by Dean | Mar 19, 2017 | General
Military pride and victory, battlefield suffering, religious conviction, and death in all its pervasiveness all meet in the Julien Duvivier film, La Bandera (The Flag, 1935), whose gritty screenplay Duvivier and co-scenarist Charles Spaak adapted from a novel.
The picture concerns a Frenchman called Gilieth who murders a man in Paris (“a piece of crap” he calls him) and then runs away to Barcelona, where he is unemployed and hungry. In order to survive, he joins the Spanish Foreign Legion, though not without a clandestine Spanish detective on his trail. All the legionnaires, Gilieth included, volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and an agonizing, disastrous experience it is. Can there be—is there—the acquisition of honor in this?
The French actress Annabella, who was married to Tyrone Power, has top billing in this film (she plays an Arab girl whom Gilieth marries), but she is not the star. Jean Gabin is, satisfyingly cast as the one-time murderer. . . La Bandera is now creaky and obstreperous, but also vivid and candid. I would say that at first its attitude is misanthropic, but eventually it does see Gilieth as acquiring honor as it puts a measure of faith in men on the battlefield, as it necessarily respects human risk and endurance. At least the Spanish detective seems to see Gilieth as acquiring honor (or expiation).
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Mar 16, 2017 | General
Cover of The Shawl
There are politically correct people who would yammer about the Jewish woman, Rosa Lublin—in Cynthia Ozick‘s novella, The Shawl—yelling “Sodom!” when she sees two male lovers lying naked on the beach. They would foolishly suspect Ozick of being “homophobic.” But such people understand nothing about war or brutality or trauma—at least the trauma of others. Rosa was in a German concentration camp, and the Nazis murdered her infant daughter, Magda: the shawl of the story’s title was used in swaddling the child.
Living in Florida, Rosa behaves as though Magda were still alive, for only the past has any substance for her. The present is dead, incomprehensible. It is necessary to ask, though, whether Rosa is mad, to which I respond that I think Ozick is presenting her as traumatized. Not mad, but eccentric and impractical through trauma.
A mother with a single child who is dead can easily be a “crazy woman” (a phrase of Rosa’s). On the last page of The Shawl, however, Rosa manages to demonstrate a patent sanity, an encouraging note in this strong, excellently written 1988 fiction.
by Dean | Mar 13, 2017 | General
Rene Clair‘s 1931 film, A Nous la Liberte, ends (almost) with a comically ironic look at the replacement of man with machine in the factory—before it was known that society would weather this storm—and it induces us to wonder how relevant this matter is to our own time. In any case, what is actually central to the film is that an escaped convict, Louis (Raymond Cordy), is hungry for freedom but, after becoming a wealthy manufacturer, leads men into forms of captivity. He means no harm, though, and finally he loses his business and is free only in the way he was after escaping from prison. He hits the open road.
Liberte is such a weird little flick it is not exactly my favorite Rene Clair. Again, statements are put to music and the plot is bulging. It is as artificial as it is satirical (more so). But uniqueness is uniqueness; Clair is cannily and charmingly daring. And Liberte does succeed at making you think.
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Mar 12, 2017 | General
So far I have seen six episodes of the TV series, The Affair, Season 2, on DVD, and I’m considerably impressed by it.
Noah (Dominic West) has left his wife Helen (Maura Tierney) for a former nurse, Alison (Ruth Wilson), and has also been arrested—the plot just has to be enriched—for the murder of a cad who impregnated Noah’s daughter.
Many of the scenes with Helen are powerful (and one, alas, which is artsy), as when she tells her strident mother to leave her house. The show examines the ties with other people that cannot quite be severed as well as those that are severed all too easily. It is intelligent enough, in one episode, to have Alison talk the way the black hero in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man talks: she complains of her own invisibility, that people never see her, Alison the person.
I hope I am not repulsed by anything in The Affair and wish to stop watching it. So far it’s been riveting, and I’d like to write about the remaining episodes.
by Dean | Mar 8, 2017 | General
Cover via Amazon
Presenting debauchery and distress apropos of booze and sex, Leaving Las Vegas (1995) is Mike Figgis‘s candid but pretentious story of short-term love between a drunk (Nicolas Cage) and a hooker (Elizabeth Shue). Cage no longer has a wife or a job and wants to drink himself to death in the Las Vegas to which he travels. Shue gets knocked about by her pimp who eventually tells her to get lost before he is blown away by mobsters. Oddly, Shue remarks to Cage that she is happy; I fail to see how she could be. But if she is, it doesn’t last: By the picture’s end, she becomes as much of a veritable loser as Cage.
Another detail I don’t understand is why someone as beautiful as Shue has to settle for being a prostitute. How did she get into this profession? Couldn’t she have become a model or a dancer or an actress? Or was she too lazy?
LLV‘s pretentiousness lies in its artiness. The use of slow motion is matched in frequency only by the use of cinematic snippets fading to black. The soundtrack is egregiously fancy, although the often mellow musical score, written by Figgis himself, is pleasant. As for the acting, Cage is not exactly uninteresting, but neither does he have sufficient personality for an important leading role like this. Hence he has to resort to being somewhat mannered. Shue, on the other hand, is as haughty, sensitive, friendly-flirty, and pathetic as Sera the hooker was meant to be. She is not that well developed a character, but this is screenwriter Figgis’s fault; what Figgis required Shue provided. It’s just about the only asset in this critically acclaimed failure of a film.
by Dean | Mar 5, 2017 | General
In the film Nebraska (2013), it is driven home to David Grant (Will Forte) that two people he is expected to love—and must love—have always had feet of clay: his elderly parents. No, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) and his scrappy wife (June Squibb) are not like such nice elderly people in the film as Peg Bender and the Westendorfs. David decides to spend time with Woody by taking a road trip with him which lacks an actual goal (the goal is imaginary; Woody thinks he has won a million dollars from an outfit in Lincoln, Nebraska). What a confused old man anticipates will not be coming to pass, but it is a positive occurrence when David is charitable to his father by buying him a truck and permitting him to retain his dignity in the town where Woody grew up.
I found the movie, directed by Alexander Payne, technically impeccable. There is nothing wrong with how it was shot, full of nifty medium shots and cutting, and this even includes the screen “wipes” for scene transitions. Though photographed in monochrome, Nebraska sometimes has a Five Easy Pieces flavor, and a fairly well written screenplay by Bob Nelson. Not the best from Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) but still a success.
