Why Mike Leigh's domestic dramas should be better known

I think I've said this in previous posts but it's worth nothing again that Mike Leigh is unappreciated as a serious contemporary filmmaker. Not that he's gone w/out accolades or commercial success, and not all of his movies are the kind of low-budget, shot on location, small cast, interior dramas that serve as the marker for serious independent filmmakers, but for those that fit this bill, notably Secrets and Lies, Another Year, and the film we watched last night, Lie Is Sweet (1990) should earn Leigh a place among the great auteurs of his/our time. In fact, if any of those 3 films were made in French, Swedish, or Romanian, they would I think have drawn far more critical attention and praise. Life Is Sweet set a patter for later Leigh films: A domestic drama about a working-class family in an English row-house suburb, generally making the best of tough times, spirited and, at least at first, seeming to love one another (although there's often a "difficult" child in or friend of the family), so that at first we think we're seeing a sweet family comedy abut then the fissures appear in the wall, the cracks widen, we see the trauma and trouble at the heart of the family, and we build toward a powerful and tearful confrontation and finally a partial, uneasy, still open-ended resolution. In Life Is Sweet the mom in the family (Wendy, played by Alison Steadman, and who reminded me of a later Leigh character, Poppy in Happy-go-lucky) has what at first seems to be an endearing laugh that lets her make light of various troubles - but we gradually see this laugh as an annoying and desperate attempt to avoid recognition of the family issues. A young James Broadbent is terrific as the well-meaning but easily conned dad. In fact the entire cast (including a very young David Thewliss) is terrific, there are some terrific comic moments - notably everything involving the failed attempt to open a French restaurant in the English Midlands commercial district - and terrific writing that seems to owe a debt to a British theater tradition, in which no doubt Leigh and all of the cast members first earned their chops. My only quibble is that it's extremely difficult at times for an American viewer to parse the think Midlands accents (especially in that the dialog is rapid and often said in soft voice) - but even missing a surprising # of lines we can still easily follow the drift - just by watching expressions and other body language. This film should be better known.

An early Martel film that has great moments though it's hard to follow the narrative

Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's debut movie, La Cienaga (The Swamp), 2001, is a great movie scene by scene but unfortunately an extremely difficult movie to follow and to hold together in your mind as you watch because of Martel's deliberate eschewing of narrative conventions and of context. The film - more or less about a bourgeois family in a small Argentine city over the course of a few weeks in the summer - has the look and feel of a reality TV program, as if it's unrehearsed and harshly edited giving us the feeling of being voyeurs at the scene of a crash. Over tine, we kind of sense the relationships among the characters and their children, but I was never fully confident that I understood who was who, even at the end. That said, there are some terrific scenes and moments that more than compensate for the narrative difficulty (and in fairness I think the movie would be less challenging for someone who could forego the subtitles). The opening sequence - a bunch of middle-aged people sitting poolside, drinking heavily, while the children cavort, culminating in the mother - who becomes the central figure - stumbling drunkenly and severely cutting herself on a broken cocktail glass - sets the tone for the movie. There's a lot of mistreatment of servants, lack of attention to and supervision of children (an ongoing ominous note that leads to a frightening incident near the end of the film) who spend far too much time playing in the woods with loaded rifles or driving cars and pickups with no licenses and no supervision, petty snobbery, and marital discord. Much of the plot, such as it is, concerns planning a trip for the mother and a sister to Bolivia to buy school supplies at discount rates; the trip never materializes, however - one of the many "empty spaces" in the loose narrative of this film. The concluding ten minutes or so are harrowing, building to a point of crisis that Martel lets just hang in the air, ominous and reverberating. This isn't a film for all viewers, but it does give us insight into Martel's unusual style and significant talent - which really came to light in later work (e.g., The Headless Woman - and does that film pick up on some of the same characters in later life?).

Excellent topical Durch film about the evolution of a young jihadist: Layla M

The 2016 Dutch film Layla M, streaming on Netflix, is a terrific drama that's both topical and universal: the story of a young (last year in high school) girl in Amsterdam, of Moroccan descent, who gets drawn into a jihadist movement. The eponymous Layla, as we see in the first, energetic scene at a soccer/football match, is spirited and ready to take offense at anyone who disparages those of her Muslim faith (an opposing coach talks about trouble he's had w/ "your people," which sets her off). We soon see that she's become active in civil-rights movements for Muslims living in the Netherlands, an advocacy that puts her at odds against her parents, her father in particular, a successful and well-assimilated businessman. As with so many her age, she becomes bold and reckless, particularly once her brother is beat up and held briefly by police following a rights demonstration. In rebellion against her family and their high expectations for her, she scuttles her final exams (and her chance to enter college as a premed) and focuses on a romantic relationship that has been slowly developing (via some form of Skype communications) w/ a fellow activist - far more committed and devout than she. As her relationship w/ her family deteriorates, she leaves home and marries her boyfriend in a traditional Muslim ceremony - and then they're off, to Belgium he says. Things immediately get worse: They stop off at a jihadist training camp, he increasingly isolates, ignore, and denigrates her, and then announces that they're going to "the mideast" - it's never established exactly where they go aside from the Syrian border; Ithink it must be Jordan. Once there, she and new husband are set up in a truly dingy apartment, and he leaves her alone all day as he works w/ others in the jihad, evidently preparing for martyrdom. It is a strictly male-dominated society, and she gradually realizes what she's gotten into - and finally leaves, and the movie ends somewhat abruptly, w/ Layla's being detained on arrival in Amsterdam. Then, the smart filmmakers give us information - explaining that many youths are attracted to jihad, which some abandon and try to return home, but each country handles returnees differently. We feel for Layla - she's in some ways just a kid who made bad decisions - but we also understand: How can they be sure she's not returned home to create more terror? The movie is smart, open-ended, and holds you in its grip from start to finish, in large part because of a great performance from the lead (I will look up names): Nora El Koussour. Director is Mijk de Jong.

Collateral has all the virtues we've come to expect from British TV

The four-part BBC/Netflix series Collateral has many of the virtues we've come to expect from British TV: fine acting, intelligent writing, great production values. Carey Mulligan plays the lead, as a detective assigned to investigate the shooting death of a pizza-delivery man, and as with most godd crime stories touching strand dislodges the entire web of events. The pizza guy is Middle Eastern, wo there's suspicion of a hate crime, and through a series of odd coincidences a Labor party leader is linked to the events of the crime (his ex-wife was the one who ordered the pizza; is she involved?) as is an Anglican vicar (her same-sex partner, in the country on false papers, signed - coincidentally? - by the same MP, is the only witness to the shooting). Clues and the witness account suggest that the shooter was a woman with military background, which sets the story off in another direction (though we fairly quickly learn the ID of the shooter, the motive remains mysterious till near the end). In fact there's so much going on in this story - written by the prominent British playwright David Hare (amazing how BBC can attract top talent) - that you should probably binge-watch this series (which I never do), as it was extremely hard to recall the plot details from night to night. Mulligan is great in her role, as are most of the secondary characters, there's some beautiful footage, especially of London at night, and the series will hold your attention throughout and reward you with some unexpected twists in the final episode.

A totally over-the-top film that has a noble theme - Hairspray

John Waters's 1988 film, Hairspray (which has gone on to have a long life as a musical), is a double-nostalgia trip: An '80s style look at the '60s (set in 1963) in Baltimore, focused on a group of working-class teens from Baltimore row houses whose life centers on a teenage-dance show, modeled on American Bandstand, on a local TV station. Everything about this movie is over the top: the bizarre-looking characters, their cartoonish behavior, the corny dialog, the garish coloring and lighting, the lack of nuance (characters are either good and with-it or evil Luddites), the outrageous hair, the campy costumes. And yet, or rather, as a result, the movie is entirely entertaining (we watched on the great site Filmstruck, but it's a film that, because of its hilarity, clearly plays better to a large audience rather than a home theater). The film has a noble theme, as well, developed in two plot line: the acceptance of someone not conventionally attractive, a pudgy and overweight Rikki Lake in the lead role, selected as the most popular dancer on the program - and she gets the handsome guy!; and, more significant, the characters fight, successfully, for the integration of the dance show. Till then, black teens had their own record shop and a one-day-a-month "negro day" on the show; thanks to the persistence of a lot of the kids, black and white, the doors open and the show is integrated at the end: These were real battles fought in Baltimore in the early 1960s, as I can attest. Is it a great movie? Probably not - but it's entertaining and feel-good and, hey, you can dance to it (thanks to good soundtrack of 1963-era dance music, white and black, and a catchy title song). The dancing is good, very coordinated and staged, and very much of its era; there's a hint, in one awkward scene when the kids wander into a "beatnik" art studio, of the world of sound and art that was soon to arrive, but this film celebrates the innocence of an earlier era while recognizing the ever-present tensions and inequalities (notable in particular in a scene involving the "special education" class at the high school) that permeated life, then and now.

The dark and cruel side of the life of the geisha in Street of Shame

I watched Mizoguchi's 1956 film, Street of Shame, in part because it makes a revealing contrast with the novel I'm reading (Tanizaki's Naomi, which concerns the life of a young woman rescued from a probably life as a geisha/prostitute in 1920s Japan by an unsuitable marriage to a much older man). Street of Shame, based on a contemporary novel, is about the lives of several "geishas" in 1950s Tokyo: Unlike in Naomi, now 30 years and a World War later, there's a lot of public pressure to outlaw prostitution in Japan. I am assuming that the practice was tolerated and profitable, especially during the years of American occupation, but now that the Americans are gone the authorities are moving in on the remaining houses. As we see from this melodramatic film, the women in the houses are all struggling w/ poverty and isolation in various forms, and there's no easy solution: Shutting down legal prostitution will drive them further into crime and more dire poverty, whereas leaving things as they are will just protect the unscrupulous owners of the houses, men (and women) who profit by "loaning" money to the women who work for them - much like the company stores in American agriculture and mining in the early 20th century (before the labor movement took hold). The film is a little clunky at first,as it's hard to establish so many narrative lines (the novel probably does a better job at this), but gradually we see the various forms of suffering each woman endures: one from a prosperous family in which her father was a well-known patron of geisha houses, another struggling to get enough money to care for a sick child and an unemployed husband, another trying to support her adult son who it turns out is deeply ashamed of his mother, another sly trickster who manages to truck a wealthy customer until his business is ruined and she can swoop in and take control of it - the only "winner" among the several geishas. There are some very fine night-time street scenes, powerful scenes when the women leave the house to meet w/ family members, a scary segment in which one of the women has a mental breakdown - altogether a good drama about the dark and cruel side of an industry that has been far-too-often glamorized in books and movies.

Season 4 brings Halt and Catch Fire to a fitting and moving conclusion

Halt and Ctch Fire Season 4 brings this excellent AMC/Netflix series to a fitting and moving conclusion, as the 4 surviving (I will steer clear of all spoilers) go off on their separate paths, following many ups and downs that the experienced in the early years of the PC industry and the birth of the Internet. We see several of the characters change and evolve, in this season and over the course of the seasons, some for better others not. New in this season is a developing plot line around Gordon and Donna's two daughters, now in high school and each striving for her independence - a plot line that to me was not always on point. This season overall was the most personal of the 4, with a lot of emphasis on the marital strains of several of the leads and, in particular, on the tempestuous relationship between Joe and Cameron (Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis). There's one death that is powerful and surprising, and a few imaginative episodes, such as one that consists almost entirely of a phone conversation between Joe and Cameron and another episode that artfully uses flashbacks to the earliest years of Donna and Gordon's marriage. A few moments, particularly in the finale, are a little too stagey and preachy (Donna's speech to a women-in-business group, Boz's farewell to Cameron), and a few things are a little hard to piece together (just why did Joe and Cameron split?, and who is this Alexa who's suddenly giving Cameron orders?), but these are quibbles, the kinds of things I'd care about or notice only in a series w/ which I'd completely engaged. Fine and surprising conclusion that, in a way, brings us back to the very outset of the series, and M. noticed, and by the way who else noticed the Updike collection on Joe's bookshelf? And do you know why it's there?