The protracted conclusion of a book project has left me behind in my movie reviewing, so I will try to catch up with a generalized commentary on the competing virtues of documentary and feature filmmaking.
Two recent films make for a pointed comparison. I watched both with the same companion. After Milk (2008, MC-84), I turned to her and said, “It was okay, but the documentary was better,” referring to the 1984 Oscar-winner The Times of Harvey Milk. After Cadillac Records (2008, MC-65), she said to me, “It was okay, but a documentary would have been better.” Each was based on a true story from the recent past, and one’s view of each was determined by how one weighed the merits of performance vs. authenticity. If you were swept up in Sean Penn’s deservedly celebrated portrayal of Harvey Milk, or smitten by James Franco as his lover, or intrigued by Josh Brolin as his murderer, then you make allowances for the movie-fying of his story. Similarly, if you are mesmerised by Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, or Beyonce as Etta James, or Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the mensch in spite of himself who started the eponymous record company, then you go along with the soapy tv machinations of plot, as it perfunctorily checks off its points. It’s all about how much you lose yourself (and your critical, reality-checking faculties) in the portrayal of the characters.
The director (and budget) makes a difference as well. Gus Van Sant is a gay man who alternates mainstream movies with edgy independent films, and here delivers the commercial goods, albeit with a story that definitely engages him. Darnell Martin is a black woman who has mainly directed tv episodes but every decade or so gets to make a movie she has written. So I am prone to pull for -- or make allowances for -- her more than him. Both films are worth seeing, but I enjoyed Cadillac Records a bit more than Milk, though each would benefit from more documentary veracity and less conventional drama.
A film that dispenses with drama but delivers a documentary “you-are-there” quality is The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966), probably the best of the historical programs for Italian (and French) television to which Roberto Rossellini devoted the last decade-plus of his career, after declaring that cinema was dead. It certainly was the only one I had seen and retained a favorable impression of, and it’s been given singular treatment by the Criterion Collection, who at the same time released an Eclipse boxed set of other Rossellinis, about which I will write more later. All these films have a stagy, pageant-like quality, with characters spouting lines of exposition that might have been copied from a textbook, but in this particular case that style matches the subject exactly. Pageantry was just what the Sun King was after as he consolidated power in absolute monarchy, forcing the aristocracy to live in the opulence of Versailles and bankrupting themselves to keep up with the fashion of high living. So when we endure a long, long shot of Louis consuming a sixteen course meal by himself at a dais, we are in exactly the position of the aristocrats who are obliged to soak in his majesty. (Sofia Coppola had to have seen this before she had Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVIII dining in Marie Antoinette.) And in this case, the nonprofessional actor who portrays the King is perfect in his inadequacy to the role, with all the overwrought glamor serving only as a cover for his fear. Unable to memorize his lines, he was forced to read them off a blackboard, but that averted gaze perfectly conveys both the king’s inadequacies and the indifference of royalty to its inferiors. The lack of performance contributes to the authenticity of the film, an article of faith with directors like Dreyer and Bresson, but rarely proved as well as here.
For the sake of contrast, I will mention a film that is totally about performance and absolutely not about authenticity, and therefore the only one of these I hesitate to recommend. Nathalie (2003, MC-69) was written and directed by Anne Fontaine, but is all about French star power. Fanny Ardant plays a tony Parisian gynecologist who more than suspects her husband, Gerard Depardieu, of cheating on her, and enlists a bargirl-prostitute, Emmannuel Beart, to seduce him and report back on exactly what he does. But who is seducing whom? The answer is oh so French. But it hardly matters. It’s enough to spend the time in the company of Fanny Ardant, who not only has her own enigmatic beauty but also gives me a last tenuous connection to the life and work of Francois Truffaut. Depardieu always inhabits his roles with bearish comfort, and Beart nicely plays on the ambiguity I always feel toward her, attractive and yet scary, those lips too luscious to be anything but poison. I was reminded of Bibi Andersson in Persona for the erotic charge of just talking about sex. This film is of course not in that class (very few are), just a tease instead of a revelation.
No comments:
Post a Comment