Filling in the gaps

Lately I’ve been re-viewing a lot of films without being moved to review them, so I will just mention some of them in passing. Zhang Yimou’s staging of the Beijing Olympics led me back to To Live (1994), which some time ago was a revelation to me (Gong Li!) and set me off on a binge of Chinese movies, including all of his. Lately he has relied too much on sheer spectacle, in historical martial arts epics, but formerly alternated relatively intimate films of contemporary peasant life. To Live contains both elements, in a decades-long family saga within an historical pageant (for which I tend to be a sucker -- e.g. The Best of Youth), following China from World War II through the Cultural Revolution. This time the filmmaking seemed a bit stodgy, but the history lesson remained vital.

I was happy to relive the bejeweled music box perfections of two French classics of aristocratic adultery, but feel disinclined to look too much inside the works, to examine the delight-producing mechanisms. In my intermittent retrospective of Jean Renoir (in which La Bete Humaine filled a gap and Elena and Her Men stuck me as his worst effort, chaos without control), I had the Criterion Collection disk of Rules of the Game (1939) around for months, while I spent way too many evenings watching election coverage of one sort or another. But once Barack was safely elected, I was free to revisit the chateau where Renoir’s figures high and low go through their clockwork dance. What a perfect construction -- delightfully complicated, exquisitely sad, lightly profound! Though I will always prefer La Grande Illusion personally, I cannot quibble with the consensus view that La Regle du Jeu is one of the very best films of all time.

Meanwhile another new Criterion Collection disk finally arrived after a “very long wait” on my Netflix queue. Max Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame de ... (1953) displays similar clockwork charm, though his mechanism is a moving camera rather than Renoir’s deep focus. Through the contrivance of the eponymous jewelry, which passes back and forth like the clap in La Ronde, Ophuls tells a story of passion that breaks through the mirrored facades of fin-de-siecle France. Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio De Sica are sublime as the lofty lovers, while Charles Boyer maintains his dignity as the cuckolded general. One marvels at the construction, but catches a breath of passion as well -- it’s all artificial but moving nonetheless.

Peter Watkins must be one of the most unwatched and unwatchable of great filmmakers. Gradually more of his work is becoming available. It was decades before I got another chance to see an old favorite, Battle of Culloden (1964), but when I caught up with Punishment Park (1971) on IFC recently I couldn’t bear the old counter-cultural hysteria. Privilege (1967), however, retained its interest despite seeming amateurish and implausible. There was some incisive social analysis in the story of pop star Paul Jones being exploited to subvert dissent into semi-fascist conformity. Jean Shrimpton is blankly effective as the bird of the moment, and the broad caricatures of British business and religious leaders are sometimes spot-on, if you can see past the lameness of the overall enterprise.

The Coen brothers, on the other hand, are sometimes undermined by their own facility, which can border on slickness. While recently underwhelmed by No Country for Old Men -- at least relative to its Best Picture Oscar -- I retain appreciation of a number of their films. Having read several references to the growing cult status of The Big Lebowski (1998), I decided to give it another look. Sure enough, it’s very funny in places, and its central conceit of plopping aging stoner Jeff Bridges in the midst of a Raymond Chandler-like plot gives free rein to a number of reliable performers, such as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, and others. It’s not a great film, but it does fit neatly in the Coen career project of genre deconstruction. I think most would agree, “The Dude abides.”

Charles Burnett seems to me to have been given the benefit of critical affirmative action, with many willing to overlook the low-budget flaws of his slice-of-ghetto-life stories. While Killer of Sheep was sustained by the soundtrack -- whose clearances kept it from being released for decades -- My Brother’s Wedding (1983) proves less worthy of resurrection. There are some flavorful characters, but it is less the amateur actors than the flat-footed script that undermines the authenticity of Burnett’s picture of Black life in L.A.

Having passed the midpoint of my “Anime for Grown-Ups” film series, I am inclined to pat myself on the back for my selections from Studio Ghibli. Grave of the Fireflies is truly one of the great anti-war films of all time, Whisper of the Heart a delightful and poignant story of a young girl growing up and finding her purpose in life, and Porco Rosso an accomplished pastiche of cinematic adventure and romance seen through personal perspective of Hayao Miyazaki. I tried to pick animation that would appeal to filmlovers who don’t typically watch animation, and these films certainly fill the bill.