Saturday, August 31, 2013

Love is All You Need -- CALL Discussion Notes


In Suzanne Bier's new film, a Danish hairdresser, Ida (Trine Dyrholm), has lost her hair and had a masectomy but appears to have survived her cancer. She comes back early from her chemo treatment to find her husband Leif (Kim Bodnia) bonking a young colleague Thilde (Christiane Schaumber-Muller). 
     Putting her pain aside, Ida goes to Italy alone for their daughter Astrid’s (Molly Blixt Egelind) wedding. She gets off on the wrong foot with the groom’s widowed father, the transplanted Brit Philip (Pierce Brosnan). Their tensions are paralleled in the about-to-be-weds. After registering his detachment from Astrid, groom Patrick (Sebastien Jessen) discovers he’s gay when he’s attracted to hunk Allesandro (Ciro Petrone). Leif -- perhaps some might say insensitively, but I don’t like to judge -- brings Thilde to the wedding. When he forces himself on Ida in a dance, Leif is decked by his one-armed soldier son Kenneth (Micky Skeel Hansen). The young couple break off their wedding after deciding they don’t want to live a lie. No longer with Thilde, Leif courts and wins Ida’s return. But when Philip comes to the salon to invite her to Italy she decides to give life another chance. She brings him her unopened letter from the hospital, reporting on the lump she felt on her neck. We don’t learn the contents of the letter -- because now it doesn’t matter.  In the first scene Ida spurns “breast reconstruction;” she ultimately reconstructs her life of love.  


Questions

  1. How does this differ from most of the Wedding Comedies we’ve been getting lately? Is there a Danish/American difference here?
  2. What was gained/lost in the title change from The Bald Hairdresser? That’s Den skaldede frisor.
  3. What is the point in the parallel tensions between the generations, i.e., the engaged and their respective parents?
  4. With a largely Italian setting and a British lead is this still a Danish film?
  5. Why make Leif’s new girl “from Accounting”? Cherchez le metaphor.
  6. What is the point of the dance references, e.g., the rejected tango shoes, the wedding shindig and its various couplings? Right after Patrick and Alessandro kiss we get a quick shot of Astrid dancing playfully with another girl.
  7. Why is Philip in vegetables?
  8. How/why does Bier contrast Copenhagen and Sorrento? Consider the opening shot, flat yellow high rises. 
  9. Consider the colour symbolism in general, especially in the characters’ wardrobes. 
  10. How does the plot benefit from the persona (the actor’s established screen image) of Pierce Brosnan? Consider how he changes from our first impression. Any echoes from Mamma Mia? Counterpoints?
  11. What’s the point in the opening title dissolving like glittering dust?
  12. Why make Philip’s sister-in-law Benedikte (Paprika Steen) so awful? How specifically is she pertinently bad? What does her comeuppance signify?
  13. What is it -- romance or irony -- when the film opens with Dino’s That’s Amore -- cp Moonstruck, etc. -- and repeats its melody throughout?
  14. What does the one-armed son signify?
  15. How do later revelations deepen and explain early scenes, e.g., Philip’s explosive response to Ida’s collision, Astrid carrying Patrick over the threshold?
  16. How is this film illuminated by any of the following (from IMDB) quotes from director Bier:

I use it [hand-held-camera] in order to enable actors to move around freely because I want them to be truthful at all times and that means they should be able to move and not be bound by a fixed camera position. I think if it's used for style it's a mistake. It's there to do something very specific.
[on the underlying premise of In a Better World (2010) (original title: Revenge): It's about the distance between being savable and not savable. At what point does redemption become impossible? Is there such a point? This is what we wanted to explore in the subtext of the story. I also think it's very interesting to trace the route of an innocent who actually behaves like a terrorist but is really just an angry little boy - an angry little boy who can also be dangerous.
My first job as a filmmaker is to not make a boring film. I don't see a conflict between art and commerce, but I do see one between boredom and commerce. I think once you start structuring according to theme, things become more educational than emotional, and I don't think that works. I think it really is about addressing the conflict between the characters and addressing the storytelling and psychology. That way, the feelings are the undercurrent of the whole story, which is exciting.

Reflect on the following lines of dialogue:
  1. “I think Leif likes me as I am so long as I make him a lemon pudding every week.”
  2. “Remember to get a receipt.”
  3. “It’s been hard for me to see you so ill.”
  4. “I just thought he was a dream.”
  5. “The females are the worst. The men are all harmless. Their lives are absolutely without meaning.” What comes next?
  6. “One tree can bear both lemons and oranges.”
  7. “Botanically, the lemon is a berry.”
  8. “No-one wants to be alone.”
  9. “I’m just angry with everyone else.”
  10. “Grandma said he had nice table manners.”
  11. “Mom, why do you always crack jokes at the wrong time?”
  12. “We’re not right for each other at this time.”

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

We're the Millers


Where most comedies depict families overcoming their tensions and outside threats to reaffirm their unity, in We’re the Millers four non- or even anti-family characters discover the rewards of being a family. The film ends up rejecting the opening scene schnook’s declared frustration with having a family and envy for his college friend David’s (Jason Sudeikis) single, irresponsible life.  
The children in David’s pretend family, Kenny (Will Poulter) and Casey (Emma Roberts), are refugees from single-parent neglect and homelessness, respectively. The parents-to-be, David and Rose (Jennifer Aniston), are moderate outlaws, he a small-time drug dealer, she a virtuous stripper. Surprisingly, they will find success, fulfillment and comfort in the alien language and posture of conventional parents. So the stripper’s real name turns out to be -- Sarah, the tormented but ultimately blessed wife of the patriarch Abraham. The nebbish David ultimately brings down two drug Goliaths.
      The conventional comedy disrupts a situation of familial and social order, then subdues the chaos in the last scene, restoring order. Here we start with chaos that erupts into something like order. The outlaws eventually go straight and all four loners take advantage of the Witness Protection Program to set up a home together. That protects them less from the drug bosses than from their own impulses to be loners. Though they ultimately live the front of a normal family --as they did even in their initial bickering and anger -- the foreground marijuana plants suggest the family will retain their off-beat character and charm. They return to a new improved, harmonized chaos.  
Much of the humour derives from the pretend normal family’s indecorous language, actions and values. But the film’s question is “What is a normal family?” The family of DEA officer Don Fitzgerald (Nick Offerman) may seem mainstream white bread until their sexual peccadildoes whir into action. No wonder Edie (Kathryn Hahn), her marriage threatened by her shallow vagina, cried at Free Willy. They are potentially kinkier than our Millers. As Rose fulfills her inner Sarah, Edie will find fulfillment when her Don (taking David’s advice to treat her like a stripper) brings out her inner Rose.
So, too, the clean cut and cheery Ed Helms makes Brad Gurdlinger a far cry from the conventional big time drug boss, whose standard is reflected in his rival Pablo (Tome Sisley) and his henchman One-Eye (Matthew Willig). Of course, one eye precludes perception of depth, which is precisely what playing against the genre conventions brings this film. 
As he frisks against film conventions, director Rawson Marshall Thurber (whom I most fondly remember for his 2002 short, Terry Tate Office Linebacker, and his other parody of teamwork, Dodgeball), stacks up film references. A tough decision is a Sophie’s Choice moment. The last kissing/fireworks scene evokes To Catch a Thief. When the DEA’s Don deploys David, he will Set a Dealer to Catch a Dealer. The Dexter reference over the white plastic draws on the One-Eye and Scottie P actors who were thus dispatched on that TV show. Other quips refer to Annie, Spider-Man and Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. The “family” members instinctively draw their language and values from the sitcom tradition. A Ned Flanders type inspires David’s strategy. 
The characters also draw on their actors’ personae. The awkward, inexperienced, seemingly gay boy Poulter played the hip gay brother on the TV series, Shameless.  The latter role sets up the possibility that Kenny might indeed provide the corrupt Mexican sheriff’s bribe. As Julia Roberts’ niece, Emma as Casey connects to Rose’s initial rejection of David’s proposal she do a Pretty Woman role for him. The blooper epilogue ends with the cast sneaking the theme from Aniston’s Friends series into the scene where they sing to TLC’s Waterfalls. This film assumes a knowing, sympathetic audience. Rose/Sarah is a smart inflection of Aniston’s persona, as it reminds her audience how sexy and beautiful she is (Take that, Brangelica!) even as she before our eyes matures into the role of mother, which we may see her taking more often now that she’s pregnant. She has come a long way from the rootless blonde of that TV classic. In another kind of metacinema both Sudeikis and Anniston break the fourth wall by gesturing to the audience. 
This film’s success is partly due to its inventive plot, winning performances and hilarious script. But it also reads as a barometer of its time. Those film references assume an audience with shared film and TV experience and knowledge. Because the drug on which the plot turns is grass, and Sudeikis is a virtuous dealer (e.g., he won’t sell to minors, he helps the kids in distress), the film has no problem in letting our heroes get away unpunished for their huge smuggling attempt. The film reads the public’s distinction between grass and hard drugs on the scale of danger and criminality.  
It’s also au courant in stretching the range of ”normal” both in what constitutes family values and sexual identity. Here you don’t have to be born and raised together to make a family. It’s enough to come to care for each other and to want to stay connected. This is a story of people who made themselves -- out of the most unpromising material -- into a family. That’s just as good as being born into one. 

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Woody Allen's Harvey Wallinger


Woody Allen’s politics have always been quietly on the left -- for education, intelligence, humanity, social responsibility, culture, and against corporatism, philistinism and callousness. It’s typically implicit in Gil’s (Owen Wilson) tensions with his fiancee’s Republican parents in Midnight in Paris. Most recently, the primary target in Blue Jasmine is the unbridled selfishness of corporate America and its impunity even after the recent economic collapse. (See my blog on the film.) As enough Democrats have been complicit in failing to correct the unbalanced system, Allen is not practicing party politics here but reaffirming traditional humanist values. Even in Midnight in Paris Gil is not above trying to buy some bargain Matisses to bring back to the 21st Century market. In Canada Allen would be called a small-l liberal, a designation too dangerous to inflict on him down south. 
Allen did make one full-blown political satire, that was unfortunately shelved when he refused the commissioning PBS’s demand he remove a couple of jokes. That was “The Harvey Wallinger Story,” made in 1972 for the putative series, Men of Crisis. Allen played Wallinger as a miniature parody of Henry Kissinger.
Viewed today (at the marvelous Paley Centre for Media in NYC) the film seems a time capsule both of the social issues of that day and of Allen’s comic strategies. Even there he prefers a non-partisan stance that will satirize the pretenses and foibles of the opposition Democrats as well as the governing Republicans. As Allen injects himself -- and the lookalike credited as Richard M. Dixon -- into the period footage the film anticipates the more complex The Purple Rose of Cairo and especially Zelig.
Allen frequently plays the image against the voiceover narrative. A shot of Hubert Humphrey stumbling undercuts his description as “a man of grace and balance.” Spiro Agnew, “a great physical specimen,” flubs a tennis shot. Art Linkletter and Bob Hope exemplify the intellectuals supporting re-election candidate Richard Nixon. As Nixon makes the White House “a cultural mecca” we see a pathetic Jewish comedian making mouth noises. Inevitably, Nixon’s “gracious departure from politics” is his “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more” speech. Allen’s wider target here is the unrealistic hype and posing that attends political candidacy.  
The satire strikes presciently at some important issues. Attorney General John Mitchell is hampered only by the constitution. Nixon’s “very strategic reason” for bombing Laos was that he wasn’t happy with how it’s spelled. Nixon and Agnew are intellectuals: they can read and know almost all the numbers in sequence. So, too, “I think it’s important to put the criminal into jail before he commits the crime.” Harvey uses his power to have an ex-girlfriend (Louise Lasser) drafted and sent to Korea. 
Some comedy strikes beyond politics. In an intuitive sense of the conflicted FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover places himself on the Most Wanted list. Harvey was named after a rabbi busted for passing counterfeit matzoh. 
In the exercise of his familiar schnook persona, Allen’s Wallinger is a mock heroic version of Kissinger. He can’t understand the oath of allegiance and at the ceremony complains that his suit itches. “I have the job, right?” He graduated 96th in the Harvard law class of 95. As a supporter of the Red-scared Senator Joe McCarthy Wallinger belligerently interrogates a man who attended Boy Scouts but wasn’t a member. This incompetence suggests that Kissinger owed his position and power to some kind of special control over his friend Nixon. Louise Lasser recalls Wallinger would make Nixon laugh by tickling him. When they double dated Harvey would dance with Nixon.  
In his version of Kissinger’s “equally flamboyant private life” Wallinger distractedly follows a passing woman up the street, like a civilized Harpo. Lasser recalls her “bad first experience” with him, but a nun remembers him as “really sexy... a real freak.” Diane Keaton plays Harvey’s first wife, a cross-eyed Vassar blacksmith major, who says Harvey had to keep his legs crossed during sex. She could not persuade Nixon to shave before the Kennedy debate. She countenanced Harvey’s infidelities but left him when he had sex with a “dirty” Democrat. In a familiar Early Allen joke, “I don’t like un-American sex.” One needs to feel shame and guilt.
The film would have been a smasher at the time. Pulled from the vault it remains a very funny, spirited piece,  anticipating the mock documentary of current TV.  With the delights of all his early work, it also reminds us how far this brilliant auteur has come.  

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The Patience Stone


The Afghanistan feature, Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone, examines that understudied thesis: Islamic terrorism is rooted in a repressed and perverted sexuality. The rhetoric of politics and religion are a false front. As the heroine’s worldly aunt remarks, the men who make war can’t make love. 
Though the film is based on Rahimi’s novel, its sexual and moral paradoxes smack of the films coscripter Jean-Claude Carriere wrote with Bunuel. The terrorist officers are proud to rape virgins but refuse to rape a whore. That saves the virtuous heroine (Golshifteh Farahani). Conversely, the young soldier who approaches her as a whore is the first man to treat her with respect and affection. As the victim of his commander’s sadism he empathizes with the supposed whore. The woman who personifies the will and capacity to survive is the prostitute aunt. That fate awaits the heroine’s two young daughters -- if they are lucky enough to survive the male world of war. The reversals are as surreal as the bombed landscape.    
The central marriage is totally aberrant. The young girl was by arrangement both engaged and married to the terrorist hero in absentia. As a lover he’s even more absent when he’s there. His “love” making is brutish and violent. The closest the woman comes to a happy relationship with him is when he lies comatose and she can for the first time unburden herself of her secrets. After ten years of silence and misery she comes to like him when he ostensibly listens to her. For the first time she has a voice. For the first time she can express herself. For the first time he can not spurn her kisses and caresses. The confession that breaks through, that returns him to life, is her revelation that because he is sterile she arranged for another man to sire his two daughters. The woman needed to procreate to sustain the marriage. When he returns to himself his impulse is to kill her. Again male violence is rooted in a perverse concept of masculinity.  
The film aims for a kind of essential universality by not naming the booming invasive war (Afghanistan? Iraq? ) and by not naming the key characters: the woman, the aunt, the young soldier. The Persian legend in the title is the syngue sabour, a magic stone that bears the speaker’s pain and suffering, a kind of mineral scapegoat. Here the comatose husband collects his wife’s disclosures until his vanity cracks and he erupts back to his normal brutishness. His mineral state was superior to his animal.

Friday, August 16, 2013

In a World


      The unseen world of film trailer voice-overs proves a fertile ground for replaying the  feminist revolt against male authority. For even in that arena, where the actors are disembodied, the male gender wields authority. That’s how pervasive patriarchal power is: It operates even without the body. Even when the body is irrelevant the advantage of maleness isn’t. 
In both the theatre and advertising worlds the voice-over actors are on the bottom rungs. They enjoy no celebrity outside their inner world, in part because their work is relatively simple, in part because they are unseen. And yet their rather sad little awards ceremony is as glitzy and pathetic as the big award shows and the industry’s political infighting and rivalries as bitter. As in the old joke about university politics, the passions run so heated because the stakes are so small.
Though the leading women are rather collections of quirks than characters, the film works because of the imaginative screenplay. One relationship is first broken, then recovered, through tape recordings. The voice business opens into the whole range of sexual tensions. Men are anxious/proud about the relative size of their...feet. In the culture of women’s sexual subordination the sexy little girl’s voice is overvalued -- to the detriment of the corporation lawyer’s plausibility. Sons are prized and daughters neglected. Having a woman narrate a new epic’s trailer is as radical as -- well, giving them the vote, or equal salaries, or senior economic positions, or indeed admitting them into any traditional preserve of male power. The epic film in the plot is a saga of Amazonian women ruling the globe -- it provokes laughs even in our audience.  
The male prerogative in free sex is neatly caught when the heroine’s father urges his studly young rival on to exploit his new conquest -- unaware the girl is the dolt’s daughter. The heroine’s secret admirer wins her by helping her defeat her father in the voice audition. That device, the young lovers against the cold oldies, is as old as Greek comedy. 
Essentially this is just another in the recent stream of comedies  -- Judd Apatow and spawn -- about young people postponing as long as possible their growing up into adult responsibilities. The film’s happy endings, with two families reunited and a third couple set, confirm the entire project’s conservative, safe spirit. But he voice-over context gives it some freshness. Still, as writer, director and lead actor Lake Bell proves a promising new talent -- even without Orson Welles’s stentorian voice and girth. 

Thursday, August 15, 2013

The Act of Killing


Joel Oppenheimer’s harrowing but indispensable The Act of Killing reminds us that even in a documentary, the particulars of plot and character are as open to expand into metaphors as a fictional work is.
The film presents the Indonesian death squad leaders who in 1965 overthrew the Soekarno government and committed massive genocide to maintain their power. There are two leading figures. Adi Zulkadry remains chillingly proud of his horrific actions. Anwar Congo -- who bears an unsettling resemblance to a younger Nelson Mandala -- shows some signs of a moderate guilt. As if to atone he has himself filmed pretending to be beaten up, then proudly shows the footage to his grandchildren. Despite his claims, of course the powerful killer can have no idea what his powerless victims felt. 
Oppenheimer has the killers restage their crimes for purposes of making a film. Zulkadry in particular relishes reliving the genocidal evil. Even Congo takes pride in demonstrating his efficient use of a wire to strangle his victims. What’s most moving is the effect of the staging on the citizens cast as victims. Though they weren’t party to the original crimes, just their staging moves them into uncontrollable pain and weeping. The “act” reminds them how vulnerable they still are to the killers now governing the country. They fathom their country's unspeakable suffering while its perpetrators don't.
That’s what makes this film speak beyond its putative subject matter. The particular case of 1965 Indonesia comes to signify the callousness and amorality of any government drunk on its own power. It would be a mistake to leave this movie feeling comfortable in our political system’s supposed superiority. North Americans may not be subject to their government’s committing genocide but the power gap remains. The Indonesian killers‘ impunity recurs in a more civilized manner in America's financial structure that remains intact, uncorrected, unpunished, for the self-service and havoc it wreaked upon the economy and the citizens. Here as there power corrupts. Here as there a government bent -- and I mean bent -- upon its own preservation can not be trusted to protect its citizens‘ lives, living or interests.  
The film’s political thrust is intensified by the film-making within the film and its acknowledgment that the killers were inspired by Hollywood movies. They proudly call themselves gangsters because that denotes “free men.” For them freedom means personal license. Any freedom that extends to the citizens signifies “too much democracy.” That’s like bailouts to the people being vile socialism, but to the banks and hedge funders is fine. The film’s government gangsters highjack the theme from Born Free and work a drag queen and musical numbers into the gore of the film’s history.
Those show biz ironies don’t lessen the film’s political impact, however. Making this film, exposing their present government officials‘ bloody past, amoral pride and freedom from conscience, all that is still very dangerous. The killers show no qualms about luxuriating in -- not just admitting -- their jaw dropping torture and killing. But the ordinary citizens, including a host of production and crew members, are forced to hide behind Anonymous.          

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Prince Avalanche


       It’s tempting to call David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche a post-apocalypse bromance. But it’s rather a fable about men and their -- as the heroes’ song puts it -- “bad connections,” not just with women and each other but with themselves and reality. 
In contrast to the film’s Icelandic source, here the wasteland derives not from ice but from fire, the 1987 Texas forest blaze. When the apparently worldlier Alvin (Paul Rudd) and the apparently naive Lance (Emile Hirsch) work all week painting the centre lane lines on the highway, their function is to bring a slim sense of order to the charred and remote wilds. Their work starts promisingly enough. But when their respective love lives backfire and their tentative friendship explodes, they drunkenly run their line painter amok then dump their equipment. The next morning they proceed with no sign of remorse or loss.
Alvin is disconnected from his girl-friend Madison, Lance’s sister, though they exchange poetic letters  and he sends her cash. He makes no effort to phone or to visit her on the weekends. Instead he mincingly plays at sharing domesticity on the ruins of a burned out house. Worse, Alvin is disconnected from his disconnection, completely unaware of their increasing estrangement. He considers his German lessons make him superior to Lance with his boom box.
The blunter Lance has fewer illusions about Madison but is equally self-unaware when he plans to seduce his friend’s (perhaps ex-) girlfriend, then to score at a regional beauty pageant and -- in between --  to help a much older bedmate deal with her unexpected pregnancy. In parallel forms of onanism -- aka “self-sufficiency” -- Alvin pretends to be a strong outdoorsy man’s man and Lance a stud, but neither has a clear sense of themselves or the ability to deal with their inevitable disappointment.
The world can survive apocalypse. Hence the brief scenes of rustics sawing logs and children playing with chickens. After an inferno the human race stirs itself back to life. In the microcosm, so do the young men. Their romantic hopes dashed they set off with a new friendship -- based on their own interaction not Madison’s connection -- but not with new insight or self-awareness They share the macho reflex illusion: the fools gold promise of that beauty pageant.
Two older figures confirm the film’s sense of fable. A boisterous trucker lauds the lads’ work, provides them with moonshine and warns them not to bed a woman more than three times lest they succumb to “feelings.” An older German woman rakes through the ashes of her burned out home and strolls the fields spectrally. She seems as unreal as Madison. The two older figures don’t connect to each other even when they appear in the same truck. They seem to embody the film’s sense of alternative reality, as also imaged in the black and white footage and in the shots in which speed melts together the separate lane lines.
The film begins like a road version of Godot but when it dwindles into buddy comedy it falls short of Beckett’s clarity.

Monday, August 5, 2013

The Attack


The fact that The Attack, Ziad Doueiri’s film of Yasmina Khadra’s novel, got made  at all is more heartening than the film itself. Jews and Arabs collaborated on making this Israeli film, that attempts even-handedly to examine the Israeli-Palestinian contretemps. In the film there appears no hope for the two warring sides to reconcile. Even more disturbing is the Arab nations’ ban on the film for its having been shot in Israel. 
If anything the film tends toward the Palestinian side. An early report has an Israeli policeman refusing to let an Arab enter a mosque unless he smokes a cigarette first. As it is Ramadan the Arab refuses, there is a scuffle, the cop is stabbed, the Palestinian arrested. However necessary the defensive posture, an exchange at a checkpoint shows Israeli abruptness almost trigger a fatal melee. The Arab surgeon hero, Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman), is seen to grow as he shifts from being the Israelis’ house Arab to refusing to help the Israelis commit more suppression in the name of justice and peace. His suicide bomber wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem) strikes a powerful chord when she writes that she can’t bear bringing a child to live without a homeland. The Jews know about that, but that’s not grounds for their national suicide.
When the surgeon receives his Israeli medical award, the first Arab to receive it in its 41 year history, he recalls experiencing Jewish hostility. He considers that erased by the support he received in his medical education and career, culminating in this award. But we see he is still treated with hostility. A Jewish medical colleague snipes at the surgeon’s success as a doctor and in his investments. A Jewish bombing victim refuses to be touched by the Christian Arab doctor. The policeman investigating the suicide bombing abuses his power in trying to wring a confession out of the innocent doctor.
In his acceptance speech the doctor makes perhaps the film’s central point: we have to reexamine our certitudes. Having suffered prejudice, he has come to respect and to befriend his Jewish colleagues and patients. But as he tracks down the forces behind his wife’s astonishing double life he rediscovers the Palestinian side of the issue. As his wife’s cousin contends, the Palestinians want to live in dignity. 
Here the film perhaps stops too soon. The Palestinians could have lived in dignity in their own state since 1948. Instead they have refused the two-state solution in the hopes of eradicating Israel instead. Where Israel accepted the 750,000 Jews expelled from the Arab countries around 1948, the other Arab nations rejected the Palestinians, banning or expelling them or making them second-class citizens, preferring to keep them suffering as leverage against Israel’s existence.  A dignity that requires the elimination of another people is something quite other than dignity. Even in the current renewal of peace talks, any optimism must be countered by Abbas’s promise that no Jew would be allowed to live in the new Palestine, while the Palestinian rights to return to Israel remains a basic condition. The ”right to return” is a one-sided campaign, intended to eliminate the one Jewish state in a world with about 60 Moslem states. 
Finally, examining our certitudes cuts two ways. As the murders and vengeance continue the peacemakers may lose their zeal and hope. When the doctor reveals his new perspective he loses the Jewish woman colleague who had been such a supportive friend all along. The longer this war continues the more set the old certitudes will become and the more negative any change. 

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Museum Hours


I’d say Museum Hours is an incidentally self-reflexive movie. It’s an intense work of art about the advantages of engaging in art, whether the visual arts, film, storytelling or music. Writer/director Jem Cohen rejects the tradition that art is an imitation of life -- and vice versa. His film argues that life is art and art is life. Any gap between them is our own insentience.
When the Montreal single Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) borrows money to visit her ailing distant cousin in Vienna, she finds her comatose and dying. Isolated, Anne visits the famous, gigantic Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, where she befriends a museum guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer), who gives her a variety of assistance. Between the visitor and this gay man there is no sexual tension. As their rhyming names suggest, both characters share the need to be re-enlivened. As Anne remembers her free spirited first lover, Johann remembers his heady days as a band agent, before the free wheeling of rock’n’roll hardened into “event management.”  If Anne goes to the museum for an escape from her care and solitude, what she rather finds there is the way to a more intense experience of the world around her. Johann finds beauty and charm in off-beaten spots in Vienna that he had forgotten.
Birds are one of the film’s major recurring symbols. An early shot that appears to be a still of a bird flying away from a tree turns out to be a background detail from a Breughel painting. That shot segues into a shot of a real bird flying. The bird signifies the spirit that soars through and to make art, of whatever medium. Later Anne sings a song about a bird and “the glories of a strong story.” The couple will walk into the country to see a reported flock of birds at a church. Anne describes seeing a real bird that seemed part of the tree, i.e., like a painting.
The cousin dies just when Anne and Johann are on a tour of underground water caves. That is, the real death plays out against a literary archetype, Charon rowing the dead across the river to the other side. The news of the death prompts a montage of antiquities, a reminder that art preserves a lost culture, lost artists, a lost community. Though Anne is stricken by the news, a rowdy neighborhood pub singalong effectively provides her a wake. Later Anne sings herself another song, about absence. “You have not gone away,” her chorus concludes, but in its last verse she omits that line, as if the loss can not be denied even in a song. The cousin’s absence is imaged in Anne’s emptied hangers in the hotel closet.  In the next shot as Johann walks alone through his museum we share his sense of Anne’s absence. In the reticence these images allow, the film is -- as the art historian describes Breughel -- neither sentimental nor judgmental.
A central scene presents that woman’s commentary on some Breughel paintings. A visitor insists that St Paul must be the center of a painting titled The Conversion of St Paul. The historian instead points to the emphasis given a small boy dwarfed and blinded by his military suit, or the prominence of two -- literal -- horses’ asses. She contends that the painting’s more profound meaning lies in the mundane material that effectively marginalizes the epic, titular action. In support she cites a famous Auden poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” where Breughel’s attention is not on the heroic Icarus but upon a ploughman about his work, unfazed. For her and for Auden the function of art is not to celebrate the unusual and the heroic but the quiet, quotidian reality. Art is not larger than life but the ability to see the beauty and animacy in the mundane. Thus the film ends with Johann describing five real sites with the aesthetic percipience usually exercised -- as that academic did -- on a work of art. Life is art.
Constantly the film interweaves reality and art. Anne describes being touched by the soft mien of a man who couldn’t speak English to her; cut to a painted portrait of such an ordinary man. Once we are attuned to art, the detritus in the street speaks and touches like a Rauschenberg, the abstract patterns on an old exposed wall a Rothko, a bar’s wallpaper of snapshots a Boltanski installation. These artists aren’t mentioned but neither is Rachel Whiteread when the couple visit her Holocaust memorial. They don’t have to be. This film preaches to the converted, with the intention of deepening a faith already entrenched. After all, its audience chose to attend a subtitled art movie with the word Museum in the title. They’re probably not expecting Ben Stiller. This film won’t convert anyone to art but it could correct any artsies who may prefer it to life. With the winter setting, Vienna at its bleakest reveals a touching beauty. The physical world itself blossoms from this effect. A large frozen tree sprouts a new leafy twig; a stone wall bursts into a drawing of a bear’s head. 
After the couple considers nude portraits of Adam and Eve we see three museum patrons shamelessly nude, open as Anne remembers her first lover. This surreal frisson suggests the liberating power of the experience of art. The proper feeling in such a rich museum is comfort because it provides a community unfortunately less available outside. Anne’s connection with Johann typifies the community art gives us with our past and with our present communicants. That may explain why Anne increased her debt in order to visit a cousin from whom she had grown distant. She had an instinct to recover that community; in art she found a broader one. 
The film closes on an antique store window, focused on two abstract silver figures on a seesaw. That emblematizes the brief union of Anne and Johann but also that other union, usually considered antithetical but here seen as a fusion of two functions in a single game: art and life.    

Friday, August 2, 2013

Our Children


Two arcs propel Joachim Lafosse’s remarkable Our Children
The most obvious and significant is the heroine Murielle’s decline from a beautiful, loving, young spirit to a depressed, oppressed, despairing drudge. She proves the dictum, Biology is destiny. From her honeymoon through her four child bearings she loses her sense of self, her liberty, her control over her life. Her last action is her tragic resolve to save her three daughters and one son from their being ruined by the sexist, patriarchal system that destroyed her. Unable to grant them liberty she gives them death. Though her Moroccan husband Mounir claims he doesn’t want to raise his daughters in his sexist homeland, Murielle is destroyed by a European patriarch in Belgium. 
Dr. Pinget provides the antithetic arc. His apparent generosity and care are gradually exposed as heartless self-serving power and authority. Having married a young Moroccan woman, he leaves her in her homeland but brings one of her brothers, then eventually the other, to Europe variously to serve him. When his hopes to have Mounir join his medical practice are dashed, he hires him for office work. He pays for Mounir and Murielle’s honeymoon, then agrees to join them. He shares his house with them, then to keep them buys them an estate where he again lives with them. His callousness towards Murielle drives her tragedy. 
The film’s primary theme is woman’s suffering in a male system. In a key scene Murielle sings along with a popular tune on the car radio. First the man sings that he loves all women, then that they are so complex, they are so difficult. His appreciation overlies rejection. As she realizes she has been living the role the patriarchy cast her in she breaks down crying. The male attraction to woman is fatal to her.
Dr Pinget appears to be sexless. His marriage seems a paper affair, like the one he arranges for Mounir’s brother and Murielle’s sister. He doesn’t have any relationships outside the family he has bought, Murielle’s. He walks out indignant when her sister asks if he has any love-life. As for Mounir, his insensitivity is latent as early as his marriage proposal. He doesn’t tell Murielle he loves her, or even ask her to marry him. He just states he wants to marry her. Perhaps an endearing shyness at that point, it turns into verbal and physical violence later, as he leaves Murielle to run the house and the family and is harshly critical when she has problems.
As we watch the daughters grow more beautiful and delightful, especially when they play at the make-up ritual that will turn them into women, they seemed doomed to blossom into their mother’s gloom. When she summons them one by one upstairs they leave behind a TV cartoon with a corpulent white authority figure, an image of Dr Pinget, exercising his rage.
Murielle finds understanding and sympathy in only two people. With one she only speaks, with the other she can’t. The first is the therapist whom Dr Pinget attacks her for seeing. The other is Mounir’s mother, with whom she shares an understanding of woman’s oppression but from whom she’s isolated by their different language. The victims’ shared understanding survives national borders. When the mother collapses from a vision of death, she may have sensed Murielle’s not her own. (That shadow crops up on the side of the screen in several shots, reducing the wide screen as it does Murielle’s living space.) But all she can advise Murielle is “Get rest.” She herself is a victim of the system, forced to be grateful to the doctor for buying and taking away both her sons and remotely controlling her daughter.  
The tension between the Moroccan family and the fat, hedonistic, impotent but suffocatingly powerful white European doctor adds another compelling theme. This domestic tragedy is also a parable for European colonialism. The white power insinuates itself into its colony, funds it, wins its trust and affection, imposes its own culture, but for all its pretense of generosity and care insists on dominating it and imposing its will. Any move to independence is suppressed as an affront to nature and to reason. (The film’s original French title is A Prendre la raison, or Insanity.) That ruthless power is what the male patriarchy shares with the European colonial tradition.
The film opens with a woman crying, begging that her four children be buried in Morocco. So it’s a whodunit. Except here the killer is the true victim. 
Not that this film needs any factual justification beyond its careful metaphors, but it was triggered by the 2007 case in Nivelles, Belgium, where Genevieve Lhermitte killed her five children. 

I'm So Excited


Pedro Almodovar’s new frolic, I’m So Excited, is more accurately titled in its original Spanish, Passengers Lovers. It’s a cocktail with three heady genre ingredients.
The first is the disaster film, subspecies Airplane. Ground crew lovers Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz unwittingly cause a luggage cart accident which leads to the locking of the landing gear on an international flight. The plane circles above Toledo (the Spanish one) before finding a runway for an emergency landing. Typically, the terror leads to the passengers and crew finding a new level of self-awareness and honesty. 
The second is the Ship of Fools genre, where the cross-section of society meet and endure along the Road of Life. Specifically Almodovar’s characters are a funhouse reflection of the characters in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Almodovar like Ford liked to deploy the same troupe of actors and both are similarly (?) concerned with the nature of manhood. 
Mr Mas is the supposedly respectable banker fleeing his defrauding of the new airport at La Mancha. Norma, a famous porn star and dominatrix, echoes the Claire Trevor whore. As the latter settles into marriage to The Ringo Kid (Johnny Wayne), Norma walks off with the securities advisor who is actually the hitman one of Norma’s clients’ wives hired to kill her. With her profession’s obligatory heart of gold Norma arranges Mas’s reunion with his runaway dominatrix daughter and reveals that she really hasn’t made those graphic videos to blackmail her highest profile clients. To see his daughter again Mas will face the police. Ford’s whiskey drummer is here the less meek newlywed who pulls a wealth of mescaline from his -- southern state. To enliven things Almodovar adds Bruna, a mature virgin with ESP, and Ricardo, an actor whose public phone calls involve his most recent ex, the suicidal Alba, and Ruthie, her wiser predecessor. Determined to fulfill her vision of losing her virginity, Bruna rapes a comatose young man in Economy, Nasser, with whom she goes off at the end.
The third element is the swizzle stick Almodovar, whose camp black comedy inspires every scene. The flight crew in Business class and cockpit are in varying degrees of openness gay. The stewards’ exuberant highlight is a Berkeleyan dance and mime to the Poynter Sisters, intended to distract the passengers from their danger. The “Peninsula” airlline points to the film’s camp phallicism. (On the wing the logo shrinks to Pe, Cruz’s nickname, recalling the start of the problem.)The pilots turn on “the crossfeed selector” while discussing the implications of their fellatio.
The main action takes place in Business because the Economy passengers and stewardesses have all been doped unconscious. The result is an exposure of corruption and hypocrisy at the upper end of the social ladder, properly to discomfit the affluent.  The plane is named Chavela Blanca, which may connote a white knight like Cervantes’s dreamer, as it miraculously lands at -- the abandoned, spectral La Mancha.
Almodovar begins with the statement that his film is pure fantasy. But like Dali’s surrealism, it begins with meticulously detailed images of the material preparation for takeoff. A hypnotic spiraling axle launches the main business. The film ends with a dream-like realism in its movement through the ghost airport, where the empty floors shimmer like a desert at noon. The line of unused trolleys recall the pre-title image of cartoon suitcases moving along without people. 
If the narrative is a fantasy then it’s Almodovar’s dream of a society in which people can live out their personal ecstasies -- whether in drugs, sexuality or that dangerous taboo, open, honest conversation -- without fear or furtiveness. At the end the characters float down into a field of white foam -- a cloudy heaven on tarmac -- and find their happiness, however unconventional. The pilot learns his wife and mistress know of and accept his affair with his male steward. Odd couples pair off. Ruthie has the character not to resume her affair with Ricardo. Like Ford, Almodovar wants to save his outcasts from “the blessings of civilization.”