The Night of the Shooting Stars (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, 1982)

 

The Night of the Shooting Stars (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, 1982)

Cast: Omero Antonutti, Margarita Lozano, Claudio Bigagli, Miriam Guidelli, Massimo Bonetti, Enrica Maria Modugno, Sabina Vannucchi, Giorgio Naddi. Screenplay: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Giuliani G. De Negri, Tonino Guerra. Cinematography: Franco Di Giacomo. Production design: Gianni Sbarra. Film editing: Roberto Perpignani. Music: Nicola Piovani.

Ginger and Fred (Federico Fellini, 1986)

Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina in Ginger and Fred

Amelia Bonetti / Ginger: Giulietta Masina
Pippo Botticella / Fred: Marcello Mastroianni
Host: Franco Fabrizi
Admiral Aulenti: Friedrich von Ledebur
Transvestite: Augusto Poderosi
Assistant Director: Martin Maria Blau
Brother Gerolamo: Jacques Henri Lartigue
Totò: Totò Mignone

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Toninio Delli Colli, Ennio Guarnerini
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Nino Baragli, Ugo De Rossi, Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nicola Piovani
Costume design: Danilo Donati

The two actors most associated with the films of Federico Fellini had never worked together before Ginger and Fred, and the movie is enough to make you wonder why not. To be sure, the waifish Masina of La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) seems worlds apart from the worldly, jaded Mastroianni of La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), but both transcend those stereotypes in this film, one of the director's last. They also manage to soften and sweeten a hard and sour film that expresses Fellini's distaste for the vulgarity of modern entertainment. Ginger and Fred is an expansion on the satiric impulse that Fellini displayed much earlier in the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), with its nightmarish awards show. Here we have a television extravaganza in which Masina's Amelia Bonetti and Mastroianni's Pippo Botticella have been asked to reunite their old dance team, in which they mimicked the routines of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But they are herded into a phantasmagoric assemblage of headline-grabbing pseudo-celebrities and dubious variety acts. Amelia pluckily maneuvers the fading Pippo through it all. The film gained some notoriety when Rogers decided to sue the producers and distributors for trademark violation and defamation, thereby betraying the fact that she may have been a great dancer and comic actress but lacked a sense of humor. She lost. There is a shrillness to Ginger and Fred that makes it sometimes hard to take, but the two performers shine through.

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian and Christine Boisson in Identification of a Woman

Niccolò: Tomas Milian
Mavi: Daniela Silverio
Ida: Christine Boisson 
Woman in Swimming Pool: Lara Wendel
Carla: Veronica Lazar
Nadia: Enrica Antonioni
Mavi's Sister: Sandra Monteleoni
Mario: Marcel Bozzuffi

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangeo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma
Production design: Andrea Crisanti
Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni
Music: John Foxx

As I said recently about his La Notte (1961), it helps when Michelangelo Antonioni has cast movie stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau in his films because they provide something of a backstory to his often enigmatic characters. Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, and Christine Boisson, attractive and capable actors though they are, don't do quite enough to illuminate what's going on with Niccolò, Mavi, and Ida in Identification of a Woman. It's a film that plays almost like a parody of the movies that Antonioni and other directors made 20 years earlier: There's a party filled with bored Eurotrash like the ones in La Notte, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1961), and Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1962); there's a film director trying to get over creative block like Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963); there's a search for a missing woman, though not so fruitless as the one in Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960); there are some mutterings about imponderable philosophical questions, such as whether god would exist if human beings didn't; and there's a good deal of sex, still not enough to overcome the problems of the characters, though the nudity is more frontal and the copulation more explicit than it was two decades earlier. In short, we've been here before. Still, Identification of a Woman is not without its rewards, most of them provided by the wizardly color cinematography of Carlo Di Palma. His artistry and technique are on display in such scenes as the film's most memorable segment, the journey through the fog, as well as in the play with reflections (see the still above) in the Venetian hotel scene. They do more than the actors do to bring the film to what life it possesses. 

La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte

Lidia Pontano: Jeanne Moreau

Giovanni Pontano: Marcello Mastroianni 

Valentina Gherardini: Monica Vitti 

Tommaso Garani: Bernhard Wicki 

Gherardini: Vincenzo Corbella 

Signora Gherardini: Gritt Magrini 

Roberto: Giorgio Negro 

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra 

Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo 

Production design: Piero Zuffi 

Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 

Music: Giorgio Gaslini 

Movie stars often provide a shortcut to establishing the backstories of the characters they play. Once we see the bruised intelligence of Jeanne Moreau and the weary elegance of Marcello Mastroianni, familiar to us from their previous films, we know something about their characters, Lidia and Giovanni Pontano, that the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte doesn't need to tell us. We know there will be tension in their marriage, that Lidia will go for long solitary walks and that Giovanni will yield to almost any temptation that crosses his path. Giovanni is a successful writer, but the money that affords them a handsome apartment in Milan mostly comes from her, which gives her one reason to feel resentful when she's shunted aside by his celebrity. So La Notte is mostly about her lonely search for a raison d'etre while he indulges himself with the pleasures of the moment: the come-on of a sex-crazed woman in a hospital, a celebratory book-signing, a night club floor show, a flirtation with the beautiful daughter of an industrialist, a lucrative job offer from that industrialist. Lidia even seems to be trying to find ways of indulging herself the way her husband does: On her long walk through Milan, she plays at being a prostitute, throwing backward glances at men she passes on the street, though never making the essential connection. She tries to break up a fight between two young men from what seem to be rival street gangs, but when the shirtless victor of the fight pursues her, she flees. She gets a kind of erotic charge from watching a group set off skyrockets. And she escapes from the industrialist's elaborate all-night party, a kind of tepid orgy manqué, with a handsome young man, only to stop in mid-dalliance and ask him to return her to the party. And so at the end of the film we leave the Pontanos grappling in the dirt as the dawn appears, somehow destined to continue their perverse games. La Notte has more narrative coherence than the other two Antonioni films usually thought of as a trilogy, L'Avventura (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), which makes it essential in understanding what the director is up to. I take the currently prevailing view that Antonioni is less interested in existential alienation than in the lives of women in a society that valorizes male aggression. Hence the pivotal scene in which Lidia meets Valentina, the industrialist's daughter who has been toying with her husband, and instead of fighting they reach a kind of understanding, an assertion of female moral superiority. 

Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point

Mark: Mark Frechette
Daria: Daria Halprin
Lee Allen: Rod Taylor
Cafe Owner: Paul Fix
Lee's Associate: G.D. Spradlin
Morty: Bill Garaway
Kathleen: Kathleen Cleaver

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Rossetti, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe
Cinematography: Alfio Contini
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Music: Jerry Garcia, Pink Floyd

It sometimes seems as if every bad movie eventually finds an audience, even if only as fodder for wisecracks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Makers of bad movies even have movies made about them, like Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) or James Franco's The Disaster Artist, his upcoming film about Tommy Wiseau, the auteur of The Room (2003), a film whose badness turned it into a cult movie. Things get a little more complicated when the filmmaker is a director of the stature of Michelangelo Antonioni. Zabriskie Point is certainly a bad movie by any usual standards of plot or performance. Its endorsement of the revolutionary fervor of the young felt naive at the time and now seems at best simplistic. It was a critical and commercial flop: Roger Ebert called it "silly and stupid," and it banked only $900,000, against a cost of $7 million, on its initial theatrical run. But like another major flop, Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), it has been the subject of a continuing reassessment, attracting defenders and even a small coterie -- not to say cult -- of admirers, especially for its ending: a spectacular demolition of a desert house, with interpolated shots of the contents of a refrigerator and a closet being lofted in the air in slow motion. The fact remains, however, that Zabriskie Point really has nothing to say except that capitalist consumerism is bad and being young is good -- especially if you're hot. Neither point is made subtly and persuasively. The most glaring weakness is in the casting of its two young leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, who give almost hilariously inept performances as lovers drawn together in their rebellion. We never learn, for example, why Daria becomes so destructively disillusioned with her boss, real estate developer Lee Allen, that she imagines the cataclysm that ends the movie. It seems to have been inspired by her improbable encounter with Mark, who has stolen a small plane and, seeing her driving far below, decides to buzz her automobile. When he lands and they meet, they wander out into the desert, where they have sex. Their coupling is multiplied by a fantasy sequence of perhaps a score of couples rolling around in the dust. Incredible as the meeting of Mark and Daria is, it's perhaps more incredible that Antonioni, who had worked with actors of the caliber of Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, and Monica Vitti, should have found anything to work with in Frechette and Halprin, whose lack of affect and stilted delivery verge on the ludicrous. Still, the film always gives us something to look at. Cinematographer Alfio Contini has an especially keen eye for the absurd and ugly jumble of billboards and signs that clutter Los Angeles, but he's equally skilled at capturing the beauty of Death Valley and the high desert in Arizona. Too bad that the visuals only serve to reinforce the banal contrast between civilization's corruption and nature's purity.

Turner Classic Movies

Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)

Oleg Yankovskiy in Nostalghia

For the last film of his life, The Sacrifice (1986), Andrei Tarkovsky, self-exiled from the Soviet Union, would venture into Sweden with the help of Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, and he made his first film outside of Russia in Italy with the help of co-screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who had written screenplays for Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Just as Bergman is a spiritual presence in The Sacrifice, so are Antonioni and Fellini in Nostalghia. But mostly it's Tarkovsky's deracination that shows in both films, especially in Nostalghia, in which he imports a damp Russian climate into the Mediterranean atmosphere of Italy. I find Nostalghia more accessible or more satisfying -- if such words could ever be adequate to one's experience of Tarkovsky -- than The Sacrifice because Tarkovsky doesn't take on anything so enormous as nuclear holocaust in Nostalghia. In its bare essence, Nostalghia is the story of a Russian poet, Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovskiy), in Italy to write the biography of an 18th-century Russian composer, who finds himself sinking deeper into depression until he encounters a madman named Domenico (Erland Josephson) who allows Andrei a moment of transcendence. Nostalghia is a film about fire and water. Domenico, who lives in a leaky ruin into which the rain continually drips, believes that he can save the world if he carries a lighted candle through the waters of the spa at Bagno Vignoni. The authorities, however, continually prevent him from even attempting the task. Eventually, Domenico becomes a mad prophet, preaching to a scattered audience of followers before he douses himself with gasoline and sets himself on fire. Andrei then sets out to complete Domenico's task, walking across the pool -- which has, however, been drained for a periodic cleaning -- with the candle and then collapsing. Tarkovsky films this scene in a single long take, during which the wind blows out Andrei's candle twice, forcing him to restart the task, before he finally accomplishes it. This is film as poetry, the product of a singular, remarkable sensibility, and it probably should be judged more by the standards we apply to poetry than by those we apply to narrative film. Tarkovsky was one of the last romantics, still willing to ascribe virtue to enthusiasm, to find wisdom in madness, to rail against our alienation from nature as profoundly as Wordsworth or Shelley or Blake ever did.

Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)

Titta: Bruno Zanin
Gradisca: Magali Noël
Miranda: Pupella Maggio
Aurelio: Armando Brancia
Grandfather: Giuseppe Ianigro
Lallo: Nando Orfei
Teo: Ciccio Ingrassia
Oliva: Stefano Proietti

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Danilo Donati
Music: Nino Rota

Nostalgia, Fellini-style, with lots of bawdiness, plenty of grotesques, much comedy, and a little pathos. It was a huge hit, earning the foreign-language film Oscar and nominations for Fellini as director and as co-author (with Tonino Guerra) of the screenplay. It's certainly lively and colorful, thanks to the cinematography of Giuseppe Rotunno, the production and costume design of Danilo Donati, and of course the scoring by Nino Rota -- though it sounds like every other score he did for Fellini. What it lacks for me, though, is the grounding that a central figure like Marcello Mastroianni or Giulietta Masina typically gave Fellini's best films, among which I would name La Strada (1954), The Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), and 8 1/2 (1963). The presumed center of Amarcord is the adolescent Titta, whose experiences over the course of a year in a village on Italy's east coast serve to link the various episodes together. But Titta is too slight a character to serve that function the way, for example, Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) did as the Fellini surrogate in I Vitelloni (1953). There are some marvelous moments such as the sailing of the ocean liner SS Rex past the village, which goes out to greet it in a variety of fishing and pleasure boats. But too much of the film is taken up with the noisy squabbling of Titta's family, who soon wear out their welcome -- or at least mine.