3 Cyranos

The character of Cyrano is so familiar, in the common coin of cultural currency, that it came as a surprise to find that I didn’t really know the play at all, aside from the basic premise. And an even greater surprise to find out how deep and resonant it is. I couldn’t have told you that Rostand’s play premiered in 1897, that it was written in Alexandrine verse, or that it was considered the last great popular historical romance. So the 1990 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and starring Gerard Depardieu came as a revelation to me, most in how close to home the theme felt -- the fond hope that beauty of language may be more attractive than beauty of person, closer to the soul. Lavishly produced and festooned with awards, this French production is meticulous in its recreation of a 17th century milieu. The music of the language comes through even when one knows little French, and the subtitles written by Anthony Burgess effectively transmit the poetic meaning. This film made Depardieu an international star (after he had made 80 of his 160 films to date), and he is both an imposing and a wistful presence, swashbuckling and sensitive, up to rousing action and to plaintive retreat as well. And it’s easy to fall for Roxanne in the person of Anne Brochet. All round, an impeccable adaptation. *8+*

Jose Ferrer won a Best Actor Oscar for the 1950 Hollywood version of Cyrano de Bergerac and his way with the poetry in translation makes this highly watchable as well, sticking close to the play itself, or at least to the French movie. The other credits are unfamiliar, but while Michael Gordon’s direction is workaday, stage-set stuff, Mala Powers was good enough as Roxanne to make one wonder why she didn’t have much of a career thereafter. All round, an honorable adaptation. *7+*

So then I went back and watched Steve Martin as an updated Cyrano in Roxanne (1987), which was probably my only direct acquaintance with the character heretofore. It’s certainly charming enough as a contemporary romantic comedy, with Fred Schepisi directing well in a Rocky Mountain town setting and Darryl Hannah as charming as Roxanne (Kowalski, in this case) as she was as a mermaid in Splash, but just as imaginary. Martin as scriptwriter jettisons most of the plot and all of the poetry, retaining a few bravura scenes and some of that wistful faith in the power of words. His fire chief C.D. Bales is as adept as the traditional Cyrano in some ways, though in others the film is somewhat slapsticky. Still, a competent and amusing effort, which suffers only by close comparison to the original. *7-*

Notes on a Scandal

Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett -- ’nuff said. They’re not the only good things about this film, but they are a sufficient recommendation. As directed by Richard Eyre from a Patrick Marber adaptation of a Zoe Heller novel, it surmounts two liabilities going in, a spoken narration and an overbearing musical score by Phillip Glass, until the conclusion resorts to histrionics instead of a quiet chill of psychological menace. But you’re in fascinating company with Dame Judi and babe Cate, the former an old battle-ax of a history teacher and the latter a novice art teacher at a London high school, who fall in with each other out of asymmetric need. Dench needs the companionship of a protege, needs to touch the life and person of a younger woman; Blanchett needs the excitement she missed when at 20 she married an older man and disappeared into motherhood, needs the touch of a younger man -- much younger, a 15 year old student of hers. The older woman wants to be a confidante, but settles for emotional blackmail when she discovers the younger woman’s affair. It’s a game of cat and mouse that turns into a fur-flying cat fight. Again, the two stars save the film, because they make their basically odious characters intriguing and even sympathetic (something an accomplished quartet could not do with the misanthopic Marber’s script for Closer.) They each get a quiet scene at the end, but not before things get very noisy indeed. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)

Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World.)

Subdued but ravishing, this Alain Corneau film makes the case for music not just as the essence of human feeling, but as a way to raise the dead, literally a resurrection of spirit. Gerard Depardieu is court composer to Louis XIV, and though resplendent in ribbons and lace amidst the Baroque splendor of Versailles, he owes his soul to his severe mentor on the viola da gamba. He recalls his teacher in extended flashback in which his character is played by Depardieu’s own son, Guillaume. Jean-Pierre Marielle is the old Jansenist who becomes even more hermetic on the sudden death of his beautiful young wife, and neglects his two young daughters except for their musical education. Anne Brochet is the elder, who falls in love with the younger Depardieu, who insinuates himself into the master’s household but lacks the feeling to reciprocate in full. Later, after success at court, the older Depardieu is mortified into renewed submission to the tutelage of his master, now stripped of all human connection except through his music. A still life painting figures in the story as a parallel to music in art, nature morte indeed, and the cinematography by Yves Angelo is painterly in the extreme. Though I put together this “Age of Claude: Films of Painting and Performance in the 17th Century” series rather casually around a tenuous hook, it turned out to be much more powerful and coherent than I expected, with this film offering a perfect summation. (1992, dvd@cai, r.) *8+*

Heading South

Make a mental note of the name Laurent Cantet -- with this successor to Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001) he establishes himself as a director who guarantees an intellectually engaging film. Keenly attuned to the realities of economic life, he brings a political agenda that is tempered by a tough-minded empathy that extends across class lines. So this is a film about neocolonialism and sexual tourism, with lots to say about race and gender, but with clear-eyed sympathy for all its characters, except for Baby Doc Duvalier’s thugs in 1970s Haiti. We arrive with Karen Young (recognizable as Adrianna’s FBI case agent from The Sopranos) at a beachside resort, where she makes a beeline for a black youth lying on the beach, and soon meets Charlotte Rampling, a French literature professor from Wellesley who is the rooster-hen who rules this migratory roost of aging birds, well-off white women nesting with pretty black boys. They vie for the attentions and favor of the beautiful young man, who has troubles of his own outside the sequestered confines of this paradisal resort on an infernal island. There is no reflexive moralism here, but rather an honest acknowledgement of mutual need, and revelation of character under emotional stress. There is no taking of sides, just a depth-charged understanding of each side. Beautiful to look at, this film is even more impressive to think about. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-73.)

A week’s wrap-up

I’ve seen a lot of films in the past week, but I’m not up to offering succinct summations and assigned ratings, so I’ll make do with a series of rambling observations.

I was amazed to discover I had never seen Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) before showing it in the Clark auditorium as the penultimate film in my “Age of Claude” series about painting and performance in the 17th century. I assumed my memory was merely vague and nonspecific, but somehow I’d missed this film despite all its accolades (5 Oscar noms & 1 win, 11 Cesars, Cannes grand prize) and despite the fact I had it in my Video Archive at Either/Or (I confirmed by checking online with the Milne Library in Williamstown, where the collection now resides.) (Since I’m rambling anyway, I will digress to remind you that the Milne Library also gets the DVDs of all the films I show at the Clark, available to anyone with a Western Mass library card.) Anyway, this Cyrano was so good, I moved two other versions to the top of my Netflix queue and will review all three together soon. This lavish French production starring Gerard Depardieu and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau will be hard to beat.

So that made two weeks in a row for my first time ever showing a film I’d never seen, and it worked out fine. I put this series together rather casually, so I’ve been surprised myself by its excellence, in detail and in sum -- as well as in audience response. If you’re in the area, I can offer a definite recommendation for the final film in the series this Friday at 4:00, another Gerard Depardieu film, this time playing a court composer to Louis XIV in All the Mornings of the World (Tout les Matins du Monde.)

Otherwise my watching has been an unaccountable mishmash, which I will organize into arbitrary double features. First off, my impromptu Rico Tubbs duo: I never watched the 80s tv show Miami Vice, so it took me a while to figure out who that familiar face was in Sparkle (1976), and it took the final credits for me to sort out his three first names, Phillip Michael Thomas. I did recognize Irene Cara as the title character, but I wonder why I didn’t recognize Lonette McKee as her older sister -- she had so much screen presence and yet I don’t remember her from anything else. Anyway this DVD release piggybacked on the theatrical release of Dreamgirls (which I missed but await on DVD), and some reviews cited it as a better film about a Supremes-like girl group in the early Sixties. Though this film certainly had moments of exuberance in the early going, it limply followed a template already old thirty years ago. I actually enjoyed it a bit, but it is definitely not something I would recommend.

In Michael Mann’s self-appropriation of Miami Vice for the big screen (2006), Tubbs is played by Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell is Crockett, and Gong Li (!) is the drug queen. All four are more than capable of holding the screen on their own, so this thriller is continuously watchable though intermittently intelligible. Rather than sun-kissed, this is a dark, tangled vision of a Carribean crossroads between heaven and hell -- fast, frantic, obsessive, visually striking but not particularly rewarding. I actually admired it a bit, but it is definitely not something I would recommend. (MC-65, me: *6*)

Now another ad hoc duo: very, very French films about amorous conflicts, notable for the ambition of the director and the astounding magnetism of the female lead. Isabelle Huppert has been as ubiquitous as Gerard Deperdieu in French film of the last three decades, and is equally capable of ringing changes on her persona. In Gabrielle (2005) she might just have recycled Madame Bovary in another tale of erotic misery, this from a story by Joseph Conrad, adapted by Patrice Chereau, but she plumbs new depths of despair as an upper class trophy wife who leaves her husband but then chickens out and returns within hours, but not before he has read the note she left behind, so devastating to his complacent self-regard (well embodied by Pascal Greggory.) Chereau’s direction is typically unblinking in its view of emotional desolation, though a little over-ingenious with switches between black & white and color, title cards, jump cuts, and other violations of cinematic convention. The two performances carry the day, however, grim as the proceedings may be. (MC-79, me: *7-*)

Large claims are made for Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours (To Our Loves) (1984), just released on DVD with full Criterion Collection treatment, but for me it was made remarkable just by the star-is-born debut of a 15-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire, as the confusedly promiscuous teenage daughter in a disintegrating family. Even if unaware of the subsequent career that would take her from Vagabond to Joan the Maid and many other notable films, you can feel the camera fall in love with her immediately, the subdued watchfulness broken too rarely by the radiant smile. That doesn’t mean you can really understand the actions of her character, or the rest of her dreadful family. The absconding father is played by Pialat himself, and the American correlative would be the films of John Cassavetes, to whom I never responded particularly and haven’t watched lately, despite his having become a touchstone for so many critics and young filmmakers. So this film is painfully intimate, ragged and supposedly real. I don’t know about that, but I do know that Sandrine is always a woman to watch.

Next up are two documentaries from 2006 that I TiVo’d from IFC and PBS respectively, but which are also available on DVD. Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated effectively demystifies the MPAA film rating system, but its efforts to be entertaining come across as cute and puerile, so I appreciate the service it provides but discern special interest pleading in its Metacritic score of 75. Contrariwise, a collective score of 79 doesn’t do full justice to Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: the Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, which interweaves a wealth of material into a powerful summation of an 1978 event that for someone of my generation and inclination was one of the horrific peaks of historical and emotional devastation on the continuum from the JFK assasination to 9/11. This perversion of hope into tragedy, as a vibrant and idealistic community committed suicide at the behest of a deranged leader, more than 900 people drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid in the isolated jungle of Guyana, is something that made my life sadder but wiser, and this film makes it present again in a judicious but lacerating manner.

While on the subject of documentaries, let me reiterate my strong recommendation that you catch up with Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel or on DVD -- it really represents the state of the art when it comes to nature cinematography, and it doesn’t dilute the wonder of evolutionary diversity with excessive anthropomorphism. This week I will be watching the ballyhooed PBS series, America at the Crossroads, and will report back to you..

The Mother

Roger Michell is not a name that leaps to mind when one talks about the best directors working today, but maybe it should. Persuasion was the best of a spate of Jane Austen adaptations in the 90s, and Notting Hill is about as good as a frothy romantic comedy can get. Here he does well by a Hanif Kureishi script, with its characteristic candor and insight into the erotic lives of contemporary Londoners. It starts almost like a British transposition of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (a great place to start!), with provincial parents paying an unwanted visit to their upwardly mobile children in the city, in an excruciating clash of culture and family. But when the father dies suddenly, the mother can’t go home again, and intrudes on the life of her children, most grievously by involving herself with her daughter’s lover. Anne Reid is pitch perfect as the difficult woman in her 60s trying to imagine a new life for herself, and Daniel Craig (who is emerging as one of the best actors working today) convinces equally as the 30ish man who feels sympathy and something more for her, despite or because of the disorder of his own existence. Now we’re in the terrain of Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (a great place to wind up!), an unblinking look at the erotic connection between an older woman and a younger man, each character all too real. The result is well-wrought and well-judged, with a dynamic visual style and a strong emotional pull. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-72.)

Carnival in Flanders (La Kermesse Heroique.)

This was the first time I’d ever programmed a film at the Clark that I hadn’t seen myself, based only on critical reputation and fit with the theme of the series. Otherwise unavailable in this country, I had to order a DVD from Britain and rely on the A-V wizardry of the Clark auditorium manager to find a way to show it. The film turned out to be well worth the effort, a true specimen of the golden age of French filmmaking (pre-New Wave, that is.) Exquisitely designed and wittily directed by Jacques Feyder, it brilliantly evokes the world and style of native Flemish masters, particularly Brueghel, while demonstrating political and cultural prescience in its amusing dissection of the war between men and women, as well as occupier and occupied in the military sense. When a Spanish army on the march stops in a remote Flanders town, the men run and hide and the women take up the conjoined causes of homeland defense and sexual liberation. Entertaining and provocative, this is an old film with a modern spirit. (1935, dvd@cai, n.) *8*

The Lives of Others

Though Pan’s Labyrinth would win my vote, this German film from first-time writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnesmarck was a worthy choice for best foreign film at the Oscars. It’s portrayal of East Germany’s transition from the gray, Stasi-haunted landscape before the fall of the Wall, to the graffitti-plastered freedom of re-unification is extremely persuasive. The focal character, played with just the right touch of melting steel by Ulrich Muhe, is reminiscent of Gene Hackman in The Conversation, the agent experienced in surveillance and interrogation gradually changed by the lives he spies into, in this case a playwright of ambiguous affiliation and the actress/muse he lives with. The film runs a little long as it tries to pack in resolution of all its themes, and the central conceit that if you are receptive to art and beauty then you must have a conscience, and a soul despite the stoniness of your personality, is rather baldly stated -- but carried off by the skill of the performances and detail of the filmmaking. (2006, Landmark Chicago, n.) *8-* (MC-89.)

The Notorious Bettie Page

Slight but well-made, Mary Harron’s film about the Fifties pin-up queen is surprisingly charming. The same can be said for Gretchen Mol in the title role, really delightful in both appearance and personality. The B&W evocation of the era is slightly reminiscent of Good Night and Good Luck, though here David Strathairn plays Estes Kefauver instead of Edward R. Murrow. Along with Lili Taylor, he typifies the top to bottom quality of this production. Rather than heavy breathing over pornography or censorship, this film comes across as good-natured and winsome as its subject, a Southern girl of religious bent who was preternaturally comfortable undressing and dressing up for the camera, even in bondage regalia, innocent and yet kinky. Bettie/Gretchen is as sunny in aspect as the colorful Florida interludes that punctuate the film in faux-Technicolor, more sweet and funny than powerful or penetrating, but still a thoughtful effort all round. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-64.)