Elliot’s Reading and Watching - Feb. 2024

Another wonderful film from French writer/director Bertrand Tavernier is the family drama A Sunday in the Country (1984) based on a novel by Pierre Bost - so simple in a way, a group of siblings and their children spend a Sunday at the beautiful landscape home of their recently widowed father, a well-known but not famous artist (the film is set  in the early 20th C. with appropriate costume and decor of the period. On the surface, not much really happens, but we get a full picture of the family dynamics specially driven by ball-of-fire site Irene (Sabine Azema); there are a few squabbles over provenance of some of the many possessions, most off which we assume were bought by the late spouse; throughout the father/grandfather M. Ladmiral (Louis Duecrux) reflects upon his career as a painter - he can’t get beyond the urge to paint in the “modern” fashion - e.g. Renoir, but he feels that to work in this mode would be insincere, mere copying - he will stay with his conventional techniques even if they mean he will be forgotten. The film ends with his staring at a blank canvas: will he ever paint again? Will he just spend the rest of his time with a luxurious s=country estate, but who can join in his pleasure? His son in law can’t seem to wait to get on the train home to Paris; the kids have their own world of play, that does not include him - and he knows, as do they, that his time has nearly come. This film is one of beauty and pathos - without any tricks of photography, the film is much like its subject: quaint, beautiful, subtle, and in some ways tragic.  

The Greatest Night in Pop (2024), a doc on Netflix on the first LiveAid broadcast in 1989, in particular the night of the multi voice performance of We are The World that would be the theme in the multi-locale setting, is by no means great cinematic art - too much talking heads esp by the producers, camera work and lighting tho best avail it today clunk and awkward - yet - what we do have as at least a glimpse of the most famous American pop singers working together (and apart) on the recording, most of the singers had never heard it ; all we’re provided w/ sheet music), the rehearsal started as the AMA awards were rapping and all gathered at an LA studio to record the piece involving some 50 artists; the went to dawn and tempers flashed at times - the highlights of course. For me, the highlight of course was Dylan (my lifetime fave) - everyone stood in awe before him - but when his turn to sing a line cane up we could see that he couldn’t really read the score - and he asked if they want him to sing in his natural voice or not; wouldn’t loved to hear not, but out was great to see him participate - one of the production team noted that  he was the most ill at ease and nervous in the crowd - which stood in his awe. Worth seeing just for that - but ther are other major artists and incredible performances including those from showstopper Cyndi Lauper and from the legendary Ray Charles (my fave in youth), Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and many others. 

Graham Greene’s late-career novel The Honorary Consul (1973) gets off to a great start as we find ourselves in a land of social and political scenes and mores are remote from the centers of commerce and publishing, a imagined land somewhere between Paraguay and Argentina, in a secluded and impoverished city hours from the capital. A team of rebels captures and hold hostage a Britain in hopes that one of the neighboring countries will meet the rebels’ demands because they’ve grabbed the British consul - but they haven’t, they’ve an “honorary consul,” who is of no interest at all to Britain or anyplace else. As always wth GG he does a fantastic job depicting the 3rd-world setting, there’s lots of dark humor, and a # of plot lines about the lives, the sex lives actually, of many of the (male) characters who frequent the local high-class brothel. GG’s treatment of the prostitutes and their domain is sexist by today’s or any other day’s era - the life of a prostitute in a remote, male-dominated city could hardly be idyllic except by the clients apparently. The only other flaw in the entertaining piece is the way too long section when the honorary consul is held captive and his accomplices, the main characters, are scheduled for execution unless they turn over to the rebels forces the innocent and oblivious captors. I felt like the hostage! 

Chris Weitz’s Operation Finale - the biopic about the Israeli capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman (2018), written by Matthew Orton, gets off to a shaky start, feeling “stagey,” self-righteous, and belaboring the obvious but for some reason the film took a turn about the mid-point the film takes off and is much more impressive in the 2nd half. The eponymous operation was AE’s maser plan, adopted by Hitler, to eradicate European Jewry, and leading the the mass killings and massacres of Jews - generally through mass executions. Most people, I think, know about the Eichman trials in Israel, but few have probably even thought about how Israel managed to get OS from Argentina toIsrael. That’s where the film really kicks up, as the Israeli team holds AE in captivity as they wait for the rescue plan to arrive in Argentina. The Israeli team make a point of treating AE reasonably we’ll and subject to know violence - am as a result there is almost a bonding between AE and his captors - the scenes where on the the Israelis (played by Oscar Isaac) and AE Ben Kingsley engage in long discussions and AE, devious monster that he was, almost earns our sympathy. Will his captors break? AE was a master and avoiding detection -posing as a just a peaceful with a small family farm and a neat household - and then we see some shots of the massacres and it’s hard to believe we’re watching the same guy, a monster. Viewers will almost find new info that should never be championed or spoken of in a positive or supportive manner, anywhere, forever.

Bertrand Tavernier’s film Spoiled Children (1977), which BT wrote w/ Charlotte Dubreuill and Christine Pascal, starring the veteran actor Michel Piccolli, is sometimes seen as a standing for BT: he plays a screenwriter and director w/ a work underway co-authored by a somewhat flighty and sexist guy. The work is not going well, and MP’s Bernard, a 40ish guy, a strong presence, decides he needs more solitude to write this difficult script so with the blessing of his wife, who is a therapist who works diligently with traumatized children, give the OK, which leads Bernard rents small apartment own one of the buildings in the Defense neighborhood (glam and glitzy, not typical of Paris, to complete the screenplay - but of course the flat is poorly maintained and the landlord is raising rents sp the tenants have formed a protest group and hired a lawyer = and Bernard takes a leading role in the job action - during which a he begins a torrid affair with another tenant. Ultimately, the protest never gets the full attention of the building’s owner and Bernard and his partner (who is beautiful and half his age) go their separate ways: Bernard’s wife, oblivious of or indifferent to Bernards philandering welcomes him home and takes pride in the progress of her clientele. So who’s the spoiled child? 

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1917) isn’t a novel per se, it’s really a sequence of events loosely connected that trace the course (and the lives) of a small mid-West towns over a 50 or so year span. The first section of the book shows the true pioneers who have moved for the most part from Central Europe believing that they can make a living or even a fortune on the nearly untouched fields of the prairie states (no specific mention of any one place or even territory). Then the book jumps forward a generation and we see that some have prospered and others have turned away for the extreme hardship. Now there are cars, telephones, flush toilets! The small town is headed for great prosperity, or so it seem - but then some plot elements take over the story as at the end it becomes a tale of lost love, emigration (to the next hot place, California and Alaska - ie Gold) and ultimately to a shooting nd a killing and incarceration. As in all life, all communities, some thrive and some barely survive - but all under the shadow or illusion of turning the prairie soil into a means for lavish success. 

The massive collection of essays and visuals the cover the entire career of the world’s greatest living artist, Bob Dylan: Mixing up the Medicine, by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishell (2023).This extraordinary book is arranged sequentially by BD’s 30+ albums with several interpolated sections on particularly great aspects of BD’s life and career, such as Newport 1965, the Nobel Prize for literature (wise choice!), Woody Guthrie, and ma lot more: the best account I’ve ever read of Dylan’s method of composition, an essay on BD’s extensive knowledge about many aspects of culture and history (the Civil War pin particular), and an incredible visuals of Hibbingand of BD’s childhood, including grade-school photos, the first record “Bobby Zimmerman” cut, so much great material and 500+ ;are pages - I recommend reading each chapter one a night, don’t over-do it. All of the materials depicted and described are part of the holdings the Bob Dylan Holdings, in Tulsa - which are comprehensive. The only thing missing, the only drawback, is that there is little or no material on BD’s personal life beyond his childhood. Though Dylan’s first love, Suze Rotolo, there is literally not a word about any of his wives, adult family, children - and of course BD must have wanted it this way; other biographies may tell more about his life, but none, thanks to the Archives,  could tell more about his art. 

I couldn’t watch to the finish Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980), a weird sci pic about a world in which people only rarely die - and about a project to film the death of one of the few people who will die (Romy Schneider.) Only scifi devotees will sit through the boring slog slog of this one, a rare mistake forTavernier. 

Ben Lewin’s Falling for Figaro (2021, co-writer Ben Lewin) is the essence of romcom - attractive though “heavy set” woman dramatically turns down a promotion in her burgeoning high-tech financial corp. to, with support from her genial and adoring sig other, pursue her lifelong dream of becoming an opera singer. She has zero experience but for some reason is taken by a famous but cruel and eccentric coach who prepares her for entry in a maajor voice competition - anyone wanna make a guess as to where this is headed? The x factor in the film is that the only other student in this tutelage, a handsome slightly older man, is also up for the same prize; at first they are rivals but -wanna guess again? Naah. Despite its improbability the film is a lot of fun twitch, in particular for the aria performances. Opera fans: go for it. Everyone else: You’ll know where this familiar plot line is headed. 

Alfred Hitchcock’s Cold War drama Torn Curtain (1966, co-written with 

Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse, and Brian Moore) is a whole lot of fun to watch, particularly to see Paul Newman in the lead playing one of the world’s greatest physicist - he’s nearly created the formula for a nuclear weapon that would disable all other nukes thus ending the project of nuclear war - but to complete the project has has to get some info from & work together with the greatest German (East German, in this era) to share their knowledge; Newman, traveling in Europe with his wife (Julie Andrews - what a mismatch!) gets an emergency notice that he has top go to E Germany immediately and top secret - even his wife can’t know - he thinks he sends her home w/ hardly a word of explanation, but she’s cagey enough to follow him and lots of complications ensue, notably that PN, as Michael Armstrong (a predictive name?) and Andrews are branded as traitors and defectors - so they must get the needed info to save themselves (as well as the world). The film has all of the speed and audacity and phantasmic compositions and difficult shots, plus a jumping score that grip us right away and hold us - rare in movies of its day now seen from a half-century vanishing point. Of particular interest: the hilarious scene in with Newman and his EG counterpart have  dueling match writing incomprehensible (to us)notes and gigues on a black board as they gradually understand how their two theories and co-exist and lead to world peace. We don’t quite get there, but who cares - it’s one of H’s funniest (at times) and fast-paced (always) films not seen so often as they could or should be - in retrospect, it’s kind of sad, even to imagine such international cooperation on film or in the world. 

Part of the fun in watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope (based on Patrick Hamilton’s play adapted by Hume Cronyn and w/ screenplay by Arthur Laurents) is figuring out how AH could manage to appear in this one-set production, over the course of a gone-wrong cocktail party that takes place entirely in one Manhattan apartment (if you can’t find AH, an Internet search will help). It’s also all around a good film adaptation of a murder master, far away in style from most of his other work. The film opens with a young man strangling to death a peer and stashing the body in a cabinet as he and his roommate (homosexual motifs throughout) prepare for a party - using the closed cabinet as the dining table! Totally improbable, but still— The mystery solver, a good performance by the laconic James Stewart as the prep-school teacher visiting two of his ex-students, carries the plot along - and there’s even an element of Nietze’s philosophy put into practice by these heartless and spoiled young men, who espouse the philosophy that the superior beings have the ethical  right to destroy the inferior, and we know where that  leads. It feels very much like a stage play, which it was, but still fun to watch even though  we haven sympathy for the killer nor for his weak-willed roommate. 

Writer/director Carolina Cavalli’s debut production, Amanda (2022) show signs that she someday may be a top-drawer director, particularly for her beautiful scenic shots of the Italian villas and exurban countryside and some dramatic scenes shot in tight close-up - A really beautiful film - to watch. That’s almost enough to make up for the confusing and cliched emotional crisis affecting the eponymous Amanda: the source of her overall rage against society and failure to maintain any long-standing friendship or romantic impulse. In other words, the plot is thin and poorly developed, but the film is easy on the eyes. Viewers will hope that CC will have more drama, conflict, and character development in future projects. The talent is there. 

William Trevor was rightly called one of the 2 greatest short-story writers in that genre of his time (let’s say 1950-2025; I’d read virtually all of his stories, and over the past couple of years have had a look at his novels, which were mostly mid-career disappointments (his first one, The Old Boys, was an exception, though I don’t know for sure —  I read it many years ago). But Trevor seemed to revitalize his work and wrote his first excellent novel in 1994 — Felicia’s Journey, a straightforward narrative about the life of a troubled young woman and her flight from home, and into many encounters. The novel feels like an episodic, but without the conventional wisdom acquired in a “bildungsroman” (a novel of education) - it’s more experience without the education: Felicia, whose name suggests happiness (ironically ha ha), gets pregnant with the child of a knockabout do-nothing guy frothier small hoe town in Ireland. Before she tells him of her pregnancy, the guy takes off to seek work in England, and he promises to return - ha ha. So Felicia goes off in search of her ex, who of course has left with no forwarding address - and thus begins the eponymous journey, in which F lives through much suffering, sadness, cruelty, and in particular one really odd and eccentric older man about whom we, if not she, are skeptical about from the start. WT has created a credible heroine in a sorrowful  passage that carries us right through to the strangely elegaic conclusion whose message is written: All of us have seen on the roadside people like Felicia, and what have we done for them? What should we do? What is their story? 

Kitty Flanagan’s 2021 Australian TV comedy, Fisk (Netflix)created with Vincent Sheehan and co-scripted with Penny Flanagan, is a riotous series about the barely competent law-office crew to which Flanagan’s Fisk is a newcomer. The episodes can stand alone - much life Gervais’s The Office, but not’s better to see them in sequence, as the characters get to now one another - and we to them, with the to us odd accents and idiosyncrasies - such as a choral group of women who run themselves as a charity whose object is to comfort the bereaved by singing upbeat songs at scenes of civic so-called disasters (e.g.. a broken waterman that’s flooding a Melbourne intersection. The humor can at times be elusively subtle, but there’s humor throughout as Flanagan’s Fisk takes on some really odd clients seek new or revised wills. 20 minutes or so (including commentary over the closing credits), definitely worth the time.

The British 2024 series One Day (Netflix) - starring Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall as an unlikely couple - he a happy-go-lucky good-looking wealthy kid and she as a studious kid of Indian background and no great wealth, who meet - or at least speak to each other - on eve of graduation for Edinboro U., a true mismatch, or so it seems, who spend the night together sans sex, strange from Woodall’s “Dexter,”and we (and they) write it off as a one-nighter but oddly he and Mod’s Emma stay in touch and the film follows them for 15 or so years, each episode a new segment in their friendship or love or neither in a story line that’s quiet and contemplative and 100-percent believable and, though it’s in a way even beyond romcom and touching the boundary of Soap, is totally watchable and we believe and and root for these two seeming misfits who are both right and wrong for each other - right up to a concluding episode consisting mostly of flashbacks and is a moving and intelligent though tearful ending - all based on the novel by David Nicholls.

Another excellent series early in 2024, Amazon Prime, is Lulu Wang’s  Expats, based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel The Expatriates; this series breaks with convention in many ways as several story lines cross paths without entirely converging.In essence, we see 3 (American) families who have come to settle at least for a year in luxury housing in Hong Kong. Everything looks lovely, the families ll have ridiculous amounts of $ - but soon a tragedy happens in one of the clans (Nicole Kidman is the Mom) and we follow the families over the course of several months as they all cope, help one another, hurt one another, suffer together and apart, breakup or not, break down or not, and eventually the saga ends with all the families settled (or unsettled) back in the U.S. Yes, in many ways it’s just a highly polished soap, and, yes, none of the characters is exactly likable, to put it mildly, but its verging on convention is in a way its strength. Improbably, we feel sorrow and pity for these unsympathetic characters; the series defies and redefines our expectations. 

Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), based on a story by Gordan McDonell w/ screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, is far from AH’s best - tough gangster son returns to idyllic Midwestern home town [ sorry, I now know it was Santa Rosa, Cal.]where he is welcomed by his family members whose gullibility and even simple-mindedness keep him blind to the goings on - complicated by a search for a murderer who to appearances must by the brother, played well by Joseph Cotton amid a slew of inferior, robotic characters. There are some fine Hitchcockian moments - a woman locked in a  a garage with the car engine running, a struggle on the coupling of a speeding train - but the plot is so thin (What was Thornton Wilder doing on this project?) and most of the performances are so mediocre (everyone was serving in the war) that this one’s near the bottom of the Hitchcock list (and I never spotted AH’s cameo).