Moonrise Kingdom (d. Wes Anderson, USA, 2012) B
As you can probably tell from the still above, Moonrise Kingdom has Anderson continuing to preserve his hermetically-sealed diorama of the world, this time telling the story of two young lovers, Sam and Suzy, who run away (from their Scout Camp and their crumbling home, respectively) to live together in a secluded cove on the island of New Penzance in 1965. You know whether or not you'll like the movie depending on your existing opinion of Anderson. As a fan, it's always a pleasure to spend some time in the director's meticulous playground (he also wrote the screenplay, with Roman Coppola), but those pleasures seem to be diminishing each time Anderson returns to the well. (At least Fantastic Mr. Fox departed from the template a bit.) The stellar cast brings droll life to the characters, but they're not given a chance to turn them into flesh-and-blood people: there are some melancholy undercurrents to the story (failing marriages, extramarital affairs, self-loathing), but Anderson oddly mutes and rushes past their suffering, whereas in his best movies (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic) he would have respected and fully conveyed their heartache. The movie ends up being pleasant, spry, and (it almost goes without saying) visually intoxicating, but it's also completely inconsequential: the pitfall of an auteur being able to do whatever he wants is that his characters and sets gradually come to seem like toys shuffled around for the director's own amusement.
Pépé le Moko (d. Julien Duvivier, France, 1937) A
In many ways the French prototype for Casablanca (made five years later in Hollywood), Pépé le Moko shimmers with a tragic beauty; it attains the kind of cinematic poetry that American and French studios managed occasionally in the 1930s. French gangster movies are a lot like the American films noir made a decade later (which they themselves influenced): unassuming genre pictures that smuggle great beauty and despair into their seemingly simple bloodlines. The inimitable Jean Gabin plays Pépé, a gentleman's thief more elegant than Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean put together: a Parisian transplant stuck in the Casbah of Algiers, he's a jewel thief and bank robber who remains outside the grasp of the French and Algerian police, thanks to the shady cohorts who sequester him in the Casbah's alleyways and terraces. He's already imprisoned, in other words: all he wants is to return to grand Paris, a desire that burns even brighter after he meets Gaby, a beautiful Frenchwoman staying in Algiers with her rich husband; her sparkling diamonds tempt Pépé less than her dazzling beauty and bona fide Parisian elegance. Like most heroes in French crime movies from the '30s, Pépé steps headlong towards a doomed fate, and he seems to know it: he considers death for the sake of freedom and love more honorable than his slum notoriety. The movie achieves an effortless grace and overflows with one astonishing sequence after another: an early montage of the Casbah's labyrinthine exoticism, a hyperreal murder scene in which a dying hood guns down the man who betrayed him, the simmering chemistry between Gabin and Mireille Balin as Gaby, and most of all a climactic series of rear-projections that foreground Pépé against a dreamy vision of death-soaked Algiers. You want to criticize the movie for its complete indifference to the actual city and people of Algiers (the movie is practically an apologia for colonialism), but it so obviously takes place in a realm of heightened visceral poetry that real-world political quibbles hardly seem to apply.
Persepolis (d. Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, France/USA, 2007) B+
Satrapi's series of graphic novels, which detail her childhood in Tehran and ambivalent feelings towards postrevolutionary Iranian culture (the overthrow of the Shah, the Iran-Iraq war, and so on), are condensed into a film that employs deceptively complex black-and-white compositions to magnify her tempestuous emotions. As headstrong young Marjane listens to Western punk and rock-and-roll and defies the men who, thanks to the paternalism of her culture, treat her with callous entitlement, the movie becomes both flippantly entertaining and harrowingly tense: her youth is built off of the carefree verve she wants to embrace and the oppressive regime that won't let her have it. Persepolis is eye-opening and engaging at the same time, but it also moves so quickly that certain images and emotional traumas don't have the chance to register, and some of the stylistic tricks are too self-conscious for their own good. (The anarchic spirit of Satrapi's illustrations work better in still images than moving ones.) But it's hard to disparage the turbulent history undergone by both Marjane and her country, even if this movie only offers us a hasty Cliff's Notes version of it.
Monkey Business (d. Howard Hawks, USA, 1952) B–
There's an incredible wealth of talent at work on Monkey Business – Howard Hawks behind the camera (with Milton Krasner his cinematographer), Ben Hecht and I.A.L. Diamond as writers, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe onscreen – so this amiable screwball comedy inevitably disappoints a little bit. It's nowhere close to the freewheeling lunacy of Hawks' better comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and the humor dates more awkwardly than in many of Hawks', Grant's, or Rogers' finest hours. (Today's audiences probably won't find jokes about early-50s clothing and automobile fashions particularly hilarious.) At its best, screwball comedy is pure anarchic zeal, but the subgenre has a tendency to try too hard, screaming its jokes at us and hoping that its sheer bombast will cover up the weaker spots. For the most part, Monkey Business is best at its quieter moments: the sweet and witty interplay between Grant and Rogers (when they're not under the effects of Grant's disastrous youth serum), some chimpanzee actors who threaten to upstage their human counterparts, and a ludicrous but laugh-out-loud gag with an infant that Rogers assumes is her husband, reverted to his newborn years. Monroe, unfortunately, has little to do but look astounding (which of course she does).
4:44 Last Day on Earth (d. Abel Ferrara, USA/Switzerland/France, 2012) A–
Ferrara's latest is set on the day of the apocalypse, as a couple (Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh) deal with the impending end of the world, their own failed relationships and broken friendships, and past demons. They have sex, struggle to abstain from drugs and alcohol, paint, wander around; much of the movie is comprised of Skype sessions and grainy digital videos viewed online. If this sounds hilariously anti-special-effects for an end-of-the-world movie, that seems to be the point: these two people spend their last day on earth as they would most any other day, albeit with a greater sense of immediacy and regret. As in Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, the apocalypse approaches quietly, unavoidably: humans are powerless to thwart it, and simply go about their routine until they can't anymore. Yet if Tarr's film is more bleakly existential (emphasizing the insignificance of humans within the cosmos), Ferrara's allows room for a bit of humanism: in their last moments, these characters at least try to reach out to their loved ones, the pain of mistakes and unclaimed futures unspoken yet written on their faces. (Equally existential, then, yet in a different way: if there's no pattern to the cosmos, all people can do is forge their own relationships, writing their legacy by the way they lead their lives.) Quietly thought-provoking, 4:44 Last Day on Earth also has a fascinating view of technology as a bridge (rather than a hindrance) for human interaction – a theme devastatingly conveyed by a Chinese delivery man, who uses the main characters' laptop to Skype (in an unsubtitled conversation) with his family back home, tearfully saying his last goodbyes.
Accattone (d. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1961) A
Besides Buñuel, no other director mixes the profane and the sacred as audaciously as Pasolini, a tendency exhibited even from his feature debut, Accattone. Vittorio is a lowlife pimp on the outskirts of Rome; known as "Accattone" (a disparaging term for scrounger or beggar), he wanders the slums, visits his estranged wife and the son who doesn't know him, exploits the prostitute Maddelena (whose name pointedly echoes Mary Magdalene) until she's beaten by violent thugs and imprisoned by the police, and makes a fleeting effort to go straight for a beautiful peasant girl named Stella – an attempt at an honest living that doesn't last very long. Emblems of Catholic piousness (statues of angels, iconography of the crucifixion) commingle with the crumbling buildings and decrepit streets of the slums, turning Accattone into a spiritual story of degradation and the illusion of redemption. The movie is bleak and unflinching in its portrayal of the main character's coarse selfishness, but it's also tremendously sympathetic and humane: as in neorealism (the movement in which Accattone is usually, somewhat misleadingly, placed) the characters' everyday lives take on the vivid scope of real human experience, but Pasolini's formal ingenuity and gritty symbolism transcend neorealism, attaining something more spiritual.
The Merry Jail ("Das Fidele Gefängnis," d. Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1917) B+
Lubitsch's earliest surviving film is an interesting precursor of things to come for fans of the director, not to mention a blithe sex comedy (made in Berlin during the first World War!) that revels in carnal pleasure. More will be written on this soon, as I'm starting a series of articles about Lubitsch's filmography; here, I'll just mention that "the Lubitsch touch" is on display right from the beginning, especially in the director's subtle visual touches, which can deliver an entire joke and punchline through a simple tilt or pan.
