Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002)

Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002)

Cast: Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Mia Maestro, Diego Luna, Valeria Golino, Roger Rees, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, Geoffrey Rush. Screenplay: Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas, based on a book by Hayden Herrera. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Felipe Fernández del Paso. Film editing: Françoise Bonnot. Music: Elliot Goldenthal.

I usually don't like biopics, with their lurches back and forth between trauma and triumph and their subordination of fact to drama. But I admired Julie Taymor's attempt to integrate Frida Kahlo's life with her work, or really to interpret the latter through the former. I think Taymor falls into the inevitable trap of spending more time on her subject's love life than on her actual work, but Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina are so skillful in displaying the passion and volatility of the film's versions of Frida and Diego Rivera that I can forgive the emphasis on that relationship. Taymor and the screenwriters are less successful in integrating the political aspect of their lives, with its culmination in Frida's affair with Trotsky, played a little remotely by Geoffrey Rush. But the film thrives on its visuals, integrating Frida's paintings with her life, and by the evocative use of color to denote the emotional states of its subject. The trolley accident that marked Frida's life is superbly staged and edited, followed by a brilliant use of Day of the Dead images to suggest Frida's delirium as she undergoes treatment. Frida's greatest success is that it will be hard for me to look at her paintings again without summoning up memories of the film.

Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

Cast: Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simone Signoret, Claude Mann, Paul Crauchet, Christian Barbier, Serge Reggiani, André Dewavrin, Alain Dekok, Alain Mottet, Alain Libolt, Jean-Marie Robain. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme, Walter Wottitz. Production design: Théobald Meurisse. Film editing: Françoise Bonnot. Music: Éric Demarsan.

The stoic restraint that pervades Army of Shadows extends to the images provided by the credited cinematographers, Pierre Lhomme and Walter Wottitz. For a long time I wasn't really sure whether the film was made in color or black and white, so desaturated are the images. Occasionally the color of a garment or Simone Signoret's hair or the blue of the Mediterranean in the background will catch the eye, but for the most part the film takes place in a world drained of anything suggestive of vivid life. Death is presented as something inevitable, as something that has to be gone through, so futile has resistance to the occupation of France by the Nazis become. Faced with executing a traitor, the Resistance operatives feel reluctance and guilt but also proceed practically: The sound of a gun would attract attention; there are no usable knives at hand; so the solution is to strangle their former comrade with a kitchen towel, and the garroting proceeds with as little drama as possible. This is a film about endurance rather than action, about moral choices made with deliberation and without fuss. Sometimes what action there is feels contrived: The rescue of Gerbier from prison at the moment of his execution depends on sheer luck and coincidence and not on skillful timing and precise intelligence. But dramatic probability is not the point, instead it's the feeling that all of the lives depicted in the film are poised on a razor's edge.

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)

Watching Costa-Gavras's great political thriller on a night when Donald Trump was raking in votes in the Republican primaries was unsettling. But then it was an unsettling film to watch in 1969, the year after Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, the police clashed with demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and Richard Nixon was elected president. What made it unsettling this time was the way the film shows the destructive collaboration of ideologues, buffoons, and thugs. It's a more grimly funny movie than I remembered, particularly in the portrayal of the general in charge of the police, who as played by Pierre Dux is both ideologue and buffoon. There is buffoonery also among the thugs, and Costa-Gavras has fun mocking the conspirators who, once they angrily leave the room in which they've been indicted, each try to open a locked door. But we mock them in vain. For while the efforts of the prosecutor played beautifully by Jean-Louis Trintignant are heroic and Costa-Gavras and screenwriter Jorge Semprún make us expect justice to prevail, it doesn't. The story is that of the assassination of Greek opposition politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 and the subsequent investigation that brought a glimmer of hope to the country only to be squelched by the military coup of 1967. However, the film is set in no specific country -- it was filmed in Algeria -- and only an opening "disclaimer" that parodies the usual assertion about any resemblance to persons living or dead dares to say that the resemblances in the film are entirely intentional. Costa-Gavras and Semprún were political exiles from, respectively, Greece and Spain. The composer Mikis Theodorakis had been arrested and his music was banned in Greece; he gave Costa-Gavras permission to use existing compositions for the film score. But the decision to set the film in no particular place only strengthened its ability to reach out and make its story meaningful beyond a specific place and time. Although Yves Montand and Irene Papas get top billing as the assassinated politician and his wife, Montand's role is comparatively small and Papas's is virtually a cameo. The movie is mostly carried by Trintignant and by Jacques Perrin, one of its producers who also plays a very aggressive investigative journalist, and a capable supporting cast. It won Oscars as the best foreign-language film and for Françoise Bonnot's film editing. It was also the first film to be nominated in the best picture category, and picked up nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay, but lost in those categories to Midnight Cowboy and its director, John Schlesinger, and screenwriter, Waldo Salt.