The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)

Manjinder Virk in The Arbor

Cast: Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Natalie Gavin, Parvani Lingiah, Danny Webb, Kate Rutter, Jimi Mistry, Robert Emms, Kathryn Pogson, George Costigan, Monica Dolan, Neil Dudgeon, Matthew McNulty, Lizzie Roper. Screenplay: Clio Barnard. Cinematography: Ole Bratt Birkeland. Production design: Matthew Button. Film editing: Nick Fenton, Daniel Goddard. Music: Harry Escott, Molly Nyman. 

The Arbor is a heartfelt, scathing docudrama about promise without fulfillment, centered on the playwright Andrea Dunbar and her children, particularly the eldest, Lorraine, who is played on screen by the actress Manjinder Virk, lip-synching the actual Lorraine's voice from recorded interviews. Director Clio Barnard uses this technique throughout the film, with the voices of Lorraine's siblings, her foster parents, and other members of the Dunbar family dubbed in place of the voices of the on-screen actors. It's an arresting device that runs the risk of having a film full of monologues, which Barnard avoids by staging the scenes in the actual locations, particularly the drab, run-down council estate (i.e. "public housing"), where the Dunbars lived. She also includes scenes from Dunbar's plays, and the film, Rita, Sue and Bob Too (Alan Clarke, 1987), that was made from one of them. The Arbor culminates in the story of Lorraine's descent into drug addiction and the consequent death of her small son. It's not a film designed to lift your spirits, but the effectiveness of Barnard's way of telling the story makes it well worth seeing. 

A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda

Cast: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, Maria Aitken, Tom Georgeson, Patricia Hayes, Geoffrey Palmer, Cynthia Cleese. Screenplay: John Cleese, Charles Crichton. Cinematography: Alan Hume. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: John Jympson. Music: John Du Prez. 

By all rights, A Fish Called Wanda shouldn't have worked: It's a blend of comic acting styles, from Monty Python to Hollywood to Broadway, under the direction of a septuagenarian best known for his work on that comparatively restrained classic of British postwar comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). It's vulgar and silly and hardly sensitive to social concerns -- it was denounced by disability rights advocates for the laughs derived from the Michael Palin character's stutter. And yet it remains one of the most successful screen comedies in history. It won Kevin Kline an Oscar for his performance as the dopey Übermensch Otto, and covered John Cleese, Palin, and Jamie Lee Curtis with glory -- especially Cleese, who not only wrote the screenplay (from a story he concocted with director Charles Crichton) but also reportedly did much of the directing for which Crichton got the Oscar nomination. The secret to its success is that it takes nothing seriously, especially the British and American national identity, but is so light-hearted in its offenses that they amuse rather than offend. It's full of little in-jokes, like calling the character played by Tom Georgeson "George Thomason," and naming Cleese's character Archie Leach without nodding to the fact that it was Cary Grant's real name. (That one may even be a double in-joke, since Grant himself ad-libbed a line about Archie Leach in Howard Hawks's 1941 screwball classic His Girl Friday.) Maybe it falls a little flat at the end, with the frantic business at Heathrow, but it would be hard to top what has gone before. 

In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

Volker Spengler in In a Year With 13 Moons

Cast: Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Eva Mattes, Günther Kaufmann, Lilo Pempeit, Isolde Barth, Karl Scheydt, Walter Bockmayer, Peter Kollek, Bob Dorsay, Gerhard Zwerenz. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Production design: Franz Vacek. Film editing: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben. 

You might need to be better versed in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than I am to give a full account of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons, but two things are immediately apparent: It's a fable about identity and desire, and it's a very personal film for its maker. Fassbinder wrote, directed, photographed, and edited the movie as a response to the death of his lover Armin Meier. The story gradually tells us about the life of Elvira Weisshaupt (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman who began as Erwin Weisshaupt, married and fathered a daughter, but after falling in love with a man decided to undergo surgery and become Elvira. Some ambivalence about her transition seems to remain: At the beginning of the film, she has dressed as a man in order to solicit sex from male prostitutes, but that ends with her being severely beaten. When she returns to the apartment she shares with her lover, Christoph (Karl Scheydt), he angrily packs a suitcase and storms out. Over the next few days, with the help of a prostitute named Zora (Ingrid Caven), Elvira seeks out a nun (Lilo Pempeit), whom she knew from her childhood in an orphanage and who tells her the truth about her parentage. She also visits with her ex-wife and her daughter, and makes her way in to see the man who inspired her transition, the powerful Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), a reunion that cannot end well. Despite the tragic drift of Elvira's story, there are ludicrous moments, as when she joins with the employees in Saitz's office in recreating a routine from a movie starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that is playing on the office television. There's also a gruesome sequence in a slaughterhouse as well as a brief interlude in which Elvira watches a man commit suicide after expounding his Schopenhaueresque philosophy of the will. This is Fassbinder at both his most enigmatic and his most heartfelt. 

10 to 11 (Pelin Esmer, 2009)

Mithat Esmer in 10 to 11

Cast: Nejat Isler, Mithat Esmer, Laçin Ceylan, Tayanç Ayaydin, Savas Akova. Screenplay: Pelin Esmer. Cinematography: Özgür Eken. Art direction: Naz Erayda. Film editing: Ayhan Ergürsel, Pelin Esmer, Cem Yildirim. 

Pelin Esmer's 10 to 11 gets its title from one of the items in Mithat's collection: a clock that he has carefully watched to determine precisely how much behind the time it runs. When he calculates that figure, he writes it on a label and attaches it to the clock, which is only one of the numerous clocks he has collected. We would call Mithat a hoarder: He lives in an Istanbul apartment with stacks and stacks of newspapers, which are only part of the various things he collects. Unfortunately, the building in which he lives is in the process of being condemned, and the elderly Mithat is the only holdout among the tenants willing to sign the building over to the authorities and relocate to a new building. He stubbornly resists the pleas of the head of the tenants association to do so, and finally is the only remaining resident, along with the caretaker, Ali. As the film ends even Ali has forsaken him, though he leaves behind an item that Mithat has long sought for his collection. Mithat's story is more droll and exasperating than melancholy, partly because Mithat is played by writer-director Esmer's uncle, Mithat Esmer, himself a real-life collector. The interplay between Mithat and Ali (Nejat Isler) becomes a delicately handled character study, with the naïve, provincial Ali gradually being educated in the ways of the big city by Mithat's cranky, precise demands. At one point, Mithat is visited by a nephew who, seeing a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka on a shelf, opens it to pour a drink, only to be scolded by Mithat because the unopened bottle was part of his collection. Even recapping the bottle isn't sufficient to restore it to the pristine state Mithat demands for that part of his collection. The story becomes a resonant commentary on the nature of time and memory, with Mithat determinedly attempting to hold onto the past in tangible form, as the changing city tries to sweep the past away. 

The Children of the Century (Diane Kurys, 1999)

Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche in The Children of the Century

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel, Stefano Dionisi, Robin Renucci, Karin Viard, Isabelle Carré, Patrick Chesnais, Arnaud Giovaninetti, Denis Podalydès, Olivier Foubert, Marie-France Mignal, Michel Robin, Ludivine Sagnier. Screenplay: Murray Head, Diane Kurys, François-Olivier Rousseau. Cinematography: Vilko Filac. Production design: Bernard Vézat. Film editing: Joëlle Van Effenterre. Music: Luis Bacalov. 

Handsomely mounted and splendidly acted, Diane Kurys's The Children of the Century ultimately goes the way of all biopic costume dramas: history and fact bumping up against dramatic and narrative imperatives, and opulence overwhelming story. It's fun to watch Juliette Binoche throw herself into the role of George Sand, but it's more fun to watch her in films in which she has to create a character from scratch rather than from what books have already us about the character. Benoît Magimel goes grandly over the top in giving us the mood-swinging Alfred de Musset, but at the cost of making us wonder why Sand would have put up with his excesses as much as she did. Still, there's magnificent chemistry between the actors in the best scenes and even if the film doesn't do much to illuminate the works of Sand and de Musset, it's easy on the eyes.  

Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)

Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey in Carmen Jones

Cast: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Olga James, Joe Adams, Brock Peters, Roy Glenn, Nick Stewart, Diahann Carroll. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, based on a book for a musical by Oscar Hammerstein II, an opera by Georges Bizet, Henri Meilhac, and Ludovic Halévy, and a novella by Prosper Mérimée. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Art direction: Edward L. Ilou. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Georges Bizet. 

Turning Georges Bizet's opera Carmen into a stage musical with an all-Black cast set in the American South was not the coolest idea to start with, especially when it resulted in such silliness as turning the bullfighter Escamillo into the prizefighter Husky Miller and the tavern run by Lillas Pastia into a roadhouse run by Billy Pastor. Still, Otto Preminger's film version of Carmen Jones has a lot to recommend it, particularly Dorothy Dandridge's Carmen, a fiery, committed performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress -- the first ever for a Black performer of either sex in a leading role. The theatrical version that premiered in 1943 was designed to be sung by musical theater performers, not opera singers, but when Otto Preminger agreed to direct the film version, he insisted on operatic voices, meaning that even though Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, the film's Joe, were well-known as singers, their roles and others had to be dubbed in the musical numbers. Marilyn Horne, then only 20, hadn't yet developed the vocal depth and flexibility that would make her an operatic superstar, but her voice matched well with Dandridge's speaking voice, so the illusion works. LeVerne Hutcherson was less successful in dubbing for Belafonte, whose own singing voice was so familiar that the disparity with Hutcherson's becomes obvious. But the best vocal performance in the film is probably that of Pearl Bailey, who belts out the Gypsy Song, "Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum," in her own voice and provides one of the movie's high points. The lyrics provided by Oscar Hammerstein II are sometimes banal -- the Toreador Song turns into "Stand Up and Fight Until You Hear the Bell" -- but usually serviceable. Unfortunately, the film falls apart at the end, with a clumsy staging of the final tragic confrontation of Carmen and Joe.   

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2013)

Cast: Lee Kang-sheng, Yang Kuei-Mei, Lu Yi-Ching, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lee Yi Cheng, Lee Yi Chieh, Wu Jin-kai. Screenplay: Song Peng Fei, Tsai Ming-liang, Tung Cheng-Yu. Cinematography: Liao Pen-Jung, Lu Ching-Hsin, Shong Woon-Chong. Art direction: Liu Masa, Tsai Ming-liang. Film editing: Lei Chen-Ching. 

To go from yesterday's post on Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break to today's on Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs is to go from one cinematic polarity, the hyperkinetic, to the opposite, the almost intolerably static. We mostly expect some version of the former from movies: Motion pictures are by definition supposed to move. But Tsai stubbornly resists that impulse, even to the point of almost eliminating what makes cinema its own distinct art form: montage. Instead we have long, long takes, beginning at the start of the film with a woman lethargically brushing her hair while she sits on the edge of a bed where two children are sleeping. One of the key sequences of Stray Dogs is a shot of two men in plastic raincoats standing on a traffic island while holding up advertising placards; the sequence lasts so long that we welcome the moments when the traffic light apparently changes and the eye is relieved by the movement of cross-traffic. And the film concludes with a man and a woman standing absolutely still, looking at something (the mural in the picture above) off-screen. Minutes pass in which nothing happens except for the tear that rolls down the woman's face. This kind of stasis can be enormously effective when there's a narrative direction to it, as in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), in which the fixed camera makes us watch as the banality of Jeanne's daily chores is established with long takes of her washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and so on, only to be disturbed when things go slightly wrong with those chores on a second visit to her apartment, giving Jeanne's story a forward movement. Stray Dogs accumulates such moments in the lives of the man with the advertising sign and his two children, along with three women -- including the one brushing her hair and the woman looking at the mural -- who interact with them. But in this film we seem to be looking for looking's sake. We may react to the social context of their lives -- the man and the children are homeless, and one of the women lives in a crumbling, water-streaked dwelling -- as the import of the film, but Tsai seems to feel no urgency about letting us know more about them than he shows us. There are moments of enigmatic drama unlike any we've seen in a film before, as when the man finds a cabbage in the bed he shares with the children. They have drawn a face on it, and the man first tries to smother it with a pillow, then attacks it with his teeth and nails and devours much of it. Any significance we may impose on this scene comes from us -- is he, for example, attacking the hopelessness of his existence, taking it out on the cabbage doll? -- but Tsai isn't going to tip his hand in that or any other direction. The film won numerous awards, and had several critics hauling out the word "masterpiece," but it also earned a dismissal from the New York Times critic Stephen Holden as a "glum, humorless exercise in Asian miserablism." I can't dismiss it that glibly, but I also can't endorse it with great enthusiasm. It's not a movie I would urge on anyone who isn't prepared to undergo a good deal of ennui -- my own finger hovered over the fast forward button several times -- in order to reflect the nature of the cinematic experience.  

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, James Le Gros, John Philbin, Bojesse Christopher, Julian Reyes, Daniel Beer, Chris Pedersen, Vincent Klyn, Anthony Kiedis, Dave Olson, Lee Tergesen. Screenplay: Rich King, W. Peter Iliff. Cinematography: Donald Peterman. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Mark Isham. 

Point Break is so kinetic a movie, so crammed with stunts and fights and chases, that it almost seems like a parody of an action flick. Just when you wonder how the movie can top its surfing sequences, it throws in a skydiving episode. When you're expecting another car chase, you get an exhilarating, not to say exhausting, foot chase. I have to wonder if what makes Kathryn Bigelow such a successful action director is that, as a woman, she has a special point of view on what testosterone-driven action looks like. The dialogue is loaded with machismo: "Young, dumb, and full of cum." "It's basic dog psychology: If you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit." Skydiving is "Sex with gods. You can't beat that!... One hundred percent pure adrenaline." "Why be a servant to the law when you can be its master?" "You gonna jump or jerk off?" After a fight: "This is stimulating, but we're out of here." It's the one female character of any consequence in the movie, Lori Petty's Tyler, who sardonically quits a scene by commenting, "Okay, too much testosterone around here for me." Bigelow's objectification of male display is what gives the movie its subversive quality.   

 

History Is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)

Leo Carrillo, Charles Boyer, and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night

Cast: Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur, Leo Carrillo, Colin Clive, Ivan Lebedeff, George Meeker, Lucien Prival, George Davis. Screenplay: Gene Towne, C. Graham Baker, Vincent Lawrence, David Hertz. Cinematography: David Abel. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Margaret Clancey. Music: Alfred Newman.

It starts as a domestic drama about a failing marriage, then becomes a suspense thriller, then a romance, then a rom-com with screwball touches, and winds up as a disaster movie. Objectively viewed, History Is Made at Night is a mess. But somehow it holds together, partly because of the chemistry of its leads, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, as well as some good comic acting by Leo Carrillo and the creepiness of Colin Clive, outdoing even his Dr. Frankenstein. And most of all, I think, by the direction of Frank Borzage, an under-recognized helmsman who seems willing to take anything the screenwriters and producer Walter Wanger throw at him. I've always been a fan of Arthur, and I think she's at her best here. She's not the sort of leading lady that makes you think men readily fall deeply in love with her, but here her character, Irene Vail, causes both the sinister steamship magnate Bruce Vail (Clive) and the suave Parisian headwaiter Paul Dumond (Boyer) to become obsessed with her, to the point that Dumond pursues her from France to America and Vail is willing not only to murder his chauffeur but even to sink an ocean liner with 3,000 passengers for her sake. Somehow, Arthur imbues the character with a quirky charm that makes all this credible. No, it's not a great movie by anyone's standards, but as a sample of Hollywood hokum it's at least great fun.  

À Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

Sandrine Bonnaire and Maurice Pialat in À Nos Amours

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Christophe Odent, Dominique Bresnehard, Cyril Collard, Cyr Boitard, Jacques Fischi, Valérie Schlumberger, Evelyne Ker, Pierre Novion, Tsilka Theodoru. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Jacques Loiseleux. Production design: Jean-Paul Camail, Arlette Langmann. Film editing: Valérie Condroyer, Sophie Coussin, Yann Dedet. 

Maurice Pialat is one of those directors who don't make it easy for viewers. He likes jump cuts from time to place that keep you slightly off-balance, and he seems to be obsessed with dysfunction. Not that À Nos Amours is hard to follow or hard to watch. It's graced with a skillful performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, making her screen debut in the key role of Suzanne, the teenage daughter in a family so volatile that it sometimes erupts into blows. Pialat himself plays the father, who finally gets so fed up with his wife (Evelyne Ker) and his dilettantish son (Dominique Bresnehard) that he abandons them -- not before knocking them around a few times. In response to this family craziness, Suzanne turns promiscuous, ignoring the attentions of Luc (Cyr Boitard), who loves her, and sleeping around until she finally decides to marry Jean-Pierre (Cyril Collard), though at the end of the film she has left him and is off to America. There's a raw immediacy to the film, created in part by Pialat's indifference to conventional exposition and transitions, so that we often feel as if we've been thrust into rooms to which we haven't been invited.