Broken Embraces

Made for cinephiles by an ardent cinephile, Pedro Almodovar’s latest love letter references Hitchcock, Sirk, Rossellini, Powell, Malle, and not least, himself. And that’s just at first glance. I compare it most to Truffaut’s Day for Night, in its passion for filmmaking. So I liked Broken Embraces, and I reveled with Almodovar in his mastery of movie magic, without ever being gripped by the characters or story – it’s good-looking and clever rather than moving and meaningful, which he is also capable of being at times. His usual muse, Penelope Cruz, also gets to channel other actresses, from Audrey Hepburn to Marilyn Monroe. The mutability of personae pervades the exercise, with every character going under multiple names and identities, in different timeframes. In essence, a blind screenwriter flashes back to the days when he was a sighted director in love with his leading lady, making a film very much like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (which I happened to see again quite recently). This film is more self-reflexive than consequential, but seems masterful in every frame, a bravura performance perhaps a shade too in love with itself. (2009, dvd.) *7* (MC-76.)

(500) Days of Summer [etc.]

I wouldn’t urge Marc Webb’s off-beat twentysomething rom-com on you -- unless you, like me, find Zooey Deschanel’s doe-eyed gaze charming, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt a sympathetic young actor. They meet while working at a greeting card company in downtown LA. He, in his own mind an architect rather than a dispenser of treacle, is utterly smitten; she, a no-bullshit free spirit, is willing to spend some time and have some fun with him, no strings attached. Her name is Summer and 500 is the number of days it takes him to get into and then over her. The days are literally numbered and help the viewer keep track through all the flashbacks and flashforwards that are part of the film’s enlivening gimmicks, along with animation and song & dance. You won’t learn much you don’t already know about life or love, but you are likely to be amused for an hour and a half. (2009, dvd.) *7-* (MC-76.)

Two other films of recent vintage could sneak in under the same umbrella description, though less fully satisfying within the parameters of each premise. The Invention of Lying (2009, dvd, MC-58) starts out as sharp, smart satire but then goes all mushy. In a world devoid of the concept of saying anything that is not so, Ricky Gervais tells a lie inadvertently and makes the astounding discovery of the utility of saying untrue words. As his mother is dying, he makes up a comforting story about what’s about to happen to her, and soon he is a celebrity evangelist bringing the word from the Man in the Sky. With someone like Alexander Payne directing, this might have been scathingly sarcastic fun, an equal opportunity offender, but with Gervais collaborating with Matt Robinson on script and direction, the premise peters out in a sub-Groundhog Day romance. To me, however, Jennifer Garner has even less appeal than Andie Macdowell, so I couldn’t buy into the relationship at all. Oh, that Ricky had remained true to the David Brent within, and not tried to imagine himself as a romantic hero!

Mike Judge followed up Beavis and Butthead with the cult hit movie, Office Space, and after several more animated tv series, is back with another live-action, workplace comedy called -- unmemorably -- Extract (2009, dvd, MC-61). It stars Jason Bateman – whom I have come to like through several recent supporting roles in good movies, but moreover from my belated viewing of the three seasons of Arrested Development – as the owner of a small factory turning out extracts, like vanilla and such. Ben Affleck is his druggy bartender buddy, who has all the wrong answers for Jason’s marital frustrations. Don’t ask -- but it involves a dimwitted pool boy gigolo and a hot little con artist trading on her sex appeal. The heart of the film is the real-life factory, where realistically humorous characters live out their worklives, disrupted by an industrial accident, hilariously-staged, and a subsequent wildcat strike. With so many good things in it, I’m surprised the whole didn’t leave a better impression – despite intelligent amusement throughout, it remains in memory as vague as its title.

Billy Budd

Peter Ustinov produces, directs, and stars in his own adaptation of Herman Melville's tale of a saintly seaman and his tragic end. Terence Stamp in his debut role glows with innocence as Billy, Robert Ryan is convincingly evil as his nemesis Claggart, and Ustinov distinguishes himself as Captain Vere, who must reluctantly mete out justice on a British man o’ war early in the Napoleonic Wars. Notable for widescreen location shooting in lustrous black & white, this film has a clever credit sequence that I don’t remember seeing elsewhere – as the actors’ names appear on screen, they sound off with their characters’ names and ranks. There’s very little swashbuckling action or high seas drama, as the film comes down to a well-done court martial sequence, which may lend a different emphasis than Melville but is dramatically effective. (1962, dvd.) *7*

I’d had Billy Budd on my Netflix queue for a long time, but bumped it to the top in preparation for showing Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1998) to the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark, which also jumps off from Melville’s posthumous novella. There the setting is a French Foreign Legion post in East Africa, and the dynamic amongst the three leads is even harder to parse, but as cinema that aspires to the condition of music and dance, Denis’ film definitely works.

Catching up

I seem to have taken a short holiday from film reviewing, but it won’t take me long to catch up with what I’ve been watching. And it’s easy to single out one film as a recommendation. Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, dvd, MC-83) is irresistibly charming in its faux-primitive stop-motion animation, with the ingratiating vocal performances of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, et al. I wouldn’t call this free-form adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s story a must-see but it certainly is fun to see, and does not insult the intelligence of six or sixty year old.

Among other recent releases by well-established directors, Tony Gilroy’s well-made but frustrating Duplicity (2009, dvd, MC-69) does not come close to duplicating his superb Michael Clayton, and Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (2009, dvd, MC-66) displays a mixed bag, as so much of his career does. Clive Owen and Julia Roberts entertain as the two competing spies in Duplicity – first MI-6 and CIA, then corporate -- who fall for each other and all the deceptions they each spin, but the viewer eventually loses patience with all the doubling back and gives up trying to figure it all out, not believing (or caring about) any of it. The Informant! could easily have had the same title (or The Insider, if that weren’t already taken), and would have been better off called something like Whistleblowing, since that exclamation point is a giveaway to its flaws, the attempt to goose an interesting story with too much goofy first-person narration and slapstick music. Matt Damon is quite good as a duplicitous executive at the agricultural conglomerate ADM, who turned FBI informant at the same time he was embezzling from the company and faking test results. The true story has enough substance and amusing twists that it would have been better told without the honking bells and whistles.

Of course I’ve been in a heavy cycle of screenings at the Clark, which I tend not to review after the fact, since the recommendation is implicit in my programming of them, and I say what I have to say about the films at the event. Last weekend, however, stands out. The Friday screening for the film club, The Edge of Heaven, confirmed Fatih Akin as one of the more interesting young directors out there today, and I added two earlier films by him to my Netflix queue. The “Portraits of Society” film on Saturday equally confirmed that Max Ophuls’ gliding, glittering rondelay, The Earrings of Madame de…, is one of the precious gems of cinema history, with performances from Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica that are absolute jewels. Sunday’s Roberto Rossellini double feature was overpowering: Rome Open City coming through with enhanced force in its Criterion Collection restoration, and Paisan pounding home its vast ambition in a way that made even its flaws impressive – I don’t know if I’d call it a good film per se, but it is certainly important and thought-provoking, to the history of war as well as cinema.