Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

Jason Franklin, Bette Henritze, and Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven

Cathy Whitaker: Julianne Moore
Frank Whitaker: Dennis Quaid
Raymond Deagan: Dennis Haysbert
Eleanor Fine: Patricia Clarkson
Dr. Bowman: James Rebhorn
Sibyl: Viola Davis
Mona Lauder: Celia Weston

Director: Todd Haynes
Screenplay: Todd Haynes
Cinematography: Edward Lachman
Production design: Mark Friedberg
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Costume design: Sandy Powell

Homage never turns into parody in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, a film whose very title alludes to Douglas Sirk's great 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Haynes's film is set in 1957, only two years after Sirk's was released, but the sensibility that controls it is very much of an era almost half a century later. Haynes has the liberty to deal with matters that were taboo for American filmmakers in 1955, specifically miscegenation and homosexuality -- two terms that now have an antique sound to them. But his film has the same resonance as Sirk's: Both expose the raw wounds inflicted on people by social conventions, by the desire to "fit in" with what a given community establishes as its values. We like to think of the 1950s as the nadir of American conformity, a society on the brink of having its repressive qualities exploded by the rebellious 1960s, but although Haynes's film is a "period piece," I think it also provokes us to evaluate what restricts us today. We can pat ourselves on the back that we -- or at least the liberal-minded people in the circles in which I travel -- no longer recoil in horror at an interracial couple or find ourselves shocked, shocked that there are people who love others of their own sex. But just as Cathy Whitaker and her circle of friends retreat into an exclusive community, we too often find ourselves falling into a similar trap of smug self-righteousness that won't withstand the cold shock of reality -- like, for example, a presidential election gone awry. Cathy's blithe intellectualized conviction that all people are created equal is tested when she crosses the invisible line between the races. Her frustration at not being able to have a friendship with a black man -- i.e., someone other than the dull suburbanites that surround her -- is mirrored by her husband's inability to make his way out of the closet. But Cathy naively thinks that there's a "cure" for his problem, making it a lesser trial than her own, which she can blame on society. In the end, the beauty of Haynes's film is that he never yields to the temptation to impose a false liberation on his characters, an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. Cathy sees Raymond off at the station, knowing that she'll never visit him in Baltimore. Frank is holed up in a hotel room with his lover instead of his spacious suburban home, his family life and probably his job now at an end. They are real enough characters that we want to know what will happen to them, but we suspect that there are no stirring triumphs ahead, only a struggle to rebuild damaged lives. Haynes and his team of cinematographer Edward Lachman, production designer Mark Friedman, costumer Sandy Powell, and composer Elmer Bernstein have crafted a 1950s world that's familiar to us from countless movies, but because of the shrewdness of the screenplay, the depth of the characterization, and the brilliance of the performers the film succeeds in making it real. There are stereotypes in the film, like Celia Weston's malicious gossip, but they are balanced by roles that could have fallen too easily into stereotypes -- Patricia Clarkson's best friend, James Rebhorn's doctor, Viola Davis's maid -- yet manage to develop dimensions of actuality. Far From Heaven also does something that very few films inspired by older ones do: It illuminates its source, so that it's possible to watch All That Heaven Allows again with a new understanding of Sirk's achievement.

Starz

Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Trilogy (1931, 1932, 1936)

Marius (Alexander Korda, 1931)

Raimu and Pierre Fresnay in Marius

César Olivier: Raimu
Marius: Pierre Fresnay
Honoré Panisse: Fernand Charpin
Fanny: Orane Demazis
Honorine Cabanis: Alida Rouffe
Félix Escartefigue: Paul Dullac
Albert Brun: Robert Vattier
Piquoiseau: Alexandre Mihalesco

Director: Alexander Korda
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol
Based on a play by Marcel Pagnol
Cinematography: Theodore J. Pahle
Art direction: Alfred Junge, Vincent Korda

Fanny (Marc Allegret, 1932)

Fernand Charpin, Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis in Fanny

Cast identical to Marius, except:

Félix Escartefigue: Auguste Mouriès
Aunt Claudine: Milly Mathis
Elzéar: Louis Boulle
Dr. Venelle: Édouard Delmont

Director: Marc Allegret
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol
Based on a play by Marcel Pagnol
Cinematography: Nikolai Toporkoff
Production design: Gabriel Scognamillo
Music: Vincent Scotto

César (Marcel Pagnol, 1936)

André Fouché and Raimu in César

Cast identical to Fanny, except:

Césariot: André Fouché
Félix Escartefigue: Paul Dullac
Innocent Mangiapan: Marcel Maupin
Elzéar: Thommeray
Pierre Dromard: Robert Bassac
Fernand: Doumel

Director: Marcel Pagnol
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol
Cinematography: Willy Faktorovitch, Grischa, Roger Ledru

Critics of the auteur theory -- that the director is the true "author" of a film -- point to Marcel Pagnol's Marseille trilogy as a glowing exception: It's the writer's characters and dialogue that carry all three films, even when Pagnol himself is the credited director, as he is in the third film, César. This amounts to nitpicking, I fear. Pagnol was on hand for all three films, even when they were nominally being directed by Alexander Korda and Marc Allegret (neither of them inconsiderable directors), and by all accounts Pagnol was not at all silent about making his opinions known. He had been an early enthusiast of the talkies, and immediately saw that his plays, Marius and Fanny, were naturals for the screen. What better way to sweeten his stories about life in Marseille than by opening them out with visuals of the actual waterfront? But for Pagnol, the words and the sounds came first: It's said that he would turn his back as a scene was being shot, and would only give his approval when what he heard sounded right. That presupposed, of course, a cast capable of making the words work, which meant starting with the original César, the actor known only as Raimu (Jules Auguste Muraire), and the original Panisse, Fernand Charpin, both of them born in the neighborhood of Marseille. The Marius, Pierre Fresnay, and the Fanny, Orane Demazis, had to be coached in the dialect, but most of the rest of the cast were from the south of France. The dialect is lost on us subtitle-dependent Anglophones, but it seems to have been one of the reasons that all of France took the trilogy to heart, relishing this slice of provincial life even in Paris. And it is a glorious trio of movies still, rich with comic performances, dominated of course by Raimu as the blustering, sentimental César. It's hard to find a performer to compare with Raimu, but the one that comes to my mind is Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, certain of himself and capable of explosions that go off with lots of noise and very little actual damage. Raimu, Charpin, and the actors that form their little circle -- best seen when playing cards, as in the classic game in Marius -- are a superb ensemble. There is some controversy over Demazis as Fanny -- the actress is described in one source as "pudding faced," and if you're expecting a gamine type like Leslie Caron, who played the part in the 1961 Fanny directed by Joshua Logan, you'll be disappointed. But I don't mind Demazis at all. While it's hard to think of her as the most beautiful girl in Marseille, she has the ability to pull off the more melodramatic scenes -- admittedly the weakest moments in the trilogy -- with real feeling. Pierre Fresnay is a touch too old in Marius and Fanny, but he comes into his own in César, when the character is closest to his actual age. But what makes it work are the ebullient characters and the splendid comic timing of the performers.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Fear of Fear (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Margit Carstensen in Fear of Fear

Margot: Margit Carstensen
Kurt: Ulrich Faulhaber
Mother: Brigitte Mira
Lore: Irm Hermann
Karli: Armin Meier
Dr. Merck: Adrian Hoven
Mr. Bauer: Kurt Raab

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Design director: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

As the title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film suggests, the protagonist, Margot, is stuck in a kind of emotional feedback loop: Her anxiety is exacerbated by the fear that she'll have another anxiety attack. As a sufferer of free-floating anxiety myself, I know the problem: Your inability to control fears that you know to be absurd undermines your sense of self, thereby arousing more fears. Fear of Fear, made for German television, is not an entirely satisfactory portrait of the problem: Fassbinder loads too much against Margot. Beautiful, model-thin, she's married to a loving but homely schlub, who is so preoccupied with passing an examination that he tends to shut her out. Moreover, they live in the same house as her mother-in-law, a homely woman who resents Margot's beauty, and constantly rates her for laziness, for neglecting her children, for not cooking wholesome meals for her family, and the criticism is only echoed by Margot's sister-in-law, Lore. Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann bring these Dickensian harpies to full life, but the element of caricature in the conception of the roles, though it adds a splash of needed dark humor, tends to undermine one's sense of Margot's plight as a real-world experience. Margot tries to escape from her ills into exercise, but she even gets criticized for swimming too much. So the other avenues of escape follow: Valium, alcohol (she guzzles cognac straight from the bottle), and sex. She begins sleeping with the handsome pharmacist across the way, partly to thank him for illegally refilling her Valium prescription when she runs out. Naturally, her dalliance is discovered, and Lore's husband, Karli, even tries to make a move on her. Finally, after being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, she goes to a mental institution where she's treated for depression. Seemingly cured, she returns home, but the film ends on a doubtful note: After learning that the strange man who stares at her and her daughter on their way home from kindergarten has committed suicide, she once again experiences an anxiety attack, which throughout the film Fassbinder has shown from Margot's point of view as a kind of rippling in the image. Margit Carstensen's performance carries the film, with the help of Fassbinder's shrewd direction, filming scenes through doorways and in mirror frames to suggest Margot's entrapment.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940)

Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook in Gaslight

Paul Mallen: Anton Walbrook
Bella Mallen: Diana Wynyard
Rough: Frank Pettingell
Nancy: Cathleen Cordell
Ullswater: Robert Newton
Cobb: Jimmy Hanley
Elizabeth: Minnie Rayner

Director: Thorold Dickinson
Screenplay: A.R. Rawlinson, Bridget Boland
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Bernard Knowles
Music: Richard Addinsell

One of the more famous crimes of MGM was its attempt to destroy the negative and all existing prints of Thorold Dickinson's 1940 version of Gaslight in order to avoid any comparisons between it and the 1944 remake directed by George Cukor. It failed somehow, and the two versions can now be seen back to back. The 1944 film is superb entertainment, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman and showcasing Charles Boyer to very good effect. By its side, Dickinson's version can feel a little undernourished -- or is it just that the later version is overfed, fattened up by Hollywood largesse? I feel very kindly toward the earlier film, which doesn't attempt to disguise the fact that it's sheer melodrama with backstories that try to add psychological realism. All we really need to do is accept the film's Victorian subtext and to know is that Paul Mallen is a foreigner and that his wife, Bella, grew up breathing the pure air of the English countryside to see whose side the film is on. Just the way the Viennese-born Anton Walbrook smooths his mustache is enough to let us know he's a rotter. And was anyone more born to play the gaslighted victim than Diana Wynyard who, with her slight strabismus and her habit of staring into the distance, seems to be seeing things that no one else can? The 84-minute run time sets everything up efficiently and moves steadily through some truly suspenseful moments to its tables-turned conclusion. The 1944 remake runs half an hour longer and while its performances may be more elaborate (and in the case of the teenage Angela Lansbury's conniving maid, superior), Thorold's version keeps us nicely tantalized. The casting of Robert Newton as Bella's cousin is amusing, considering that Newton would go on to make his name as an actor with the terrifying Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948). Those of us who saw that film first may suspect that he's up to no good in Gaslight, but we'd be wrong.

Turner Classic Movies

Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion

Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth: Joan Fontaine
Johnnie Aysgarth: Cary Grant
General McLaidlaw: Cedric Hardwicke
Mrs. McLaidlaw: May Whitty
Beaky Thwaite: Nigel Bruce
Mrs. Newsham: Isabel Jeans
Ethel: Heather Angel
Captain Melbeck: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, Alma Reville
Based on a novel by Anthony Berkeley as Francis Iles
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Franz Waxman

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you," as Joseph Heller put it in Catch-22. Considering how many plots of Alfred Hitchcock's films are variations on that theme, he might well have had the phrase posted on his office wall. Suspicion is one of the purest explorations of that premise: A woman thinks her handsome rotter of a husband is out to murder her, and the evidence keeps piling up up that she's right. Of course, she isn't, but it takes an hour and 39 minutes to reach that rather anticlimactic conclusion. Suspicion was Hitchcock's fourth American film, and it shows that he was still getting used to working in a rather different studio system than the one he had in England. After the micromanaging of David O. Selznick on his first, Rebecca (1940), he had a comparatively easier time with producer Walter Wanger on Foreign Correspondent (1940) except for the difficulty of making a film about impending war in Europe while the United States was still officially neutral -- so the bad guys could never be explicitly identified as Nazis, for example. But his third film, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), his first set in the United States, was a dud, in large part because Hitchcock had yet to master American idiom: The prissy character played by Gene Raymond, for example, was supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. I doubt that Hitchcock knew what a fullback was, let alone one from Alabama. So for Suspicion he retreated to familiar territory, England at a time when there wasn't a war going on, and some actors he had worked with before: Joan Fontaine, Nigel Bruce, and Leo G. Carroll from Rebecca, as well as May Whitty, who had starred in The Lady Vanishes (1938). The chief newcomer was Cary Grant, who would become, along with James Stewart, one of Hitchcock's most reliable leading men. But Grant's presence in the film presented its own problems: He was known as a charming actor in romantic comedy. Would an audience accept Grant as a potential murderer? One story, reportedly verified by Hitchcock himself, holds that the studio, RKO, didn't want to mar Grant's image and insisted on a change from the novel's original ending, in which Johnnie Aysgarth really is guilty. Biographers, however, have disputed that story, claiming that Hitchcock really wanted to focus on Lina's paranoia and not on Johnnie's villainy. In any case, the film's ending feels wrong, mostly because it resolves nothing: Is Johnnie's fecklessness really curable? The chief problem is that Lina herself is an unfocused character, improbably wavering between shyness and passion, between common sense and paranoia, between tough determination and a tendency to faint. Fontaine did what she could with the part, and won an Oscar for her pains, but the film really belongs to Grant. Hitchcock was the one director who could really bring out Grant's dark side.* He did it more brilliantly in Notorious (1946), but in Suspicion Hitchcock effectively exploits Grant's ability to turn on a subtle, cold-eyed menace.

Turner Classic Movies

*A possible exception to this statement is George Cukor, who first explored the "other" Cary Grant as the Cockney con-man in Sylvia Scarlett (1935).

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Brigitte Mira and Gottfried John in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven

Emma Küsters: Brigitte Mira
Corinna: Ingrid Caven
Thälmann: Karlheinz Böhm
Frau Thälmann: Margit Carstensen
Helene: Irm Hermann
Niemeyer: Gottfried John
Ernst: Armin Meyer
Knab: Matthias Fuchs
Nightclub Owner: Peter Kern
Bar Owner: Kurt Raab

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurt Raab
Based on a story by Heinrich Zille
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

It's a too-familiar story in the United States: A disgruntled employee attacks his place of work and then kills himself. It may have had a more ripped-from-the-headlines feeling in West Germany during the recessionary times of the 1970s, which is my way of saying that Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven feels a little more stuck in time and place than Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films usually do. The setup is familiar: A man goes berserk at his workplace and commits suicide, leaving his family to face the aftermath. The follow-through is predictable: People -- tabloid reporters and politicians -- flock to milk what they can from the family's pain. But Fassbinder being the satirist that he was couldn't simply play the story for conventional domestic drama. He treats the family from the outset with a sardonic tone: The soon-to-be widow does piecework, assembling electric sockets on her kitchen table, as her son and his wife squabble over their coming vacation. Helene, Emma Küsters's pregnant daughter-in-law, is given to putting on airs about healthy living, preparing salads for dinner when Emma's husband and son want meat. Ernst, the son, works as a butcher, but he is so under his wife's thumb that he submits to her every wish, including a vacation in Finland when he would really prefer to go somewhere warmer. When news comes of the crime committed by Herr Küsters, we meet the daughter, Corinna, who fancies herself a singer, but really is just sleeping with the owner of the bar where she works. When the whole family gathers, the reporters flock to get the dirt, which is immediately swept up by Niemeyer, a writer and photographer, who starts sleeping with Corinna. In the background, their initial presence never quite explained, are a well-dressed couple, the Thälmanns, who turn out to be members of the Communist Party, eager to find a recruit in Frau Küsters, who becomes "Mother Küsters" for them. And so the unsavory game of exploitation begins. The problem comes when it has to end: Fassbinder provided two endings, in both of which Mother Küsters becomes a pawn in a game between the Communists, who are really just bourgeois radical-chic types, more interested in election victories than revolution, and the anarchists, who want headline-grabbing action. But one ending, the one shown in Germany and Europe, culminates in the death of Mother Küsters -- though the bloodshed isn't acted out, but just narrated in end titles. In the other ending, shown only in the United States, the action, a sit-in in the offices of the newsmagazine for which Niemeyer works, fizzles out because nobody really cares that much. Mother Küsters goes home with a janitor who has to close up the place and invites her to join him in a dinner of "Himmel und Erde" -- apples and potatoes with blood sausage. Both endings make the point, the first by refusing to dramatize the outcome of the protest, the second more directly: There's no real political conviction anymore. I rather like that both endings are available together now, not only because they reinforce one nicely, but also because there is nothing definitive to be said about the plight of Mother Küsters in a post-ideological context. Fassbinder, that great admirer of Douglas Sirk, seems to be saying that life itself has been reduced to melodrama, and the choice of a bloody ending or a happy one is completely arbitrary. 

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)

Mario: Marcello Mastroianni
Natalia: Maria Schell
The Tenant: Jean Marais
Mario's Landlady: Marcella Rovena
The Maid: Maria Zanoli
The Prostitute: Clara Calamai
The Dancer: Dirk Sanders

Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti
Based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Chiari
Music: Nino Rota

With White Nights, Luchino Visconti made a move from neorealism to neoromanticism that would be the major direction of his career -- a shift toward characters with operatic, overstated emotions, treading on the edges of sanity. It's a tribute to the skill of Marcello Mastroianni that he manages to keep White Nights grounded as Maria Schell's performance tests the limits. Mastroianni's Mario is a man whose good sense tells him that Schell's Natalia is a fragile woman on the bounds of self-destruction but his loneliness and infatuation with her beauty -- did anyone ever have a more dazzling smile than Maria Schell? -- keep him tied to her. He tries to break away, but an encounter with a prostitute restores his longing for the innocence he cherishes in Natalia. White Nights teeters on sentimentality, as do almost all of Visconti's films, but it's rescued by the skill of the performers and by the rightness of its mise en scène, especially the carefully crafted heightened realism of the studio sets. It also helps that there's a brilliant break in tone in the scene in which Mario learns how to dance to the music of Bill Haley and His Comets -- another demonstration of Mastroianni's boundless talent.

Turner Classic Movies 

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Mel Ferrer and Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious

Vern Haskell: Arthur Kennedy
Altar Keane: Marlene Dietrich
Frenchy Fairmont: Mel Ferrer
Beth Forbes: Gloria Henry
Baldy Gunder: William Frawley
Maxine: Lisa Ferraday
Mort Geary: Jack Elam
Wilson: George Reeves
Preacher: Frank Ferguson
Harbin: Francis McDonald
Comanche Paul: Dan Seymour
Kinch: Lloyd Gough

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Daniel Taradash
Based on a story by Silvia Richards
Cinematography: Hal Mohr
Music: Emil Newman

Arthur Kennedy was one of those reliably good Hollywood actors who never made it to the first rank of stardom though he received five Oscar nominations during his 50-year career on screen. He gives what is perhaps the most convincing performance in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious as the Wyoming cowboy who obsessively tracks down the man who raped and murdered his fiancée, but convincing acting perhaps isn't to the point when you're up against Marlene Dietrich, one of those larger-than-life movie stars who can upend a scene just by tossing back her shoulders, unleashing her familiar hooded gaze, and letting a famous leg slip from the slit in her skirt. The part of Vern Haskell needs a Gary Cooper or John Wayne just for balance. Nor does Mel Ferrer, his reliable blandness offset by frosted highlights in his hair, fare particularly well as Frenchy Fairmont, the current lover of Dietrich's equally absurdly named Altar Keane. But Lang keeps Rancho Notorious from steering too far into the direction of camp, offsetting its Western clichés with some well-staged action scenes and a steady pace that briskly ties up the plot in just under 90 minutes. Unfortunately, Rancho Notorious, which was originally titled Chuck-a-Luck, was tricked out with a narrative ballad accompaniment, "The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck" by Ken Darby, with the unsingable refrain, "Hate, murder, and revenge," that pops up every time you think you can keep a straight face. Still, the film is as watchable as it is incredible.

Turner Classic Movies

Wrong Move (Wim Wenders, 1975)

Peter Kern, Hanna Schygulla, Rüdiger Vogler, Nastassja Kinski, Hans Christian Blech in Wrong Move

Wilhelm: Rüdiger Vogler
Laertes: Hans Christian Blech
Therese Farner: Hanna Schygulla
Mignon: Nastassja Kinski
Bernhard Landau: Peter Kern
The Industrialist: Ivan Desny
Wilhelm's Mother: Marianne Hoppe
Janine: Lisa Kreuzer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Peter Handke
Based on a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Film editor: Peter Przygodda

With his presence in Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road (1976) Rüdiger Vogler became as essential to Wim Wenders's films of the mid-1970s as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese's work in the late 1970s and the 1980s. His homely everyman face is perfect for the self-centered loners of the first and the third films in Wenders's "road trilogy," men who find themselves having to come to terms with a world -- or at least a Germany -- they can't fully accept. But Vogler feels miscast in the middle film -- too old to be playing the young writer out to discover himself, a character drawn by screenwriter Peter Handke from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and thrust into modern post-Nazi, post-Wirtschaftswunder Germany. There is no naïveté left in Vogler's face, there are no illusions to be lost. Yet Wenders sends his 30-year-old Wilhelm on the voyage from northern to southern Germany, from Glückstadt to the Zugspitze, and into encounters with the world of art and politics that might have disillusioned a 20-year-old. Which is not to say that Wrong Move is a failure. It remains a film that tantalizes with its non-realistic narrative, its sense of of a world grown alien to people who think and feel, and of a country haunted by its desperation to escape from a terrible history. No surprise that a good part of its dialogue consists of people telling one another of their dreams, for the film itself has a liminal dreamlike quality. Would a fully awake and aware Wilhelm really pay the train fare for the con artist Laertes and his mute traveling companion Mignon? Do people really fall in love when their eyes meet between trains traveling on different tracks, and then somehow manage to get together after all? Do strangers really decide to travel together and wind up by mistake in the mansion of a suicidal industrialist? Or does all of that happen only in dreams? Wenders's film is touched by the mysterious angst that afflicts the characters in Antonioni's films -- the scene in the concrete caverns of Frankfurt evokes the bleak modern Rome of a film like L'Eclisse (1962), for example. In the context of a film so beautifully shot, so eccentrically put together as Wrong Move, even the miscasting of Vogler feels like not so much a mistake as a provocation.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel in Youth

Fred Ballinger: Michael Caine
Mick Boyle: Harvey Keitel
Lena Ballinger: Rachel Weisz
Jimmy Tree: Paul Dano
Brenda Morel: Jane Fonda
Queen's Emissary: Alex McQueen
Julian: Ed Stoppard
Paloma Faith: Herself
Miss Universe: Madalina Diana Ghenea
Masseuse: Luna Zimic Mijovic
Sumi Jo: Herself

Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino
Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi
Music: David Lang

Woody Allen

Is it just accidental that in Youth, wearing a slouchy hat and dark-rimmed glasses, Michael Caine often looks like Woody Allen? Or is Paolo Sorrentino suggesting some kind of connection between Caine's character, a reclusive composer-conductor trying to drift into retirement, and the prolific but scandal-plagued writer-director? The resemblance might have been more on point if Caine had played Harvey Keitel's part, a writer-director trying to put together what turns out to be his last film, meanwhile obsessing on the lost past and approaching death. But then nothing quite fits together right in Youth, a somewhat scattered and occasionally enervated film. Caine's Fred Ballinger and Keitel's Mick Boyle are old friends -- there is even a suggestion, not followed up, that they may once have been lovers. They are also tied by the fact that Fred's daughter, Lena, is married to Mick's son, Julian. Fred and Mick have come together at a spa in Switzerland, Fred to undergo medical examinations, Mick to work with an entourage of screenwriters to put together the final touches on a script that's meant to star one of his longtime collaborators, the actress Brenda Morel. Also on hand, as a kind of confidant for both Fred and Mick, is a young actor, Jimmy Tree, preparing for a film in which he would play Adolf Hitler, an attempt to counter his popular image as the star of a sci-fi movie in which he played a robot. Sorrentino tries hard to bring together all the threads of each character's plot, including the breakup of Lena and Julian's marriage, Fred's resistance to a command performance for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and Mick's difficulties in coming up with a final scene for his film. But the pacing of Youth is too slow, and the manipulation of the themes of youth and age, past and present, too superficial. Caine and Keitel are two of the most dynamic actors ever, and Rachel Weisz and Paul Dano are certainly worthy of their company, but Sorrentino tamps down their energies. The only time Youth ever comes to life is when Jane Fonda finally makes her appearance as the aging, rather blowsy Brenda, in a performance that reminds us how good she has always been. She delivers the worst news Mick could imagine: that she has decided not to appear in his film but to do a TV series. But Sorrentino follows up her scene with one that feels ripped off from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), in which Mick, like Fellini's Guido long blocked from completing his film, finds himself surrounded in an Alpine meadow by the women from his earlier movies. It's not so much shamelessly derivative as it is pointless. Sorrentino is a formidably imaginative writer-director, as demonstrated by his dazzlingly off-beat TV series The Young Pope and his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) -- also indebted to Fellini but with a more inventive twist. Youth has touches of inspiration, but too often gets snarled in its own plots.

Cinemax