Screening Log, July & August

 
3 Women (d. Robert Altman, USA, 1977) A
Altman's dreamlike masterpiece seems to have been a huge influence on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive; at the very least, both movies have overlapping interests in the blurring of identity and the transformative power of sexual desire. 3 Women steams ahead on a wave of propulsive dream logic; more important than narrative causality is how the characters' passions and delusions manifest themselves in amorphous, surreal fashion. Many oneiric films such as this are ultimately hampered by their complete lack of characterization (see Beyond the Black Rainbow below), but 3 Women treats its titular trio respectfully; Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek), and to a lesser extent Willie (Janice Rule), are all fully-fledged characters whose camera-friendly quirks also offer fleeting insight into their veiled psychologies. Benefiting from the sort of unfettered production background that's practically unheard of in Hollywood (Altman reportedly pitched the idea after dreaming it all up while his wife was ill in the hospital; producer Alan Ladd, Jr., provided funding and final cut without a screenplay ever being written), 3 Women transplants Altman's typical roaming camera (the cinematographer here was Chuck Rosher), overlapping soundtrack (enlivened by Gerald Busby's bizarre musical score), and genre-bending narratives to immersive dream territory, and the results are hypnotic.

Shoeshine (d. Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946) B+
Made two years before Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine might be deemed a trial run for De Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini's subsequent collaboration: this film displays the neorealist interest in the everyday lives of lower-class Italians following World War II, yet was shot mostly on studio sets and has a narrative familiar from numerous prison melodramas of the 1930s. (In addition to a prison riot, tyrannical guards, and a climactic escape, even the cellmates are an ensemble of cliches, from the sleazy bully to the bespectacled bookworm.) But it's unfair to compare Shoeshine to De Sica's later, more idiosyncratic films, especially when it's so achingly, humanely sincere. Pasquale and Giuseppe are two young boys eking out a living by shining foreign soldiers' shoes on the streets of Rome; their unbreakable friendship is endangered when they're embroiled in a black market scheme, imprisoned in a jail for juvenile delinquents, and ultimately turned against each other by an indifferent penal system. The story offers an unsettling parallel to Italy's wartime fascism, as young innocents are forced to rat on their loved ones by callous forces of law and order, and the damning processes of greed and xenophobia inure Giuseppe and Pasquale to a world of barbaric cruelty. At times the film is too polished and relies too heavily on cliches to be as emotional as it wants to be, but the ending is an undeniable tearjerker, and the young actors who play the protagonists (Franco Interlenghi and Rinaldo Smordoni) offer an effective portrait of sublime youth tarnished by a bleak world.

Prometheus (d. Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2012) D+
So there are these inscriptions throughout human history that seem to point towards a planet called Prometheus. This may be the same place where, at the start of Prometheus, we see a mysterious creature ingest an oyster-like object that proceeds to tear him apart from the inside. Millennia later, a crew of scientists and space explorers voyage to Prometheus, hoping to find the birthplace of the human race. They're funded by the Weyland Corporation (the same conglomerate that instigated the space missions in the original Alien movies), whose CEO may or may not be dead and who could have started the mission with ulterior motives in mind, and who may have a secret relationship with the Prometheus mission director. With me so far? None of this has anything to do with the original Alien franchise, which is fine in theory; what's unfortunate is that Prometheus sets up a handful of intriguing questions only to ruin them all with inconclusive cliffhangers, overelaborate CGI that begs for your attention, some of the worst dialogue ever spouted by a great cast, and a general visual drabness that provides little distraction from the increasingly by-the-numbers plot. In other words, everything great about the first three (yes, three) Alien movies is missing from this "prequel" (or spinoff, or whatever they're calling it). A self-performed abortion, while as ludicrous as it sounds, at least provides a memorable and thrilling setpiece, but for the most part Prometheus is surprisingly tepid; if only it had had the courage of its initially ambitious convictions.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (d. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 1975) A
I finally got around to seeing Akerman's celebrated, meticulously controlled study in gender politics; rather than being underwhelmed due to unrealistic expectations (as sometimes happens when catching up with universally-heralded masterpieces), I ultimately asked myself why I hadn't leapt at the chance to see the movie earlier. Jeanne Dielman's release in 1975 coincided with concurrent waves in durational modernism and overt feminism: Akerman's film uses a rigorous long-take setup (in which the camera's static compositions seem to trap Jeanne as inescapably as her domestic milieu) to eviscerate preconceptions about women's role in society. Drawing upon memories of her mother and grandmother observing precise routines in an observant Jewish household, Akerman plots out Jeanne's menial chores precisely; the first hour of the movie is dedicated to immersing us in her everyday existence, so when things start to unravel (as they do around the 100-minute mark) it unsettles us with unexpected intensity. Given its emphasis on tedium and its 200-minute running time, some may claim that "nothing happens" in Jeanne Dielman; actually, though, we're bearing witness to the unraveling of one woman's sanity, and it's both hypnotic and highly disturbing.

Assault on Precinct 13 (d. John Carpenter, 1976, USA) B–
Carpenter gets my vote for one of the most underappreciated auteurs in mainstream American film (The Fog in particular is about as painterly as horror movies get), but Assault on Precinct 13 demonstrates the director's narrative efficiency without any of his later compositional prowess or offhand surrealism. (True, this was only his second feature after Dark Star, so Carpenter was undoubtedly still honing his skills.) Reportedly given full creative license as long as he stayed within a minuscule budget, Carpenter realized he couldn't carry out his ideal project – a remake of Rio Bravo (which was directed by Carpenter's idol, Howard Hawks) – so he updated the classic Western to a dilapidated, nearly-abandoned police station in a Los Angeles ghetto. A murderous gang bombards the precinct in order to avenge the killing of one of their members; inside, a laconic lieutenant, two female workers, and a handful of prisoners mid-transport try to fend off the assailants. The protagonists are a mix of white, black, male, and female, but it's still baffling that this movie is lauded for its diversity: the murderous gang outside is clearly comprised solely of Hispanics and East Asians. Furthermore, the stock characterizations and pithy one-liners – while amusing in campier Carpenter films, like Big Trouble in Little China and They Live – don't mesh well with the movie's gritty evocation of a racially turbulent war-zone. But Carpenter's ability to make the most of his tiny budgets (at least until the success of his follow-up movie, Halloween) remains impressive (the scenes in which the gang bombards the station, zombie-like, are thrillingly effective) and the movie gets a stranglehold on your attention with an early murder scene that remains one of the most genuinely shocking in film history.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (d. Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2012) B
Believe it or not, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is even more preposterous than its title makes it sound: turns out slavery was a massive conspiracy undertaken by vampires who relied upon slaves for fresh meat, and who saw the abolitionists as a threat to their survival. Gleefully rewriting history with the zeal of Tarantino, it's disconcerting (to say the least) how the movie turns the institution of slavery into fodder for Hollywood's next high-concept SFX extravaganza. And yet, it's hard to deny that the movie recognizes how films turn history (and/or reality) into mythology; if we're being kind, we can even find evidence that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter draws intentional correlations between the act of bloodsucking and the development of American "democracy," making the point that this country arose out of the blood of innocents (the animation over the end credits makes this point succinctly; it's worth the price of admission alone). The pleasure may not be all guilty, then...but it mostly is; for better or worse, this is the most brazenly ridiculous Hollywood movie you'll see all year. Thankfully no one involved in the project seemed to realize how absurd it was, or at least didn't let on: there's no ironic Snakes on a Plane-style winking at the audience, which allows the movie to excel in its own bombastic way.

Elena (d. Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2012) B+
With slow-burning intensity a family unravels: a stoic patriarch alters his will, revealing the ruptures and unexpected empathies between himself, his cynical yet emotionally honest daughter, his distant wife, and her deadbeat family. Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return), who some say is Russia's modern heir to Tarkovsky, Elena is hardly a political treatise but it still works as a sobering depiction of how capitalism's emphasis on greed and self-preservation can turn individuals against each other. The movie doesn't exactly have a bleeding heart – the ensemble is observed with clinical, observational detachment, and the lower-class characters are a bit too simplistically malicious – but that doesn't prevent the film from ending with an emotional wallop. If nothing else, the movie demonstrates what will probably be the best cinematography of the year (courtesy of Mikhail Krichman); the opening and closing shots, which act as subversive bookends, are especially astounding.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (d. Panos Cosmatos, Canada, 2012) C
I actively wanted to like Beyond the Black Rainbow before I even sat down to watch it: the trailer promised something like a bad LSD trip, a surreal, mind-bending pseudo-story that prioritized dreamlike images over narrative cohesion. I usually go for that sort of thing (sometimes against my better judgment), but sadly Beyond the Black Rainbow reminds us that even the trippiest film-as-nightmare needs solid ideas, relatable characters, or at least a sort of ethereal grace to hold our attention. (The Holy Mountain, Mulholland Dr., and Un chien Andalou, for example, are great not just for their surreal imagery but for what else they offer us: beauty, complexity, heartache, tantalizing mystery.) In some ways Cosmatos' debut sustains Canadian film's legacy of forward-thinking innovations that exist somewhere between narrative and experimental cinema, between genre templates and free-flowing dream imagery, between pop and the avant-garde (previously practiced by David Cronenberg and Guy Maddin, among others). Give the movie credit for eschewing filmmaking conventions, and for providing the most horrific and unshakable image I've seen so far in 2012 (as far as I can tell, it involves a man climbing into a vat of oil, witnessing the face of God, and decaying into carrion until his body somehow reassembles itself). But there are only a few such awe-inspiring moments; the bulk of the movie is comprised of monotonous dialogue (conveyed via dead-eyed performances that seem to reaffirm that the characters and whatever they say don't really mean all that much) and contradictory references to both '80s slasher films and more surreal abstractions (including avant-garde masterpieces such as Dog Star Man and The Exquisite Hour). Call it a failed but noble experiment, though it's one that suggests fascinating things to come from Cosmatos.

The Sacrifice (d. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/UK/France, 1986) B–
A lesser film by Tarkovsky is still better than most other directors' works, but there's no denying that The Sacrifice, for all of its magisterial imagery, winds up a bit disappointing. Filmed on the Swedish isle of Fårö (where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked), with Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist and one of his frequent actors, Erland Josephson, The Sacrifice does in fact seem like a middle-ground between the two auteurs: Tarkovsky's austere imagery (comprised of abstract memories and dreams, gracefully-composed long takes, and the employment of numerous planes of action in one shot) and philosophical ambiguities are still in full force, but with lengthier monologues and, perhaps, an earthier fascination with tenuous human relationships, both reminiscent of Bergman. The film's drawn-out dialogue sequences involving Nietzsche, Shakespeare, science, morality, war, and Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi" are as weighty as they sound, but the philosophies they espouse may be less eye-opening than they presume to be: ultimately, the movie's message may be that a faithless, self-centered modern world may already be doomed to apocalypse, a concept that's certainly worth articulating but may not be particularly multifaceted. In any case, Tarkovsky's command of visual language is astounding as always, and certain scenes (such as the apparent onset of World War III and the resulting views of a city street obliterated by nuclear holocaust) are impossible to forget.

The Lubitsch Touch: "The Merry Jail" and "The Eyes of the Mummy"

What is "the Lubitsch Touch"? A phrase beloved by Hollywood marketers, the Lubitsch Touch was meant to denote sophisticated comedy, sparkling dialogue (an impression even conveyed, somehow, by his silent movies), urbane treatment of sex and desire, and a seemingly effortless grace that could convey complex jokes and punchlines in a single camera movement. Lubitsch was arguably the most famous emigre director in 1930s Hollywood, as gradually the Lubitsch Touch transformed into its own brand name: a near-guarantee of reliable craftsmanship and elegance. Only Hitchcock's "Master of Suspense" moniker rivaled the Lubitsch Touch for most well-known directorial catchphrase (reportedly, Billy Wilder struggled to find a similar slogan for himself in the 1940s and '50s, and eventually gave up). In Ephraim Katz's estimation, the Lubitsch Touch "was characterized by a parsimonious compression of ideas and situations into single shots or brief scenes that provided an ironic key to the characters and to the meaning of the entire film."

Irony, subtlety, elegance – these descriptors offer an impression of what the Lubitsch Touch might have been, but it's something more than that, too. Some aspects of the film image can't be put into words (that's what makes them cinematic), and in danger of sounding too hyperbolic, this ineffable visual quality seems to subsume Lubitsch's movies. Since I've become a fan of the director (which is basically since I first saw Trouble in Paradise eight years ago) I've suspected that the Lubitsch Touch is more of a fleeting aura than a quantifiable stylistic trait. Hopefully, if visual evidence of the master's touch can be parsed out, I'll be able to do so by charting his filmography, in chronological order, as fully as possible (which unfortunately is not as full as one might hope: many of Lubitsch's films, including most of his silents, are now lost).

A young Mr. Lubitsch

Lubitsch was born in 1892 Berlin to a Jewish family. His father was a tailor (a profession that features prominently in some of Lubitsch's films, notably The Shop Around the Corner) and Ernst, drawn to acting but encouraged to continue the family business, led a double life, serving as bookkeeper for his father by day and acting in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911, he joined Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater; a year later, he was hired as the handyman for Bioscope Film Studios, and in 1913 began acting in a series of film comedies as a character named Meyer, who represented a then-popular brand of ethnic Jewish humor. (This is according to Lubitsch's biography; these films are now lost, so it's hard to know exactly what this "ethnic Jewish humor" constituted.)

Gradually turning his attention to directing, Lubitsch garnered acclaim in Germany for his tragic fantasy The Eyes of the Mummy in 1918, but it wasn't until 1921 that he found success in the US. In that year, three of his dramas – Madame du Barry, aka Passion, 1919; Anna Boleyn, aka Deception, 1920; and Carmen, aka Gypsy Blood, 1921 – were released stateside and chosen by The New York Times as three of the most "important" movies of 1921. (His 1919 comedy The Oyster Princess, though now seen as his first masterpiece, was less famous at the time.) Lubitsch left Germany for Hollywood in 1922, and it was there that he solidified his legendary status.

Yet if it was his historical epics and dramas that first brought him esteem, it's his sophisticated comedies that eventually revealed him as a master of the craft. Whether in elaborate musicals or smaller-scale comedies, he seems to display a bemused fondness for his characters and their sexual hangups and desires. Indeed, some of his movies, joyous as they are, were scandalous upon their release: as Michael Wilmington writes, his films were "at once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well." Another of Lubitsch's favorite satirical targets was money, specifically the kind of excessive wealth that carries a semi-automatic excuse for horrible behavior. Both sex and money were touchy subjects for American audiences, but Lubitsch's elegance and wit turned self-ridicule into a gentle diversion (particularly during the Great Depression, when Lubitsch was arguably at his peak).

The Merry Jail (1917)

But let's flash back to Berlin, 1917, when Lubitsch made his earliest surviving film: The Merry Jail. It's surprising how much this early effort encapsulates and foreshadows Lubitsch's later comedic style: a movie about shameless carnality, both spirited and subtle, The Merry Jail lampoons a wartime Berlin in which wealthy aristocrats entertain themselves by initiating torrid affairs and getting obscenely drunk. The gravity of the Great War doesn't seem to affect these characters at all. If the interwar Weimar period of Germany was known for its amoral hedonism and the disastrous simultaneity of lavish spending and severe poverty (a social unrest ridiculed by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, among other films), that period seems to have its origins in the freewheeling culture portrayed here. Lubitsch, though, doesn't judge his characters or this society, perhaps seeing moral conservatism as a restrictive force.

The plot is a familiar one (it was actually adapted from Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus): Frau von Reizenstein, an aristocratic wife well aware of her husband's adulterous affairs, attends the same costume ball as he does one night, unbeknownst to him; they end up flirting unabashedly, with Herr von Reizenstein unwittingly attempting to initiate an "extramarital" tryst with his own wife. There are other dalliances transpiring: between the Reizensteins' maid and a doddering aristocrat (Mizi the maid is clearly enjoying her sexual liberty: upon tripping on a staircase while entering the costume ball, she turns to the gentleman escorting her inside and flirtatiously says, "That was my first bad move of the day"); or between Frau von Reizenstein and an overzealous suitor named Egon Storch. Basically every relationship is a potentially sexual one, with a passionate affair always lurking in wait. The sexual openness is summed up by a piece of advice given to Mizi by her sister: "If someone tries to kiss you, don't giggle. That's not chic."

There's also the merry jail of the title, a jail that Herr von Reizenstein is supposed to occupy: given his "scandalous behavior" one drunken evening, the police have issued a warrant for his arrest and one-day imprisonment (a warrant he ignores in order to attend the costume ball). The jailer at the prison, Quabbe, is at least as sexually frank (and as drunkenly lecherous) as the rest of the ensemble, and his homosexuality is displayed brazenly: he continually strokes one prisoner's arm, kisses another on the lips, tells another one that he really likes him. (Quabbe is played by Emil Jannings, who would become famous for complex dramatic roles in later classics such as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel. Here, outfitted with a gnarly mustache, Jannings demonstrates devious lunacy in one of his rare comedic roles.) Lubitsch's pre-Code Hollywood movies are known for their sexual openness, but the jailer's homosexuality is a liberty that would be unavailable to him later on in his career – a surprising indication of movies' licentiousness before the strictures of social censorship clamped down.

The Merry Jail

While most film comedies in 1917 were essentially vaudeville acts performed in front of the camera (which isn't necessarily a criticism – Chaplin made poetry out of such a setup), Lubitsch here shows an early flair for using the camera and montage editing to deliver the punchline of a joke. The film opens, for example, with Frau von Reizenstein searching throughout the house for her absent husband; when she retreats to the den and reads the arrest warrant that's been issued for him, the camera slowly tilts down to reveal the presumably-still-drunk husband passed out underneath the desk. The joke's not quite over yet: feeling something brushing against her legs, Frau von Reizenstein agitatedly informs Mizi that the house has mice. In response, the maid offers her an elaborate mousetrap, unexpectedly conveyed to us via a close-up insert. Throughout this sequence, Lubitsch reveals himself as a master joke-teller through purely visual means (camera movement, varying shot scales and edits) as the scene culminates in what might be the visual equivalent of the punchline: a close-up.

Sometimes, on the other hand, Lubitsch's jokes are so subtle you're not even sure if they're jokes at all. At the end of the aforementioned sequence, for example, the besotted husband gingerly gives the maid his cane and top hat. As he extends his overturned top hat to her, he seems to look inside and come perilously close to vomiting into it; when the maid takes it, she glances into it, recoils in disgust, and holds the hat at arm's length while she exits the scene. Lubitsch doesn't offer us a closer angle so it's impossible to know for sure, but the suggestion is that this callow aristocrat lives a life of privileged luxury while overdrinking so heavily that he throws up into his accoutrements – itself a sly and subtle conflation of elegance and vulgarity.

Herr von Reizenstein is undeniably a shallow cad who inflates his self-worth by racking up adulterous affairs – in a modern romantic comedy, he'd be the smug asshole competing with the sensitive hero for a woman's affections. But all ends well in The Merry Jail: the following morning, as the whole ensemble is deliriously hungover, Frau and Herr von Reizenstein make up after she reveals she was the masked paramour from the night before, Mizi and her aristocrat drive off together, and Quabbe the jailer admits his suppressed feelings for the unreciprocating prison warden. Sexuality is an amusing riddle here: Lubitsch doesn't judge Herr von Reizenstein's adulteries or Quabbe's homoerotic longings. Most mainstream romantic comedies are obliged to supply a happy ending which takes the form of a man-woman romantic union; The Merry Jail suggests a more chameleonic sexuality, which doesn't abide by the rigid contours of a cinematic genre.

The Eyes of the Mummy (1918)

Unfortunately, there's a lot less to say about The Eyes of the Mummy, which Lubitsch made a year later (1918) for the UFA film studio. To modern viewers, it may seem strange that Lubitsch first found success and acclaim thanks to large-scale dramas like this; even the visual style of Eyes of the Mummy seems less exuberant than in his comedies, and the narrative is patched together from a number of outworn Gothic horror and melodramatic cliches.

The Eyes of the Mummy was the first film collaboration between Lubitsch (graduating to feature-length drama) and Pola Negri, who would be invited to Hollywood (along with Lubitsch) by Paramount in 1922. Negri would go on to become one of Hollywood's most adored stars (especially in her roles as Rudolph Valentino's love interest) and the first in a long line of "exotic" actresses imported to the US from Europe (Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc.). Here, she plays "Queen Ma" – actually not a queen at all (much less a mummy), but a young Egyptian country girl kidnapped by the villainous Radu many years ago and imprisoned in a tomb located in a pyramid somewhere outside of Cairo. (Emil Jannings, in semi-blackface, appears once again as Radu.) When Ma is rescued by a German painter on vacation and returns with him to Berlin, Radu follows soon after (now the servant to a nobleman named Prince Hohenfels) and vengefully searches Berlin for his "queen." Firmly placed in the genre of tragic melodrama, Eyes of the Mummy proceeds to its inevitably bleak conclusion; there's not much in the way of horror (and, as many critics have pointed, nothing at all in the way of mummies), so we're basically left with a lugubrious drama about starcrossed lovers.

Both Negri and Jannings belong to the emotive, theatrically-based style of silent-film acting that puts off most modern viewers; while their performances here can be enjoyed in a markedly distinct, almost abstract time-capsule way, they do little to draw us emotionally into the movie. The problem is compounded by the fact that the story is riddled with irrational holes (who exactly is Radu? why does he seem supernatural at times and powerless at others? what were the painter and Prince Hohenfels doing in Cairo?) that demonstrate a reliance on secondhand genre tropes and plot structures. Quite obviously shot on a low budget (the interiors of the "mummy's" tomb especially emphasize the barebones nature of the production), The Eyes of the Mummy today seems like little more than a curio in the director's early career, although there is one shot that nearly makes it worth watching: a reverse tracking shot during the climax that retreats in horror as Radu approaches menacingly. It's a sequence of visual intensity and narrative engagement that most of the film is sorely lacking.

An UFA advertisement for Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy Ma), 1918

NEXT UP: Another blithe sex comedy, the cross-dressing I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918); and another exotic melodrama with Pola Negri, Carmen (aka Gypsy Blood), 1918.

Screening Log, May 30 - June 5

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.

Screening Log, May 23 - May 29

Ten (d. Abbas Kiarostami, 2002, France/Iran/USA) A–
One of Iranian cinema's most cerebral pranksters, Kiarostami here places a tiny digital camera on the dashboard of a taxicab in Tehran, then steps back and allows semi-improvised conversations to take place in an uncanny valley between fiction and documentary. In an example of his graceful minimalism, Kiarostami auditioned a large number of non-professional actors, then simply provided the subject matter for their interactions and allowed them to forge their own characters and conversations. Kiarostami is hardly absent, though; he steers the conversations into feminist territory, evoking female characters grappling with unfaithful lovers, a restrictive patriarchy, crises in religious faith, divorce, motherhood, and other issues that Iranian women typically aren't allowed to confront so explicitly in movies. Because of this, Ten is at once an emotional depiction of universal themes, a revealing snapshot of modern-day Tehran, and a striking formal experiment in fortuitous improvisation and a sort of laissez-faire directorial style.

Bronson (d. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009, UK) B–
Refn's stylish biopic relates the unsettling story of Michael Peterson, a London lad from a middle-class family who was imprisoned (initially to a seven-year sentence) for robbery, then spent the next 30 years in prison (most of them in solitary confinement) for instigating brutal brawls among prisoners and guards. Fittingly, he takes the alias Bronson – in honor of the Death Wish actor – for his vicious exploits. We should be thankful that the movie doesn't try to psychologize Bronson: there are no childhood traumas or mental anomalies to explain away his behavior, which of course makes his animalistic bloodlust all the more disturbing. While this means that there are no lazy plot devices to wrap up the main character with a tidy bow, it also means the movie can seem like all style and no substance: Bronson's violence is presented to us with a hypnotic arsenal of slow tracking shots and vivid patches of color, but any interpretations for its existence (a latent libidinous male impulse; society's propensity for turning violence into awe-inspiring spectacle) are entirely up to the viewer. But if the movie's point sometimes seems a little muddled, at least we have Tom Hardy's awe-inspiring lead performance and Refn's reliably dynamic style. (If he ever incorporates some strong ideas or genuine emotion into his aesthetic, he could be brilliant.)

This Is Not a Film (d. Mojtab Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, 2012, Iran) A
The production backstory is well-known: sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking by the Iranian government for allegedly "conspiring against the state," Jafar Panahi enlists the help of a friend (documentarian Mirtahmasb) to film his house arrest as he ponders film and the creative process. Meanwhile, the anti-government demonstrations of Firework Wednesday erupt on the Tehran streets outside — only a wall away, yet infinitely further. Knowing these circumstances won't prepare you for the singular experience of watching this quasi-film, though; the title, while a coy evasion of the punishment that was handed down to Panahi, is also correct in that you've never really seen a movie exactly like this. Close to certain essay films by Chris Marker or Agnès Varda, This Is Not a Film stands in awe of the creative process, cherishing the unexpected difficulties and fortuitous mistakes of the act of filmmaking, alleging that often it is the movie who "directs" the director. There's deep sadness, inevitably, as Panahi wonders if he'll ever be able to continue his next film project; but there's also a palpable love for Panahi's homeland and compatriots. Infinitely more complex than its anti-censorship foundation might suggest, This Is Not a Film ultimately makes the inspiring case that artists will continue to create, even after the tools of their expression have been cruelly taken away.

The Kid with a Bike (d. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2012, Belgium/France/Italy) B+
The Belgian masters of spare minimalism turn their attention to a motherless boy in a Parisian foster home. His immature dad works at a nearby restaurant but wants nothing to do with his own son, desperately holding any kind of responsibility at arm's length. (He's played by Jérémie Renier, a longtime Dardenne regular, in an echo of his deadbeat-dad role in 2005's L'Enfant.) The boy, compellingly played by Thomas Doret, is a red-haired spark of energy: we typically see him biking, running, flailing through the frame, often pouncing on boys much larger than him in a torrent of pent-up adolescent confusion. Really he's just looking for love, which sounds trite here but never comes off as stale in the film itself: the characterizations (sparse dialogue, seemingly effortless naturalism) convey emotion and honesty as subtly as possible. Ultimately The Kid with a Bike may seem less momentous than the Dardennes' The Son (2002) or less intense than L'Enfant, but it's also much more hopeful and has some of the brothers' most beautiful cinematography to date (it's shot by Alain Marcoen).

Cat People (d. Paul Schrader, 1982, USA) D+
Schrader's sexed-up remake of Jacques Tourneur's 1942 classic is a perfect summation of the writer/director's bizarre mix of Catholic conservatism and drugged-up, lustful hedonism – which, it turns out, isn't a good thing. Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell play sibling members of an ancient race of Cat People; if they make love with anyone outside their own race, they revert to their feline form at the point of orgasm, and can only become human again if they kill their lover. The story is ridiculous in a grandiose, mythical way, and it works whenever we're only watching Kinski: she has the kind of innate movie-star beauty where she only has to stand in front of the camera and we're instantaneously awed. An incredible movie could have been made around her alone. But unfortunately there are other characters – as her brother, McDowell is all bug-eyed insanity, an over-the-top self-parody that contrasts absurdly with Kinski's slow-burning passion; and as the zoologist who is irresistibly attracted to her, John Heard is an obnoxious epitome of crass early-80s machismo (you want to see him mauled by leopards as soon as possible). The movie is visually intoxicating, but its style can't mask a ridiculous moral prudishness: the underlying theme is that Kinski will unleash her dangerous wiles if she succumbs to her sexual impulses, but thankfully she's literally caged at the end of the movie, domesticated into obedience in a repellant metaphor for marriage. If the ending is supposed to be depressing (i.e., if Schrader finds marriage a soul-crushing imprisonment), you still have to notice the hypocrisy: he puts Kinski's nubile naked body on display for most of the movie, only to suggest that that kind of uninhibited sexuality has to be subdued and controlled somehow (preferably, it seems, by the arrogant zookeeper who's allowed to indulge his sexual whims any way he wants).

Cinévardaphoto (d. Agnès Varda, 2005, France)
Actually a triptych of short documentaries by one of the progenitors of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda. In the first short, Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc..., Varda employs digital video to peruse an art exhibit curated by vintage-photo collector Ydessa Hendeles. The exhibit covers several stories of an art gallery, overstuffed with photos from the early 20th century that somehow involve teddy bears; the gimmick is ostensibly a "narrative that explores world memory," and it's true that the photos (especially those of Nazis and Jews before and during the Holocaust) allow us to pore over them intently, trying to inscribe some sort of family history into the compositions (an investigation Varda accommodates by showing numerous still photos onscreen for long durations). While it offers a dense entryway into Varda's themes of photographic composition and its imprinting of memory, the next two shorts are more successful, especially Ulysses (from 1982), the high point of the collection. Varda re-explores a still photo she took in the late 1950s, a mysterious image of two naked male figures on a rocky beach, with the corpse of a goat in the foreground. Ulysses finds Varda at her most intellectually lively, drawing allusions and remembrances from a visual enigma; it also displays her blithe sense of humor (witness the follow-up interview with one of the photo's male subjects in the nude, or the scene of a goat proudly devouring a photographic print of one of its dead brethren). Finally, the last short – a documentary about the Cuban revolutionary movement made in 1963 – may be less dense and thought-provoking than the first two, but it offers a glimmering snapshot of an idealistic time and place that now seem petrified in history. Together, the three shorts provide a surprisingly entertaining deconstruction of notions of composition, remembrance, and community.

Screening Log, May 16 - May 22

In an effort to post more frequently on Phantom Lightning, I'd like to initiate a new weekly series: Screening Logs containing every movie I watch, with at least a sentence or two on each title. Though the commentary I provide for each film might sometimes be brief or dismissive, I'll try to keep the snark to a minimum...

The Avengers (d. Joss Whedon, 2012, USA) B+
Some mind-numbingly long (and not terribly impressive) action scenes are inevitably part of The Avengers' lifeblood, but this is about as good as overproduced Hollywood blockbusters come. Essentially, the task handed to director/writer Whedon (and scenarist Zak Penn) was to get a motley crew of superheroes together as quickly as possible so they can wage bombastic, eerily 9/11-reminiscent war against a squadron of alien invaders. The CGI special effects are fine but not particularly distinguished (what sleek mainstream movie doesn't have pristine graphics?); the warfare itself is exciting but once again proves the disconcerting fact that American audiences love to see our cherished metropolises demolished onscreen. (The desert of the real wasn't real enough for us, apparently.) The movie is really enlivened by Whedon's reliably witty dialogue, the actors' convivial interplay, and the emotional import supplied by Mark Ruffalo as the third cinematic Bruce Banner in recent memory. (He's the only semblance of emotional depth, but still.) What's more, the movie's ideas about how humanity craves subjugation (even at the hands of supposed heroes) are, while not original or especially deep, at least sporadically thought-provoking.

Hail the Conquering Hero (d. Preston Sturges, 1944, USA) B
One of the alternate titles conceived for this film was Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, which suggests the outrageous subversive tone the final product could have had. It's true that even a mediocre Preston Sturges movie stands head-and-shoulders above a lot of lesser directors' works, but even so, Hail the Conquering Hero doesn't quite satisfy. It can't compare to the crackling satire and dizzying pace of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek or The Palm Beach Story, not to mention the unparalleled elegance and wit of The Lady Eve. A genial satire of wartime hero-worship and hollow patriotism, Hail the Conquering Hero speeds ahead so cavalierly through its cynicism that it somehow convinces you it's still a flag-waving portrayal of quaint, small-town Americana. (Surely this is why the Production Code censors, normally so stringent during the war years, let Sturges' portrayal of political corruption and social gullibility pass.) Eddie Bracken, as the hay fever-afflicted schlemiel barred from military service who's passed off as a wartime hero by a group of Marines for his homecoming, is too dour and agitated to make his character's plight either relatable or subversive; the strangely plucky group of soldiers who surround him are, in fact, more likeable characters. But of course the movie has its charms (its effortless portrayal of the ensemble of townspeople, subtle wit not only in the dialogue but in small visual symbols spread throughout the frame), and a great running gag involving a number of overeager marching bands who repeatedly start playing their patriotic fanfare prematurely.

Red Desert (d. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, Italy/France) A-
Antonioni's follow-up to his loose trilogy of La Notte, L'Avventura, and L'Eclisse (and his first color film) is a bleak but fascinating depiction of a depleted dystopia rampant with loneliness, ennui, desperation, and a deadening cycle of production and consumption. The plot (having to do with the wife of a factory manager, slowly driven mad by the harsh environment, who succumbs to a desperate affair with a visiting businessman) is only occasionally engrossing, but Antonioni movies shouldn't really be watched for their stories. More compelling is Monica Vitti's characteristically chilly performance, a wonder of slow deterioration that manages to be thrilling despite its iciness; and most of all the austere color cinematography, surveying the hellish landscape with both a haunting hopelessness and an adoration of its stark beauty. If we can associate Antonioni with any one dominant theme, maybe it's the breakdown of people's identities when faced with a capitalistic society that devalues humanity and togetherness – not at all a hopeful theme, but one that's undeniably complex and unsettling. You could stop the movie at any frame and likely have a masterpiece of cinematic composition (though in that case you'd miss out on the meticulous and foreboding soundtrack).

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (d. Pedro Almodóvar, 1990, Spain) B-
As immersed in sex and cinema as we'd expect from an Almodóvar film, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is undeniably sexy and tantalizingly kinky, but its emotional resonance lags a bit behind its perversions. Ricky (Antonio Banderas), just released from a mental hospital, kidnaps a burgeoning movie star (who's also an ex-porn actress and former heroin junkie), convinced that she'll grow to love him over time. Which she does, suggesting a dark-toned, twisted examination of attraction, attachment, obsession, sadomasochism, and the possibility of "controlling" other people (and being controlled). Unfortunately the movie doesn't really capitalize on this potential, preferring instead to concoct a vibrant, propulsive smorgasbord of color and movement that's visually arresting but conceptually hollow. At least this allows the film to escape charges of misogyny or gratuitous shock value (despite a sweat-soaked sex scene, it's surprisingly timid), but it also doesn't make it especially memorable. As Marina, the former junkie-turned-starlet, Victoria Abril is only allowed to show range or dynamism in the last ten minutes or so, which at least provides Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! with a solid closing shot. But at least there is another image now imprinted permanently on my memory: a scene from Marina's film-within-the-film in which she swings, pendulum-like, from an open window in a pouring rainstorm.

 
Grave of the Fireflies (d. Isao Takahata, 1988, Japan) A-
Courtesy of Ghibli Studio (the Japanese animation house where Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were colleagues) comes a profound effort to translate the brutality and desperation of the Japanese experience during World War II into the traditional style of hand-drawn animation. Seita, a young teenager, is forced to care for his toddler sister Setsuko after their father departs to serve in the Japanese Navy and their mother dies, victim to an American napalm bomb. Those who assume animated movies are placating affairs directed at families and children will be proven wrong if they watch Grave of the Fireflies: despite moments of levity and solace, the movie's overwhelmingly bleak, and proceeds undeterred (and realistically) towards its inevitably heartbreaking conclusion.

Takahata employs static backgrounds comprised of desaturated, hazy colors — lots of browns, grays, blacks, and pale yellows — in order to evoke an atmosphere of hopelessness and pervasive warfare. Of course the unmoving backgrounds, so vastly different from the complex vistas created for latter-day Ghibli productions (not to mention the dazzling environments created by Pixar or other CGI-animation companies), is starkly unrealistic, as are the vivid facial expressions and gestures created for the characters; but that non-realism actually serves Grave of the Fireflies well, as it emphasizes the characters' unavoidable, cosmic fate and the extreme, abysmal situations in which they've been placed. (Call it neo-hyperrealism, maybe.) Yet there are also moments of great beauty (one montage sequence, bridged by a series of dissolves, segues from a flower-petal-strewn memory to a glorious cascade of white rice) as well as the fireflies themselves, which act as a potent all-encompassing symbol for both the joy and the misery that Seita and Setsuko experience.