A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, September 15, 2017

Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, and Ulli Lommel in Effi Briest
Effi Briest: Hanna Schygulla
Instetten: Wolfgang Schenck
Major Crampas: Ulli Lommel
Frau Briest: Lilo Pempeit
Herr Briest: Herbert Steinmetz
Roswitha: Ursula Strätz
Johanna: Irm Hermann
Wüllersdorf: Karlheinz Böhm

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Based on a novel by Theodor Fontane
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Art direction: Kurt Raab
Costume design: Barbara Baum

Our ideas of the movie costume drama adapted from a literary source were formed by MGM and Merchant Ivory: Lushly produced, expensively costumed, glamorously cast, but often a little askew from the original novel. So it's informative to see what a writer-director with a determinedly contemporary oeuvre that often features satiric glances at modern life comes up with when he turns his hand to adapting 19th-century literature. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Effi Briest is based on a novel by Theodor Fontane with which most anglophones (I include myself) are unfamiliar. Instead of lush, it's spare; instead of sweepingly romantic, it's stately and slow; instead of glorious Technicolor, it's filmed in a rich and textured black-and-white. But it's also fascinating and, from all accounts, steadfastly close to the source. Fassbinder even uses dialogue and narration -- he does the voiceovers himself -- straight from the novel. Scenes often end with abrupt whiteouts that some critics liken to turning the page of a book, and there are intertitles in Fraktur, the font used in German books well into the 20th century. It's a film that demands attention -- especially because some of the dialogue and commentary were meant to be read and not spoken, so that they can sometimes feel a little oblique and stilted -- and reflection upon its themes, which center on moral rigidity and the pursuit of social status. Yet Fassbinder also makes it highly cinematic, particularly with his characteristic framing of figures in doorways and mirrors. There is, for example, a key conversation between Instetten and his friend Wüllersdorf that's glimpsed mostly in an ornate mirror with beveled mirrors in its frame, so that we get a fragmented, almost cubist take on the figures seen in it. The story is about the failure of the marriage of lively young Effi to a man who is twice her age when they wed, and her removal from a cosmopolitan household to one in a provincial backwater. The analogous stories are those found in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, among other famous novels, but Fassbinder turns his tale of adultery into a sharp indictment of German respect for authority and class -- the time is the late 19th century, but you can clearly see the attitudes that plunged Germany into two world wars. I wouldn't recommend Effi Briest to anyone who isn't already familiar with Fassbinder's work -- it's not a film that reaches out and grabs your attention eagerly -- but I would rank it among his best.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Joel Barish: Jim Carrey
Clementine Kruczynski: Kate Winslet
Patrick: Elijah Wood
Stan: Mark Ruffalo
Mary: Kirsten Dunst
Dr. Mierzwiak: Tom Wilkinson

Director: Michel Gondry
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth
Cinematography: Ellen Kuras
Production design: Dan Leigh
Film editing: Valdís Óskarsdóttir
Music: Jon Brion

I have a sneaky feeling that there's less to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind than meets the eye. That it is nothing more than a romantic drama tricked out with intricate storytelling devices like misleading cuts and deceptive flashbacks and an overlay of sci-fi. The story of the affair of two misfits, the morose Joel Barish and the eccentric Clementine Kruczynski, has been told before. How far, for example, are Joel and Clementine from C.C. Baxter and Fran Kubelik in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960)? The course of true love never did run smooth, but Eternal Sunshine doubles down on that premise, putting Joel and Clementine through the bumpy paces twice, leaving us to ponder if Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, et al. are telling us that their mismatched couple were meant to be together no matter what. Did Joel and Clementine split prematurely, rushing into the radical solution of erasing themselves from each other's memories, when instead if they had stuck it out they could have resolved their differences less drastically? No matter, because Eternal Sunshine is so efficiently and originally accomplished that we can overlook the conventional situation that is masked by so much cleverness. It is certainly the peak of Jim Carrey's boom-or-bust career, Kate Winslet demonstrates once again how invaluable she is as an actress, and the supporting cast is made up of top-caliber actors. I suspect that the film owes more to the fertile imagination of Charlie Kaufman, who won an Oscar for it (along with Gondry and Pierre Bismuth), and film editor Valdís Oskarsdóttir than to Gondry's direction -- he has yet to make another film as impressive as this one.

Showtime