At Wonders in the Dark we enjoyed one of our banner weeks, as several threads boasted some of our most fascinating comment threads and heftiest totals.  At the top was the review for Von Trier’s Antichrist, but superlative response was also affored the countdown reviews for The Truman Show and The Double Life of Veronique, as well as reviews of Campion’s Bright Star and an opera, Janacek’s From the House of the Dead, the latter of which received a delightfully surprising and exhilarating response.

     The two biggest “events” for me this week were the Wednesday evening opera (Janacek’s From the House of the Dead, -based on Dostoyevsky-directed by film and opera luminary Patrice Chereau) at the Met (reviewed on Friday here at WitD) which was a shattering experience, and a magnificent Saturday night showing of Chaplin’s  masterpiece, Modern Times, with Lucille and all the kids at the Loews Jersey City movie palace and their gigantic screen and werlitzer organ, which navigated a pre-film Christmas carol session with the movie patrons, many of whom -surprisingly – were teenagers.  When my own kids admitted to me that they liked Modern Times, it really warmed my heart, as this, City Lights and The Gold Rush are three of my favorite films of all-time, as is the case with many other film fans.  As a number of you will remember our pal Dave Hicks chose the film as his best of 1936 in his completed annual countdown at GoodFellas, and he penned a fabulous essay here:                                               http://goodfellamovies.blogspot.com/2009/06/1936-modern-times-charles-chaplin.html

     I saw three new releases in the theatres:

     UP IN THE AIR is the is the year’s biggest bust, a classic example of a film that is grossly overrated, and seemingly is headed for the Best Picture Oscar, in a decision that will mark it as the worst choice in Academy history.  This is a smug, emotionally distancing film that attempts to impart some existential substance on what is a slender and tedious premise, and George Clooney plays George Clooney is a situation that putters out after a half hour, and never segues into that level of melancholy which would give this romantic comedy any level of real significance.  It’s passable at best, but the recognition it is receiving is kind of appalling.

    BROTHERS, a Jim Sheridan re-make of Suzanne Blier’s superior film from a few years back, is a decent enough effort, a bit better than I expected, though it doesn’t have any resonance beyond it’s narrow focus.  Still, it grips on the strength of it’s performances, and competant direction, even if those flashback sequences are rather predictable.  It’s worth a look.

    EVERYBODY’S FINE.  The weekend’s best film is the one that was almost guaranteed to be the worst one.  The trailers were abysmal and appeared to make the film look trite and formulaic in the worst sense, yet Kirk Jones has surprisingly fashioned a nuanced, probing and truthful look at a dysfunctional family, that has been compared to ABOUT SCHMIDT, but also with some distant kinship to Ozu’s TOKYO STORY, but with a dash of lies and secrets.  As Bob Clark reminded me online today, it’s based on a 1990 Tornatore film I didn’t see, but it’s Robert DeNiro’s unexpected subtlety in a role that could have inspired saccharine overload, that really fueled this deeply-affected dramedy, that is rather a trap for snobs. This film had particular emotional resonance for me in my personal life as of late, as one sub-plot involved a situation I am most familiar with, and continue to mourn.

     Anyway, as I am not yet aware of how the sports teams have fared, I’ll let Dave Hicks and Joel talk about the Bengals and Pats.  The Olson family though is rightly thrilled about the Ducks and their upcoming Rose Bowl appearance!

Around the blogosphere there is quite a bit of action, and it’s by and large most stimulating:

    At Darkness Into Light, Dee Dee is running a series of Lubitch reviews by her good friend, Australian Andrew Katsis.  His latest is on Ninotchka:  http://noirishcity.blogspot.com/2009/12/counting-down-twenty-five-days-to_04.html

Tony d’Ambra has traveled north to Southeast Asia for ten days on business, but he’s provided an invaluable noir list for his “Recess Noir” post at FilmsNoir.net.  We wish him the best during his trip: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/recess-noir.html

John Greco continues to illuminate the blogosphere with his ever-prolific writings on film known and relatively unseen.  His latest is Where Danger Lives: http://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/where-danger-lives-1950-john-farrow/

WitD’s favorite Garden State scribe, the ever-versatile David Schleicher has what appears to be a fascinating look into the past with a personal memoir: http://davethenovelist.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/the-spiral-of-the-seasons/

Troy Olson has finished his comprehensive ‘Italy Trip Report’ and it really deserves everyone’s attention, especially those who have travel plans or wish they did: http://troyolson.blogspot.com/2009/12/italy-trip-report-finally-finished.html

Craig Kennedy, preparing his popular Watercooler thread, has a perceptive piece up on thedocumentary The Cove, which he was no fan of: http://livingincinema.com/2009/12/05/dvd-review-the-cove-2009-12/

After penning one of the great internet reviews of recent months on Wellman’s silent classic Wings, our dear UK friend Judy is back on top in what appears to be another gem on Wellman’s Beggars of Life: http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/beggars-of-life-1928/

Daniel Getahun, ever-prolific as always has an engaging essay in his “300″ series on New York, I Love You at Getafilm:               http://getafilm.blogspot.com/2009/12/300-words-about-new-york-i-love-you.html

Ed Howard’s stupendous review of Hitchcock’s Sabotage at “Only the Cinema” also includes a lively and contentious comment thread that’s quite worth a look: http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2009/12/sabotage.html

Long-time South African friend and blogger Nick Plowman is back in print at Fataculture with a superlative review of Three Monkeys: http://fataculture.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/review-three-monkeys/

At Gateway Cinephiles, Missouri’s finest film critic, Andrew Wyatt, apparently has som every good things to say about The Road, which needs to be read: http://gatewaycinephiles.com/2009/12/05/here-at-the-end-of-all-things/

At “Cinemascope” our very good friend Shubhajit has one of his cae capsules up on the Dardennes’s The Son:                                                                               http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2009/12/son-le-fils-2002.html

Samuel Wilson has a review up at Mondo 70 of 1982’s Vice Squad: http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2009/12/vice-squad-1982.html

Marilyn Ferdinand, Writer Extraordinaire, has what appears to be yet another extraordinary essay up on a Jewish film, Defamation:           http://ferdyonfilms.com/

A most-interesting quiz that has been circulating the net is presently at Pat’s place, “Doodad Kind of Town:                       http://doodadkindoftown.blogspot.com/2009/12/lets-get-quizzical.html

The esteemed Film Doctor has the Media Links post up at his place right now: http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2009/12/notable-film-and-media-links-december-3.html

Jason Bellamy, fresh off his marathon complicity with Ed Howard on their Monthly Conversations (this time with Lawrence of Arabia, which shamefully I haven’t gotten over to yet), has a Weekly Rant up on “Prop Blunders” at his place, “The Cooler”: http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2009/12/weekly-rant-best-prop-blunder.html

J.D. at Radiator Heaven is featuring that Thanksgiving/Christmas quiz in his lead position:                                                         http://rheaven.blogspot.com/2009/12/slifrs-thanksgivingchristmas-movie-quiz.html

Our dear friend Qalandar has a piece up at his place titled “The Museum of Innocence”:                                                                                    http://qalandari.blogspot.com/2009/12/fragment-on-museum-of-innocence.html

R.D. Finch has his typically elaborate, well-penned essay up on Renoir’s The Golden Coach:                                              http://movieprojector.blogspot.com/2009/11/theater-of-life-jean-renoirs-golden.html

Rick Olson’s latest post, always a must read, is “A Tale of Two Openings” at Coosa Creek Cinema:                                                  http://coosacreek.org/mambo/2009/12/05/a-tale-of-two-openings/

And last but by no means least is Tony Dayoub, who presently has a review I will most assuredly be getting to on Herzog’s film at The View Finder                                        :  http://www.cinemaviewfinder.com/2009/12/movie-review-bad-lieutenant-port-of.html                                                                                                                                 Tony also reviewed “Everybody’s Fine” I see, which I must read tonight!

    Kaleem Hasan, Dorothy Porker, David Noack, Ed Howard, Frank Gallo, Peter, and and some others are big silent fans, and of course Ed has reviewed some challenging material like Franju and early Hitchcock at his site.  T.S. of Screen Savour has been on sabatical as of late, but his specialty has always been the silents, as he has done extraordinary work with Chaplin, Keaton and the early German masters.  In fact T.S. is a titan in this regard.  Marilyn Ferdinand, a consumate scholar also has an extensive background, as does her site colleague Rod of the U.K., who just reviewed The Big Parade.  Rick Olson is a long-time proponent of silent cinema as well, and the esteemed Film Dr. is another writer with extensive background.

    Hence the 2000’s polling (2000-2009) won’t commence until early April, at which point many other internet pollings will be complete.  But ours will allow many to take their time seeing films they may not have seen with the quick-trigger voting, making the project far more comprehensive.

    Once again that man from Sydney, Tony d’Ambra, has done some magnificent work on our sidebar!  Check it out!  It’s really great stuff.  Thank yous are simply not enough.

(France/Poland 1991 98m) DVD1/2

Aka. La Double Vie de Véronique

Four Colours: Yellow

p  Leonardo de la Fuente  d  Krzysztof Kieslowski  w  Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz  ph  Slowimir Idziak  ed  Jacques Witta  m  Zbigniew Preisner  art  Patrice Mercier, Halina Dobrowolska 

Irène Jacob (Weronika/Véronique), Halina Gryglaszewska (aunt), Kalina Jedrusik (gaudy woman), Aleksander Bardini (orchestra conductor), Philippe Volter (Alexandre Fabbri),

One would be forgiven for thinking that Kieslowski had premonitions of his death, a feeling I had ever since I noticed the use of the number 270641196 in Three Colours: Blue (see the essay from that film for an explanation).  I deliberately avoided watching this earlier Kieslowski film again after first seeing it in 1991 because I wanted to wait for a suitable DVD version to be released.  It was a decision more than vindicated.  For what over a decade ago seemed too perplexing and puzzling, now seems almost prophetic, and I shall try my best to explain what I mean.  The tagline is not ill-used; the colour yellow permeates the entire film, from first to last it seems to be shot in a magical light that is not only symbolic but almost transcendental.  Could it be possible that it and the later trilogy were, in actual fact, a quadrilogy?  

Two young women, each called Veronica, both suffering from heart trouble, both with styes in their eyes, both with a passion for music, live in different cities, one in Poland, one in France.  One day, the Polish girl sees her double board a bus in a town square, and the girl on the bus unknowingly takes a picture of her double.  Soon after, the Polish girl dies of heart failure in the middle of a recital, and at virtually the exact moment that she is being buried, while in the middle of love-making session with her boyfriend, the French double feels a tangible but inexplicable feeling of loss. 

Irène Jacob in Kieslowski's sublime masterpiece

            One could read it that the Polish girl had disrupted the cosmic balance by seeing her double, and hence she had to die.  But only in retrospect is one aware of a synchronicity beyond the movie itself, but to Kieslowski’s life.  Jacob continually wears red, as if looking forward to her playing the lead in Red; the musical connection carried forward into Blue; when Véronique carries wind chimes across the school playground one instantly recalls the one memento that Binoche’s character kept in the later film; in addition to which there is the old lady seen by both women, once carrying heavy bags of shopping, once walking through a garden with a stick (looking forward to the bottle lady in the later trilogy), and the continual shots of a burned out car which, when put together with the final shot of Jacob touching a tree through her car window, adds up to the accident that takes the lives of Juliette Binoche’s husband and child in the very next scene of his film career, the opening to Blue.  On another level, the musical connection goes further, as Preisner’s score not only closely resembles that for the later Blue, and that in 1999 Preisner wrote a piece in memory of Kieslowski, entitled “Requiem for a Friend”.  Add to this Kieslowski’s announcement at Cannes in 1994 that Red would be his last film, before then saying weeks before his death (like Weronika, of heart failure)  that he had written a final work, a trilogy about Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (later filmed by other directors).  All of which is only appreciable both after the release of the later trilogy, and after the master’s death.  It’s as if Veronica, in both forms, is Kieslowski himself, and that, aware of his own mortality, just as the spirit of Weronika lived on in Véronique, his spirit would live on in the visions of different directors.  Those films, as it turned out, would not quite be the worthy tribute they should have been, but proof once more that he really was one of a kind and, to this writer’s eyes, the greatest film-maker of the last thirty years.  Not to overlook Idziak’s photography or Jacob’s radiant, sensual yet pensive performance, her beautiful face (indeed, her whole body – the film has more nudity than other Kieslowski films) radiating an inner warmth, bathed in a golden glow.  Like Jacob, the film is not merely enigmatic, baffling or even ambiguous, but an epiphany.

 by Sam Juliano

     From the House of the Dead, based on a novel by Dostoyevsky, may well be famed Czechoslovakian composer Leos Janacek’s most extraordinary opera.  The rather extreme musical style of the last years of Janacek’s life is complemented here by a dramaturgy in opera that was actually years ahead of its time.  This is a stark work with vocal writing that exhibits powerful expressive force.  It is the final work from Janacek, and like the three that preceded it- Kata Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen and The Makropoulos Case it speaks with a deeply humanitarian voice.  The composer aimed here to portray the bleakest suffering, unknowingly creating resonances with historical events and places he would never live to see – notably, the gulags of Soviet Russia and the concentration camps of the Nazi regime.  The raw power of the situation itself is paralleled brilliantly in the composer’s style.  Janacek’s depiction of the Russian penitentiary is so belligerant, so forceful in its realism that it takes on a kind of white-hot fervor.  In fact Janecek once wrote: “You know the terror, the inner feelings of a human being who will never cease to breathe: complete despair which wants nothing and expects nothing.  This will be developed in my Dostoyevsky opera.” 

     Celebrated film director Patrice Chereau, who is equally famed for his Bayreuth Wagner Ring Cycle, acknowledges the results of this development when he asserts that “there are two things that I sometimes hear about From the House of the Dead: that there is no plot, and that there is no love or hope in the story. The title of the opera comes from the novel by Dostoyevsky, who believed these kinds of prisons are made for killing people.  In a  beautiful passage, he says that every youth, every hope, every future is destroyed in these camps.  But then he goes on to tell tell incredibly beautiful stories about a group of fascinating people who are still living and hoping, trying to survive, through tears or anger, in the inferno of the prison.  That’s the paradox: the inmates know that there is no hope of ever leaving the prison, but  they nevertheless strive to survive.  They have enormous energy for surviving, for creating a community, and the prison becomes its own society.  Janacek’s music, with its rude, some times violent sound, with its use of ostinato, with its strange and incredibly strong forms, tells us the story of a community that is alive and energetic.”

     With From the House of the Dead Janacek has made a kind of collage, assembling elements and placing them one aside the other, like a collection of postage stamps.  Over the course of the performance, three people emerge from the huge ensemble and explain how they came to commit murder.  Three people – Luka, Skuratov, and Shishkov tell their stories, and from these smaller pieces emerges a single arc and story: the story of this particular humanity, with its stronger characters and weaker ones.  Chereau effectively binds everything together to forge a clear destiny for all the characters and to make the story larger than its individual pieces.  Hence, love, or the lack of love is at play every day in this prison.  Skuratov kills for love and Shishkov kills for lack of it.  And at the center of the piece, there are two plays – within-the-play, which the prisoners have probably spent a year preparing, and both of them are about love, (which is basically everywhere in this opera, because that’s what the prisoners miss most.)  The life of this group of people is both the plot of From the House of the Dead and their destiny.  Janacek, like Dostoyevsky before him do not pass judgement on the murderers, instead urging tolerance and respect.

     While the original story of From the House of the Dead unfolds in a prison settlement in Siberia in the 19th century, the action of the Chereau staging is set in an unspecified time and place, much in the tradition of Brecht.  The diverse characters represent a rough cross-section of society, including, among others a nobleman, a priest, a drunk, and a commendant and guards who are also, in a sense, victims of their system.  Set designer Richard Perduzzi has constructed high concrete walls (seen in picture above) that periodically slide open and closed, and the claustrophobic enclave contains the crowded cast.  The rather slovenly, indescript costumes and dingy lighting (not to mention some simulated onstage sex) were also characteristics of another Met production I saw earlier this year – Luc Bondy’s controversial Tosca.  Perduzzi designed that one too.  But where the avante garde approach clashed with the lavish ornate architecture and aesthetic demand of the Italian opera, the approach here is compellingly effective, and it provides a perfect match for the brutally beautiful score that is noted by an economy of expression that deftly encapsulates thoughts and emotions.  It’s music that’s sometimes dissonant, sometimes lyrical, and always inventive.  It blends romanticism and modernity, and a vast orchestra is employed.  Violin solos are particularly ravishing, while the vocal lines are declamatory and closely follow the speech pattern of the Czech language.   And it was quite joyously apparent that Janacek’s love for folk music shines through in the dance tunes that appear in a play-within-the-opera, although these melodies are far beyond exercises in the picturesque; here they are tainted by memories, and the sound is simultaneously beautiful and ominous.

      Delivering the opera’s longest soliloquy – almost 20 minutes to some urgent music- Peter Mattei gives a powerful and moving peformance as Shishkov, who commits a “crime of passion.”  Stefan Margita in his Met debut, is a tenor who plays Filka (Luka) and he sings a moving monologue about being sent to jail and then murdering a strong-arming officer.  Eric Stoklossa, who also makes his first appearance at the opera house, is a winning Alyeya, who is befriended by the comamnding Gorianchikov, who is played by the superb baritone Willard White.

     The opera’s biggest pyro-technic moment (and some patrons who spend over $250 for a seat in the front orchestra and first balcony need something to visually excite them) was when a massive load of what appeared to paper and garbage fell onto the stage from above, which was an excellent transitional device, which segued into a stage of dust and smoke.

     It’s stagings like this from luminaries like Chereau, and much obscured and underestimated scores, like this one-act work (which is surely one of Janecek’s best,) that allow for the perfect chemisty to create that rarity on the Metropolitan opera house stage.  From the House of the Dead is a miracle.

Note:  I saw ‘From the House of the Dead’ on Wednesday night (Dec. 2nd) all by my lonesome at the Met.  The opera ran only 1 hour and 35 minutes (an unusually short opera) with no intermission.  I spent some time before on this rainy but mild evening at a local sandwich shop on Broadway enjoying some tomato rice soup and some blueberries and fruit juice.

(UK 1992 85m) DVD2

Shining a torch into the night sky

p  Olivia Stewart  d/w  Terence Davies  ph  Michael Coulter  ed  William Diver  md  Robert Lockhart  art  Christopher Hobbs  cos  Monica Howe

Marjorie Yates (mother), Leigh McCormack (Bud), Anthony Watson (Kevin), Nicholas Lamont (John), Ayse Owens (Helen), Tina Malone (Edna), Jimmy Wilde (Curly), Robin Polley (Mr Nicholls),

Watching Terence Davies’ autobiographical piece was, to this reviewer, rather like flicking through a family album, heralding from a family barely removed from that depicted in the film, in location, time and spirit.  It isn’t a prerequisite to be acquainted with the north, or with Catholicism, or remembrances of the 1950s, but it certainly helps.  And though those who cannot tick those boxes can and do enjoy and celebrate the film, they do miss something in the translation.

            It’s more than merely an exercise in nostalgia, critics both professional and amateur have talked of it being like a stream of the subconscious, and in many ways they’re right, with remembrances of different years and moods taking place seemingly at the same time.  Essentially, the viewer is transported much like Scrooge by the spirits of Christmas into the childhood remembrances of Bud, an 11 year old from the terraced streets of Liverpool.  All the expected reminiscences are present and correct, from canings to show the kids who’s boss and visits to Nitty Nora the Bug Explorer to the mind-numbing tedium of assembly and warm welcomes to black men who mistakenly come to the door to begging for a shilling for the pictures and neighbourly gatherings on the doorstep.  It really is a different world, and one so dreamlike that one is not surprised when seemingly otherworldly voices ring in one’s ear, reminiscences not just of Bud’s but of our own collective movie-going subconscious.  Those with ears to hear will recognise choice sound-bites from Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Happiest Days of Your Life, Meet Me in St Louis, The Ladykillers, Private’s Progress, Great Expectations and, several times, The Magnificent Ambersons, mixed with songs from Nat King Cole, Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds (Tammy, naturally).  To this, add several choice snippets of hymns known to anyone who’s suffered through a Catholic primary education, Waltons-like ‘goodnights’, and a friend of the family who lives to do Cagney and EGR impressions.  To this add a truly stunning visual sense, which bathes the film in a romantic, nostalgic glow despite actually being very gloomy in its surface aesthetics.  Rain, as befits the wet North-West, is never far away, and the reflection of rain patterns on windows on wallpaper in darkened rooms adds a further ethereal touch.  And not for nothing does the film open with a credit time lapse shot of a bowl of roses slowly wilting and dying, a simple but telling metaphor for the fleeting nature of those happiest days of Bud’s, and Terence’s, lives. 

            It’s also interesting to compare it to his earlier Distant Voices, Still Lives, which for all its careful detail and strong performances, was a little too grim in tone to fully satisfy.  In Closes Davies mixes this grim exterior with an altogether warmer glow, as opposed to the cold light of day of the earlier film.  It also includes several slow pans that Max Ophuls would be proud of, from a simple yet stunning overhead of the steps and railings of the terraced streets to the perhaps aesthetically more memorable pan through a fairground of Bud holding a perennial candy floss, and there are essences of Dennis Potter and even of the first generation of the interminable Coronation Street in the street sequences.  Appropriately perhaps, considering the setting in the British Catholic heartland, it’s a spiritual film in many ways, not merely religiously but of the soul.  Gorgeously shot by Coulter, it also benefits from the superb interior and exterior sets of Hobbs, as well as from some exemplary performances from Yates as Bud’s Ma, McCormack himself as Bud, and Malone as a salt-of-the-earth neighbour.  It may be slight, it may be idiosyncratic and personal, but it’s magical all the same.  To paraphrase a hymn heard in the film, “once in Terence Davies’ city…”

(USA 1999 188m) DVD1/2

I shall smite all thy borders with frogs

p  Joanne Sellar  d/w  Paul Thomas Anderson  ph  Robert Elswit  ed  Dylan Tichenor  m  Jon Brion, Fiona Apple  m/ly  Aimee Mann  art  William Arnold, Mark Bridges  cos  Mark Bridges

Julianne Moore (Linda Partridge), William H.Macy (Quiz Kid Donnie Smith), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Phil Parma), Tom Cruise (Frank T.J.Mackey), Jeremy Blackman (Stanley Spector), John C.Reilly (Jim Kurring), Jason Robards Jnr (Earl Partridge), Melora Walters (Claudia Wilson Gator), Philip Baker Hall (Jimmy Gator), Melinda Dillon (Rose Gator), Alfred Molina (Solomon Solomon), Michael Bowen (Rick Spector), April Grace, Ricky Jay, Michael Murphy, Henry Gibson, Thomas Jane, Luis Guzman, Miriam Margolyes,

Ladies and germs, may I present the most ambitious masterpiece of American nineties cinema.  If ever a film demanded multiple viewings to pick up its textures and nuances, this is it.  Some called it pretentious, indulgent and even overlong and they have a point, but very few filmmakers have the balls to run with their indulgencies to the point where greatness is achieved.  Boogie Nights promised much, especially in its director’s handling of its eclectic ensemble cast, but Magnolia surpasses it easily.  Indeed, one can see his ensemble being the finest seen since the days of John Ford and Preston Sturges and his style being the modern successor to Altman.  They, and he, are that good.

            The plot itself is very Schnitzler like; a young black boy’s stepfather is murdered, the investigating cop falls for a young hyper-nervous drug addict, who in turn hates her father, who is dying of cancer and who for forty years has presented a game show about brainiac children (the 1968 champion of which is now reduced to working in an electronics store after his parents spent his winnings and the current champion of which is pressurised by his greedy excuse for a father) sponsored by a misanthropic old businessman, likewise dying of cancer and tended by a male nurse, who he asks to get in touch with his estranged son, a sex guru, much to the disgust of his once gold digging but now guilt-ridden and hysterical wife, who decides to end it all, only to be rescued by a young black boy who happens by…

            This all takes place in a single twenty-four hours in the San Fernando Valley, but the opening prologue with its three tales of coincidence and chance tell us to expect the unexpected.  Here, fate and destiny rules and nothing is pure chance.  Those continual references to 82 and variations thereof point to the very quote from Exodus Ch8, Vs.2 that explains the almost Twilight Zone biblical ending (predicted by the arcade game in the bar being “Frogger”).  Yet this is not only a film about complex lives and performances (of which Walters, Hall, Robards, Hoffman and Macy are superb and Reilly, Moore and Cruise simply extraordinary), but the sheer bravado.  The incredibly complex tracking shots leave one spellbound and have since become known as Anderson shots.  He dares to have his characters introduced as infuriating, telling much of the plot through Aimee Mann’s wonderfully meaningful song lyrics (all the while squirming through the continual renditions of Gabrielle’s “Dreams”).  Some of the speeches and monologues reach almost poetic proportions; one particularly recalls Robards’ deathbed speech on regret (“use that regret for anything, any way you want…”).  Though the narrator may say that “if that was in a movie, I wouldn’t believe it…”, you do because it’s so extraordinarily well done, with the finale surprising despite the cryptic clues.  The title itself is indeed only explained by cryptic clues (the Masonic symbols in the studio are because the 82^nd – that number again – chapter of the Masons is in Magnolia, Arkansas).  Emotions are at a high throughout and you just have to go along with it, and each repeated viewing is a richer experience than the previous one because those previous viewings are history.  As the film says, “we may be through with the past, but the past aint through with us.”

  

by Sam Juliano

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”

                -John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 1819, Hampstead, England

     Over a period of a few weeks in 1819, John Keats composed three of the most famous poems in all of English literature, Ode to a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to Melancholy, and many literary scholars now consider him the greatest poet in the English language after Shakespeare, despite the fact that he lived only into his twenty-fifth year.  Yet during his short life Keats, who was born in London in 1795, received little acclaim, and wasn’t recognized as a great figure until decades after his death.

     New Zealand-born director Jane Campion’s rapturous film Bright Star, based on a biographical volume by Andrew Motion, tells the story of Keats’s brief but intensely passionate relationship with 19 year-old Fanny Brawne when the poet was 24 and nearing the throws of the tuberculosis that eventually claimed his life in Rome a year later.  As the film opens, Keats has just returned from a walking tour of Scotland with his friend, fellow poet Charles Brown, who is a neighbor of the Brawne family, which includes  Fanny, 14 year-old Sam and 9 year-old Toots.  it a difficult time for Keats financially, and Brown affords him vital assistance telling Keats: “Your writing is the finest thing in my life.”  Needless to say such a scenario lends itself to an upcoming conflict as Keats’s blossoming affection for Fanny is rebuffed by Charles who accuses her of “making a religion out of flirting,” but it’s clear enough that there is some jealousy at play too.  Charles feels that his friend’s artistic soul is at risk by this affair, which is sure to mute inspiration.  But at this point Keats is actually maturing even further, as both Nightingale and Melancholy are written at this time after the death of his brother Thomas to tuberculosis and a preminition of his own death to the same illness.

    At the time Keats and Fanny begin their relationship, the poet had just completed his masterful Endymion, which opens with the famous lines (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:/Its loveliness increases; It will never/Pass into nothingness; but still will keep/A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.)  Predictably the poem is rejected in literary circles back in London, but Fanny’s a huge fan, and she’s tried to impress Keats by immersing herself in the works of his heroes: Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton.  But Keats’s poverty row status earns him no respect from Mrs. Brawne, who cares only about her daughter’s financial well-being and not about love and happiness.

    Bright Star is really about Brawne, as Campion is content to utilize the poet’s letters and prose as sensuous presence, even though the actor Ben Whishaw gives an affecting, if oddly withdrawn performance as the doomed romantic genius. (But in view of the real-life passing of his brother at that point, constant melancholy would be expected.)  It’s understandable that Campion, a fervent feminist would apply her focus on the female half of the short-lived relationship and its psychological and emotional underpinnings.  It’s clear that Campion was deeply moved by the tragic brevity of the Keats-Brawne affair, and she infuses the film with unabashed emotionalism, by wedding literature to music.  It’s hard not to react when one hears Abbie Cornish, (an Australian with a dark-eyed gaze) who delivers an exquisite and soulful performance as Brawne, reading of the poem “Bright Star” (printed at the outset of this essay) written specifically for her, in a pathetically sobbing and chocked up voice.  And when the stunning Ode to a Nightingale (“Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/And leaden-eyed despairs”) is recited over Mozart’s “Serenade in B, K. 361, Adagio, during the closing credits it’s a sublime, emotionally wrenching moment that you know can only be experienced at the movies.   But perhaps most significantly it’s the silences and non-verbal interactions between Whishaw and Cornish that are the most effective here.

     Paul Schneider plays the caretaker role of Charles, who literally rescues some of Keats’s manuscripts from the trash bin.  Charles exemplifies the division in the social class of the time, where men were allowed to cross class lines, women were not.  Unsurprisingly Charles impregnates a servant.  However the societal constrictions deeply affect Fanny who asks: “Is there another life?  Shall I awake and find this all a dream?  There must be. ”  ”We cannot be created for this sort of suffering” she mournfully continues.  “Why should relations between people be so hard?”

     The cinematographer Greig Fraser makes excellent use of light and air in his quaint county settings, that always seems to bring awareness for nature even in the indoor segments.  The metaphorical butterfly scene, rich in symbolism is a visceral highlight, but the real showcase is a ravishing field of purple flowers that has becoming an art house allure for fans.  Janet Patterson’s costume design in this film is revelatory, and it’s home spun embroidering helps to forge some modest character metamorphosis, and a fine delineation of social class.  It’s the finest work of its kind in many a moon.  First-time feature film composer Mark Bradshaw has written about 20 to 25 minutes of his own material to compliment the use of classical music and his mainly violin-laden work here is haunting, and a subtle undercurrent to the hard-earned emotions that realize full flourish in the final scenes.

      By charting a direct path to the human heart, with compelling prosaic-style direction, Jane Campion tells a story in Bright Star that seemingly needed to be told, and the result is the director’s best film, and one of the most piercingly beautiful in years.

     Final rating:  ***** (highest rating)

     Note:  I saw ‘Bright Star’ with Lucille weeks ago around the time of it’s release, but was unable to get to a review despite issuing a star rating at the Monday Morning Diary.

  

(USA 1998 96m) DVD1/2

In case I don’t see ya…

p  Scott Rudin, Andrew Niccol, Edward S.Feldman, Adam Schroeder  d  Peter Weir  w  Andrew Niccol  ph  Peter Biziou  ed  William Anderson, Lee Smith  m  Burkhard Dallwitz, Philip Glass, Wojciech Kilar  art  Dennis Gassner, Richard L.Johnson  cos  Marilyn Matthews  spc  Michael J.McAllister, Larz Anderson, Craig Barron

Jim Carrey (Truman Burbank), Laura Linney (Meryl), Noah Emmerich (Marlon), Ed Harris (Christof), Natascha McElhone (Lauren/Sylvia), Holland Taylor (Truman’s mother), Brian Delate (Kirk Burbank), Paul Giamatti (Simeon), Blair Slater (young Truman), Harry Shearer (Mike Michaelson), Philip Baker Hall, O-Lan Jones,

If they handed out prizes for originality at award ceremonies, surely Peter Weir’s brilliant satirical fantasy cum Kafkaesque nightmare would have won in 1998, and probably for its decade.  It would also prove to be a revelation to those who saw Jim Carrey as just a rubber faced comedian and to those who thought that true originality had long since disappeared from the cinema.  All assumptions are fatal, even that your life is your own. 

            Truman Burbank is a seemingly happy 30 year old, with a loving wife, a long standing best friend and a fear of water, following the death of his father in a boat accident when he was a boy.  But what Truman doesn’t know is that his father didn’t die because it was all faked as part of his fake life.  A life that is being broadcast 24/7 to an audience of millions from within a cocoon of a giant studio enclosing the fictional town of Seahaven.  But then he thinks he sees his dead father as a hobo on the streets…

            Some claimed that such a concept was flawed, and certainly the idea of an actress being paid to be a man’s wife and, assumedly, sleep with him, amounts to little more than voyeuristic prostitution.  Leonard Maltin, for example, accused it of being way overlong for a story better dealt with in Twilight Zone episodes in the sixties.  However, for all the genius of Rod Serling’s TV series, I doubt that any of its episodes were to prove as prophetic.  In 1998 we were on the cusp of the reality TV craze which has so infuriated intelligent viewers, but pleased to death the junk food searching masses and TV execs looking for a cheap show to save revenues.  Just as TV’s Big Brother watches its contestants 24/7, so Truman is watched.  Admittedly on a much greater scale and he doesn’t know he’s on camera, but the depiction of obsessed masses huddled round their TV sets (two car park attendants, two elderly ladies on a sofa, a man in a bath, etc.) watching this was to prove a wickedly accurate representation of not only mankind’s obsession with sticking their nose into what doesn’t concern them, but with the very idea of celebrity itself.  As Christof says when trying to explain Truman’s acceptance of his world, “we accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.  It’s a simple as that.”  We have all had feelings of insecurity and of people projecting insincerity, often unfounded.  The Truman Show takes that concept, mixes with it a paranoia worthy of Kafka and ultimately shows that the once accepted adage from The Wizard of Oz (“happiness is in your own back yard”) is not only obsolete but suffocating.  Taking away a man’s freedom to even exist in any sort of reality is reminiscent of the stolen identities of fascism.  This concept is wonderfully visualised when Truman first goes missing and the moon turns into a giant searchlight, which cuts to another light atop a tower more akin to The Great Escape and Nazi patrols, then again to a search party lead by Truman’s neighbour’s Dalmatian growling ferociously like the dogs of the SS searching the Krakow ghetto in Schindler’s List.  Even the music as he batters to get out is Kilar’s Father Kolbe theme from Zanussi’s Life for Life set in Auschwitz.  Our liberty is not only being taken away by Big Brother, but it seems to be accusing us of being accomplices, and indeed we are.  Who are the bigger villains; the executives and creators like Christof who exploit Truman, or the paying millions who allow him to be exploited by watching him so obsessively?  It’s all about producing to satisfy a need and, in that, it seems to be Hollywood’s most cutting attack on contemporary and potentially future society.

Charlotte Gainsbourg (above) and Willem Dafoe (below) in woods scenes in Lars Von Trier's 'Antichrist'

by Sam Juliano

     One of opera’s most beautiful arias, Handel’s mournful “Lascia Ch’io pianga” from Act II of Rinaldo, provides the aural accompaniment to one of the most ravishing opening sequences in the history of cinema.  Yet it’s a sequence that ends in unconscionable tragedy, after the infant son of a young couple “doing it” climbs up to a window and drops to his death during a snowfall.  It’s a shocking event that will hover over the remainder of the film, and dictate the level of depravity and despair that unleashes the worst behavioral possibilities can that possibly be engineered by man. Of course the grief experienced is so intense that the mental state of the characters is fragile at best.  The man and woman, referred to as “He” and “She” (the young son Nicholas is the only character in the film with a name) retreat to a cabin in the woods, as the suggestion of the male, who is a psychotherapist.  The forest surrounding the shanty is known as Eden, and its clear that Von Trier isn’t masking some pretty standard Biblical imagery.  But this Eden is closer to the garden of Satan, and when the wife screams out “the cry of all the things that are to die” are one with the real sounds of nature, it’s clear that there’s a proclamation here that everything must die.  As acorns rain down on the roof of the cabin, “She” completely breaks down mentally and the film decends into such revolting barbarism, that’s it’s clear that there’s a pervading sense of hopelessness and crushing despair in the existence of these characters, indeed of all mankind.  It’s an uncompromising view of a dream-turned nightmare and it’s execution is both carnal and surreal.

     Von Trier neatly outlines his film with on-screen and ornate chapter stops that in addition to applying some compelling visual metaphors, clearly deliniate the stages of mental breakdown that leads to the aforementioned collison course.  After the monochrome and highly lyrical proloque (which the director almost seems to have devised as an answer to charges of visual ugliness in his films) we have a ‘Chapter One’ sequence entitled “Grief” which unsurprisingly chronicles She’s funeral collapse, hospitalization with alternating consciousness, and inability to process time.  After various tactics fail, “He” decides to use “exposure therapy” learning that his wife’s greatest fear is on the cabin, a place she spent time with her young son the summer before.

     The second chapter, titled “Pain” is bracketed with “Chaos Reigns” and it concerns the intensifying of grief, manic depression and seeming paranoia, that greets “He’s” attempys at psychotherapy.  meanwhile, outside there are metaphoric acorn showers and the fox warning that ‘chaos reigns.’  The third chapter, “Despair” (Genocide) begins with “He” coming upon scrapbooks compiled by his wife for an upcoming thesis featuring pictures of witch hunts and various misogynist topics.  At this point “She” comes to believe that women are inherently evil – and this ‘revelation’ has led to cries of mysogony against Von Trier himself – and without warning she viciously attacks her husband by stabbing him below the stomach and stripping him down while declaring that “He” was planning to leave her.  After smashing his testicles with a heavy piece of wood, she masturbates him to orgasm, which causes him to ejaculate blood onto her face, in one of the film’s most revolting passages.  “She” then drills a hole through one of his legs, and bolts a heavy circular grindstone through the wound, and then runs out into the woods disposing of a wrench that she used to complete the dasterdly deed.  “He” finally awakens and drags himself outside, finding refuge in a fox-hole, while “She” angrily screams over and over “Where are you?”  She eventually is aided by the shrill of a crow (one of the Three Beggars) but she then reverses herself, apologizing and helping to pull her hasband back to the cabin.

     The Fourth Chapter, “The Three Beggars” “She” relates to her husband that somehow it was not meant for him to die, but that this would be reversed upon the arrival of the Three Beggars, which of course has already happened with the appearance after chapter one of the deer with the dead fawn, the self-disembowling fox who warns of the prevailing chaos, and the section in the fox hole where “He” is unable to kill the black crow after repeatedly beating it, even after it was buried alive.  In one of the film’s most notorious scenes “She” them multilates her clitoris with a scissor as a result of her belief (visualized in flashback) that she failed to act to prevent the tragic death of Nic.  No doubt Von Trier was influenced here by the scene in his Scandinavian compatriot Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, when Ingrid Thulin cuts her own vagina with a shard of glass and smears the blood on her face.  During the night the couple are again visited by the crow, deer and fox, and after “She” again gets violent by stabbing “He” with the scissors, he removes the heavy millstone and then strangles “She” to death, and then takes her body outside to burned at the pyre, recalling all kinds of witchcraft movies, but because of nationality, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath are immediately envisioned.

    In the surrealistic Epilogue, “He” departs the cabin gathering berries on the way up a hill.  With the beggars in attendance again “He” sees hundreds of faceless women walk past him, again recalling Bergman, as the Three Beggars watch.  If Von trier provides some measure of relieve from the oppressive and dire proceedings, he offers no respite from the torture that will certainly destroy the film’s lone “survivor,” but even a more hopeful prognosis can’t be backed up with any interpretation.

     Willem Dafoe delivers his most intense performance in a number of years as “He” and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who won Best Actress honors at Cannes gives a raw-boned, chilling and ultimately shattering performance as the haunted “She” who resorts to the most depraved actions to avange herself, when in fact she later concludes that she was mostly to blame.  Gainsbourg’s physical performance is astounding here.  The film’s cinematographer, Anthony Tod Mantle, who won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire last year, is responsible for that extraordinary Epilogue with its glistening monochrome lyricism, but also for the forbidden blackness and claustrophia of the scenes in the woods, which thematically inform the work’s essence.  Mantle’s grainy and expressionistic saturated noctural hues convey unremittingly lifelessness, seemingly chartered by none other than the Grim Reaper himself.   It’s the camerawork of our worst nightmares, and it’s successful navigation is no small feat.

     There’s little question that Von Trier could not have been on any kind of a spiritual upswing when he conceived this film.  But unlike author Stephen King, who stashed away his horrifying Pet Cemetary (which also featured the violent death of a young boy) in a drawer, refusing to publish it for several years, the Danish director, bold and fearless, and with an ego to boot, pulled no punches in this bleakest of visions.  It’s a terrible place to go, but it’s thematically rich, and impossible to forget.  Antichrist joins Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Breaking The Waves as one of the controversial auteur’s greatest films.

Final Rating:  * * * * 1/2

Note:  I saw ‘Antichrist’ five weeks ago at the IFC in Manhattan with Lucille and Broadway Bob after the worst week I ever had to endure in my life.  Instead of lifting me the film took me further down into the depths, and unavoidably I’ll always make this corrolation.  Yet, in answer to the obvious question “How could one “like” such a film” I can point to it’s complex metaphorical underpinning and it’s consumate artistry.  In this instance it overrides the horrific premise.  One is reminded of the artist Edvard Much, another Nordic Von Trier colleague, whose work riveted and disturbed simultaneously.

(Hong Kong 154m) DVD0 (Hong Kong only)

Aka. Ruan Lingyu; Centre Stage; Yuen Ling-yuk

Actors are madmen.  I am one of them. 

p  Leonard Ho Koon-Cheung  d  Stanley Kwan  w  Yau Tai On-Ping  ph  Poon Hang-Sang  ed  Peter Cheung  m  Siu Chung  art  Pok York Mok

Maggie Cheung (Ruan Lingyu/herself), Tony Leung Ka-Fai (Cai Chusheng), Cecilia Yip (Lin Chu-chu), Carina Lau (Li Lili), Lawrence Ng (Chang Ta-min), Han Chin (Tang Chi-shan), Lee Waise (Li Min-wei), Paul Chang (Boss of Lianhua),

“She’s a legend” Maggie Cheung says of Ruan Lingyu, and it’s hard to argue.  Stanley Kwan’s dissection of the life and death of the great Ruan Lingyu is not only one of the most complex biopics ever made, it is also one of the most complex films of its decade.  Actress is not a film for everyone for it challenges us in ways that may not be appreciable on initial viewing.  Your average biopic goes about simply telling the story of its protagonist’s life.  As Jonathan Rosenbaum observed, “any historical movie worth its salt historicises the present day along with the past, and this movie explicitly juxtaposes our own inadequacy with those potent clips of Lingyu herself.”  What we have here is a dramatisation of the life of Lingyu inter-cut with not only clips of the surviving films of the great actress but also, most tellingly, interviews with the cast and crew behind the scenes making the film, and even interviews with surviving figures from the thirties, including Li Lili and a very frail and close to death Sun Yu.

            Ruan and her contemporaries lived and worked in Shanghai in the early 1930s, at the famous Lienhua studio.  Kwan and his cast and crew worked in turn of the nineties Hong Kong.  The former lived in constant threat of the Japanese on its doorstep, the latter only a few years from the handover from Britain to China.  The film tells the story of Ruan’s final few years, detailing her rising from frothy parts as a teenager to the great tragic roles she became famous for in films such as Little Toys, The Goddess and New Women.  Her private life, however, was in turmoil, with the spectre of an old relationship with the selfish Chang Ta-min and her adulterous affair with married director Cai Chusheng causing scandals in the gutter press.  Indeed, it is alleged that the said press paid a large part in Chang taking Ruan to court and the ensuing scandal which lead to her fateful decision to take a cocktail of sleeping pills at midnight on 7^th March 1935.  It may be a different time and place, but the notion of constant harassment by the press hounding a great celebrity to death has resounded through the subsequent decades.  It also exposes the semi-hypocrisy of the hysterical mourning that saw hundreds of thousands of mourners dwarf even the outpouring of necrophilia after the death of Rudolph Valentino and which even made it to the front page of the New York Times. 

            Actress dares not only to have life imitate art (Ruan’s final film has her hounded into suicide by press attention) but also vice versa (Ruan films a scene where her character’s father dies in the rain, reminiscent of her own father’s death).  This is mirrored in the plot structure of the film where Kwan holds up the story of Ruan to his present day actors, putting them in Ruan’s position and asking them how they wish to be remembered.  This allows him to contrast not only the times but indeed the essence of stardom in those two different eras.  The very modern and erudite Cheung is truly remarkable as Lingyu.  She looks nothing like Ruan, but she undergoes an almost ethereal metamorphosis in which her fragility and grace are captured beautifully, while she also allows us a peek into her own persona; in every respect she’s never been more striking or beautiful.  For those who have never seen a Ruan Lingyu film – or indeed any of her director contemporaries – Fei Mu, Bu Wancang, Cai Chusheng or Sun Yu – it is a fascinating study of celebrity and contrasting histories.  For those who have, and know Lingyu’s majesty, it’s almost epiphanal.  Just as the less myopic and astute of critics would list Ruan among the ten greatest screen actresses without hesitation, so they would not hesitate to nominate Stanley Kwan’s film for the highest honours.