film, but still it’s hard to generate enough sympathy to make their final reconciliation (and the boy’s potential redemption) moving and finally convincing. I give the Dardennes credit for eschewing musical cues to prod nonexistent feelings, but I was definitely left outside the minimalist emotions conveyed by their deadpan camera eye. That said, the acting is quite effective. But this film, despite (or because of) its Palme d’Or at Cannes and critical acclaim, is a tough sell. Socially engaged and spiritually ambitious, call it junkyard Bresson. Or a Dosteyevskian examination of the EU’s underbelly. Either way, it’s an acquired taste. (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-87.)

The Impressionists

This is a well-produced BBC docudrama miniseries that may or may not be coming to PBS, but for which I will try to arrange a screening during the Monet exhibition at the Clark this summer. Lovely to look at and respectful of fact, with the actual locations and paintings very well repesented, this program is precisely aimed at a middlebrow viewer such as myself, who knows enough to verify the veracity of the narrative and brings enough antecedent interest to care about a less than gripping narrative, but doesn’t know enough to be thrown out of the story or driven to debunk. As a film on its own merits, it may not be more than pretty and well-informed, but as a cultural travelogue, it’s hard to beat. None of the actors was immediately familiar to me (except for the delightful Amanda Root of Persuasion as Monet’s second wife), which contributed to the film’s air of you-are-there reality. Even with my limited background, I had to ask where is Pissarro? and what about Morisot and Cassatt? -- but as presented through the reveries of Monet at Giverny in 1920, the series does sketch in the stories of Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Cezanne in a relatively true-to-life group portrait, giving an honest impression of the Impressionists. (2006,dvd, n.) *6+*

Marie Antoinette

Here’s another of those love it or hate it films; to dispense with suspense -- I loved it. It helps to have watched a recent PBS documentary on the reviled French queen, or to have read the revisionist Antonia Fraser biography, but Sofia Coppola is eminently successful in constructing her own alternate reality. It helps to have the real Versailles as your stage set, and amazing costume and set design. It also helps to have an amazing cast, from Kirsten Dunst on down. I liked Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI more than as Max Fischer in Rushmore, and that’s saying something. Right down the line the casting is off-beat but spot-on: Marianne Faithful as the Austrian empress, Steve Coogan as the ambassadorial adviser, Judy Davis as mistress of French protocol, Rip Torn as Louis XV, right through to major French star Mathieu Amalric in a walk-on role. With one possible exception, the ’80s music -- described as post-punk by those who know more than I -- worked amazingly well too. I was prepared to find the anachronistic acting and music annoying, but instead found it continuously engaging in recasting Marie Antoinette as the first teenage celebrity, which may be an exaggeration but is no lie. This is definitely a film to astonish the eye and the ear. As a radical egalitarian, I would have been surprised as any to hear in advance that two of the best films of 2006 would focus on unsympathetic Queens. However, since the essential moral purpose of cinematic art is to broaden our sympathies, it is just as worthy to elicit our sympathy for a misbegotten Royal as one of the criminal underclass. Sure, this isn’t the real story of the French Revolution, but it is a real story of a young girl stripped of her bearings and thrust into a situation out of her control, in which she must nonetheless discover herself. And that may be truer to history than one would imagine. (2006, dvd, n.) *8-* (MC-65.)

The Ground Truth

It wasn’t so much that this documentary was one-sided, since it’s my side and I’m inclined to see it as the side on which truth lies, but that it wasn’t honest about its one-sidedness. If it had presented itself as the testifying voices of Iraqi Veterans Against the War, it would have been more truthful. But instead it slices and dices testimony to make an uncontested case, following a composite of the soldier’s experience from enlistment enticements to the evasion of VA responsibility for aftercare. Only at the end do you realize that the common bond of all these soldiers is antiwar activism, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that should have been announced from the beginning instead of merely dawning in conclusion. It makes the whole film the equivalent of a campaign commercial, and even if I support the cause, I have to take it with a grain of salt. For me the definitive film about the soldier’s eye view of the war in Iraq remains Operation: Dreamland. (2006, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-74.)

None But the Lonely Heart

Another Cary Grant film resurrected by Turner Classic Movies in their monthlong festival of Oscar winners, this was especially interesting for its rarity and the fact that Archie/Cary was said to have identified with this part more than any other in his career. Indeed he initiated the project by convincing his friend Clifford Odets to adapt the script from a Richard Llewellyn novel, and direct for the first time. Odets lays on his trademark gutter poetry a bit thick, as the actors do the Cockney accents, and the atmosphere is murky (whether it’s the London fog, the unrestored age of the film, or inadequate digital transmission by satellite or DVR), plus the story is overloaded with some suggestion that our jaunty but beset interwar hero will become the unknown soldier of WWII, but nonetheless I found this gripping to watch throughout. Unlike The Talk of the Town, for example, here Cary Grant negotiates the tragicomic to perfection. His Ernie Mott is both funny and moving, an inveterate drifter who settles with his mother in the East End when he finds out she is dying. Ethel Barrymore is superb as the mother, and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. June Duprez is the odd but affecting, proto-noir femme fatale, and Jane Wyatt the bright-eyed but too-good-to-be-true neighborhood girl. Even Barry Fitzgerald is believable as the the older-but-wiser friend. It’s all very theatrical, but with an undercurrent of reality and surprise. (1944, TCM/T, n.) *7-*

Pan's Labyrinth

This is a mighty grim “Alice in Wonderland” tale, call it “Ofelia in Maliceland.” I feel a bit bullied in rating this film, since it comes with a Metacritic average of 98, fourth highest ever on the site. I went in looking for a reason to debunk the hype, and yet I couldn’t find a single one. I’m no fan of CGI-dependent filmmaking, but here it was so seamlessly interlaced with the “real” world of the film, together they made a mythos. As for Guillermo Del Toro, I was never tempted to see Hellboy or his other comic-book-based Hollywood films, and was not taken with his previous film about a child in Fascist Spain, The Devil’s Backbone, but with this he moves into must-see director company with his two amigos from Mexico, Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel). Here is the story of an 11-year old girl (Ivana Baquero in a wholly believable performance, on either side of the looking glass) who clings to her books of fairy tales, while thrust into a real world of legendary badness, when her widowed young mother weds an evil stepfather. No, I mean really, really evil. Sergi Lopez is Fascism made flesh, creepy but all too real. (His performance is enhanced by contrast of his roles in With a Friend Like Harry and An Affair of Love.) It’s 1944 and while the Allies may be liberating France, Franco is cementing himself in power in Spain, where the Fascists are relentlessly rooting out the last bit of Resistance in the hills. Maribel Verdu (well-remembered for Y Tu Mama Tambien) is housemaid to the commandant, but sister to the rebel leader, and she undertakes to protect the defenseless girl. But unbeknownst to all, Ofelia is a princess of the underworld in exile, who undertakes three missions assigned her by a huge fawn, in order to return to her idyllic home beneath the earth. Set design and music, makeup and computer animation, all conspire to weave a spell on the borderline between fairy tale and grim reality, interpenetrating states of being rendered with colliding force. Will definitely be worth another look, may well reach classic status. (2006, Images, n.) *9* (MC-98.)

Illusions on film

Lately watching a variety of movies not calling for either strong recommendation or warning against, I take the lull to ruminate on the theme of illusion in film. As you might expect, The Illusionist (2006, dvd, n.) sets the theme. This film definitely divided critical opinion, getting an average grade of 68 from Metacritic, based on a number of 100s (from respectable critics!) running down to several of 50 or less -- and I have to say I tend toward the latter end of the scale. For me it simply lacked some element of plausibility or engagement, the illusion did not take. It was nice to look at, with Prague as usual standing in for Vienna 1900; Edward Norton and Paul Giammati are consistently interesting actors; there was a fairly fascinating interweave of fairy tale and the mechanics of magic. And yet it never came to life for me. Perhaps in the immersive environment of a theater I would have been swept up in the spectacle, but slumped in my easy chair I found it inert (and felt glad to have saved my admission money.) So despite the illusive endorsement of Jonathan Rosenbaum and others, I am not about to anoint Neil Burger as a promising young writer-director.

Tickets (2005, dvd, n.) is a portmanteau film by a trio of Neorealist masters, Italian director Ermanno Olmi (beloved by me for Il Posto and Tree of Wooden Clogs, among others), Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, and the great British leftist Ken Loach, confined to a Trenitalia train headed from Austria to Rome. Here everything is invested in the illusion of reality, you ride the train with these various groupings of people, virtually real time in a real space, a public location of common experience. Olmi follows an old research scientist returning from a consultation with a pharmaceutical company, daydreaming about the young female assistant who escorted him to the train. Kiarostami follows a belligerent older woman and the younger man escorting her; their enigmatic relationship turns out to be that he is doing public service to attend the general’s widow to a military ceremony. Loach returns the leads of his Sweet Sixteen as three young soccer fans from Scotland heading to a match in Rome, this episode rather loud and funny compared to the others but equally in need of subtitles. Weaving through the stories is a multigenerational family of women and children, who turn out to be refugees, and in the Olmi episode there is an unsettling presence of English-speaking soldiers with dogs, apparently sniffing out terrorist plots while the old guy fantasizes about his young honey. But the political points are definitely muted in what seem like real life encounters of an unmediated sort, or so the illusion is created. This was definitely more my sort of filmmaking, but I couldn’t really recommend it over the films of each of these estimable artists on their own.

Stardom is of course one of the foundational illusions of film, but among the realest of the real stars you have to number Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. After reading about a recent biography recounting how Archie Leach created the illusory character of Cary Grant, I was moved to TiVo a couple of Turner Classic Movie offerings, both of which had surprised me on first viewing but just seemed pleasantly familiar on second, well worth seeing but not essential to re-see. They may both be taken as warm-ups for the sublimely delightful Philadelphia Story, by director George Cukor as well as the pair of stars, though each is a little kinky in its own way. Sylvia Scarlett (1935) features a startlingly cross-dressing Kate impersonating a boy travelling with deadbeat dad Edmund Gwenn, and falling in with con man Cary, to become a travelling seaside troupe of Pierrots and to run into an enclave of artists running their own cons. This is a film that was definitely halfway out of the “celluloid closet” way before its time. It does not sustain its effervescence all the way through, but is strange enough to be continuously fascinating. Holiday (1938) has a late-Depression subversiveness in its satire on the rich (despite the drawing room gloss of the Philip Barry play), and its preference for free play over moneygrubbing. Cary is an earnest young Harvard man, who doesn’t want to get ahead so much as to use a windfall to go on holiday to find out who he really is. Unfortunately he’s fallen for the drab though bedaubed daughter of a Fifth Avenue banking magnate, but have no fear, Kate is the stick’s unconventional sister, and there is never a moment’s doubt who belongs with whom. Edward Everett Horton is Cary’s funloving professor friend, and it’s a kick for a Rocky & Bullwinkle fan to put a face to the distinctive voice of “Fractured Fairy Tales.”

Ten

Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami maintains a mode of maximal minimalism, and makes it work. It doesn’t sound like a recipe for success, but m-m-m -- that’s a tasty Persian dish. Just take two digital cameras mounted on the dashboard of a car, one fixed on the driver and the other on the passenger seat. Add a beautiful thirtysomething woman in a succession of fashionable headscarves as driver, and mix in a succession of passengers -- her son, sister, friend, a holy woman and a prostitute, non-actors all -- then set them in dialogue while the streets of Tehran swirl through the window in backdrop. Mix 23 hours of footage down to 90 minutes, and count down 10 episodes with interspliced film leader. Voila! The chef is most creative in standing aside, and letting his selected ingredients slowly simmer in their own juices -- most personal in removing himself from the scene. The film tastes like a documentary (and is a very timely look inside an undemonized Iran), but Kiarostami seasons it with his favorite flavors so it has the signature of his hand. And of his mind -- as uncontrolled as it is, few films are more thought out. As you will discover if you watch the feature length extra on the dvd, “10 on Ten,” in which the camera is fixed on Kiarostami himself as he drives through the landscape of A Taste of Cherry, and expounds the thinking behind the film in ten “lessons.” This may not be the best entree to Kiarostami, but if he is to your taste, you will love this offering. (2003, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-86.)

The Devil & Daniel Johnston

Coincidentally I watched this the same day that the new issue of Focus reported it was Images Cinema’s lowest grossing film of last year, but confirmed their bold judgment in showing it. Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary is exceptionally well-made and should be of interest even to those like myself, who have not even heard of the alt-indie icon who is its subject -- a reedy-voiced, off-key singer-songwriter and outsider artist, who happens to be crazy as a loon but has still managed to achieve a measure of fame and recognition, while shuttling between mental hospitals and the care of his parents and siblings. Reminiscent of Crumb in its depiction of artistic mania, and of Capturing the Friedmans in its canny use of obsessively recorded family life, this film is continuously unsettling and engrossing, a case study that opens out to larger questions of the creative mentality even if one doesn’t buy into the exaggerated claims for Daniel Johnston’s genius. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-77.)

Volver

Unless you are committed to the subtle and understated, Pedro Almodovar is hard to resist. His sheer exuberance as a filmmaker is infectious, as is the love he shows for his characters, as well as the actresses who play them. He plays with dolls and he plays with us, but it’s all in good spirit. If men are MIA or DOA, diablos for sure, well then, they get plenty of adoration in other movies. It’s just us girls here. In abundant variety, but inveterate beauty. The story is snappy, the visuals are lush, the music is grabby -- what’s not to like? I am not as wild for Penelope Cruz as many are, either her looks or her acting, but she does anchor the ensemble nicely in this film, a Donna Quixote tilting at the huge modern windmills of La Mancha. Lola Duenas is adorable as her sister, Carmen Maura enchanting as her mother, her daughter and friends all appealing. If a few men have to die to spread happiness among the ladies, that’s fair enough -- let the love of women have its day, let sisterhood and motherhood reign. With men out of the way, the women can forgive each other and live happily every after. The enigmatic title of “Volver” might have been translated as “To Return” but I believe our Pedro wanted it to stand as a homologue of “Vulva.” (2006, Images, n.) *8* (MC-83.)