by Dean | Jun 13, 2017 | General
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Frenchman Jean ceases to love Helene, who in turn plots to avenge herself on him. She starts financially supporting Agnes, a destitute cabaret dancer, and Agnes’s mother with the objective of introducing Agnes to Jean, sensing that he will fall for her. He does, but without knowing that Agnes is less than respectable—as ashamed, indeed, as she is cynical.
This is what goes on in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1944), Robert Bresson‘s second film. The tale is lifted from a Diderot novel, though it seems very Henry Jamesian, infused with Bresson’s perennial Catholic morality. With a moving last scene, it’s quite a good love story (between Jean and Agnes), and by no means are the characters two-dimensional. They are intelligently acted by Maria Casares (Helene), a not-miscast Elina Labourdette (Agnes), and Lucienne Bogaert (Agnes’s mother). Paul Bernard, however, is deplorably charmless as Jean.
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jun 12, 2017 | General
The whole physical package of Gal Gadot—pro-Israel and former Miss Israel—is stunningly gorgeous, and the character she plays, Wonder Woman (or Diana), in Wonder Woman (2017), is truly morally good. Which only adds to her irresistible being.
Directed by Patty Jenkins, the film may prove to be the summer’s best pop feature. Diana is a princess on a splendid all-female island, and when she saves the life of a World War I pilot (Chris Pine), pulling his drenched body to the island’s beach where other Amazon inhabitants join the pair, it is the kind of rich, spectacular sequence Fellini would have enjoyed shooting had the technology been available in his day. Jenkins has an eye for grandeur and wide scopes, and is adeptly served by her team of technicians.
Granted, Wonder Woman is imperfect but certainly watchable, and thrilling. It has beauty and violence but neither is overdone. Moreover, well, it’s a rather confused religious film (three men, by the way, devised the story here). In the final scenes, Wonder Woman begins to represent the ascent of Christ-as-God, of Christianity, and—because she mightily battles Ares, the god of war—the elimination of mean pagan gods. The puzzling thing is that Diana, from that all-female island, was created out of clay by Zeus (!), and he too is ripe for elimination.
Oh, well. I liked the flick more than I do most superhero movies. . . Gee, those Middle Eastern Arabs who refuse to see Wonder Woman because it stars a pro-Israel Jew don’t know what they’re missing. Get a life!
by Dean | Jun 8, 2017 | General
Cover of Twilight
A very fine Paul Newman entertainment of post-studio system film is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, not the 1998 Twilight. A very fine detective entertainment of post-studio system film is Chinatown, not the 1998 Twilight. In this Robert Benton movie in which Newman plays an aging P.I., many of the details are a load of bull, especially in light of how many shootings take place.
Further, most crime dramas of the Sixties and early Seventies are candid but not vulgar (exception: Dirty Harry); Twilight is both. Floating around is a rumor that Newman’s P.I. had his “pecker” accidentally shot off by a 17-year-old girl. A man acted by James Garner urinates off his elevated terrace instead of in a toilet bowl, nearly hitting the P.I. Part of the bull I mentioned consists in these scenes. About the header on this review, let me say that much of the dialogue alone in the film proves it’s the work of a hack.
by Dean | Jun 6, 2017 | General
In the first-rate Iranian film, The Salesman (2016), by Asghar Farhadi, Emad, the main character, is not a salesman. He is a schoolteacher who plays a salesman—Willy Loman—in a local production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, but this is not the only role he is drawn to assume. A second role is that of vengeful husband after he discovers the man who mistook Emad’s wife Rana for a prostitute and may have impulsively abused her. Although he’s a smart man who surely knows how to leave well enough alone, Emad, failing to do this, acts the dishonored avenger; and it ends badly.
Human weakness and fault are all over this downer of a film, but as well people are trying to adjust to, and stay alive in, urban society in general and Iranian society in particular. The old apartment building where Emad and Rana live begins to collapse due to nearby construction work. The former apartment of a prostitute, the couple’s new home, invites some aggression. That the police are never called to investigate the situation has something to do with the fact that, as Anthony Lane puts it, “The woman [in Iran] is the guilty party until proven innocent.”
Life in The Salesman has people limping along day after day, and even those who charge ahead, as Emad does, are limping. What Farhadi’s men believe themselves justified in doing—and they do gain our sympathy—suddenly pushes them and their wives against the wall. Both sexes demonstrate their vulnerability, in a marriage, alas, which may be in jeopardy. Is there a new role to take on that will salvage this?
(In Farsi with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jun 4, 2017 | General
The dreamlike pre-Christian “civilization” of Federico Fellini‘s Satyricon (1970) is employed to reveal history as damned, as lost Sodom, indeed with persons both white and black united in their hedonism and in sexual nihilism. Yes, nihilism: this is what this particular sphere yields. But too much goes on, and with little profundity, in this bizarre, overlong picture. I appreciate Fellini’s decision to show us both hedonists and sufferers (such as those on a slave ship) in this ancient . . . place, and certain sets and other visuals are striking. Satyricon, even so, has no reason to exist. It’s a time waster.
I’ll say this, though: the director-writer exhibits a more acceptable half-male, half-female freak, who’s supposed to be a demigod, in this film than in the rotten Juliet of the Spirits. Interesting, too, is that homosexual behavior here is part of why there is a sentiment of sexual nihilism.
by Dean | Jun 1, 2017 | General
The protag in Pedro Almodovar‘s Julieta (2016), the beautiful Julieta (played as a young woman by Adriana Ugarte) meets and engages in sex with a bearded man called Xoan while traveling on a train. The sex scene is one of the proofs that this movie has in it more than a touch of art despite being a soundly commercial concoction.
Based on three stories by Alice Munro, it’s a pretty decent film about trauma and separation. Julieta is made pregnant by Xoan, so she later finds and marries him, with the first trauma not far ahead. Julieta can be soapy but Almodovar, in adapting his script and competently directing Ugarte, displays misery as vivid as the color red in the film.
As for the subject of separation, the film captures the awful state of a mother whose child (a daughter) chooses to back out of the mother’s life, made worse by Mom’s taking the blame for the backing-out.
The director’s bad-boy tackiness is absent in Julieta; instead, there is a Munro-like concentration on the human condition. Mr. A shows some genuine tenderness, and he refuses to judge his characters. A serious if brightly colored middlebrow artwork is what we have here, and actors Carmen Suarez, as the middle-aged Julieta, and Rossy de Palma, as a soul frumpish and melancholy, know what they’re doing.
(In Spanish with English subtitles)
