THE DEAD - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written in 2009 for DVDTalk.com.

 

Legendary director John Huston's last film, The Dead, was a family affair. His son Tony adapted the script from a short story by James Joyce, and his daughter Anjelica has one of the two main roles in the picture. This is as it should be, as the film is one that centers on family. The Dead is a movie about remembering times past and the connections that bring us together, as well as the secrets that we hold that keep us apart.

The Dead takes place in Dublin, Ireland, on Christmas Eve 1904. Three sisters (played by Helena Carroll, Cathleen Delany, and Ingrid Craigie) are hosting a dinner for family and friends. The guests come, they enjoy a little song, and then they partake of a goose feast. Amongst the guests is Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), the nephew of the two older hostesses, and his wife, Greta (Huston). Throughout the meal, the many attendees share their love of music and their memories of favorite singers, discuss religion, and largely get on well. There is some witty interplay between the two drunks, the good-natured Freddy (Donal Donnelly) and the self-centered Mr. Browne (Dan O'Herlihy), a flirt who judges the younger man but fails to see that he's just as pickled. There is also honor paid to the ladies who have done so much to gather everyone together.

Following the dinner, and after most of the guests have gone, one of the lingerers, a professional singer (Frank Patterson), gives a private performance, and his sad song inspires a melancholy in Greta. The moment marks a seismic shift, taking The Dead from a story about communal nostalgia and celebration to an intimate coupling and private sadness. Gabriel senses his wife's distance, and when they are back at their hotel, gets her to open up. She tells the story of a young man who sang her that song when she was a teenage girl and how he died from his love for her. The implication is that she died with him, at least emotionally. It's a wonderful scene, the bravura moment for Anjelica Huston. Her monologue is a powerful recounting of lost passion, a heartbreaking display of sorrow that is so exhausting for Greta, she immediately passes out, disappearing into slumber.

Here The Dead shifts again, getting even more intimate. The final scene of the movie is another monologue, but this time an inner monologue. Gabriel watches the snow fall outside his window, and he contemplates his wife's story, laments the lack of feeling in his own life, and also ponders the fate that awaits them all, the one that found his wife's true love at such a young age. Though the whole of the finale passes without Donal McCann opening his mouth, his performance here is no less memorable than Huston's. There is a subtle juxtaposition between the woman who is unafraid to feel, who lets her emotions pour out, and the man who can never find the same courage.

The Dead was nominated for an Oscar for Dorothy Jeakins' costume designs, and a large part of why this film works so well is the meticulous attention to detail paid by Jeakins, as well as production designers Stephen Grimes and Dennis Washington. The clothes and the sets are elaborate without being ostentatious. They make the story believable without ever overshadowing it. The whole of The Dead is understated in a way that makes it all the more realistic. It is not as attention grabbing as most costume dramas are, John Huston prefers the focus to be on the writing and the people and not the setting. His is a quiet film, one that grows quieter the longer it runs, from the sounds of a party all the way to silence. The final image is of snow falling in the sky, no words, only accompanied by plaintive music that hangs on to the very end, then stopping for a breath, the sky turning to nothing.

John Huston passed away in August of 1987, and The Dead was released that December. I can't think of a more perfect finish for a versatile filmmaker. Huston had debuted as a director in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon [review], a movie that almost literally starts with a bang. What, then, could be more fitting than a final fadeout that echoes with such poignancy without ever making a sound.

FAT CITY - CRITERION CHANNEL

 This review was originally written in 2012 for DVDTalk.com.

The 1972 boxing picture Fat City is one of those films that may not make sense to you right away. Truth be told, it took me all the way to the perfectly composed, heartbreaking final scene to understand exactly what it was I had just watched. This isn't your standard sports story; it is not a rise-and-fall narrative. Rather, it's one where the fortunes of its characters gather steam, stand up, and crash repeatedly, like waves on the ocean. It is a movie about carrying on, about finding reasons to get up in the morning, about how men seek pursuits where they can imagine themselves happy.

Fat City was directed by veteran filmmaker John Huston, whose credits already included The Maltese Falcon [review] and The Misfits [review], and who would go on to an old age of poignant movies about the end of life like Under the Volcano [review] and The Dead [review]. Fat City finds the cinema pioneer fully embracing the times. It is not a throwback to the Golden Age of Hollywood, but is in step with the maverick artistic aspirations of 1970s American moviemaking. Based on a book by Leonard Gardner (who also wrote the script), it stars Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges as two boxers, one an old has-been and the other a young could-be. The tale traces their intersecting paths. Keach's Tully randomly encounters Bridges' Ernie at an empty gym. Seeing something in the kid, he recommends Ernie go see his old manager (Nicholas Colasanto, best known as "Coach" from Cheers). Ernie gets a few fights while Tully works as a day laborer. Tully has a drinking problem and shacks up with a barfly (Susan Tyrrell, Cry-Baby); Ernie knocks up his girlfriend (Candy Clark, American Graffiti) and has to get serious about earning a wage. Both men eventually find themselves in the same place again.

The predictable thing to do here would be to have the boxers fight, young vs. old, the student taking on the master. Luckily, Gardner and Huston avoid such an easy out. The tragedy of Fat City is there is no great victory, neither fighter is anything special, they are just working men struggling to get by. One maybe sees his hope in the other, but they both deny their shared pain. Particularly Tully. He could stare in a mirror and say, "There but for the grace of God go I" and not realize it's his own reflection. Keach plays him masterfully. He is essentially a kind and even tender man, but life's disappointments have buried a rage in him. It comes out in explosive ways every once in a while, but mostly it eats away at him from the inside out. One of the best scenes of the movie is when Tully is chatting up Oma (Tyrrell), listening to her stories and bearing her insults, but eventually he provides an able body for her to lean on as he walks her home. As Fat City rolls on, it's clear no one is going to give Tully a similar break.

Like a good fighter, Fat City is lean and in shape. It dances around its central theme, drawing the punches, using each minute wisely. Huston is creating a naturalistic fight movie here. He wants to show how common life is on the lower end of the profession. The cinematography from Conrad Hall (Cool Hand Luke, Road to Perdition) captures the real scenery--the bars, the onion fields, the rundown gyms--without adding any extra glitz. The texture of the old film stock, and even the somewhat dilapidated DVD transfer, makes Fat City look like a perfectly preserved moment in time. There are no frills, no great sweeping camera movements. The boxing is raw, sometimes confusing and distant, and not at all graceful. It's dirty and cheap, the visual equivalent to the gravel in Kris Kristofferson's voice in the movie's theme.

And so it is that you come to that ending: two generations sitting together and pondering the misery of a third. Each one thinking, "I don't want to be that guy." Which is exactly when it hits you: everyone ends up as "that guy." You survive, you keep breathing, and just hope it turns out to be enough.

LA PISCINE - #1088

 “L’eau c’est la vie…l’eau c’est la mort."

Forgive me if that isn’t quite right, put the blame on Google. But that’s about as simple as it gets, right? Water is what fuels everything, but like too much of any good thing, it can also kill you. It is life and it is death. So when a filmmaker puts a swimming pool as the center of his erotic thriller, and even highlights it in his title, as Jacques Deray did in 1969 with La piscine, you can bet it’s going to both charge the sexy times and drain the life out of someone.

Thriller might be too strong a word here. La piscine isn’t a nailbiter in most traditional senses, though you will spend the first half of the movie worrying about how it will all go wrong and the second half wondering what the consequences will be. It stars Alain Delon (Le samourai [review]) and Romy Schneider (Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno [review]) as Jean-Paul and Marianne, a couple on vacation at a remote villa with a swimming pool. They spend their time canoodling with one another, bickering a little, engaging in a power dynamic that regularly explodes in wild passion, her on top this time and him next time. It’s just the two of them. It works. It’s good.

It can’t last. We know this. 

Enter Harry (Maurice Ronet, The Fire Within [review]), an old friend of Jean-Paul’s and an old flame of Marianne’s. He has arrived with Penelope (singer Jane Birkin), a grown daughter no one knew he had. The striking young woman becomes the object of all attention. Does Jean-Paul have a thing for her? He’s inscrutable, it’s hard to tell, but does Marianne think he does? And, gross, is Harry attracted to his own daughter, too? Or is it all just the macho musk in the air? Because Harry definitely still has a thing for Marianne and this might just be about these two brutes—one who talks to much and one who says very little—wanting each woman so the other can’t have her.

A few days go by with normal activity. Couples split off, confessions are made, everyone kind of agrees to not like Harry, Marianne makes some very French guesstimations as to Jean-Paul’s potential lust, and Deray arranges the characters around his sets like chess pieces waiting to move. It’s funny, the filmmaker never tips his hand, we kind of guess that maybe something happened between the older man and the young girl (she’s of age, don’t worry), but neither gives up the info. It’s all about guilty glances and knowing looks. Delon is the king of deadpan, but Birkin could give him lessons in not giving anything away. What’s fascinating about her performance is that Deray presents her as an object to gaze upon, but she resists such an inelegant notion. Penelope may be the perennial observer in most scenes, but those eyes aren’t empty. She sees how ridiculous these adult machinations are, even if she’s not always aware that she’s falling into them.

La piscine, which I should note is available both on disc and currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, is more character than plot, a tale of predator and predator. There is no real prey here. Marianne doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to, and she’s more than willing to rebuff or welcome advances as she sees fit. Schneider has a regal bearing that automatically places her in charge. There is also a bit of the cliché that she’s the emotionally mature one that will help these two boys keep it together. Harry is a narcissist, Jean-Paul is troubled in ways that are only hinted at. We hate them both, but Harry is the invader, the bully, the interloper…and thus the villain. He’s the one the audience wants to see fall.

It’s interesting that Deray has made a pretty chilly drama even though it’s set in the very sunny French summer. How can there be secrets when everything is bathed in so much light? Even in a nighttime scene, Jean-Paul comments on how there are too many electric lights, and they are drawing mosquitos. What a sly thing to just let slip out in conversation, a metaphor for the whole of the proceedings. People flocking to these bright climes only to feed on one another. And the biggest dangers come when those people bring their secrets out of the dark. The two pivotal scenes that influence the impending violence are confessions: Marianne telling Harry how she really feels about Jean-Paul (i.e. it can never be you) and Penelope telling Jean-Paul how much she really does not like her father and how much her father does not like Jean-Paul. The latter is probably the best thing in the movie. Birkin is suddenly wholly and completely real, safe to be herself, and the steely Delon gives her all the space she needs just by listening.

That’s about explicit as La piscine gets. Deray doesn’t make any grand proclamations about love or desire, and if no character is going to explain their motivations, it’s very much up to the audience to decide. Many will be as confused as Penelope at the end. Her face as she departs suggests she knows what happened, just not what to make of it, and also likely unsure why everyone else is going along. 

The answer to that? Because it’s intriguing! From start to finish, La piscine holds our gaze, the fifth participant in the (blood)lust.

HOME - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2010.

A tiny house sits on a grassy field next to a deserted stretch of unfinished French highway. As we will learn, the family that lives there moved to this remote location because their mother (venerable French actress Isabelle Huppert) has some kind of nervous condition and this is the only place where she feels safe. They've been there for some time, at one count possibly ten years. That's how long the unused pavement has been cutting through their front lawn. The movie Home is what happens when the builders finally come to finish the road and open it up to commuters.

The family dynamic is a mom, a dad, and three kids. The father, Michel (Olivier Gourmet, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 [review]), is a good guy who keeps his family happy, going off to work every day to bring home the bacon but never letting the grind get him down. He and his wife, Marthe, get along well, and the family all plays together and enjoys each other's company. The eldest daughter, the worldly Judith (Adélaïde Leroux), even takes baths with her little brother Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein), and mom and dad hang out and splash in the tub, too. Judith is of age, and so is the only other adult in the house. She spends her days in a bikini, sunbathing while listening to death metal. She couldn't be more different than her little sister Marion (Madeleine Budd). Whereas Judith is a Lolita who has fully blossomed, Marion is like her mother to the extreme. She is anxious and concerned with germs. On the other hand, the boy Julien isn't concerned with anything. He's precocious and hyper and regularly indulged.

Ursula Meier's movie is a strange piece of work. Though she and her legion of screenwriters--there are five writing credits in addition to her own--take this solid foundation and erect a bizarre scenario on top, we are watching a parable without context. Home exists somewhere out of time, vaguely modern, but also vaguely apocalyptic. We never leave the confines of the house by the freeway, and dispatches from beyond sound almost alien. In a way, this could be a divergent off-ramp from Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend [review]. Reality is not as important as the message.

So, what is the message? I'm not sure there actually is one. As the cars begin to speed by their house, the family slowly loses its grip on its environment. They become more isolated, there is no exit onto their property. Dad parks the car across the four lanes, and they either have to dodge traffic to cross or crawl under through a sewer tunnel. Mother's illness begins to surface again as the noise and the movement get to her, Marion becomes obsessed with the effects of automobile exhaust, and Julien starts to go a little stir crazy. (In this, the movie is like Todd Haynes' Safe, only abstracted and with no cures offered.) Judith doesn't change her routine, her affectation of being unaffected remains intact, though she will eventually get in a passing car and go. Michel stays strong for everyone, but when he fails to get the family out, he becomes absorbed in his wife's psychosis and starts to go overboard in protecting her. Gourmet has the stand-out performance in Home, maybe because he gets the most to express. The good guy who loves to laugh with his children also gets his private moments--weary cigarettes stolen in the night, a quiet cry in his car, things that allow him to show some range. We get the sense that he signed on for something that has become more than he was expecting.

Home was shot by cinematographer Agnès Godard (35 Shots of Rum [review]), and she captures the bucolic setting beautifully. As the highway encroaches on everything, she lets the natural transformation of the locale take over rather than resorting to tricks to show it. What was once green and clean becomes grimy and cluttered, and Godard understands that photographing it in exactly the same way in both states says more than any lens filter or special lighting ever could.

The problem is, as much as the images speak for themselves, I don't feel the script has all that much to add. The story's isolation ends up being its Achilles heel, and its weirdness becomes something the viewer grows complacent with rather than continually intrigued by. Yes, we watch this family go through the things they go through, deteriorating under the strain of an environmental madness they can't control, ultimately to come out the other side in a rather obvious way--the predictability of the final shots is proportional to the creativity of the central concept--but to what end? Home builds and builds to a harrowing climax, only to flinch from it. Apparently, all that came before is easily solved. Marthe just needed a good nap.

I suppose I might have been fine with a shruggable conclusion had I not already lost interest half an hour before. I think I could sense the whole lot of nothing that was coming, and the more it was obvious that Meier was painting her movie into a narrative corner, the more I drifted away. There are actually outcomes that are more trite that could have caused an even bigger pile-up than this--yet, maybe then at least Home would have been a movie that would have been worth getting upset about. Instead, I'll trade one cliché for another: Home, a nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there, one visit is enough.

LA VISITA (THE VISITOR) - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2012.

The 1963 Italian film La visita (The Visitor) is a mild romantic comedy starring Sandra Milo (the mistress from 8 1/2 [review]) as Pina, a mid-30s woman in Northern Italy looking for love. The movie opens at the train station where she waits for Adolfo (Francois Perier, Le cercle rouge [review]) to arrive from Rome. The two have been corresponding since Pina placed a personal ad stating her intention to marry. Adolfo is a clerk in a bookstore with few prospects, and so he has traveled to the country to meet his potential bride.

The action in La visita takes place over a weekend as the pair get to know one another. Pina is a sweetheart who lives a solitary life that is, in its way, a warped fairy tale fantasy. Her home is decorated in Disneyana, and she has three pets: a dog, a parrot, and a turtle. Pina is well liked in her hamlet, and the village idiot (Mario Adorf) threatens Adolfo the moment he sees him. He says he doesn't like the little man from the big city, and as Adolfo begins to reveal his true nature, we realize he's not wrong. Adolfo is obsessed with money, rude, and even racist. He lusts after Pina's neighbor's teenaged granddaughter (Angela Minervini) and even flirts with her in front of his potential fiancée. Through flashbacks, we see how Pina and Adolfo got involved in this long-distance romance, as well as their secret love lives. Pina has been having an affair with a married trucker (Gastone Moschin), while Adolfo has been getting it on with the woman who makes his shirts.

La visita was directed by Antonio Pietrangeli (Adua and Her Friends). He creates an easygoing, almost pastoral vibe for La visita, capturing the quaintness of small-town living, warts and all. Some of the locals are lecherous and spiteful (they call the curvaceous Pina "Miss Pretty Booty" behind her back, thinking the "Pretty" makes it all okay), and they can also be as intolerant as Adolfo. In one amusing, cathartic scene, they trick him into a game of "soldier's bluff" and send him tumbling down a small embankment. He's pretty drunk at that point, and has shown himself to be a boor. It's difficult to fathom why Pina would still be attracted to him. Pietrangeli allows for subtle moments where we know she sees the truth. Pina isn't blind, she's just...patient.

Sandra Milo is marvelous in the lead. She is quiet and serene and she exudes an inherent charm that makes her instantly likable. Pina is far from the pushy tart she played for Fellini; rather, she masks her shyness by being a caretaker. She plies Adolfo with food and has knitted him a sweater. The more we dislike Adolfo, the more we love Pina, particularly as we realize that she and the trucker have genuine affection for one another. Yet, it's also a credit to the writing that, when the emotional climax of the film arrives, Pina is able to disarm Adolfo and get to the root of his bad behavior. The impulse that compelled the two of them to reach out in the first place is what, at least for now, keeps them together. Pietrangeli and his trio of screenwriters show us the comfort that two lonely people can find in each other's arms, and even if it's temporary, it at least makes sense.

VISIONS OF EIGHT - #1081

 

Someone asked me this morning if I had watched any of the Olympics, and I replied “No, but that reminds me I have an Olympic documentary at home to watch and should probably give it a spin.” The fellow asking gave me what I admit was an appropriately perplexing look in response. A contradiction maybe only cinephiles understand. I won’t engage in the Thing but I’ll watch a movie about that Thing. 

Sports movies are probably high on the list for this situation. Why do I not enjoy watching or playing sports but I’ll take a boxing or football movie any given day of the week?

Criterion has re-released 1973’s Visions of Eight just in time for the delayed 2020 Olympics; now labeled 2021, the XXXII Olympiad may seem like it’s full of strife, but keep in mind, the XX games back in ’72 are the games where Palestinian terrorists killed Israeli athletes, an incident only touched upon briefly in Visions of Eight. It’s backdrop for John Schelsinger’s segment, “The Longest,” as the attack delayed the marathon by a whole day. It’s hard to imagine what gets into a runner’s head with that extra day, and how it effects his race. That’s what intrigues Schlesinger the most: what does the long-distance runner face beyond the fatigue of body?

The Midnight Cowboy director [review] is the last to go in this anthology documentary, the 8th of the 8 in the title. Producer David L. Wolper (Roots) picked this octet of international filmmakers and let them loose to shoot what interested them, and each came back with their own snapshot of the Munich Olympics. The notion is that no one film can cover the whole event, so let’s slice it up and create a collage. Naturally, some of the shorts are better than others. Kon Ichikawa, no stranger to the Olympics, having set the standard for documentaries about the games back in 1965 with Tokyo Olympiad, is perhaps the most inventive here, chronicling one 100-meter dash by filming the race at 4X slower speed, isolating each athlete so the audience can track the contortions of body and face, and then showing the whole widescreen image, finally revealing who won. Each competitor looked like the victor on their own, but only one can get the Gold.

Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde [review]) also gets inventive, tightening in and abstracting high jumpers in both success and failure, creating a montage of daring and defeat. Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [review]) has the most fun, matching the decathlon events to musical performances adding atmosphere during and adjacent to the competition. And I suppose it takes a French director to blithely undertake “The Losers;” Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman) focuses on those who miss the mark and how they react to blowing it.

The weak link in Visions of Eight is something that only likely appears as such due to the passing of time. German director Michael Pfleghar’s segment “The Women” is the only one besides Lelouch’s to give the female competitors any time, and he spends most of it highlighting their clothes and how they prepare themselves (like, you know, primping their hair). There is a noticeable focus on mostly white faces throughout the film, as well, and though Visions of Eight is a product of its era and should be judged as such, it’s worth noting that even though Wolper tells you up front you are not getting the whole story, he’s not telling you how much you really aren’t.

For those interested in the technical specs, Criterion does deliver Visions of Eight using a new 4K restoration that looks fantastic while maintaining the veneer of film stock used in 1972. Sound is also good, giving some nice punch to the occasional music by the great Henry Mancini. Extras include audio commentary by podcasters from The Ringer, a new documentary, and archival materials.

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

BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2011.

Things may have changed since I was in school, but my only recollection of any civil rights leader ever being discussed at length in American history classes is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There were brief mentions of Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez, and we also learned who Rosa Parks was, but any more meaningful profile of more aggressive political leaders was nowhere to be found. While I have, of course, gathered additional knowledge over the years, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is still a revelation, a documentary that both educates and informs, but also entertains.

Though credited to director Göran Olsson, The Black Power Mixtape is more of a collaborative effort spreading back more than forty years. The footage used to construct the documentary is taken from a variety of Swedish television broadcasts. Sweden took an active interest in American culture at the time, exploring our internal struggles and racism, as well as condemning the war in Vietnam. Their distance from the issue allowed for a fascinating perspective, and unlike most of the news media in our own country, they viewed the Black Panthers and similarly minded African American leaders as essential figures in an understandable and necessary revolution. As a result, they gained unprecedented access to Black Panther headquarters and social centers. Stokely Carmichael visited Stockholm with his mother, Eldridge Cleaver let camera crews into the Black Panther embassy while in exile in Algeria, and Angela Davis talked at length with a European reporter while in prison awaiting trial.

The alternative perspective is astonishing for both new viewers and people more educated in the truth. Olsson has gathered up contemporary African American figures, as well as a few surviving voices from the past, to watch the footage and comment. Their reactions can be heard as voiceover. Rapper Talib Kwali, for instance, is surprised by the humanity of the news pieces, and it also reinforces for him his connection to the Black Power movement of yesteryear. Footage of a black bookstore in Harlem in the 1970s reminds him of one he worked at in Brooklyn in the 1990s. A piece on a typical African American family in the late '60s inspires Erykah Badu to sing the coded songs they taught her in school to discourage questioning authority. In other clips, Harry Belafonte looks at himself as a young man meeting Swedish dignitaries, and Angela Davis reflects on the larger meaning of the struggle.

Smartly, Olsson keeps his commentators off-screen, avoiding letting The Black Power Mixtape turn into a talking-heads documentary. What historical context is not provided in the journalist's copy from the actual broadcasts is given via short news clips of other events or text in the upper corner of the frame. Olsson never lets his audience lose a sense of time and place, and he builds the framework naturally, moving in chronological order across the years. Raw footage is also enhanced by new music from Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, drummer for the Roots and a respected hip-hop producer. His compositions, like the film itself, blends old and new, mixing vintage musical lines with more up-to-date rhythms, but avoiding making any of it too domineering. (The musician also contributes to the voiceover.)

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 ends on a sobering note. Harlem always served as a microcosm of black culture, and as drugs flooded its streets in the early '70s, they had a damaging effect on African American empowerment. Years of fighting back had brought about some victories, but it also caused fatigue. As with most of the political activism that had survived the turn of the decade, the Black Power movement was losing steam. Yet, there were still voices struggling to be heard, and some of those voices still speak up and, as this movie illustrates, there are others speaking alongside them. Olsson provides the right perspective for why everything shown in the previous 90 minutes still matters and where we can take the inspiration it engenders from here. It's a compelling message, one that seems particularly relevant as disparate individuals gather across the country to protest economic injustice. There is much to be learned and considered from the past, much to be gleaned from the success and failures of those that fought before, and for that, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is certainly a vital place to start.