The British film The Dig (2021) tells of the “based on a true story” account of the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon funeral ship (a great leader or warrior was entombed in this ship, hauled to land) in a Sussex field of burial mound in 1938. The excavation was commissioned by the widowed landowner, Mrs. Pretty (!)(Carrie Mulligan and overseen by an excavator whom she hired, against the encouragement of, well, just about everyone who tried to get her to hire a respected archeologist rather than this unassuming, working-class guy with a passion for historical preservation. Against all odds (except those of movie plots) the dig was successful and led to contributions to the British Museum - tho the excavator, Basel Brown (Ralph Fiennes) received no credit until decades later (the film never clarifies exactly when, nor whether Brown was even alive to see his name in the museum). This is all to the good, yet I wished this story could have been told as a documentary; rather, the film indulges in numerous cliches, strives to build a back story about a young woman on the dig who’s in an unhappy marriage, lots of stuff about the eve of WWII - has there ever been a British film about the first half of the 20th C that did bring in the war?, about the early death of Mrs. Pretty, the plight of her poor, sweet 9-year-old son, and characters who are either extremely likable or extremely not. All this claptrap made the potentially good film, w/ lots of good information and much beautiful photography of the region, seem about least half-hour too long. Special criticism for the musical score, drenched in melodrama and intruding on virtually every potentially moving scene, blaring at us and telling us what we should be feeling rather than letting the British actors, all of them pros, tell the story.
Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon (1981 - aka Clean Slate) is a kind of weird but interesting film about a hapless chief of police in a small village in French West Africa, a place ripe with corruption and racism and w/ extremely loose morals. The protagonist, Philippe Noiret, is at first picked on and kicked around (literally, in one memorable scene) but various tough guys and gangsters in the town, and his wife, clearly, is cheating on him w/ a man whom she pretends is her brother - and there’s little Lucien (Noiret) can or will do about these humiliations - but eventually, he strikes back and takes advantage of his position and of the lack of any overbite and kills those who mistreated and humiliated him - including the husband of the woman with whom he’s having an affair, played by a young, dynamic Isabelle Huppert. The story line is surprisingly engaging, though any viewer today will be troubled by the treatment of the black community, quite peripheral in most of this film, which in itself is a commentary. When the characters do interact w/ the black population, it’s only to mistreat and abuse (or kill) them - a terrible expose of the worst of colonialism. Noiret is a bit of a philosopher as well, and his comments on the colonial culture in Africa are sometimes surprising and illuminating. Interestingly, this film was adapted from a novel by American author Jim Thompson, whose novel was set in the American South (I would guess Noiret’s philosophical bent owes something to this source material); it’s strange how well this film fit in with a completely different culture and milieu - or was it really that different? Viewer, be prepared for a # of scenes of abuse of women - although rest assured that the women get in their own licks as well.
Some of the good comedic miniseries work because we can identify w/ the lead characters or we can at least recognize in them the characteristics of people we know. Others work because they are so different from anyone we know or are likely to encounter. Some of the best combine the two elements, bring a character who seems somewhat “like us” and thrust him/her into an entirely alien world: best example probably Breaking Bad. The HBO series Barry, starring Bill Hader, does Breaking Bad to a comic rather than dramatic effect, and does so really well, at least thru the first season. Hader’s Barry Block is an extremely unlikely hitman for hire; at the outset, he’s preparing to assassinate a young man in LA, and as part of his scheme he follows the targeted victim who, as it happens, is attending an acting class. Barry finds himself drawn into the class dynamics and realizes that he wants to give up his life of crime and become an actor - a premise that leads to all sorts of plot twists and hilarious predicaments: A group of Chechen criminals get Barry into their sites, and a rival gang of comically inept Bolivians declare war on the Chechens… well, you’v got to see it. A particular strength is the focus on the acting class, where many of the characters have to excel at something really difficult, deliberately bad acting. Barry/Hader does plenty of that as well, but in the scenes that he plays with passion - including some Shakespeare and some “improv,” we see Hader’s ranger, which is wide
Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger (2021), based on Aravind Adiga’s novel, has so much going for it that I feel a little guilty about some quibbles, which I’ll get to in a moment. First, the strengths: extraordinary cinematography capturing, as best I can tell, the look and feel of a variety of contemporary Indian landscapes and peoplescapes, including impoverished village life, crowded urban settings, luxurious living in the new India of commerce and skyscrapers (much like Miami, as M noted). We see the sometime beauty of the countryside, but never sentimentalized, always fringed with the dangerous or the unsavory. No film I’ve seen gets down better the contrast in India, far beyond what we know in the States, of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, the high and low of life - one comparison would be the great, under appreciated Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance. Adarsh Gourav owns the movie, playing the title role of Balram, raised in extreme poverty in a remote village but with an acute intelligence that rises above the total incompetence of the educational system in the village and aspires to wealth and greatness and who sees his opportunity open as he becomes a driver for a corrupt, noxious family of businessman/mobsters. We see the many moral, ethical, and psychological accommodations B must make to wile his way into this family and to please his “master,” a young, liberal, somewhat “westernized” man who thinks he can be pals with his driver without the slightest understanding of the social distance between them. A crisis ensues - foretold in the opening sequence - that tests everyone’s morality. I won’t go into that, but without any spoilers it’s worth noting that the film seems to diminish in its last 20 minutes or so, as B improbably gains a foothold in the new economy and accrues some wealth; this element of the plot seems rushed through and not well conceived. I’m also a little bothered that the film, obviously hewing closely to the source novel, is narrated scene by scene by B, through the strange device of his writing a letter to a visiting politician from China: Wha worked in the novel, at times feels a little tedious and over-controlled in the movie, where I’d have preferred that Bahrani had let some of the scenes play out longer on their own.That said, still worth watching!
Giving lots of props here to the team that put together the great series from France, Call My Agent/Dix Percent, a hilarious, insightful, and at times moving series about the daily struggles, life and work, among a team of film movie agents in a Paris office. The catch is that in each episode a different actor plays himself/herself, usually as a neurotic narcissist. This tack was I’m sure much more of a hit in Fr., as few of the “stars” are known to American viewers - w/ exceptions of Sigourney Weaver and Isabell Huppert (in finale to season 3). What’s particularly creditable in S4 is that it was obvious that the plot lines were just beginning to become repetitious and out of steam; parting of knowing how to do a great series is in knowing how to quit - and to go out on your own terms, and this is 100 percent true for the CmA team. The plot lines in the final series all point toward the end, and the final episode (#6) is what I would call a brilliant denouement, right down to the hilarious last line (which I won’t divulge!). By the end, the characters are much more than just “types,” and the show is more than just a send-up. Check it out - unless you want to wait for the rumored English remake from the UK?
I’ve seen Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) several times over the course of many years, but of course as one of the true classics of world cinema, it’s a movie worth coming back to time and again - so much I didn’t see or comprehend in earlier viewings, so much I’d forgotten. The story line, pretty elementary as such, is that a young woman from a wealthy but perhaps unsavory business/construction family goes off with her lover (Sandro), her best friend (Claudia - a killer role for Monica Vitti), and a few other pals for a weekend jaunt via yacht to explore some unpopulated island off the coast of Sicily. During the course of the visit, Anna vanishes (and we never learn precisely what happened to her); a rescue crew finds no sign of her - but Sandro and Claudia return to the mainland and embark on a search for the missing young woman, during the course of which they become lovers - leading us to suspect Sandro of some ulterior motives, but nothing’s quite nailed down. It’s this ambiguity that drives the film, as well as MA’s unique style of editing and storytelling: many key moments in the narrative are just skipped over or unexplained, and some of the scenes, though the lead us nowhere, are just plain weird and mysterious (without being supernatural or “dream-like”), notably a brief visit to an uninhabited village (It’s not a town, it’s a cemetery, Vitti says),a weird encounter with an apothecary and his extremely unhappy young wife who claims to have seen the missing Anna, a small city that seems to be inhabited only by men, the crowded nightclub toward the end that arises out of nothing at all. While Anna/Vitti is sympathetic throughout, much less can be said for Sandro, a liar, cad, and opportunist, evident to us all time but never to the naive if tough-sounding Anna, who, we learn late in the film, is the only one in her group of so-called friends who wasn’t born into wealth. MA doesn’t ay it all out - so much is told by nuance and innuendo - but it’s in many ways a tragic film, moving toward a cool, strange, yet perhaps inevitable conclusion.
A brief note on Season 2 of the HBO series Barry (Bill Hader), which continues the pace of Season 1 w/ some really hilarious sequences, often based on the most unlikely of premises (as is the show itself, in which Barry, an ex-Marine, enters post-military life as a hired assassin, but is never comfortable in the least w/ his work - and tries to break away from the life of violence to become an actor) such as Barry taking on the role of combat trainer for a Chechen drug/crime gang or Barry hired to assassinate a guy who turns out to be a Tai Kwan Do Olympian so during the killing scene the two of them pretty much destroy the guy’s apartment and a nearby Fields supermarket - never for a second believable but, as with all the violence in this series, so far beyond the pale that it’s funny. The particular highlight, for me though, is Barry’s struggle to become an actor, with the terrific theater director played by Henry Winkler pushing him to tell his life story in his class exercises, which is the last thing he wants, and in particular Barry’s attempt stage a scene from the life of his sometime girlfriend, Sally, played by Sarah Goldberg - a rising star I would think -, as she tells the story of breaking up w/ her ex and Barry nearly cracks up during the sequence, all the more painful for him and her but all the better for the routine. Great look at inside the life of aspiring actors w/ varying degrees of talent and integrity - seemed quite accurate from what I know. 2/14
It would be easy and unfair to say of Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s 2013 film Grigris as the best film from Chad you’re likely ever to see. It’s actually a really excellent feature by any measure - short, emotional, and to the point. The plot involves the eponymous Grigris (his stage name or nickname), played beautifully by Soulémane Démé, who has a fantastic bar/nightclub act of solo dancing - worth seeing this just for the first few minutes if nothing else; after the opening sequence we recognize that GG has some disabilities, which I won’t divulge, and that he is struggling with some family crises, notably his beloved stepfather is dying of some kind of lung disease and needs money to pay for treatment and care. Over the course of the film we see the incredible poverty that permeates every facet life in this struggling country. One way out, of course, is crime, and GG stupidly gets involved in a ring that smuggles gasoline out of the country - which nearly becomes his undoing. Meanwhile, he develops a huge crush on a beautiful woman who hired him to shoot photos (his sideline - he recognizes it’s not a likely enterprise in the dawn of iPhones) for a fashion-modeling contest (which she does not win) - they are the most unlikely of couples, esp when GG learns about her unsavory history. In the end, after much drama, they make a great escape and settle for a time in her native village, which is entirely populated by women and children, as the men are all off for season field work. The conclusion is a powerful and surprise demonstration of the power of women. I totally enjoyed watching this film, and my only question is: Why hasn’t it been adapted and made into a contemporary American film?, which of course would probably totally ruin it. C’est la vie. 2/14
The Emerald Fennell (writer & director) film Promising Young Woman (2020), another star vehicle for the versatile Carey Mulligan (compare w/ her completely different equally convincing role in the recent The Dig), who even does her mid-American accent perfectly, is a dark thriller (though w/ its amusing moments) that requires an incredible amount of willing suspension of disbelief (I don’t want offer any spoilers but let’s just say it would be literally impossible for Cassy/Mulligan to embark on her vendetta against men without herself coming to serious harm) and a willingness or even eagerness to buy into the story premise that - there’s no other way to put this - literally all men are sexual predators, aided by pretty much everyone in a complicit society. Get over these two hurdles, however, and the film is, I have to concede, witty, surprising at times, and, most important, a dire warning to those who would exploit or condone male sexual brutality and a flag-raise to feminism and female solidarity. The film, for a time, tricks us into thinking that there may, somewhere, be a few good men - I wish it hadn’t been so tendentious - but I have to admit I was totally caught up in the developing story line and felt some glee in seeing the right guys get their comeuppance, to put it mildly, even if the plot kind of creaked its way through the final scenes as loose ends were (loosely) tied. Clearly, Fennell and her team never shy from controversy the need to make lead characters “likable” (sad to see Connie Britton in a villainous role) - they go all out from the first scene. So I don’t think it’s a “likable” film, but it will get you talking, thinking, and taking stock: Who hasn’t done something in their past that now is shameful, or worse? 2/15
Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020), never quite get away from its place of origin as a stage play (also Zeller’s in French no less) but no matter - it’s an extremely powerful and disturbing portrayal of a man (Anthony Hopkins, who owns this show) in the throes of Alzheimer’s, being cared for to a degree by his daughter (another fine role for the ubiquitous Olivia Coleman) who tells him she will be leaving shortly to live abroad in Paris with the partner - or will she? The genius of this film - one of several in recent years on this heart-breaking topic, including the recent Elizabeth Is Missing - is that we’re never quite sure of our point of view. Are we seeing the family and caretakers as they try to manage The Father’s illness and needs - a process that strains and upsets all of the characters - or is everything, including the betrayals and major and minor spats about their obligations to the father, seen only in the mind of the father, who is always disoriented and suspicious (suspects that his caretaker stole his watch - obviously she didn’t - and also “suspects” that egoistic son-in-law wants him out of the flat and placed in a home: We see that scene, but is it “real,” or the father’s hallucination and paranoia? The result is an especially provocative film that keeps you thinking, and closely watching, straight to the end. 2/17
It’s hard to believe that Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet-era scifi (loosely) drama Stalker was filmed in 1979; if you didn’t know the date, you’d for sure think it was Tarkovsky’s take on the ruins of Chernobyl (which imploded in 1986). In brief the novel follow three men - The Writer, the Professor, and the eponymous Stalker, who serves as their guide on a journey of discovery through what the call The Zone and The Room. Why they make this journey is never entirely clear, at least to me, but it seems to be some sort of existential challenge and voyage of self-discovery. None of that made sense to me at any time in the movie, in particular at the conclusion when they wax philosophical - so don’t watch this movie for plot or character-development in any conventional sense. But the movie is a visual and atmospheric masterpiece, as we watch the 3 men pass through a landscape of industrial ruin and devoid of any human habitation of presence - very much as we would imagine part of the abandoned land around the Chernobyl plant might look today. Tarkovsky is known for his long takes, and he uses them abundantly here as the men proceed on their torturous journey: an allegory for life itself? for history? Who knows? At the end, the Stalker, returned to the good graces of his family (at the outset his wife was furious w/ him for his taking on another visit to the Zone), lies in bed, comforted, and talks about his lack of respect for the men he’d guided because of their obsession with wealth and success - which is not anything I picked up anywhere in this movie and I suspect was carved into the story line so as to please Soviet censors. All told, Stalker is a nearly unique and a uniquely powerful film for its visuals and its landscape, though when it strives toward meaning, insight, or allegory the film is pretty much a mess. 2/21
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2020), based on Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half Life, has gotten tremendously positive reviews across the board, but I have to dissent and suggest that part of this enthusiasm has built on Reichardt’s terrific line-up of indie favorites that combine in a unique way the quiet subtleties of characters lonely and distressed with elements of adventure and expeditionary travel (see Meek’s Cutoffk, Wendy & Lucy, Old Joy, e.g.). This film though seems off the mark; yes, she gives us a terrific sense of the hardships and brutality of life on the Western frontier in the early 19th-century. The narrative concerns two men who meet tip at a trading post for the nascent trapping (beaver pelts) enterprises in the Oregon territory. We see and feel the difficulty of life in these rugged, nearly primitive conditions (for most - the mayor or governor of the territory lives pretty nicely).. The plot, such as it is, involves the two men (one is a baker by trade, the other - far more intelligent and enterprising - is the driving force) concocting a scheme to cook and sell fresh biscuits (they look like fried donuts) in the outpost. To do so, they need one key ingredient - milk - so each night they go out after dark and milk the “first cow” in the settlement, the one owned by the governor. Bad idea! How long could that work? And of course they’re found out, pursued, and eventually the collapse in exhaustion and, we surmise, are found and shot to death by the governor’s men. This is not a spoiler, as the film begins, for some reason, in present-day with a young woman coming across two skeletons side-by-side in a forest clearing. Why begin w/ the end? And aside from the visuals what’s so great about this improbable story line? I admire the film for its simplicity and lack of pretense, but overall I found it to be thin gruel. 2/23
Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film, Minari (2020), about a Korean-American family of 5 (Dad and Mom, young girl and boy, elderly but lively grandma) trying to establish a small Korean-vegetable farm in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. Chung beautiful captures the struggle, the obstacles (interestingly, never any overt racial discrimination, which surprised me), the aspirations, and the challenges that the family members face - not all that different save for setting than that of almost any immigrant family hoping to attain success in the U.S. Happy families are all alike, etc. - but then again this is not exactly a happy family, which gives the film its strength: relations among the parents are always strained, and the young boy - a terrific Alan S. Kim (David), who was I think 6 when filming started - carries a burden: various medical and psychological issues. At its heart, the film is about the film is about David’s establishing a relationship - at first hostile, but gradually, loving - with his grandmother Youn Yuh-jiong (Sonja), who is also terrific in this sometimes comic role. The film is subtle and moving; though there’s one highly dramatic sequence toward the end, it’s for the most part a domestic drama, full of interior tensions and subtle changes in relationships and attitudes. Much of the film is short from the POV of the children - the camera set just a foot or two above floor or ground level - the Tatami style, which Ozu established - all of which adds to the intimacy that this film establishes and maintains. The title refers to a Korean herb, perhaps similar to arugula?, that thrives on its own when planted in the wild near a source of water. 2/28
