Yes, it is. Georgian dance is used as a metaphor, or microrepresentation, call it what you wish, for Georgian society and it is through musical numbers that much of the psychological plot plays out. It's not one of last year's best gay films; it's one of last year's best films. Whatch out for one wonderful travelling during a wedding scene. That's quality, mister.
Reviews
17 Reviews
Stalker
(1979)
how to bridge the gap
4 December 2005
Warning: Spoilers
In Stalker Tarkovsky searches for what lies beyond both measurement and intellect, and hooks the viewer by the senses. The first images after the credits are hypnotic, bleached, cold, that's home. Then there's a trip, some danger but nothing serious, in black and white, for a moment its sustained rhythm makes it almost warm, and then there's a search that takes the bulk of the movie, that's the Zone, a forbidden area outside society. The relatively normal colours of a cool climate are apparent but the visual elegance seems to persist. It's an abnormal normality, a vast natural stage emptied for the actors. The play begins and the actors search, first in open spaces and then in caves and rooms. They're a scientist, an intellectual and a stalker, a man for whom the totally rational world where he lives is insufferable. He's bullied by the scientist and the intellectual in a scene near the end. In the epilogue, the stalker's wife confesses to the camera that she knew this man was an outcast, that there would be problems, but she discarded the possibility of a better suitor. Their daughter, a girl with telekinetic powers, ends the movie.
Constrained by a shoestring budget, and despite visually dazzling moments and an undeniable social element, Tarkovsky's exploration seems minimalist and geared towards introspection. The social and the personal are shown side by side. Lesser filmmakers are often incapable of telling one category from the other. "Intangible" and "tangible" apply to parallel or contiguous realities. The abnormal powers of the stalker's daughter displace the glasses across the table; the vibration by the train passing nearby affects the table and the glasses on it. Stalker is that rare artifact, it knows what to take from reality and what to expect from allegory, how to connect form and content in a coherent way that extends to the exacting relationship between the director and his medium. The Zone's travelogue may not always be top-notch. You sleep a little but wake up to a lot.
Constrained by a shoestring budget, and despite visually dazzling moments and an undeniable social element, Tarkovsky's exploration seems minimalist and geared towards introspection. The social and the personal are shown side by side. Lesser filmmakers are often incapable of telling one category from the other. "Intangible" and "tangible" apply to parallel or contiguous realities. The abnormal powers of the stalker's daughter displace the glasses across the table; the vibration by the train passing nearby affects the table and the glasses on it. Stalker is that rare artifact, it knows what to take from reality and what to expect from allegory, how to connect form and content in a coherent way that extends to the exacting relationship between the director and his medium. The Zone's travelogue may not always be top-notch. You sleep a little but wake up to a lot.
Innocence
(II) (2004)
an unmanageable surname for a great revelation
8 August 2005
Heaven makes some odd couples but I wasn't expecting this one. Lucile H and Gaspar Noé.? Oh my, Katherine Mansfield dates Jack the Ripper! Now, seriously, I read Mansfield quite a few years ago so I probably mistake her for someone else, Noe can't be that bad, he's all show, and Innocence isn't only a delicate tale, there's a ghost story hanging in the air, the ghost is partly male. Lucile wants to tell the world and Gaspar wants to shock it. She's a grown-up woman telling what it may feel like to be a girl, a middle-class one to be precise, you just listen, watch her tell it. For some it may be too obvious or heavy-handed but there's nothing wrong with simple things as long as they're not simplistic. Others could miss a substantial plot development but a true plot is only necessary for plot-driven movies. It is a coherent and consistently balanced job; if there are provocations, they are offered rather than imposed and can be easily handled. They used to say girls grew up first. I just wonder what she would do with a school for boys. No, I don't want to know what Noé would do. The movie begins with the credits, à la Irreversible, and there's an explanation for that at the end but what does it mean? Could it possibly be a tribute? I don't know, but I think there are tributes: Varda's Cleo and Truffaut's next door.
The Intruder
(2004)
movies, dreams and dirt
20 April 2005
Two things haunt you throughout L'intrus (The Intruder): who's the intruder and is it a movie or a dream you're watching? The ending is so shocking that for a while you're at a loss for an answer to either of those questions. The intruder pops up as different characters, different men in different circumstances who don't belong in the scene, so they're expelled from it, kindly or brutally, but often without emotional involvement. The main character, Louis, is a contemptible man. He's got rough ways, some mean job and no heart. He needs one and goes after it. He has a heart transplanted and afterwards decides to start a new life. Can this man succeed in his quest for redemption? A guy like that could cut your throat at the drop of a hat. You know it but Claire Denis doesn't encourage you to judge him. Occasionally, there's a young Russian woman -a beautiful girl who seems to inhabit someplace between heaven and earth - who does judge him. She may even punish him. But not Denis. There's the character played by Beatrice Dalle who wants no business with him: don't touch me, she says. But Denis lets this man be himself, films him in his self-absorbed quest. I don't know if what she films is the heart or the mind but it isn't the traditional plot basics. Whatever she films, you get it in the end. You know who's "the" intruder, you know why, more or less, and some scenes come back to your mind with their full meaning. But was it a movie or a dream?
Fear
(1954)
Tales of fear and marriage
12 April 2005
Whenever I see La Paura I think of it as a companion piece to Eyes Wide Shut, or maybe it is the other way around. Adultery makes both films tick but in different ways. I think Phillip French was right on the money when he pointed out a Wizard of Oz thing in Kubrick's last work. Like Dorothy, Tom and Nicole go through fantasies and nightmares and at the end Dorothy's reassuring childish motto "there's no place like home" is ironically updated to the adult circumstantial adage "there's no sex like marital sex". Kubrick's take is intellectual, he never leaves the world of ideas to touch the ground. He taunts the audience first with an erotic movie and then with a thriller and refuses to deliver either of them. He was married to his third wife for 40 years, until he died. Rossellini was still married to Ingrid Bergman when he directed La Paura; they had been adulterous lovers and their infidelity widely criticized La Paura is a tale, a noirish one. The noir intrigue is solved and the tale has a happy ending. The city is noir; the country is tale, the territory where childhood is possible. The transition is operated in the most regular way: by car, a long-held shot taken from the front of the car as it rides into the road, as if we were entering a different dimension. Irene (Bergman) starts the movie: we just see a dark city landscape but her voice-over narration tells us of her angst and informs us that the story is a flashback, hers. Bergman's been cheating on her husband. At first guilt is just psychological torture but soon expands into economic blackmail and then grows into something else. From beginning to end the movie focuses on what Bergman feels, every other character is there to make her feel something. Only when the director gives away the plot before the main character can find out does he want us to feel something Bergman still can't. When she finds out, we have already experienced the warped mechanics of the situation and we may focus once again on the emotional impact it has on Bergman's Irene. In La Paura treasons are not imagined but real, nightmares are deliberate and the couple's venom suppurates in bitter ways. Needless to say, Ingrid has another of her rough rides in the movies but Rossellini doesn't dare put her away as he did in Europa 51, nor does he abandon her to the inscrutable impassivity of nature (Stromboli). His gift is less transcendent and fragile than the conclusion of Viaggio in Italia. He just gives his wife as much of a fairy tale ending as a real woman can have, a human landscape where she can finally feel at home. Back to the country, a half lit interior scene where shadows suggest the comfort of sleep. After all, it's the "fairy godmother" who speaks the last words in the movie.
Le Beau Serge
(1958)
Beau is not good enough
15 March 2005
This is said to be the first film of the Nouvelle Vague. I don't see the Nouvelle Vague anywhere here. The distance between Le Beau Serge and The 400 Blows is not one year but an age. Chabrol's first film is like a melodramatic throwback to 19th century naturalism with a touch of redemption, that is, unnaturalized naturalism. Serge and his gang are enslaved by circumstances but his Parisian pal will work hard to bring them hope. It feels as if it had already been outdated at the time of opening and it doesn't look very chabrolian. Not that chabrolian always means "good".
I've seen at least as many bad movies by Chabrol as good ones. How could this happen to me? Once upon a time people used to say he was a legendary master, someone to keep track of. Maybe he was. He has indeed made some masterful pictures in the 1960s-70s and some think he's also made 3 or 4 very interesting films in the last 20 years.
Anyway, that's no excuse for all the mediocrity he's churned out so complacently not only during the last 20 years but, as it turns out, since 1958 when he directed this shrill rural drama. There's even a mean priest and, of course, the saviour is a secularized priestly figure, he's devoted to his flock but has sex. As priests go, I'd rather have the uncanny Gerard Depardieu in that miracle Pialat borrowed from Bernanos: Sous le Soleil de Satan.
I've seen at least as many bad movies by Chabrol as good ones. How could this happen to me? Once upon a time people used to say he was a legendary master, someone to keep track of. Maybe he was. He has indeed made some masterful pictures in the 1960s-70s and some think he's also made 3 or 4 very interesting films in the last 20 years.
Anyway, that's no excuse for all the mediocrity he's churned out so complacently not only during the last 20 years but, as it turns out, since 1958 when he directed this shrill rural drama. There's even a mean priest and, of course, the saviour is a secularized priestly figure, he's devoted to his flock but has sex. As priests go, I'd rather have the uncanny Gerard Depardieu in that miracle Pialat borrowed from Bernanos: Sous le Soleil de Satan.
I Heart Huckabees
(2004)
is it wacky enough?
13 February 2005
The US v Europe in philosophical style via a little eastern Zen. I Heart Huckabees is an American comedy, which means it has a happy ending. Sometimes the plot may seem flippantly thin and the comic rhythm too subdued for a screwball comedy but it does have a few points to make and some hilarious scenes, like one with left-wing environmentalists and an all-capitalist God-loving family.
Huckabees is an intellectual comedy. The bright-side look on life draped in suburban Buddhism represents American optimism, everything can be solved, everything is connected, pain comes from a narrow and fragmented perspective. Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin play the existential detectives committed to this trend; they are parental figures. Opposite, the fallen angel, the existential Satan, obviously someone from France: Isabelle Huppert. A nihilist philosopher disguised as femme fatale. Huppert's pitch is chaos, life is painful, don't connect the dots that have never been there, things can't be solved.
But Huckabees is an American intellectual comedy and Americans aren't always comfortable with thought. They are practical folks out there across the Atlantic and like their things being used, with buttons and preferably with folding accessories, so sometimes they mistrust thought and tame it, they make it usable and pocket-sized. And that's when Huckabees existential hero, the troubled Jason Schwartzman, reaches a conclusion, solves the mystery of the universe, puts yin and yang together, reconciles the old and new worlds and we have our existential happy ending without having really entered a daring territory or have we?. Maybe I'm biased but I don't think Europeans mistrust thought so willingly. They have learned to live with thought as they have learned to live with God, even when they don't have much faith in either of those. Huckabees goes from screwball to feel-good, and it feels good but it should have been wackier. I wish there were more films like it.
Huckabees is an intellectual comedy. The bright-side look on life draped in suburban Buddhism represents American optimism, everything can be solved, everything is connected, pain comes from a narrow and fragmented perspective. Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin play the existential detectives committed to this trend; they are parental figures. Opposite, the fallen angel, the existential Satan, obviously someone from France: Isabelle Huppert. A nihilist philosopher disguised as femme fatale. Huppert's pitch is chaos, life is painful, don't connect the dots that have never been there, things can't be solved.
But Huckabees is an American intellectual comedy and Americans aren't always comfortable with thought. They are practical folks out there across the Atlantic and like their things being used, with buttons and preferably with folding accessories, so sometimes they mistrust thought and tame it, they make it usable and pocket-sized. And that's when Huckabees existential hero, the troubled Jason Schwartzman, reaches a conclusion, solves the mystery of the universe, puts yin and yang together, reconciles the old and new worlds and we have our existential happy ending without having really entered a daring territory or have we?. Maybe I'm biased but I don't think Europeans mistrust thought so willingly. They have learned to live with thought as they have learned to live with God, even when they don't have much faith in either of those. Huckabees goes from screwball to feel-good, and it feels good but it should have been wackier. I wish there were more films like it.
Flowers of Shanghai
(1998)
That old toxic business...
9 December 2004
Prostitution has been a popular trade in the movies. It could be about glamorous courtesans in chic apartments for the rich or miserable young women in dingy hotel rooms for the low wages of the poor, some kind of bordello or simply that most elliptical dishonour, the heroine with a dirty past. Sometimes the girls got married, sometimes they remained alone or died but they were usually entitled to a sublimated love scene with their lovers, if not their customers, and when morals changed they could be obliging enough to have sex with both lovers and customers.
Hou Hsiao-hsien makes this film as if it belonged in some old time that maybe never existed. Flowers of Shanghai is a film about glamorous brothel-bound prostitutes without a single sex scene but it shows or tells everything else, which provides it with a surreal intimacy.
That intimacy is reinforced by the fact that there are no exterior scenes and by the gripping warmth of its colour palette. That warmth invites you into the movie's visual environment to share in the cruel melancholy of the stories, the domestic routines through which they unfold and in some unexpected comic episodes: an attentive camera that pans and zooms attests to a regimented fate for the characters it watches, carefully staged vignettes shot in distant takes feel like vivid scenes spied on through a keyhole or behind a curtain and in some cases the dramatic expectations about the characters are ironically upended.
There's a great article on the movie in the external reviews section. The author is in awe of what he writes about. It lingers on Hou's camera movements and framing and gives a detailed account of what makes this movie intoxicating. But it's in Portuguese, so stop reading this and learn the language!
Hou Hsiao-hsien makes this film as if it belonged in some old time that maybe never existed. Flowers of Shanghai is a film about glamorous brothel-bound prostitutes without a single sex scene but it shows or tells everything else, which provides it with a surreal intimacy.
That intimacy is reinforced by the fact that there are no exterior scenes and by the gripping warmth of its colour palette. That warmth invites you into the movie's visual environment to share in the cruel melancholy of the stories, the domestic routines through which they unfold and in some unexpected comic episodes: an attentive camera that pans and zooms attests to a regimented fate for the characters it watches, carefully staged vignettes shot in distant takes feel like vivid scenes spied on through a keyhole or behind a curtain and in some cases the dramatic expectations about the characters are ironically upended.
There's a great article on the movie in the external reviews section. The author is in awe of what he writes about. It lingers on Hou's camera movements and framing and gives a detailed account of what makes this movie intoxicating. But it's in Portuguese, so stop reading this and learn the language!
Weekend
(1967)
A funny, brutal and a bit too preachy time warp
28 November 2004
Week End for me is divided into three parts. First, the Apocalypse of capitalist society, which is deliberately presented as a madcap comedy. It reminded me of those medieval tales about the end of the world where the havoc wreaked by the plague seems to be a symptom of wider social malfunctions. It kept me thinking of Bergman's The Seventh Seal all the while. Then, there's a middle section in which Godard's preachiness gets increasingly simplistic. Its climax is that scene in which the black and Arab representatives of an exploited African continent eat a sandwich while Godard states the more or less obvious. Finally, there's the new dawn for a reborn human kind, intentionally filmed as a terror movie, something like 2001 played as a slasher flick. But the movie this last section made me think of was Passolini's Salo, which I think it anticipates. The main difference would be that Saló's brutal savagery cannot be redeemed, it's carried out for its own sake, fascism without additives, which makes it unendurable beyond words. In Week End that brutality is sort of moral, human kind has to be reborn... but there's that bourgeois girl in the new human tribe, so maybe it all is a bloody joke.
Distant
(2002)
It's a Turkish movie
15 November 2004
When you're watching Distant you know you're not watching a French movie, there's little sex and it's mostly elliptical and people don't talk that much here, there are a few lines scattered here and there and a couple of important conversations, just to let you make sense of what's going on. It doesn't look American either, there aren't any car chases or shoot-outs or violence, unless you consider the killing of a mouse an act of blood or the daily tension of getting by a subdued catastrophe. At times, the relatively long-held medium-distance shots may remind you of 'contemplative' Asian cinema, but just reminds you, the director doesn't push things to the radical minimalism of some Taiwanese filmmakers but then again, this is not a Taiwanese movie, it's a Turkish movie. I don't know what that means, I don't even know if that's supposed to mean something.
The movie doesn't have a plot proper and yet, those few lines, those somewhat long-held shots and that often mitigated tension gradually build a sense of something happening, a sense of 'plot', for lack of a better word, that grows on you. By the end of the movie you may get the feeling you're going to miss those two cousins who have many things in common but are worlds apart.
The movie doesn't have a plot proper and yet, those few lines, those somewhat long-held shots and that often mitigated tension gradually build a sense of something happening, a sense of 'plot', for lack of a better word, that grows on you. By the end of the movie you may get the feeling you're going to miss those two cousins who have many things in common but are worlds apart.
2046
(2004)
Lightning doesn't strike twice
5 November 2004
Some of Wong Kar-Wai's films are a bit hazy in my memory but judging just by Happy Together and In the Mood for Love he was near to sublime in going into the ineffable intricacies of that old catchall metaphysical concept, think they call it love. 2046 is pedestrian by comparison both plot-wise and visually. What could persuade this guy to make an uninspired sequel to something that was perfect is something that beats me. The poor writer fellow in the movie, Tony Leung reprising his role from ITMFL, certainly didn't need it because he comes up with some lousy stories and more women than he can handle. He's not in the mood for love anymore, so why should we?
The Return
(2003)
Crying game in the boot camp
24 October 2004
In The Return we find another father-son story, its opposite, the mother-daughter story, has a less pervasive visibility. It must be something to do with tradition and who runs the industry in the US, Russia or wherever.
I can't buy this movie. You can smell the kind of emotional trap the film is going to set you up with miles away, you know what kind of accident is waiting to happen. If you know that, it doesn't mean you're bright, not even that you've read the whole panoply of reviews available on the internet, it means the screenplay leaves no other way out for the plot to come to closure. We see the same pattern of interaction among the three main characters, the father and the two kids, scene after scene so the only way for the plot to evolve is that 'accident'. The second thing that puts me off is its military sentimentality. The father has been absent for twelve years, the first time the kids see him after he's returned, the guy is asleep on the bed, naked from the waist up, so he comes across as big, hairy and lazy, a perfect example of domestic leadership, which is really all you can ask from daddy in the morning, but what can he offer you in the evening? Well, it seems just some boot camp training lessons. And there you have it, daddy is tough but daddy is good. For all its biblical and metaphysical input, the lack of surprises is wrapped up as Spartan sentimentality.
But the truth is I can't really call this a failure nor even a bad movie, let alone be disparaging about what the director may offer in the future. The two kids are just great and the film is a succession of beautifully composed shots in bleached-out colors. That you can't deny. It has 'art-house' written all over it.
I can't buy this movie. You can smell the kind of emotional trap the film is going to set you up with miles away, you know what kind of accident is waiting to happen. If you know that, it doesn't mean you're bright, not even that you've read the whole panoply of reviews available on the internet, it means the screenplay leaves no other way out for the plot to come to closure. We see the same pattern of interaction among the three main characters, the father and the two kids, scene after scene so the only way for the plot to evolve is that 'accident'. The second thing that puts me off is its military sentimentality. The father has been absent for twelve years, the first time the kids see him after he's returned, the guy is asleep on the bed, naked from the waist up, so he comes across as big, hairy and lazy, a perfect example of domestic leadership, which is really all you can ask from daddy in the morning, but what can he offer you in the evening? Well, it seems just some boot camp training lessons. And there you have it, daddy is tough but daddy is good. For all its biblical and metaphysical input, the lack of surprises is wrapped up as Spartan sentimentality.
But the truth is I can't really call this a failure nor even a bad movie, let alone be disparaging about what the director may offer in the future. The two kids are just great and the film is a succession of beautifully composed shots in bleached-out colors. That you can't deny. It has 'art-house' written all over it.
Good Morning, Night
(2003)
Things that never happened
18 October 2004
Warning: Spoilers
#spoilers?
Bellochio seems to be on a roll, after making L'ora di Religione he came up with another excellent film the next year, Buongiorno, Notte. In both films he mixes what's real and what's imaginary in a way that comforts. It doesn't fool or numb, but it cleanses.
Buongiorno, Notte is about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the conservative leader who 'threatened' the cold war settlement of the Italian state by favouring an understanding with the communist party. After Moro's kidnappers have carried him in a trunk into the flat, they find in one of his briefcases a screenplay called Buongiorno, Notte, which is the title of the film. Further on in the movie, a young would-be writer says he has written a screenplay titled, guess what, Buongiorno, Notte. Bellocchio is the director and also the author of the film's screenplay, so he slips himself into the plot, at least symbolically. But Bellocchio's alter ego has a life of his own and a thing for a girl who can be no other than the star, Chiara, one of the kidnappers. It is to Chiara that he confides the 'last-minute' changes he's made to the script and charges her with the responsibility to carry them out. Those changes can alter fiction but not history and symbolize what Moro should have been able to count on during those terrible days.
Moro counted on nothing of the sort, he was murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978. He was caught, the film suggests, between the murderers and the cynics. Chiara is an imaginary wedge Bellocchio drives into reality to settle old scores with a history about which he's unsparing. In an interview, Bellocchio suggested the young writer could be Chiara's conscience, which is perfectly reasonable, but who if not the author could give his character such a conscience? The author does all he can to restore his character her lost nobility, a task Maya Sansa, the actress who plays Chiara, with her intense eyes and anguished feelings, makes so easy to accept. Despite all this talk, the movie is very easy to follow, uses sound in a manner close to clairvoyance and has many remarkable scenes.
Among those, Chiara's black and white dreams or one involving an elevator in which the director, by displaying a perfect use of expressive resources, shows the impact of terrorism on Italian society. It's something of a master's touch.
Bellochio seems to be on a roll, after making L'ora di Religione he came up with another excellent film the next year, Buongiorno, Notte. In both films he mixes what's real and what's imaginary in a way that comforts. It doesn't fool or numb, but it cleanses.
Buongiorno, Notte is about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the conservative leader who 'threatened' the cold war settlement of the Italian state by favouring an understanding with the communist party. After Moro's kidnappers have carried him in a trunk into the flat, they find in one of his briefcases a screenplay called Buongiorno, Notte, which is the title of the film. Further on in the movie, a young would-be writer says he has written a screenplay titled, guess what, Buongiorno, Notte. Bellocchio is the director and also the author of the film's screenplay, so he slips himself into the plot, at least symbolically. But Bellocchio's alter ego has a life of his own and a thing for a girl who can be no other than the star, Chiara, one of the kidnappers. It is to Chiara that he confides the 'last-minute' changes he's made to the script and charges her with the responsibility to carry them out. Those changes can alter fiction but not history and symbolize what Moro should have been able to count on during those terrible days.
Moro counted on nothing of the sort, he was murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978. He was caught, the film suggests, between the murderers and the cynics. Chiara is an imaginary wedge Bellocchio drives into reality to settle old scores with a history about which he's unsparing. In an interview, Bellocchio suggested the young writer could be Chiara's conscience, which is perfectly reasonable, but who if not the author could give his character such a conscience? The author does all he can to restore his character her lost nobility, a task Maya Sansa, the actress who plays Chiara, with her intense eyes and anguished feelings, makes so easy to accept. Despite all this talk, the movie is very easy to follow, uses sound in a manner close to clairvoyance and has many remarkable scenes.
Among those, Chiara's black and white dreams or one involving an elevator in which the director, by displaying a perfect use of expressive resources, shows the impact of terrorism on Italian society. It's something of a master's touch.
Before Sunset
(2004)
late magic in Paris sunset
13 October 2004
At first these two seem too successful and idealistic and cliché to care much about them. It's kind of sweet, but kind of naive too. So I said to myself, this whole thing needs pathos. Then the pathos came but I couldn't muster much emotion either, so I apportioned the blame to the director, the writers and the actors in equal shares, which are basically three shares , Linklater, Hawke and Delpy. And then, when I didn't expect anything else, came the magic: Julie Delpy sings a waltz, and it stays with the movie for the few minutes that are left. I don't know if that's worth the price of admission but it's kind of mean to regret having paid it.
The Keys to the House
(2004)
All the body can take
1 October 2004
Warning: Spoilers
'Le chiavi di casa'(Home's keys) is an Italian movie about a father and his 15-year old disabled child. The boy can't walk properly, his arms seem permanently bent in a 90 degree angle, his upper back is slightly hunched forwards. The movie is tough, unsentimental, and all the more moving for that.
The father Gianni, has never seen Paolo, his child. The reason will be unveiled in the second half of the movie and it enables the viewer to identify with the father: we get to know Paolo at the same pace his father does. They are on a trip to a Berlin hospital dedicated to rehabilitative therapies and treatment for the disabled.
It's a journey back to a lost fatherhood for Gianni and it's shown through the physical rapport between father and son. The first time Gianni meets Paolo he doesn't so much as touch him. The boy is asleep in his train compartment. The camera doesn't show us his face. Gianni is hesitant about his role as a father and they're still strangers.
In the next 'phase' Gianni tends to Paolo, he helps him to walk, to go to the bathroom, he washes him.... Then a crucial scene comes: Gianni witnesses a therapy session. Paolo walks back and forth aided by a kind of cane on small wheels. The process is painful and Paolo suffers. It is at this moment that Gianni acknowledges his son's body as one not to be aided or 'corrected' but as one capable of suffering and therefore, of affection too. This realization culminates in a beautiful scene in which Gianni starts by arranging Paolo's hair and then kisses him and caresses him every other second as if the boy were a 'cagnolino', a little pet dog. But this is not a rosy postcard.
At the Berlin hospital Gianni meets a French lady (Charlotte Rampling) who has a severely disabled daughter, she's been tending to her every need for over 20 years. This lady has a tendency to be brutally honest without ever really being impolite, but in one of their encounters she tries to put a brave face on things when Gianni asks her how she can look so serene after all she's been through. She doesn't tell all the truth and that's a crime that an actress as talented as Rampling cannot leave unpunished, and I guess that's why Amelio wanted her for the part. The next scene is formally simple and elegantly executed and we see in Rampling's face and hear in her lines what her character has been through during all those years, how her body has also suffered.
The three main actors are great, Kim Rossi, Rampling and the kid, Andrea. Kudos to Amelio, the director.
The father Gianni, has never seen Paolo, his child. The reason will be unveiled in the second half of the movie and it enables the viewer to identify with the father: we get to know Paolo at the same pace his father does. They are on a trip to a Berlin hospital dedicated to rehabilitative therapies and treatment for the disabled.
It's a journey back to a lost fatherhood for Gianni and it's shown through the physical rapport between father and son. The first time Gianni meets Paolo he doesn't so much as touch him. The boy is asleep in his train compartment. The camera doesn't show us his face. Gianni is hesitant about his role as a father and they're still strangers.
In the next 'phase' Gianni tends to Paolo, he helps him to walk, to go to the bathroom, he washes him.... Then a crucial scene comes: Gianni witnesses a therapy session. Paolo walks back and forth aided by a kind of cane on small wheels. The process is painful and Paolo suffers. It is at this moment that Gianni acknowledges his son's body as one not to be aided or 'corrected' but as one capable of suffering and therefore, of affection too. This realization culminates in a beautiful scene in which Gianni starts by arranging Paolo's hair and then kisses him and caresses him every other second as if the boy were a 'cagnolino', a little pet dog. But this is not a rosy postcard.
At the Berlin hospital Gianni meets a French lady (Charlotte Rampling) who has a severely disabled daughter, she's been tending to her every need for over 20 years. This lady has a tendency to be brutally honest without ever really being impolite, but in one of their encounters she tries to put a brave face on things when Gianni asks her how she can look so serene after all she's been through. She doesn't tell all the truth and that's a crime that an actress as talented as Rampling cannot leave unpunished, and I guess that's why Amelio wanted her for the part. The next scene is formally simple and elegantly executed and we see in Rampling's face and hear in her lines what her character has been through during all those years, how her body has also suffered.
The three main actors are great, Kim Rossi, Rampling and the kid, Andrea. Kudos to Amelio, the director.
Vertigo
(1958)
Boy, was I obsessed!
9 September 2004
- possible spoilers-
Does anyone need another comment on Vertigo? I don't think so. I'll be brief, sort of. Vertigo is the story of an illusion, of something that cannot be had. Scottie falls in love with a woman that doesn't exist so he's bound to lose her every time he falls for her, chases her or simply tries to make somebody else into her. It's not unrequited love or doomed love, it's just love, period, the idea of love, there's nothing else because there is no one to love, just Scottie entrapped in this sexual obsession with no object that can never be satisfied and from which there is no escape. I think that's Vertigo, sort of.
So what about Kim Novak? Miss Novak is Hitchcock's MacGuffin, the master's bait, the poisoned ghost he gives to Scottie to feed his imagination but at the other end of the ghost there's a woman, Judy, and she suffers the consequences. If there's a haunted soul in Vertigo is not that of Madeleine but Scottie's. Madeleine is the haunting ghost.
Vertigo is a very strange movie for Hitchcock. The plot has more than one hole. Vertigo makes sense for the eyes rather than the ears. But not always in a rational way, not if you think of Novak's make-up. The Carlotta subplot, for instance, are we to believe that Hichtcock is making a supernatural thriller with a Shyamalan twist? If we go along with everything is because we look through Scottie's eyes. To show us what Scottie sees Hitchcock displays a surreal feast worthy of Bunuel accompanied by an aesthetic refinement that would make Visconti eat his heart out. He was no stranger to either surrealism or elegance but I don't think he had ever abandoned himself to his visual instincts in this way. And he had a couple of master cards up his sleeve: a devastatingly beautiful Kim Novak and a peerless James Stewart. Stewart never was a heartthrob, he was the "everyman". Could some 50s hunk or some contemporary "everyman" have done what Stewart did in Vertigo? I don't think so. He makes accessible what is twisted, rich what is baseless.
Collateral
(2004)
not the best Mann, but still a man to watch
30 August 2004
I agree with all those reviews that pan Collateral's script, there's simply nothing in it that you haven't seen before and that you didn't expect. Worse still, you expected it crisper, taut. It's hard to find enough tension going on between Vincent and Max because there's no interplay between Vincent and Max, there's Vincent playing with Max, poor Max is taking it up the derrière most of the time.How Max can manage such docility is hard to get, because Vincent, after all, is a pro but not a brute, he's a gentleman round the edges, which ends up marring the whole thing. Neither fish nor meat. The actors are good, though and although Mann doesn't seem particularly concerned with improving the script's underdevelopment he's got enough talent in him to make it a watchable and occasionally warm thriller. And there's LA... Never been there but the mann sure looks at her with a lover's eye but does he trust his woman?
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