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. 

All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

Jessica Lange and Roy Scheider in All That Jazz

Cast: Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, Cliff Gorman, Ben Vereen, Erzsebet Foldi, Michael Tolan, Max Wright, William LeMessena, Irene Kane, Deborah Geffner, John Lithgow, Sandahl Bergman. Screenplay: Robert Alan Aurthur, Bob Fosse. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Philip Rosenberg, Tony Walton. Film editing: Alan Heim. Music: Ralph Burns. 

Bob Fosse's All That Jazz has a valedictory feeling to it, and not just because it's about a man foreseeing his own death, which strikingly foreshadows that of Fosse himself. It also feels like one of the last films of the 1970s, a decade associated with young hotshot American filmmakers who were determined to go their own way and to craft movies filled with personal vision that didn't sugarcoat the material or pander and talk down to the audience. After them, the myth goes, came the deluge of movies made with a view to spawning sequels and franchises. That summary is oversimple, of course, but perhaps it does illuminate why a film like All That Jazz continues to fascinate viewers, despite its inherent messiness and occasional excessive self-indulgence. It's held together by Fosse's abundant mad energy and by a cunning, committed performance by Roy Scheider as the driven, workaholic, self-destructive Joe Gideon, whom only the most obtuse would deny is a warts-and-all self-portrait by Fosse. All That Jazz is usually classified as a musical, because of its elaborate production numbers, but it fits the genre only loosely. It's a bit like 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) in that it's a "backstage musical" with a serious undercurrent, although the undercurrent becomes a torrent in All That Jazz, and the music becomes an ironic counterpoint to the sardonic drama of the life and death of Joe Gideon.   

L'Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)

Michel Terrazon and Marie Marc in L'Enfance Nue

Cast: Michel Terrazon, Linda Gutenberg, Raoul Billerey, Pierrette Deplanque, Marie-Louise Thierry, René Thierry, Henri Puff, Marie Marc, Maurice Coussonneau. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil. No credited production designer or film editor. 

L'Enfance Nue is as straightforward and unadorned a portrait of a dysfunctional childhood as you're likely to see, with no special pleading, no excuses or indictments. Young François (Michel Terrazon) does some bad things: He kills a cat (though he first tries to nurse the wounded animal), he steals compulsively, and he helps cause a serious automobile accident. But we also see that he's capable of affection, especially to the aged Meme (Marie Marc) in the second foster family to which he's posted. (Even then, he swipes money from the coin purse under her pillow.) Yet there's no attempt on the part of director Maurice Pialat to sentimentalize him, or even to manipulate our sympathies toward him as openly as François Truffaut does with the boy Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959). (Truffaut was one of the producers of L'Enfance Nue.) The title means, of course, "naked childhood," which is also the title under which it was sometimes released in English-speaking countries, and the nakedness consists of a steady realism, a documentary approach to telling François's story. There are moments of warmth in Pialat's film, such as a wedding party scene, but the general effect of L'Enfance Nue is a clear-eyed directness, as unsparing to the audience as it is to the characters. 

Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)

Dorothea Wieck and Hertha Thiele in Mädchen in Uniform

Cast: Hertha Theile, Dorothea Wieck, Emilia Unda, Hedy Krila, Ellen Schwanneke, Erika Mann, Else Ehser, Gertrud de Lalsky, Lene Berdolt, Margory Bodker, Charlotte Witthauer, Ethel Reschke, Doris Thalmer. Screenplay: Christa Winsloe, Friedrich Dammann, based on a play by Winsloe. Cinematography: Reimar Kuntze, Franz Weihmayr. Art direction: Fritz Maurischat, Friedrich Winckler-Tannenberg. Film editing: Oswald Hafenrichter. Music: Hanson Milde-Meissner. 

An aura of naughtiness still clings to the title of Mädchen in Uniform, which is unfortunate, as if this drama set in a German girls' school were some sort of exploitation flick. What we have instead is a sensible, sensitive account of the emotional confusion of adolescence, done with a finesse in acting and camerawork that mostly seemed to escape Hollywood filmmakers in 1931. The premise is this: Manuela (Hertha Theile) is the new girl at a school run by a grim-faced martinet (Emilia Unda) who believes that education should be a matter of Prussian discipline. Naturally, the students rebel as much as they can, as do some of the teachers, especially Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck), who believes in kindness and love as a way to inspire the girls. Naturally, all of the girls love Fräulein von Bernburg, who is quite good-looking, but Manuela, whose mother died when she was a baby, is especially drawn to her -- so much so that she freezes with embarrassment whenever the teacher calls on her in class. Eventually, this leads to a declaration of love before the whole school, and a consequent scandal that pits the head of the school against not only Manuela but also Fräulein von Bernburg. Director Leontine Sagan effectively stages both the boisterous scenes with the girls and the quiet ones between the principal characters. The film serves as an indictment of the harshness of the school system, which may have been as much a reason for its being banned when the Nazis came to power as its understanding and approving of the schoolgirl infatuation, which led to its being banned and heavily cut in the United States. It's often called a "lesbian classic," which it may well be, but it tells a universal story irrespective of sexual orientation.