Limite (Mario Peixoto, 1931)

Olga Breno in Limite

 Cast: Olga Breno, Tatiana Rey, Raul Schnoor, Brutus Pedreira, Carmen Santos, Mario Peixoto, Edgar Brasil, Iolanda Bernardes. Screenplay: Mario Peixoto. Cinematography: Edgar Brasil. Film editing: Mario Peixoto.

Limite is a film for cinéastes, by which I mean anyone who feels compelled to watch almost anything that has a measure of acclaim from other cinéastes. I don't know that I fall neatly into that category, since I have some expectation from films that is satisfied only by the ones that have a coherent narrative. Limite almost has that, but only in hindsight and in reading what others tell me about it. Left to my own devices, I don't know that I would have figured out that the film is about the memories or past experiences of the three people, two women and a man, who are seated in a boat, aimlessly drifting in the sea. And even having been told that, I'm not sure I can make it cohere in my memory of watching the film. But Limite has a reputation as a great experiment, a film made by Mario Peixoto, a 22-year-old poet who never made another one though he lived to be 83. It was exhibited in his native Brazil shortly after it was made, and though it was caviar to the general it acquired some admirers of the years, including Orson Welles and David Bowie, but like the vast majority of movies, especially silent ones, it suffered from neglect until it was restored in 2010 and became widely available. I found it oddly hypnotic, especially in its use of a shrewdly assembled pastiche of musical themes by a variety of composers, including Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky, Borodin, and Prokofiev, which underscore and perhaps illuminate what's being done and felt by the people on screen. I doubt that I would have responded to it as positively as I did without the soundtrack, which is only to say that I expect cinema to be distinct from other visual arts like painting and still photography, which don't need to be "sweetened" by music to make their effect. There are some lovely images in Limite but they tease us into wanting them to fall into emotional and narrative shape. Life is so full of unanswered questions that I expect art to help us toward answering them. So if you watch Limite asking why these three people are in this boat together, you may find yourself hungering for more conventional film. Unconventional, let's say, isn't always a good thing.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, Aleksa Palladino, Michael Shannon, Amy Ryan, Brían F. O'Byrne, Rosemary Harris. Screenplay: Kelly Masterson. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Production design: Christopher Nowak. Film editing: Tom Swartwout. Music: Carter Burwell.

This unrelentingly bleak family/crime drama was Sidney Lumet's last film as a director, and I can only say that he went out at the top of his form. That it was also one of the last films of Albert Finney and also starred another actor gone before his time, Philip Seymour Hoffman, only adds to its melancholy weight. Hoffman is at his best as Andy Hanson, the financially overextended older son, who tries to drag his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) into a scheme to rob their parents' suburban mall jewelry store. Andy persuades Hank that it would be a victimless crime: They'd collect the loot and their parents would collect the insurance. Everything goes wrong with this scheme that you might imagine. It's complicated, for example, by the fact that Hank is sleeping with Andy's wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). Hawke is superb in the role of Hank, a weak, spoiled younger brother now gone to seed -- a part that fits the actor perfectly as he ages out of the boyish good looks that once made some critics dismiss him as a lightweight. And midway through the film, when things have gone so wrong that the men's mother, Nanette (Rosemary Harris), lies comatose from the shooting that took place during the botched robbery, we meet Charles, their father, played by the always reliable Finney. The brothers are already in trouble because the wife and brother of the man Hank hired to do the job, who was killed in the heist, want hush money. Things get even worse when their father, urged implacably on by grief and anger, begins investigating what brought about his wife's death. Kelly Masterson's screenplay doesn't give Tomei enough to do in the story, but every moment when she's on screen is memorable, particularly the scene in which she leaves Andy. Lumet stages this in their apartment with a long take that holds Andy in the background as Gina struggles to haul her suitcase to the door, all the while delivering the news that she's been sleeping with his brother. Andy doesn't react immediately to this bit of information, but even later when he meets with Hank again, Hoffman lets us see how it's seething inside him. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is not an easy film to watch; it's perhaps a little too grim and sordid for its own good. But at its best it's the kind of morality tale you might find in medieval literature, in the darker moments of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and it has some of the burden of greed and hubris that afflicts the families of Greek tragedy, even to the point of reversing the story of Oedipus in its stunning outcome.