Elliot’s Watching April 2022
A New Yorker blurb led me to watching Chantal Akerman’s 1986 musical feature, Golden Eighties, which could hardly differ more from her landmark work, Jeanne Dielman: This a mostly light-hearted film told mostly in musical #s, and in the spirit of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, though without the emotion and the pathos. Akerman’s characters are foolish and not in the least credible nor are they meant to be - this film is meant primarily to dazzle us with color (it’s filmed in a small shopping mall below street level in the Paris (?) Metro system) as we bounce around among three settings: a beauty salon, a coffee bar, and a clothing store, and with the buoyancy of a # of tunes, none of which is memorable though it’s uplifting to watch the beauty-shop employees do the dance #s. But who are these people? What’s the story? Not much, other than the characters take any form of social commitment, even marriage, as just a traffic advisory; when one young man, for ex., ditches his fiancée on the day before their to-be marriage, the adults console the young woman by telling her, hey, you’ll soon find another guy and you can be unfaithful to him. The heart of the story, such as it is, involves an American visiting France who purely by chance runs into a woman he’s lived w/ after the war and has pined for ever since. Nothing credible about this, except - the New Yorker writer (Richard Brody?) notes that this film is played out against a landscape of war and the Holocaust. Really? Blink and you’ll miss it! There’s a single mention when the woman says she was so skinny after they left the camps and that’s why she and the American lived together without sex. Hm, well, that hardly makes this into Shoah 2. Anyway, fun for the dancing and the overall design, but as a drama it makes no sense and seeing this will remind you that there has never been a French song or band to make it big anywhere.
Quick note on a few shows sampled and abandoned: Star Struck Season 2 seems like a rehash of Season 1 and got us nowhere; The Outlaws, written by the Office team from England, is not nearly as funny in fact not funny at all.
Horace Jenkins’s 1982 film, Cane River, long lost and forgotten but recently restored, is a landmark in cinema history as one of the first films written, directed, produced by an all-Black team (some minor parts in the movie played by whites, who are tour guides in a former plantation house) and filmed on location in Louisiana. I wish it were a better film, though it does have its strengths; the leads are very appealing couple start to finish - Peter (Richard Romain) a recent college grad returned to his home town, and Maria Tommye Myrick), set to begin her college life at the end of the summer (though she’s supposed to be 22 so what happened in her life? We get little back-story.) Their love is a bit R&G or WSS, as they seem to be from different but adjacent but rival Black communities; at the outset, that seems to be a big deal, as M’s brother in particular strongly oppose their relationship - though nothing comes of his opposition. That in a sense is the major weakness of the story; there’s not much dramatic tension until near the end when M’s mother, in a long scene probably mostly improvised, gives her hell for spending time w/ Pete. A good, dramatic scene in itself, but what’s up with this narrative? Both P and M are in their 20s, but the story line presents them as if they were kids, teens, just graduating from h.s. It’s almost comical to see the mother freaking out about her daughter’s behavior at age 22! Pete himself is enigmatic; he was a college football star who has just returned home after refusing pro opportunities; he doesn’t want to play football, he wants to be a poet. Yes, that’s possible - but we really need to see more of his “poetic” side - he seems incredibly naive for a 26-year-old (!) college grad in the 1980s - does he ever read, recite, memorize, think about poetry? Does he know how to begin to start a career as a writer? Anyway, we can bang away on this movie, but the subtext is it’s incredibly sad that Jenkins didn’t live to see it completed and didn’t get the chance to expand and improve his artistry.
Kathleen Collins’s film Losing Ground (1982) is recognized as one of the first films by a Black director and featuring a nearly all-Black/Hispanic cast, has some excellent moments but its willful ambiguity seems very 1980s (or 60s?) and probably leaves most viewers with the sense of wanting more (not a bad thing, better too little than too much) although wanting more clarity isn’t necessarily good. I really liked the two main characters from the start - a married couple, she about 30 he at least a decade older, she (Seret Scott as Sara) a well-liked and charismatic college prof (Philosophy?) and he (Bill Gunn as Victor) a self-employed artist who’s just learned that a museum is buying one or some of his key works. They decide - he decides, actually - to rent a place upstate (it looks like a town on the Hudson such as Nyack?) for the summer. At first, Victor seems affable and joviaL - Gunn has a terrific laugh - but we gradually realize that he’s a big mansplainer and, worse, a troublesome flirt. Their relationship sours and darkens over the course of the summer, has he makes little effort to hide his dalliances (with a much younger Hispanic woman) and she sets aside her scholarly research to take part in an amateur or student film project, in which she dances w/ a handsome and mysterious black actor. It seems we’re meant to parse the differences between their two behaviors: she flirts because it’s in the script, it’s a role, whereas he does so because it’s in his character. I don’t want to give away too much by the ending - which is possibly violent - as we are, I think, meant to discern the moral and physical distance between what two people might do in pursuit of art - did the gun really go off or was it just a play? - and in life, particularly sex life. I don’t know anything about other work by Collins but I like to believe she had other opportunities in film and that later films were less random and withholding regarding key plot elements, that is, re life and death.
Gordon Parks Jr.’s Thomasine & Bushrod (1974), written by Max Julien (who plays the male lead, alongside Vonetta McGee as Thomasine) has some strengths and innovations that make it worth a look - notably, an exciting gunfight filmed by a handheld camera that gives a vital sense of reality and danger, plus an imaginative montage of stills that trace the from obscurity to fame, or notoriety if you prefer, of the two Bonnie & Clyde- like gangsters - with the catch that they’re both law-abiding black citizens in 1911 Texas, facing a great deal of racism and racial hostility, at first with some equanimity but eventually with violence of their own. Unfortunately, the plot is thin as tissue paper, with far too little attention to the bounty hunter pursuing the two outlaws, so we never experience their danger nor do they ever do much to conceal their identity or whereabouts - in fact, it seems that the T&B would have been easy, natural targets as they go on a rampage of auto theft and shooting (apparently never fatal shooting); there are nice scenes that show the outlaws distributing their bounty (in the form of loads of bread, so we do get the symbolism) to impoverished people of color, Native people I assume, and the 2 leads throughout are pleasant and likable - we can’t help but root for them despite their sometimes too easy resort to violence and theft. This film comes about 6 years after its obvious model, B&C, and I just wish it had taken more of an original course of action and development, instead of coming off too much as a “Black version” of the antecedent. Also have to note that the film boasts perhaps the worst theme song ever attached to a movie (doesn’t help that the names of the lead characters are so odd).
Ermanno Olmi’s third feature, i Fidanzati/The Fiances (1963) follows up on his great feature Il Posto as a great look at working-class life in post-war Italy. In this instance the story line follows a young man, Carlo Cabrini as Giovanni (too old for the part it seems) who leaves his home - and leaves his girlfriend (not clear except from the title that they’re engaged) Lilianna behind on the mainland as he heads off to Sicily where he’s been recruited for what seems to be a mid-level professional position in engineering at a gigantic power plant. He imagines this job will be a great economic opportunity - if I don’t take it, 10 other guys will, he says - that may help him and L. financially; times are tough all over despite some postwar prosperity. He learns on arrival that the job isn’t quite what he’d expected: horrible and unsafe working conditions, exploitation of the manual laborers (mostly Algerian), terrible and over-priced housing, and little to no guidance or recognition. We see quite clearly that any prosperity in the region takes advantage of the workers and disrupts all life in the region; the factories and the plant itself are ghastly monstrosities. Olmi’s great strength lies in filming this like a documentary, like an expose of the lives of the workers and to some degree the life of the Sicilian community - the 3-day festival includes some remarkable footage, for ex. Unfortunately, the narrative runs out of gas toward the end, as we see/hear an interchange of letters and messages between the G and L, as we get the sense -never specified as far as I could see - that he will return home to her asap. (The dance-hall scene at the opening of the film - where L. sulks in sorrow and declines to dance, is quitebeautiful.) Note: I saw this film a few years ago and blogged on it, but haven’t re-read the blog; I’ll do so later to see how much my views have changed or my memory has faded.
One of the lesser-known (today) works by the Eric Pressburger and Michael Powell team is the delightful I Know Where I’m Going (1945), a pit of whimsy and romance near the end of the war in which the war casts a shadow over the story line but the story itself offers some comic relief, so called: A young man (Wendy Hiller) heads off from London to the Hebrides where she is to meet up with her wealthy industrialist (hard not to think of war profiteers) fiancé, whom apparently she hardly knows but is wowed by his stature, at his family castle in the Hebrides for a very quick wedding. En route she meets another young man from the islands - who also has a family castle/estate, as it’s obvious to all of us that they will end up together, just a matter of how and when (about 90 minutes). A series of storms and gales keep the woman from getting onto her finances island, and during that interval she learns of his cruel and self-centered character and becomes ever more warmly attached to guy #2. There’s lots of light island humor throughout (the movie was mostly shot on location - quite unusual then) and some great scenes including a singing, dancing, and speechifying during a long night’s celebration and in particular the foolish final attempt to motor through the gales and reach the remote island - this part obviously shot in studio using a projected film background but done so effectively that no doubt susceptible viewers have felt sea sick. Not one of the great movies of all time, but a great movie of its time and a pleasure to watch some 75+ years later.
RaMell Ross’s documentary film Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) is moving and absorbing in many ways - it’s a portrait filmed over several years of life among the (mostly) Black community in this small rural county in Alabama. The highlights include some inventive and quite beautiful camera work - high-speed photography, unusual light filters, and most striking are two brief but powerful sequences on life (birth) and death (of a child). We seem to follow over the course of time several members of a family, in particular the older son who is enrolled in a small college in nearby Selma where his focus seems to be on basketball - throughout the entire project there is little to no talk about schooling, about preparation for college, about careers. The flaw in the series, however, is that we don’t get sufficient introduction to the central characters so it’s quite difficult to follow a narrative arc - and by the end the film seems to be a collage of mostly inventive passages and sequences. Ross deserves some credit for eschewing the more conventional form of documentary narrative, but a little more spine to the story, a little more sense that we are following the course of the lives of several people in this rural community. There is little reference to the “outside” world - a brief comment about a celebration of the Selma protesters, but that’s about it - and, again, Ross avoids the conventions of documentary filming: as best I can recall we never hear him ask a question or probe - the story such as it is unfolds, slowly, over time.
Martin Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), based closely (I think) on the novel from 1920 - both set decades back, in the 1870s - is notable for its break-the-band extravagance of the period details of the lives of the uber-rich in the elite Manhattan social circles, so if that’s what turns you on for it - and also watch The Crown, which was similarly adorned, with one difference: the Crown told a great historical-generational story whereas Scorcese’s indulgent piece smothers a great novel. Viewers will not readily pass from the slumbering giant of a movie to Wharton’s elegant narrative. In fact one problem with the movie - which I could not watch in its self-indulgent entirety - is that MS relies far too heavily voice-over narrative, without the narrator’s having any personality of her own. What’s cool about it? OK, the camera work in long ballroom dance scene is a technical marvel, an obvious tribute to Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons - and maybe as well a reprise of his own justifiably famous Copa scene - and the opera (I guessed correctly that it was Gounaud’s Faust) at the opening is beautiful (it oughta be) and he does manage to get gorgeous megastars into his movie but what he never gets - or at least 40 of so minutes in fails to get - anything moving or heartfelt about the story, which just seems a lot of gossip and protocol from the denizens of a social world that has ceased to exist and good riddance. Read the novel.
For several years I was one of the judges for a statewide short-story contest, and inevitably each year several entries read something like this: Terrible noise, storm, lightning, I sought shelter in an abandoned house, creaking noises, a hand at my throat, what could I do?, and then I woke up! These were particularly frustrating when the set-up was better and more original, but we can see what happens: writer can compose a good, even great, scene but has no idea how to tell a story. Same would be true for David Lynch’s frustrating Muholland Dr. (aka Mulholland Drive, 2001). There are good, even great scenes throughout the film, start to finish, most notably Naomi Watts’s “audition” for a film that will obviously never happen, the Cowboy scene, the figure behind the Dumpster, the lip-synch theater art, the intense woman-to-woman sex scene, the jewelry destruction - just for starters. But about halfway through the film, after Lynch has set up two or three plot lines that highlight the vanity and hypocrisy and even the corruption of the Hollywood film industry, it appear he has no idea how explain and bring to gather these pieces of narrative nor does he have any interest in doing so. Yeah, maybe you can devise, as I’m sure many have, an explanation that would account for all the elements, but it wouldn’t really make sense of this chaos, so the best way to watch it is to enjoy the show as it moves along and don’t worry about explanations. Lynch doesn’t.
John Ford’s 1939 classic, Stagecoach, is still a pleasure to watch if you can get by the racism and stereotypes that mar some of the scenes and just recognize these - the Apache warriors, the comical Hispanic-American English pronunciations - as relics from a (nearly) bygone era. In essence, the film is a version of Canterbury Tales meets Sartre’s No Exit, as a group of 10 or so travelers, each with his/her own mission, share a coach for transport across dangerous open lands to the next fortification. We see the drunken doctor, the “bad girl” pushed out of town by the intolerant matriarchs, the card shark/gambler, the blowhard banker, the timid salesman, the jocular coach driver, the intrepid sheriff, the brave and loyal wife (pregnant) who’s traveled from Va. to reunite w/ her soldier husband, et al. - the key figure being the outlaw whom they allow to join the ride because he’s a fighting expert - played by a young John Wayne in a career move. Viewers today will get a charge out of the excellent studio re-creations of a frontier town and at the magnificent Monument Valley landscape, used in many subsequent films so as to establish the iconic visual recognition of the frontier and still worth a visit today. The film is full of humor, pathos, and schmaltz, a lot of fun, not exactly realistic but same could be said and has been said of most movies, not just Westerns.
The HBO series Slow Horses (James Hawes, director; based on Mark Herron novel) is a complex and emotionally draining work about a team of British agents assigned to Slough House aka Slow Horses because of their various screw-ups and misdeeds - trying to redeem their reputations through their efforts to thwart the kidnapping of a young Muslim comedian taken by a group of right-wing extremists who plan to execute the young man - highly dramatic plot, with lots of twists - hard to follow at times, at least for this American viewer, if we get to season 2 I will probably try untitles though I hate to admit that. Gary Oldman, as the supervising agent in charge of the team of misfits, is a grumpy, spiteful, hateful man - apparently Oldman playing himself, which may be enough to put some viewers off. That said, it’s an intelligent script, well plotted, full of high drama, esp. in the final episode.
