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.”