Ferdy on Films, etc.

Get Ready for TOERIFC’S First Film

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I’m back at work after a 12-day break, so posting may be a bit sparse this week as I catch up on the stuff that pays the bills. But I want to remind you that The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club (TOERIFC) kicks off next Monday right here at Ferdy on Films, etc. with Jennifer Baichwal’s intriguing documentary The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia (2002). I have already written my review and hope that club members have been able to get their hands on a copy of the film. Remember, you don’t have to be a member to watch the film and participate. I encourage everyone with an interest in images (and isn’t that all of you?) to join in as we discuss the many issues this film explores. Go to the TOERIFC link for all the details.

As a warm-up, here’s a teaser from my review and a few questions to consider:

"There’s a saying that a picture’s worth 1,000 words. While this statement is a bit vague, I think I’m safe in saying that, generally, it means that a photograph can convey more information instantaneously than can be gotten from reading 1,000 words on the same subject. Photos are documents—living memories, even—of what we looked like at a certain time of life, where we’ve been, things we’ve seen, and people we knew and met. They tell us truths about ourselves that the vagaries of memory may have erased or distorted. They bear witness. But is a photograph a reliable witness?"

1. Should Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachian photographs be as controversial as they seem to be?
2. What are all the factors that make them controversial?
3. Does Adams have the right to use human subjects for his own purposes and enrichment?
4. Does Adams have a moral obligation to share his financial gains with the poor subjects of his photographs?
5. What do the consumers of these photographs think and feel about what they are viewing?
6. What other photographers have incurred the wrath of the public and their subjects? Why?
7. Does the artist create his or her own moral universe?
8. Why should we trust Shelby Lee Adams’ view that he is a respectful Appalachian insider?
9. Why should we trust the portrait of Adams and his subjects that director Jennifer Baichwal presents?
10. What is the true meaning of pictures?

The Break that Refreshes

Angela Lansbury

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If you want something done right, do it yourself. I've lived my life believing that adage. Nonetheless, I have been persuaded from time to time to delegate. Sometimes it goes well. This time, it was disastrous. I told my contractor time and again which one needed to be removed from office: a goofy-looking guy with helmet hair and a delusional look in his eyes. And did I say anything about rifles? I don't remember anything like that. Just drive him across the Illinois border; take his shoes, cellphone, and wallet; and make him get out of the car. We'll have him impeached before you can say "Rod Blagoe... Blaga..., uh, Blugah..." oh, never mind.

Never hire a zealot. That's my new adage.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Vampyros Lesbos (1970)
Director: Jesús Franco

By Roderick Heath

What better way to start the new year than with a psychedelic lesbian vampire freak-out?

Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) and her boyfriend Omar (Andris Monales, billed as Victor Feldman) attend an erotic cabaret show one night in Istanbul, where they watch a kinky stage act in which a dark-haired woman straddles a prostrate, wooden blonde. Linda is transfixed: the brunette exactly resembles a figure that keeps appearing in her dreams, calling to her incessantly from a mysterious island amidst a plethora of repetitive, fetishist images, for example, droplets of blood dribbling down a pane glass door, a sky-flailing red kite, and teeming scorpions.

Linda works as an agent for an Istanbul real estate firm. Soon she is sent off on a mission to negotiate a real estate deal with Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda, billed as Susann Korda); Linda is overseeing the transfer of assets of a Count Dracula and his family to Carody. On her journey to the Mediterranean coast, she is put up in a hotel where she is warned by the sleazy porter Memmet (director Franco) about the dangers of going to the Countess’ private island; she soon finds that Memmet himself is a crazed killer collecting corpses in the basement. Linda flees for the presumed safety of the Countess’ island, but things don’t get much saner there. She is astounded to encounter the images from her dreams, and the reclining, bikini-clad form of the Countess, who invites her to bathe nude within a minute of meeting. In the night, the Countess enters her room, seduces her, and then bites her in the neck. When she awakens in the morning, Linda is dazed and has a vision of the Countess floating dead in a pool, at which point she blacks out and awakens later in a private psychiatric clinic.

Jesús Franco, born in Madrid in 1930, wanted to be a jazz musician, and gained his first film credits as an assistant director and composer for Juan Antonio Bardem’s (uncle of Javier) Comicos (1954). A sometime trash novelist and all-around busybody, Franco made a breakthrough in the grindhouse universe with Gritos en la Noche (The Awful Dr. Orloff, 1962), an adaptation of his own book and a rip-off of Eyes Without a Face (1959). Franco has directed more than 180 features and stands today as one of the gods in the pantheon of Eurotrash sex-and-horror auteurs of the late 1960s. He gained mainstream visibility by taking over the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu series.

But Franco maintained his sideline as an erotic-minded surrealist, one part Luis Buñuel, one part Marquis de Sade (whose works he has adapted several times), and with Necronomicon (1967), gained the praise of no less a personage than Fritz Lang, who called it the only sex movie he’d ever watched all of because of its intoxicating beauty. In that golden age of semi-underground cinema, Franco worked between the poles of respected filmmakers like Buñuel and genre director Mario Bava, and gruesome hackmeisters of the ilk of Antonio Margheriti and Adrian Hoven. Along the way, he accumulated, by the IMDb’s count, some 69 pseudonymous credits.

Vampyros Lesbos is quintessential of its era: infused with a decorative, meandering lushness in its designs and cinematic effects, casual perversity, pseudo-psychedelic style, and striking experimental music score by Manfred Hübler and Siegfried Schwab (Franco did the score for the heavily edited Spanish cut) that occasionally dips into saucy jazz-pop during pointless sunbathing scenes. It’s an uneasy mixture of oneiric, splintered-narrative surrealism and seamy whack-off flick. It lacks the lightness of touch of Jean Rollin, the preeminent director of underground horror films of the ’70s, or Buñuel. Franco loves his zoom lens. Picturesque Istanbul sunset? Zoom shot. Naked sunbathing scene? Zoom shot. Moth crawling up a window? Zoom in, baby. Cheesy as these effects can be, Franco nonetheless labours to weave a totality of style, a restless, oneiric sensibility that’s genuinely entrancing. Or, as a friend put it when I played her a snatch of the soundtrack, ‘This makes me feel like I’m tripping!’

Vampyros Lesbos’ plot moves according to a fitting dream logic, and melds two highly disparate mythologies to evoke a no man’s land of sexual and moral confusion. Earlier in 1970, Franco had directed an attempt to make a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker with Christopher Lee entitled El Conde Dracula (which also starred Soledad Miranda as Lucy); Vampyros is its semi-sequel, but it executes a perverse spin on Stoker, with Linda as Harker and Countess Nadine as Dracula and entwining the legend of Sappho, with its predatory anti-heroine inhabiting a sun-struck Grecian isle, her irresistible call cutting through Linda’s defences even when she lies in bed with her boyfriend, bringing home a peculiarly literal vision of the call of the forbidden. Carody herself was a childhood victim of rape by soldiers defiling her native Hungary, from which she was rescued but then vampirized by Count Dracula. This led to her rejection of men in general, except for her silent, loyal servant Morpho (Jose-Martinez Blanco). Her last lover was Memmet’s missing wife, Agra (Heidrun Kussin), who is in the same clinic that Linda washes up in, completely mad, psychically linked to the Countess, writhing ecstatically and howling in pain according to what signals she receives from her mistress. How Linda got from the island into the clinic is never explained, but she is soon reunited with Omar. He becomes the target of the Countess, who has followed Linda to Istanbul determined to take her back.

Franco’s recurring fascinations—apart from hot chicks making out with each other and killing guys—include a blurring of the borders between dream, life, and performance. As in other Franco films like Necronomicon, and Venus In Furs, the villain is a cabaret artiste, taunting with and disappearing within her ritualised erotic acts. Vampyros begins with a lengthy performance sequence in which Nadine performs, enacting her narcissistic seduction of her prey (she makes love to herself in a mirror before turning her attention to a passive, naked blonde). But the second time she gives this performance, she actually feasts on her partner, to the audience’s wild applause. Nadine’s servant, like that of several of Franco’s villains, is named Morpho, cutting right to the heart of their perfervid confusion of dreams, identity, desire, and the way these elements intertwine. The script is so poor (immortal dialogue: “Can you tell me more about Count Dracula and his family?”) that credited cowriter Jaime Chávarri denies having anything to do with it. But it’s also essentially superfluous: Vampyros Lesbos tells a story of a sort, but it’s better taken as a fugue, and works well as a surreal meditation on the nature of unconscious desire.

There’s the inevitable soft-core clinch of Linda and Nadine, actually the flattest scene in the film until Nadine bites her. Elsewhere, Franco’s images are deliriously fetishist in bent, for example, the visions of the Countess calling to her would-be lover with arms outstretched like a primal priestess, her red scarf wavering in the breeze, to her final demise. Nadine is associated visually with both a catcher of fish (her dinnertime seduction of Linda is backgrounded by a great net) and a venomous scorpion waiting to sting. Franco conjures an unsettling mood, though he indulges no familiar gothic touches. The Countess’ island abode is hyper-modern; Franco’s surrealism is closer in mood to Resnais than to Murnau, and even Nadine’s family castle is hardly a cobweb-strewn dungeon. The action almost always takes place in radiant, delirium-inducing daylight, emphasised by the sunstruck lushness of its Turkish settings. This film seems to have influenced likes the of Tarantino, who openly admires Franco, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (which always showed signs of ’60s and ’70s Euro-horror, underneath its deadpan Kubrickian obsessiveness), particularly in the orgy sequence and its weird music.

Lurking within this trippy vision are dashes of psychosexual satire. Linda’s psychiatrist listens to her account of her dream whilst drawing doodles and recommends she have more sex. Spurned husband Memmet turns into a savage serial killer, trying to enforce a perfect sadomasochistic control over women. Dr. Alwin Seward (Dennis Price), the private clinic’s director, pretends to want to cure and expel the evil and madness that has claimed the women under his care, but actually eagerly wishes to embrace the possibility of eternal supernatural life. When he meets the Countess, he begs her for this, but she contemptuously has Morpho kill him instead. Given that only a few years before this film was made homosexuals were being given electric shocks in aversion therapy by men of science, Franco’s cynicism about it is understandable and prescient. Omar and his father, evoking the revenge of the patriarchy, set out to bring down their Sapphic enemy. But in the end, it’s Linda who euthanizes the hopeless Countess by jamming a pin in her eye, after almost giving in to the temptation to feast on Nadine and become the new vampire queen. Agra drops dead and Morpho commits suicide. The vision Linda had of the Countess dead in the pool is reconfigured as the image of one of the island’s teeming scorpions drowned by the tide. If Franco reveals his lack of courage, it’s that he plays the game of neatly tidying up his film with a finale that returns us to stable, familiar male-female relations and morality.

Franco’s no-name cast allows him to push the boundaries without actually approaching porn. Stroemberg is a nonentity, and the presence of aging, ill-looking Price, the gay blade of Kind Hearts and Coronets, dubbed into German no less, is just weird. Miranda is the film’s core—the tragic cult actress, who died the same year in a car crash shortly after being offered a major studio contract, plays the wicked lady with the right mixture of distance, severity, sensual knowledge, and a hint of the tragic. l

The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969)
Director: Bryan Forbes

By Marilyn Ferdinand

By now you may know that I find year-end wrap-ups a difficult exercise. I don’t make lists, so I can’t fall back on that well-worn discussion starter. I hardly see any mainstream films, so I can’t form a common bond with the moviegoing audience at large. I look for the films in the attic, so to speak, so it’s not always easy to relate to even my most loyal readers. What I’ve decided to do to bid 2008 farewell is present you with a film that I think represents this moment in time—the fading of a dark and destructive era in the United States, and the rise of hope for a more peaceful, just, and generous country than we’ve seen in a long time.

The Madwoman of Chaillot started life as a play. Written in 1942 during the Nazi Occupation of France and first mounted in Paris in 1945, Jean Giraudoux story imagines good triumphing over evil, life enduring against living death, and above all, the survival of France and all that is unique about the country. Its fantasy quality and 19th century nostalgia are reminiscent of the fairytale and period films French filmmakers were forced to retreat to during the Occupation to appease the German authorities. Some of these films conveyed a veiled message of resistance that only their French audiences would understand. Thus, I imagine these films influenced Giraudoux in his protest against the Nazis, lending weight to this exaggerated parable. It’s a message that was current when the film was made, and unfortunately, it still reverberates today.

The film announces visually the turbulence of the late 1960s and the forces that will join to set things right: a street protest violently broken up by the Paris police and a tall, elderly woman dressed in fin de siècle garb moving through the streets causing minor havoc—cutting a surveyor’s line so that she doesn’t have to walk around it, pouring a window washer’s bucket of water into a window box of flowers. The woman is our madwoman, Countess Aurelia (Katharine Hepburn), on her way to her favorite café in the Chaillot district. She will ally with one of the young protestors, Roderick (Richard Chamberlain), nephew of the rich and lunatic Prospector (Donald Pleasence) who sets the plot in motion.

Roderick returns to his uncle’s home just as a new addition to The Prospector’s collection of toilets is being hung on the wall—a very rare outhouse from Johannesburg for which The Prospector paid 1.5 million francs. Roderick, bleeding from the blow he received from a policeman’s baton, goes up the stairs to tend to his wound. The Prospector complains that he is bleeding all over the towels. Roderick answers that he has been injured doing something that matters, to which The Prospector sneers that he’s all talk and no action. He then hands Roderick a large suitcase containing a bomb and tells him that if he really wants to take action, he should plant it in Room 22 of the Municipal Hall, where a truly nefarious bureaucrat is making plans for war.

The scene switches to a Chaillot café where The Reverend (John Gavin) and The Commissar (Oscar Homolka) sit at a table awaiting the arrival of the rest of “The Board.” The General (Paul Henreid) and The Chairman (Yul Brynner) arrive in a white limousine. Shortly thereafter, The Broker (Charles Boyer) arrives to tell The Chairman how, with a bit of market manipulation, he helped The General make 5.5 million francs. Happily, The Chairman announces he will pay for lunch, until he recalculates his profit and comes up with only 5 million francs: “You pay for lunch,” he instructs The Broker.

The usual denizens of the café, including a juggler (Gaston Palmer), a flower seller (Harriet Ariel), and The Ragpicker (Danny Kaye), come to The Board’s table, as they do to all the tables. The Chairman rudely dismisses them and shouts insults and orders at their waitress Irma (Nanette Newman). He tells the rest of The Board that he is waiting to see a man he has never met to receive instructions for his twelfth successful campaign. This is no ordinary rendezvous: the stranger will have the very key to the scheme and the proper name for it, and they will recognize each other through some strange look in the eye. As it happens, the man The Chairman is looking for is The Prospector. Indeed, The Prospector comes over to their table and having secured enough dirty secrets from each of them to insure against a double-cross, reveals the secret. He has been all over Paris sniffing and sampling the tap water and finally found what he was looking for—the taste of petroleum at this very café. “There’s oil under the streets of Chaillot,” he declares. The Chairman’s eyes light up as he orders the Board into the café to sample the tap water at the bar, bothered by the appearance of an eccentric—The Countess—demanding her usual table from its current occupant.

The only thing standing in the way of drilling is a pesky clerk who won’t issue a permit. The Prospector has seen to that by sending his nephew to blow the man up. Unfortunately for The Board, Roderick sees a family with small children sitting outside of Room 22 and runs to a bridge over the Seine and tosses the bomb in. He is mistakenly thought to be jumping, and gets punched unconscious by a policeman. The Countess and Irma see to his care. When he comes to, he and Irma lock eyes and fall in love. When Roderick realizes his uncle planned to do away with a simple clerk and the reasons behind the assassination attempt, he reveals all to the good people of Chaillot. The Ragpicker—the philosopher of the group—must explain to the Countess how the world has changed. “I looked at people, and they looked back. Now, they stare back with dead eyes.” Realizing that they are now living in an age of The Golden Calf, the Countess lays a trap to stop The Board from destroying the world.

The view from the café appears to be the same one used when little Pascal first finds his balloon companion in The Red Balloon, establishing Chaillot as a magical place for this viewer. Certainly to the “good guys” in this film, their world is indeed a wondrous place. For Countess Aurelia and her three similarly garbed friends—Gabrielle the virgin (Guiletta Massina, in a rare English-speaking role), Constance the Madwoman of Passy (Margaret Leighton), and Josephine the adjudicator (Edith Evans)—the world is an illusion into which they can slip when they aren’t living in their ancient memories of youth. The common men and women of Chaillot must break through this illusion to convince the Countess that the world has changed, grown coarse and mean, to rouse her to action. The Countess is, in fact, a representative of historical France—an aristocrat from the 19th century, when monarchy returned for a time to the French Republic. Her decision to exterminate the members of The Board is the type that an absolute monarch would make; it is Josephine who insists that a trial must take place, thus marrying the ideals of the Republic with the nostalgic place of the monarchy in France.

To lure her victims to her mansion, she plays on their greed. She visits each of them and shows them a sample of the oil that is under her home—in fact, a mixture created in the café kitchen. She has the opportunity to see for herself the darkness they spread. From The Broker she learns that to make futures trading profitable, crops that could feed thousands may be burned. She watches The General bumble around with nuclear missiles. The Reverend reveals himself to be an Elmer Gantry with an intolerance for other religions. And The Prospector and The Chairman are unbridled greed itself. These episodes may be preaching to the converted among many in the audience, but they are important in order for the Countess to enter the modern world and do what must be done.

The members of The Board are delightfully villainous. Yul Brynner and Donald Pleasence are yin and yang as The Chairman and The Prospector, their bald heads nodding in unison, their madness perfectly matched. Brynner assumes a maniacal glee as he plays his role large, not an unpleasant caricature by any means. Pleasence, however, really convinces as a man who trusts his nose. When the others wonder at his prediction of oil under Paris, he wags his nose in their faces, turning profile to emphasize its impressive size, as a phallic symbol of his power over nature.

The most compelling scene—and also the most stagey—of the film is the trial. Josephine (a shrill creation of Dame Edith) rules that the criminals can be tried in absentia as long as they are provided with proper counsel. The Ragpicker is chosen to defend them. This may be Danny Kaye’s finest hour on film. He presents arguments about the legitimacy of progress and the rights of innovators over those who would squander their resources, and wins Constance over. This alarming development encourages him, and he reveals more of his clients’ naked purposes. Revealing the true hubris of the oligarchs, The Ragpicker sums up his defense with, “We buy the legislators who make the law. We ARE the law!” Kaye’s performance taps the potential cruelty and arrogance in us all, infusing The Ragpicker with the integrity a defense attorney should have for his clients, but also their guilt. Those who only know Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen are in for a shock here.

Katharine Hepburn has a sufficiently imperial air to glide easily into the role of a nearly untouchable grand dame. Yet she fails to capture a real sense of madness, preferring to be a garden-variety eccentric in a role that calls upon her to commit some highly significant murders. We see moments of callousness in the Countess during the opening sequence and in her offhanded treatment of her mad women friends. But Hepburn softens her character so much, particularly by dissolving into tears early and often, that the strength and, yes, righteous cruelty she represents doesn’t come through. Her supporting cast offers little to bolster the sense of power that I always associate with a nation of commoners who could overthrow a monarch and establish a republic.

Bryan Forbes is entirely too enamored of the keyhole shooting style that was popular in England at the time. He frequently shoots Hepburn through a “gauze” of leaves, scenery, and monuments, perhaps to suggest her illusory life; to me, however, it just looked like he got his framing wrong. The cinematography in the Countess’ mansion is appropriately gothic, but not nearly as horrifying as it could or should have been as, say, the kangaroo courtroom in M was. The film’s look is at its best in the streets of Paris, where the cause the Countess and her friends are fighting for can be seen and appreciated.

While The Madwoman of Chaillot comes up short in various areas, the overall impression of a cautionary fable does its job. Standing at the doorway of 2009, I hope along with the rest of the world that the United States will be a better place in the coming year. But in keeping with the above title card, I’m not holding my breath. l

By Roderick Heath

Considering that I’ve always taken more pleasure in digging through the ephemera of the past and the detritus of pop culture more than pretending that right now is so bloody important, I don’t think I should feel as phony as I do writing this. For starters, there’s the absurdity of the notion that we all have the same “year”. This year saw my enrollment in a Film Studies class that played like a Gary Trudeau satire (now kids, you are to analyse the awesome artistry of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone). It also saw the release of a stupefying number of films, few of which I’ll ever see. And I inevitably wonder what’s being made today that will provoke interest, excitement, the thrill of the unexpected, the signs of the artful, in 40 years? Where amongst the avalanche of films released this year are the little gems, the future cult films? Are there any? What, in short, will last? Wasn’t it only a few years ago when people thought films like A Beautiful Mind or Crash were important in some fashion?

Doomsday; The Strangers

Many of the best movies I’ve seen in the past 18 months are strange mutts produced by similar lines of thought. Films like An Old Mistress, Boarding Gate, Doomsday, and The Strangers are works made by intelligent filmmakers hunting for the scent of real blood and bone in the suspect qualities of old-school trash, florid melodrama, film noir, and no-budget horror. The year that saw the death of “termite art” theorist Manny Farber could be called a vast aesthetic tribute to his ideas. Or is the increasing tendency to nail films as “Oscar bait” the final process in the dumbing down of pop culture, a great excuse to ignore everything except the new comic book movie, which, by the by, has to provide the requisite amount of “darkness” and “relevance” in “parable” in compensation for the dearth of serious cinema? Sometimes our contemporary culture feels like the victim of a car crash learning to walk again.

Either way, I suppose in the next couple of months I may work up the enthusiasm to pretend that David Fincher is some kind of artist and that I care anymore about Clint Eastwood. There’s a host of said Oscar bait that’s been jammed into the last weeks of this year like a wholesale clearance at a high class but unprofitable carpet warehouse, and many other films anticipated still nowhere in sight (Hurry up, Let the Right One In, Avanti, Gomorrah. Please move your arse, Rachel Getting Married). More than ever, ambition in Hollywood has become a wage-slave in an Oscar-hungry boutique, trading desperately in the Christmas build-up and abandoning the rest of the year, like the Romans did their empire, to hordes of ravening cinematic barbarians.

Angel

I saw some of the best films I’ve ever seen in the past twelve months—trouble is, they were all from last year. My world was appropriately rocked by the glory of There Will Be Blood, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days (which both went on my all-time list), Death Proof (my current favourite film), Verhoeven’s gutsy Black Book, and Francois Ozon’s delightfully weird Angel, and I did not demand my money back for the likes of Atonement, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Eastern Promises; Romance & Cigarettes; Lust, Caution; No Country for Old Men; and Sweeney Todd either. Good, bad, and ugly, these were all works of real cinema that demanded at some point during their running time for us to ask just what our definitions of quality, invention, art, and entertainment are.

10,000 BC; Get Smart

I know I’m not alone in kissing goodbye to one of the dullest years of cinema in living memory (and I lived through 2001). What can one say about 10,000 BC, the dullest caveman flick ever made (and that’s saying something—seen Clan of the Cave Bear lately?) or the utter catastrophe of Australia? The limp Get Smart? The pointless The Edge of Love? The instantly forgettable The Other Boleyn Girl? The last two especially would have been prime Oscar nets if they’d had the slightest idea of what they wanted to achieve.

If 2007 was the year for works of grandly calamitous art, reflecting the fullest measure of an anxiety-wearied age by mixing fury and fear in many measures, 2008 reflected a year of transition—it didn’t know what it was about, but knew it wanted things to improve. The strongest fare came from some tried and tested sources. My favourite for the year was Catherine Breillat’s Une Vieille Maîtresse, which forcefully interrogated assumptions about the past, about gender and love, and certain genres of film-making. Mike Leigh’s deft Happy-Go-Lucky, which was badly marketed and even more badly described by most critics, was his most entertaining film since Topsy-Turvy and his most sleekly assembled since Career Girls. More importantly, it extended artfully on themes long crucial to Leigh—the necessity of communal existence and the unnoticed but vital presence of the people who make that existence possible.

The Mother of Tears

It was impossible, after watching Asia Argento lick the blood off Fu’ad Ait Aattou’s bullet wound, to take the likes of The Duchess seriously. It was Asia’s year: as well as Maîtresse and her dad’s The Mother of Tears, she possessed the screen in Olivier Assayas’ gorgeously cryptic Boarding Gate. Assayas’ overcooked dialogue hardly obscures that he’s one of the few directors trying to stare modern dislocation dead in the eye; whereas Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor represents, to my mind, where indie cinema is, for better and for worse. Intense, well-acted, real-feeling, and a movie with something to say, it still leaned heavily on familiar props of the cute little film where people of different backgrounds come together, someone learns a life lesson, and our worthy multicultural fantasies come (temporarily) true—a kind of mix-tape for middle-age wannabe radicals. Still, it sported probably the year’s finest romantic coupling, and could be remembered as the signal Obama Year film. At least it wasn’t Juno.

As far blockbusters went, I found it a year of mixed blessings. Steven Spielberg didn’t quite nail his return to his finest franchise, with the stupidly plotted, badly structured, anti-climactic Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But it delivered a master class in how to shoot comedic action scenes, and had a kind of breezy, throwaway sense of humour (particularly in the delightful support turns of Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett) that stood in high contrast to the dour, lacklustre pretension and sloppy edits of the year’s most astoundingly overrated blockbuster, The Dark Knight. The latter film operated like a straitjacket on one of the age’s finest actors (Christian Bale) whilst liberating another (Heath Ledger, in a good year for Aussies playing villains) all too briefly.

Iron Man

More entertaining than Knight and more solid than Indiana Jones was Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, a neatly done, disposable superhero flick that ended up looking like a masterpiece by default, and sporting some of the year’s best actin, even though it wasn’t really as good as we said. Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted had the potential to be the year’s greatest thrill ride, with its Fight Club-rapes-The Matrix set-up, but something went wrong thanks to garish cinematography plotting so dumb (did the hero really bring down his enemies with a horde of explosive rats?) a five year old would have been offended. As far as genre bollocks went, Neil Marshall’s giddy, unconscionable Doomsday kicked all their arses: it dove head first into revved-up car chases, gross-out effects, and ’80s references so obvious that the film finally became something of a mix-tape of the films I grew up with—indeed, it’s a film that’s testimony of the unshakable effect of disreputable but fascinating movie-making of the past. I wouldn’t exactly call it good, but it wasn’t dead either.

The Black Balloon

Aussie cinema’s desperate straits yielded, under the great cloud of Luhrmann’s Australia, Elissa Down’s The Black Balloon, a meat-and-veg little-people film that won a bunch of Australian Film Institute awards chiefly because it made money. It told us that retarded people are occasionally irritating to be around, and that Gemma Ward is awfully cute. Yes, we knew that. Ward was better used—even though she had about three lines of dialogue and spent the whole film wearing a mask—in the best horror film of the year, Brian Bertino’s The Strangers. A thin but beautifully handled exercise in pure dread that proved that someone, at least, remembers what the cinematic frame is about, The Strangers offers the possibility that the horror genre may escape its dreadful rut. Of any of the films I saw with a chance of being remembered as the cinemaniac’s dirty little secret, it’s the type that could fare very well.

Andrei Rublev; Bend in the River

What else? The greatest film I saw this year—possibly ever—was Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, a titanic work of eccentric artistry that managed to be both austere and implacable, and yet immersive and accessible. Films like that only come along once in a generation. What else? Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata, Kagemusha and The Bad Sleep Well; Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us; Val Guest’s The Abominable Snowman; Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels; Reed’s The Key; Godard’s The Little Soldier; Carne’s Hotel du Nord; Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express; DeMille’s The Plainsman; Jack Hill’s Spider-Baby; Jesus Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos; Anthony Mann’s Bend in the River; Franju’s Eyes without a Face; Grèmillon’s Stormy Waters; and Fleischer’s See No Evil. These films all remind me that, in the end, cinematic culture is far from being only the mediocrities and minor triumphs of the moment—it’s an evolving thing, depending not just upon what comes out at the moment, but also on the perspective we gain from discovering its history. l

Boarding Gate (2008)
Director: Olivier Assayas

By Roderick Heath

Miles (Michael Madsen) is a middle-aged tycoon who owes large sums of money to some disreputable Chinese loan sharks. He announces to his partner Andrew (Alex Descas) that he’s going to sell his share in their business to them. Shortly thereafter, his ex-girlfriend Sandra (Asia Argento) reenters into his life. She had been pimped out to Miles’ business acquaintances and indulged in all the excesses of the high life, leaving her a pale, wraithlike, but still fire-eyed survivor. Entering his office one day, the pair swiftly click back into the taunting, provocative, addled rhythms of relating—she recalling his drugged-up impotence, he proposing that she really loved being his slave-for-hire—that tell the whole gruesome story of their affair. Now Sandra works for a furniture importing firm in France, run by Lester (Carl Ng) and Sue Wang (Kelly Lin), married business partners she met through Miles.

Sandra and her friend and coworker Lisa (Joana Preiss) have their own importing business, with a cocaine shipment coming through in the furniture Sandra plans to sell to finance her final escape from France. She wants to open a nightclub in Beijing, a project Miles refused to finance because he knew she’d never come back to him. But the drug deal turns sour, and Sandra only escapes thanks to the intervention of Lester. She’s having an affair with Lester, which he seems to be obscuring from Sue. Sandra is invited to Miles’ sterile villa, and their woozy relationship seems primed to pick up again, leading to such moments as her tying her belt around his neck and jerking him off, and he locking in her and promising to ravish her. Then, when he’s on his knees, handcuffed and giggling, she pulls out a gun and empties the clip into his back.

Up to this point, and despite the genre suspense of Sandra and Lester’s escape from the blown drug deal, Boarding Gate seems closer in sensibility to the likes of The Night Porter or Last Tango in Paris—an alienation-coated study of a cruelly sensual, destructive relationship, with two epic sequences in which Sandra and Miles converse, flirt, combust, and finally annihilate. Abruptly, the film changes tack with a dancer’s agility, becoming a Hitchcockian chase saga, as Sandra flees her act and we discover the reasons behind it. Into that Orphic realm—that place that Hitchcock defined as the essence of his style of thriller, the place beneath everyday life which must be ventured into to have a hope of returning to life.

Boarding Gate is, in some ways, a pure, reductive B-movie, with Argento as its manga-gorgeous muse (Sandra herself had created a sci-fi heroine for a website with whom Miles identifies her), and depending on Argento’s ever-ready love of stripping off and stripping down to shift from wilted orchid to Venus Flytrap in a blink. Yet it’s also deeply eccentric. Although the plot is more deftly constructed than first glance might suggest, the film never cares particularly about explaining it to us, and the final 20 minutes constantly pervert the expected. Sandra is a morally null heroine who acts through pure, outraged nerve whom we root for mainly because of her nihilistic determination to survive. Sandra’s killing Miles seems an act of amour fou, but actually is motivated by money: she’s been promised to be paid for knocking him off by Lester and Sue, who in turn, have been employed by a shadowy international network, and finally it leads back to Andrew, eager to eliminate his flaky partner. Sandra soon plunges down the rabbit hole. When she reaches Hong Kong, where she has been promised safe haven by Lester, she finds that her friend and confidante Lisa has been murdered by jittery local thugs, and that she, too, seems set for a shallow grave.

The film cunningly constructs a likeness of exploitation, and questions simple dividing lines between the types of abuse people can dole out to each other. Though Miles (like Madsen’s Budd in Tarantino’s Kill Bill) is filled with regret and shame for his evil acts, he also cannot resist resuming them, because they’re all that keeps him alive. He’s a clinically cynical vision of a modern man—a divorced father, consuming aplenty, driven by a nameless lust that only finds it satiety in Sandra, not by being with her but in possessing her. Sandra mocks him with his failed purchase of a Russian petrochemical plant and ebbing clout as a businessman, analogous to his failing grip on her. Her final murder of him is a claim of financial, sexual, and emotional independence, revealing a blunt desire to escape Miles’ intolerable idea of existence.

Director Olivier Assayas, who established himself with Irma Vep (1995), a tribute to a cinematic ur-text (Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampyres, 1916), specialises in films about a globalised world with an increasingly fragmented sense of humanity filtered through a hazy, kaleidoscopic visual sensibility that captures an era numbed by technological glaze and the comedown blues after a night of cocktails, Ecstasy, and kinky sex. Boarding Gate forms a loose trilogy withDemonlover (2002) and Clean (2004) as a globe-trotting study of terminal emotional exhaustion, the illimitable capacity for depravity, and the simplicity of decency. Assayas maintains a tenuous space between being a facile, faux moralist, video-clip director like David Fincher and an equally boring, plain moralist through his bare enjoyment of the spectacles of sex and excess and shimmering, surreal surfaces of modernity beneath which lies a grim Hades.

Eventually, astute critics will make a broad study of the modern world through the recurring images and moods in films like Assayas’, Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Matthias X. Oberg’s Stratosphere Girl, Zhang Ke Jia’s The World, and the last chapter of Hou-hsiao Hsien’s Three Times . These films are defined by the brutal edifices and labyrinthine guts of great, oriental metropolises and the great communality of modern culture, but also its increasing atomization. Their complex quotations and mockeries of genres and pop canards, their sense of vast paranoia that infuses the urban and suburban everyday form the core of a new breed of modern, internationalist filmmaking, broad in compass, sons and daughters of Antonioni and Batman. Assayas’ poor ear for English dialogue often results in scenes that hit their beats too heavily, but that’s pretty well beside the point. Indeed, Assayas winks at the corny tropes of genre dialogue, especially in Argento’s climactic encounter with a plot-explaining international woman of mystery (played, with a kind of robotic realism, by alt-culture goddess Kim Gordon) who plays gatekeeper to Sandra’s escape. Assayas conscientiously turns the trappings of the international jetsetter life into a glittering mockery.

As far as I’m concerned, 2008 is the year of Asia Argento: between this film, Une Vieille Maîtresse, and her father’s The Mother of Tears, she’s taken a hammer to every nicety expected of an actress today. She—not the woefully overexposed Angelina Jolie—is both the sex symbol and symbol smasher of the age. And if Madsen gets any cooler, by the time he hits 60, he’s going to single-handedly reverse global warming. Ng has a lean, Bogartian intensity, and it’s almost a disappointment that he doesn’t get to come out swinging as a badass. Assayas stages his scenes with an offhand brilliance, building to a breathless gunfight and chase through Honk Kong’s streets and a confrontation with the snide Sue in a karaoke parlour. This comes across as a particularly hellish devastation of the portrait of karaoke parlour as portal of international brotherhood and idealism in Lost In Translation. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux paints in stupefyingly beautiful widescreen frames images of office banality, sexual explosiveness, and exotic locales, all with the same glaze of slithery, icy clarity.

Assayas’ genre bending is a front to explore the nature of ardour. Sandra is no femme fatale, in that she is motivated not by a desire to destroy, but by her spurned capacity for love. The film’s finale is all the more taut for being almost a throwaway, as Sandra, believing Lester has betrayed and abandoned her, prepares to stab him and steal away with the bounty Andrew has paid him. The audience knows that Lester has not betrayed her and has left the rapacious, untrustworthy Sue, so experiences anxiety that she will kill the man who loves her, having been sucked in so far by this inhuman life. But she finally walks away, disappearing into the great contemporary haze, having, one hopes, recognised that she can’t escape her mistakes by annihilating those who hurt her. The simplicity of decency indeed. l

The Break that Refreshes

Billie Burke

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This season has been hell on some of my friends. While I was relieved of all responsibility for cooking and hosting the holiday dinner, some of them were not so lucky. Poor Millicent faced a crisis that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It appears only she and I appreciate its seriousness...

Twenty Meme Redux: Actors

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Whether this is an official meme or not, I thought it only fair to give the masculine disciples of Thespis their day in the sun. I found out something interesting that piggybacks on something I read last night in Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies: “It is only recently that men have come to monopolize the popularity polls, the credits, and the romantic spotlight allocating to themselves not just the traditional male warrior and adventurer roles, but those of the sex object and glamor queen as well. Back in the twenties and thirties, and to a lesser extent the forties, women were at the center.” When I look over my choices for favorite actors, I see fewer from the Golden Age than I had among the actresses I chose.

If I’m honest, a number of the actors were included for the “hottie” factor, though I also think they’re good at what they do. You’ll also see that I have an inordinate fondness for chubby guys, no doubt an Oedipal connection to my rotund father. I’m somewhat surprised by some of my choices as well—where are Bogey, Grant, Tracy, Newman? Sorry, boys, you lack that je ne sais quoi for me. Choosing photos, I discovered that posing men with cigarettes was quite the thing, so if you're a man who smokes, you may have been inordinately influenced by the movie image of masculinity.

Once again, here are my favorites in alphabetical order.

Daniel Auteuil is a prolific French actor who just seems to get better and better. He’s in a lot of the films I see, lending a certain unspoken sadness to each of them. I’m particularly fond of his work in the very touching The Eighth Day and the film from which the above picture was taken Girl on the Bridge. As long as he keeps making pictures, I’ll keep watching them.

Antonio Banderas is absolutely gorgeous, but so are a lot of actors. He makes the list for that and for having a brilliant sense of humor to go along with his swoonworthy qualities. He makes every film he’s in a little better.

James Cagney is a fave rave of mine from way back. When I was young, I’d set my alarm clock to wake me when one of his movies was on TV in the middle of the night. Time has only shown me that he was more than a schoolgirl crush. He was one of the best actors we’ve ever seen.

Lon Chaney created dozens of amazing characters, undertaking physical distress to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the armless carney in The Unknown, and covering his face completely in The Phantom of the Opera. How he managed to make monsters sympathetic under all the make-up is beyond me, but he changed cinema forever by doing so.

Gary Cooper is the stand-up guy of cinema. Whether he’s playing a humble war hero, a dying ballplayer, or a friendless sheriff, he shows inner strength and courage better than anyone I can think of. I adore him.

Russell Crowe is my swashbuckler for the new millennium. His turn in Master and Commander cemented his stature in my eyes, becoming mythic in a realistic performance. I look forward to basking in his aura for years to come.

Johnny Depp first became a presence for me on 21 Jump Street. He wore his hair long in front so you couldn’t see his eyes. The network probably made him do that because his gaze is definitely too sexy for prime time. He’s become a fine actor with a particular talent for fantasy and imagination.

Keir Dullea has a quiet intelligence in his best roles. Watching him match wits with HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey is truly suspenseful, but I really fell for him in The Lathe of Heaven, where he could literally dream a different world.

Charles Durning is the first of my chubby guys. He’s a wonderful character actor who makes his presence felt wherever he appears, stealing his scenes with Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. I particularly like him as Charley in Death of a Salesman, truly being the only friend Willie Loman (Hoffman again, can’t that guy catch a break?) says he is. What a gentleman.

Bruno Ganz is a fantastic actor and will cause me to watch a film just because he’s in it. His most memorable role was the angel in Wings of Desire, but I can name so many films that are elevated because he’s in them. Truly a great actor of our time.

Gregory Hines is another of my hotties. I could watch him dance all day and night. Even just standing around in a cashmere sweater, he seems in magnificent motion. Tap has a place of honor in my film collection.

Boris Karloff has become a favorite of mine ever since I got a chance to see his work in such films as Bedlam and Targets. The latter film especially shows what an elegant, generous actor he was.

Klaus Kinski was the modern Lon Chaney, as out there as they get. One of the best things about our times is that a guy like Kinski could have a career playing something other than gunsels, though he did that, too.

Marcello Mastrioanni has attained legendary status based on his work with Fellini, but he’s so much more than that. His brilliant comic performance in Divorce, Italian Style showed me a new side of him. I love him. I really do.

Joel McCrea is an actor who has displaced others I used to admire. His performance in Sullivan’s Travels is fabulous, but it was Ride the High Country that really put him on my radar screen. I’m finding out more about him all the time, and I like what I’m finding.

Eduardo Noriega is the handsomest man alive, and yet, he played against that fact in Open Your Eyes. He was chilling in The Devil’s Backbone. He’s one of Spain’s finest.

Eugene Pallette is a wonderful character actor who created some indelible characters—Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Papa Bullock in My Man Godfrey, a political boss in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He made a ton of films in the studio system, so I’m constantly pointing delightedly while watching some obscure silent or 30s film and saying, “Eugene Pallette!”

James Stewart is one of the most versatile actors in motion pictures. His inherent likeability and a certain ardent romanticism made his performance in Vertigo both shocking and believable. If we have an everyman in films, he's it.

Rudolph Valentino has a small shrine in my office so I can gaze on his magnetic eyes whenever I want to. He jumps off the silent screen with the presence of Garbo, yet he also has a wonderful sense of humor that comes through in such films as The Eagle and Son of the Sheik. I worship him.

Anton Walbrook makes the list on the basis of two performances: Svengali-like Lermontov in The Red Shoes and German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. His range and his intensity are amazing, particularly in the latter film in which he ages 40 years and moves from open youth to sad disillusionment. He's a wonder.

Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962)
Director: Abe Levitow

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Oh, Magoo, you’ve done it again!

In 1941, John Hubley and several other animators who were on strike from Disney left that studio altogether to form United Productions of America (UPA) and produce cartoons that use what is now called “limited animation.” Hubley felt constrained by Disney’s emphasis on realism and wanted to create more stylized cartoons. In 1949, UPA came up with a very distinctive character—the short, bald, near-sighted Quincy Magoo, with actor Jim Backus as his first and only voice. The Magoo cartoons were hits, with two of them winning Academy Awards. When times got tough for UPA, Mister Magoo transitioned to television. It was there that Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol first appeared.

Although many consider this animated film a classic, you’re not likely to see it airing with the same frequency as A Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In fact, you may not find it at all, and that’s a real shame. Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol tells a shorter, but still faithful version of Dickens’ story bookended with classic Magoo comedy and a glorious score by Jule Styne, composer of “Let Me Entertain You,” "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow,” and many more great standards. The 1960s would see a radical change in musical styles, but since the setting of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol is a Broadway stage, Styne produced a score fit for the Great White Way. (In fact, one song not used in the animated film went into a real Broadway show and became a hit—“People” from Funny Girl.)

The film opens with Magoo driving the wrong way down a Manhattan street singing the pizzazz-y “It’s Great to Be Back on Broadway.” Magoo narrowly misses hitting dozens of cars and ends up wrecking against a pole. Never missing a beat, he crosses busy streets, forcing cars to screech to a halt to avoid hitting him, and arrives at the theatre where his musical “A Christmas Carol” is playing to boffo B.O. Looking for the stage door, he misreads the sign of an adjacent restaurant and clangs and clatters his way through it and past a nervous stage manager to make his triumphal entrance in the offices of Marley and Scrooge. This opening is classic Magoo.

Once the musical gets underway, it’s played fairly straight. Magoo as Scrooge is drawn with a nasty scowl; his face only brightens when he begins counting his gold coins in “Ringle, Ringle.” The song becomes a contrapunctal duet with Bob Cratchit (Jack Cassidy), who contrasts Scrooge’s love of money with his own misery at working in the cold. The song ends as Scrooge stops Cratchit from taking any more coal for his stove. The famous confrontation between Scrooge and the men collecting for charity manages to remain as shocking in cartoon form as it is in live-action versions of the story.

Returning to his home, Scrooge sees a strange face overlaying his lion’s head door knocker—a bit of a joke on Magoo’s poor eyesight that fits perfectly into the story. No time is wasted once Magoo dons his night clothes and tucks into bed. Climbing up the stairs, only legs, chains, and strong boxes visible, comes the ghost of Jacob Marley (Royal Dano) to confront Scrooge. In response to Scrooge’s dismissals of his reality, Marley gives a truly frightening wail and points through the window to the other chained apparitions wandering the night sky. He tells a shaken Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts that night who present a way for Scrooge to save himself from Marley's fate.

The Ghost of Christmas Present (Les Tremayne) takes Scrooge directly to Bob Cratchit’s home to view his assistant’s meager Christmas celebration. All are waiting for Bob and Tiny Tim to come back from church. When they do, a line Bob speaks strikes a particular Christmas note: “(Tiny Tim) hoped the people saw him in church because he was a cripple and thought it might be pleasant to let them remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see.” I could be wrong, but I don’t remember this line in other filmed versions of the story. Then a wonderful song, "The Lord's Bright Blessing," begins in quiet anticipation as the Cratchit children imagine what it would be like to have a Christmas tree, stockings stuffed with treats, and jars and cakes of “Razzleberry dressing, “ a particular obsession of Tiny Tim (Joan Gardner). When their humble Christmas dinner of soup is served, Bob leads them in the song's buoyant chorus.

The past provides two of the best sequences of the film. First, The Ghost of Christmas Past (Joan Gardner) takes Scrooge back to his boarding school where he has been left alone for the holidays. The song “All Alone in the World” has the kind of lyrics a child can relate to, but it is the animation that is particularly poignant. There is no rescuing sister in this version—only a chalk family drawn on a chalkboard. When young Ebenezer traces his four-fingered cartoon hand and attempts a handshake with it, he shows his frustration by smearing the chalk.

If you’re a believer in root causes, this simple song shows how a miserly heart can grow from one deprived of love. We move quickly through Fezziwig’s Christmas party, where Belle (Jane Kean) only dances with Ebenezer, to Belle’s rejection of Scrooge. “Winter Was Warm” is a lovely ballad that talks about the beginning and the end of love; it certainly ranks with some of the best love ballads written.

Scrooge does not return to his bedroom to await the arrival of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come; instead Scrooge is plunged into this part of the tale directly from Belle’s rejection. It is a bit abrupt, but there is something appropriate about juxtaposing the death of love with the death of the body. Nothing is left out of this part of Scrooge’s journey, from the businessmen talking about his death, to the scavengers who pawn his belongings in a ghoulish musical number, "We're Despicable (Plunderer's March),” to the death of Tiny Tim and Scrooge’s discovery of his own tombstone.

Scrooge's rebirth in the morning as a man of love and generosity is handled particularly well. As Scrooge flatters the young boy he sends to buy the prize turkey, the boy shows pleasure at every compliment—again something I don’t think I’ve seen in other versions. When the butcher arrives with an enormous turkey, the near-sighted Magoo pokes the butcher’s belly instead of the bird, a welcome visit by the star within the play. A rousing finale of “The Lord’s Bright Blessing” ends the show, and Magoo literally brings down the house with his bumbling.

I know I'm reflecting the bias of my own childhood in thinking that the simple animation and show tunes of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol have an enormous appeal, but I also think that for children anyway, I'm right. Children's movies are the last refuge of movie musicals, reflecting the importance of music to children's development and entertainment. There are few children's films today that have music to match the quality of Jule Styne's score for this film, and with a return to realism in animation—hyperrealism, actually—visual experimentation of the type practiced at UPA is becoming something of a lost art. I know that illustrators are still interested in it, if the number of visitors linked to my review of The Dot and the Line through graphic design sites is any indication. If they can produce anything as pleasurable, intelligent, and graphically interesting as Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, I'd personally like to encourage them to pursue movie-making for the whole family. To all those families out there, pick up the DVD of this wonderful seasonal cartoon and welcome a new-old classic into your home. l

The Break that Refreshes

Wendy Hiller

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Now I know we're all thinking about what gifts we're giving and likely to receive this holiday season. Well, almost all. I'm far more worried about my New Year's resolution—learning the new slang. Here's a clip from my instructional video so that you can see just what a challenge I've set for myself. But it's got to be done; I'm tired of being one of the old fogeys of film blogging.