Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/22/24

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

Monday, January 22, 2024

The Cassandra Cat (Vojtech Jasný, 1963)

Cast: Jan Werich, Emília Vášáryová, Vlastimil Brodský, Jiří Sovák, Vladimír Menšík, Jiřina Bohdalová, Karel Effa, Vlasta Chramostová, Alena Kreuzmannová. Screenplay: Jirí Brdecka, Vojtech Jasný, Jan Werich. Cinematography: Jaroslav Kucera. Production design: Oldrich Bosák. Film editing: Jan Chaloupek. Music: Svatopluk Havelka.

Sometimes you have to wonder how a movie came about. I mean, how did the premise underlying The Cassandra Cat -- a cat whose gaze makes people change colors, revealing their true selves -- emerge? It surely didn't come from spitballing in a story conference. Was it from someone nibbling on a funky mushroom while foraging in the Bohemian forest? And even granted that premise, how did it become the basis for a fable about hidebound authority stifling the creative imagination? Actually, that latter is pretty much standard for Eastern European filmmakers under Soviet rule, finding any way to poke at the oppressors without waking the censors. Whatever the origins, the resulting film is a sprightly creation, featuring an astonishingly docile cat. I mean, if anyone tried to put sunglasses on one of my cats, or trundle them about a village square with a gang of children, I'm sure the results would have been unpleasant. Still, The Cassandra Cat makes me wish the story had been turned over to one of the Czech masters of animation like Karel Zeman or Jiří Trnka rather than made into a live action film. The special effects in the movie are just clunky enough to be distracting, especially if your tolerance for the kind of whimsy prevalent in the film is low.