Realism and inhumanity in Son of Saul

The Hungarian Oscar-winning film Son of Saul is both shockingly and distressingly realistic while also in some ways it's hard to believe. Of course every Holocaust film (and novel and memoir) is hard to believe - can these things really have happened? So recently? So nearby? But this film in its attempt to build drama creates a conflict that I just never could buy into, at least on a realistic, literal level. The main character and the focal point of nearly every shot in the film is a Hungarian Jew, named Auslander (foreigner, or outsider perhaps) who is one of the slave laborers in an unnamed concentration camp, part of a team with the repulsive job of leading the newly arrived people into the shower rooms where they are gassed to death - then going through their belongings looking for coins or jewelry, carting out the dead bodies, scrubbing the chambers, incinerating the dead, and disposing of the ashes. Horrendous. What we learn also is these crews are put to work for a few months and then murdered (presumably to minimize the chance that these operations will be reported to the world). Auslander seems to recognize one of the dead - he says it's his son, Saul, but this may not be true and becomes obsessed with giving this boy a proper burial, complete with a rabbi reciting the Kaddish. As Auslander goes about through various bribes and subterfuges to make this happen, he's also part of a prisoner's rebellion, in which they manage to get some guns and break free from the camp, at least for a period of time. I am by no means an expert on these matters, but I don't think there were any such successful uprisings, and from all I've read I don't think any of the prisoners would be thinking about a proper burial for anyone - they were so immured by death and starvation that they, rightly, were thinking only about survival, and perhaps about the guilt they must bear for what they have seen and done, against their will. For a more honest, I think, account of a similar situation read Ketesz's novel Fatelessness. On the plus side, however, painful as it may be few films bring you so directly into the experience of living in the camps: excellent hand-held documentary-style footage, with a "deep focus" lens that keeps the foreground sharp and the background - stacked bodies, armed guards, beatings, harassment - blurred and indistinct, as in a dream, with a seemingly live soundtrack - the constant haranguing of the guards, the loudspeakers, the barked commands, the inhumanity: a difficult film to watch, but a powerful and unusual viewpoint on these horrors.

The PItts: Why not to watch By the Sea

Angelina Jolie Pitt's By the Sea may not be the worst movie ever made but it sure could be a contender. It could also be a contender for vanity project of all time: written and directed by AJP and co-starring herself and hubby Brad. Would you imagine they produced this with their own $? I would say so, as it is inconceivable to me that any other production company would throw good money toward this project other than to retain the loyalty of 2 reliable box office stars. The story, set ca 1970 on the French Mediterranean (filmed on Malta, actually), is of  the Pitt couple about 15 years into a childless marriage, driving along the coast and stopping at a beautifully but isolated hotel. Reason give: "to get away from it all" (Brad). They move into their room and immediately rearrange the furniture, setting up a writing desk w/ typewriter. Ah, he's a writer! (A writer w/ no apparent concerns about money - but that's something stars of Pitt magnitude have no comprehension of anyway - they probably think the couple is living on the cheap because they're in a one-bedroom suite and they buy their own groceries.) Unfortunately, he can't seem to get anything going, and soon we see that he's really a drinker. And she's just morose and depressed (we learn along the way that she lost one, or maybe two, children in pregnancy). Two less appealing characters have seldom appeared together on screen. And Pitt, although he speaks French in the film, is not in the least convincing as a writer - Fitzgerald for one drank his way across the Riviera, but I'm sure that, from time to time, he may have said word one about writing or literature? These 2 have nothing to say; not to give away the entire plot, but here goes: a honeymoon couple moves into the adjoining room, and the Pitts get off by peering through a peephole and watching their neighbors have lots of sex. Trust me, it's not erotic - just ridiculous on numerous levels. At last, the Pitts have sex and things seem a little better and he begins to write again. This could actually be a parody of any of a # of serious European films of the 50s and 60s - maybe an Antonioni or a Polanski, tired couple sparked to life by encounter with youthful, sexual energy - if there were even a hint of wit or humor, or even of homage (or originality, for that matter). AJP, stay with acting; and Pitts, stay w/ producing - oddly enough, their company invested heavily in an unlikely success, Spotlight, so they do have some perspicacity about what makes a good move - the problems occur when egos obscure vision. A few true geniuses can write, star, and direct themselves: Welles, Renoir, Allen; but others go there only at their own risk.

An anti-noir interpretation of Chandler: The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman's 1973 remake of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, starring Elliot Gould (what a shame that his career seems to have evaporated) in a tour-de-force starring role is in way an anti-noir interpretation of Chandler. Gould/Altman's Marlowe isn't a taciturn tough guy but he's a neurotic mess, constantly talking to himself, keeping up a running commentary on the action, and mouthing off to guys much tougher than he is, completely oblivious of the danger he's putting himself in - and that's how he succeeds, so cool that others bend to his will, because they can't ruffle him. The movie is set in then-contemporary LA and rather than the noir look that we're familiar w/ in detective stories and films - the dark office in a rundown street in the business district, nightclubs w/ crooners, shot-and-beer bars, dingy waterfronts, etc. - this LA is brighter, airier, Gould/Marlowe does business out of his apartment, which is in a weirdly distinctive art moderne complex - his only apparent neighbors are a suite of young beauties who spend all day getting high and doing yoga. There are various running gags about animals - a cat that's a picky eater, a doberman that his it in for Marlowe, some dogs in a Mexican village that copulate on cue - and all told, it's vintage Altman: characters tend to talk over each other, lots of long tracking shots, real establishment of atmosphere, lots of jazz variants on a single musical theme, and if the plot seems to fall apart as the movie progresses who cares really? This film, not much seen these days I think, forms a group with MASH, Nashville, a couple of others from that era as establish a particular type of insouciant male character and a social milieu that is recognizable this director's alone.

Mifune, high and low

Kurosawa's 1963 film High and Low feels like 3 separate films, at least - most of them very good, fortunately. For the first half-hour we think we;re watching a movie about corporate execs locked in a struggle for control of a Japanese shoe company - first scenes all take place in a living room as they argue about what kind of she to manufacture, who controls company stock, etc., and we think are we really going to watch this for 2 hours? The meeting breaks up w/ great bitterness and we stay w/ the exec in whose house they're meeting - and we see that he's a ruthless businessman surreptitiously seizing control from his rivals - he's played by the great Mifune, in a very unusual casting decision and a good one. Suddenly, the movie changes abruptly as Mifune gets a call that his young son has been kidnapped.He prepares to pay a large ransom - and then the story takes a very dramatic twist as we learn that his son's playmate - son of the company chauffeur, an extremely deferential character, is the one kidnapped. Should Mifune pay the ransom for the child of one of his employees? This is a great moral dilemma, and the film pushes Mifune in every direction - before he finally acquiesces and does what's right at great personal cost. I was thinking that this should definitely be remade as an English-language film and then was interested to see on the liner notes that it's based on an Ed McBain novel, so who knew? (Spoilers coming): They rescue the boy about halfway through, and then the film becomes a standard-issue police operative as a team of police officers and detectives work to capture the kidnapper and retrieve Mifune's money. To a degree, the energy has been sapped from the film at this point - but we do get a few great scenes as they track the kidnapper, particularly a long sequence following him through the city's lurid night-town and eventually into a shooting den for heroin addicts - the movie showing a side of contemporary Japanese life rarely depicted or even acknowledged at that time. Movie closes with an encounter between Mifune and the imprisoned kidnapper, sentenced to death, in which we see how deeply disturbed and bizarre the kidnapper is - visually a compelling scene, but unfortunately Kurosawa didn't build the foundation for this encounter: the kidnapper talks about his loathing for Mifune, who lives in a big house on top of a hill and visible from the city slums in the valley (note the film title), but that doesn't seem to be sufficient motive and we hadn't seen this character enough in earlier scenes to understand him or care about him - might have been less sensational and more credible if his motives were solely mercenary.

Back in the USSR: A curious piece of cinema history

The Cranes are Flying is a 1975 Soviet film that people talked about back in that era, a glimpse, one might have hoped, of art and creativity in the USSR in those bleak days and a little bit of a bridge from East to West - a love story, no less. Today on the one hand it's still surprisingly good, a plain old melodrama - young couple separated when the young man volunteers to go off to war, and we watch him in battle as the girlfriend struggle with wartime poverty and air raids - hey, wait a minute, doesn't this remind me of some Russian novel? Anyway, the story does have a few unexpected twists - the girlfriend, who hasn't heard from soldier (Boris)  ends up marrying hiscousin, who has an exemption from service and musical aspirations, though her motive for this is never clearly explained - there's a hint that they might, gasp!, have had sex. Based on the story line, the heavy handed characterization, the clumsy propaganda scenes (even in wartime, the Russians are surprisingly comfortable, living in ample apartments with plenty of food), and the archaic editing (montages lifted from Eisenstein, for example) this looks like a film not from 1975 set in 1945 but like a film from 1925. But some things the Russians do really well, crowd scenes especially: seeing the soldiers go off to war, and the triumphant return of the Soviet army after the defeat of the fascists are both great sequences, bustling with life and w/ emotion. The scene in the impromptu Siberian wartime nightclub, as the piano player croons with a stub of a cigarette dangling in Bogartian manner, is a great moment of decadence, and, on the opposite extreme, the jubilant animation of the young lovers before the war, with Boris's balletic ascent of the winding staircase, is also a beautiful shot sequence. Doubtful that this was a realistic vision of Soviet life at any time, but it's about as close as they ever got to making a film that wasn't completely agit-prop and that had some potential appeal to a wider audience - a curious piece of cinema history.

Why Jeanne Dielman is a feminist classic

Chantal Akerman's 1975 very long Belgian movie, Jeanne Dielman, is considered a feminist classic, and though I have trouble with some aspects of the ending (there will be a spoiler[ I will alert you) I have to say it lives up to its reputation and then some - but this is not a film for all viewers. It's almost 3.5 hours long, covering 3 days in the life of the eponymous Jeanne, all shots taken from a still camera with a fixed frame than Jeanne passes through as the "action" proceeds. There are only 2 characters, for the mos part, Jeanne and her sullen, androgynous teenage son, and very little dialogue other than the forced politeness of a few conversations w/ shopkeepers. The point is that Jeanne, a 40ish widow, lives a life of quiet desperation, like so many others, and what makes hers out of the norm is that she makes her living by prostitution - each day, a man shows up for what seems to be a weekly tryst, they have sex in her bedroom (we don't see this, at least for the first two men) and then quietly pay and depart, a cold, clinical, slightly shameful transaction. One of the peculiarities of the movie is that we never have any idea how or why she got into this profession; one of the strengths is that it's so believable and sorrowful - there have been other movies about prostitutes, Nights of Cabiria and Belle de Jour and Klute to name 3, but those are very male-centric - this is one of the few to stay close to the woman's point of view. Akerman's photo compositions are astonishingly beautiful, each a work of art - of a very particular kind: Jeann's apartment is dowdy and chintzy, with opressive wallpaper and the big ugly wooden furniture that was well out of date by the '70s. Her technique of telling the narrative in single takes has been carried forward today esp by some Asian filmmakers - as in El Norte and Stray Dogs. And in turn she was influenced by Asian filmmakers of a generation earlier, notably Ozu with his "tatami mat point of view." So what happens in this movie? Until the very end, almost nothing, but by the 3rd day we begin to see more of Jeanne's pent-up rage as she rushes through some of the domestic chores that make up her day: she is a careless sitter for a neighbor's infant, for example. Her main interaction is w/ her very strange son - the long silent dinner in day one is especially painful, and he's just a troubled but nasty young man, can't even say thanks to his mother for waiting on him hand and foot, much less do anything to help. (BTW, what's the walk they take each night about?) So at the end - here's the spoiler - should we be rooting for Jeanne as she stabs to death the 3rd guy she has sex with? I'm sure it's been argued that she is striking that man for all or women and for all womanhood, but I just can't buy that - she's partly in a hell of her own making, and her isolation from all friends and family, her strained relationship w/ her difficult son, may be, mus be, deeply painful to her but they don't give her the right to take the life of an innocent man (he's crude and callous in his sex, but there's no sense that he injured or abused her). So the ending just adds a further provocative touch to a film worth watching even for 3+ hours. (You can easily watch it in 3 segments, one for each day, and maybe that's the best way to do so.)

Mac and cheese: Why Steve Jobs doesn't work

Aaron Sorkin's screenwriting style is distinct and recognizable almost immediately - characters speak very fast, with lots of quips and barbs and ironic observations and witty retorts - all the time under great pressure, whether int the West Wing, a newsroom, or the board room. You either like his style or you don't, and I have not been a big fan - most of the time I'm thinking, yes, funny, good line, well written, but nobody speaks like this: he gives the illusion of documentary reality but in fact his work is completely fictive. (One notable exception: In Social Network for the first time I thought, yes, these super-high-IQ-nerd-competitive narcissists maybe to speak like an Aaron Sorkin script.) We get more of Sorkin's unlikely dialogue throughout the Danny Boyle-directed Steve Jobs (2015), and for all the frenzy it's a dud of a movie. What worked in Social Network does not work here: there's no obvious antagonist to Jobs except himself, we don't really root for him or care for him, in fact we dislike him pretty intensely much as we may like his products, and there's just not all that much drama in the battle to resurrect the near-moribund Apple as there was watching a start-up rise from nothing. The guiding concept that drives the movie had some potential, as the entire film is structured around several (4?) product unveilings - beginning with the Mac and building up to the iMac (there's a rather clumsy hint at the future of the iPhone - they were smart I think not to bring the movie up to the present, not even in the closing credits). The pattern, however, becomes dull and repetitous; each product event seen entirely from the backstage, much like actors before a big show (can't help but think Birdman was a big influence on Boyle's style here, with lots of movement backstage and some long tracking shots as the characters speak while rushing along ill-lit corridors, e.g.). Problem is it's one thing to imagine an atmosphere for potential crisis w/ a million people wanting the attention of the head honcho if the honcho is, say, the U.S. President, but these back-stage dramas - with a hapless Kate Winslet constantly saying Jobs has to be ready in one minute - seem absurd, far removed from normal or even abnormal human behavior. Yes, Jobs was a flawed human being but do we really care? Do we really care that he's a tyrant to his underlings, indifferent to his colleagues (Seth Rogen is cast perfectly as Wozniak, in on the ground floor and unable to see the vision beyond the relic of the Apple 2), and a distant present to his daughter? He made Apple into the most successful company in the world, almost single-handedly it would seem, but this movie doesn't make him into a real presence and - other than a reminder that at one time Apple looked like a company on the brink - the movie doesn't tell us any more than we already know or need to know about technology, design, marketing, corporate politics, or people.

A film that's a step on the way toward greatness: De Sica's The Children Are Watching Us

The seldom-seen Vittorio de Sica 1944 film The Children Are Watching Us doesn't rise the heights of his greatest works - Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine, Umberto D (and he worked w/ the same writer, Cesare Zavattini, had to look that up, on all of these) - but you can see it clearly as what one of the commentators called "proto-neorealism": he's just beginning to experiment with using natural settings and with unconventional narrative, and his sympathy for young children (boys) is apparent throughout - but he hasn't quite found his style yet as the movie, though unconventional in many ways, is much more a domestic drama, even a melodrama, than his later works about social conditions, poverty, class struggle, and loneliness. The Childre, somewhat like What Maisie Knew (a possible influence?) is told almost entirely from a young child's viewpoint so, like him, we piece things together by inference and observation, and there are gaps in what he knows and therefore in what we know. The 5-year-old boy witnesses his mother leaving the family to run off w/ her lover, then coming back for a time, but still drawn to flashiness and romance and not to the rather staid and boringly loyal father. Ultimately, she complete neglects the young child as she goes off with her lover; the father takes the child back, puts him into a strict Catholic boarding school, where the boy's fear and loneliness is palpable - and at the end the father commits suicide - we never see this, we learn of it from reaction shots - and, when the boy is told, his mother is cold as ice and he walks away from her, a tiny little thing in vast room in the school. It's a shockingly honest movie for its time, a very sad movie about a neglectful and selfish mother, and told w/ great economy and beauty and w/ no sympathy whatsoever for the mother: the boy is the victim, as is the faithful husband. Among the great scenes are the boy's feverish vision on the train ride home from his evil grandmother's place, the punch & judy show in the park in Rome, the seaside capers as the family tries fecklessly to reunite, the nightclub scene with the strange magician/illusionist and with the insipid society folk flirting w/ the young mother, and of course the little boy running away, walking along train tracks, nearly getting killed, tumbling down an embankment, running along the sand in the shadow of two policemen. Not a great film but fine for its era and a step along the way to greatness. BTW film was made and seemingly set in the early 1940s but not a hint or whiff of fascism and the war under way - it's not even referenced by its absence. For all intents, film could have been from 1930 - how can this be? Some kind of censorship or code in Italian cinema of the era?

Room - Exploitation or serious work about violence against women?

Brie Larson no doubt deserved an Oscar for her performance in the Emma Donoghue production Room, but is it a good movie? Definitely a compelling movie, at least for the first half. The first hour of the movie is entirely shot within the "room" (a garden shed") in which Larson has been held captive for 7 years (she's now 24), held by an evil, horrendous middle-aged man, unemployed, living in a working-class Akron neighborhood; during her captivity she has given birth to the young boy who nearly steals the show, he's now 5, and will play a key role in her escape. Honestly, I didn't think I'd get through the first hour - not that the movie was bad in any way it was just too disturbing. From the moment I heard about Donoghue's novel I knew it would be compelling but wondered why the hell anyone would want to write about such torture (wondered the same thing about the over-praised Lovely Bones, which turned into a terrible movie). Examination of humanity at its lowest pitch, or exploitation ripped from headlines? Well - not much of a spoiler here - but they do get free, and I think most will agree w/ me that the 2nd half of the movie, with the mother and son struggling with adjustment to the world (which he had never seen except a "flat world" on TV) and to family, etc., is a let-down - the air has been sucked out of the movie, and out of us, already. In a way, the movie is a stunt - and I'm sure many would say it was a writer's concoction and could never happen - except that it did happen, and I wonder how much the book and movie were influenced by the horrendous Cleveland kidnapping story (the Ohio setting seems intended to make that connection for us). Part of me wants to consign this movie to the category of art about violence against women that weirdly titillates and sensationalizes the violence it purports to oppose - Dragon Tattoo being the prime example of that -- but I recognize that the motives were more sincere and the goals were higher in this film; it's not a crime movie so much as a study in personality and culture (thankfully, after mother and son are freed and we learn in passing of the arrest of the madman, we don't hear from him again). We can admire this movie for its ambitions and its technical prowess, but it's a damned hard movie to watch, or to like.

A note on Renoir and the world's quirkiest and maybe toughest race

First, a note on yesterday's post: I may have overstated the matter in blaming the Nazis for making it impossible for Renoir to finish A Day in the Country. Not that I'm apologizing to the Nazis! But, having watched some of the supplementary material about A Day in the Country, there's more to the story: Yes, Renoir abandoned the film and moved to the U.S. during the war and never returned to the project, which his crew and others worked into a 40-minute feature. But it was primarily problems with weather and funding that put the film on ice - and Renoir had to move onto other commitments. However, the producer, who was trying to raise the funds to complete the film, was a Jewish man and as the Germans took over the government of France it was impossible for him to get funding and he had to move to hiding in the south of France. Only after the war was he able to raise the money, and by that time Renoir was out of the picture, so to speak.

Last night saw the documentary The Barkley Marathons, about the world's quirkiest and maybe toughest endurance run (covering 5 marathon-length loops over trails and rugged, hilly terrain in Tennessee), not exactly a run but a combination of mountaineering, orienteering, hiking, climbing, running, and pure survivalism. Race times out at 60 hours (2 1/2 days), allows only 40 entrants per year, and there are often no finishers. Runners will have particular interest in this film, but others would like it to, esp if, like M., you are fan of all moves about survival and struggle against the elements, such as Everest and Meru. As movie, it breaks no new ground, but the filmmakers do a good job telling the story of the race through the viewpoint of the participants (although why didn't they interview any of the women?), and the got good footage of the participants during the race at various points, including some nighttime footage, and harrowing footage of the very fit participants struggling into the hq (they must past the starting gate at the start of each of the 5 loops), as we watch a few deciding to give up the quest, they can literally take no more, they're at the end of their endurance.

An unfinished gem - Renoir's A Day in the Country

Another thing for which to blame the Nazis, in case we needed one more, is that French director Jean Renoir decamped for America without ever completing his 1936 film, A Day in the Country, so what we have via the gods of Criterion is a 40-minute version that shows the promise of being a great film but of course leaves so much undeveloped that it reaches for the stars but never gets there. The film, based on a de Maupassant story that I've never read, is about a family of four (plus a shop assistant) from Paris who take a weekend jaunt into the countryside and stop at a little country in for a "picnic" (what's the term? dejournee sur les herbes? - same as the title of Renoir pere's great painting?). A couple of country boys who work at the inn spy the Parisians and make plans to distract the men and seduce the ladies (young, sweet girl, daughter of shopkeeper and destined to marry the doltish shop assistant, who plays the role far too grossly for this film; her mother, a flighty, bossy, silly woman who willingly throw off her taciturn husband for the fling w/ the much younger man). There are a lot of themes touched on here - country v city, class issues, miscommunications, sexual energy - and we can see that Renoir was building toward an ending of great pathos as the characters return to the scene years later and look back on the missed opportunities of their lives - but the movie just sketches this in, necessarily. It's also a great example throughout of how well Renoir worked en plein air - beautiful pastoral scenes, that make a nice contrast with his cultivated pastoral in the great Rules of the Game. The movie unfortunately has a horrible, cloying musical score that intrudes rather than heightens the emotion of the film, and I have to believe Renoir never approved the score. Still worth watching - but not if it's your first Renoir film.