About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti in About Elly

Sepideh: Golshifteh Farahani
Ahmad: Shahab Hosseini
Elly: Taraneh Alidoosti
Shohreh: Merila Zare'i
Amir: Mani Haghighi
Peyman: Peyman Moaadi
Manoochehr: Ra'na Azadivar
Alireza: Saber Abar

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi, Azad Jafarian
Cinematography: Hossein Jafarian
Music: Andrea Bauer

Sepideh invites the unmarried Elly, one of her daughter's teachers, to spend a three-day weekend with her, her husband, and two other couples and their children, at a villa overlooking the Caspian Sea. Also joining the group is the recently divorced Ahmad, who is taking a vacation from his job in Germany. Because of the Islamic Republic's prohibitions against unmarried men and women traveling together, Sepideh persuades the group to pretend that Elly and Ahmad are newlyweds, a lie that begins to backfire when the managers of the seaside property want to celebrate the young couple's marriage. Embarrassed by the attention, Elly decides to leave after the first night, which Sepideh, set on her matchmaking, tries to prevent. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi sets all of this up carefully, so that the story could easily turn toward comedy. It doesn't. When the young son of Shoreh and Peyman almost drowns, Elly disappears during the chaos of his rescue and resuscitation. Has she drowned trying to rescue the boy, or has she made good on her determination to return to Tehran? Sepideh is particularly frantic when Elly's disappearance is noted, plunging into the sea to try to find her. It's then that we begin to discover that Sepideh knows a great deal more about Elly than she has told the others, and a great snarl of complications develops, especially when the group begins to create more stories to tell the police, the property managers, and Elly's family. The performances of the cast -- some of whom, like Peyman Moaadi, Merila Zare'i, and Shahab Hosseini, will be familiar from Farhadi's 2011 Oscar-winning A Separation --  are uniformly brilliant, and Farhadi's script and direction result in a film that is both suspenseful and morally complex. It has been suggested that the film has a subtext of criticism directed at the Iranian government, under which people routinely dissemble in order not to bring censure upon themselves -- especially the young professionals like the ones in the film. Is it significant that the last scene of the movie shows the group trying to free a red BMW from the sand in which it has bogged down?

The Beggar's Opera (Peter Brook, 1953)

The Beggar's Opera, Act V, by William Hogarth, c. 1728

I watch TV with the closed captions on, partly from age-related hearing loss, but also because it helps me savor dialogue better. Sometimes, however, I find that the caption writers go hilariously astray, especially if they're transcribing what they think they hear instead of following a script. In this case, I was amused to find that references to Newgate, the old London prison that is the scene of much of The Beggar's Opera, were being recorded as "Nougat." John Gay's 1728 ballad opera is said to have been inspired by a suggestion of Jonathan Swift that someone should compose "a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there." Peter Brook's film, his first as a movie director, isn't exactly a "nougat pastoral," but it's a pleasant enough confection, with Technicolor cinematography by Guy Green and production design and handsome costuming by Georges Wakhévitch that give the film a Hogarthian ambiance. Best of all, it has Laurence Olivier, Hugh Griffith, Dorothy Tutin, Stanley Holloway, and Athene Seyler in the cast. Gay's songs, originally set to familiar folk song tunes, have been remusicalized by Arthur Bliss, with some additional lyrics by Christopher Fry, who also wrote the screenplay with Denis Cannan. Most of the singing was dubbed, with the exceptions of Olivier and Holloway: The latter nicely displays a basso buffo style and Olivier has a pleasant if sometimes slightly stressed baritone. The film was a flop, unfortunately, and isn't much seen today, but it's worth checking out when it comes around again to TCM.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

Sandwiched between two epic versions of the life of Jesus released in the 1960s -- King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965) -- Pasolini's version looks like the most successful today. It is raw and unfiltered through Technicolor and wide-screen processes, unencumbered with movie stars. Its Jesus is not blue-eyed like Jeffrey Hunter or Max von Sydow, but a darkly handsome Spanish economics student named Enrique Irazoqui, who had never acted before. (His voice is dubbed by Enrico Maria Salerno, a professional actor who also dubbed Clint Eastwood's voice in the Italian releases of Sergio Leone's Westerns.) The film takes no liberties with the story as presented in the New Testament Gospel of St. Matthew, following it virtually to the letter. The dialogue in Pasolini's screenplay relies for the most part only on the words actually spoken in the gospel. In fact, those unfamiliar with the narrative presented there may sometimes find the film's story hard to follow. No elaborate sets were constructed: Pasolini filmed on locations in Calabria and Sicily and other parts of southern Italy, enlisting the locals as cast members and extras. Like Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), it is a film of faces, and seldom handsome ones -- with the exception of the delicately beautiful Margherita Caruso, who plays the young Mary. (The older Mary is played by Pasolini's mother, Susanna.) Irazoqui, with his unibrow, looks strikingly like a figure out of a Byzantine mosaic or a Russian icon. The cumulative effect of the film is of having sat through something plausibly much closer to the actual events than the more conventional dramatizations of them like the Hollywood epics. Pasolini was, of course, an unbeliever, a gay Marxist, and the effect of the film is more intellectual than spiritual. The Jesus of the film preaches love, but he can also be harsh and enigmatic, proclaiming that he comes to bring not peace but a sword and, in one of the oddest moments in the gospel, smiting a fig tree for some unspecified offense. There are moments when, by following the biblical narrative so closely, the film falls apart, as in the interpolation of the story of Salome (Paola Tedesco) and John the Baptist (Mario Socrate), and it's clear that, as he later admitted, Pasolini's heart is not in the depiction of such miracles as the loaves and fishes and Jesus's walking on water. The choice of music to accompany scenes is curiously eclectic, ranging from the obvious, Bach and Mozart, to the derivative, a bit of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky score, to the startling, African-American spirituals. But even when Pasolini's film goes awry, it remains a fascinatingly personal response to the source material.

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

With 12 Oscar nominations and three wins for directing, William Wyler holds a firm place in the history of American movies. But not without some grumbling on the part of auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who observed, "Wyler's career is a cipher as far as personal direction is concerned." His movies were invariably polished and professionally made, but if what you're looking for is some hint of personality behind the camera, the kind that Hitchcock or Hawks or Ford displayed no matter what the subject matter of the film, then Wyler is an enigma. His most personal film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), grew out of his wartime experiences, but they are subsumed in the stories he has to tell and not revealed with any assertively personal point of view on them. And anyone who can trace a Wylerian personality latent in movies as varied as Mrs. Miniver (1942), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and Funny Girl (1968) has a subtler analytical mind than mine. What they have in common is that they are well made, the work of a fine craftsman if not an artist. The other thing they have in common is that they won Oscars for their stars: Greer Garson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, and Barbra Streisand, respectively. The Heiress, too, won an Oscar for its star, Olivia de Havilland, suggesting that in Wyler we have a director whose virtue lay not in his personal vision but in his skill at packaging, at arranging a showcase not just for performers -- he also directed Oscar-winning performances by Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and by Fredric March and Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives -- but also for production designers, costume designers, composers, and cinematographers: Oscars for The Heiress went to John Meehan, Harry Horner, and Emile Kuri for art direction and set decoration, to Edith Head and Gile Steele for costumes, and to Aaron Copland for the score, and Leo Tover was nominated for his cinematography. Wyler lost the directing Oscar to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives, but is there any doubt that The Heiress would have been a lesser film than it is without Wyler's guidance? All of this is a long-winded way to say that although I honor, and in many ways prefer, the personal vision that shines through in the works of directors like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, et al., there is room in my pantheon for the skilled if impersonal professional. As for The Heiress itself, it's a satisfying film with two great performances (de Havilland's Catherine and Ralph Richardson's Dr. Sloper), one hugely entertaining one (Miriam Hopkins's Lavinia Penniman), and one sad miscasting: Montgomery Clift's Morris Townsend. It's a hard role to put across: Morris has to be plausible enough to persuade not only Catherine but also the somewhat more worldly Lavinia that he is genuinely in love with Catherine and not just her money, but he also needs to give the audience a whiff of the cad. Clift's Morris is too callow, too grinningly eager. There is no ambiguity in the performance. If we like Morris too much, we risk seeing Dr. Sloper more as an over-stern paterfamilias and less as the cruelly self-absorbed man he is. Richardson's fine performance goes a long way to righting this imbalance, but he's fighting Clift's sex appeal all the way.  

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

In the catalog of vampire movies, Vampyr is probably the second scariest after Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922). Which is odd, because its narrative, based by Dreyer and co-writer Christian Jul on a story be Sheridan Le Fanu, is fractured and almost incoherent and its characterization scattered. But you get the feeling that Dreyer himself really believed in the malevolent creatures he put on film, not surprising since most of Dreyer's films were in one way or another about faith. One story has it that the look of the film came about accidentally: Cinematographer Rudolph Maté shot an early sequence slightly out of focus, and when he apologetically showed it to Dreyer, the director insisted that was exactly how he wanted the film to look. Maté consequently shot many sequences through gauze. Accident also dictated some of the story: Dreyer insisted on location shooting, and in scouting for places to shoot, discovered the flour mill, giving him the idea for the scene in which the doctor meets his rather gruesome end. The lead character, Allen Grey, was played by a non-professional, Nicolas de Gunzburg, under the pseudonym Julian West -- Gunzburg was also the principal financial backer of the film. Most of the rest of the cast were non-professionals as well, and the sense that Vampyr is the result of serendipitous filmmaking has given the film a certain cachet over the years, especially with filmmakers and critics struggling with the restrictions that the corporate bottom line places on their art. To my mind, Vampyr is a collection of fascinating, disturbing images -- the man with the scythe crossing the river, the play of eerie shadows, the unusually successful double exposure that gives us Allen Grey's out-of-body experience, the sequence in which Grey sees himself in a coffin, and so on. But it seems to me to be brilliant parts in search of a satisfying whole.

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)

Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter

Laura Jesson: Celia Johnson
Dr. Alec Harvey: Trevor Howard
Albert Godby: Stanley Holloway
Myrtle Bagot: Joyce Carey
Fred Jesson: Cyril Raymond
Dolly Messiter: Everley Gregg
Mary Norton: Marjorie Mars
Beryl Walters: Margaret Barton
Stephen Lynn: Valentine Dyall

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame
Based on a play by Noël Coward
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Lawrence P. Williams
Film editing: Jack Harris
Music: Percival Mackey, Muir Mathieson

It had never occurred to me until I started reading essays about Brief Encounter that the movie is a period film: It's set in 1938, which explains why there is no visual evidence of or reference to World War II, which was still going on when it was made. This also helps explain some of the film's jitteriness or reticence about sex. Why, given the facility with which Laura Jesson lies about her relationship with Alec Harvey, don't they just go ahead and have sex? The film is a portrait of prewar middle-class morality, something the war helped break down, especially with the arrival of American troops, proverbially "oversexed and over here," in Britain. When it gained great popularity after the war ended, it was possible to debate whether Brief Encounter was a validation or an indictment of this morality. Is it really healthy for Laura to spend the rest of her life with her pleasantly stuffy husband, dreaming of what might have been? Is it necessary for Alec to uproot his family and emigrate to South Africa just because of sexual frustration? The resolution to their dilemma seems easier to us: We wish Laura and Alec could unbend, the way the working class characters Albert and Myrtle seem to do. (For all her pretense at refinement, it's easy to see that Myrtle has a healthy off-duty sex life.) But then we get glimpses of the social milieu in which Laura and Alec move: He has to contend with the catty nudge-nudge-wink-wink of Stephen Lynn, the friend whose apartment almost becomes a venue for the consummation of their passion; she is surrounded by friends whose only pleasure in life seems to be to talk. There is a real brilliance in the way which Lean, greatly aided by Robert Krasker's noir-expressionist black-and-white cinematography, suggests the entrapment of the lovers in a world they are afraid to break out of. Celia Johnson is magnificent, of course, and it was a stroke of genius to cast Trevor Howard opposite her. For all his kindness and attentiveness, there is something faintly menacing about him, a hint of danger and possibility that can only attract but also subtly frighten a woman whose life consists of helping her husband with the crossword and spending Thursdays in town returning her library book and shopping for an ugly desk tchotchke for his birthday. Everything in this movie is so well judged and efficiently presented that it only makes me regret that Lean turned from such intimate stories and entered on his epic phase.

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012)

Frances Ha succeeds at what I think it sets out to be: an affectionately amusing look at what an earlier generation called Yuppies -- except that Yuppies seemed to have a much easier time of integrating themselves into adulthood than the Gen Y or Millennial characters in this film. Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach, is charmingly awkward as Frances -- whose last name doesn't come from the frequently ironic interjection of "ha ha" in her conversations but from the truncation of her full surname, Halladay, that's revealed at the film's end. Frances is a would-be modern dancer trying to make it in New York even though her talent is, well, marginal. As a result, she's dependent on a collection of friends, including her fellow Vassar alum, Sophie (Mickey Sumner). But when Sophie and others in her life start finding their way in the world, clumsy, agreeable Frances starts to fall behind. If some of this reminds you of the HBO series Girls, and not because both the film and the series feature Adam Driver in a key role, it's not surprising. It's the same set: young middle-class white people in downward mobility when compared with their parents. We meet Frances's parents -- played by Greta Gerwig's own parents, Christine and Gordon Gerwig-- when she goes home to Sacramento for Christmas, a sequence probably designed to remind us why Frances prefers to struggle in New York than to settle for security in a less competitive milieu. Too much of this sort of generational comedy can wear out its welcome, but Frances Ha is so unpretentious -- except perhaps for Baumbach's decision to film it in black and white as an hommage to Woody Allen's Manhattan -- and Gerwig so skillful at creating Frances, that you can't help liking it.

The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988)

Nightmarish without being in the least surreal, The Vanishing frightened me more than any horror movie ever has. It's a film about the dangers of curiosity and commitment -- double-edged virtues. A Dutch couple, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia Wagter (Johanna ter Steege) are vacationing in France, bickering a bit as couples do. When they run out of gas in the middle of a mountain tunnel, a precarious situation, Rex sets out to get some more, leaving a protesting Saskia behind. When he returns with a can of gas, she's not with the car, but this turns out to be only a temporary "vanishing" -- she's waiting at the side of the road when he emerges from the tunnel. They agree that they both overreacted to the situation -- in fact, the quarrel seems to have made their bond stronger. They reach a rest stop where Rex fills up the tank as well as the emergency canister and Saskia goes to buy drinks -- and never returns. Three years later, Rex is still obsessed with finding Saskia, to the dismay of his new girlfriend, Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus). Meanwhile, we meet the man responsible for Saskia's disappearance, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), and watch as Raymond sets a trap into which Rex is lured by his own desire to know what happened to Saskia. (The French title, L'Homme qui voulait savoir -- The Man Who Wanted to Know -- is particularly on point where the crux of the movie is concerned.) The film works by setting up the conventions of the mystery thriller, then subverting them by revealing the identity of the kidnapper and the mechanisms by which he accomplishes his crime. Only the final horror of what Raymond has done with Saskia is withheld until the very end. The performances of Donnadieu and Bervoets go a long way to making the film credible, but it is chiefly the ingenuity of Sluizer's adaptation of the novel by Tim Krabbé that lifts it out of the ordinary. It is a cold-hearted movie that never spares the audience.

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

One of the things that make me think Tom Cruise is smarter than his involvement with Scientology suggests is that lately he has been willing to surround himself in his films with actors who are more appealing than he is. In the case of Rogue Nation, they include Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson. He has also shed the tendency to flash the famous toothy grin on any occasion, though his Ethan Hunt in this film doesn't have much to grin about. As the movie begins, the Impossible Missions Force is about to be disbanded and its members labeled "shoot to kill" by CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). It's a good premise for a thriller, if perhaps an over-familiar one: Make your good guys the target not only of the bad guys but also the other good guys. So off we go on a round of stunts that don't bear summarizing, but McQuarrie's script and direction keep the gee-whiz response pumping for an enjoyable couple of hours. Some critics thought the chief villain, a rogue MI6 agent named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), wasn't villainous enough, but I have liked Harris's work since I first noticed him as Cesare Borgia's gay henchman Micheletto on the Showtime series The Borgias (2011-2013). He underplays in Rogue Nation, and the decision to dye his hair blond was probably a mistake, but I thought his subtlety was an effective contrast to Cruise's usual tendency to overplay. It has to be said that, at 55, Cruise is just beginning to be a bit implausible in his action sequences, especially the one at the film's beginning that has him leaping onto the wing of a cargo plane and clinging to it as it takes off, Perhaps it's true that he still does his own stunts, but in this golden age of camera tricks and CGI, that seems unnecessary: Audience are going to think it's faked anyway. There may in fact be a nod or two in the movie to Cruise's aging: After the extended underwater swim, Hunt has to be resuscitated, and there are a few moments, played mostly for comic relief by Pegg, when Hunt's disoriented state becomes a matter for concern. A sixth M:I film is evidently in the works. It will be interesting to see whether age plays more of a factor in it.

Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921)

Who knew that one of the chief causes of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror was "Bolshevism"?  Or that Danton, who helped send Louis XVI to the guillotine, was "the Abraham Lincoln of France," as one of the title cards for Orphans of the Storm proclaims? D.W. Griffith's gift for pseudo-historical hokum stood him in good stead in making this often preposterous classic, but it worked even better for Lillian and Dorothy Gish, whose performances as the titular orphans are superb. I think Dorothy may give the better performance as Louise, the foundling who is left blind by the "plague" that killed her adoptive parents, but that may be because I've seen Lillian's winsome tricks more often than Dorothy's. Lillian certainly flings herself into the role of Henriette, who became Louise's sister after her parents took in the girl as an infant, and her caretaker after she became blind. The girls go to Paris in search of a cure for Louise's blindness, and there Henriette is abducted by a lecherous aristocrat but saved by the virtuous Chevalier de Vaudrey (a surprisingly handsome young Joseph Schildkraut). Separated from Henriette, Louise falls into the clutches of the conniving Mother Frochard (Lucille La Verne), who puts the blind girl to work begging on the streets. (La Verne sports a monstrous wen and a mustache, reminding us that she was the voice of the wicked queen and the witch in the 1937 Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) And then comes the Revolution, in which Henriette almost loses her head to the guillotine, thanks to the evil Robespierre (Sidney Herbert), before being rescued by, of all people, Danton (Monte Blue). (An end title informs us that the Reign of Terror ceased when Robespierre was beheaded, but conveniently ignores the similar fate of Danton.) In the end, Henriette and de Vaudrey are to be married, and Louise not only regains her sight but also learns that she was the daughter of the Countess de Linieres (Katherine Emmet) from a previous marriage to a commoner that was suppressed by the countess's family. This delicious stuff, which Griffith's screenplay took from a play by Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon along with liberal borrowings from Dumas, Dickens, and Victor Hugo, is kept furiously a-boil by Griffith's superb gift for pacing and cutting. He never lets the action flag, even for the necessary exposition.