A German domestic drama that's honest but neither cold nor hot

Maren Ade's (had to look that up) German domestic drama Everyone Else (more accurate translation of title would be All of the Others) is really about one couple, Chris and Gitta, unmarried, not living together, maybe early 30s, on a vacation staying, as we gradually learn, in Chris's mother's vacation home on Sardinia (beautiful!, and mostly unspoiled, it seems) and about their troubled relationship, their alternating variously between verbal abuse, humiliations, worries about careers (his, mostly), physical abuse (self-abuse, mostly - Gitta jumps out of a window for example) and some playfulness (at times), sex (several times, and the only time he actually says he loves her) - in other words about a week in a very rocky and difficult relationship that seems to be heading toward dissolution; they contrast with another far more successful (and conventional) couple they run into on the island - a couple who's professional success and generally peaceful relationship with and commitment to each other (she's pregnant) brings out the worst, most passive-aggressive and then aggressive behavior in Chris and Gitta's relationship. I have to admire the movie for its honesty and its emotional scope - a whole range of emotions and attitudes in its two-hour span - but also have to say that I kept waiting for something actually to happen, something other than the relentless bickering and posing: something dramatic, some revelation, something that would move their relationship toward a conclusion or dissolution if need be. This is not Albee's Virginia Woolf nor is it a Bergman domestic drama; it's much more low-key and even civil  (it's closer maybe to a contemporary take on Antonioni). It seems to me that for a film like this to work we have to empathize with the main characters and their troubles or loathe them, and in this case it's neither, we're left like the Laodiceans - neither cold nor hot, which is maybe worst of all, for a drama anyway.

Is the future really theirs?: Riots in the Paris suburbs circa 1995 - La Haine

Watched the 1990s French film La Haine (Hate), (dir M Kassovitz, looked it up) which seems especially on point today - about the street demonstrations and the thug life in the Paris banlieux (sp?), the suburbs that, in the reverse of the American topography, house the poor, the immigrants, the outcast. Film begins with terrific documentary footage of the street riots and clashes w/ police outside Paris and then breaks into a narrative, beginning on the morning after the riots w/ one of the rioters in critical condition in a local hospital. We follow 3 guys - late teens, early 20s, affiliates through a loose gang association w/ the guy in the hospital - and we follow the 3 over the next 24 hours as they get in various scrapes, commit a # of crimes, beginning with the petty and building in gravity and intensity; a lot revolves around a gun that one of the gendarmes lost during the riots and that one of the 3 guys has found - this seems so odd to us in American, where half the people on the streets probably own guns legally - and, as all movie and theater-goers know, if you show us a gun in the first act, someone will have to shoot it in the 3rd. It's a really dark movie about these three estranged and somewhat dangerous guys, representative of an entire culture; though one is Arab (the others are black and Jewish), this movie predated the age of terrorism and the culture clash with the vast Muslim community in and around Paris - it's nonideological and a little dated in that sense. There's some humor, at times, but dark and vulgar and sexist humor - at times it reminded me of the young toughs in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, but it doesn't really build in us much sympathy for these characters (the black guy maybe an exception - he's been trying to rise above his circumstances) and we know little - intentionally - about their families, education, aspirations. They scrawl on walls the slogan "The Future is Ours" - but it's just a slogan. They seem to have no thoughts beyond the present moment.

Veep season 2 builds toward its inevitable conclusion

Season 2 of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus vehicle, Veep, builds inevitably toward her decision to split with POTUS (the president is never named, nor seen) and run for president herself. The last episode is a terrific back-and-forth as she struggles with her decision, sending each of her staff members into a frenzy, each reacting differently but each one immediately looking out for self - loyalty to a boss in politics can evaporate in 2 seconds. A particularly strong episode in season 2: the TV crew visit to Veep in her home, a seemingly puff-piece feature interview that turns at various times extremely nasty when the interviewer (Allison Janney) drops a few provocative questions. Entire episode filmed in one location, all interior, and very smartly cut from interview footage the the various prep actions of both the news crew and the Veep staff. Consistently, this series gets the personalities and the predicaments right - exaggerated for comic effect, of course. JLD carries the show, w/ her malicious smile and her wilful blunders, but the supporting cast, each a type: the steely and dead-serious scheduler, the affable and rumpled media guy, the smooth and ambitious top aide, the equally ambitious but maybe just slightly yearning for a life of her own chief of staff, the idolatrous personal aide - all will be instantly recognized to anyone who's been around elected officials and their entourage.

Exxcllent South American film about 2 ethnographers exploring the rain forest - 30 years apart

The Embrace of the Serpent looks like the kind of film that Werner Herzog might have made (he didn't; it's by a team from Colombia), an ethnographic drama that follows two anthropologist/explorers in South America (undefined rain-forest area, could be Columbia or Brazil), two stories told in tandem: the first is of a German man interested in learning about and preserving the native cultures, brought by a native Indian who is slightly westernized (wearing the same type of tropical khakis as the German) to an Indian shaman and healer who seems to be living alone in the jungle - angry and resentful about the way white settlers have taken over tribal land and corrupted (or killed) native people. The native man agrees to a river journey to find healing medicines for the German. In the parallel story, set about 30 years later (the 1940s) an American, having read the posthumous journals of the German ethnographer, locates the same native healer and asks him to help him find a tree of great value - he agrees, and the go on a river journey the recapitulates the earlier journey 3 decades later and we see some of the increasing devastation and native people are enslaved and oppressed. There are some very beautiful scenes (movie shot in b/w widescreen, except for 1 sequence) and some harrowing moments, particularly the 2 visits to a Catholic school for boys - later corrupted into a Jim Jones-type settlement. Late in the movie we learn that what the American is seeking isn't some powerful hallucinogen but a rare form of rubber tree - something desperately needed - and highly valuable - at the start of WW2. A totally engaging and often weird movie, and we learn at the end - but good to know at the outset - that it's based on the actual journals and papers of the two white explorer/ethnographers/exploiters.

Why Campion's Janet Frame biopic misses the mark

Jane Campion's film about the life of the New Zealand author Janet Frame - originally a 3-part TV series, later distributed as a 2.5 hour movie in 3 parts, An Angel at my Table - based on Frames three-volume memoir (the title is the title of Frame's 2nd vol.) - has many of Campion's strengths as a director, and some serious weaknesses, unfortunately (I watched only the first two parts). Campion is great at establishing a historic period and giving us a vivid, almost tactile sense of the hardship of life for a large, working-class family struggling to get by in a remote NZ town in the 1940s: the cramped bungalow, with 4 girls sharing a mattress, the dismal outhouse, beautiful mountain scenery all around but the living conditions bordering on squalor. Also she gives us a good sense of Frame as a young misfit, strangely homely, awkward with others, withdrawn, lacking in social graces and boundaries (in one powerful scene completely misreading a whole situation and letting the family know at dinner that she saw her older sister "fuck" the boy next door). So the first section is pretty good, especially in that we know we're seeing a portrait of the artist as a young girl. The second section or chapter really misfires, however: in this section Frame goes off to college (in Christchurch, I think) to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. At one point in despair she tries to kill herself w/ an aspirin OD; a well-meaning but feckless teacher suggests she go to a hospital, which apparently leads to a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and 8 years in an institution under-going hundreds of electroshock treatments. I say "apparently" because none of this is dramatized, Campion skirts over that entire section of Frame's life (she may have done the same in her memoir), and the next we know she's out, living in a rural spot with a fellow writer (a mentor, not a partner) and writing - and lo and behold her first book is accepted on first try! But what does she write about? We really have no idea (and from the little I've read about Frame I think she was published pretty widely before her hospitalization - the movie seems to distort her chronology for dramatic effect). Too much left unexamined and unsaid her, and Frame in part 2 is just a blank canvas. I really want to know more about Frame, but will have to go to her books for that to happen (maybe that's as it should be).

Veep still gets it right - if exaggerated

Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Veep continues solid into the second season, with the humor still building - especially as we get more accustomed to the types that populate her office, each of them quite believable (if exaggerated) and at least one cast against type (the polling guru who controls the President, cast not as a wonkish nerd but as a handsome outdoors-man). What continues to make the series especially strong, aside from JLD's great acting, is the range of her character and of the reactions she provokes in us: sometimes she's winning and charming and we root for her, sometimes she's a tyrant and a termagant and we wonder how she could be so cruel to those she works with. And in this she's typical of many politicians, I think - able to put on the charm when needed, but touch as nails, and often terribly narcissistic, in constant need of reassurance and reinforcement. Her tirade on AF2 when she learns her comic song has gone viral - of course she should never have expected it to remain confidential - is great. And the dislikable characters - Jonah from the West Wing, her aide's girlfriend the overbearing Dana, the Senator from Ohio - are so loathsome it's entertaining every time they're on screen. Five seasons? I don't know if it can sustain that, but going along fine and the midpoint on 2.

The romantic idea of the artist and the silence of God - in Autumn Sonata

Adding a note to previous post on Bergman's 1978 film, one of his last, Autumn Sonata: Watched the Criterion "commentary" version and made several observations. First, after the long night of drinking and confession and gut-spilling, culminating in Eva (Ullmann)'s charge that her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) caused the illness of her daughter Lena through her abandonment and neglect, yes, we see Charolotte as a narcissist and a monster - she's so cold to Eva and indifferent to Lena, so wrapped up in her own world - as noted in the haunting he final scenes with her riding off on a train with her English manager, she'd much rather be there, talking business, than with her daughters - but there's a sense in which Bergman (Ingmar) is actually on her side: Yes she's a horrible parent and an unfaithful spouse (like the two Bergmans?) but she gives all for her art. The scene in which she plays the Chopin prelude, showing Eva how it's done and totally showing her up, says it all: the art is brilliant, and the artist steps over everyone, even (especially?) her daughter to get there. Eva is the more sympathetic character by far - and Bergman emphasizes the sympathy for her - just as Ingrid B is playing part of her life in this role, so is L Ullmann, w/ her then preteen daughter silently portraying the young Eva in a # of flashbacks, emphasizing on the literal level the bond she - unlike Ingrid B - feels w/ her daughter) - but Eva is also rather dull and bland, only opening up after a night of drinking, and then closing everything down again with a cringing letter of apology to her mothers. It's as if Bergman is saying: that's the wrong path, the wrong decision, at least if you have talent and genius. It's the romantic idea of the artist for sure, but it's an idea he lived: suffer, and give up everything else, for your art. On re-viewing the film, other haunting moments emerge, esp Lena's calling out for her mother at the end: Mama, come!, bleating it, while lying on the floor at the head of the stairs. And the silence and absence of Eva's minister husband - completely uninvolved in, even unaware of, the drama and struggle going on all around him - like God.

A late chamber film from Bergman still worth watching: Autumn Sonata

Ingmar Bergman's 1978 film, Autumn Sonata, is another one of his "chamber" films, involving only 4 actors (save for a near-silent role toward the end), and w/ almost all of airspace taken up to 2 of the greats, Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as mother daughter in a life-long love-hate struggle: Ullmann is married to a minister, quite a bit older than she, living a quiet and contemplative life in rural southern Sweden (or Norway?), Ullmann psychologically very frial, a hint that she'd suffered some kind of breakdown, that she married to get away from a difficult relationship. Mother Ingrid comes to visit - they had not seen each other for 7 years, mothers is a famous and completely self-absorbed concert pianist. At first mother and daughter embrace in happiness, but in moments they're picking apart their relationship the damage the mother has inflicted over a lifetime: abandoning her husband and, later, her 2 daughters (one of whom is near death from what seems to be MS, now living w/ Liv U., to the mother's chagrin), humiliating her daughter (a terrific scene in which the mother puts a knife in the wound, showing the timid and solicitous Ullmann all that's wrong with her piano playing), and on it goes. Ullmann's character builds in strength as toward the end she really lets rip and tells her mother all that she'd done wrong - but of course this changes nothing, and the disengaged, feckless husband watches from afar - like a distant and silent god? This film isn't as well known as Bergman's great b/w chamber films from the 60s - his reputation was beginning to ebb at this time, when he seemed so removed from the political and social uprisings that were shaking the world in the late 70s, but it's still powerful and beautifully filmed by the great Sven Nyquist.