LIMELIGHT - #756

“I thought you hated the theatre?”

“I do. I also hate the sight of blood, but it’s in my veins.”

As I write this, it’s Charlie Chaplin’s birthday. Born April 16, 1889, he would have been 127. This puts him at more than 60 years old when he made his final American film, the bittersweet tribute to vaudeville, Limelight. Though he had a couple of more movies to come following his exile to Europe, of all of his efforts post-1950, this one feels like the final curtain, a summing up of a well-spent career, with a few touches of real life for those looking to see the man in his art.

Chaplin stars in Limelight as Calvero, the last of the great stage clowns, known for his wordplay and hobo persona. (Perhaps it was the presence of the former that discouraged the performer from actually making the film about his own Little Tramp, a character born of silent cinema.) Calvero’s act has passed into the history books, drowned in alcohol and anxiety. As the picture begins, he stumbles home from the bar, only to realize his downstairs neighbor Theresa (Claire Bloom, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold [review]) has locked herself in her flat with the gas on. The old man kicks in the door and rescues the young woman from suicide, letting her sleep it off in his apartment where the air is clear. Terry is a dancer who is despondent over many things. She let the love of her life, a composer (Sydney Chaplin) get away, and her sister’s turning to the streets to pay for her dancing career has left the girl unable to take the stage, the guilt is too much to handle.

In fact, following the attempted suicide, Terry is so upset, she can’t walk, her mind has completely shut down the lower half of her body, not unlike how nerves and booze have overtaken Calvero’s ability to step in front of a crowd. The pair of artistes bonds over their respective blocks. Calvero swears off the sauce and nurses the girl back to health, giving her pep talks, all the while dreaming of his old routines, sometimes inserting Terry into the act, sometimes waking up in terror, realizing his dream self is playing to an empty house. Helping her gives him purpose, and a chance to lead by example.

It’s a lovely and loving relationship, one that could have been tainted by Chaplin’s real-life dalliances with younger women, but the honesty with which he presents their shared experience avoids any actual creepiness. Calvero’s view of Terry is paternal, despite the cover story that they are married as a means to fend off gossip. In fact, there is a frankness throughout Limelight that is surprisingly fresh, even if the script must tap dance around saying some things outright. Calvero first thinks that the whispers about his new roommate being a prostitute are true, and that she tried to kill herself due to consequences stemming from the profession. Though the truth is far more mundane, the way in which the elder statesman is prepared to accept the younger’s indiscretions--he notes that he himself is an old sinner--makes for a sweet dynamic between them. They accept each other’s faults only in so far as they encourage their companion to overcome them.

Chaplin was likely looking for a little acceptance himself, following accusations of Communism and FBI smear campaigns due to some of his less idyllic carnal affairs. (Check a recent episode of You Must Remember This to hear how this affected the auteur’s previous release, Monsieur Verdoux [review]). Later in the film the clown demands truth in both performance and life, as it’s the only thing he knows to be steadfast in a fickle world.

Despite all of this off-screen drama, Chaplin does not allow for any cynicism in Limelight. Quite the contrary, the film is entirely romantic, in both its love stories and in its view of the theatrical community. Behind the laughs beats a great big heart, and Limelight is less a comedy and more of a melodrama. Working with a plot structure more befitting a play--and often staging his scenes in small spaces like in a theatre, focusing on the two characters in conversation rather than the surroundings--Chaplin draws from a variety of theatrical traditions to create something perfectly cinematic. The filmmaker pulls out and goes wide, funnily enough, when in the theatre space itself. The cutaways to the dream sequences, showing Calvero on stage, and later showing Terry dancing, give us both the breadth of the performance space, but also the size of the crowd. In a way, his framing suggests that our own lives are small, and its art that gives them larger meaning, transcending borders so that people around the world may share all that they have in common, including not just our own foibles, but also the natural world in which we live and operate (mother nature and human nature). Most of Calvero’s routines center around animals (worms, sardines) or compulsions (love). The only exception being a fun skit featuring Chaplin and the great Buster Keaton--a comedian down on his luck for real--as two inept musicians that ends up being Calvero’s ultimate encore.

It’s interesting to consider that Chaplin himself must have seen many tides turning, and rather than submit to the trends, he instead dug in his heels and tipped his hat to where it all began for him (including street performers). Not that Limelight is a completely fanciful representation of theatre life. There is a toll to be paid for the spontaneity and joy of stagecraft. Not just age and passing fads, but also the isolation and the physical and mental demands come to bear for the comedian and the ballerina alike. Chaplin sees a kindred spirit in the dancer--both disciplines require perfection and control, but they also allow for improvisation, for injecting one’s personality into the material.

The final act of Limelight has some O. Henry-level twists, including ironic sacrifices and difficult decisions. Yet, even with the heavy foreshadowing--Calvero tells Terry pretty much exactly how it will go--by the time the change-ups and misunderstandings occur, you’ll be so invested in the characters and the drama itself, the artifice won’t bother you. Plus, the artifice is kind of the point. Limelight is as much about the movement of the bodies on stage as how they affect one another offstage--though no moreso than the movement in the ballet Chaplin pauses to show us, featuring both the clown and his admirer, and which itself draws from traditions of the Commedia dell’arte. In Chaplin’s narrative, the history of the stage is as interlocked as humanity’s. We all build on what came before, and so by extending a hand, the old can aid the young with their experience and wisdom, and maybe themselves get a new lease on life.

And, of course, as throughout, Chaplin walks it like he talks it. The ultimate message of Limelight? Always leave them laughing.

A few images from this review were borrowed from my old alma mater, DVDTalk.com. Read Justin Remer's review here.

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS - #806

Why is it we always forget that Cary Grant could be rugged?

Sure, we remember that he’s funny and handsome and debonair, but even when he was playing the dandy, Grant was a man’s man. In movies when he wasn’t on the same continent as a tailored tuxedo, he was still suave and commanding, but in a way that was far different than the romantic playboy image that endures.

He was rugged.

Should you not believe me, then you need look no further than Howard Hawks’ 1939 aviation drama Only Angels Have Wings. In the film, written by Jules Furthman (The Docks of New York [review]), Grant plays Geoff Carter, the head of an airmail service flying out of South America. His crew is made up of guys who are mostly young and have the daredevil streak that is the stock-in-trade of motion picture pilots. They live for their time in the air, and when on the ground, they spend it getting high, indulging in booze, food, and women.

It’s one of those women, a tough Brooklyn gal, that serves as our entry point into their world, as well as the dramatic catalyst of much of what goes on in Only Angles Have Wings. Jean Arthur (The Devil and Miss Jones [review]) stars alongside Grant as Bonnie Lee, a traveling musician who runs into a couple of Geoff’s boys during a cruise layover. The two pilots (Allyn Joslyn, Heaven CanWait, and Noah Beery Jr., Red River) make a play for the beauty, but she’s more taken with the idea of conversing with her countrymen than she is being romanced. It would seem the American pilots have a similar homesickness, as they are all ready to have their heads turned by the visitor. This includes Geoff, who rearranges his team’s assignments to try to make sure he’s the one who can woo Bonnie before she has to return to the ship.

This proves disastrous, however; Bonnie has picked the wrong night to visit the airfield. Geoff’s people are responsible for shuttling the mail, and they must fly regardless of weather. One of Bonnie’s suitors has to go up in the terrible fog that has spread across the area, and he doesn’t make it back.

The scene in which Geoff and his right-hand man, Kid (Thomas Mitchell, Make Way for Tomorrow [review], Stagecoach [review]), try to guide the doomed flyer back to base is the first of many bravura sequences that Hawks delivers in Only Angels Have Wings. He plays the scene long, focusing on the ground team, cutting out ambient noise both for effect and because, storywise, it’s necessary for Geoff and Kid to ascertain where the plane is positioned. It’s a good trick. As they lean in to listen for the vessel’s location, we instinctively lean in, as well. Only Angels Have Wings has our attention.

It’s not the only time that Hawks lets a moment run long in the film. His narrative style was Tarantino-esque before Tarantino, drawing tension from delayed resolution (see, for instance, Death Proof [review] for Quentin’s employment of the same kind of withholding). Hawks is patient, taking his time with the scene, knowing that a quicker release would have far less impact. A year later, Hawks would make movie history with His Girl Friday, when he famously had his actors (including Cary Grant) perform the script at twice the accepted pace. Here, however, he is not concerned about getting through the material quickly. At times, Only Angels Have Wings appears shaggy. It is episodic rather than plot heavy. In the camaraderie amongst the pilots, Hawks achieves a surprising realism, letting the conversations follow a natural course and somehow capturing the performances in such a way that they appear, if not improvised, at least unrehearsed. Take for example a scene where Geoff and Kid try to settle a disagreement by flipping a coin. The action when the actors chase the money is clumsy, the way it would be were two fellows trying to one-up the other in real life. Maybe Grant and Mitchell had marks to hit, but the audience would never see them.

This stripe of convincing buddy-buddy behavior is essential to a film that is all about the relationships between men who have signed on to do a particular job. In many ways, Only Angels Have Wings prefigures the sense of duty that would permeate more patriotic films made in the years during World War II. What sets it apart from those films is its sense of isolationism. Geoff and his air force do what they do, and outside interference is not welcome, even when it’s a beautiful woman who is willing to accept that the untamable adventurer would be a fine lover just as he is. Only Angels Have Wings has story points in common with Casablanca. Both feature rogues who exile themselves to exotic, dangerous locales to escape a broken heart--but unlike Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, Cary Grant’s Geoff doesn’t do what he does because it would be good for others, he does it because it’s what is expected of him. It’s what he signed up for.

In this, Only Angels Have Wings also prefigures film noir, and even another famous Bogart picture, The Maltese Falcon [review]. There is an existential streak in Geoff that we would see in noir antiheroes. He has a code, and he must follow it. As a rake and a rapscallion, Geoff’s Achilles heel is his commitment to doing the right thing. Geoff’s fatal flaw is that if the mission is considered impossible, he’ll take flight himself rather than send one of his men. It’s the sort of soft and gooey character trait that makes audiences care for him and adds credibility to Bonnie’s unrequited love for the flyboy. We know he’s good despite his cynical protestations.

Also reminiscent of noir is the sense that the past will catch up with you, no matter how good your are at outrunning it. Fans of Gilda [review] take note, Only Angels Have Wings gives Rita Hayworth her breakout role, and in many ways, it sets the tone for her signature performance. Hayworth plays Judy, the wife of Geoff’s newest hire. She also happens to be the woman who broke Geoff’s heart, the mysterious phantom that Bonnie sees hovering over her would-be lover from the jump. Neither Geoff nor Bonnie reveal this fact, it would be too complicated and they both would rather deny their past. Yet, the added irony is that Judy’s husband (silent-era star Richard Barthelmess) is himself harboring a disgraceful history, one he has hidden from his bride. Geoff and the boys keep that secret to themselves, even though, for Geoff, exposing it might change everything. Move this plot to a casino, and it’s Gilda before Gilda.

The big difference between Only Angels Have Wings and noir, though, is that Only Angels Have Wings is more redemptive. Both men will get another shot to prove themselves, and even Judy will have a chance to get it right. The only one who doesn’t need redemption is Bonnie, but then if we know our noir, the down-to-earth blonde might have a chance to ground the aerial daredevil. Just maybe.

Furthman gives his script a kind of doubled structure, like a coin with the same face on either side (plot point!). The first flight will be echoed in the last flight, and though we might guess that hearts will melt, the writing stays true to its main character’s principles right to the end. That last scene is pure old Hollywood, and yet smarter than it has any right to be, holding fast to the manly ethos laid out in the rest of the movie. I feel simultaneously more sensitive and more macho for having seen it.

Criterion’s high-def presentation of Only Angels Have Wings is wonderful, offering a pristine picture and a soundtrack that lacks any snaps, crackles, hiss, or pops. Extras include a radio performance of the movie, condensed for the home listening audience, and a new documentary examining Howard Hawks’ other aviation-themed movies.

And for comic book fans, the cover and interior illustration is by Francesco Francavilla, artist on Zorro and Afterlife with Archie, as well as creator of the pulp-inspired The Black Beetle.

The screengrabs for this review were taken from an earlier DVD release. The Criterion disc under review was provided by the Criterion Collection.

SHALLOW GRAVE - #616

Motive, means, opportunity.

Except all out of order. That’s the way of 1994’s ShallowGrave. It’s backwards. Opportunity provides the means, and hanging onto those means becomes the motive.

An accidental overdose of the fourth and newest roommate in a Scottish flat offers the tight-knit friends sharing the apartment the chance to change their own lives. The three twentysomethings--journalist Alex (Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting), doctor Juliet (Kerry Fox, An Angel at My Table), and accountant David (Christopher Eccleston, eventual star of some television sci-fi medical drama or other)--find a suitcase full of cash in the dead man’s bedroom. He was a drug dealer as well as a user. No one outside of the apartment really knew he lived there, he had just moved in. If they can discard the body undetected, they could keep the cash.

The debut of Danny Boyle, Shallow Grave is darkly comic, almost Hitchcockian, with hints of the cinematic verve (extreme angles, tricky camera moves, songs by Leftfield) that would quickly become his trademark. The ease with which he developed that style, and with which he now cravenly exploits it in humdrum efforts like Trance [review] and Steve Jobs, doesn’t necessarily suggest the cinematic revolution to come, but Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald, and writer John Hodge were on the verge of something big. That they would take off with Trainspotting two years later, only to crash and burn with the unfairly maligned Coen Bros.’ riff A Life Less Ordinary and the exaggerated failings of The Beach is perhaps a defining story of 1990s motion pictures. Frame it as a mini version of the rise and fall of the American auteurs of the 1970s. Like Coppola leapfrogging from The Godfather [review] to One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now (if, you know, everyone hated the latter). We aim so high only to have our excess bring us low.

There isn’t a more 1990s movie than Shallow Grave. It’s not just of its time, but it’s accidentally about its time. Sure, there’s the obvious bad, poorly fitted fashion and the techno soundtrack, but it’s more than the outer trappings, it’s also the characters. Think about the types: the smartass Kurt Cobain wannabe, the independent woman with the short haircut, and the uptight accountant. Give us a Joey and a Phoebe, and you’ve got yourselves an episode of Friends where the Ugly Naked Guy dies in Monica and Rachel’s flat. (Oh, wait, we need a Rachel, too.)  And just like the 1990s, you want to slap that mildly amusing smirk off Shallow Grave’s face by the end. Its deep lesson is about as deep as the title would have you believe. It’s so ’90s, its sequel is John Cusack’s suit in Con Air. To quote Pulp, a band whose rise was contemporary to the folks involved with this picture, “You’re going to like it, but not a lot.”

Part of the problem is that the Juliet, David, and even Alex are all aggressively unlikeable and, even worse, not that interesting--which is usually the way around unlikeability, we want to watch the terrible people doing terrible things. Witty Alex isn’t all that funny, and none of the three appear to be anything other than mediocre at their chosen professions. Hence their need to belittle others and play cruel pranks. While Hodge’s scripts does raise a lot of moral conundrums, with the dead body and the stash of cash proving an apt metaphor for much of the 1990s--does one stay true to oneself or sell-out?--his characters never break out of their types. This means none of their decisions are all that surprising. We can guess that, for instance, the uptight bean counter who initially blanches at the prospect of covering up a death will change his mind after being humiliated at work, and eventually decide he wants to e  a big man and deserves the lion’s share of the treasure. Likewise, we know that there will be other bad guys on the hunt for that money, and the urge to protect it will cause the friends to all turn on each other.

Which, hey, that could quite possibly be a good movie. Think The Treasure of Sierra Madre but in a four-room Edinburgh rental. The cast here is as game as John Huston’s was in 1948. McGregor is fresh-faced and buoyant, his charisma punching holes in the script’s smarm, and Eccleston is predictably tense but without the egotism later directors would exploit to varying effect. The problem here is that Boyle feels often more like an architect and a technician than a storyteller. Shallow Grave predicts the award-winning sheen of his most successful feature, Slumdog Millionaire, and like Slumdog, has the same preoccupation with making the pieces fit a schematic rather than find an organic path to the same conclusion. It’s more Jenga than plot. Have you ever asked yourself how Dev Patel’s character managed to be asked not just the right questions, but in chronological order mirroring the events of his life?

In fact, if you think about Slumdog’s ever-present, Oscar-winning score and how much polish that added to Slumdog, you have another connection. Because the music in Shallow Grave, provided by Simon Boswell (Santa Sangre, Hackers), is cheesy cliché all the way, like a bad television movie that is afraid the dramatic histrionics won’t work well enough on their own, despite how obvious the emotional beats really are. It’s all shortcut.

It’s also pretty easy to watch, and thus pretty easy to give Shallow Grave a pass, despite its considerable flaws. Boyle’s filmmaking is skillful and alluring, and draws the viewer along like a Looney Tunes character who has caught whiff of a savory pie, floating on air, ready to take a bite. Perhaps I’m being harsh on the film, I used to be a fan, and it’s been since the actual 1990s that I likely saw it. It’s funny how things strike you depending on where you are in life, and it is worth remembering how exciting the 1990s could be post-Sex, Lies, &Videotape; however, unlike that movie or, perhaps, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Shallow Grave may be too much of a time capsule, frozen in its era, and less relatable for it.

"Mr. Dead Drug Dealer, you're trying to seduce me."

A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON - #805

One of cinema’s most observant documentarians meets the ramshackle world of rock ’n’ roll in the 1974 film A Poem is a Naked Person. Part concert movie, part journalistic portrait, part travelogue, Les Blank trains his camera on singer-songwriter Leon Russell, an Oklahoma native, piano player, and revered session musician who, in the early 1970s, transitioned into solo work, performing swampy rock jams and writing a few classics along the way, perhaps most notably “A Song for You.”

Blank joins up with Russell’s camp at the apex of the performer’s career, when success has allowed him an opportunity to build a recording studio in his home state. Blank’s team follows Russell throughout the construction, though they don’t always stay around to watch the hammers swing. Interspersed with these scenes are snapshots from the road, including full performances and dalliances backstage. For much of A Poem is a Naked Person, these are our only real glimpses of Russell. Probably unsurprising to anyone who knows Blank’s work, the director spends much of the movie looking at the world around his subject, getting reactions from the locals regarding their famous new neighbor or watching as Jim Franklin, the man painting a mural on the bottom of Russell’s pool, catches scorpions before putting brush to concrete. Or stepping away from people altogether to look at the natural environs.

This impulse to cast his glance sideways keeps A Poem is a Naked Person from being a great music documentary, but Blank makes up for it by basically inventing something that is its own beast. Throughout his work, he has been fascinated by Americana and folk art, and there are subtle touches here, like the Hank Williams façade on the front of a building, or the accidental visual echo of the man with the butterfly tattoo hearkening back to the butterfly imagery in that painting on Russell’s pool.  Even the rootsy music that Russell covers in his concerts remind us of a musical tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of our nation. Not to mention added performances by George Jones and Willie Nelson, themselves legends in the country music field.

The downside is that if you’re looking to learn more about Leon Russell, you’re probably going to be better off reading his Wikipedia entry alongside the film. He doesn’t step out from behind the piano and start to emerge as a character until about halfway through the movie. And even then, since Blank never interviews him directly, he remains an enigma, almost entirely in control of what he shows the camera lens. One is quickly reminded of Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back [review], especially so in a scene where Russell sarcastically dresses down a musician using his studio who steps to him in the wrong way. The way the elder statesman verbally bats around the young newbie (Eric Andersen) and puts him on the defensive is up there with Dylan’s humiliation of Donovan, right down to the lesser’s naïve sincerity.

But then maybe the code to this thing is right there in the title: A Poem is a Naked Person. Blank is creating something evocative of the man and his art, and through these captured impressions exposing something about both. He doesn’t exactly strip Leon Russell bare and show him off to the world, but perhaps he exposes more of the personage by suggesting the image dominates all that may be underneath.

For more local color, Maureen Gosling’s, Poem’s sound recordist and assistant editor has put together a montage of some of her own footage taken during the shoot, adding commentary using excerpts from letters she wrote to her parents. (Gosling is one of the director’s of the recent This Ain’t No Mouse Music [review], which shows Blank’s influence quite heavily.)

There are also supplements looking back at the making of the film, including a more recent conversation between Russell and Les Blank’s son Harrod, in which Russell discusses why he initially disliked the film and kept it out of circulation for years. Turns out, he didn’t think it was about him enough either! So is the naked person being put on display really Les Blank after all? Leon seems to think so.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY - #804

Just when a guy thinks he’s had enough of coming-of-age dramas about troubled adolescents, along comes a movie like A Brighter Summer Day to remind him of why he liked the genre in the first place.

Released in 1991, Edwin Yang’s true-to-life tale has a lot going for it: an interesting setting (Taiwan) during an interesting time period (the start of the 1960s), and historical roots that give it elements of a docudrama. The climactic incident that happens to our main character, Si’r (Chen Chang), actually occurred, and the fallout had a tremendous impact on Taiwanese culture and politics. Or so we are told in a textual coda, Yang’s movie is the build-up to the moment. The denouement is for others to explore.

Taking into account all those things mentioned above, to call A Brighter Summer Day merely a coming-of-age story is to understate it. Yang’s narrative is all encompassing, novelistic in length and approach (the film is nearly 4 hours long), looking not just at the teenaged boy’s troubles, but the struggles of those around him and the reality that informed his downfall. Following the Communist takeover of China, many citizens left the mainland for the small island country of Taiwan to escape persecution. At the outset of the 1960s, the people there are feeling the influence of America (mostly by choice) and Japan (not so much) even as they endeavor to establish their own identity. As Si’r will find out the hard way, there is also an influx of the same oppressive politics his parents tried to outrun.

The Commies and the government are no match for rock ’n’ roll, though. It’s the biggest influence on Si’r and his friends, who form street gangs and adopt ludicrous American nicknames like Honey, Airplane, Tiger, and Deuce. Si’r’s best friend, Cat (Chi-tsan Wang), sings with his brother in a band that covers the latest hits, transcribed for them by Si’r’s older sister. The babyfaced, angel-voiced Cat doesn’t know the meaning of the lyrics, but he gets the emotion and sees how the girl’s react to even a middle-aged Asian man singing Elvis. The title of the movie is a misheard lyric from “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and as Cat’s subplot wraps up, we’ll see that music has come to mean for him what it has meant for so many kids since Bill Haley first rocked around the clock: escape from the everyday. Cat and Si’r likewise indulge in escapism by spying on the productions at a movie studio neighboring their school.

Ironically, Si’r is the one perhaps the least in need of escape. Though the budding juvenile delinquent’s behavior might remind one of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows [review], Si’r comes from a nice family who take an interest in his studies and, much to their eventual chagrin, trust him enough to think he’s sticking with it, even when bad behavior and poor performance gets him busted down to night school with other students who act out and underperform. Si’r’s older brother (Han Chang) has gone down a similar path. He’s a hustler with a penchant for pool. So far, though, Si’r has mostly observed rather than participated in anything truly bad. A little vandalism, a minor theft, that’s about it. The kid acts tough, and doesn’t back down when challenged, but he’s not got the mettle to carry through with real violence, especially when his opponent is at a disadvantage.

Deep down, Si’r has romantic tendencies. He fantasizes about a knife that Cat has, believing it was used in a lovers’ suicide pact, staring longingly at a photo of the woman who allegedly owned the blade. He also falls for Ming (Lisa Yang), the girlfriend of the leader of the Little Park Gang, currently on the lam from the law. His absence has left a power vacuum that other boys are trying to fill. This includes making claims on Ming. As many a sensitive adolescent before him, Si’r fancies himself a bit of a white knight, though his intentions and the girls he tries to impose them on never quite line up. Not one, but two young ladies dress him down for trying to change them. These fumblings ultimately lead to tragedy, and of a manner that has haunting parallels to other such tragedies of today.

It’s kind of fascinating how Edward Yang (Yi Yi [review]) constructs such a broad story, and yet manages to pull the strings closed to make it all seem like it’s been about Si’r and Ming. A Brighter Summer Day is so long because Yang’s eye roves from person to person. We see Si’r’s brother get tangled up with a rival gang he’s hustled at pool, we see Si’r’s dad burdened by work woes and government suspicion, and we see Ming’s mother and her declining health. Even the most minor characters get their own arcs. The owner of a café where the Little Park boys like to hang out is only in a few scenes, but from one to the next, she has suffered and grown. It’s not arbitrary, either: in the last scene in the café, Si’r is witness to an alternate option should he choose to step away from gang life. Likewise, his brother’s skill at billiards has an effect on Si’r’s trajectory, it’s not just there to add color.

Yang’s style here is steady, both in visual presentation and scripting (he’s one of four credited writers). The pace and construction is a little bit Godfather-era Coppola, a little TV miniseries. There isn’t a lot of fat, nor a lot of lingering or expository scenes. The dramatic staging is realistic, and the natural settings feel lived in, but A Brighter Summer Day is still big moviemaking at its most fundamental. Yang’s story is large enough to take up as many reels as required. To be honest, before I realized that A Brighter Summer Day was a true story, I thought it might be autobio and Si’r was going to end up working at the movie studio. No dice. Instead, Si’r will eventually decide filmmakers really don’t know anything about life. It’s an ironically meta comment for a movie that itself seems to know so much.

The bonus disc in the A Brighter Summer Day package features a 2002 documentary called Our Time, Our Story, chronicling the rise of independent cinema in Taiwan and the eventual loosening of government control of the motion picture business. The full-length doc does a good job of shedding light on the cinema scene that Edward Yang came out of, even if Yang himself is not interviewed. His contemporaries, like director Hou Hsiao-hsien (Flight of the Red Balloon [review], Three Times [review]) do a good job of explaining what a fertile, creative period the mid-1980s was and how they shifted the focus of mainstream movies from kung-fu and romance to reflect life at that time.

Also included is a videotaped performance from 1992 of Yang’s stage play Likely Consequence. Shot on a bare set with the audience flanking both sides, and featuring timed sound effects, the production is ambitious and engaging, even if the presentation here is lo-fi. The drama focuses on a couple debating what to do with a dead body that the wife may or may not have killed on purpose. The more they argue, the more that is revealed about both their past and their current situation.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SECONDS - #667

“I’ve been assigned to go over the circumstances of your death with you.”

So goes the sales pitch that kicks Seconds into high gear. After watching middle-aged, upper-middle-class businessman Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) navigate mysterious instructions from long-lost friends, meat packers, and dry cleaners, we finally get to the heart of the matter, the thing that he is being lured toward. The program isn’t something you choose, they choose you, whether you’re looking for it or not. You ready to take that mid-life crisis of yours by the horns? Look no further. You can wake up tomorrow with a new face, a new vocation, and a new identity. The only price is...well, everything.

A predecessor to Fincher’s The Game [review], a close cousin to Orson Welles’ The Trial, John Frankenheimer’s 1966 paranoid freak-out is an enigmatic, intriguing hallucination. It hits the ground with both feet and runs like hell, never worrying too much to stop and explain itself, confident the audience will get on board, banking on our wanting to understand what it all means, putting us in our anti-hero’s shoes by never letting us know more than he does. It’s fascinating and weird and strangely prescient. It wouldn’t shock me at all to find out this was Charlie Kaufman’s favorite film as a child.

After plastic surgery and rehab, and a complete overhaul of his most telling physical features (new teeth, removed fingerprints, etc.), Arthur wakes up as Antiochus Wilson (Rock Hudson, Magnificent Obsession [review]), a painter with a beach house in California. It’s a fresh start where the husband and father is now a single swinging bachelor, primed to pursue his art, no matter how impractical; he just has to go along and get along. Which naturally, he can’t. The new Mr. Wilson can’t quite wrap his head around what happened to him, and he starts trying to scratch at the veneer.

“Rebirth is painful...Is it easier to go forward than go back?”

Released at the center of a cultural revolution, Seconds pursues a question of the times: can the past be assimilated into the future? (The present need not apply.) If Arthur Hamilton has bought into the dream of the establishment, living a life of quiet desperation in the suburbs, then he is part of the old guard, one ill prepared for changes to come. Yet, he’s also one with the means to buy his way out. As Wilson, he is set up with a new bohemian lifestyle, free of responsibility, disconnected from cultural change, even if in some ways he is embracing counter culture. The drunken bacchanal that baptizes him as a member of his new community is at once a throwback to the orgies of Rome and a reflection of the Free Love 1960s. Yet it’s false, the whole experience is, which is what Wilson can’t accept. His partying is a bit like Roger Sterling’s experiments with LSD on Mad Men: he has stepped beyond the point where he could maybe pull it off.

The conundrum here is in which direction Frankenheimer’s critique flows. Is his disdain for the squares or for the hippies? The fact that Seconds exists almost within a void, with little hint as to the time it was actually made, it could be viewed as relevant regardless of where you are standing on the continuum. Wilson could just as easily be any struggling white man trying to outrun obsolescence in 2016. The problem is that once Arthur/Wilson has woken up, as it were, he cannot go back to sleep. You can’t roll back history--even if many today try to pretend them can. To not accept change is to end up back in limbo. In this case, an office job within the program, only escapable by selling someone out to your same fate. To once again invoke Mad Men, Wilson is a little like Don Draper at the end of that series, becoming aware that he must relinquish material things, but in this case, too late to bend this enlightenment to his will or exploit it.

Hudson is perfect for the role of the man lost in the construct of himself, perhaps because he knows the pain of living a false identity all to well, having done it for so long in his real life. The restlessness and self-loathing of Wilson grappling with his fraudulent existence is agonizing. Something was lost in the endeavor to have everything. Hudson lends a heaviness to the performance, and when Wilson begins to self-medicate, the actor makes for a very convincing drunk. It’s one of the funniest scenes in a movie full of black humor, and one of the creepiest when the crowd all turn against him. That drunkenness gives way to a tangible despair, and the self-medication turns to literal medication when Wilson returns to the company. They give him pharmaceuticals to keep him pacified. It’s yet another turn that is all too current and relevant, 50 years later.

Seconds is nothing if not immediate. Even how it was shot was intended to make it seem as if it were happening at the exact moment each viewer witnesses it. Director of photography James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) uses a stark photographic style, one with a more realistic, unenhanced look we might expect from more contemporary pictures shot on video or digital. He favors extreme close-ups and even over-the-shoulder moves to put us in the thick of it. In the various party scenes, the camera practically gets buried in the revels. And when things get weird, reality warps under fish-eye lenses and tricky perspectives, pushing us away at one moment and pulling us in the next, like we are dangling on a spring. There is an intimacy to our participating in the unraveling that keeps us firmly in Wilson’s shoes. We are trapped in the same horror movie as he is, but with the added enhancement of gothic organ music.

“Just who the hell do you think you are?”

For Wilson, that is an unanswerable question in the end. He is either/or, neither/nor. He surrendered the identity he spent a lifetime building in exchange for an altogether different, artificial construct, and when he fails to maintain it, that is stripped from him, too. It’s a fairly chilling ouroboros: you have to assimilate in order to be different. It’s the illusion of freedom, and there’s nothing really to be done, the more you push against it, the more it dissipates. So it goes, same as it ever was. THE END.

Special thanks to Francis Rizzo III, from whose DVDTalk.com review of the movie I snagged the majority of the above images.

SOLO CON TU PAREJA - #353

I’ve been circling various artful ways in which to enter this review, but they all make me more irritated and bored than I already am, so I’ll just give it to you straight: Sólo con tu pareja is not a very good movie.

I’ll even go so far as to say that it is one of the more baffling selections in the Criterion Collection. It’s fairly common for Criterion nerds to debate what movies do and do no deserve to be in the Collection, and I tend to be more forgiving than most, preferring to default to the label’s original mission statement and figure out what the film represents that makes it important to this version of cinematic history. When it comes to Sólo con tu pareja, however, I come up with nothing, except that it’s the full-length debut of Alfonso Cuarón, made in Mexico a decade before Y tu mamá también [review]. Well, I guess it’s true, everyone has to start somewhere. The cover copy calls Sólo con tu pareja a “ribald and lightning-quick social satire,” to which I can only reply, “I guess...?”

Sólo con tu pareja, which translates as “Only With Your Partner,” and has also been referred to as “Love in the Time of Hysteria,” is a sex comedy released in 1991. Written by Carlos Cuarón, it tells the story of Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho, BadEducation), a ladies man who we are lead to believe has game inside the bedroom, but who otherwise appears to be a buffoon outside of it. As a schemer, Tomás seems to have picked up most of his moves from Three’sCompany reruns. We’re talking a guy who calls in sick to work while holding the thermometer against a light bulb to prove he has a fever. Over the phone.

Tomás not only refuses to settle down, but he’s irresponsible about it. You see, Tomás is one of those immature lovers who refuses to wear condoms. If the girl is on the pill, that’s enough, he doesn’t think about other consequences (but more on that later). Things change for Tomás on a night he tries to balance two women--his best friend’s assistant, Silvia (Dobrina Liubomirova), and his own boss (Isabel Benet)--keeping one in his apartment and one two apartments down. It’s when moving between the two via the building’s outer ledge, going in and out through the bathroom windows, that Tomás spots the new neighbor that has moved into the middle apartment. Clarisa (Claudia Ramírez) is a pretty flight attendant who captures Tomás’ imagination. So much so, he declares he’s in love and will change his ways to impress her.

Only, as such things go, Tomás has to actually learn his lesson first. Tomás’ best friend, Mateo (Luis De Icaza), also happens to be his doctor, and this puts Silvia in the position to intercept Tomás’ lab reports and mark him down as having tested positive for HIV. Fearing his life now ruined, while everyone else is out celebrating for New Year’s, Tomás is concocting ways to kill himself (like sticking his head in the microwave!). As luck would have it, when Clarisa comes home early and catches her own boyfriend, a pilot with silver-fox Elvis hair, having sex with another woman on her bed, she joins Tomás’ suicide mission. You think they’ll find love with one another rather than go through with it? Well, do ya’?

Oh, and did I mention that earlier Tomás accidentally gave Silvia his stool samples when seeing her off to work, and he took her lunch to the hospital for lab analysis. Is that a “meet cute” or a “meet poop”?

In many ways, Sólo con tu pareja is very much of its time, particularly in style and presentation. One could see it fitting in with the early 1990s Sundance circuit, where many middling efforts were applauded for their quirky energy and stepping outside the mainstream. Indeed, Sólo con tu pareja sort of comes off like Pedro Almodovar decided to make an Adam Sandler movie, but ended up meeting Sandler more than halfway in his attempt to adapt to the comedian’s style. Even for 1991, the comedy is politically tone deaf, making light of people’s ignorance about a very serious subject, with occasional pit stops for racist comments about some Japanese doctors visiting Mateo. Really, that Sólo con tu pareja holds any kind of critical regard at all is down to that strange reverence some cinephiles have for movies in any language other than English. Were this a Hollywood release, it would already be forgotten, and it should be held up as evidence that cinema from other shores is not automatically better or devoid of schlock. We are just normally spared anyone importing the worst of it. Hell, I’d probably sit through The Cobbler again before reaching for this disc.

As a young filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarón already shows an attention to detail and an early interest in tricky shots and extreme angles. Likewise, his relationship with his regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, is  starting to form. The storytelling here is clear, as are the pair’s command over a locale. What Cuarón shows little facility for, however, is comedy, which might explain why his career has gone in other directions since this debut. His instincts for what is funny and for how to frame a gag prove woefully inadequate. Despite the preponderance of pratfalls and slapstick, Cuarón is no Charlie Chaplin, and his leading man is no Buster Keaton. Cacho gives an off-putting performance full of mugging and banal mimicry. Worst of all, he fucks like he’s being bitten by bugs and is trying desperately to shake them off his body, meaning this sex comedy isn’t just unfunny, it’s unsexy, making it hard not to root for Tomás to get everything he deserves.

Though vastly different in tone and quality, Criterion also includes two short films from the Cuarón brothers on Sólo con tu pareja: Alfonso’s 1983 student film Quartet for the End of Time and Carlos’ 2002 comedic short Wedding Night. Of the two, Carlos is the winner, with a quick vignette that features a solid gag. The trick here is not overselling it or overstaying his welcome: set-up and punchline.

Quartet is more ponderous, as perhaps befitting a college project. Angst, boy, angst!