Crime without borders

On the evidence of notable recent films from Romania, the Mideast, and France, there is a universal tension -- along with inevitable collision and collusion -- between underclass and law enforcement around the world.

Police, Adjective (2009, MC-81) is by far the lightest assessment, might even be considered a deadpan comedy in the dry Romanian style, but still is devoted to habits of mind held over from the era of a police state.  A young plainclothes detective is tailing a kid -- in what feels like real and suspended time -- ratted out by a friend with whom he shares his hash.  His boss just wants to run a sting on the kid, but the cop doesn’t want to entrap him for a basically innocent activity.  At work he is lectured on the implications of authoritarian language, while at home his wife instructs him in the meaning of pop songs and grammar edicts from the authorities.  As with most of the currently celebrated wave of cinema from Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu’s film requires patience until its implications emerge.  This one didn’t click into place for me, as it did for many critics.  I sort of get it, but did it have to be so slow and drab?

Slow was not the problem with the jostling Ajami (2010, MC-82).  Co-written and directed by Israeli Arab Scandar Copti and Jew Yaron Shani, this film is named for an occupied neighborhood of Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv, and features a bustling cast of nonprofessional actors from both sides of the great divide, each forced to cross boundaries of one sort or another.  Using the currently fashionable technique of telling seemingly unrelated stories in a jumble of puzzle pieces that all connect at the end, we meet an array of characters:  a young Arab man trying to negotiate himself out of a family vendetta, a hard-nosed Israeli cop whose young conscriptee brother has disappeared, a Palestinian boy trying to earn money for his sick mother back in Gaza, a Muslim hipster with a Christian girlfriend who thinks he’s free to rise above his situation.  The convoluted suspense plays pretty well, and the ultimate connections do not seem forced, but the real attraction here are the dynamic, close to the bone performances by people very much like those they are playing.  Sum it up as Mideast neorealism, in the storytelling vein of Crash or Babel. 

Even better at the lower depths clash of civilizations is A Prophet (2010, MC-90), Jacques Audiard’s accomplished follow up to Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped.  Though set in a French prison, here the clash is between Muslims and Corsicans.  Tahar Rahim is outstanding as the central character, a homeless, illiterate youth, just old enough to get thrown in adult prison after an altercation with police.  The great feat of this performance is to maintain our sympathy for the character as he receives a post-graduate education in crime.  Niels Arestrup is electrifying as the old Corsican boss who seems to run the prison, even most of the guards.  He presents the youth with a choice, kill a fellow Muslim on command or be killed himself.  In a truly horrifying sequence, the boy does what has to be done and becomes the Corsicans’ Arab flunky, but thereafter forms relationships with other Muslims that allow him to operate precariously between two worlds.  Stylish and intense as a thriller, this film is an anti-Scarface that excels at character development and implicit social commentary, potent and punishing.

You may have noticed that I have stopped applying numerical grades to my reviews, trusting my rating to emerge from my comments on the film.  For the record, I would evaluate these three in turn as:  noted with esteem but reservations; solidly recommended; and emphatically recommended (if you can take it).

Oscar upsets

The last two films to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film have both encountered widely divergent responses.  On the one hand rapture, and on the other resentment and dismissal.  As usual the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the extremes.

Departures earned a Metacritic average of 68, in a curious mix of 100s with 50s or less.  Competent middlebrow entertainment, with an intriguing glimpse of odd foreign customs mixed with universal themes, it was a likely choice for Best Foreign Film at the 2009 Oscars, and some embraced it as such.  Other critics resented the award not going to more challenging fare like Waltz with Bashir and The Class, and took that out on this inoffensive nominee from Japan.  Sure, it’s too long and too obvious, but you can’t ignore the appeal of its characters and story, and the inherent fascination of Japanese mortuary rituals, every bit as stylized as tea ceremony.  For cognoscenti perhaps Yojiro Takita’s film is confected too prettily out of familiar faces and themes, but for most the inherent strangeness and dignity of a different culture’s approach to death makes it seem fresh.  The only face I recognized was Tsutomo Yamazaki, recycling his taciturn “noodle cowboy” from Tampopo, as the elder “encoffiner.”  I found the young couple very ingratiating, though the man who plays the failed cellist and apprentice encoffiner apparently has achieved stardom in Japan in very similar roles, and while the woman may strike some as simpering to me she seemed charming and expressive.  The film would definitely be better with twenty minutes of repetition and underlining deleted, but it is hypnotic in its depiction of the ritual of cleansing and dressing the body for burial, however formulaic other parts may be.

The Secret in Their Eyes won the 2010 Oscar, and encountered similar disparagement at the hands of a few critics who felt the award should have gone to The White Ribbon, A Prophet, or Ajami – and once again I find myself in the middle.  The Argentinian Juan José Campanello apparently has directed episodes of Law & Order -- the ubiquitous tv series that I have somehow managed to avoid – so is adept at the mechanics of a legal thriller.  He reaches for more here, and grasps a fair portion.  For an Argentine audience, the shuttling of the story between 1974 and 1999 seems particularly evocative of the Isabel Peron era, but Americans are left free of their own memories to notice the rather unconvincing cosmetic aging of the characters and other artificialities.  But the melding of police procedural with thwarted love story comes off quite well, owing to the appeal and skill of the two leads, Ricardo Darin and Soledad Villamel.  He’s a court inspector, and she’s an upper class, Ivy-educated lawyer who comes in as his boss, and as his lifelong object of yearning.  When he’s retired and she’s become a judge, he brings her a novel he is writing about a 25-year-old rape/murder case.  The story flashes back and forth between the two eras, with bravura scenes like one pursuit set in a soccer stadium and various kinds of hugger-mugger.  The film certainly sustains interest, if not total belief.  It will engage your interest but not change your life, well-done entertainment but not quite art, which those other three nominees decidedly are.  So my opinion again falls somewhere in the vicinity of the Metacritic mean of 81.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

This is a film I liked much more than the critical consensus, perhaps because of two women toward whom I’m decidedly predisposed.  Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter and wife of Daniel Day Lewis) caught my eye with Personal Velocity, and Robin Wright (does she still append “Penn”?) has attracted me in nearly anything she’s done.  Miller’s personal quirks, as she adapts her own novel, come across to me as authenticity, and Wright never betrays her own complicated reality for easy effects.  Here Robin as Pippa is married to a literary man thirty years her senior -- Alan Arkin effective in a role that obviously owes something to the writer-director’s father -- and has gone with him into a Connecticut retirement community.  Unmoored, she starts to sleepwalk and also to roam in memory and flashback through various stages of her life.  At the time of meeting her husband, she’s a loose-living runaway played by reasonable look-alike Blake Lively.  She has grown into a controlled and dutiful wife and mother of grown children, but now is looking to re-find herself.  Well-known faces turn up in peripheral roles, such as Mario Bello as Pippa’s mother in flashback, from whom she flees only to find her within herself, Keanu Reaves as the life-buffeted loser who moves in with his mother next door, and Winona Ryder as the confidante turned betrayer.  Though the comedy sometimes turns cartoonish, literally, and the drama too pat, this is a fairly serious portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, so something new can emerge from the cocoon she’s in.  The story has been told before, but this comes with a literary and thespian pedigree that gives it unexpected weight.  (2009, MC-49.)

Serious about series

Outside of news (including the fake news of Jon & Stephen, plus documentaries of all sorts), I don’t follow many tv programs, but these days I am among those who find the best quality series to rank in artistry and appeal with the best feature films.  While eagerly awaiting the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights, the fourth of Breaking Bad, and the second of Treme, here’s what I’ve been watching lately.

Of course, the current leader in “appointment television” is the fourth season of Mad Men (MC-92), which started with dark days indeed for our antihero Don Draper.  As the arc of the season was inscribed from episode to episode, it was trending downward, but while disaster looms ever greater for Don and the rest of the gang at SCDP, all the plots that have been set spinning, and the black humor that inflects them, are rushing to a conclusion over the next few weeks, confirming the show in its classic status.  I won’t presume to comment further, but if you’re into show as much as I am, here’s a place to really chew it over (check weekly recaps).

Gangsters during prohibition do not have the novelty of admen in the Sixties, but after two episodes, with instant renewal for another season, Boardwalk Empire (MC-88) promises to be worth watching at some length.  Show creator Terrence Winters relies on other veterans of The Sopranos, with an assist from the master Martin Scorsese, to get the proceedings going with a bang.  Led by the extremely reliable Steve Buscemi and Kelly Macdonald, the estimable cast includes “serious man” Michael Stuhlbarg, wild man Michael Shannon (here a tightly-wound G-Man) and other feature film veterans, along with big-budget production values.

With Boardwalk Empire and Treme, HBO is endeavoring to reclaim its mojo from AMC as the place for cable drama series.  Sorry, I can’t sink my teeth into True Blood – I’ve had my fill of vampires.  Can’t get into their half-hour comedies, either, though I did find the second season of Hung a guilty pleasure, broad and silly, but with engaging characters and acting.  Meanwhile, I watched the last season of Entourage only because I’ve been watching all along, mainly for Jeremy Piven’s over-the-top antics as superagent Ari Gold.

Speaking of Ari, it was intriguing to see his nemesis Carla Gugino in a younger incarnation as one of The Buccaneers in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Edith Wharton’s last, unfinished novel, in which she looks back sixty years to the newly-rich American girls who went to England in the 1870s to land themselves titled husbands.  Definitely racier than the buttoned-up society of Age of Innocence or House of Mirth, and tarted up with rape and homosexuality to go with infidelity and illegitimacy, this adaptation casts Mira Sorvino with an unlikely Brazilian accent, and two other American actresses who seem out of place in the classic British heritage settings of Masterpiece Theater, but that disconnect suits the story.  If you’re into the whole dance of dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and their stately dwellings, this (available from Netflix) will definitely meet that appetite, but it does not have the taste of the best BBC adaptations of Austen or Dickens or even Gaskell.

Film Club update

CINEMA SALON FILM CLUB AT THE CLARK RESUMES SEPT. 24^TH

Film scholars may lament that “cinephilia is dead,” but for members of the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark, film as art is alive and well.

The movies these days seem to be all about competing in a crowded media marketplace, with the opening weekend box office gross vastly more important than any vestigial aesthetic encounter, but there was a time when cinema was widely acknowledged as “the art form of the 20^th century.”  That century may past, but film remains an important medium of art, at least at the margins.

The Cinema Salon Film Club looks to explore some of those margins.  Seeking around the world, into the past and little-seen corners of the present, the Club screens a wide range of films worthy of discussion, for their artistry and ideas, in their simultaneous uniqueness and universality, strange yet familiar within the collective dream of cinema.

A new series of Club screenings will begin on Friday, September 24, at 3:00 pm (note earlier start time to allow for more discussion after the film) in the Clark auditorium.  The theme of this series is “A Criterion of Excellence,” and the Club collectively will pick films to watch from the hundreds of dvds issued by The Criterion Collection, with its guarantee of quality both in choice of films and in meticulous digital transfer.

To kick things off on 9/24, the Club will screen the very first film in the Criterion catalogue (and one of the all-time favorites of Steve Satullo, film programmer at the Clark and presenter of Cinema Salon):  Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), the granddaddy of all POW escape films and one of the great human documents of the interwar era, starring Jean Gabin, Erich von Stroheim, Pierre Fresnay, and Marcel Dalio.

At the first meeting, the Club will select the next screening out of a varied pool of several candidates that Steve will present.  At the same time, Steve will take open nominations for the next selection after that.  (Votes and nominations may also be entered by email.)  Check out Criterion’s list here:  http://www.criterion.com/library/all

Cinema Salon is technically a private club, and not official Clark programming, but it is free and open to anyone interested enough to inquire.  It’s probable that most future screenings will be at 3:00 on alternate Fridays, but that is subject to variation.  The Club may be likened to the floating crap game in Guys and Dolls -- you need to be in the know to find out what’s being shown when. There are two ways to stay in the know. 

Check the Cinema Salon website: www.cinemasalon.blogspot.com. 

Or send Steve a request to be included in regular email updates: ssatullo@clarkart.edu.

See you at the movies. 

Coming to the Clark

All about Art but the Art: The Business of Aesthetics

Free Films on Saturdays at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium

Surrounding artists and their work, many others contribute to the business of culture.  This film series looks at collectors and curators, the way the art market assigns value, the responsibility of museums and other holders of our common cultural legacy.  Each film, whether documentary or feature, stands on its own merits, but collectively they present an engrossing series of questions about the art world in the context of the wider economy and society.

September 25:  Herb & Dorothy.  (2009, 87 min.)  He’s a postal clerk; she’s a librarian.  Together the Vogels amass a world-class collection of contemporary art.  When the collection goes to the National Gallery in Washington, it takes five moving vans to carry all the art that had been crammed into their tiny Manhattan apartment.  Early on they befriended -- and collected in depth -- the starving young artists of the Minimalist and Conceptual schools, who went on to become an all-star roster of names such as Sol LeWitt, Christo, Robert Mangold, and many others.  Now this charming couple, looking like outer-borough senior citizens, are the toast of the New York art crowd, in Megumi Sasaki’s delightful documentary.

October 2:  My Kid Could Paint That.  (2007, 83 min.)  A precocious preschool girl turns out Jackson Pollock-like canvases that begin to sell for prices that escalate as her media exposure grows, until celebrity turns against her and her parents in a profile on “60 Minutes,” which questions the authenticity of her work.  Questions about what makes art valuable, with commentary by Michael Kimmelman and others, blend into a familial mystery, which Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary leaves tantalizingly open.

October 16:  Who Gets to Call it Art?  (2006, 80 min.)  One answer to the question posed by the title of Peter Rosen’s documentary is provided by his subject, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  At the center of the Manhattan art scene in the 60s, Geldzahler mounted his signature exhibition, “New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970” at the Met, and many of the participants comment on their relation to him in this lively group portrait.

November 6:  The Art of the Steal.  (2010, 101 min.)  This documentary explores the controversy over the Barnes Foundation and the move of the celebrated collection -- unrivalled for its depth of masters such as Renoir, Cezanne, and Matisse -- from its quirky but beloved installation in a residential suburb, mandated by the founder’s will, to a new museum in downtown Philadelphia.  The passionate advocacy of director Don Argott demands argument, while raising important questions of cultural patrimony.

November 20:  Summer Hours.   (2009, 103 min., in French with subtitles)  In Olivier Assayas’ widely-acclaimed feature film, three far-flung siblings (including Juliet Binoche) gather at their mother’s country house to decide on the disposition of her uncle’s collection of art, raising in a fraught familial situation a host of issues regarding the value and ultimate purpose of an artistic legacy.  The involvement of the Musée d’Orsay in this project might seem self-interested, but is certainly a favor to viewers of this quietly profound film.

Unlikely trio

Even a random sequence of films begins to reveal odd connections.  Here are three I watched in succession that seem strangely related, though wildly disparate in most respects.  The first two come through Turner Classic Movies by means of my TiVo “wishlist,” and the third from a new dvd of a recent foreign release.

Latterly coming to some appreciation of Olivia de Havilland as one of the great ladies of the classic Hollywood screen -- for a long time I’ve admired her in The Heiress, but recently was impressed by The Snake Pit -- I set out to see her other Oscar-winning performance in To Each His Own (1946, not on dvd). Ah yes, the Academy loves to see an actress age through make-up.  But Olivia does do a creditable job, as a middle-aged businesswoman in London during the Blitz, and in flashback as a teenager in a small Upstate town during the First World War, where she falls for an aviator on a bond tour.  Soon after, he dies in France, and Olivia is forced to deal with an out-of-wedlock baby in a censorious small community.  Her approach is novel, not to say implausible.  But it sets up the return to the train station in London where she comes face to face with that baby grown up to be an American flyboy himself (and played by the same actor).  As a woman’s weepie, this does not quite rank with Stella Dallas, but Mitchell Leisen’s intelligent direction keeps it interesting.

I wish I could say the same for William Wellman in The Great Man’s Lady (1942), but the only interest here is in the performances.  Barbara Stanwyck (the reason I watched, if you are aware of my recent obsession with her) outdoes Olivia by aging from Philadelphia maiden to frontier wife to centenarian teller of the hidden truth of America’s westward expansion.  Joel McCrea is the great man in question, but Brian Donlevy is the more interesting character as the gambler with a heart of gold, which he gives to our girl Barbara.  Again she is faced with babies of questionable parentage, though this story takes quite a different turn.  In an odd way, this film prefigures Liberty Valance in its balancing of fact and legend in the development of the West, but a wartime piety about American history takes any sting out of the story.

From an entirely different era and culture comes another story of a woman abandoned with child by a supposed great man.  In the case of Vincere (2010, MC-75), the “great man” in question is Mussolini, who seduces women, before he seduces the nation of Italy, with his presumptions of greatness.  It turns out Marco Bellochio, bad boy of Italian cinema -- best known for his debut Fists in the Pocket (1965) but best remembered by me for China is Near (1967) -- has been making films all these years, though rarely seen in the U.S.  He still pulls out all the stops, including documentary footage, animation, and other camera tricks, but this film too comes down to the riveting performance of its female lead, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as the woman who gives all to the dashing blowhard, played with smoldering monomania by Filippo Timi, only to be abandoned when the erstwhile Socialist comes to power as a Fascist, who must clean up his past by sending his lover and then their grown son to mental asylums.  To me, Mezzogiorno seemed a dead ringer for Debra Winger, but she certainly has a passion all her own.

Documendations

Under this heading I will from time to time offer brief recommendations of documentaries I have been watching that you would do well to watch, either via broadcast or on dvd.  Not only am I a fan of the documentary form in all its inexhaustible variety, I am a partisan of a documentary aesthetic in all films.  My one theoretical construct in cinema is that the divergent possibilities of film were there from the very beginning, with the Lumière brothers documenting, say, a train pulling into the station, and Meliès fabulating a trip to the moon, like a stage magician.  Documentary and fabulation remain the poles of filmmaking, and the more a film leans toward the former, the better I like it.  John Grierson coined the word “documentary” and gave it a definition that has yet to be surpassed, or contained: “creative treatment of actuality.”  Sometimes it is the actuality that grips the viewer, and sometimes it is the creative treatment, and when both are powerful, nothing could be better.

And sometimes a poverty of means yields the richest result.  After Forever (see “omnibus” review just below), I am into Heddy Honigmann, and the only other film of hers that Netflix had was O Amor Natural (1996), so I watched it with no advance idea of what it was about.  This remains filmmaking by personal encounter; whereas in Forever Honigmann approached people in a Parisian cemetery, in O Amor Natural she accosts people on the streets of Rio and asks if they know who Carlos Drummond de Andrade was, and if they do know the famous Brazilian poet, she asks them to read aloud from his posthumous volume of that title – a book of erotic, damn near pornographic poetry.  She concentrates on men and women in their 70s and 80s, and there is delicious mischief in seeing how they react to the steamy, smutty material.  Probably again due to Honigmann’s choices, most respond gleefully with their own erotic memories.  This film manages to be thoroughly charming and thought-provoking at the same time.

Ranking with the best films of this year or last, depending on release date, is Sweetgrass (2009, MRQE-72) by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaign-Taylor.  This documentary takes an utterly different approach, in the tradition of anthropological film or Frederick Wiseman’s patient direct cinema studies of institutions – no narration or narrative frame or explicit point of view, just selective observation and juxtaposition of sound and image to weave a story out of contemplation of the reality given to the camera eye and microphone ear.  Sweetgrass follows one of the last treks of a huge flock of sheep to summer grazing on public lands in the mountains of Montana.  The sheep themselves are a constant source of amusement and wonder, from their sheepish antics to the breathtaking sweep of their collective passage through the Big Sky landscape.  The cowboys fit the laconic stereotype and say virtually nothing intelligible, except when cooing at or cursing the flock, or their dogs and horses, or when the younger, less grizzled one whines to his mother on a cellphone how much he hates it all, while the camera does a slow pan of one of the world’s most magnificent landscapes.  This film is lovely and meditative, and entertaining if you are willing to give it your time and attention.

Spike Lee’s If God is Willin and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2010, now on HBO) will definitely test your time and attention.  In this follow-up to his indispensable Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke, Lee revisits many of the scenes and people, to good effect for the most part, but when the BP oil spill happened in the course of filming, he went off in search of that story and stretched the proceedings to four hours, by which time I had lost the thread of interest. Though you could say that new disaster belonged to New Orleans too, it tells a different set of stories from Katrina, so the film does seem to run on.

Another HBO documentary, which I do recommend, for its actuality if not its treatment, is Josh Fox’s Gasland (2010), which takes an extremely personal approach to an important issue that has gotten nothing like the notice it ought to.  While the oil spill in the Gulf has drawn all eyes, there is a slow motion environmental disaster in the making, which may one day dwarf it.  The exploitation of the vast Marcellus Shale deposits of natural gas (so-called “clean energy”) across wide swaths of the Eastern United States is quietly wreaking devastation on the water supply and public health in out of the way areas where the drilling goes on.  So what, you may say, if some hillbilly in a trailer can ignite the water coming out of his kitchen faucet, but then you realize that Marcellus Shale extends under the watershed that supplies most of the drinking water to the mid-Atlantic region.  What a surprise to find another area where Halliburton and Dick Cheney are the devil incarnate!