Is there any director in American cinema more leisurely than Richard Linklater? I don't mean this as an insult—it takes great skill to do leisurely right. What I mean is that his best films (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise/Sunset) are in no hurry to get to where their going, or even to force any action. They just lean back, tell their stories, and let their characters talk. And if it all seems rambling, that's okay, because the dialogue is so good and the performances are so loose and natural that the ramble becomes exquisite. Life is full of rambles, and the movies so rarely allow them—only Linklater has been able to get away with it. Lately, the same leisurely outlook could be applied to Linklater's career itself. He crossed over successfully with School of Rock (a high-concept crowd-pleaser done right), and since then has moved from project to project, some odder or more mainstream than others, in an eccentric direction that maybe only Steven Soderbergh understands.
With Bernie, as well as his previous film Orson Welles and Me, his career has hit an odd phase. Those two films appear more commercial and are definitely uncharacteristic of his previous classics, and yet there's a degree of oddball craft that makes them equally incongruous with the average studio fare. Which may be the reason why some critics don't know what to make of it, and why Bernie has arrived in theaters with little fanfare or expectations. I found it playing at a local arthouse in Menlo Park—it's a place that plays Rocky Horror twice a month and has a sign in the window that says "The Cashiers Do Not Have the Combination to the Safe", but still caters largely to seniors. Shortly before the show, the two women behind me were talking about how it felt to turn 70. I wonder what they made of the film that followed.
Bernie is based on a true story, though it's so bizarre you'd be forgiven for not believing it. In Carthage, Texas, Bernie (Jack Black) is the town's mortician as well as something of a local celebrity: a very active member of the community, he's found by all to be the sweetest, kindest, gentlest, most popular man in town, even if it's clear from the start that something isn't quite right with him. Bernie befriends a wealthy, elderly widow (Shirley MacLaine), who has earned reputation for being the town witch. Over the years, he provides her with companionship (no one knows any more than that) and before long he's her personal assistant, beneficiary on her will, and has power of attorney. But her mean streak comes out. She's demeaning and possessive, and in a brief fit of anger, Bernie kills her. As for where it goes from there, I won't say—but things are just getting interesting.
As a film, this carries more than a couple contradictions. For one, its presented half as straight-up drama, and half as documentary, with the real-life townsfolk getting to weigh in. It's also a Jack Black comedy without the Jack Black persona. It's a film noir with the brightest color palette imaginable. And it's a crowd-pleaser that opens with a morbid, creepy, and slightly queasy sequence on how to prep a dead body.
The contradictions work. The reason that Bernie doesn't—at least, not fully—is that even though it's good for plenty of ghoulish, nervous laughter, it scarcely shows interest in its subjects beyond fodder for comedy. This can be seen in Jack Black's performance, which, until the final climactic scenes, doesn't involve slipping into a character so much as adopting certain affectations: Bernie becomes just another comic persona. But who is Bernie? The answers are too often untreated (or treated as punchlines), so by the end, the film feels more like gossip than exploration. In Slacker, Linklater showed a real sense of empathy for America's most off-kilter citizens; here, it's different. When a parade of eccentric locals from East Texas gets their chance to talk, the ensuing laughter feels smug.
The fake documentary format made me think of the easy comparison with Into the Abyss, Herzog's take on crime and punishment in Texas. That film certainly had its problems—and couldn't escape condescension itself—but through a lot of Bernie's gags, I was left with a desire to see what Herzog, in full Grizzly Man documentary mode, could do with such a bizarre real-life case. I'm sure he would try to plumb the depths of this man, and it would boil down to more than a final shot of Jack Black doing a funny walk for one last laugh.
As for Linklater, he remains one of the most interesting and talented filmmakers today as far as I'm concerned, even if I'm not sure how this fits into his body of work. When I was on my way out of the theater, an elderly gentleman going in asked me if the movie was any good, and I answered "yes" without hesitation. That must count for something.
3 out of 5 stars.
*************
Bernie is currently playing in select theaters.
Directed by Richard Linklater
Screenplay by Skip Hollandsworth & Richard Linklater
Starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, and Matthew McConaughey
Friday, May 25, 2012
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
REVIEW: The Avengers (2012)
And so we reach the End Game of the franchise tentpole era, where after half a decade of backstories and post-credits teasing, six superheroes from four franchises all merge into one cross-branded synergistic supernova. And make no mistake, the comic book supernova is big: for this attraction, we get aliens invading through a dimensional portal, Norse gods speaking faux Shakespeare (one of whom wears the single tackiest costume in megabudget history), an aircraft carrier that can fly, a hero whose superpower is archery, and a lot of devotion to the heroic feats, friendships, and inner struggles of men in costumes. If that sounds corny, it is. But if you want to make corniness hip, there's no one better than Joss Whedon, who knows that it doesn't need to be cool (not in any grown-up sense) so long as it's shameless.
So the plot is both somewhat complicated and somewhat irrelevant. There's an evil demi-god, Loki, who's using an energy cube called the Tesseract to lead an alien invasion of Earth, so Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, with an eye-patch and a soul patch) assembles superheroes from Marvel lore and recent films to fight them off. You can quibble over the specifics—if The Avengers magnifies everything about superhero movies, it also magnifies their plotholes. But most of all, it's an excuse for icons to pose, fight, and punctuate each action with a line of banter. Take your pick: there's Robert Downey, Jr., secure in the knowledge that the show is his to steal; Scarlett Johansson, as the latest of Whedon's foxy ass-kicking heroines; Jeremy Renner, excited by his invite to the big leagues; Chris Evans as Captain America, whose attitude is the closest to the heart of the film; Thor, without whose franchise none of this Loki business would be possible; and the Hulk, who after two failures to launch finally gets a big screen incarnation people will agree on.
In the end, The Avengers is not as momentous as it's made out to be, neither for Joss Whedon fans who want to see what he can do with a tentpole, nor on IMDb, where any franchise movie that has a stable script and charisma gets crowned one of the greatest ever made. (Currently, The Avengers is #31 on the Top 250, which places it slightly behind Psycho and slightly ahead of Sunset Blvd.). In many ways, it's actually a very ordinary case: an adventure movie stronger on star-power and special effects than story, where the stakes are everything and feel like nothing, shepherded by a talented director who's partway allowed to do his own thing but largely has to toe the franchise line.
But if anything makes it a cut above—aside from the zingers that Whedon slips in—its the commitment to the material. It's very telling that the word "old-fashioned" keeps appearing, and that the superhero fandom of a supporting character becomes a pivotal plot point, because that's where the film finds its larger, more covert meaning. And in an era where comic book franchises spring up left and right—and sometimes twice—it's certainly one of the most pure and innocent, if only because it nobly embraces the inherent silliness of it all. The highlight of the film for me, aside from everything Robert Downey Jr. says, comes during the final brawl, where one unbroken tracking shot through the New York skies shows each superhero fighting his own small battle. You can't deny the giddy thrill, nor can you deny how ridiculous it is. Forget epic adventure—this is a celebration of pop culture, and it comes at a time when very little in pop culture seems worth defending. Rock on.
4 out of 5 stars.
**************
The Avengers is currently in theaters, breaking lots of records.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
REVIEW: Into the Abyss (2011)
When following the nonfiction career of Werner Herzog, the biggest and most understandable mistake you can make is thinking of the films as "documentaries." If you do, you may wonder why, in a genre meant to inform, the director keeps chiming in, often superimposing his own views, or shooting it all in such a way that raw footage feels like it's being beamed to you from another planet. It's far better think of them as something like "first-person cinema": Herzog travels the world, from Antarctica to prehistoric caves, and records what he sees and how it makes him feel. With films like Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), his interest is not simply facts or information, but mood (otherworldy), lyricism (dark), philosophical speculation (darker), and other things that are best handled subjectively. How well you jive with seeing the world through a Herzogian prism is up to each viewer. Some find it offensive to his subjects, and some just find it funny, which is why he's inspired his very own line of internet parodies. But it's an undeniably fascinating approach, smashing auteur theory and documentary ethics together. Just as Herzog's most famous narrative films—with their obsessive location shooting and wayward stars like Klaus Kinski and Bruno S.—had a certain unscripted element, so his "documentaries" have an air of fiction, of being a constructed and fabricated work of art. Together, they constitute one of the most unique bodies of work in modern cinema, and it can make you wish to see what other narrative filmmakers would do if they tried to branch out into the documentary vein.
So it's strange that Herzog's latest foray into nonfiction, Into the Abyss, is in many ways his most formally conventional documentary in last ten years or so—at least, shorter on lyricism and musing, and high on topicality—and it shouldn't be so surprising that the film is marred for it. Perhaps because, the closer Herzog comes to making what we think of as a documentary, the more the downsides to his approach come to the surface.
Into the Abyss finds Herzog visiting death row, detailing a decade-old case of murder and carjacking in Texas and the fallout its left behind on both the victims' families and the perpetrators. It's about a way of life as much as it's about any particular people, and the film's power comes from its subjects. A young man on death row talks about how he found God and has made peace with dying. A woman falls in love with and even marries a man who's in prison with a life sentence. A convicted father talks about how he feels like a failure, because his son is now in jail, too. And a weary retired guard details, with a heartbreaking cracked voice, the step by step process of putting a man to death. The grand themes under the surface—the burden of existence in an indifferent universe, the insanity of a supposedly civilized society, the brief and surprising moments of ecstasy—are familiar terrain for Herzog, and once the film dispenses with the necessary exposition and moves into the second half, it builds remarkably.
But for the first time in recent memory, Herzog's guiding hand feels as much like a detriment as an aid. His presence from behind the camera, caught in glimpses during interviews, can feel exploitative, or even condescending. While in Grizzly Man, Herzog found a sense of understanding in his subject, here he seems consciously to view this milieu from the outside, in his worst moments just a filmmaker looking to score powerful footage. It's a subtle distinction—only a few degrees away from a true success like Encounters at the End of the World—but it's enough that a truly haunting film can also leave a bad taste in your mouth.
4 out of 5 stars.
*****************
Into the Abyss is now playing on Netflix Instant.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
REVIEW: Damsels in Distress (2012)
There was reason to be excited. Metropolitan, Whit Stillman's comedy from 1990, was one of the best debut films to come out of the American independent film boom, even as it stuck out like a sore thumb from the moment it arrived. Most independent films from that era to tackle American youth, from She's Gotta Have It to Stranger Than Paradise to Slacker to Clerks, centered on characters who were hip, or at least pop-culture-savvy. Metropolitan's subject is a group of upper class, stuck-in-time Manhattan preppies: incredibly wealthy, impossibly mannered, insular by definition, and slowly realizing that adult lives await—and that the ladder of American social mobility leaves a lot of room to fall. It is, in short, proudly and defiantly square. And as for pop culture...well, they do spend a fair amount of time talking about Jane Austen novels.
The film was made on a shoestring budget, most of which was presumably spent on tuxedos, and it starred a perfectly-cast group of unknowns and non-professionals who sadly never got any bigger than the occasional TV guest appearance. But most of all, it had a terrific, literary script. By literary, I don't mean the references to Austen, but rather the rich layering of character and incident. In even the shortest scenes and most minor characters of Metropolitan, you can see warmth, pathos, and little bits of wisdom passed from the adult writer to his post-adolescent characters. Square or not, it has as much to say about youth aimlessness and anxiety as any of its peers. Stillman was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, which is the best a film like this can do, and he went on to make two more, Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998). Both were very much in the same vein, and the concern arose whether Stillman could only really make one type of movie. And then he dropped off the map, and the concern became whether he had another movie in him at all.
Damsels in Distress arrives as Stillman's first film in over a decade, with a title announcing its intentions to be as old-fashioned as anything the man has done. The plot centers on a group of female undergrads, led by mother hen Violet (Greta Gerwig), who've taken it upon themselves to civilize (and odorize) the frat-dominated campus. It's a promising choice of material for the director, setting the anachronism of his characters and dialogue against 21st century college life. But more than that, it's an ode to innocent simplicity. Violet and co. regularly volunteer at the local Suicide Prevention Center, where their chief form of therapy for depression is tap-dancing. Indeed, Violet imagines that the greatest contribution that she (or anyone) can make to human civilization is starting a new dance craze. The central theme is clear: life's biggest problems can be met with life's little pleasures, from dancing to bath soap to proper color coordination. It's a noble sentiment, and it deserves a film of its own.
Regretfully, the film we have is something of a mess: the kind of awkward narrative that feels simultaneously too long and like pieces have been cut out of it. Subplots and characters are truncated, while some comic scenes go on far beyond the joke's shelf life. So where Metropolitan was a model of tight eloquence, Damsels fumbles with characters and tone, combining various plot elements that the writer-director doesn't seem fully in control of. Part of this is the setting, or at least the way the setting is played: in Metropolitan, the behavior and mannerisms found their perfect aesthetic home in posh, softly photographed Manhattan apartments that seemed anything but sterile. In a vibrantly colorful college campus, its effect is more jarring, and risks tipping over the edge into hyper-tasteful kitsch. It's entirely possible that Stillman, who was never known as a visual filmmaker and never needed to be one, could use a certain lo-fi element: the clearer and brighter it gets, the less organic it feels.
Still, if it's not a comeback, it's at least a return. Stillman remains one of our most idiosyncratic writers, and Damsels, beneath the clutter, does shows signs of his talent: the empathy with young men and especially women who are trying to figure things out; a willingness to mix darker subject matter into what first appears so light and feel-good; and, most of all, a knack for working on an intimate scale. Even in his lesser films, like The Last Days of Disco, you see a man who doesn't feel the need to force big climaxes—the endings simply leave you with the feeling that the lives of these characters will go on, but new paths are open to them, and everything will be okay. It's a shame that these elements don't shine through in Damsels as gracefully as in the past. But I'm glad he's back, and here's hoping the next one doesn't take so long.
In the meantime, see Metropolitan.
2 out of 5 stars.
***************
Damsels in Distress is playing in select theaters.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
5 Lesser-Known Palme d'Or Winners You Can Watch on Netflix Instant
The big movie news last week, temporarily bumping anything else off the main headline, was the announcement of the lineup at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It's as intriguing and exciting a list of films that will compete for the Palme d'Or, possibly the most prestige-inducing award in international cinema. Right out the gate, the heavy-hitters for American cinephiles are David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis and Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. But the festival will also show new films by previous prizewinners like Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Haneke, Ken Loach, Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) and Matteo Garone (Gommorah). Not to mention the legendary Alain Resnais, who, at the age of 89, has titled his new film You Haven't Seen Anything Yet. And if the history of the festival has taught us anything, it's that we shouldn't discount the newcomers. You can see the full rundown of the official selection here.
Of course, many of these films will only become available to American audiences in fits and starts, sometimes long after the fact and with little fanfare or presence. (In fact, some of last year's prizewinners have only just opened in US theaters now). So for anyone who'll be stuck waiting, now is as good a time as any to sift through the Palme d'Or winners of the festival's very rich past.
Naturally, the Cannes jury (a different set of cine-ratti each year) is only human, and any superlative connotations about one film or another being the "best" should, as ever, be taken with a grain of salt. In retrospect—or even at the time—it can be clear that the top prizewinner isn't always the most essential. In fact, there's no guarantee that the "best" film is even playing in Competition, and not in one of the parallel sections. But even keeping this is mind, moving through old Palme d'Or winners is a rewarding endeavor, much more so than, say, the Oscars or the AFI Top 100, if only because the festival embraces a broader definition of what a film can be. For this reason, they have one of the more solid track records for keeping their finger on the pulse of a changing cinema and a changing world.
Previous winners include films as popular and iconic as Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now, and cinephile staples like La Dolce Vita, The Third Man, The Conversation, and Blow-Up. But the honor roll also includes many more obscure, off-the-beaten path films, including some that seem to have all but disappeared after their moment on the Croisette. The most obscure of these are very difficult to track down, and many don't even exist on a US DVD.
Fortunately, between the classics and the rarities, a lot of under-acknowledged Palme d'Or winners can be found buried in Netflix Instant, for any American movie buff with a Netflix account (which by this point I assume is all of us). I've picked five that deserve more attention or often get overshadowed. I'd recommend them all to new and veteran cinephiles looking for a fix while they wait for the news from Cannes. See if anything strikes your fancy.
2001: The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, Italy)
Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti is the President of the Jury this year, and his latest is now in American theaters, so it's worth looking back at the film that won him the top prize ten years ago. The first thing that strikes you about the film is how utterly unassuming it is: no political statements (coded or overt), no epic sweep, no formal tinkering, nothing boundary-pushing—just a fine, small-scale drama that cinephiles can comfortably show to their parents. Moretti stars as a psychiatrist whose son dies in an accident, leaving him, his wife, and his daughter bereft and unsure how to move on. It's a quiet story, the sort whose final revelation is done practically at a whisper, and which assures us and the characters that life will go on, and isn't that at least as wonderful as it is sad? And Moretti, presiding over it all, shows a gift for human observation. Whether it deserved to beat out more respected competition like, say, Mulholland Dr., is a fairly one-sided argument (the kind I like to avoid). But it's nice to know that films of such modesty aren't kept out of the running.
1998: Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)
One of the unending debates around movie buff/auteurist circles is the relative importance of screenplays. Some directors call them the cornerstone of a film, some hardly used one. Being pro-screenplay always made the most sense to me, but then you have to wonder why words on paper seem so schematic when compared to the might of sounds and images. All of which is to say that when I first saw Eternity and a Day, I had issues with drama: the structure was odd, supporting characters didn't feel right, the personal and political elements weren't quite balanced. And yet, none of that explains why I was gripped for two straight hours. The camerawork, always gliding slowly from composition to composition, is like a filmmaker writing in calligraphy while most choose to print, and the lead performance by Bruno Ganz seems to come from a deep emotional wellspring. Cinephiles will note the similarities to Andrei Tarkovsky, only it's much less dry and much more generous. The story, or rather the set-up for what comes after, is about an elderly man nearing the end of his life. He's scheduled to go into the hospital for what is euphemistically referred to as a "test", though it's clear that once he enters, it's likely he'll be there for the rest of his days. And so he spends his last day visiting family and, very much against plan, getting involved with an orphaned refugee. This is clearly the work of an artist in the twilight of their life. The director is Theo Angelopolous, the eminent figure in Greek cinema. He passed away just this year, was over sixty when he made the film, and had been behind the camera for decades. As a personal work, set more in a dreamscape, it's most comparable to older films like Wild Strawberries or 8 1/2, and it may well be that this film's Palme d'Or win served as a kind of sweet farewell to an earlier arthouse era. Few movies in the mainstream tackle what it's like to be old, and fewer have tackled it this well. With aching sincerity like this, any concerns melt away.
1985: When Father Was Away on Business (Emir Kusturica, Yugoslavia)
Made during the waning days of Soviet power, this drama from Serbian director Emir Kusturica offers a child's-eye-view of life during the Stalin era, when tensions between Yugoslavia and the USSR were running high. Mesa is a loving father (though also a serial philanderer) who, for reasons that aren't explained to him, is arrested and exiled. This whole situation—the father's behavior, the politics, and daily life in Yugoslavia—are all refracted through the innocently curious faces of his two children, who serve as the heart of the film. This is a film that knows that any political movie worth its salt is also a movie about people, and can have the full range of emotions therein. So for all its topicality, this is also a film film full of warmth, humor, and character. There's a close-up near the end of a woman, and for a moment you can't tell if she's laughing or crying. That image sums up the film's vision, which is simultaneously light and dark, tongue-in-cheek and contemplative, wry and empathetic. Of all the films mentioned here, this may be my favorite.
1980: Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
Akira Kurosawa, never one to think small, reportedly referred to this stately samurai epic as a "dress rehearsal" for Ran, his reworking of King Lear that is often seen as his late career masterpiece. It's unfortunate that Kagemusha exists so much in Ran's shadow, because it's arguably the better, more complex film. Its story is a variation on a folkloric staple: during a time of conflict, a powerful warlord is killed, so to prevent a panic, his generals find a double—a poor thief who bears an uncanny resemblance—to take the lord's place as a figurehead. And so the film becomes a look at not only the folly of ambition, but at the subjective nature of identity. The question looms of how the thief, who tellingly is never given a name of his own, can possibly live up to a larger-than-life image. Throughout the film, he is alternately treated like both a king and a beggar, and he must know that he deserves neither. It's not hard to imagine that this idea had some personal resonance for Kurosawa, who, after a run of masterpieces in the 50s and 60s, fell on hard times. The decade leading up to Kagemusha was filled with personal and professional woes for him, culminating in a notorious suicide attempt. (Famously, Kagemusha was funded with help from George Lucas, fresh off the success of Star Wars, who was amazed that his longtime idol couldn't get financing). It may be a dress rehearsal in the sense that it's lighter on scale and spectacle than his other epics, but it's still visually stunning—just look at the screengrabs above—and it marks both a return and an advancement into new territory. One of the most underrated films by one of the most venerated directors.
1965: The Knack...and How to Get It (Richard Lester, UK)
In between his two Beatles films (A Hard Day's Night and Help!), Richard Lester won the top prize for this freewheeling 60s sex comedy, which, especially compared to the films that bookend it, is little known today. Of course, the film has a hurdle with modern audiences, which is that it needs to prove it's something more than just an artifact of its time. The plot is simple. Tolan has "the knack": an unerring ability to get any woman he wants (the opening sequence shows a long line of beautiful, blank-faced, tight-sweatered women waiting to get into his bedroom). His roommate Colin does not. In fact, Colin knows little about sex, and even seems to be slightly afraid of it. Enter Nancy (the doe-eyed Rita Tushingham), a naive new girl in town who drifts in between them. And what was surreal to begin with becomes increasingly chaotic.
The pacing is downright manic, as the characters run, dance, and jump-cut their way through Swinging London. But ultimately, whether someone sees The Knack as grotesquely dated or surprisingly advanced depends on how they interpret the last 20 minutes, when the chaos takes a sudden, serious, and controversial turn. It is, I must admit, difficult to know what to make of it, especially since if you take it at face value, it runs a heavy risk of tastelessness. A fair number of critics frown on this film as a relic, but I don't think they give full credit to how ironic and emotionally attuned it is, or how it spoofs the male sex drive (rather than celebrating it), or how much it's in love with the innocence of its central romantic duo. The title is misleading: the boys' club fantasy of having "the knack"—and bedding a long line of beautiful automatons—is revealed to be hollow and regressive, and the true potential of newfound sexual liberation is pairing up with someone to whom you feel a connection. So the film, beneath its tricky editing and innuendo-laden humor, has a lot to say about vulnerable young people flying blind and tentatively trying out love and sex at a time when the rules are changing. Reactions to this one widely vary, but the undeniable thing is that the film remains energetic and fascinating. Recommended for students of the Mod era, British comedy, sexual politics, and general weirdness.
Of course, many of these films will only become available to American audiences in fits and starts, sometimes long after the fact and with little fanfare or presence. (In fact, some of last year's prizewinners have only just opened in US theaters now). So for anyone who'll be stuck waiting, now is as good a time as any to sift through the Palme d'Or winners of the festival's very rich past.
Naturally, the Cannes jury (a different set of cine-ratti each year) is only human, and any superlative connotations about one film or another being the "best" should, as ever, be taken with a grain of salt. In retrospect—or even at the time—it can be clear that the top prizewinner isn't always the most essential. In fact, there's no guarantee that the "best" film is even playing in Competition, and not in one of the parallel sections. But even keeping this is mind, moving through old Palme d'Or winners is a rewarding endeavor, much more so than, say, the Oscars or the AFI Top 100, if only because the festival embraces a broader definition of what a film can be. For this reason, they have one of the more solid track records for keeping their finger on the pulse of a changing cinema and a changing world.
Previous winners include films as popular and iconic as Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now, and cinephile staples like La Dolce Vita, The Third Man, The Conversation, and Blow-Up. But the honor roll also includes many more obscure, off-the-beaten path films, including some that seem to have all but disappeared after their moment on the Croisette. The most obscure of these are very difficult to track down, and many don't even exist on a US DVD.
Fortunately, between the classics and the rarities, a lot of under-acknowledged Palme d'Or winners can be found buried in Netflix Instant, for any American movie buff with a Netflix account (which by this point I assume is all of us). I've picked five that deserve more attention or often get overshadowed. I'd recommend them all to new and veteran cinephiles looking for a fix while they wait for the news from Cannes. See if anything strikes your fancy.
One small disclaimer: the top prize at
Cannes wasn't always called the
"Palme d'Or", but spent many years as the "Grand Prix du Festival
International du Film." Regardless, I refer to the top prize for all years as the
Palme d'Or for simplicity, and so I don't have to keep writing "Grand
Prix du Festival
International du Film."
2001: The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, Italy)
Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti is the President of the Jury this year, and his latest is now in American theaters, so it's worth looking back at the film that won him the top prize ten years ago. The first thing that strikes you about the film is how utterly unassuming it is: no political statements (coded or overt), no epic sweep, no formal tinkering, nothing boundary-pushing—just a fine, small-scale drama that cinephiles can comfortably show to their parents. Moretti stars as a psychiatrist whose son dies in an accident, leaving him, his wife, and his daughter bereft and unsure how to move on. It's a quiet story, the sort whose final revelation is done practically at a whisper, and which assures us and the characters that life will go on, and isn't that at least as wonderful as it is sad? And Moretti, presiding over it all, shows a gift for human observation. Whether it deserved to beat out more respected competition like, say, Mulholland Dr., is a fairly one-sided argument (the kind I like to avoid). But it's nice to know that films of such modesty aren't kept out of the running.
***
1998: Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)
One of the unending debates around movie buff/auteurist circles is the relative importance of screenplays. Some directors call them the cornerstone of a film, some hardly used one. Being pro-screenplay always made the most sense to me, but then you have to wonder why words on paper seem so schematic when compared to the might of sounds and images. All of which is to say that when I first saw Eternity and a Day, I had issues with drama: the structure was odd, supporting characters didn't feel right, the personal and political elements weren't quite balanced. And yet, none of that explains why I was gripped for two straight hours. The camerawork, always gliding slowly from composition to composition, is like a filmmaker writing in calligraphy while most choose to print, and the lead performance by Bruno Ganz seems to come from a deep emotional wellspring. Cinephiles will note the similarities to Andrei Tarkovsky, only it's much less dry and much more generous. The story, or rather the set-up for what comes after, is about an elderly man nearing the end of his life. He's scheduled to go into the hospital for what is euphemistically referred to as a "test", though it's clear that once he enters, it's likely he'll be there for the rest of his days. And so he spends his last day visiting family and, very much against plan, getting involved with an orphaned refugee. This is clearly the work of an artist in the twilight of their life. The director is Theo Angelopolous, the eminent figure in Greek cinema. He passed away just this year, was over sixty when he made the film, and had been behind the camera for decades. As a personal work, set more in a dreamscape, it's most comparable to older films like Wild Strawberries or 8 1/2, and it may well be that this film's Palme d'Or win served as a kind of sweet farewell to an earlier arthouse era. Few movies in the mainstream tackle what it's like to be old, and fewer have tackled it this well. With aching sincerity like this, any concerns melt away.
***
1985: When Father Was Away on Business (Emir Kusturica, Yugoslavia)
Made during the waning days of Soviet power, this drama from Serbian director Emir Kusturica offers a child's-eye-view of life during the Stalin era, when tensions between Yugoslavia and the USSR were running high. Mesa is a loving father (though also a serial philanderer) who, for reasons that aren't explained to him, is arrested and exiled. This whole situation—the father's behavior, the politics, and daily life in Yugoslavia—are all refracted through the innocently curious faces of his two children, who serve as the heart of the film. This is a film that knows that any political movie worth its salt is also a movie about people, and can have the full range of emotions therein. So for all its topicality, this is also a film film full of warmth, humor, and character. There's a close-up near the end of a woman, and for a moment you can't tell if she's laughing or crying. That image sums up the film's vision, which is simultaneously light and dark, tongue-in-cheek and contemplative, wry and empathetic. Of all the films mentioned here, this may be my favorite.
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1980: Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
Akira Kurosawa, never one to think small, reportedly referred to this stately samurai epic as a "dress rehearsal" for Ran, his reworking of King Lear that is often seen as his late career masterpiece. It's unfortunate that Kagemusha exists so much in Ran's shadow, because it's arguably the better, more complex film. Its story is a variation on a folkloric staple: during a time of conflict, a powerful warlord is killed, so to prevent a panic, his generals find a double—a poor thief who bears an uncanny resemblance—to take the lord's place as a figurehead. And so the film becomes a look at not only the folly of ambition, but at the subjective nature of identity. The question looms of how the thief, who tellingly is never given a name of his own, can possibly live up to a larger-than-life image. Throughout the film, he is alternately treated like both a king and a beggar, and he must know that he deserves neither. It's not hard to imagine that this idea had some personal resonance for Kurosawa, who, after a run of masterpieces in the 50s and 60s, fell on hard times. The decade leading up to Kagemusha was filled with personal and professional woes for him, culminating in a notorious suicide attempt. (Famously, Kagemusha was funded with help from George Lucas, fresh off the success of Star Wars, who was amazed that his longtime idol couldn't get financing). It may be a dress rehearsal in the sense that it's lighter on scale and spectacle than his other epics, but it's still visually stunning—just look at the screengrabs above—and it marks both a return and an advancement into new territory. One of the most underrated films by one of the most venerated directors.
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1965: The Knack...and How to Get It (Richard Lester, UK)
In between his two Beatles films (A Hard Day's Night and Help!), Richard Lester won the top prize for this freewheeling 60s sex comedy, which, especially compared to the films that bookend it, is little known today. Of course, the film has a hurdle with modern audiences, which is that it needs to prove it's something more than just an artifact of its time. The plot is simple. Tolan has "the knack": an unerring ability to get any woman he wants (the opening sequence shows a long line of beautiful, blank-faced, tight-sweatered women waiting to get into his bedroom). His roommate Colin does not. In fact, Colin knows little about sex, and even seems to be slightly afraid of it. Enter Nancy (the doe-eyed Rita Tushingham), a naive new girl in town who drifts in between them. And what was surreal to begin with becomes increasingly chaotic.
The pacing is downright manic, as the characters run, dance, and jump-cut their way through Swinging London. But ultimately, whether someone sees The Knack as grotesquely dated or surprisingly advanced depends on how they interpret the last 20 minutes, when the chaos takes a sudden, serious, and controversial turn. It is, I must admit, difficult to know what to make of it, especially since if you take it at face value, it runs a heavy risk of tastelessness. A fair number of critics frown on this film as a relic, but I don't think they give full credit to how ironic and emotionally attuned it is, or how it spoofs the male sex drive (rather than celebrating it), or how much it's in love with the innocence of its central romantic duo. The title is misleading: the boys' club fantasy of having "the knack"—and bedding a long line of beautiful automatons—is revealed to be hollow and regressive, and the true potential of newfound sexual liberation is pairing up with someone to whom you feel a connection. So the film, beneath its tricky editing and innuendo-laden humor, has a lot to say about vulnerable young people flying blind and tentatively trying out love and sex at a time when the rules are changing. Reactions to this one widely vary, but the undeniable thing is that the film remains energetic and fascinating. Recommended for students of the Mod era, British comedy, sexual politics, and general weirdness.
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