An excellent Netflix series on a young woman's break from an ultra-orthodox Jewish community

Anna Winger's 4-part Netflix series Unorthodox (2020), based (loosely, I think) on the memoir by Deborah Feldman, depicts the bravery and the struggle of the 19-year-old Etsy Shapiro (Shira Haas), who flees from the ultra-orthodox community in Brooklyn for freedom and a new life in, of all places, Berlin. She leaves behind her husband of one year - their marriage was completely devoid of feeling or sentiment or love of any sort - shortly after learning she's pregnant. The dogmatic and paternalistic, to put it mildly, community sends the abandoned husband, a generally timid and introspective young man, along with his much more boisterous and worldly cousin, to find Etsy and bring her back into the fold. This series has just enough action and tension to keep it moving, but the main reason to watch is for Haas's terrific performance, in which she conveys a huge range of emotion. The film also provides a vivid depiction of the culture and mores of the orthodox community, with its cult-like insularity and removal from the contemporary world. Of course part of the edge of the series is that we know it's at least to a degree true to life - though I suspect that Etsy's assimilation into Berlin culture was far more bumptious and extended than depicted in the show, with its inevitable time compression. There are many ways in which the series could have gone off the rails, but, without my giving anything away, I was really pleased that the movie at the end steered away from the unlikely and improbable. In fact, the end is left somewhat open to interpretation, which seemed to strike the right note: We don't need to know everything about Etsy's fate, and this series gives just just enough.

A period piece and another Rohmer "inaction" film

At first the 1976 Eric Rohmer film The Marquise of O doesn't look or feel like a typical Rohmer work: It's in color, a period piece (set during the Napoleonic Wars, ca 1800, at a palatial German estate) and it begins w/ a swashbuckling scene: Russian soldiers are overpowering the forces defending the castle at O; a young Russian officer sees a group of Russian soldiers attacking the young Marquise and trying to rape her; he comes to her rescue, earning the gratitude of the vanquished German nobleman. But don't worry, the action stops there - or at least the externally and conventionally dramatic action, and we soon enter Rohmer-land: A film comprising many extensive conversations among a small set of characters; almost all the shots are interiors, with no significant camera movement, very much as if we're watching a play (or a literal translation of a story - which this is, story by Heinrich von Kleist from ca 1800). So it's by no means an action film; it's really an inaction film; but still - fans of Rohmer and his unique, restrained, "classical" style will enjoy puzzling over the complex relationships that develop over time: The Russian soldier wants to marry the Marquise (she's a widowed mother of 2); her father at first welcomes the proposal but wants to give it the test of time; the Marquise finds out she's pregnant, but insists she never had sex since her widowhood; can you figure out where this story is heading? Of course you can, but it's still worth watching the intricacies of this drama - which does rise to a few points of crisis - unfold and, uneasily, resolve.

A great Rohmer "moral tale" in which all the action is cerebral: My Night at Maud's

Eric Rhomer's 1969 film, My Night at Maud's, is unmistakably in Rohmer's style, quintessentially French, and still a really great movie though by no means for all viewers. The movie, centered on a 34-year-old engineer, Jean-Marie (Jean-Marie Trintagnant) living quietly and alone in the mountain city of Cleremont. He's a practicing if not quite devout Catholic, and at the outset we see him in church where he espies a beautiful young congregant and thinks that someday he will marry her. Shortly after, he runs into a friend from childhood now working as a philosophy prof in a local university. Over coffee, the 2, in their very French manner, engage in a lengthy conversation about Pascal and religious faith; J-M says that as a believer he cannot and engage in casual sex, nor has he ever - though he has had several long relationships w/ women whom he loved, but these relationships dissolved. We can see by this point that this will be no action-packed film - though it is full of intellectual action and intelligent, adult discussion about love and sex and family and religion. The pfor friend takes J-M to meet a young divorcee whom he has occasionally dated - the eponymous Maud - the long threesome dinner-date at Maud's place becomes increasingly tense and odd, especially when the prof rather abruptly leaves and Maud invites J-M to spend the night (rather than drive home in a snow storm). Reluctantly, he agrees; the night is full of moral challenges, as he refuses M's advances and invitations and spends an extremely uncomfortable night wrapped in a blanket. Further incidents ensue, which I will not divulge - but suffice to say that there are a few interesting twists as the movie builds toward its final scene, several years down the road. Rohmer calls this the 3rd of his so-called "moral tales," and I guess this one is a test of a man's struggle to live up to his ethical beliefs - without being a prude or a monk. The film has a slight echo of the first of the "moral tales," The Bakery Girl from Monceau, a Rohmer short from 1963, in which a law student falls in love with a beautiful girl he sees on the street but knows nothing about - as does Jean-Marie in My Night at Maud's - though in the Bakery Girl the moral dilemma is not as acute or profound, just a question of should he ditch a less promising relationship when his dream-girl becomes available (that's just young love in action, not a moral crisis).

Babylon Berlin Season 3 excellent in many ways but sure demands close attention!

Babylon Berlin, Season 3, in an odd way, reminded me of the great British series, The Crown: The amount of money and the creative energy to replicate what I will take to be the look, sound, sense of Berlin in 1929 down to the smallest detail: clothing, decor, street scenes, autos, implements (e.g., a 1929 telephone), music, entertainment, clubs, bars and dives,  prisons, hotels, government bureaus, the list could go on). In other ways BB is its own series entirely (with a nod to Berlin Alexanderplatz, a little earlier I think but the same locale), and for the most part exciting and engrossing in every episode and enormous in scope. Particularly in Season 3 we see the political forces coalesce, as the Communists face off against the National Socialist Party, and we know who's going to win out on that one - this series in S3 is really about the rise of the Nazi power. But there are many other plot strands in S3,  probably too many - a film financed by two sometimes-rival gangsters that leads to the death/killing of 3 of the star actresses; the trial and approach to the execution of Greta, convicted of planting a bomb in her employer's house killing him and his daughter - but who put her up to it?; a police investigator who goes off the rails; most of all the continued saga of Police detective Gereon Rath (Peter Kurth) and his complex relationship w/ his former sister-in-law whom he loves - and I'm leaving other aspects out such as the stock-market crash and the rise of the Hitler youth group and scenes of the gay Berlin subculture. So much that I honestly could follow maybe 80percent of the story line if that; for some that might not be a flaw; perhaps my concentration isn't the greatest of maybe the whole season demands a 2nd viewing (yikes, I forgot about the ongoing experiment to remake a human psyche through analysis and hypnosis!), so be warned, you have to give a lot of attention to this season to figure out how all these plot strands entwine and co-exist. I really think better plot recaps at the outset of each episode would help. My only disappointment, however, is the failure to develop the character of Charlotta Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), who at the end of S2 was poised to become a full-fledged police detective; in this season, she never really takes the lead on any case, though it's clear she's the smartest one in the room. I appreciate that the season shows the sexism that she's up against, but I wanted her to have a stronger role as a protagonist and less of one as a victim. (Also, wish they'd had Kurth dance again.)

Two notes: On a series that grows on you (Schitt's Creek) and on a film about a dysfunctional Italian family

A twofer today, first on Season 2 of the delightful and amusing series Schitt's Creek, w/ particular praise for the touching last episode (13th) of the season. This is a series - from the father-son team Eugene and Daniel Levy but really a fantastic ensemble cast of those two plus Catherine O'Hara and Annie Murphy as the Rose family - grows and evolves and gets better as it goes, a real rarity in TV streaming. The essence of the plot: the Rose family of 4, a wealthy LA (I think) crew - the father ran a big business "Rose Video" now defunct, think Blockbuster - loses its fortune and has to relocate to the eponymous town and live among the "yokels" in a run-down motel as they try to right the ship. Although every episode has some laughs and some episodes have many, the series didn't start out so well from my viewpoint: Essentially, the gags were just making fun of the rurals and watching this spoiled family of 4 tr to adjust to their hard circumstances. Ho hum. But over the course of the first two seasons the Roses develop relationships w/ various townfolk and it's not so much that they change the town, though the do a little, as the town changes them - and in the process not only do they grow but the whole series grows in complexity and in empathy. We change, too. Many of the secondary characters are excellence, particularly the sardonic motel manager Stevie (Emily Hampshire). All told, a series that takes a while to get on its feet and then takes off.

Also, what about the Marco Bellochio 1965 Italian drama, Fists in the Pocket - a terrific film that emerged from among the great Italian neo-realist films of the 1960s though, in its portrayal of a severely dysfunctional family (4 adult children and their mother) in northern Italy is closer in spirit to Cassavetes or maybe even Eugene O'Neil. There are many highlights, or lowlights if you will, as we watch the members of this family tear one another apart - notably the suicide note and the careening car ride, the trip w/ the blind mother, the extremely tense birthday party, and the final breakdown of the central character, the weirdly murderous Alessandro (Lou Costel). The gusts of emotion and malevolence are so startling as to be almost comic, but an extremely dark comedy a la Becket; the whole movie is well crafted and well acted start to finish. I only wonder what happened to Bellochio; this was he debut film, made, I read somewhere, on limited budget with family members and acquaintances in the cast and locales from his home town. From what I can see, his later films veered more toward commercial success than to art-house obscurity - so, good for him, if this movie opened a path through which he could pursue his career. But it seems to me it was a talent wasted or misdirected. Anyway, we have this one film from him and it's worth watching.

One of the greatest Samurai films - and for that matter just a great film: Harakiri

Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 film, Harakiri, is truly one of the great Samurai films of all time, maybe one of the great films of all time, though it's not as well known or recognized, perhaps because overshadowed by Kurosawa's work in the same genre. The film engages viewers right from the start - the first half hour or so is among the most powerful sequences in Japanese film: A "ronin" (i.e., a Samurai at large, w/out attachment to any army or leader) appears before the Samurai army and sks the leader for permission to kill himself by Harakiri on their temple grounds. He explains that in this "time of peace" (1630) he has been living in poverty and unable to support his family and wants to die in the honorable Samurai manner. But apparently this has been a scam, or so it seems, w/ many seeking this approval with the hope and understanding that the warrior leaders will give the would-be victim some money to go away in peace. But this guy's different; he insists that he wants to and will go through with the gruesome procedure. Over the course of the film, he tells his back story to the Samurai ruler, and we over time come to understand his motives (I won't give anything away - see the film for yourself). The film ends with a terrific sword-fight and with a chilling expose of the Samurai way of life or at least of the hypocrisy of this Samurai clan. Tatsuyu Nakadai is terrific in the lead, with his obsessive almost hypnotic stare dominating the mood throughout; the score (by Toru Takamitsu) is great as well. I don't know anything offhand about the director (I will look him up) but if this film typifies his work he's worth further watching (or maybe this was a one-off). Note: Have just looked up Kobayashi's filmography and see that before Harakiri he directed the terrific trilogy, The Human Condition - definitely a classic and must-see - though I know little about his later works.)

A fine work of documentary historical research and cinematic story-telling: Who Killed Malcolm X?

The Rachel Dretzin-Phil Bertelsen 2020 Netflix documentary, Who Killed Malcolm X?, is a terrific, taut account of the 1965 assassination of the  black leader, the shoddy if not corrupt NY police investigation of the killings, the imprisonment for 20 years of 2 men who had nothing to do w/ the killings, and the suspicious indifference of the police and the FBI regarding the most likely assassin. The film is based entirely on the investigation of an interested and committed citizen, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad (a Providence guy, BTW), who through his meticulous research over many years even decades has brought to light the injustice of the murder investigation and its aftermath. Overall, the film does a great job establishing through much historical footage the importance, bravery, and brilliance of Malcolm X, the corrupt practices of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm's gradual estrangement from the nation, and the power of his message and of the Islam religion and culture in the black community - specifically, the Newark mosque which was the home base of several of the accused assassins. It's hard to imagine today how powerful and important that movement was in the 1960s and how the rise of black Nationalism terrified the white establishment; obviously the movement today is not what it was two generations ago, but it does appear that there is still a thriving black Muslim community in Newark - though it's not clear if younger generations are keeping the movement alive. I'm purposely not divulging the results of A-RM's investigations except to say that there are surprises - and roadblocks - at many points throughout the 6-episode series. All told, this is a fine work of historical research and contemporary cinematic story-telling, especially of interested to those interested in black social-justice movements and to those (like me) who know or used to know a lot about Newark.

A "horror" film to which I could not buy into for a second

Just a few quick thoughts re Ari Aster's 2019 film, Midsommar, as I didn't/couldn't watch the final 30 minutes (which M kindly summarized for me), the first of which is I guess I am in no way the target audience for this film and there's no way I could possibly suspend enough disbelief to enjoy or be moved by this film. But Aster is young and developing a solid reputation as a master of the macabre and this film fits right in as far as that's concerned. Plot in brief: a group of grad students - 4 guys, one of them a Swede - plus the gf of one of the guys decide to go on a journey to their Swedish friend to enjoy the midsummer celebrations (for which Sw is justly famous). They, and we, quickly learn that the Sw student, Pelle, lives on and was raised within a extremely strict cultish community - and when the 1st day of their 10-day celebration leads to the ritualized killing of two elderly cult members, the visitors begin to freak. Though they stay! And get, of course, drawn into the cult (to varying degrees of increasing absurdity) or killed by it (w/ varying degrees of graphic horror). Sue there are oddball cults around the U.S. and around the world, but the goings-on of this cult are so absurd as to provoke laughter more than horror. A good performance by rising star Florence Pugh is wasted; so was a lot of careful attention to the design of the cult village. That said, horror such as this, in my view, works only if the filmmaker earns the buy-in of the audience; in this case, the journey of the Americans and the behavior of all never earned my buy-in for a second.

Lots to like in Season 2 of Succession, even if there are few likable characters

A note or two on the HBO series Success, Season 2, which pretty much picks up where S1 left off and maintains the same pace and the same tensions, as we watch the members of the Roy family engage in a dynastic fight to control the corporate enterprise and in Oedipal struggles to unseat or deracinate the family patriarch, Logan Roy. Again this series plays close to the playbook of the Murdoch communications enterprise, though without, surprisingly, much of a direct or even indirect nod to the Trump administration - not sure why. The strengths remain the great ensemble performances, with every cast member in and out of the family holding up the standard, the occasionally hilarious and demanding script, so intense at times that it drove us to watch w/ closed caption so as not to miss a quip, and the seeming inside knowledge about corporate finance and malfeasance. Whether accurate or not, who knows?, I suspect no more accurate that ER was about hospitals or for that matter Newsroom about journalism. Still it's fun to watch and to imagine that Fox news is run by a cast of vipers - maybe that's not so hard to imagine. On the downside, there are few, maybe no, likable characters, though at times we feel empathy for all of them except the patriarch. And though I'm no language prude I find the extreme vulgarity and profanity throughout the series troubling mainly because it's a cheap and easy way to write: If Logan Roy, for ex., said "fuck" one-tenth as often as he does in this series the word, and its attendant expression of anger/frustration, would be 20 times more powerful. Still, a totally engrossing and entertaining series throughout - and plenty still to come in an S3 I'm sure.

A Japanese police procedural by (not) Kurosawa that defies convention

I've been watching a Kurosawa film - a strange murder-mystery from 1997, Cure - and thinking how odd this is that the film would seem to be late-career Kurosawa and looked and felt absolutely unlike any film of his I'd ever seen, especially not the late films, with the imbued colors, the strong character development, the acute sense of place, the classical focus on form, and the occasional engagement with historical and literary material. Only when this feeling of dislocation became so acute that I had to look it up and saw that this is a different Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, not Akira. No relation, apparently! So let's take Cure on its own terms: this Kurosawa manages to create a film that breaks w/ convention in so many ways. At the center, this is a film about a young Tokyo police detective going through a difficult time in his marriage as work keeps him away from home and often in danger and his wife, seemingly without children or career, is becoming increasingly depressed and even perhaps suicidal. He ends up working on a serial-killer case who leaves the corpses with ghastly disfigurations (the film itself is not, by today's standards, particularly ghastly - though it's often really scary); soon we, and later he, realize that the "killer" is really a psychotic young man who hypnotizes his "victims" into performing the ghastly killings and through hypnosis of some sort implants images and ideas in the minds of his suspects - a serial hypnotizer, in effect - and eventually, when he confronts the detective, strives to make the detective his next victim. The filmmakers are smart enough to have the cop speak w/ various medical personnel who assure him that it's impossible to make a subject perform an act reprehensible to them, such as murder. But within the scope of this film, it's quite possible - and the victims are quite prominent and unlikely subjects: a schoolteacher, a doctor, a security guard, et al. The film is unsettling in many ways, especially I think in the detective's visit to the decrepit home of the young man, as we learn that he's a dropout medical student with many weird antisocial behaviors - none of which drew particular attention in the urban and urbane world of 1997 Tokyo. Not a pleasant film by any stretch, but a powerful police procedural that turns the conventional plot on its head.

Comparing Viridiana with Parasite

Just a brief follow-up to yesterday's post on Bunuel's 1961 film, Viridiana: I think this film be great to watch alongside Parasite (in fact, it's possible I was drawn to re-view Viridiana by one of the reviews of Parasite), in that both involve a group of the disposed taking over and pretty much destroying the operations of an upper-class household. Of course there are major differences in every aspect of each film - it's not as if Parasite was a "remake" of Viridiana, but setting the 2 side by side and thinking about the similarities and differences, in presentation, plot development, and significance, would be a great thought exercise. I think the major difference, of course, is that in Viridiana we see nothing of the lives of those in what has been called the "Beggars' Banquet" scene, outside of their lives in the shelter of the estate household; in Parasite, we have a greater degree of sympathy for the working-class characters, and their revolt feels like a justified revolution of an entire social class; the "revolution" of the characters in Viridiana is far more ambiguous and inscrutable: Is theirs a justified uprising of the poor and oppressed? Is the opposing for the ruling class, or the established church? what about the prejudice and inequity within Bunuel's class of "beggars"? Many strands to unravel there, but the two films offer a real commentary on each other and on the class tensions and conflicts, some 60 years and two cultures apart.