Catching up with film

Once I fall out of the habit of writing about films the day after I see them, they begin to back up, and now I’m stunned to see that I haven’t posted here in more than a month.  So I begin a process of catching up, starting with recent films, now that I have only two more must-sees due on dvd before I close the book on 2010 releases and make my official picks for best of the year.  Between now and then I will also catch up with recommended tv series, documentaries, and another round of “Classic or not?”  I will also have further word on upcoming film series at the Clark, so please keep coming back to Cinema Salon, even though I haven’t given you much to see lately.

White Material.  (2010, MC-81)  Claire Denis’ latest earned the bronze medal, voted third-best of 2010 in Film Comment poll, but strikes me as a film I would have to see again to settle on an opinion about -- but which I have no desire to see again.  As a director, Denis is a refined taste whose films I sometimes get (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and sometimes don’t (The Intruder, this film).  Here she returns to themes of her upbringing in Africa (as in Chocolat), with French settlers driven out in a civil war waged by child soldiers led by a charismatic and progressive young officer.  The ever-interesting Isabelle Huppert, whitest of the white, alien to the dark continent, has only one thought, to save her coffee plantation and its current crop, but forces are unleashed that will consume everything around her within the two days the film covers, in its own roundabout way.  The treatment is elliptical and enigmatic, but the sense of encircling menace is persuasive.  The shock ending adds to, rather than resolves, the puzzlement.

Mother.  (2010, MC-79)  Bong Joon-ho’s latest came in 11^th in that same critics poll (8^th in indieWire).  After The Host and Memories of Murder, the young South Korean is definitely one of the flavors of the month in world cinema, putting his personal stamp on various genres, following that wry creature-feature and offbeat police procedural with this “wrong man” mystery widely described as Hitchcockian, though Bong is even weirder than that chubby old pervert.  When not strange and fascinating, he can be flat-footed as well as deadpan, but this film is made by the performance of Kim Hye-ja as the mother determined to exonerate her dim-bulb grown son, who is accused of murdering a schoolgirl.  The twists of the story sometimes elicit a “Huh, what?” response, but in the end it all hangs together around that central performance.

Two favorite directors I included in my “10 Under 50” film series at the Clark some years back had recent releases that attracted almost no attention, but with which I finally caught up based on the talent involved.

Michael Winterbottom’s Summer in Genoa (known as Genova (MRQE-64) when released in Britain in 2008) is just out on US dvd, probably predicated on Colin Firth’s recent anointing as Best Actor.  He’s good here as the father to two girls, probably 16 and 10, who were with their mother when she was killed in a car accident.  Old college friend Catherine Keener gets him a teaching position in Italy and he feels that getting far away is the best way for the girls and him to cope.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  The film casts a real Don’t Look Now vibe over the narrow alleyways of the medieval city, which are penetrated by Winterbottom’s travel-light style of filmmaking.  With a compelling mix of beauty and risk, the film is flawed mainly by a conclusion that makes the whole thing seem like all wind-up and no pitch.

Similarly ominous but unresolved is Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth (2009, MC-51), which also went nowhere despite the presence of two compelling performers in Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal. They play a well-to-do New York couple who share a fabulous loft apartment with their young daughter and her Filipina nanny.  She’s an emergency room doctor on the night shift, and he’s a computer game designer off to Asia to sign a big contract, so as much as they love their daughter, the girl’s primary relationship is with the lovely nanny, who has left her own two boys back on the islands in order to earn a better life for them in this globalized but fractured world.  Each character in the film suffers in isolation from the others, despite connection by cellphone and distant affection.  Grim and moody to match the maker’s name, with lovely images and haunting music, this film has much to recommend it, but finally fails to satisfy.  The world may be a rigged game, but this film seems a bit rigged as well.

Here are two more films I found more interesting than many did, given a certain affinity going in:

Aaron Katz’s Quiet City (2007, MRQE) is a “mumblecore” enactment of twenty-somethings drifting through the Brooklyn scene.  Having once been a twenty-something drifting through Brooklyn, I was willing to expend attention on a newer version of same.  As is characteristic of this genre, the girl is attractive but not conventionally so, and the guy is a shlub.  Each shot -- some of them lovely -- is held too long, as if trying to protract the proceedings to feature length.  The film would love to be another Before Sunrise, but falls in the middle of the mumblecore pack, among whom only Andrew Bujalski so far emerges as a talent to watch. 

Marco Amenta’s The Sicilian Girl (2010, MC-48) I got into initially for its striking images of the island of my forefathers.  Then I was held by the performance of Veronica D'Agostino as the feisty teenage girl who decides to revenge the deaths of her father and brother by informing on the Mafia, and goes into ineffective witness protection in Rome.  The story follows, perhaps too faithfully, that of a real young woman about whom the director has already made a documentary, and never really goes as deep as you hope it might.