Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/09/20

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

Sunday, February 9, 2020

Delicatessen (Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)

Marie-Laure Dougnac and Dominique Pinon in Delicatessen

Cast: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Ticky Holgado, Edith Ker, Rufus, Jacques Mathou, Howard Vernon, Marc Caro. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, Gilles Adrien. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Marc Caro. Film editing: Hervé Schneid. Music: Carlos D'Alessio.

Lovers of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (2001) should be warned that while Delicatessen has some of the affecting whimsy of that earlier film, it also revels in the grotesque to a sometimes queasy extent. It's a post-apocalyptic tale about a decaying apartment house in a bombed-out city, in which the ground floor is occupied by the titular establishment, run by a butcher who carves up the occasional employee (lured there by a Help Wanted ad) and serves him to his tenants. The grotesquerie of Delicatessen has caused it to be likened to the works of Terry Gilliam (who endorsed its American release) and David Lynch, but it's somewhat more anarchic than their films, borrowing its tropes equally as much from horror movies. It has its moments, but I found my interest flagging as its eccentricities piled up.

Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002)

Cast: Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Chen Daoming, Donnie Yen, Zhongyuan Liu, Tianyong Zheng, Yan Qin, Chang Xiao Yang. Screenplay: Feng Li, Zhang Yimou, Bin Wang. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: Tingxiao Huo, Zhenzhou Yi. Film editing: Angie Lam, Vincent Lee. Costume design: Emi Wada. Music: Tan Dun.

Visually, one of the most beautiful films ever made, Hero is a ravishing blend of color, texture, pattern, and movement, with spectacular locations that range from desert to mountain, from forest to lake. If it had as much to please the mind as it does the eye -- and ear, counting Tan Dun's score -- it might have been one of the great films. It's a fable about the emergence of China as a nation under its first emperor, using a Rashomon-like narrative structure in which we get various versions of the story of how a swordsman known as Nameless (Jet Li) vanquished three assassins -- Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung), and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) -- to earn the right to come within ten paces of the king of Qin (Chen Daoming), in other words, to come within killing distance of the ruler. Nameless first tells his story, and then the king responds with his own theory about what really happened. A true version, in which Nameless is revealed as the real assassin, finally emerges. The result is to give us flashbacks to a variety of fight sequences, involving some astonishing wire work in several breathtaking settings, the most memorable of which may be the duel in the yellow leaves of an autumnal forest between Flying Snow and Moon (Zhang Ziyi), Broken Sword's apprentice and rival with Snow for his love. In the end, however, the film seems to have no real point to make other than the need for strong and powerful leadership, which is not exactly a positive statement in these days.