The Maid

This film, which earned Sundance awards and critics voted #33 for 2009, turns out to be quite the home movie.  Sebastián Silva shot it in his parents’ home, and gets his younger brother to play his adolescent self, in a story about the two maids with whom he grew up.  It’s set in Santiago but could be anywhere in Latin America where “maid culture” is prevalent (cf. Lucrecia Martel’s Argentina).  Raquel (Catalina Saavedra, in a deservedly-honored performance) has served in this family for 23 of her 41 years.  She’s an indispensable but cranky part of the family.  On the brink of exhaustion, she refuses offers from the lady of the house to get more help, and when first a young Peruvian girl and then a tough old bird are brought in anyway, they are quickly dispatched by the scheming Raquel.  But she meets her match in Lucy (the other maid in the Silva household), who disarms her with sheer good feeling.  There are times when you think this film is going in the direction of boiling cats and crazed revenge, but it always remains rooted in real human behavior and genuine domestic drama.  It’s no more a comedy than a thriller.  A sardonic humor is always implicit, but subsumed in rather grim psychological and social specificity, and the uplift at the end is modest and well-earned.  Silva says that when he showed the finished film to the real Raquel and Lucy, the former laughed and the latter cried all the way through.  You may do some of both, or just quietly admire life as it’s really lived.  (2009, dvd)  *7*  (MC-82)     

Already I’m arguing with myself over my “Best of 2009” list.  When I went to place this Chilean gem on the list, I saw there was really little difference among the foreign films between the recommended and the highly so, aside from the plus I gave the latter in the mood of the moment.  The rankings may be idiosyncratic, but the list adds up to an impressive array of world cinema, well worth the effort to find and to watch.  To which The Maid must certainly be added.   

Do not go gentle...

By pure happenstance, on successive nights I watched two films about Nobel Prize-winning authors who went raging into that good night.  Knut Hamsun and Leo Tolstoy were polar opposites in many ways -- as far right and as far left as you can go -- but each was harried (and carried) to his dying day by a long, difficult marriage.

Hamsun is a gripping but alienating pan-Scandinavian production about the Norwegian literary lion who late in life became a notorious supporter of Hitler and Quisling.  Swedes are behind the camera and in the title role, a Danish actress plays the wife, and apparently they speak in their respective languages, though I would never know that unless told.  Writer-director-cinematographer Jan Troell does not get enough credit as one of the great living masters of film.  The inexhaustible Max von Sydow crowns an amazing career with a scary but humane portrait of aging, as the film follows the severe old man from the age of 76 to his death at 92, during which he wants only to be rid of his wife and his life.  In the meantime, however, his benighted support of the Nazis leads to a trial for treason after the war and lock-up in a mental institution.  Ghita Norby does her level best to make a shrewish Nazi into a sympathetic character, but unavoidably this unhappy marriage does not make for a happy film.  Well-done, but not a must-see.  (1996, dvd)  *6+*

The Last Station may not be a must-see either, but I liked it much more than I was led to believe by some critical dismissals.  Writer-director Michael Hoffman adapts Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s last days with verve and authenticity.  Christopher Plummer is very good within the limits of Tolstoy’s own role of sage as proto-celebrity.  And Helen Mirren – no surprise here – is outstanding as the Countess Sofya, the author’s wife of 48 years, who is in a struggle for his literary legacy (and his love) with the scheming Paul Giamatti, in effect the press agent who runs the worldwide Tolstoyan brand of idealism.  He plants James MacAvoy as secretary-spy in the Count’s household at Yasnaya Polyana, who in turn falls for a free-lovin’ gal (charming Kerry Condon) at the nearby Tolstoyan commune, which makes him more sympathetic to the high-strung Countess than he is supposed to be.  The white-bearded apostle of nonviolence is forced to deal with the violent emotions of his retinue, and escapes only to his own death.  In the end I did feel the film pushed a little too hard, but nothing like the over-the-top excess I expected from some reviews.  Along the way, it seemed funny and true, beautiful and moving, a feast of fine acting.  (2009, dvd)  *7*  (MC-76)

Lemon Tree

It’s possible that this parable of Israeli-Palestinian relations could no more deliver a satisfactory resolution than the real situation on which it is based, but the effort of Israeli filmmaker Erin Riklis to look over the Wall is honorable in intent and admirable in achievement.  At the center is the performance of Hiam Abbass as the Palestinian woman whose inherited lemon grove is threatened when the Israeli defense minister moves in next door.  The grove is deemed a security hazard and scheduled for removal, but the beautiful widow is immovable, and takes the case to the highest court.  Meanwhile the defense minister’s wife develops a secret sympathy for the woman on the other side of the fence.  The result is an even-handed treatment of a highly contested situation, which can only leave the viewer with difficult mixed feelings.  (2008, IFC)  *6+*  (MC-74)

Unvictorious

For the first half of Invictus, I admired Clint Eastwood’s economical old-master filmmaking, but in the second half the film bogged down in sports movie clichés, about perhaps the most boring, incomprehensible sport in the world, rugby.  All the way through, Morgan Freeman is very impressive as Nelson Mandela, and Matt Damon is better than all right as the captain of the Springboks, the rugby team that Mandela, just two years out of prison and beginning his term as president, wants to convert from a symbol of apartheid into a vehicle for national reconciliation and unity, just in time for the 1995 World Cup, being held in South Africa to welcome it back into the international community of nations.  If only the film had avoided re-creation of the crucial games (as did the Iranian soccer masterpiece Offside), or just sketched it in as background to characterization (as they do in the marvelous football series, Friday Night Lights), then it would have an interesting story of forgiveness as a political strategy, and the subversion of popular culture into wise governance.  Instead, the film offers uplift as cornball as the Victorian poem from which it takes its title.  (2009, dvd)  *6*  (MC-74)

I only watched Invictus because I’d caught The 16^th Man on ESPN’s frequently admirable “30 for 30” documentary series, which told the real story of the Springboks’ unlikely success in a much more gripping manner, as far as I’m concerned.  The doc seemed to spend less time on actual game footage than the feature film did, more on the sociological and world historical implications instead of the undeniably stirring sports miracle.  So the hour-long documentary -- produced by Morgan Freeman incidentally, with Mandela himself making an even better Mandela than him -- would be a better use of your time than the two-hour-plus feature film.

Recommendations from 2009

With my typical six-month delay, I am prepared to render judgment on my favorite films from last year.  Herewith I list my choices in rough order of my intensity of response, with links to my original reviews plus rankings from the Film Comment critics poll.

Best of the year:  In a come-from-behind victory, for me this year’s laurels go to Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments, which does not appear in the top 50 of the Film Comment poll, perhaps because its release fell between two years.  Until the finish line, Jane Campion’s Bright Star (#15) led the pack, confirmed by a second viewing, while it was a second viewing that moved the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (#8) up into this rank, while possibly dropping An Education (#24) into the next.

Outstanding:  Domestically, my two choices come from different angles, the wonderfully animated Up (#23) and the quiet but deep American indie, Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo (#50).  From abroad, three stand out:  Still Walking (#26) from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Summer Hours (#3) from Olivier Assayas, and 35 Shots of Rum (#4) from Claire Denis.

Highly recommended:  These run the gamut from the obvious to the hardly-heard-of.  Avatar gets no love from super-serious critics, but to me the 3-D was irresistible.  Likewise I’m a sucker for George Clooney’s charm and I found Up in the Air (#28) to be a high-flying vehicle.  Greg Mottola’s Adventureland (#32) was equally charming.  Short on charm but long on power were two imports, Steve McQueen’s Hunger (#42) and the Austrian thriller Revanche (not on list).  The leading documentary of the year was Agnes Varda’s The Beaches of Agnes (#9), with other notables including Herb & Dorothy, Food Inc., and Tyson.

Recommended:  I’m not as high on The Hurt Locker (#1) as many are, but I would rank another Iraq War-themed film as its equal – The Messenger (#39).  For English language films that are not so grim, I’d single out Wes Anderson’s animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (#5), Andrew Bujalski’s up-from-mumblecore Beeswax (#38), Jeff Bridges’ bravura turn in Crazy Heart (NL), and out of the blue, the British soccer film, Damn United (NL).  I share most of the critical esteem for a wide variety of foreign films:  Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (#2), the Dardennes brothers’ Lorna’s Silence (#10), Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City (#11), Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (#12), and Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (#30).  I’d add two that didn’t make the critics’ list for some reason:  the César-sweeping Séraphine, and German docudrama The Baader-Meinhof Complex.

Also-rans for me, in the order of their Film Comment rankings, include:  The Limits of Control, The Sun, Two Lovers, In the Loop, Tulpan, Public Enemies, Where the Wild Things Are, District 9, and Tokyo Sonata.  I found each worth watching, but none would I urge upon you.

There are few films of critical consensus that I haven’t seen yet, and some I have no intention of seeing, such as Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (#7) and von Trier’s Antichrist (#20).  A few others were just non-starters for me, but there should be plenty here for you to add to your Netflix queue.

The White Ribbon

As visually beautiful as it is emotionally ugly, Michael Haneke’s latest provocation dazzles the eye in luminous black & white and haunts the mind with its shades of darkness.  The film conjures innumerable cinematic associations, but none more so than Village of the Damned.  (Ordet and Diabolique are two more that leap to mind, not to mention plenty of Bergman, with pictorial allusions to Millet and August Sander as well.)  Here the afflicted village is in Germany just before the start of World War I, a patriarchal society gone grievously wrong, where baron and steward, pastor and doctor, all abuse their power within the family and social structure.  The title refers to a symbol like the Scarlet Letter, which the pastor ties to his teenage son and daughter, to remind them of their sins and the purity they have lost.  While the men in power indulge their appetites, the mothers and children under their sway are hardly paragons of innocence.  Though the film makes it purposefully hard to sort out the large families that constitute the larger family of the self-contained village, or any firm resolution of the mysterious crime spree it suffers, the larger story of male abuse of power and the perverted revenge of its victims comes through clearly enough.  The acting of the large ensemble is consistently effective, especially the children, and a mood of quiet domestic horror is sustained throughout.  The one sympathetic, though possibly clueless, male character is the teacher, who narrates the film as an older man, while his younger self provides the film’s lighter moments in his courtship of a shy young maid.  Haneke’s mission is always to unsettle the audience, but here he offers a lovely visual antidote or counterpoint to his dark vision of human nature.  He demands attention but rewards it.  (2009, dvd)  *7*  (MC-82)

WW2 -- the big one

I am no fan of Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark, Mother and Son), but he got through to me a bit with The Sun  (2004 --2009 in US -- dvd).  For some, he is painterly -- for others, like watching paint dry.  Always slow and enigmatic, his films appeal to me less than those of his mentor Tarkovsky.  But here he has an interesting subject to examine through his eccentric lens, sort of Downfall  in Japan, with Hirohito in the bunker instead of Hitler.  At the very end of the war, with the Americans closing in, the Emperor is trapped more by his divine status than by his encircling enemies.  A rhapsodizing marine biologist, with a passion for American movies, and busts of Darwin and Lincoln on his desk (Napoleon goes in the drawer once defeat is certain), Sokurov’s Hirohito is a strange but sympathetic character, who almost embraces his humiliation at the hands of MacArthur.  He has a comic demeanor reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, with an odd fish-like way of moving his mouth, well-played by Issey Ogata (who was the Japanese computer guru in Yi Yi).  Too bad the actor playing MacArthur seems laughable to an American audience.  The visuals are also sometimes oddly artificial, but still the film has a cumulative power.  *7-*  (MC-85)

Another Eastern Bloc film about World War II that got a belated release in the U.S. last year, apparently not embraced so much by the critics, was Katyń  (2007, dvd), the culminating work of Polish old master Andrzej Wajda.  Of course it was news of the recent plane crash that killed most of the Polish government -- on their way to Katyń to commemorate the cold-blooded execution of some twenty thousand Polish officers by the Russians in 1940 – that led me to watch this film, though Wajda’s politically engaged cinema has always appealed to me, going back to Kanal (1957).  In this film, he returns to the formative event of his youth and one of the great tragedies of typically-tragic Polish history.  His father was one of the officers killed at Katyń, and the uncertainty over his father’s fate destroyed his mother, so he was on his own from the age of thirteen.  There are two stories in the film – the crime and the lie.  Stalin ordered the genocidal act, and then covered it up by blaming it on the Nazis, a fabrication self-evidently false but stringently enforced.  So there are two perspectives in the film – from the women’s and the men’s point of view.  The first is given priority, as we shift between wives and mothers, sisters and daughters, as they each approach the truth of what happened to their men.  We finally see the mechanics of the massacre at the end, in a scene of crushing power and devastating impact.  Nobody’s idea of entertainment, this is an essential film.  *7*  (MC-81)

Snake pits

Largely by happenstance, I recently caught two films on TCM about women in mental institutions.  They attracted me as I embark on my third collaboration with Kevin O’Hara -- a book about his thirty years on the psych ward, tentatively titled Inside Bedlam: Memoirs of a Bearded Nurse. 

The Snake Pit (1948) offers a surprisingly believable portrayal of madness, and with her performance here, I finally forgive Olivia de Havilland for Melanie Wilkes.  Despite the lurid title, Anatole Litvak takes a fairly serious look within the walls of a state mental hospital, with a few effectively expressionistic touches.  Therapies like electroshock, ice immersion, and chemical injection are portrayed in an unsensational manner, but the film’s heart belongs to Dr. Freud, whose portrait hangs prominently in the office of the sympathetic psychiatrist played by Leo Genn.  Sure, it’s a melodrama characteristic of its era, but this film is something more than a period piece.

Frances (1982), on the other hand, is nothing if not a sensational period piece.  The attraction of this biopic is definitely Jessica Lange’s steamy portrayal of Thirties actress Frances Farmer.  Is it just me, or is it hot in here?  Certainly Jessica as Frances is hotheaded enough, shamelessly over the top, but we don’t end up with any real sense of her character.  Much of the period detail, such as her affair with Clifford Odets and sojourn with the Group Theater, is interesting, but when Frances is thrown in the loony bin for deviant behavior, the film goes crazy too, throwing in lobotomy and rape to go with shock treatment.

Elevator to the Gallows (1957) doesn’t really fit under this rubric, but I won’t get around to commenting on it otherwise.  Louis Malle’s first film has been released by the Criterion Collection as a sort of ur-text of the French New Wave, and it does have some historical interest in that respect.  Certainly the paradigm of a girl, a gun, and a car that made Breathless famous is already evident here, as are Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet as lovers conspiring to murder her husband.  The thriller business of a stuck elevator, and the twist that foils the perfect crime are handled well enough, but certainly the most exciting element of the film is the music by Miles Davis, which throws an aura of cool over the whole enterprise.

Everlasting Moments

I don’t know whether to express profound gratitude to the Criterion Collection for promptly issuing Jan Troell’s recent Academy Award nominee for best foreign film -- which immediately becomes my pick for best of the year -- or sputtering rage at the lack of any dvd release of his diptych from the early 70s, The Emigrants and The New Land, by which I could confirm their ranking among my top ten of all-time.  Under the current spell of Everlasting Moments, however, gratitude reigns supreme.  What a lovely masterpiece!  What a summation of the work of a master!  Some may find it old-fashioned, slow-paced and quaintly pictorial, but I was breathlessly engaged from start to finish.  It’s really a love letter to the camera and the power of seeing, both in its story and its execution.  It’s all about light, as perceived by the eye of the lens and of the soul.  Within a naturalistic, almost Zola-like, portrayal of a poor urban family in Sweden during the first part of the 20^th century, we are offered a celebration of the imaginative power of photography and cinematography.  Like Séraphine in its portrait of an historically real poor woman transfigured by the power of visual creation, Everlasting Moments chronicles the efforts of a struggling wife and mother to find her powers of expression while overwhelmed with the care of her ever-growing brood and brutish husband.  Maria Heiskanen plays her namesake character with profundity, passion, and humor.  The original Maria Larsson was a relative of Troell’s wife, who contributes to the screenplay.  In every respect this film is an expression of family love and the power of seeing.  I strongly advise you to see for yourself.  (2009, dvd)  *9*  (MC-80)

The Staircase

I was impressed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s Oscar-winning documentary, Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001), but I am late coming to his follow-up, which originally appeared as an 8-part series on Sundance Channel.  It’s an omission I’m glad to have rectified, since this is one of those rare elevations of true crime into work of art, on the order of Joe McGinniss’ book Fatal Vision.  One has to bracket questions of real guilt and innocence with an understanding of the director’s particular point of view, but with the astounding access he gained, his mastery of cinema verité techniques, and the inherent fascination of the case, the series makes for a riveting 6 hours of real-life legal soap-opera, with all the twists and turns you could ask for, and an aura of lingering enigma, nicely enhanced by an extremely evocative musical score.  Lestrade’s viewpoint, culled from 600 hours of footage, is highly persuasive, but after experiencing it, you’d be wise to fact-check other sources on the trial to get an idea of what he omitted.  (I found Heather Havrilevsky of Salon.com insightful, as well as Amazon’s “most helpful” comments.)  The director’s viewpoint may be partial but is very effective dramaturgically.   I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to decide the case based on the film, but found the presentation consistently involving, especially when approached with no prior knowledge of the trial, which apparently ran on CourtTV.  I advise going in cold to follow each twist of the tale, so I will offer no spoilers, except to say that the case involves a well-off Durham NC man accused of murdering his wife, while he claims she died from falling down the stairs.  Believe me, that’s just for starters.  (2004, dvd.)  *8* 

Channelsurfing

Here are brief comments on some films I happened to watch on TV when I didn’t have a more carefully chosen DVD on hand.

I watched some of Tilda Swinton’s appearance on Charlie Rose (promoting I Am Love, which looks to be pretty good) and in the clips reel there was a great moment from Burn After Reading (2008, MC-63).  Since the Coen Brothers are back in my graces after A Serious Man, I thought I’d catch up with one of theirs that I had skipped.  Besides Tilda, you’ve got George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins – what could go wrong?  But on the other hand, it doesn’t exactly go right either.  As so many of the Coens’ films do, this caper falls into the character of love it or leave it.  Unlike, say, The Hudsucker Proxy, I’m leaving this one, but with those players it was not a hardship to watch, despite its haphazard relationship with reality.  It’s either too wacky or not wacky enough, in its story of bumbling spies and cheating spouses in Washington DC.

I liked Sunshine Cleaning (2009, MC-61) a lot more than the film whose success it was trying so hard to emulate, Little Miss Sunshine -- largely for the reason I watched in the first place, the pairing of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, two of the more appealing actresses out there.  Christine Jeff’s film about two sisters starting a crime scene clean-up business showcases them pretty well, and certainly has its moments until it peters out into a pat resolution, touching the usual bases but never really scoring.

I gave a chance to actor John Krasinski’s debut directorial effort, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009, MC-44), because it was based on the writing of David Foster Wallace and had two alums of The Wire in its cast.  I advise you not to make the same mistake, though I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Julianne Nicholson, the woman interviewing all those hideous men.

The Girl on the Train

Though compelling at times, André Téchiné’s fictionalized backstory to a sensational French media frenzy is finally too disjointed to warrant a recommendation.  Emilie Duquenne (who was Rosetta for the Dardennes) is highly watchable as the young woman who fabricates an anti-Semitic attack by a gang of swarthy youths, even though her motivations are difficult to understand.  Catherine Deneuve graces the screen -- as she has done for nearly half a century -- as the girl’s mother.  Other characters intersect with their story, and the film wanders into their lives as well.  Scene by scene, it works well, but in the end seems like bits and pieces rather than cumulatively forceful.  The precipitating event (or non-event) is buried deep within the middle of the film, but the meanings circle around the periphery.  Perhaps if one were French, the real story would be so well known as to make the film hold together in a way it doesn’t on its own.  (2009, dvd.)  *6*  (MC-68)