Cinema Salon: December 2012

Of several long-term writing projects, Cinema Salon has been getting short shrift from me lately. It’s in need of refreshment and revival – could be my New Year’s resolution. But in the meantime I want to catch up with several months of viewing, a miscellany which oddly sorts itself into pairs of films, at least for the purpose of brief comments. (Click on Metacritic score for more detail on film, on "NFX" for Netflix availability on DVD or streaming.)

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At the head of the class is Monsieur Lazhar (2012, MC-83, NFX), a French-Canadian film edged by A Separation for the most recent best foreign film Oscar. Philippe Falardeau somehow adapts a one-person play into an amazingly lived-in middle school classroom, presided over by an emergency substitute after the untoward death of the popular teacher. The sub is a courtly but mysterious Algerian émigré to Montreal, played with dignity and depth by the stand-up performer Fellag. The two young actors who play the boy and girl most affected by their teacher’s death lead a remarkably naturalistic classroom cast. The film has a lot of points to make -- about education, grief, truth, responsibility – but does better in its silent moments of empathetic observation than its overly-verbal conclusion.

Throwing spitballs from the back of the class is Bad Teacher (2011, MC-47, NFX), which was not as bad as you or I might imagine it to be. As a comedy of antisocial behavior, I liked Jake Kasdan’s better than most, and give Cameron Diaz more credit than I usually would, as an utterly miscast middle school teacher who has lost her sugar daddy and needs $10k for a boob job to attract another, trying to seduce fellow teacher Justin Timberlake while fending off the attentions of gym teacher Jason Segel, and remaining totally oblivious of the students in her charge. Stephanie Zacharek, with her usual contrarian acuity, makes the absolute best case for the film here. But it’s not as though I’m recommending it.

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I don’t seem able to admire the unrelated Anderson boys as much as I ought. I’ve already dissed Wes and now I have hard words for Paul Thomas and The Master (2012, MC-86, NFX). I can’t get on the wavelength of the one’s candy-colored surreality or the other’s grim grandiosity, dark and Wagnerian. Nor do I relate to the latter’s penchant for scenes of one man humiliating another in reciprocal annihilation, odd couples gone hateful. P.T. Anderson is a filmmaker of visual pyrotechnics in the service of puzzling characters and open-ended storytelling, adept at spectacle suggesting substance, but for me personally, there is ultimately a failure to connect. The most stunning scene in the Master is a prolonged close-up face-off between Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, as the psychological shaman/showman demonstrates the skills that drew a cult around him, by getting inside the head of the volatile drifter, twisted physically and mentally, who has wandered into his aura. Powerful, powerful scene, as are many in the movie. (I happened to see a very similar across-the-table scene soon after, between Claire Danes and Damian Lewis on the acclaimed Showtime series Homeland, but the crucial difference was – I realize this is comparing apples and oranges – we have come to understand and care about Carrie and Brody, while we never do about the Master and his on-again, off-again disciple.) It’s possible that if I had seen the film in its intended 70mm, I would simply have been carried along by its visual splendor, but lacking any real insight into the characters, I found the film wearying, and the over-insistent music a real annoyance. Nonetheless the feel for the early-50s period and setting is a wonder to behold, and the performances are riveting if opaque.

I re-watched There Will Be Blood (2007, MC-92, NFX) to prime myself for its successor, but found myself with a similar response, admiring the visual and historical sweep but fundamentally ignorant of the character’s motivations, which neither Daniel Day-Lewis’s bravura performance nor Paul Dano’s double dose of nothing helps. I stand by my earlier review.

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New to me but definitely on my radar now is the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki. I first stumbled upon her most recent film, Where Do We Go Now? (2012, MC-60, NFX), a crowd-pleasing hit in her native country and on the international festival circuit. The film is a fable set in an isolated village, where Christians and Muslim live in peace, or at least in normal neighborly friction, as long as the conflicts of the surrounding world do not impinge. While the men are inherently rivalrous, the women are friends and conspire to keep their village free from violence. There are many good things in the film, but the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach finally wears thin. It starts with a sequence that looks like something from Shirin Neshat, of black-robed women mourning in stylized formation on their way to tend graves in the two halves of the village cemetery, but does not hesitate at slapstick, sentimentality, and sexual humor, with another sequence that looks straight out of a Bollywood film.

Besides writing and directing, Ms. Labaki is an effective and arrestingly beautiful actress, so I was encouraged to take a look at her more critically-supported debut, Caramel (2008, MC-70, NFX), which could be dismissed as Steel Magnolias-in-Beirut but won me over, with it stories about a variety of women who come together in a beauty shop to share joys and sorrows. The local color more than makes up for the familiarity of the situations. And since Nadine Labaki gives herself more screen time, it’s the greater pleasure to watch.

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So impressed by Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (see my review here), I caught up with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film, Three Monkeys (2009, MC-73, NFX), which proved watchable in a different way. Still the leisurely, painterly compositions of Turkish landscapes, but here in service of a pulpish plot involving intersecting triangles of characters, an odious hit & run politician, his driver who takes the fall for money, the wife who comes to depend on the politician while her husband is doing time, and the drop-out son who’s getting into trouble of his own. The well-played wife becomes the center of the film, as she is threatened and abused by each of the men in turn, and the ominous hum of potential violence against women, emotional and physical, is the engine of this grim but engrossing film.

As it is of the ironically titled House of Pleasures (2011, MC-75, NFX), about a 19^th century Parisian brothel. I watched it not, of course, for the prurient interest of naked female bodies, but for possible showing at the Clark to tie in with a Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition, since this is very much a world in which they were immersed. Though set in the realm of erotic fantasy, this film is hard-edged in its depiction of social and economic realities. The gilded slavery of the women, for whom escape is to be owned by only one man, is balanced by the limited gratifications of sisterhood. There’s no telling when the domination by men will turn violent. The film is as languorous as the sequestered lives of the prostitutes, with a fractured time sequence and odd juxtapositions of much later music, but ultimately effective, if a bit suffocating.

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Now we turn from the cash nexus of sex to the joys and sorrows of post-adolescent passion. Goodbye First Love (2012, MC-80, NFX) is Mia Hanson-Løve’s follow-up to Father of My Children, as impressive a start to a young woman’s directorial career as Sarah Polley’s. Mia has no doubt been abetted by her close association with Olivier Assayas, but is clearly a talent in her own right, and this story has a very personal touch and feel. A 15-year-old girl, played with conviction by Lola Créton, is passionately and precociously in love with a boy a few years older, who leaves her behind to go off on a South American adventure. While she longs for him even more in his absence, his attention wanders, and she is crushed. We jump-cut to her several years later, hair cut short, as an architecture student who eventually moves in with her teacher. The boy returns, and she faces a choice. Key moments tend to be elided, while other scenes linger with sensuous and emotional intensity. The story is not so much dramatized, but presented with a directness of personal testimony that speaks to a common, if not universal, feeling. A bright new chapter in the great French tradition of libidinal romance.

Damsels in Distress (2012, MC-67, NFX) approaches college-age romance in an entirely different way, with arch comedy. It was one thing for Whit Stillman to look at his own generation with a preppy raised eyebrow from Metropolitan to The Last Days of Disco, but to revive those attitudes in a contemporary setting, in a cast led by Greta Gerwig, indie It-girl of the moment, yields more cognitive dissonance than wry humor. The film tries for wacky, but winds up mostly whack. If you’re light enough in the loafers to be tickled by the idea of tap dancing as therapy for suicidal depression, then you might like it.

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Here are two more takes on contemporary romance among the twentysomethings, both of which I liked more than I would have guessed, though not enough to urgently recommend. The directors of Little Miss Sunshine, which I did not care for at all, return with Ruby Sparks (2012, MC-67, NFX), which is made palatable by Zoe Kazan (Elia’s granddaughter), who wrote the script and plays the lead, accompanied by her real-life boyfriend, Paul Dano. He’s a rather implausible wunderkind writer, blocked for a decade after early success, who at the advice of his shrink (Elliott Gould) starts to write about a dream girl, who comes into real existence in a way that first confounds and then tempts him, as he tries solipsistically to enslave her to his own desires and prescriptions. We’re in Charlie Kaufman territory here, but without the grounding in concrete reality as springboard to wild imaginative conceit. The white-on-white La-La Land bungalow in which the writer lives, as well as the manual typewriter on which he composes his girlfriend, are too outlandish to generate any baseline conviction from which the fantasy can leap. That said, Zoe is charming and attractive in an offbeat way, and Dano mugs for all he’s worth, while some cameos click (Annette Bening as the boy’s mother) and some fizzle (Steve Coogan as a frenemy writer). It’s a piece of light entertainment that is not insulting to one’s intelligence.

Similarly, Sleepwalk with Me (2012, MC-71, NFX) follows the efforts of a nebbish to come to terms with a dreamgirl. Mike Birbiglia adapts his stand-up routine, about his inability to commit to his longtime girlfriend, into a surprisingly effective film, ably assisted by a loveable Lauren Ambrose, with whom our sympathies lie as this schlub proceeds systematically to lose her, in a manner as self-damaging as his habit of sleepwalking into danger. He says he doesn’t want to get married till he’s sure nothing better is going to happen in his life, so he forsakes the best thing that ever happened to him -- unless you count this film. A modest and generally appealing amusement.

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At least since The Son’s Room, I have admired the Italian director and actor Nanni Moretti. His latest film is We Have a Pope (2012, MC-64, NFX), which is a comedy about what happens inside the Vatican enclave as a new Pope is chosen, seamlessly meshing with documentary exteriors of an actual papal transition. Unfortunately the tone does not mesh seamlessly, as a crisis develops when the Pope selected changes his mind and goes on the lam. Michel Piccoli is quite moving as the old man who quails at being chosen by God (or political maneuvering) for the awesome responsibility of the care of a billion souls. Moretti himself is less successful as the psychiatrist brought in to convince him to accept the role, who is sequestered with the cardinals and engages them in a slapstick volleyball tournament. The film displays both humor and pathos, as well as pungent political commentary, but adds up to less than the sum of its disparate parts.

In Quiet Chaos (2009, MC-51, NFX), Moretti writes and stars but turns over direction to Antonello Grimaldi, and I found it much better than its mediocre Metacritic score. You never really know where the film is going, right from the beginning, when the Moretti character and his brother save two women from drowning, but then he returns home and finds his wife has died suddenly. Stunned by this turn of events, when he takes his 10-year-old daughter back to school and she is apprehensive, he promises to wait all day in the park just opposite the school. He proceeds to do so, and continues to do so every day, coming to know the denizens of the park, and letting his business partners, in the throes of a corporate takeover, bring their respective concerns to the park (the big boss played in a surprising cameo by Roman Polanski). It’s really an affecting journey through the stages of grief, even though the corporate plotting is somewhat opaque, but Moretti’s performance carries the film.

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In this heyday of 3-D computer animation, it’s nice to know hand-drawn 2-D animation still flourishes. Here are a couple of recent examples that enchant even when they do not totally satisfy. The fluid lines of Oscar nominee Chico & Rita (2012, MC-76, NFX) dance to the Cuban music that the film celebrates, with a sexiness that makes this no cartoon for kids. The romance of the title characters is a tad formulaic, but the sense of ambiance, both in pre-Castro Havana and bebop jazz New York, carries the film.

Another film in which the backgrounds are more compelling than the foreground characters or story is The Secret World of Arrietty (2012, MC-80, NFX), an adaptation of the children’s novel The Borrowers by Studio Ghibli (overseen but not directed by Hayao Miyazaki), whose films I always prefer to watch in the original Japanese with subtitles rather than in English with well-known celebrity voices. Arrietty is a brave little girl, very little, maybe three inches high, but an intrepid explorer in the realm of humans, from whom her family scavenges and adapts the basics of life. To see her run through a garden or kitchen is to be transported to a magical yet familiar world, with a new perspective on the adventure of living in the visual world.

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My final coupling of films is definitely odd, completely different crowd-pleasers with which I was somewhat less pleased than the crowd. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012, MC-62, NFX) rounds up a lot of usual suspects from the magnificent ranks of mature British actors and actresses, and plops them into the colorful and chaotic world of an Indian city, but doesn’t give them much to do or take them any place new. A random group of retirees are lured by low prices and lavish promises to a ramshackle hotel inherited by Dev Patel, the young man from Slumdog Millionaire. They have a predictable variety of reactions when they see where they have actually landed, and director John Madden does these veterans no favors in working out their respective fates. Bill Nighy comes through best, Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson are reliably watchable, but Maggie Smith and some of the others are reduced to self-contradictory caricatures of their usual personae. For a much better look at the bittersweet reality of Britons in retirement, see Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005, MC-67, NFX), starring Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend (more recently of Homeland).

There’s no gainsaying the energy of Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike (2012, MC-72, NFX) or the appeal of Channing Tatum as he takes off his clothes and contorts his hunky body into provocative poses, to the squealing delight of fantasy-hungry female fans, who stuff dollar bills into his leather jockstrap. This gender turnabout is humorous and revealing, and also allows Matthew McConaughey to strut his still-buff stuff in winning self-mockery as the leader of the “Cock-Rocking Kings of Tampa.” So far, so good, in an amusing if inconsequential way, but attempts at seriousness fail to convince or enlighten. Tatum’s aspirations beyond the fake-sex-for-money game are rather hackneyed and the saving romance is perfunctory, but if you want to get rowdy and watch rippling muscles and thrusting pelvises, then this could be the movie for you.

Cinema Salon

Friday, December 28, 2012

Winter films at the Clark

Odd couples

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