by Dean | Jun 18, 2019 | General
Asghar Farhadi has made another film outside Iran, this time in Spain—Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben, 2018)—and it concerns a kidnapped girl. Its themes include the pervasiveness of that which is secret in families, when obligation leads to rupture, and belief in God.
I esteem Farhadi for giving us another tragic drama, but this is not as good as A Separation or The Salesman. Though skillfully directed and persuasively acted by Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and many others, the film has a weak script with unlikely plot devices. Farhadi is a better writer than this, and probably it is time for him to use this particular talent in the traveling of a different but still serious path.
(In Spanish with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jun 16, 2019 | General
The title of Kenneth Lonergan’s film, Margaret (2012), is taken from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Spring and Fall.” Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) has an innocent involvement in the accidental death of a stranger killed by a careless bus driver. Her subsequent pain and guilt and anger effect in Lisa the kind of mourning for herself that arises in the Margaret of Hopkins’s poem (“It is Margaret you mourn for”), or so it seems to Lonergan, who both wrote and directed the film. A mere teenager, Lisa sees her life as though it were an “opera”, as one of her acquaintances puts it, and is actually turning people around her into “supporting players”–for her. Thus she becomes all but indifferent to her mother (J. Smith-Cameron). Thus she brazenly asks a boy at school with whom she has no relationship to take away her virginity, which he does. All this, I suppose, is integral to her self-mourning.
There are many things wrong with Margaret, mostly because of production problems which undermined the film when it was made a few years ago (but not released until 2012). Watching it, a spectator will say, “Boy, a lot of this must have been left on the cutting room floor!” Even so, the film is worth checking out: it is rich and intermittently fascinating. Intelligent too; patently it ain’t just the sex and nudity in the picture that Lonergan is interested in. Plus there is a moving epiphany at the end.
The best thing about the movie as it now exists is the acting. Paquin and Smith-Cameron give penetrating and energetic performances. Although I recoil at the character she plays–but then I recoil at Lisa too–Jeannie Berlin acts Lisa’s acquaintance Emily with gutsy prowess.
It’s quite a concept: the Margaret in Hopkins’s short poem becomes the Lisa in Lonergan’s long film.
Margaret (2011 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jun 10, 2019 | General
Adapted from a novel by Vitaliano Brancati which I did not much care for, the 1960 Italian film, Il Bell Antonio, is a work for which I care a lot.
It deals with an undeniably handsome man, Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), reputed to be a stud but who is in reality, in the pre-Viagra days of the Sixties, impotent strictly with the women he loves. The Woman he loves is virginal Barbara Puglisi (Claudia Cardinale), picked by his parents because they need money and the Puglisis are rich. However, Barbara’s father needs an heir and Barbara, after she and Antonio marry, remains untouched. This agonizes Antonio’s parents—while the Puglisis gradually see an avenue for getting even richer, and it excludes Antonio.
Here, to be impotent in sex is to be impotent in status. The body cannot be too chaste or a family’s fortunes are affected. In truth, they are not affected without certain moral outrages springing up. The accusation made by a dying Puglisi elder against Antonio’s father, Don Alfio (Pierre Brasseur), is more serious and bothersome than Antonio’s impotence. A lack of wealth is allied with a lack of integrity. That Antonio profoundly loves Barbara matters not in the least. . . This deeply sad film was intelligently directed by Mauro Bolognini. Vernon Young correctly noted that his “shot selection is sensitive to mood,” and, indeed, the film is a jewel of such sensitivity. It is, moreover, a fine contribution to the body of classic foreign pictures of the late Fifties-early Sixties.
(In Italian with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jun 8, 2019 | General
It is harmful to the Netflix-produced romantic comedy, Always Be My Maybe (2019), that the female lead, Ali Wong, has no charm. Randall Park, the male lead, does, and so do a few of the other actors, notably the winsome Vivian Bang (as Jenny). But Wong is too worldly for charm—a real blow to a fundamentally good-natured movie. Often funny and even clever, it is nevertheless one of the most inconsequential comedies I’ve seen. It is utterly wispy, not even edgy. It would probably help if character here was more developed, more incisive, than it is.
by Dean | Jun 4, 2019 | General
The chief character in Eric Rohmer‘s French film, A Tale of Winter (1992, available on YouTube), Felicie (Charlotte Very) is a not-very-bright young woman who is “protected” by the supernatural, by God. She is protected in the sense of being granted a miracle of sorts.
But Felicie is no saint, and she says “Religion and I don’t get along.” She risks getting pregnant during a joyful romance with her beloved Charles, and pregnant she becomes. After foolishly losing track of Charles, she gets involved with two men at the same time, as though she is greedy. One of these men, Loic (Herve Furic), is a wishy-washy Catholic intellectual—unmarried when he probably shouldn’t be. Deeply fond of him, Felicie nevertheless does not love him (she loves Charles). And Felicie, without converting, seems to receive God’s favor. In a way—because in the film’s beginning footage she frolics unclothed with Charles—she is the naked pagan who turns into the blessed “Christian.”
With much, much talk, A Tale of Winter is another Rohmer film that demands a lot from a viewer, but it’s worth it. It is quiet and heartening, and in Luc Pages’s cinematography there is subdued, wintry prettiness. Charlotte Very is pretty too. Close to being one of Rohmer’s best films, Winter is, I think, simply too static but also rather lovable in spite of itself.
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | May 31, 2019 | General
Directed by Jafar Panahi and written by the acclaimed filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian picture, The White Balloon (2005), is talky but brilliant. At the center here is the childish desire for a chubby, not a skinny, goldfish for an Iranian New Year’s celebration. A childish desire, this, because in fact it belongs to a child—seven-year-old Razieh (Aida Mohammed-Khani)—who lives with her parents and her brother Ali (Mohsen Khalifi) in Tehran.
Rezieh’s hard-working mother un-eagerly gives Razieh money with which to buy the goldfish, but the girl loses the money down a grate. Much of the film concerns the efforts of Razieh and her brother, aware of financial hardship, to retrieve the 500-toman note.
Though adorable, Razieh, like Ali, is being shaped by the prejudices of her society. She will probably never respect, as Ali does not, a man like the one she encounters and talks with: a non-Tehranian army conscript with an accent. And she will probably never smile on an Afghan person like the boy who sells balloons on the Tehran streets for a living, who, indeed, offers the kind of white balloon found enticing by Ali. But Ali never comments on the balloon since it is an Afghan boy who is selling it. It is clear that the film is saying that Iranian society is one of prejudice and loneliness—even that it is damaging: e.g., Ali may have been hit in the face by his father.
Years after seeing The White Balloon at the theatre, surprisingly I saw it for free on YouTube. Perfectly directed (with many a tight shot) and cleverly photographed, it is about children or childhood only on its surface. It is beautifully subtle.
(In Farsi with English subtitles)
