Documentary round-up

Inside Job (2010, MC-88) suffered for me from the high expectations I brought to it, having found Charles Ferguson’s first film, No End in Sight, the most enlightening documentary I’d seen about the Iraq War.  So I figured he’d really unpack the banking meltdown of 2008, and very likely I’d join the critics of the Film Comment poll and rank Inside Job among the top handful of films from last year.  Not quite.  The film offers a clear enough picture of the financial skullduggery behind the crisis, and I agree that some people should have gone to jail for it, but I didn’t find its argument as informative and convincing as I expected.  So I can’t quite agree with its Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Another nominee that I found more surprising and satisfying was Waste Land (2010, MC-78), which I will certainly schedule for the Clark at first opportunity.  Vik Muniz is an artist well-known for his re-photographed portraits in chocolate, sugar, or dust, and a pair of matching Madonnas, one in peanut butter and one in jelly.  Lucy Walker’s film follows Muniz when he returns to Brazil, having achieved success in the global art world, in an effort to give something back to the community from which he arose.  He chooses as his focus the largest landfill in the world, where most of the waste in the Rio area goes, and as subject for his portraits the catadores, or pickers, who recycle a modest living out of the piles of garbage.  He takes photos of them, and then enlists their aid in recreating the portraits by arranging refuse on the floor of a warehouse and then re-photographing the construction from above.  He then takes the portrait subjects to a London gallery show and auction of the finished works, returning the money raised to the pickers’ association for mutual aid.  There are many ways this film could have turned icky, but it maintains its humor and intelligence throughout, and winds up quite moving as well.

At first I assumed the HBO documentary Reagan (2011) would be an anodyne celebration of the Gipper’s hundredth birthday, another amnesiac hagiography of the patron saint of all Republicans.  But then I saw that it was directed by Eugene Jarecki, who in Why We Fight went back to Eisenhower’s farewell speech and lucidly showed just how the “military-industrial complex” has taken over in the fifty years since the old soldier’s warning.  This film manages to debunk without anger, and still to celebrate what there was to celebrate in Reagan’s leadership.  It works as a reality check both ways, more a serious work of history than a partisan argument.

Another documentary I approached dubiously on PBS "Independent Lens" series, For Once in My Life (2010), turned out to be well worth seeing.  I suspected this story of a band of variously-disabled performers from a Goodwill facility in Miami getting ready for a big public performance would be a source of saccharine uplift, but the film by James Bigham and Mark Moormann included as much eye-opening insight as special pleading, on the path to its rousing and heartening conclusion.

I also didn’t expect a competition among pastry chefs for the French honor of  “master craftsman” to make for a riveting film either, but I certainly had enough respect for giant of direct cinema D.A. Pennebaker and his partner Chris Hegedus, to give a look to Kings of Pastry (2010, MC-69).  The film baked up more amazement and emotion, not to mention humor and suspense, out of sculptures in sugar than one could have easily imagined going in, with a small subject that revealed unsuspected depths of implication. 

A much weightier subject is addressed in Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2010, MC-78).  Gini Reticker’s film follows a peace movement among Christian and Muslim mothers, led by Leymah Gbowee, which managed to bring an end to Liberia’s civil war with the overthrow and exile of corrupt strongman Charles Taylor.  This film makes an excellent prequel to The Iron Ladies of Liberia, another good documentary which covers the subsequent election of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson as the first woman president in Africa, and the initial efforts at reconstruction by her largely female administration. 

Also worthy of note is the second season of the Sundance Channel series, Brick City (2011), a high-toned reality show that follows Newark mayor Cory Booker as he deals with budget apocalypse and a re-election campaign.  Booker is an admirable and engaging character, a Rhodes scholar who takes on the mission of saving New Jersey’s beleaguered largest city against formidable obstacles, while maintaining some sense of mystery about his private life, if any, and his deepest motivations.  His story is intertwined with that of the police chief and various reforming gang members, as well as the entrenched opposition of native Newark or would-be radical forces.  In the current days of municipal meltdown and threatened default, these stories are important to see, and the comparison to The Wire as a portrait of a city in multiple crises is well-deserved.  Booker’s story is fascinating to follow, from the excellent stand-alone documentary Street Fight, which detailed his first, unsuccessful run for mayor, through the first season of Brick City, in which he wins and takes office for the first time.  I’m eager to see whatever’s next.

As an addendum to the Cinema Salon film club’s first series on “The Art of Documentary,” let me re-recommend F for Fake, Orson Welles’ elegantly braided exploration of art and lying; The Gleaners & I, Agnes Varda’s amusing and thoughtful exploration of the margins of economic system, and an obvious inspiration for Waste Land; and most especially, Heddy Honigmann’s  Forever, which seemed even better to me on second viewing, in its exploration of death and immortality, art and memory, through the window of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Displaced persons

The central character of Amreeka  (2009, MC-73) is as much placeless as displaced.  As she has to inform airport security, she has no country, she is Palestinian and comes from occupied territory.  Her 15-minute commute to work takes two hours because she has to go around the Wall and through checkpoints where she and her son are routinely hassled.  Her husband has left her for a younger, slimmer woman, and her son urges that since the old man’s done what he wanted, they ought to do what they want, which is move to America when their papers come through.  They go to stay with her sister in suburban Illinois, her husband a doctor whose successful practice is suddenly shunned after 9/11.  Despite two degrees and ten years experience in banking, our heroine has to take a job at White Castle, while pretending to her family that she is working in the bank next door.  Cherien Dabis knows whereof she makes her film, and while it may run through a checklist of predictable plot points, it does so with grace, charm, and wit.

Nearly witless yet sharply satiric, Four Lions  (2010, MC-68) portrays a group of Muslim young men living in England but not at home there, longing for jihad, with pratfalls at every step.  This film can only be categorized as terrorist slapstick, so be prepared to laugh as one dunderhead after another blows himself up, and if you can’t imagine laughing at such things, then pass this film by.  In one respect, Chris Morris’s film is very much like The Hangover (which I just happened to catch in passing on HBO, but did not find special in any way), in which a group of wild and crazy guys find nothing but misadventure on their path to paradise, whether it be Las Vegas or scented gardens with 77 virgins.  Given the exploits of the underwear bomber and the clown who left a carful of fertilizer in Times Square, this film may give a truer than expected portrait of the losers who turn to terrorism, but it still winds up a mixed bag, which may or may not be yours.

In Alamar  (2010, MC-77), a young boy is transported to something like paradise, above the coral reefs of Mexico.  He is the product of a brief union between an Italian mother and a Mexican guide, and is going to spend time with his father, living in a house on stilts above the water and spending his days baking in the sun on fishing boats, falling into the rhythms of an extremely elemental life, while tacitly absorbing paternal lessons in communion with nature.  Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s film is half documentary, half rhapsody, slow and stately, intimate and sensual, quiet but ultimately powerful.

I guess I was the person displaced from Around a Small Mountain (2010, MC-63) – I just didn’t get it.  Jacques Rivette’s latest falls under my category of “The New Wave gets old,” and as with Resnais’ Wild Grass, I am disinclined to follow.  Only my man Rohmer was strong till the very end.  Rivette as usual looks at the lives of performers, in this case a traveling circus in the south of France, but unusually and mercifully this film is quite short.  I’m interested enough in Jane Birkin to watch for 80 minutes to try to figure out why she left the circus 15 years ago and why she’s back now, and whether she will fall for the Italian charmer stalking her.  But I didn’t figure it out, and I didn’t really care.

I’ll squeeze one more recent film under this heading:  It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010, MC-63).  This unmemorable title suits this kind of okay movie, about a teenager who is displaced by checking himself into a mental hospital, when suicidal feelings get the better of him.  It’s a plush place where he learns some not-very-hard life lessons and meets a cute girl with just a few cosmetic scars on her wrists and face.  The whole thing is less “Boy, Interrupted” than “Boy Goes to Overnight Camp.”  Still, I watched it because I’d been impressed with the earlier films of the directorial team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Half Nelson and Sugar. They should forget catering to a wider audience, and go back to making their own stories, instead of adapting popular young adult novels.  Keir Gilchrist is ingratiating enough as the central character, Zach Galifianakis is good as the fellow crazy from whom he learns the ropes, and the rest of the cast is inoffensive in this “cuckoo’s nest lite.”  So the film won’t bore you silly or altogether betray your sense of plausibility, but you won’t remember it or its title for very long.

Never Let Me Go

Don’t let this one go by.  Mark Romanek’s adaptation of a Kazuo Ishiguro novel received some lukewarm reviews, but I’m with those who see its virtues.  Foremost among them is Carey Mulligan -- I believe I could watch the subtle movements of her kewpie-doll face for the duration and be content.  The suddenly ubiquitous Andrew Garfield also seems to be inherently interesting.  And here Keira Knightley has something within her range.  They are residents of a not quite right British boarding school some decades ago, in this strangely-retro speculative fiction of cloning to harvest organs.  There, I’ve given it away.  And will do so more by comparing this film to Gattaca in its thoughtful addressing of questions of genetic ethics.  The three characters are earlier played by a younger trio who mirror them nicely.  The film is prettily shot by and I found Rachel Portman’s music to be appropriately lugubrious and meditative.  Aside from the set-up, I leave the mystery and romance to unfold for you step by quiet step – it won’t make you happy but it will hold your attention, and give you plenty to think over afterward.  (2010, MC-69) 

Lovers discourse

Showing Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse (1967) to the Cinema Salon film club was one of the most agonized viewing experiences I've ever had, with its provocative aggravations hardly giving most of my audience an inviting introduction to one of my favorite directors.  Yet I could have as easily made a case for it as apologized for it, and I was glad when some of the audience spoke up in favor.  Later the same day, I watched two other of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” and confirmed that he is indeed engaging as well as persistently interesting, and now I’ve been on a binge of watching or re-watching every Rohmer film I could get my hands on.

The most excruciating scene of La Collectioneuse was certainly when the annoyingly pretentious artist Daniel persisted in mindlessly stamping his feet on the living room floor.  The character was played by a real artist named Daniel and he no doubt considered his rudeness a conceptual performance piece, as painfully prolonged as many such are.  While the discomfort of the scene might have seemed too mimetic, still one could see Rohmer doing interesting things within it, in the reactions of the other two characters, the man who smirks admiringly at this friend’s effrontery even while his own leg falls into the other’s rhythm, and the girl who determinedly moves to her own rhythm and gives a sensible if exasperated response.  The whole film is there in miniature, if you can bear to watch.

But the thing is, Rohmer is usually easy on the eyes -- like Haydée in this film -- and if you pick up his rhythm, get on his wavelength, he is endlessly and seamlessly entertaining, yet continually thought-provoking.  Like Ozu, he is a master who basically made one lifelong film, comprised of interlocking (and almost interchangeable) chapters.  So here’s my brief take on a number of those chapters.

  

The “Moral Tales” I watched to get the taste of La Collectioneuse out of my mouth were Ma Nuit Chez Maud  (1969) and Love in the Afternoon (1972).  Both were every bit as good as I remembered them to be, well establishing the Rohmer formula – a few attractive people in an attractive place, ruminating endlessly on the ambiguities of attraction.  One person is pursuing another, but is distracted from pursuit by a third.  Much rationalization -- and comic delusion of self and other – follows.  The characters are specimens we observe with sympathetic amusement. 

In My Night at Maud’s, the black & white setting is Clermont-Ferrand at Christmastime.  That’s Pascal’s hometown, and the film revolves around the question of Pascal’s Wager, as Jean-Louis Trintignant pursues his “innocent” blond dreamgirl Marie-Christine Barrault, despite his attraction to dark-haired, worldly-wise divorcee Francoise Fabian.  In Chloe in the Afternoon (as it was first released in the U.S. to avoid confusion with the Audrey Hepburn film), a stuffy Parisian businessman threatens his comfortably bourgeois marriage by taking up with an old bohemian flame.  In Claire’s Knee (1970), which I’ve seen often enough not to need my memory refreshed, the setting is summer at a Swiss lake, where an engaged diplomat forms a fixation on a blond teenager’s lovely gam.

Beatrice Romand plays another teenager, a dark frizzy-haired foil to Claire, but grows up to return as the main character in Le Beau Marriage (1981), in Rohmer’s next series, “Comedies and Proverbs” (and will return again, as is Rohmer’s habit with actresses, as the delightfully difficult middle-aged seeker for love in An Autumn Tale in 1998).  Here she’s a young woman who’s never had trouble attracting men, commuting between art studies in Paris and family home and job in the old section of Le Mans, when she decides arbitrarily to get married and suddenly encounters disappointment in her pursuit of a mate.

We return to a seaside summer in Pauline at the Beach (1983), with our first glimpse of the delightful Amanda Langlet as the 15-year-old title character, who follows the erotic escapades of her va-va-voom older cousin and begins to form her own attachments.  As usual, Rohmer manages to find humor, pathos, and complication in his bikini-clad characters.  Summer (Le Rayon Vert) (1986) features another difficult babe and Rohmer favorite, Marie Riviere, as she restlessly seeks a place to vacation and some sort of romantic companionship.  Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L’Ami de mon amie) (1988) concludes the “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, back in a fancy new suburb of Paris, where young professional women try to find a mate and sort out their love lives, as usual charmingly complicated and fondly satirical.

Then Rohmer turned to his “Tales of Four Seasons,” beginning with A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps) (1989), which follows a young Parisian philosophy teacher as she falls in with a younger girl and eventually her father, in another rondelay of hidden motive and sexual scheming.  Amanda Langlet returns in A Summer’s Tale (Conte d’été)  (1996), again wise beyond her years as she waits for a young man to make up his mind, while he vacations on the Brittany seacoast waiting for his tardy girlfriend and encountering a hot chick, emulating the choice of Paris in selecting the fairest of the three.  Scandalously unavailable in any video format, I remember An Autumn Tale (1998) most fondly of the tetralogy, for its winning reunion of Beatrice Romand and Marie Riviere, the former as a winemaker ripe for love amongst her beautiful vineyards.  I don’t remember much about A Winter’s Tale (1991), except that it delivered the reliable, though ineffable, pleasures of any Rohmer film.

I recently reviewed Rohmer’s last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2006), and then at last, I caught up with his penultimate film, Triple Agent (2004), which as a World War II spy saga seemed like an outlier in his oeuvre, but turned out to be quintessential Rohmer in its depiction of intimate deception of one’s self and the other.  Based on a real case, the film examines a White Russian general living in France, who may be collaborating with the Nazis or the Russians, but is certainly deceiving his stay-at-home Greek painter wife, in Rohmer’s usual round of conversations filled with themes of loyalty and betrayal, trust and suspicion.  Amanda Langlet reappears as the upstairs neighbor in this very interior drama.

These last two films complete another implicit cycle of Rohmer's work, which might be categorized to as historical stylizations.  However different in setting and style, each essentially recapitulates all his obsessions, of romantic complications among attractive people, usually young.  The Marquise of O (1976) adapts a Kleist novel into a beautifully chaste though passionate vision of domestic life during the Napoleonic wars.  Perceval (1978) emulates a medieval pageant, on minimally unreal sets, to retell a tale of chivalry and knighthood amongst a group of lovely modern young people, especially notable for introducing Fabrice Luchini as the title character, humorously balanced between naiveté and nobility.   The Lady and the Duke (2001) plays out an affecting story of the French Revolution from the perspective of the nobility, against green-screened period paintings of interiors and exteriors, an effective innovation in historical recreation that surprisingly has not been much emulated.

So there in capsule form is the career of one of the greatest of all filmmakers.  Dip in at any point, and enjoy!

Recent viewing

Reviews are mixed, by myself or the critics, on these assorted films from 2010 that I combine here simply because I’ve watched them in the past few weeks. 

The biggest surprise to me was Animal Kingdom (2010, MC-83), which I put in the category of Red Riding Trilogy as films that ought to be loathsome in their violence and corruption, but actually approach the pity and terror that is the point of such drama.  David Michôd’s debut crime thriller follows the disintegration of a Melbourne family of not-so-goodfellas, with their pride -- preying and preyed upon -- led by a dowdy old lioness, a seductive and deceptively sweet grandma named Smurf (believably embodied by Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver with a bleach-blond mane).  She takes in her 17-year-old grandson when her estranged daughter ODs on heroin.  He comes under the wing of his uncles, for whom armed robbery (as in The Town) is the family trade, though threatened by cops more eager for the kill than the collar.  This grimy, unglamorous revenge tragedy plays out in a sunny suburban landscape of gas stations and supermarkets, yet remains hypnotically absorbing through its twists and turns, feints and blows.  Character, even when creepy, is more important than action.  The acting is good across the board, though only Guy Pearce, as an unusually honest cop, is a familiar face.

Also worthy of note is Lebanon (2010, MC-85).  Written and directed by Samuel Maoz, this film -- like Waltz With Bashir – is a personal reminiscence of being a very raw Israeli conscript in the 1982 war in Lebanon.  The particular novelty here is that the entire film is shot from a viewpoint inside an armored vehicle, so it does for tanks what Das Boot did for submarines, evoking a claustrophobic atmosphere so dense you can smell and taste it.  In some ways the film is as formulaic as a play, as one character after another drops through the porthole for a scene or two with the four typically assorted crew members, but the gunner’s-scope view of chaotic battles and civilian devastation seems particularly potent and powerfully evokes the director’s personal experience.  Not a must-see, but worth a look if the subject interests you.

Creation (2010, MC-51) is one film I endorse more warmly than the Metacritic average.  I found Paul Bettany quite convincing as Darwin and Jon Amiel’s direction good at evoking wonderment in the face of nature and portraying a plausible struggle to write.  Bettany’s wife, Jennifer Connolly, serves as Darwin’s pious and severe wife, who dreads publication of his ideas.  Marsha West (daughter of “McNutty” on The Wire) is engaging as the deceased child whose ghost haunts and inspires Darwin.  I wouldn’t say this rises far above a good BBC television production, but it certainly held my interest and more, intellectually convincing despite some sentimental contrivance.

I part company with the critical consensus in the opposite direction on Dogtooth (2010, MC-73), a prizewinner at Cannes and nominee from Greece for Best Foreign Film.  I confess I was slow to get the point of this fable of horrific parenting by Giorgos Lanthimos, but by the time I got over its sheer weirdness, I was put off by several scenes of shocking violence, gratuitous or not (less so by the graphic sex).  So be forewarned about this story of three post-adolescent children who are kept sequestered in a gated compound, and whose isolation is enforced down to being taught nonsense meanings to words that might suggest a world outside.  You could take this as a very bleak black comedy, or you could just leave it.

For You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010, MC-51), my “meh” response pretty much matched the critical average.  I’m not sure why I keep watching Woody Allen, as he obsessively recycles his material year after year.  There’s always an intriguing cast, and a smoothly delivered veneer, but never anything new being said.  Naomi Watts made this one tolerable to watch, though Anthony Hopkins could do nothing with the hackneyed role of the old guy besotted with a young hottie, and several other familiar faces are wasted.  We follow a group of loosely-related characters for an hour and a half, and then the narrator throws up his hands and closes the proceedings abruptly.  I couldn’t believe that was it, that these desultory sketches were supposed to add up to a feature film.