Under the Kanopy

Over on Kanopy, the library-based alternative to Criterion, I found a new film I was very eager to see, The Old Oak (MC-69), reportedly Ken Loach’s final film.  And a fine swan song it is.  The title is the name of the surviving pub in an old mining village near Durham, where the mine shut down years ago, and in 2016 Syrian refugees are being bussed in to reside in vacant houses.  Dave Turner plays the depressed pub owner who is helping to get them settled (a former union man who is a proponent of solidarity rather than charity), and first-timer Ebla Mari superbly embodies the soulful young woman with whom he forms a platonic bond.  She’s an aspiring photographer who learned English in a refugee camp and speaks for her mother and younger brothers, with their father still imprisoned by the Assad regime.  There’s a Greek chorus of down-at-heels pub dwellers, undoubted Brexit voters who resent the newcomers, but who have a valid point about their own abandonment by the powers-that-be once the mine shut down.  Loach remains a progressive social critic, but allows himself a final expression of hope in the collective strength of the powerless joining together.
 
Also on Kanopy, Martin Scorsese follows up his “personal journeys” through American and Italian film with Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (MC-83), in which he relates his intimate appreciation for the films of The Archers, the partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  He doesn’t just survey their Forties string of masterpieces from Colonel Blimp through I Know Where I’m Going and Black Narcissus to The Red Shoes, but also recounts his early viewings as a sickly child stuck at home and struck by seeing them on a small b&w tv, and his ultimate appropriation of some of their techniques in his own distinguished films, not to mention the close personal relationship he developed with Powell.  This documentary is excellent as an introduction to The Archers’ work or a reminder of their greatness, either way a prompt to watch these classic films, most available on the Criterion Channel.
 
Another Kanopy find was Aisha (MC-81).  The title character, a Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland, is movingly played by Letitia Wright, a revelation to me but apparently already a star in the Marvel universe.  She’s hard-working and kind, but perpetually jerked around by the system.  A security guard in her group home, played by the always-accomplished Josh O’Connor (whose lower-class Irish accent requires captions more than her Nigerian inflections), takes an interest in her and tries to help her navigate the rocky road to permanent resident status.  Frank Berry’s film delicately follows the reticent arc of their relationship, in addition to documenting the harsh realities of immigrant life.
 
I’m always up for a new Virginie Efira film, so I was happy to see Just the Two of Us (MC-65) pop up on Kanopy’s new releases.  Perhaps you would need to share my (and the French film industry’s) infatuation with her to really like this film; or my attachment to strong, independent actresses in the mold of Barbara Stanwyck; or fondness for Sirkian “women’s picture” melodramas.  Valerie Donzelli’s film may be marketed as an erotic thriller, but it’s really a portrait of a marriage gone wrong.  We witness the first spark between Efira and co-star Melvil Poupaud burst into hot romance and quick marriage, and follow step by step as she begins to realize her husband is a domestic abuser, subtly at first and then overtly.  Efira has a double role as twin sisters, also alluded to in the title, but her husband breaks that bond to maintain exclusive control.  Tension is ratcheted up, but the violence is more emotional than physical.
 
That warmed me up for another French-language exploration of mating habits, The Nature of Love (MC-80), written and directed by the Canadian Monia Chokri.  The philosophical rom-com is a rare amalgam, and on the scale that runs from my personal favorite Eric Rohmer to a crowd-pleaser-that-doesn’t-please-me such as The Worst Person in the World, this one edges over the line toward the latter.  The unknown-to-me performers are all appealing enough, but the main character’s alternation of her classroom lectures to seniors on various philosophers’ definitions of love, her unexciting long-term relationship to a decent well-off guy, and her steamy Lady Chatterley interludes with the workman renovating their lake house in the country, fail to come together in a mutually satisfying way.  The social comedy with friends and relatives comes off best, but neither the romance nor the comedy of the woman’s quandary really landed with me.   
 
Turning back from romance to politics, here are several highly-praised films that I found on Kanopy:
 
Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border (MC-90) is a punishing but rewarding film about the immigration crisis on the wooded, swampy border between Belarus and Poland.  We follow a group of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan as they become helpless pawns in a geopolitical conflict, pushed back and forth by paramilitary units on both sides of the barbed wire.  This documentary-like film, brilliantly shot in black & white, is an immersive experience, bearing witness to all-too-prevalent human misery.  (And eliciting uncomfortable reflections on what’s about to happen on our own southern border.)  We follow a three-generation family group from their hopeful arrival by plane in Belarus, with arrangements to cross over into the E.U. to seek asylum with relatives in Sweden, joined by an “auntie” who speaks English and has money to offer bribes along the way.  Step by step, all that is stripped away, reducing them to the “animals” they are accused of being.  Their fates interweave with two other stories, of a border guard with some compunction about the mandated brutality, and a psychologist who joins up with a group of activists who provide what help they can to the refugees.  Thankfully, the film reaches some final gestures of ambivalent hope, or it would be just too dark to bear.  This caps Holland’s long, distinguished, international career in film and tv direction, but she’s not done yet, currenting shooting a film about Franz Kafka.
 
Too much of a good thing.  That’s how I would characterize Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat (MC-91), an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary.  It’s a vital retelling of a nearly-forgotten episode in C.I.A. “diplomacy” – the assassination of Patrice Lumumba -- weaving together disparate themes in an effective manner, which is undermined by some stylistic innovations and a cavalier disregard for chronology.  Rather than voiceover, quotations are typed out on screen, with tiny citations that are impossible to take in, which adds to the visual jumble.  The basic juxtaposition of global Black liberation and American reaction around 1960, with performance clips of a variety of Black jazz musicians, does yield context for Louis Armstrong’s CIA-backed blackwashing tour of Africa at the time.  And examinations of Cold War ideology – embodied in Allen Dulles’ pipe-smoking smugness and Khruschev’s desk-pounding at the U.N. – are well-served by bringing in the commentary of Malcolm X on Third World decolonization and racialism.  A lot is covered, from the Suez crisis to the Congolese civil war, but the viewer must supply their own timeline to make sense of the sequence of events.  Lumumba himself remains an enigma, but Belgian director Johan Grimonpriz amply documents not just the Belgian mining concern that fomented division in the former colony, but the American pattern of undermining the elected leaders of other countries for its own political, economic, or strategic interests.
 
Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano (MC-79) won lots of awards and nominations last year, but I was daunted by the grim subject matter and delayed watching.  The story of two teenage cousins leaving Senegal in pursuit of some dream of Europe is hard and dark, rife with exploitation and savagery at every turn, but also heroism and endurance.  From endless bus rides to a brutal truck ride to treks on foot across a trackless expanse of desert to a perilous boat ride with Sicily as the goal, the boys are expressively depicted, subject to trials and torture graphically rendered.  It’s definitely a tough watch, but sure to engender compassion for the fates of so many immigrants worldwide, at least by those capable of compassion.  The end may seem improbable, but this true story was the germ of the film, along with the documentary testimony of actual immigrants.  
 
Are you ready for a three-hour Vietnamese film about death, faith, and immortality?  It took me a while to get there, but I was grateful for the experience.  Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (MC-94) is certainly a rarified taste.  I admired filmmaker Thien An Pham’s debut feature for its stylistic audacity, but did not always muster the patience he requires.  Still, so much of the film is beautiful and magical, verging on spiritual, that I didn’t mind the longueurs and the enigmas, many of which resolve if you’re willing to wait and pay close attention.  The story (and the camera) weaves its way back and forth in time and space, light and dark, dream and waking.  It follows a young man from the countryside, morally adrift in Saigon, who is forced by family tragedy to return to his home village, in a wandering and wondering search for lost connections.  The viewer is compelled to face the same question as the character, “What exactly is happening here?”  Not to mention, where is this going and when will it end?  These three hours are slow (and puzzling) to be sure, but worth the journey.
 
How about an under-two-hour Swedish film about death, faith, and immortality?  Hilma (MC-61) is a lot easier to watch, and it’s even in English, as most of journeyman director Lasse Hallstrom’s films have been.  This biopic of the belatedly-celebrated painter Hilma af Klint is sort of a home movie for him, as she is well played by daughter Tora Hallstrom in younger years and wife Lena Olin in later years.  It’s a lush period piece (incorporating old color footage of Stockholm street scenes) that does justice to the artist’s amazing story and her work.  She can be called a credible precursor to both Kandinsky and Pollock in painterly abstraction.  Her purity of vision prefigured her eventual resurrection.  Kanopy also offers the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (MC-78), which got my enthusiastic recommendation here (scroll down to end of that post).  
 
Having just watched Emilia Perez, I took the opportunity to watch Jacques Audiard’s previous film, Paris, 13^th District (MC-76).  If he was channeling Baz Luhrman in the newer film, he seems to have been bent on updating Eric Rohmer in the earlier.  You can probably guess which I prefer.  This black &white sexual roundelay of young people, set in an unglamorous section of the French capital of love, recalls several Rohmer films and has a decided nouvelle vague feel.  It also benefits from the writing assistance of Céline Sciamma, and her star from Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Noémie Merlant.  We follow our four lead characters from bed to bed, as the connections shift.  Tastefully sexy, the film is deliciously humorous and deftly characterized – just what one wants from a French rom-com in the age of Tinder.
 
Finally on Kanopy, there’s One Life (MC-69), a perfectly decent Schindler’s List Lite, in which a British stockbroker organizes an effort to get hundreds of refugee children out of Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of WWII, with his effort memorialized by a television program with the survivors in the 1980s.  He’s played by Johnny Flynn in the flashback sequences and Anthony Hopkins in the latter time frame.  Not a bad film, but nothing new or particularly revealing.  Striking how many of the films covered in this post deal with refugees and immigrants from a European perspective.
 
Besides these new releases, Kanopy has a huge back catalogue of films and tv shows, foreign and domestic, classic and recent.  If you have a school or public library card, it’s worth checking to see if it gives free access to Kanopy.  It’s even worth the effort to acquire a qualifying library card.  Start here.
 
[DVD addendum]  Getting a mammoth boxed set of Elia Kazan films from the library, I watched two I had never seen, from the beginning to the climax of his career as film director.  Kazan has made some of my favorite films, from On the Waterfront to Splendor in the Grass, but somehow I managed to miss his first, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Wiki), about an Irish-American family in Williamsburg in 1912.  After a prodigious career in NYC theater, this uncharacteristic assignment was the first film he directed.  Some traces of stage acting remain, but by the end more trust in the camera begins to emerge.  Peggy Ann Garner is more natural than most child actresses of the time, and won a special Oscar, as did James Dunn as her father, a good-hearted but alcoholic singing waiter.  Dorothy Maguire has the thankless role as the spoilsport drudge of a housewife, with Joan Blondell as her spirited sister.  Very watchable, on the whole.
 
Like me an ethnic loner as a student at Williams College, Kazan mined his immigrant background in America America (Wiki), telling the largely true story of his uncle, who emigrated as an ethnic Greek from Turkey (eventually bringing Kazan over from his birthplace Istanbul, as a child with his parents).  In widescreen B&W, with more than a hint of neorealism in its depiction, the film follows our young hero (?) from Armenian massacres in Anatolia to rug merchants in Istanbul to slave labor in order to purchase passage to America, and final arrival in the promised land of dreams.  Cinematographer Haskell Wexler and editor Dede Allen help Kazan make his favorite and most personal film, and certainly one of his best.