51 Birch Street

You could say this is nothing more than a glorified home movie, but it is a glorious home movie -- witty, subtle, profound, of both psychological and sociological interest. The first-person filmmaker Doug Block had always been close with his mother and distant with his father, so when after more than fifty years of marriage his mother died quite suddenly and his father remarried within three months, he and his sisters were shocked and mystified. Doug tries to unpack the mystery, through interviews with surviving family members, as well as going through old family pictures and films. Without the overt scandal of Capturing the Friedmans, this well-recorded life of a Long Island household (not for nothing is the film named for the address of the house) delves revealingly into family history and dynamics. Mina was Betty Friedan with her light under a bushel, and her voluminous diaries give Doug an avenue back into the past. Mike was a mechanic, a mechanical engineer in fact, and somebody who approached life from a common-sense mechanical perspective, rather baffled by his wife’s push for passion. Though Doug starts out on his mother’s side, he discovers another side of his father, in a film that has a genuine feeling of exploration and a surprising universality emergent from the specifics of one family’s life. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-77.)

Just a word of recap on “In Dutch” film series just completed at the Clark: Of the films I was willing to sit through again, Oscar-winner Character struck me as even better second time through, while Oscar-winner Antonia’s Line struck me as a little better but still not good, but little-noticed Simon moved in my estimation from pleasant surprise to hidden gem. If you’re into sex and drugs, or engaged with issues like gay marriage or euthanasia, then definitely seek out Eddy Terstall’s lively exploration of the ethos of contemporary swinging Amsterdam. You won’t find it in any film guidebooks, but it is available from Netflix. (Or soon at the Williamstown public library, where go all the dvds I show at the Clark, including Twin Sisters, which drew a big and enthusiastic audience, and the Criterion Collection disk of The Vanishing, a superb psychological thriller, not to be missed if you have the nerve for it.)

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing

I normally wouldn’t have watched any of the recently released “Joan Collins Collection,” but I try to keep up with films about architects, and this was interesting for Ray Milland’s portrayal of Stanford White. A very young Joan Collins plays a sanitized Evelyn Nesbit and Farley Granger is the demented rich boy Harry K. Thaw, to complete the fatal triangle. White’s work and the era in general are rather thinly characterized, but the Cinemascope dazzle of Richard Fleischer’s direction certainly characterizes an era when Hollywood turned to spectacle to try to win audience back from television. The rendition of real events is far from reliable and actual motivations are self-censored, so the story is a bit of a hash, sort of minor league Lola Montes with the sex bleached out. But even while putting on a demure act, Joan/Evelyn sizzles, and the well-restored scope and bustle of the colorful staging made this a nice workout for a big new tv. (1955, dvd, n.) *5+*

Once

John Carney’s film -- about an Irish busker (Glen Hansard) called simply “the guy” and a Czech immigrant (Marketa Irglova) known only as “the girl” -- is thoroughly charming and enchanting, a rough-hewn but romantic musical dramedy. The guy and girl meet cute on the street in Dublin, with a low-key but hilarious bit of business involving a vacuum cleaner, and they proceed to make music, if not love, together. That’s it for 88 minutes, but that’s plenty. Much as in Richard Linklater’s great Before Sunrise, it’s a stripped-down story of two people learning how to communicate with each other. Music is a foreign land to me -- I sometimes like to visit, but don’t really understand the language -- but I had no trouble picking up the melody of faces in this film, even while missing many of the words. I look forward to seeing it again on dvd -- to take advantage of subtitles -- but even with gaps in understanding of dialogue or lyric, this is a film to love. (2007, Images, n.) *8* (MC-88.)

Sansho the Bailiff

This Kenji Mizoguchi classic is indubitably great, but undeniably slow and lugubrious. It’s a lustrously beautiful black & white rendering of a folk tale of 11th century Japan, but seems to have two more direct impulses: the country’s recent defeat and suffering in war, and an attempt to capitalize on the international success of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The same cinematographer contributes the same sun-dappled and gloomy-shadowed look, though Mizoguchi has his own style and story to tell. Two repeated refrains sum up the tale, “Without mercy man is a beast,” and “Life is torture.” An enlightened governor is exiled for siding with the peasants against the generals, and ten years later when his wife and son and daughter go to reunite with him, they are waylaid by bandits and sold into slavery. The son has his ups and downs of fortune, but as is usual the women bear the greater brunt of suffering. Painterly compositions and evocative camera movement make the film a pleasure to watch, even while the suffering is piled on. It’s now on a typically impeccable Criterion Collection DVD, and I happened to watch it on a brand-new HDTV, so it was dazzling to see while painful to contemplate. (1954, dvd, n.) *8*

Le Petit Lieutenant

Part of the fun of going to movies is falling in love with people, and then maintaining relationships with them over the years. I first fell for Nathalie Baye when she was the scriptgirl in Francois Truffaut’s sublime lovesong to cinema, Day for Night (1973), then was ravished by her beauty in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), and revelled in the mature eroticism of An Affair of Love (1999.) So it was a trip from the get-go to see her as the mature captain of a squad of Parisian detectives, a supercop daughter of a supercop, back on the job after several years off to overcome alcoholism. Director Xavier Beauvois obviously loves her too, ending the film with a protracted close-up of her silent face, as she conveys emotion enough to win the Cesar for best actress. She has been compared to Helen Mirren in the BBC series Prime Suspect, which I will have to take a look at. Mahnola Dahrgis of the NYTimes also compared the film to The Wire, which I hadn’t while watching but it makes sense, for the honest depiction of the detailed drudgery of detective work, and the clear-eyed view of the lives of cops. This is a police procedural that resolutely refuses to go where you think it’s going, and retains the randomness and surprise of real life. The inevitable violence is not choreographed but presented as the messy struggle it truly is. The cast is effectively close-knit, but Nathalie Baye steals the show. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-71.)

Documentary round-up

I’m going to sort through a group of recent documentary features, some well-reviewed but not recommended by me, others little-noticed but worth seeking out in my opinion.

Rachel Boynton’s Our Brand Is Crisis is basically The-War-Room-goes-to-La-Paz -- James Carville and his gang go to Bolivia to try to regain the presidency for the surrogate-American candidate known as “Goni,” massaging the message through focus groups and negative campaigning in a wide-open race. Goni sneaks through to re-election with little more than 20% of the vote, but is deposed by violent demonstrations within a year, while the consultants indicate regret but no guilt over the outcome. The story is inherently instructive about our peculiar electoral system and the limits of its exportability, but the film does nothing special to frame it. (2006, dvd, MC-69) *6*

On the other hand, Ralph Arlyck’s Following Sean appeared on the PBS series “P.O.V.” with little fanfare, so little that I hadn’t bothered to TiVo it, but tuned in purely by happenstance as it was starting and felt compelled to watch all the way through. It was pitched as another American variant of the 7 Up model, revisiting the film record of a child now grown up. But it is really a first person essay film, more like McElwee or Berliner or Steve James in Stevie. As a student living in Haight-Ashbury at the height of the hippie phenomenon, Arlyck made a film about the 4-year-old son of a hardcore hippie family living upstairs, an urchin who navigated the streets freely in bare feet and bragged about smoking dope. The film achieved some mix of celebrity and scandal, and Arlyck revisits it and the characters updated by more than thirty years, but he also weaves in meditations on many themes, his own French wife and semi-radical parents, and eventually his own grown-up kids, various philosophies of labor and activism, family and community. What emerges is thoughtful and rich, a small subject opening out to wide vistas. (2006, PBS but also available on DVD, MC-64.) *7*

Jonathan Berman’s Commune is another recent film that looks at the aftermath of hippiedom, surveying the story of the Black Bear Commune in Northern California from 1968 to date. It is reminiscent of In the Same River Twice in juxtaposing vintage footage of nude frolickings with revisits to the characters as they approach Social Security age. A sobering vision indeed. But being in the same boat, I’m kind of a sucker for this boomer nostalgia. This one told me nothing new, however, so it’s MC-74 rating is much higher than I would go. Still, it’s indicative of the lively documentaries to be seen on the Sundance Channel.

HBO is another refuge for good documentaries, if you look past Taxicab Confessions and the like. It recently broadcast Coma, a new film from Liz Garbus, who has been on my list of directors to watch since I was blown away by The Farm: Angola USA (1998.) She also directed one of the features in the recent HBO series on Addiction and was involved with Berlinger and Sinofsky in the excellent series, “Ten Days that Unexpectly Changed America.” Coma follows four patients recovering (or not) from brain trauma, framed by the celebrated cases of Terry Schiavo on one hand, and on the other the man who recovered brain function through electrical stimulation after 18 years without. These are tales of unbearable suffering and hopes raised and dashed, but the filmmakers demonstrate tact and caring in becoming intimate with each family’s tragedy, and the fitful promise of medical advance.

Nonetheless it is still PBS that most consistently showcases worthy documentaries. The two series running currently that are always worth checking out are “Wide Angle” and “P.O.V.” The first, in the usual “Frontline” timeslot, offers a fascinating hour’s worth of an international perspective too rarely seen on tv. Two recent standout hours looked at the emerging legal system of China, and an extremely popular talk show on Arab satellite tv that features four women of different nationality (only the impossibly beautiful Saudi wears a headscarf) frankly discussing taboo subjects such as divorce, homosexuality, and female masturbation, as well as fundamentalism and terrorism. Really eye-opening! And on “P.O.V.”, besides Following Sean, I have recently been favorably impressed by two feature-length documentaries: Revolution‘67, about the race riots in Newark and the other American cities on fire in what was summer of rage, insurrection, and military reaction, as well as of hippie love; and Prison Town USA, which explores the community implications of America’s huge boom in prison building, and incarcerated populations, on the rural towns where they replace old mills or any other form of regular employment.

One further note: I finally watched The Agronomist (2003), which I had TiVo’d from IFC months ago. Jonathan Demme’s celebrated film about Jean Dominique, long-time radio station owner and force for liberation in Haiti, is more than competent though trickier than it needs to be. Dominique is a vibrant character, as is his wife and partner, and their comings and goings to and from exile, and their periods of free broadcasting punctuated by shoot-ups of their radio station by government thugs, chart the history of Haiti from Papa Doc to Baby Doc, from Aristide to military coup and back again, with the U.S. always pulling the strings -- occasionally with human rights in view, at least under Carter and Clinton. Anything but a sad character, Dominique comes to a sad end in a sad country, but not before spreading the good word of hope.

The History Boys

Without making any great claims for this film, I did like it much better than The Dead Poets Society. Nicholas Hytner has effectively transposed Alan Bennett’s play from stage to screen, as he did with The Madness of King George. Cast and crew tossed off the film in the break between its London and (Tony-winning) Broadway runs, so the ensemble has the material down cold. Maybe a little too cold, since the movie lacks the spontaneity of real (or even reel) life, the lines and moments flow a little too smoothly and patly. But the lines and moments are funny and genuine in their own way. We follow eight grammar (i.e. public) school boys from Sheffield who qualify to pursue Oxbridge scholarships, and get an extra semester of coaching from a team of teachers. The boys are well-characterized and differentiated, and the three teachers are strong characters as well -- the aging, portly, poetry-besotted “general studies” instructor who loves the boys a little too much (embodied by Richard Griffiths), the seen-it-all-but-still-cares history teacher (Frances de la Tour, very much like an elder Alison Janney), and the young hotshot scholar brought in to tutor the boys on how to game the system. There are no surprises in the film, and it would have been better if they did not try to insert one at the end, but it is witty and well-intentioned, wised up but not excessively so. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-74.)

The Proposition

I suspect this Australian Western would have earned a plus if seen on the big screen, but the characters would still have been invested with antithetical attributes rather than rendered authentically complex. So the outlaw personification of evil actually loves sunsets and his brothers, and the lawman tries to impose civilization through low cunning and brutal violence. It’s all a bloody business, red in tooth and claw, but rendered aesthetically by John Hillcoat, a la Sam Peckinpaugh or Sergio Leone. The singer/songwriter Nick Cave, well known apparently but not to me, wrote the script that got the project made, and supplied the distinctive music. A roster of impressive acting talent was assembled -- Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, John Hurt, Emily Watson, Danny Huston -- and the full mythic mode of Western storytelling was rolled out, with special attention to blood and dust, flies and sweat, the focus on the feral behavior of human jackals. It either overwhelms you, or it puts you off, or maybe both at once -- a reaction as self-contradictory as the characters themselves. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-73.)

Climates

I am coming at Cannes critical fave Nuri Bilge Ceylan backwards; this was the Turkish director’s follow-up to the acclaimed Distant, and clearly the afterglow from that affected the reception of this, which was the 12th best film of 2006 according to the Indiewire critics’ poll (of which more anon.) The touchstone in most reviews is Antonioni, so it’s not surprising I am not wildly enthusiastic -- mostly slow and meticulously framed scenes set in exotic landscapes, of a loveless couple who barely speak but are presumed to be communicating more to us than to each other. The couple is played by Ceylan himself and his wife, Ebru Ceylan, considerably younger and lovely in a strikingly un-Hollywood way, though they are emphatic in denying autobiographical relevance. I confess to being impatient with the pace of the film, and with the opacity of the characters. But the beauty and craftiness of the visual and sound design sometimes jolted me awake, and the unfamiliarity of the Turkish settings keeps things interesting, even when the characters aren’t, despite effective performances. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-72.)

Bobby

Emilio Estevez’s film is Grand Hotel meets The Candidate, wishing it were Nashville. It surveys California primary day at the Ambassador Hotel in LA in 1968, and it is so stuffed with familiar actors that just to list them would take this review beyond its allotted length, starting with Anthony Hopkins and Emilio’s dad, Martin Sheen, and ending with Lindsay Lohan, between stints in rehab. There’s some amusement in seeing who will turn up next, though none of the mini-stories is gripping in itself. How the film works best is as a time capsule, capturing the look and sound of the times, not least in the extended excepts from RFK’s speeches, which were indeed moving and revelatory. I was a Gene McCarthy man at the time, saw Bobby as a ruthless opportunist, but am willing to be swayed a bit by this hagiography. Bobby’s assassination did not hit me the way that MLK’s did at the time, but it was certainly a nail in the coffin of political hope, with more to be added in that dreadful summer. I was more than content to give this film two hours of my time, but not impressed enough to recommend it unless you are a child of ’68 yourself, or in need of a diffuse history lesson. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-54.)

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary

This is hardly a movie at all, just 90 minutes of a well-put-together 81-year-old woman talking directly to the camera, about her first job 60 years ago, her boss, and her coming to terms with what she knows of the business in retrospect. Simply distilled from hours of head-on footage of Traudl Junge breaking silence and offering expiatory testimony shortly before her death, without further embellishment, the film assumes dimension when viewed in conjunction with two others. The straightforwardly penitent Traudl could hardly be more of a contrast with an evasive and self-justifying Leni in the queasily fascinating documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). And her eyewitness account of the final days in Hitler’s bunker was clearly a primary source for Downfall (2004), in which Bruno Ganz brilliantly impersonates an all-too-human Fuhrer. Though more document than documentary, Blind Spot illuminates the ambiguities of its title from within. (2002, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-79.)