Elliot’s Watching - Week of 5/23/21: My Brilliant Friend

Elliot’s Watching - Week of 5/23/21: My Brilliant Friend

The Saverio Costanzo adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (Season one, 8 episodes) is to the best of my recollection an extremely faithful rendition of the first volume (and maybe part of the second?) in the author’s quartet about her coming of age in working-class Naples and in particular about her relationship - I’m assuming that the Linu character is closely based on EF’s own life, that this set of novels is part of the relatively new auto-fiction movement - with a much more adventuresome, risk-taking, rule-breaking best friend, Lila, as their life paths divulge - best friend’s family cannot or will not send her on for higher (i.e., post middle school!) education even though she’s obvious gifted and talented. Over the course of Season 1 the two girls move from childhood - playing with dolls and carefully observing the lives and mores of the families in their tight-knit neighborhood, beginning about 1950, and following the two girls as the grow to adulthood, have their first awkward sexual experiences, and get caught up in various family rivalries, including some violent gang or clan episodes. The series moves along in a slow and stately manner; it’s not a show of great tension or high drama, which may for some be a drawback though for me that made the show more credible. The production itself is quite beautiful, as the Italian team has really re-created the look and feel of life in this time and place: The many long shots of the street life if the neighborhood are particularly striking. The only real drawback for me has been my difficulty at times keeping the characters and their family backgrounds (and rivalries) in focus - a lot of characters are introduced over the 8 episodes, sometimes with little or no context, but maybe that’s just my problem. Those who loved the novels, in particular, will really enjoy revisiting this world, so well captured in these 8 episodes. 

Elliot's Watching week of 5/16/21: Tehran, Cassavetes

 Elliot’s Watching week of 5/16/21

The 8-episode (first) season of the Israeli Shenhar - Syrkin spy-thriller Tehran (2020) is tense and exciting from the first moment, as we follow the sometimes disastrous and ill-fated mission of a young woman (Niv Sultan as Tamar Rabinyan)   who’s an Israeli agent in the Mossad assigned to a dangerous mission: She flies into Tehran with faked documents w/ the assignment of gaining entry into a Tehran electric-power company to hack the computer system and shut down power across Iran in preparation for an Israeli strike against nuclear plants. A lot of things can go wrong with this scheme, and most do: she’s nearly “made” by a chance airport encounter, and she rouses the ire of a high-ranking man in the Iran military/spy agency, a man who himself is open to bribery and coercion. It’s perhaps too much to expect that this mission and its outcome would be realistic or even possible, though anyone who’s seen the recent Netflix series The Spy (unlike Tehran, it’s based closely on true events) will accept that the Mossad asks the impossible of its agents. So despite a few botched moments when we though why the hell doesn’t she just get out of there alive the series is a great entertainment w/ lots of surprising twists and reversals. 

The 1997 John Cassavetes film, Opening Night, starring JC’s wife Gena Rowlands as a movie star cast as the lead in a Broadway play in which a woman has major blow-out scenes with her husband and an ex, has some great moments and in fact was looking to be a pretty great film altogether until we got to the grossly disappointing final act (of both the movie and the play it depicts). The fist is that Rowlands’s Myrtle Gordon is a major star, constantly put upon for autographs etc.; leaving the theater after one (out-of-town) rehearsal, Myrtle watches as an ardent young fan is hit and killed by a passing car. Myrtle becomes obsessed with this death, pays a visit to the shiva service (and is scorned and told to go home); over the course of the film, Myrtle becomes increasingly erratic and alcohol-dependent. In one take on the play (The Second Woman) she does well, using her self-destructive madness to drive the character she’s portraying on the stage; in a later performance she is completely out of control, obviously blowing all of her lines, and strangely the audience loves this performance; who in the audience can tell if she’s on or off script? By the end, at the Broadway opening, she staggers into the theater and sobers up, sort of, just enough to stagger through her role; in the final act, she’s clearly lost control and the whole act - a dialog w/ her husband, played by husband Cassavetes - is ad-libbed (it’s possible that the 2 really did improvise this scene - I don’t know) and again the audience loves this, laughing heartily. The problem is: There’s nothing funny about their dialog, and if this were really an opening-night performance I would say the audience would storm out of the theater, outraged. I get that the movie shows great pathos for this deeply troubled woman, but an honest assessment of the quality of her performance and a more balanced look at how her behavior hurts so many people, including her fellow actors and the playwright, would have made this movie more honest and admirable. 

Elliot’s watching week of 5-2-21: Sound of Metal; Borgen

Elliot’s watching week of 5-2-21: Sound of Metal; Borgen

Darius Marder’s 2019 film, Sound of Metal, starring Riz Ahmed at Ruben in a career-making role, is a vivid and powerful look at the life of a young man, a drummer in a fiercely loud tock band, who is experiencing a rapid and sudden loss of hearing. He seeks some medical help, but he is in the nomadic life of a rock roadie, living in an airstream with his girlfriend (Olivia Cooke), the lead singer - they are in no position to get proper medical attention. As Ruben’s hearing deteriorates, his girlfriend brings him to a rural treatment center for those with deafness, a place run by a religious/charismatic director who’s guiding principal is that hearing loss is not something to be “fixed” but must be accepted and lived w/ to the fullest. R has trouble adjusting to the life in the clinic, with its strict regulations (his girlfriend can’t stay with him - putting of course a huge strain on their relationship). Aside from the intelligent drama and dialog, what’s particularly striking about this film is the way in which it allows us to experience and sense how the world is experienced by those w/ no hearing and, later, how the world sounds and feels to those w/ cochlear implants. There are some really powerful, beautiful, sometimes scary sequences, in particular toward the end when R tries to reunite with his girlfriend and to come to terms w/ his life without hearing. I think this film outshines the admirable but only loosely dramatic Nomadland and should have copped the best picture award. 

Season Three of the Danish series Borgen held our interest throughout the 10 episodes yet it did feel like a bit of a falling off from the drama, both political and familial, of the first two seasons. Two reasons: First, the central, driving element of the plot, which in this season entailed the career comeback of ousted prime minister Brigitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), felt much less consequential and more diffuse than in previous seasons; in essence the PM  is struggling to set up a new political party that will can win just enough seats to be determining factor in a new government. Well, that entails endless discussions about the various parties and their strengths/weaknesses, really tough going for an American viewer and a diffusion of energy for all. Second, the personal stories of the two lead women - Nyborg and her top communications assistant Katrine (Birgitta Hjort Sorsensen) - both lead to relationships that somehow just don’t feel right: Nyborg w/ a slick British architect (leading to many scenes in English, and I don’t think Knudsen acts as well in these) and Katrine with a smoothie way too old for her and work colleague to boot, big mistake. The season is kept aloft, though, by the newsroom drama involving Torbe (Soren Malling) as he tries desperately to keep a bit of integrity in the newsroom as he’s pushed to chase ratings through gimmicks - and he also gets in a misguided relationship with one of his co-workers. So in short the bar was set high by the first two seasons and, though there’s still plenty of reason to watch this developing drama, the tension and energy seem to be drifting a bit; the door is obviously left open for passage onto a 4th season.