A Month o' Movies

Going back through movies, as I said I was going to do yesterday:

Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima - seen as a double bill. I think they work better as a double feature. I've commented on Letters before - I liked it more than I let on, even then (hard to compete with Rivette), and seeing it again solidifies what I liked about it: the lack of heroism; the truth of Paul's comments on my later mention of the film - "people waiting to die". Oddly, despite the lame reception it got, and the fact that it disappeared in about 2 weeks - I think Flags might have been the better film. It isn't perfect - I'm not too impressed by the jumping around in time, the flashbacks, and flashbacks in flashbacks, and portentious framing devices - all of this serves a bit too much to sentimentalize the story. I will say - the way it jumps in and out of the battle, shows it in snatches, back and forth in time - breaks up the romanticization of the fighting. It breaks up the sense of adventure you usually get from war films, though not as effectively as Letters does telling its story straight, and just setting most of the film in a bunch of tunnels with a bunch of men waiting to die. (Both seem to me to be strategies for getting around Truffaut's rule about the impossibility of making an anti-war war film.) Still - there are cliches and melodrama aplenty in Flags of OUr Fathers, though no more so than in Letters From Iwo Jima. And it does avoid romanticizing the war; it does manage to convey the sense of betrayal the soldiers feel; it does it without quite betraying the folks back home. It's almost there. Together with Letters From Iwo Jima, the two form something very close to a truly great film. And yeah - Clint got robbed at the Oscars. There's no way The Departed can hold up as well as either of these films will.

Into Great Silence **** - shot over 6 months or so in the Chartreuse monastary, the Carthusan order, one of the most ascetic in the world - vows of silence, monks spend most of their time alone. This film shows them, patiently and beautifully, repetitively, patiently. This is rather more like Honor de Cavalerria or Colossal Youth than it seems - partly because of some of the abstract, beautiful imagery, partly because of the use of duration, partly because of the refusal of anything like plot. It is more motivated than they are, since it is about monks, who live like this - in a kind of ecstatic present that turns time into a kind of indefinite present. It is very long - 3 hours - but very effective. The aesthetics of religion, religions as aesthetics - when the monks do talk (they have one day a week where they walk outside the monastary, and are allowed to talk to one another), thet mostly discuss symbolism, the significance of things like hand washing and other rituals - this film, the way it looks, the monks' actions, reduces it all to signs, symbols, images, the pure aesthetics of contemplation. I am inclined to think this is true - that religion is aesthetics: it's philosophy and ethics and morality and everything else made into aesthetics - made significant, that is, wrapped up in fictions, signs and so on.

Bamako **** - the world bank on trial in a courtyard in a town in Mali. There are speeches and testimony, the occasional song (including a striking performance toward the end by an old griot), posed against the everyday comings and goings of the townspeople. There is a woman who goes out at night to sing - a ocuple corrupt policemen, a missing gun, a sick man, hungry children, all circulating through the film, creating more a sense of the life of the town than of a story. There is also, in the middle of this, a very funny African western parody, ostensibly on TV - starring Danny Glover and Elia Suleiman: Death in Timbuktu.

Mafioso **** - 1962 Italian film, given a re-release, starring Alberto Sordi as a Sicilian who's made it big in Milan, who goes home with his wife and kids for the first vacation in years. The first half is mostly a comedy about the clash of cultures, north and south - amusing enough, but nothing new.... Into this, though, comes a hint of menace - for our hero used to be a picciotto in the mafia. He pays his respects, and we get the idea that he got his start in life from the mafia - and now they are going to collect. I have read that the distributors are urging critics not to give away the ending - this is rather pointless, as by now most of us will have seen this basic plot a few hundred times, and will not miss it as it pops up here. Still.... an amusing, smart film, with a real sting in the tail, and a great lead performance by Sordi.

Colour Me Kubrick ** - Remember - 2 stars is still a good film! This is about Alan Conway, a con man who played Kubrick to hustle drinks, sometimes sex, and small sums of cash. The film is mostly a chance for Malkowich to camp it up, in shabby clothes, but just - at full speed. He is magnificent - it's that kind of film - there's no other reason for it to exist, but Malcovich's performance is more than enough.

July Rhapsody ***1/2 - Ann Hui film, a fine melodrama about a schoolteacher (played by Jacky Cheung, who I have not seen on screen in a while - it was a treat to see him again, he's very underrated) who confronts his wife's affair with his teacher 20 years ago, while dealing with a pretty girl chasing him. The wife is played by Anita Mui, in her last film - this gives it a particular poignancy, as it is largely about a dying man that Mui attends to. Knowing it is her last film twists the knife a bit. She and Cheung are outstanding.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley ***1/2 - The Irish rebellion of the 1920s, starting with a Black and Tans atrocity that radicalizes a pair of brothers, continuing through the campaigns against the English, to the establishment of the Free State. Then dramatizing the subsequent debates over the treaty, and showing the aftermath, as Irish turned on each other.... nicely done, handsome and respectful, though perhaps, at times, a bit too neat in its allegorizing. But a strong fine film nonetheless.

Brothers Quay Retrospective - 2 collections of short films: stop motion animation and puppetry, in strange, surreal worlds... several amazing pieces: Street of Crocodiles, their masterpiece; Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies; The Comb; a couple videos for His Name is Alive; and another masterpiece - In Abstentia, mostly shots of a woman writing - or trying to write, pencils breaking, sharpening, breaking, all of it set to a Stockhausen score featuring a horrifying mix of voices and synthezisers and electric drones and howls. Very disturbing and beautiful...

Tears of the Black Tiger **** - wonderful, campy strange melodramatic cops and robbers Thai western love story - film.... Starts brilliantly, with strange cutting patterns, very stylized sets - painted backdrops, animated clouds - the camp and glowing clors are on full display - gangsters dressed as cowboys, riding around to Morricone music, etc. It eventually settles down some, though it remains moving and strange and funny and entertaining to the end.

Indigenes *** - French war film about Algerian soldiers serving in Europe with the Free French. They fight well, but are treated badly - the film is about the racism against them as much as the war. As a war film, it's fairly conservative, with conventionally shot battles, and climatic last stands - but it's rather interesting in its treatment of the men. Especially in the characterization of the sergeant - a man of mixed Arab/French blood, who passes for European - he is complicated and strange. He is quickly established as a bastard, and remains a bastard in many ways - but reveals another side. He never indulges his men - he bullies and demeans them - but behind their backs, he pushes for their rights, their promotions (that don't come), he defends them and pleads for them, but never when they can hear.

Emperor Jones *** - Paul Robeson stars in the Eugene O'Neill play, directed by Dudley Murphy, a fascinating figure in early cinema. Not very good, but made watchable by Robeson, who is a towering presence. Murphy is competent enough. The main problems are due to the play - which is an odd mix of dignity and racism - and censorship: things like, forcing the lead actress to black up (so she wouldn't look like a white woman); the removal of all depiction of black on white violence; and in the original release, removal of the many instances of the word "nigger" - though this print reinstated most of them. The results are very strange - you can see why Robeson would want to perform in the part - it's a juicy one, he rises and falls in high style... but it's also unmistakeably racist and strangely condescending.

Lives of Others ***1/2 - suspenseful melodrama about secret policemen and compromised artists in East Germany in the 80s, maybe a bit forced in its conversions, maybe the symbolism - the way the main part ends with Gorbachev's ascent to power - is a bit too neat, but affecting nonetheless. A solid film, though I would not say it is better than Pan's Labyrinth, by any standards.