Ellliot's Watching - September 2022
Bela Tarr’s 1988 2-hour Hungarian film, Damnation (co-written with Lazslo Krasznahorkai), consists of long, long B&W shots most of which involve extremely slow panning or stasis. There’s a story within this film, though honestly I have no idea what it’s really about: superficially, a man laments that the woman he loves, a nightclub singer, is married to a thug who seems to hang around or manage the club. This fellow tells the protagonist (name?) to leave his wife alone or he’ll break his neck. He doesn’t leave the wife alone - in fact, one of the “stills” is a sex scene - but not much happens in that regard. BT has no evident interest in developing or differentiating the characters - tough going! These remarks, however, do not do the film true justice, as it’s in no way meant to be a thriller or a love story. The film is primarily a visual discourse: Any one of the “stills” would make a great 3-5 minute super-short - but to go to this film seeking plot, character, emotion is wrong. Particularly great scenes are the one in which the chanteuse sings, the celebration (of what?) near the end when, first, couples dance weird Eastern European type of jitterbug (and they’re pretty good!) and, even better, the end of the party when the whole town dances and moves about on the dance floor in so many rings - like a Hora, I think. There’s really no other film quite like this one and it’s not for everybody nor was it meant to be; the best way might be to see it in clips over several sessions rather than straight through for a tough 2 hours.
The 2nd season of the Scottish crime drama Guilt carries on from season 1 though with somewhat less mordant humor and a lot more dark and foreboding plot threads, as we follow Max on his release from prison (see season 1) and tries to re-establish his working relationship with the Scottish mob boss - a bad decision, especially in that he links his fortunes w/ the dubious private detective, Ken. Can one follow the plot? Maybe not all the way, not without some help and swimming up stream, but enough to feel the tension and too for if not the “good guy” at least the “OK guy.” One things for sure: Most American viewers will want to watch this streaming w/ subtitles - we tried for a wee bit without these intrusive widgets (Do we really need such titles as “file drawer closes”?) but we were left at sea so went back and watched again w/ help. Anyway, it’s a really good series, as good a mixture of dark and light, cries and comedy, as I’ve seen in some time, and the door is left ajar for a Season 3.
Costa-Gavras’s Academy Award-winning thriller, Z (1969 - based on a novel by Vassilis Vassilikos, based closely on the assassination of a Greek politician (C-G himself an exiled citizen of Greece living at the time in France) is an exciting, dramatic, nail-biter from the top - starting with the combative statement on the opening credits that goes something like: Any similarity to any person or persons living or dead is not coincidental - It is intentional. The film has some of the best and most terrifying depictions of street demonstrations and counter-attacks, and C-G’s management of the flow of action in crowd scenes is the best since Battle of Algiers (perhaps no coincidence that the film shot in part in Algeria). Story line in brief: A politician in the opposition party speaks at a rally - braving early warnings of street violence - when his is attacked and killed - leading to a cover-up that goes to the highest reaches of government (claiming he was hit by a drunken driver) - and is at least in part debunked through the unrelenting and fateful pursuit of truth and justice by one honest, fearless man (w/ help from a witness who tells the truth at his peril) - played well by Jean-Louis Trintagnant. Still worth watching today - in fact, maybe far too close for comfort today; the crowd scenes would inevitably call to mind the attacks of Jan 6 - and a forecast of what violence and cover-ups may be yet to come.
Barbara Loden’s film (she wrote, directed, plays the lead) Wanda (1970) is something like the anti-Bonnie & Clyde - in this case a troubled, damaged young woman who gets drawn into a bank-robbery scheme that is anything but cool and sexy and glamorized - in that sense far more realistic and gripping than any of its counterparts. Loden, in the title role, plays a woman obviously unfit for family life; the film opens with her divorce proceeding in which her husband testifies that she neglects the children; she does not contest this, and wanders off into life full of danger. She’s too trusting, and completely incompetent at managing her meager $, and falls into the clutches of the wrong guy, a mean bastard, who puts her in great jeopardy. Honestly, I thought I probably wouldn’t like this film - seemed too dreary and even saccharine from the promos - but it totally held my interest and my pity. The Pennsylvania coal-country backdrop is bleak and evocative, and probably the only wrong note in the film is that Loden - and what every happened too her? - is too pretty for the lead role.
Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1966, screenplay by Carole Eastman) was in essence the breakout of Jack Nicholson, following up on Easy Rider and predictive of Nicholson’s Three Easy Pieces (also written by Eastman), though in this film he plays the bad guy with great aplomb. Is it a good film? Depends how you measure that. I’m pretty sure I saw it a million years ago on initial release and followed the plot line with great interest but never figured out exactly what happened at the ending; watched it again this week - same story - but I still feel the fault is in myself; I’d gonna watch it again, hopes high. That’s mainly because the film is so good a long the way, mysterious and economical: a desert prospector and his feckless sidekick are scouted by a young woman bound on some kind of vengeance mission and she hires the 2 men to take her to a small town across the desert; reluctantly, they oblige - but at some point they discern that she’s leading them into a trap (duh), as they cross paths w/ the evil “Billy Spear” (Nicholson), and it’s clear those 2 are in cahoots, as they say. Why or to what end, who knows? Maybe I will after 3rd (and final) viewing - the bleak scenery is both scary and beautiful, that is, desert-like.
Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back (2021) is a monumental work of documentary and film editing - Jackson and his team built the 6-hour film from hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of film and recoding of the foursome in studio (and, ultimately, on rooftop) as they spent a month developing what would be their final album, Let It Be. To watch the group at work is to have an even deeper appreciation of their genius - as they start with what seems only fragments, bits and pieces, but nowhere near anything of a completed song - we sense that they will never be ready for their big show (and of course they’re not ready, what began as preparation for either a massive outdoor concert or for a TV spectacle gradually became another album and the brief, famous Rooftop Concert, the first great rock pop-up, in which the Beatles did a few final takes of some of the pieces on Let It Be. Never, ever, have we had better access to artists - to geniuses - at their creative work. And to see these 4 so smart, so difficult, so troubled - what a rarity, a unique, unmatched experience. Songs that start as nothing, a fragment, a core, become part of the playlist of our lifetime. Of course we see the hostility and tensions play out, as the group was obviously near disintegration - George feeling marginalized, Ringo way out of his league (though each played a vital role over the course of band’s history) - and, especially, the interaction between John and Paul: at times hostile and critical, but at their best it’s almost a romance. It takes weeks to get them to work together - despite Paul’s most valiant efforts - he’s clearly the leader, the musical director, the one who pushed everyone along against all odds. Yet John is clearly the creative genius who moved the group, and Paul especially, beyond simple pop and American blues toward a new, multi-faceted style. Yet he’s a problem, a prima donna so to speak, annoying, probably high most of the time - until they rock together and bring it all home in just 2 or 3 days (after a month of screwing around). Yoko Ono is literally at John’s side throughout the month-long session, a strange vibe for everyone, and the little known pianist, Billy Preston, glowing in his good fortune (the Beatles knew him from Hamburg days), brought in at about the mid-way point when all prospects looked bleak and pulled the group together through his imaginative keyboard backups.
Luchino Visconti’s late-life film, a (mostly faithful) adaptation of Thomas Mann’s 1914 novella, Death in Venice, strange to watch today - as we follow the last few days in the life of a supposedly famous composer on a lonely stay in the Hotel des Bains on the Lido, in Venice (some of the film allegedly shot in the studio in Rome) in which he is utterly nasty to everyone he comes across in the film, most notably the hotel staff members, who fawn on him (it’s part of the work I guess). His main activity over his few days in Venice is to stalk a young (12?) boy who looks angelic and quite feminine; the composer - named Gustav (as in Mann’s novella) - comes across as a dangerous creep - and the young boy, Tadzio, is ambiguous at best - sometimes returning Gustav’s lingering stares and his engineered close encounters. The repressed homosexuality was perhaps a big deal a century ago - now it mostly seems strange and sad. And in the original, I think we do feel sorry for Gustav - whereas here we just despise him. What was Visconti thinking? He makes much less than Mann of the plague that essentially makes Venice a prison, as all transportation to the city is cut off; he also makes much less than Mann of Gustav’s pathetic attempts to look younger than he is. But Visconti does more than Mann w/ Gustav’s musical prowess Mann’s Gustav is a writer): Visconti uses Mahler symphonies for almost all of the score (good!) but also has Gustav engage in some ludicrous hot-air discussion with a (rival?) musician about art and beauty - and he includes a scene in which one of Gustav’s works is greeted with hooting derision (unclear whether this is a terrifying experience he endured of if it’s a dream from which he wakes in a sweat). It’s hard to imagine such a reaction to any piece of serious music - he must have done something right to attract such outrage, right? All told, in my view, this movie is a misguided failure, despite the gorgeous settings of long-ago luxury; my views may be pedestrian, but a likable protagonist (played by the hapless Dirk Bogarde) would help.
Sarman Masud’s You Don’t Know Me (2021, BBC/Netflix) is a courtroom drama extraordinaire, as the drama, based on the novel by Imran Mhmood, opens with the prosecution addressing the jury and outlining what seems be an irrefutable conviction, and then the defendant (Samuel Adewunmi as “Hero”) rises to present his own closing arguments, representing himself - always discouraged. Over the course of the 4 episodes he slowly and meticulously lays out the facts as he knows them, along the way telling an exciting and moving tale, over the course of which him admits to several crimes and numerous “mistakes” as he calls them - and the question is, do you, and does the jury, believe in his story - with all the nuances of gangs and race and violence and betrayal he recounts as well as a wholesome and devout family life, which we know of course only from his testimony, so maybe it’s a scam?— so at first you think, with all the bias in the courtroom (though the jury is mixed-race) that he doesn’t stand a chance. Couldn’t his carefully crafted narration just be a another con’s hoax? Or, do we believe him? Obviously no spoilers here, but I found the conclusion to be powerful and provocative, to say the least. Definitely worth watching this series.
