Repulsion, Viridiana, and My Night at Maud's are some of the highlights from this quality-filled week. You've got classics from Luis Bunuel, Eric Rohmer, and Roman Polanski. If you're a fan of Catholic guilt and religious confusions then you'll love the first two movies in this post. You'll also find a review on my one and only 2011 documentary I've seen so far and also a review on one of the few British TV shows I've seen.
Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, Spain, 1961): This is a movie that can be seen as an attack on a lot of things. It can be an attack on Christianity, it can be an attack on fascism, it can be attack on idealism, and it can even be an attack on charity. The story centers on the title character, Viridiana, a nun who is visiting her uncle. He turns out to be sort of a creepy old man who does things to her that makes her lose some faith in humanity. That's the first half, the second half centers on her trying to take her of her uncles house after he dies. She invites homeless people to live in it with her so she can take care of them. Once again, events happen that result in her losing her faith in humanity.
This is a feel-bad movie. Initially I had a problem with the taste this movie leaves in your mouth. You come away feeling that the world isn't worth fighting for, and that's a pretty cynical view that won't help anything. But I don't believe Luis Bunuel wants you to take up this point of view completely, I think he is responding to the feel-good movies of Hollywood. He is responding to the movies that say the world is a great place and be hopeful. Bunuel is saying that the world is actually not such a good place, and sometimes even if you try your best, you won't be able to change how it is. Despite the fact that this movie won't directly make the world a better place, it can still have a positive impact. There's a reason there's been debates about idealism vs. realism. It's because none of those concepts can definitively say that if everyone in the world adopted those viewpoints, the world would be a better place. If you're an idealist, you may not change anything in the world. If you're a realist, you may not changing anything in the world either. You need some of both to really succeed. Bunuel in this film, fights for more realism in the world.
The title character, Viridiana, is a girl who starts the film one way, and ends the film in a very different place. The change she goes through is a massive change, and the way Bunuel shows that change is completely believable. It's a great study of how someone as pious as a nun can lose faith in this world. Bunuel shows that change in increments that add up to a complete and sad transformation. Viridiana is a movie written extremely well that has a comprehensive view of its world and characters. Its message is not one that I love as much as others, but this isn't a movie you can easily love. Regardless of how you feel about it, it's reality. The world is not as simple as some make it seem. For example, Bunuel directly takes on the phrase, "one person can change the world." He says that yes it can happen, but it usually doesn't. Bunuel has created a dark and disturbing satire of our world. You may not leave the film inspired, but you will leave the film more experienced, and more aware of how our world works.
Grade: A
My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, France, 1969): Similar to Last Year at Marienbad from the last post, this is a movie that will be loved by many and hated by many. It's a quintessentially french film filled with philosophical discussions about life. morality, and religion. Almost the whole movie is a series of in-depth conversations with a little bit of plot development in the second half. It's primarily about a man named Jean-Louis and all the stuff going on his head. Most of the movie is him and a friend of a friend, Maud, having personal conversations about marriage, love, religion, and mostly Pascal. The actual plot is more so about Jean-Louis' love life and his principles on love and sex. There are two women in the film he could end up with, one is Maud, and one is a Francois. Maud is not a catholic like Jean-Louis and has gone through divorces and affairs. Francois is a girl Jean-Louis has seen at church and is much more innocent and principled. We witness in the movie not only Jean-Louis contemplation on these two women, but also we see the not so clear cut lives and actions of the two women themselves.
Much of the film is about principles vs. actions. It's easy to have principles, but it's not so easy to always be true to those principles. For Jean-Louis, many of his principles are built on his catholic religion, and so we witness a sense of catholic guilt from Jean-Louis. He always tries to abide by his principles but we find out that he hasn't completely lived by them in his past, and we wonder if he can abide by them in the future, especially pertaining to sex and marriage.
The marvel (or detriment) of the movie is that it's also about so much more. There also are conversations in the movie about predestination and fidelity. Some of it can feel like a smorgasbord of philosophical concepts, and I had a hard time making out what exactly the conversations were saying about the characters and plot of movie (something Quentin Tarantino has problems with). But as the movie ends you do get a sense of what this movie is about and what sort of problems these characters are going through. It's not a movie for everyone. This movie is kind of a cross between Tarantino, Woody Allen, and Ingmar Bergman. A whole lot of talking about things that some people may find nonsense. Personally I found the conversations to be endlessly fascinating. This is the film that made Eric Rohmer famous in the international cinema world, and it also happens to be my first exposure to the oldest of the nouvelle vague directors. He doesn't use as many of the tricks that the New Wave directors are known for, but he still contributes to the greater appreciate of film as an art form that the new wavers were looking to do.
Grade: A
Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, USA, 2011): When Bill Cunningham agreed to Richard Press' repeated requests to make a documentary about him is when this movie was made. Similar to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind from the last post, this is a movie that has an inherently great story. Here you have a 80-something year old man who has been taking photographs of fashion, primarily fashion in the everyday world, while riding the same type of bicycle and wearing the same type of clothes everyday for decades. He can call some of New York's hottest fashions icons of present and past as his acquaintances. But they're only acquaintances, and not friends, because no one really knows him. He's been living in a small one bedroom apartment for years and years, no one even knows if he's ever been married or has children. There's also the fact the world he is photographing, street fashion in the New York City, is endlessly entertaining and fascinating. It would be pretty hard to mess this up for any director.
Like George Clooney on Confessions, Richard Press does his job at not messing this story up. He captures big moments, and fleeting moments of Cunningham that say a lot about who he is. He also captures the man in action in both the street and in Paris fashion shows. We see his clear adoration of street fashion, and while he doesn't have the same admire for the conventional fashion shows, he doesn't show a clear condescension for them. He appreciates them for what they are. As I watched the movie I ended up comparing it to the best documentary of last year, Exit Through the Gift Shop. While this film gives a complex and interesting portrayal of an artist on the same level as Exit Through the Gift Shop, I didn't think it delved as much into the art the film focused on. Bill Cunningham was certainly the subject of the movie, but a part of me wishes the scope was larger to incorporate the NYC street fashion scene as well (it does have a lot about the scene, but it doesn't go in depth).
There's a fascinating, and possibly contradictory, frugal and simple side to Cunningam which is completely opposite of the people he has spent his life photographing. He eats $3 meals and has been wearing the same type of jacket his whole life. For the most part, we have to assume who he is because even in the movie he is very recluse. We have to analyze his surface behavior. Press asks him some personal questions at the end of the movie because he knows the whole audience will be wondering the same thing. Unfortunately, the answers he gets are not satisfactory at all, but it just adds more allure to the man. Press does his best to make a touching portrait of a man doing work that he loves. It's a wonderfully uplifting and simple tale of an old man who is alone and still working the same job, but it still completely happy with his life.
Grade: B+
The Hour: Series One (Abi Morgan, UK, 2011): A lot of promotional articles about this show called it Britain's response to Mad Men, and then when American reviewers got to see the show they said it was Mad Men meets Rubicon. It turns out that the Mad Men comparisons are pretty forced. Beyond the setting and occasional commentary on the role of women the show doesn't bear too many similarities to that show. It does though bear many similarities to Rubicon, though it is the Rubicon-like parts that are the weakest of the show. The Hour is a well made show with very good production value, some top notch actors, and entertaining witty dialogue. It's always an enjoyable show. But its ambitions get in the way of it becoming a great show.
There are two aspects to the show that run parallel to each other for most of the series. One is the spy story. It is fairly conventional and definitely the weakest part of the show. A reporter on a new hourly news program called The Hour gets some hints about something going on from a friend of his who later dies. He's a journalist and throughout the season he gets drawn into a conspiracy that has something to do with Egypt, the Soviets, and double agents. Because the show is only 6 episodes long, there's thankfully not too much dragging of the story and the spy aspect benefits from that. The mysteries get resolved fairly quickly and without too much fanfare, though you can't help but feel some of conspiracy stuff was just busy time.
The other aspect, and the one that forms the crux of the show for me personally, is the perils of operating a broadcast news analysis TV show during wartime. A lot of the spy stuff takes precedence in many of the episodes, but the final, and best, episode devoted most of the time to this aspect. It's an exciting look at the conflict between telling the truth and putting country first. The show is set during the Suez Canal crisis in the late 50's between Great Britain and Egypt that led to a war between a British-backed war between Israel and Egypt. It's a great portrayal of the government censorship and gag orders that occur with government funded media like the BBC. This aspect of the show led to that exciting finale in which the producers of The Hour put on an episode that dealt with the conflict in Egypt by issuing the truth in unorthodox ways. It was filled with suspense and excitement and leaves you with some great payoffs that enhance the quality of each of the 5 episodes that preceded it. I'm not quite sure where this show will go from here, but if the quality of the final episode were to dictate how this show proceeds, then I'm definitely going to keep watching.
Grade: B
Repulsion (Roman Polanski, UK, 1965): There are few psychological horror films that are better directed, better acted, more unsettling than Repulsion. This is an intense and frightening character study of a woman gone completely mad. The aural qualities of this film are unprecedented for their horrifying simplicity. Roman Polanski takes Catherine Deneauve, an amazingly good looking woman, and puts her through complete hell (it's similar to a Lars von Trier film in that way). Polanski goes to Freudian territory by forcing the audience to attain pleasure from the expressionistic mental self-destruction of a beautiful woman. She loses her mind throughout 14 days in an apartment after her sister goes on a trip for a while. Polanski breaks apart this apartment literally and metaphorically, and the low-budget special effects and wide angle lens give us a first-class seat into her rotting mind.
Deneauve starts the movie as an innocent woman that's a little anti-social and seems to have much on her mind. There's a hint in Deneauve's great performance that something is off, and the rest of the film is an exploration of whatever is off in her head and how it begins to take over her mind. Many movies of this nature don't get too deep into what exactly is the cause of this mental breakdown. Many films offer artificial and generic explanations, but Repulsion explores further the gender relations that Polanski seems to be so enamored with. The film explores the love-hate relationship that many woman have with men. Woman rely on men and they want men, often for sexual desires, but they also are afraid of the power of men and what they can do. In Repulsion, Deneauve's character has clearly had a horrible history with men and so she seems to have lost all trust of men. The men that she meets are sometimes bad, sometimes good, and sometimes both, but to her they are all out to get here.
This movie can be seen as a brutally honest woman's picture. It's a film that delves deep into the minds of woman and their relationship with men. Because it goes deep into the human psyche, the reality of the feelings of the main character make the film is far more frightening than otherwise. This is a true psychological horror film, far more honest than the countless others that I've seen. Polanski would go on to make another, more famous, horror film in Rosemary's Baby. That one is also a great movie that does a wonderful job at exploring maternity and women while also being very terrifying, but dare I say that Repulsion is actually better. It's far less plot-driven and the main female character is far more complex and revealing in Repulsion. Polanski has truly made one of the finest and most honest horror films of all time.
Grade: A
50/50 (Jonathan Levine, USA, 2011): This is a movie I reviewed for the Daily Evergreen and you can find that review here. In a way, it's your typical emotional indie drama that tries to be funny and also pull on your heart-strings. Where it differs is that it works pretty well and has genuine emotion. It's not the most complex movie, but it works quite well. It's a film that's not quite as good as The Wackness, the previous film from Levine, but it's almost as good which is pretty impressive. Also, I probably gave it a bit higher grade in the review than I would now, especially compared to the other movies on this blog.
Grade: B+
Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, Israel, 2007): In his review of this movie, A.O. Scott said this movie felt more like a science fiction film than a war film. The lonely setting, the blandness of day-to-day life, and the claustrophobic tunnels all associate themselves with the lonely space station films like Solaris or Alien (you can kind of tell with the poster above). In this movie there are a bunch of soldiers stationed at an old Israeli-occupied fort in Lebanon waiting to be evacuated. All the soldiers do is dodge Hezbollah rockets every once in a while and just wait for the word that they can blow the place up and go back home. The film has its share of explosions and ultra-mourning soldier death aftermaths, but in the spaces between those moments the film is relatively low-key. Using mostly ambient music the movie has a quiet mood. The patience and subtlety of the movie is refreshing and helps it stand out slightly from similar war films.
What makes the movie forgettable is that it is yet again a humanistic film about the perils of soldiers at war. It doesn't add much to the conversation on the subject of war. The sad scenes about the soldiers are frequently cliche and overly sentimental, and arguably the main message of the film doesn't stay with you because it's the same thing you've seen so many other places. While the movie doesn't add much to the conversation on war in general, there is a little about the specificities of the setting and situation of the movie. The fort they are at, Beaufort, has been a mainstay in the Israeli Defense Forces for 20 years, and the film is a bit poignant when it deals with the complex emotions the soldiers feel about the fort getting destroyed. It's been such a mainstay but also they'd love to go back home to their families and get to safer territory. The movie shows a slow withdrawal from the fort and how it affects these soldiers. The movie is admirable in its intent, and while it does not find much to chew on a universal level, it is a quality minor effort.
Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment