Change Your Image
Marnielover
Reviews
Je rentre à la maison (2001)
Autobiography of an Ancient Director
This film by 92-year-old Portuguese film director Manoel De Oliveira is an 86-minute close observation of an elderly actor who seems to be mainly a stage actor. The film opens with a 15-minute scene from Ionesco's "Le roi meurt," in which the actor (Michel Piccoli) goes through the never-say-die speech of the 280-year-old king. After the performance, he is greeted backstage with the news that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in a car accident. The rest of the film follows him in his everyday routines, into another performance (this time in Shakespeare's "The Tempest"), and then on to a film of James Joyce's "Ulysses." In between we watch him buy shoes, quarrel with his agent, play with his orphaned grandson, and drink espresso at his favorite cafe.
De Oliveira has a habit of filming performances at odd levels. For example, in "Le roi meurt," Piccoli has his back to the camera the entire time. During a quarrel with his agent, only Piccoli's feet in his new shoes are shown. He bashes the heels against the pavement when he's mad, rocks them back and forth when he's pleased--it's all there. When he is playing Buck Mulligan in "Ulysses" we only hear his performance, and gauge it by the reactions on the face of the film director (John Malkovich). The lengths De Oliveira goes to to confound his actors' egos and the audience's expectations are inventive and a bit peculiar.
I sensed that this film was more about De Oliveira than about the characters in the story. There isn't much dialog and not much character development. The theme of the king who will not die, who is egomaniacal beyond reason, perhaps is De Oliveira talking to himself. He makes movies into his 90s because it is his habit. He should be dead by now, but he's not, and because of that he has watched everyone he loves die before him. The possibility of trying to start a new life with a young starlet that is offered to Piccoli must also have happened to De Oliveira. He won't make himself ridiculous that way. "I'm not Casals," the actor says when told of the musician's marriage at the age of 82 to a teenager. I can hear our director saying that, too.
What he wants to do is stop working, rest, and mourn his losses. This is, I feel, a personal film and all the more moving for it.
Off the Map (2003)
Sweet Salve for the Soul
"Off the Map" is an "old-fashioned" film that made me feel, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, that it's f*cking great to be alive. This film took me to a place in my heart I haven't been since the wonderful Bill Forsyth ("Local Hero") faded from the movie-making scene. It is high time for humane, gentle, wholly original stories of people and places off the map (or in our technological dystopia, perhaps `off the radar screen' would be more appropriate) to fill our movie dreamscape again. New Mexico is the only place in the United States this could have been filmed because, indeed, only the Land of Enchantment could have fit this gorgeous, lyrical story so well.
There wasn't a single relationship in this film that wasn't unique and fully realized. We've seen these set-ups before: the school-girl crush of Bo for William Gibbs, the awe-inspired worship of William for Arlene, the friendship between Charley and George. But don't we always get the caricatures, the popcorn images that point out the woeful arrested development of our country and its mythmakers? We think we want to be young forever. But it takes a film like "Off the Map" to show us all the richness we're missing out on by not growing up. (And the casting and direction of this ensemble of actors was nothing short of genius, especially Joan Allen. It's nice someone can see her as something more than middle-class white bread and pull this very individualistic performance out of her.)
I'm feeling kind of emotional just thinking about some to the great scenes in this film: when Charley runs 20 miles to George's house and goads him into wrestling; when Charley and William talk about what it feels like to be depressed; when William watches Arlene standing naked in her garden watching the totemic coyote; when Bo extracts from George the information she needs to apply for a MasterCharge card; Arlene reading Bo's letter in the newspaper advice column; Bo thanking the squirrel for giving up its life to feed her and her family; George's presence, like an old pair of sneakers, in the Groden home.
Like I said before, I didn't think people made films like this anymore. Thank you, Campbell Scott, for proving me wrong.
Remember My Name (1978)
I feel sorry for people who didn't see this in 1978
From the comments I've read here, I don't think the reviewers saw the version I did, and I can say that now since I've viewed a video of the film. The ending of the film in my version (and I suspect theirs) was nothing like what I saw on the screen and blew the entire integrity of a film that built its suspense and imagery bit by bit to lead up to a shocking conclusion. All of the things Emily asked for in her apartment are tools of her revenge on her ex-husband, but you'd never know it. It looks like she just beds him and leaves him. She does way more than that. SPOILER She chains him to the bed and abandons him. No one will know where he is or come to his rescue. He might find a way out, but it's not a sure thing. END SPOILER
And tht git who didn't like the Alberta Hunter soundtrack--the words of the songs tell the story of the film beautifully--must be deaf. It's an amazingly beautiful soundtrack.