3 Cyranos

The character of Cyrano is so familiar, in the common coin of cultural currency, that it came as a surprise to find that I didn’t really know the play at all, aside from the basic premise. And an even greater surprise to find out how deep and resonant it is. I couldn’t have told you that Rostand’s play premiered in 1897, that it was written in Alexandrine verse, or that it was considered the last great popular historical romance. So the 1990 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and starring Gerard Depardieu came as a revelation to me, most in how close to home the theme felt -- the fond hope that beauty of language may be more attractive than beauty of person, closer to the soul. Lavishly produced and festooned with awards, this French production is meticulous in its recreation of a 17th century milieu. The music of the language comes through even when one knows little French, and the subtitles written by Anthony Burgess effectively transmit the poetic meaning. This film made Depardieu an international star (after he had made 80 of his 160 films to date), and he is both an imposing and a wistful presence, swashbuckling and sensitive, up to rousing action and to plaintive retreat as well. And it’s easy to fall for Roxanne in the person of Anne Brochet. All round, an impeccable adaptation. *8+*

Jose Ferrer won a Best Actor Oscar for the 1950 Hollywood version of Cyrano de Bergerac and his way with the poetry in translation makes this highly watchable as well, sticking close to the play itself, or at least to the French movie. The other credits are unfamiliar, but while Michael Gordon’s direction is workaday, stage-set stuff, Mala Powers was good enough as Roxanne to make one wonder why she didn’t have much of a career thereafter. All round, an honorable adaptation. *7+*

So then I went back and watched Steve Martin as an updated Cyrano in Roxanne (1987), which was probably my only direct acquaintance with the character heretofore. It’s certainly charming enough as a contemporary romantic comedy, with Fred Schepisi directing well in a Rocky Mountain town setting and Darryl Hannah as charming as Roxanne (Kowalski, in this case) as she was as a mermaid in Splash, but just as imaginary. Martin as scriptwriter jettisons most of the plot and all of the poetry, retaining a few bravura scenes and some of that wistful faith in the power of words. His fire chief C.D. Bales is as adept as the traditional Cyrano in some ways, though in others the film is somewhat slapsticky. Still, a competent and amusing effort, which suffers only by close comparison to the original. *7-*

Notes on a Scandal

Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett -- ’nuff said. They’re not the only good things about this film, but they are a sufficient recommendation. As directed by Richard Eyre from a Patrick Marber adaptation of a Zoe Heller novel, it surmounts two liabilities going in, a spoken narration and an overbearing musical score by Phillip Glass, until the conclusion resorts to histrionics instead of a quiet chill of psychological menace. But you’re in fascinating company with Dame Judi and babe Cate, the former an old battle-ax of a history teacher and the latter a novice art teacher at a London high school, who fall in with each other out of asymmetric need. Dench needs the companionship of a protege, needs to touch the life and person of a younger woman; Blanchett needs the excitement she missed when at 20 she married an older man and disappeared into motherhood, needs the touch of a younger man -- much younger, a 15 year old student of hers. The older woman wants to be a confidante, but settles for emotional blackmail when she discovers the younger woman’s affair. It’s a game of cat and mouse that turns into a fur-flying cat fight. Again, the two stars save the film, because they make their basically odious characters intriguing and even sympathetic (something an accomplished quartet could not do with the misanthopic Marber’s script for Closer.) They each get a quiet scene at the end, but not before things get very noisy indeed. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)

Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World.)

Subdued but ravishing, this Alain Corneau film makes the case for music not just as the essence of human feeling, but as a way to raise the dead, literally a resurrection of spirit. Gerard Depardieu is court composer to Louis XIV, and though resplendent in ribbons and lace amidst the Baroque splendor of Versailles, he owes his soul to his severe mentor on the viola da gamba. He recalls his teacher in extended flashback in which his character is played by Depardieu’s own son, Guillaume. Jean-Pierre Marielle is the old Jansenist who becomes even more hermetic on the sudden death of his beautiful young wife, and neglects his two young daughters except for their musical education. Anne Brochet is the elder, who falls in love with the younger Depardieu, who insinuates himself into the master’s household but lacks the feeling to reciprocate in full. Later, after success at court, the older Depardieu is mortified into renewed submission to the tutelage of his master, now stripped of all human connection except through his music. A still life painting figures in the story as a parallel to music in art, nature morte indeed, and the cinematography by Yves Angelo is painterly in the extreme. Though I put together this “Age of Claude: Films of Painting and Performance in the 17th Century” series rather casually around a tenuous hook, it turned out to be much more powerful and coherent than I expected, with this film offering a perfect summation. (1992, dvd@cai, r.) *8+*

Heading South

Make a mental note of the name Laurent Cantet -- with this successor to Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001) he establishes himself as a director who guarantees an intellectually engaging film. Keenly attuned to the realities of economic life, he brings a political agenda that is tempered by a tough-minded empathy that extends across class lines. So this is a film about neocolonialism and sexual tourism, with lots to say about race and gender, but with clear-eyed sympathy for all its characters, except for Baby Doc Duvalier’s thugs in 1970s Haiti. We arrive with Karen Young (recognizable as Adrianna’s FBI case agent from The Sopranos) at a beachside resort, where she makes a beeline for a black youth lying on the beach, and soon meets Charlotte Rampling, a French literature professor from Wellesley who is the rooster-hen who rules this migratory roost of aging birds, well-off white women nesting with pretty black boys. They vie for the attentions and favor of the beautiful young man, who has troubles of his own outside the sequestered confines of this paradisal resort on an infernal island. There is no reflexive moralism here, but rather an honest acknowledgement of mutual need, and revelation of character under emotional stress. There is no taking of sides, just a depth-charged understanding of each side. Beautiful to look at, this film is even more impressive to think about. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-73.)

A week’s wrap-up

I’ve seen a lot of films in the past week, but I’m not up to offering succinct summations and assigned ratings, so I’ll make do with a series of rambling observations.

I was amazed to discover I had never seen Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) before showing it in the Clark auditorium as the penultimate film in my “Age of Claude” series about painting and performance in the 17th century. I assumed my memory was merely vague and nonspecific, but somehow I’d missed this film despite all its accolades (5 Oscar noms & 1 win, 11 Cesars, Cannes grand prize) and despite the fact I had it in my Video Archive at Either/Or (I confirmed by checking online with the Milne Library in Williamstown, where the collection now resides.) (Since I’m rambling anyway, I will digress to remind you that the Milne Library also gets the DVDs of all the films I show at the Clark, available to anyone with a Western Mass library card.) Anyway, this Cyrano was so good, I moved two other versions to the top of my Netflix queue and will review all three together soon. This lavish French production starring Gerard Depardieu and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau will be hard to beat.

So that made two weeks in a row for my first time ever showing a film I’d never seen, and it worked out fine. I put this series together rather casually, so I’ve been surprised myself by its excellence, in detail and in sum -- as well as in audience response. If you’re in the area, I can offer a definite recommendation for the final film in the series this Friday at 4:00, another Gerard Depardieu film, this time playing a court composer to Louis XIV in All the Mornings of the World (Tout les Matins du Monde.)

Otherwise my watching has been an unaccountable mishmash, which I will organize into arbitrary double features. First off, my impromptu Rico Tubbs duo: I never watched the 80s tv show Miami Vice, so it took me a while to figure out who that familiar face was in Sparkle (1976), and it took the final credits for me to sort out his three first names, Phillip Michael Thomas. I did recognize Irene Cara as the title character, but I wonder why I didn’t recognize Lonette McKee as her older sister -- she had so much screen presence and yet I don’t remember her from anything else. Anyway this DVD release piggybacked on the theatrical release of Dreamgirls (which I missed but await on DVD), and some reviews cited it as a better film about a Supremes-like girl group in the early Sixties. Though this film certainly had moments of exuberance in the early going, it limply followed a template already old thirty years ago. I actually enjoyed it a bit, but it is definitely not something I would recommend.

In Michael Mann’s self-appropriation of Miami Vice for the big screen (2006), Tubbs is played by Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell is Crockett, and Gong Li (!) is the drug queen. All four are more than capable of holding the screen on their own, so this thriller is continuously watchable though intermittently intelligible. Rather than sun-kissed, this is a dark, tangled vision of a Carribean crossroads between heaven and hell -- fast, frantic, obsessive, visually striking but not particularly rewarding. I actually admired it a bit, but it is definitely not something I would recommend. (MC-65, me: *6*)

Now another ad hoc duo: very, very French films about amorous conflicts, notable for the ambition of the director and the astounding magnetism of the female lead. Isabelle Huppert has been as ubiquitous as Gerard Deperdieu in French film of the last three decades, and is equally capable of ringing changes on her persona. In Gabrielle (2005) she might just have recycled Madame Bovary in another tale of erotic misery, this from a story by Joseph Conrad, adapted by Patrice Chereau, but she plumbs new depths of despair as an upper class trophy wife who leaves her husband but then chickens out and returns within hours, but not before he has read the note she left behind, so devastating to his complacent self-regard (well embodied by Pascal Greggory.) Chereau’s direction is typically unblinking in its view of emotional desolation, though a little over-ingenious with switches between black & white and color, title cards, jump cuts, and other violations of cinematic convention. The two performances carry the day, however, grim as the proceedings may be. (MC-79, me: *7-*)

Large claims are made for Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours (To Our Loves) (1984), just released on DVD with full Criterion Collection treatment, but for me it was made remarkable just by the star-is-born debut of a 15-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire, as the confusedly promiscuous teenage daughter in a disintegrating family. Even if unaware of the subsequent career that would take her from Vagabond to Joan the Maid and many other notable films, you can feel the camera fall in love with her immediately, the subdued watchfulness broken too rarely by the radiant smile. That doesn’t mean you can really understand the actions of her character, or the rest of her dreadful family. The absconding father is played by Pialat himself, and the American correlative would be the films of John Cassavetes, to whom I never responded particularly and haven’t watched lately, despite his having become a touchstone for so many critics and young filmmakers. So this film is painfully intimate, ragged and supposedly real. I don’t know about that, but I do know that Sandrine is always a woman to watch.

Next up are two documentaries from 2006 that I TiVo’d from IFC and PBS respectively, but which are also available on DVD. Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated effectively demystifies the MPAA film rating system, but its efforts to be entertaining come across as cute and puerile, so I appreciate the service it provides but discern special interest pleading in its Metacritic score of 75. Contrariwise, a collective score of 79 doesn’t do full justice to Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: the Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, which interweaves a wealth of material into a powerful summation of an 1978 event that for someone of my generation and inclination was one of the horrific peaks of historical and emotional devastation on the continuum from the JFK assasination to 9/11. This perversion of hope into tragedy, as a vibrant and idealistic community committed suicide at the behest of a deranged leader, more than 900 people drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid in the isolated jungle of Guyana, is something that made my life sadder but wiser, and this film makes it present again in a judicious but lacerating manner.

While on the subject of documentaries, let me reiterate my strong recommendation that you catch up with Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel or on DVD -- it really represents the state of the art when it comes to nature cinematography, and it doesn’t dilute the wonder of evolutionary diversity with excessive anthropomorphism. This week I will be watching the ballyhooed PBS series, America at the Crossroads, and will report back to you..

The Mother

Roger Michell is not a name that leaps to mind when one talks about the best directors working today, but maybe it should. Persuasion was the best of a spate of Jane Austen adaptations in the 90s, and Notting Hill is about as good as a frothy romantic comedy can get. Here he does well by a Hanif Kureishi script, with its characteristic candor and insight into the erotic lives of contemporary Londoners. It starts almost like a British transposition of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (a great place to start!), with provincial parents paying an unwanted visit to their upwardly mobile children in the city, in an excruciating clash of culture and family. But when the father dies suddenly, the mother can’t go home again, and intrudes on the life of her children, most grievously by involving herself with her daughter’s lover. Anne Reid is pitch perfect as the difficult woman in her 60s trying to imagine a new life for herself, and Daniel Craig (who is emerging as one of the best actors working today) convinces equally as the 30ish man who feels sympathy and something more for her, despite or because of the disorder of his own existence. Now we’re in the terrain of Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (a great place to wind up!), an unblinking look at the erotic connection between an older woman and a younger man, each character all too real. The result is well-wrought and well-judged, with a dynamic visual style and a strong emotional pull. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-72.)

Carnival in Flanders (La Kermesse Heroique.)

This was the first time I’d ever programmed a film at the Clark that I hadn’t seen myself, based only on critical reputation and fit with the theme of the series. Otherwise unavailable in this country, I had to order a DVD from Britain and rely on the A-V wizardry of the Clark auditorium manager to find a way to show it. The film turned out to be well worth the effort, a true specimen of the golden age of French filmmaking (pre-New Wave, that is.) Exquisitely designed and wittily directed by Jacques Feyder, it brilliantly evokes the world and style of native Flemish masters, particularly Brueghel, while demonstrating political and cultural prescience in its amusing dissection of the war between men and women, as well as occupier and occupied in the military sense. When a Spanish army on the march stops in a remote Flanders town, the men run and hide and the women take up the conjoined causes of homeland defense and sexual liberation. Entertaining and provocative, this is an old film with a modern spirit. (1935, dvd@cai, n.) *8*

The Lives of Others

Though Pan’s Labyrinth would win my vote, this German film from first-time writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnesmarck was a worthy choice for best foreign film at the Oscars. It’s portrayal of East Germany’s transition from the gray, Stasi-haunted landscape before the fall of the Wall, to the graffitti-plastered freedom of re-unification is extremely persuasive. The focal character, played with just the right touch of melting steel by Ulrich Muhe, is reminiscent of Gene Hackman in The Conversation, the agent experienced in surveillance and interrogation gradually changed by the lives he spies into, in this case a playwright of ambiguous affiliation and the actress/muse he lives with. The film runs a little long as it tries to pack in resolution of all its themes, and the central conceit that if you are receptive to art and beauty then you must have a conscience, and a soul despite the stoniness of your personality, is rather baldly stated -- but carried off by the skill of the performances and detail of the filmmaking. (2006, Landmark Chicago, n.) *8-* (MC-89.)

The Notorious Bettie Page

Slight but well-made, Mary Harron’s film about the Fifties pin-up queen is surprisingly charming. The same can be said for Gretchen Mol in the title role, really delightful in both appearance and personality. The B&W evocation of the era is slightly reminiscent of Good Night and Good Luck, though here David Strathairn plays Estes Kefauver instead of Edward R. Murrow. Along with Lili Taylor, he typifies the top to bottom quality of this production. Rather than heavy breathing over pornography or censorship, this film comes across as good-natured and winsome as its subject, a Southern girl of religious bent who was preternaturally comfortable undressing and dressing up for the camera, even in bondage regalia, innocent and yet kinky. Bettie/Gretchen is as sunny in aspect as the colorful Florida interludes that punctuate the film in faux-Technicolor, more sweet and funny than powerful or penetrating, but still a thoughtful effort all round. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-64.)

HBO and other spectacles

Though the HBO documentary series Addiction is not pinpointed to my interests, I have been watching because it brings together an all-star lineup of documentarians, really everybody from Pennebaker and Maysles forward, with characteristic work from Barbara Kopple (about the Steamfitters Union’s self-insured and union-run alcohol treatment program) and Berlinger & Sinofsky (about Boston Drug Court.) All of these notable filmmakers submerge their identities in the oddly configured series, which is surely destined more for DVD than broadcast. All the various stories are squeezed into a 90 minute compilation, and then offered with more completion as a supplemental series of 15-30 minute films. If the subject interests you from a personal or therapeutic standpoint, or if you might appreciate a compilation album of the finest documentarists, then this series would be worth your time. It certainly hammered home its main scientific point with me, that addiction is a disease of the brain that we are learning more and more about, and that it is amenable to treatment based on extensive experience and experiment.

Another sort of HBO series to which I made a completist commitment has just concluded, and I have to say that I was not sorry to see Rome end, even though the story cuts off with the rise of Augustus. I would put it in a category with trashy but readable historical fiction. There’s enough history and visual opulence to keep you watching, spiced with blood and sex for those who like it hot. If you go in for the ultraviolence and a bit of the old inandout, you will find it horrorshow. (Turns out the Roman past is just as brutal as the Clockwork Orange future, and twice as alien.) If you like historical reconstructions, you will find plenty to keep your eyes busy, and some to keep your mind busy as well. Dramatically it’s just a lavish soap opera, with villains and villainesses, shocking revelations, broad emotions, and sex-sex-sex -- not that that’s a bad thing, you understand.

For different reasons, I had occasion to look at two recent cinematic spectacles that met with lukewarm critical receptions, and I found myself sharing the averaged reaction represented by their cumulative Metacritic scores, giving both a *5+*. I watched Idlewild (2006, dvd, n.) because it was strongly recommended by one of the critics I trust most, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com. (I think our disagreements must be confined to musicals, since I remember her disparaging one I liked a lot, Gurinder Chadha’s faux-Bollywood Bride & Prejudice.) Anyway, when it comes to OutKast, I’m an outcast -- never heard a song of theirs, didn’t recognize them as the stars of this film -- so I’m out of it from the get-go. Even if I bought into Bryan Barber’s hyperkinetic vision of a 1930s speakeasy in Idlewild, Georgia, once the music started and the singers started rapping, I was distanced from the proceedings in a way I wasn’t by the anachronism of, say, Marie Antoinette. (MC-55.)

Though I’d enjoyed the book, poor reviews kept me from Rob Marshall’s adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha. (2005, dvd, n.) There was something just so Hollywood in the way the movie had three Chinese actresses playing Japanese geishas speaking English -- that sort of cultural “whatever” smacked of the old days of painted movie illusion. But on the other hand, those three Chinese actresses were Gong Li, Ziyi Zhang, and Michelle Yeoh, so that’s some serious star power to go with dazzling beauty. Which of course the film ladles on in a big way. So the eye candy is certainly sufficient to make this a watchable experience, as obvious and inert as the film may be dramatically. (MC-54.)

A different sort of spectacle is on view in Rize (2005, dvd, n.), a rap musical I could get behind, about a form of rapid, even violent, but artful street dance indigenous to the mean streets of L.A., various strains of which convey a different sort of communal identity from Crips and Bloods. This is the first documentary from David LaChapelle, apparently known for his fashion photography and music videos. That background comes through in the disjointed quality of the film, watchable in its moments but not cumulative in its impact. This is no Paris Is Burning, the marvelous and deeply moving 1990 documentary about the vogue for vogueing among a community of transvestites in NYC. It’s less a journey than a gyration, but it does give voice to lives less noticed. *6* (MC-74.)

One last note before I’m away for a week: if you are partial to spectacular nature documentaries, I advise you to tune into the series Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel or on DVD. It represents the state of the art -- awesome in the truest sense of the word.

Little Children

Not a bad film, but a major disappointment based on expectations from previous work of director Todd Field (In the Bedroom) and writer Tom Perrotta (Election, Joe College, this novel), particular favorites of mine. No disappointment in Kate Winslet -- by herself she makes the film worth watching -- except for the potential criticism of being too beautiful for the role. Though I guess they were setting the bar high by making her only have to be less beautiful than the wife of straying hubby Patrick Wilson, played by Jennifer Connelly. Jackie Earle Haley won a lot of praise for his comeback role as the paroled pedophile who inflames the passions of a well-off suburban New England community and sets in motion what story there is. I for one thought the movie, and the original novel, would have been better off without that character at all. As it was, I found the film all over the place and uncertain of tone, with some very good scenes and some very strained scenes, patched together with a most annoying narration. On the one hand, it was good to hear Perrotta’s wry novelistic voice, but on the other it betokened a failure of focus and imagination in the film as an independent entity. And it was disconcerting that the actual narrator’s voice was familiar from dozens of PBS documentaries, throwing me out of the proceedings even more. This film might have been Rohmeresque, if not Flaubertian, but settled for the desperation of housewives and the hyped up terrors of suburbia. (2006, Images, n.) *6* (MC-75)

Burn! (Queimada!)

I’ve been looking for this film for a long time, since it is Gillo Pontecorvo’s follow-up to Battle of Algiers, in my view one of the greatest films ever. Plus Brando! In a way it wasn’t a disappointment to watch, even though it was a mess, just too many elements that fail to coalesce. How long is it? What language is it? Apparently there is an 132 minute version in the “original” Italian, so Brando is dubbed. The recently-released dvd here is twenty minutes shorter, and in English, so you get Marlon’s second stab at a Fletcher Christian accent in his own voice, and everyone else is dubbed. He plays William Walker, who’s an international adventurer/fixer for the Queen’s Navy, who first comes to this Antilles island to foment revolt among the canecutters against the Portuguese, and then returns ten years later to put down revolt among the same people against the English now in control. The island of Queimada -- which literally means “burned-over” -- was initially colonized when the Portuguese burned out the natives and brought in African slaves to work the sugar plantations. Walker revisits that strategy against the slave insurgency in 1848. The contemporaneous Vietnam connections are obvious and powerful, the billows of flame recalling nothing so much as napalm, and the notion that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. There is a lot going on here, the ambition is staggering, but Pontecorvo does not manage to hold it together, and the polyglot cast is fragmenting as well. There are sweeping scenes and set pieces, but no coherent flow. The color photography is sometimes striking, but sometimes amateurish, and the Ennio Morricone score seems slapped on from some other movie entirely. Still -- Brando was yet a mesmerizingly beautiful man at the time, and always fascinating to watch in his offbeat approach. And the film’s warnings about colonialism and imperialism are still highly relevant. (1968, dvd, n.) *6*

For Your Consideration

I suppose comedy really resides in the eye (and gut) of the beholder, but I do not share the critical consensus that this latest from Christopher Guest and his repertory company is not up to the standard set by Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. To me it’s very much of a piece, and of particular interest since it skewers the movie business and the whole Oscar mania. An idiotic piece of Southern schmaltz called Home for Purim starts to generate Oscar buzz while still in production, and several of the actors start to lose their sanity in lust for the golden, little ball-less man: Catherine O’Hara as the dying mother/queen Esther, Harry Shearer as the dad trying to make a comeback from his fame as the foot-long weenie in tv commercials for hot dogs, and Parker Posey (looking startlingly like Katherine Hepburn in period dress and coif) as the prodigal lesbian daughter returning to reconcile before her mother’s death. All the usual Guest troupers (plus new guests such as Ricky Gervais) march through, contributing their own largely-improvised cameos, and covering a lot of satirical ground in under 90 minutes. Frankly, some of the deleted scenes ought to have been included. Much of the satire is gentler than Borat’s but almost as cringe-worthy. This may not be the best Guest visitation, but I wager you would find your share of laughs here. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-68.)

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Oh my god, I’m a convert to the Church of Leonard. This proselytizing tribute/concert film won me over, modest Canadian production that it is, but worthy celebration of the cult troubador -- he's my man now. I wasn’t a fan beforehand -- I did consider his songs to be an essential element of the greatness of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but mainly knew his work through covers by the likes of Judy Collins (there, I’ve revealed way too much about myself.) The film incorporates tantalizingly little of his own singing, but his songs are well rendered in a “Came So Far for Beauty” concert at the Sydney Opera House, by a variety of McGarrigles and Wainwrights and Thompsons et al. The performances are intercut with interviews with Cohen himself and a gaggle of admirers, two of whom are Edge and Bono (pontificating with point, as usual), with the climax coming when U2 backs Leonard singing “Tower of Song.” First-time director Lian Lunson is no great shakes, but her film and subject both reflect an appealing blend of sincerity and artifice, which applies to the musical performances as well. Now I am willing to accept this singer-songwriter as poet-prophet, the elusive and allusive lover as Zen monk, the gravel-in-the-gutter voice as truth-telling visionary, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the race. A few weeks back I commented on a great year for musical documentaries, and while it may not be the best, this one moved me most of all. (2006, dvd, n.) *8+* (MC-68.)

Borat

I’m nearly speechless, not so much breathless from laughter or shock, as simply past the wave of this cultural phenomenon. Sacha Baron Cohen is obviously a very smart man who has a lot on his mind, but he does go in for a lot of mindless laughs and Jackass behavior. The film certainly is funny, and more satiric than just offensive for the hell of it. Some of the “Oh no, he didn’t!” moments had been spoiled for me by prior description. But I have to say that the extras on the DVD, deleted scenes and in-character promotional appearances, are every bit as funny as the film itself. The character of faux Khazak reporter Borat is the thing, and the situations he gets into. It’s more peripatetic performance art than a film per se. So I can’t go overboard with my rating. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-89.)

Nine Queens

This delightful film from Argentina is -- like David Mamet’s House of Games -- adept at the long con and the short con. Everyone in it is a con man, including writer/director Fabian Bielinski. A couple of small-timers meet cute in a convenience store, and in a day of running scams, happen upon a big score, an immaculate forgery of a philatelist treasure, the sheet of stamps known as Nueve Reinas, the Nine Queens, with an eager buyer waiting. Ricardo Darin and Gaston Pauls are excellent as the duo, laid back and perpetually wary but wise in the ways of the world, canny at playing on the weakness and confusion of anyone (including the audience.) The twists and turns are fun to follow, when you can, and if the big twist at the end is a “Now wait a minute” moment, well, you’re jolly enough to take the ride to the end. But the film has a ground level reality that distinguishes it from constructions like The Sting or Oceans 11, so there is genuine observation and insight going on amidst the gameplaying. (2002, IFC/T, n.) *7+* (MC-80.)

Omagh

Paul Greengrass was one of the writers on this film made for Irish TV, in effect a melding of Sunday Bloody Sunday and United 93, and Pete Travis directs very much in the distinctive Greengrass style of docudrama -- in close, intense, in the middle of the action, handheld and quick-cut. Here the terrorism is homegrown -- a faction of the IRA tries to undermine the Good Friday Accords by setting off a car bomb on Market Street in Omagh, Northern Ireland, on August 15, 1998, killing 29 and wounding 200, many of them children. Of course many more are actually wounded by the senseless violence, including the family of one dead young man. His father is played by Gerard McSorley, who becomes the spokesman for a group of families seeking justice from the authorities, who in turn variously have their own reasons to make the problem go away, to cover their asses or “not to disrupt the peace process.” So no one is ever tried for the crime, and the family needs to find its own way of healing. Available on DVD from Netflix, this film is a moving and informative statement on one of the salient traumas of our time, the super-empowerment of small groups of angry men bent on destruction, and their continuing effect on the social fabric. (2004, Sund/T, n.) *7*

Donkey Skin (Peau d’Ane)

This film completes an implicit trilogy with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort -- for director Jacques Demy, star Catherine Deneuve, and composer Michel Legrand. It’s a beautifully literal-minded translation of a fairy tale from the same pen as Cinderella, viewing the most extravagant tale with a child’s matter-of-fact logic of magic. Kind of creepy, as many genuine fairy tales are. Dying Queen makes King promise not to marry again unless he finds a wife more beautiful. He looks around but finds none more beautiful than his daughter. He proposes and she is shocked, but not inclined to refuse until her fairy godmother straightens her out, counseling her to make escalating demands, up to asking for the skin of the King’s fabulous gold-shitting donkey. The King is undetered in his misguided love, so the godmother has to whisk the Princess away and hide her under the cloak of the donkey skin, until she is discovered by the Prince of her dreams. Kinky stuff -- more Cocteau than Disney. One of many homages to Cocteau is Jean Marais as the King, very much as he was as the beast in La Belle et la Bete. Catherine Deneuve is every inch a Princess, even when smeared with grime and covered with a rather grisly donkey skin, and Delphine Seyrig is a swanky godmother. (Amusing sidelight: the Prince, Jacques Perrin, went on to become director of the great documentary Winged Migration.) The plot of the story is a foregone conclusion, but the details of its visualization are a continuing surprise and delight. Special effects are few, but the effects of costume, location, and camera are definitely special. (1970, dvd, n.) *7-*

Where Angels Fear to Tread

This may be taken as the runt of the litter of E.M. Forster adaptations that came out in succession in the decade after 1984, and it’s quite mousy in the radiance of A Passage to India, Howards End, or A Room with a View. I may have missed it altogether at the time, or otherwise found it utterly unmemorable, but it recently came out on DVD and got bumped to the top of my Netflix queue when I was browsing through Helen Mirren’s filmography. She is indeed excellent as always, as the wealthy young English widow who goes to Italy and is seduced by the country and the young son of a Tuscan dentist, but she departs a third of the way in and takes much of the film’s energy with her. Director Charles Sturridge is rather stodgy in his staging, and while the scenery is nice the camera is not ravished by the landscape, as it ought to be. Helena Bonham Carter and Judy Davis contribute their usual excellent characterizations, and Rupert Graves is more than adequate in a pivotal role. But muttered dialogue and obscure motivations made me long for the subtitles this DVD did not have, though a long-ago college course in Forster’s novels helped me through the story. (1991, dvd, n.) *6-*

Casino Royale

You need a greater appetite for destruction than I to appreciate this exercise in mayhem and momentum, and a greater tolerance for genre formula. But I acknowledge that Martin Campbell’s direction moves right along, visiting the usual sequence of photogenic locales and staging some inventive chases, and that Daniel Craig makes a most intriguing James Bond (an intense and interesting pair with his Perry Smith in Infamous), and that Eva Green is appropriately seductive and mysterious as the feminine foil, more a woman than the typical Bond Girl, but still a plot point and not a person. I make a point of avoiding almost all pop movie franchises, but I have seen a few Bond films over the years, and this certainly ranks with the very best. But let’s face it, this sort of movie is the enemy of everything I believe film should be. So take the ride, if that’s your thing, but realize this sort of blockbuster destroys not only vehicles and buildings, not to mention the body count, but also preempts the possibilities of film as genuine art. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-80.)

I’ve watched a lot of bizarre double features in my time, but none more so than the match between this and the film I showed at the Clark earlier in the day. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) remained enigmatic on second viewing, but still a highly watchable spectacle and an interestingly perverse variant of the English country house genre, way weirder than Masterpiece Theater. Peter Greenaway’s obsessions are not mine, but I have to say my impression of his writing and direction was enhanced on a meta-level when I read that he did all the draughtsman’s drawings as well, it’s his hand we see in the frame, which made the whole subtext about looking and rendering more tangible, more graphic. The evocation of time (1694) and place (Kent) is precise yet passing strange. It’s talky and convoluted, static and stagey, but visually acute, both funny and creepy. This quintessence of art film did not cost even a hundredth of what the Bond movie or others of its ilk cost, and I haven’t the slightest doubt where the better aesthetic value lies. Give me the inaction film over the action movie anytime. You could say the world is big enough for both sorts of cinema, but I believe Gresham’s Law holds here, bad movies drive out good films.