Elliot’s Watching - November 2021
Jean-Luck Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou sends a young(ish) couple, played of course by Belmondo and Anna Karina, off on a jaunt across France, leaving a dead man behind, traveling in stolen car, and facing many close calls and adventures - in other words, a conventional gangsters on the run film, except that it’s Godard so there are numerous weird, incongruous, convention-breaking elements that gives the movie its charm and interest, even today. Especially notable are such plot elements or segments as the decision to put on a play for an audience of American GIs about the Vietnam War, with some screen moments simply filled w/ flames; the constant bickering about Belmond’s character’s name - Karini calls him Pierrot (the title translates roughly as Pierrot the Nut - to which he always replies that his name is Ferdinand; a long interval in which Karina sings as in a choreographed Broadway musical; some odd characters introduced toward the end - a woman who claims to be the Queen of Lebonon and a man who goes on at great length telling Belmondo of his failed seductions; even the unusual typography that prevails from the opening credits onward. Does the plot make any sense? Not at all - nor is it meant to; life is a jumble of improbabilities, in Godard’s world; the film is not for all viewers of course, but is still maintains its liveliness and imaginative spirit even a half-century down the road.
However: Last night we watched the first episode of the Danish murder-mystery The Chestnut Man (based on a novel by the author of The Killing, which was an excellent series), which is OK if you can believe that a serial killer leaves behind little toy “men” built from chestnuts and matchsticks, and that this would go on for years before anyone made a serious connections, and, hell, I don’t know, a totally improbable an uninteresting, despite its obvious debt to the great Danish series about national politics, Borgen, start to a series - we’re through.
Kenji Mizoguchi’s A Story from Chickamatsu (1954) is not his best or best-known film but still worth a look - particularly the 2nd half of the film. In fact the first half, set mostly in a print-shop that’s a major source of revenue for the irascible owner, who has “”won” a monopoly contract for a # of printing jobs such as the annual almanac, is kind of hard to follow and to distinguish among the many competing factions in this complex factory/estate - but the film comes into much more clear focus in the 2nd half as the story from that point on centers on a couple on the run - strangely, much like Pierrot that I recently viewed - at first the man is simply the servant rushing the woman to safety from her violent husband but soon they realize they’ve been secretly in love w/ each other the film changes direction and is much more emotional and strange. Fans of Mizoguchi will recognize the setting in which the loves make their escape by boat - same setting as in the famous Ugetso lake crossing; the ending is particularly bizarre as the couple head off toward their inevitable destiny.
Here’s another miniseries that builds to a great conclusion/final episode, the little-known Italian series (or 4-part movie, if you prefer) from early in the century: The Best of Youth. I remember watching it, in the old days, on CD from Netflix, saw the 1st half with 2 friends, had to take the disk home, said we’d watch it at home the next night, and they said: No way you’re watching this alone! We’re gonna come over to watch it with you!
The docudrama Colin in Black & White, in which ex-NFLQB Colin Kaepernick narrates and comments, with emphasis on the racial discrimination that afflicts all young Black men, an enactment of his youth: He’s adapted by a white California couple who nurture and support his dream of becoming a high-school QB as he faces opposition on many fronts. Good information here, although most viewers will hardly be shocked by anything new, and imaginative presentation esp use of graphics, thanks I would guess to producer Ava Duvernay - but the problem is that the story line that CK narrates is full of cliches and obvious points that we can see from miles away. I hope it changes minds, but it will probably preach only the knowing. Watched only half the of the episodes.
Ryusuke Hamguchi’s 2015 giant of a film (5+ hours!), Happy Hour, follows for 30-something women friends over a course of a few months as we gradually (!) learn about their problems and their histories, especially about their past or ongoing divorce suits (handled very differently in Japancf with the U.S. - much more adversarial and litigated). I really wanted to love this film, as I tend to like films that build gradually and that seem true and organic, but the pace is so slow here that I finally had to give up after 3 hours: the 40 minutes or so spent at a yoga class the women attend seemed pretty tedious but I was willing to forego that in the interest of getting to know the characters - a celebratory evening of drinking with friends after the class with some outbreaks of anger won me back over - but then a later scene at a literary reading in which the author, a young woman named Ms. Nose (not sure if that a name in Japanese of a mockery) reads in the most dreadfully disaffected manner from a truly terrible story, followed by the most awkward author Q&A - why people didn’t walk out was beyond me. I did.
Gillo Pontecorvo’s amazing film The Battle of Algiers (1966 - GP directed and co-wrote w/Morricone the great score) re-creates the struggle for independence events from the mid-50s; it looks exactly like a documentary film, and you have to wonder: How could he possibly have reenacted these events with such fidelity? Everything about this film looks “real,” but of course it would have been impossible to document the uprising at the time. The wheels are set in motion so to speak when a young Algerian/Arabic man (Ali) is arrested for some kind of street crime; in prison, he’s recruited to work for the Algerian resistance, and from the moment forward we are introduced into many of the strategies for terrorism and disruption, for example: women dressed for a day at the beach carrying handguns in their purses; bombs surreptitiously planted at night and in places of congregation, first by the Fr. in the Casbah (Algerian quarters), then in retaliation at public places in the “European” section. Of particular interest, the way in which Ali is tested for his strength and fidelity. By mid-point in the film, the French, for the first time aware of the likelihood or even the possibility of a successful Algerian independence movement, send massive troops and a skillful and tough Colonel to stop the terrorism - with predictable lack of success and increase in the carnage. Clearly the film is from the Algerian POV and builds our sympathy, even when the Algerians adopt the crudest forms of terrorism - quite a feat, I’d say. On one level, the events seem so remote today - why don’t the French just give it up? - and in other ways we can extrapolate and re-apply some of the lessons here to many independence movements that have ensued, from Vietnam to African nations to Israel-Palestine, and the list goes on. A remarkable and engaging film first to last.
Is it possible to create a murder story in which we know from the outset who’s the perpetrator? Well, it worked out OK for Dostoyevsky. Can’t entirely say the same for the Swedish series on Netflix, The Unlikely Murderer. Based on a nonfiction account of the assassination of PM Olof Palme on a Stockholm street=corner in 1982 - a case that, as each episode informs us, has never been solved. But there has been from the outset a prime suspect, Stig Engstrom, and it’s he the series follows. And he is an unlikely murderer, at least what we see from the outset - yet at first he seems like a wannabe who claims to have been among the first to rush to the aid of Palme and his wife - but we also see footage of the killing (all re-created of course, though there are a few scenes using original footage) which puts the lie to Stig’s claim. And by the end we see that he was a tortured and troubled man, a lifelong victim of bullying, perceived lack of recognition at his workplace, troubled in love of course, seeking attention, nursing grudges - it all makes sense; wouldn’t have cared for the series as much if it weren’t based on fact - truth stranger than fiction sometimes - and it’s a little hard to follow with many jumps back and forth in time, but worth a look.
The Pablo Lorrain disaster film, Spencer, wait, I mean, just disaster, invites comparison w/ the Peter Morgan The Crown, so here goes: Whereas TC makes the Eliz. II Royal Family into “round” characters - and in particular the episodes that introduce Diana and show us what life, we imagine, is like in the Scottish castle, Spencer reduces all of the characters, including Kristen Stewart’s Diana, to stick figures and seems to me to get the entire royal family dad wrong - it’s not that they’re strict formalists completely uptight and rigid - it’s that they’re at base shallow, protected, uncaring, and incurious: nights spent watching “telly” playing parlor games and days spent in the fields hunting and shooting ( see in TC how Thatcher was mistreated and unprepared for visit to Scotland). Among the disastrous elements the first rank goes to KS whose attempt to talk-British makes her largely unintelligible throughout: everything from her is in a hushed whisper and rushed, then pause, something that comes naturally to the Brits (and to everyone else in the film, therefor) but in KS’s nobody taught KS how to enunciate to make this work - or even understood. Many other complaints, notably that Diana’s breakdown is presented in the stupidest, heavy-handed manner - driving to the castle she gets “lost” - Oh, I get it! - and there’s no dimension to her misery other than a weird desire to visit her childhood home - now a boarded-up ruin (after maybe 20 years of misuse at the most?) - and of course the ending, in which she heroically stands in front to the shooting party to get them to stop shooting pheasants (or peasants?) , one of which (pheasant) was found ominously dead on the roadway in opening scenes, oh, gosh, will Diana ID w/ the bird? What do you think? Anyway, she “demands” that Charles let go of the two boys and come to mama - something any boy out on his first “shoot” would say: Leave me alone, Mom, I’m not a baby, but, no, Will and Harry run into her arms and they eventually dash off in her sports car at reckless speed (far more dangerous and bad modeling than the pheasant shoot), with amazingly no press or staff in pursuit?, an American song no less blasting from the radio, taking them out for ice cream on the banks of the Thames, with nobody nothing. (I will add only that the score is bizarre, including jazz trumpet pieces and a string quartet playing dissonant music - Shostakovitz sp.? - during the formal dinner. nonsensical. )
A lot of positives for Rebecca Hall’s current film on Netflix, Passing, based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. Hall and her team perfectly create the look and feel of the era in part by making the film look very much like a (visually heightened) film from the Prohibition Era: the square screen format, sharp b/w cinematography, a smart and inventive jazz-age score, ingenious (and challenging) interiors in a NYC brownstone with furnishings or the era in particular many mirrors, and most of all an intelligent script and fine lead-actor performances as in a play, maybe too much so, as the film does take a good deal of time before liftoff. Three lead roles - Ruth Negga as Clare, a Black woman “passing” for white; Tessa Thompson as her (Black) friend and confidante, Irene Redfield; Andre Holland as TT’s husband, an MD, and one of the few in on Negga’s secret life. The only flaw in the design, for me, was due to the only minimal exploration of the conflicts and terrors and shame in Negga’s life (her husband and daughter don’t know her true race - and husband, we see in first segments, is a bully and racist); the film is largely about Negga’s Clare trying to insinuate herself in the the Redfield family and marriage. The film had surprisingly little to say or examine re the great secret of Clare’s life - her brutal husband appears only at the beginning and end.
Would not recommend A Cop Movie unfortunately - the idea seemed good, a docudrama that follows the lives of 2 police officers (brother & sister?) in Mexico City, but in the portion we watched the blending of documentary footage (it starts w/ a dramatic scene in which the female officer assists in a birth and delivery) and scripted material - a long monolog in which the officer discusses how and why she joined the force - was awkward (several re-staged events, some brutal) and eventually just dull. Good idea, but not brought to fruition.
Nop doubt Chaplin films were innovative and hilarious … in the 1920s, and the opening sequence in City Lights, in which CC is revealed as sound asleep in the arms of a statue that is unveiled as part of a big ceremony, is still quite funny, but overall the gags seem to me tiresome and long past their due date. I guess when you get down to it I don’t like silent features - yes, they are important as part of the history cinema but the advent of sound, and even better live sound as opposed to post-synch, has obviated the Silents. City Lights just seemed to me, over its first half-hour, utterly quaint and remote; I can only take or care about so many pratfall. At least, I’ll say this, it’s better than Keaton’s The General, in part because its sympathies are with the poor and oppressed. But I won’t stay w/ it for another hour or so, sorry.
The Perfect Candidate (set in Saudi Arabia, about a young md. whose plans go awry and finds herself as a candidate for municipal office, through which she hopes to make repairs to her medical clinic) is earnest and offers a close-up view of life in Saudi Arabia but for all that it moves at a snail’s pace and was just plane movie-of-the-week predictable and obvious, despite its best intentions. Moved on to a similar movie (in Perfect Candidate the father is a renowned performer on the old and dragoons his daughters into performing w/ him) called The Disciple, about young man who aspires to be a great sitar performer - first 10 minutes or so mostly consumed w/ performances by his master/teacher and the student’s inept attempts at mastery and it’s altogether unfunny and even unwatchable. And these films make their way to respectively the Criterion Channel and Netflix, plus strong reviews of the latter. Grouch, grouch!
The 1995(?) Jodie Foster film, Home for the Holidays, aimed, I think, to be for Thanksgiving what It’s A Wonderful Life has become for xmas, and it succeeds in a limited way - the closing sequences do pack an emotional wallop no matter what your view of the movie as a whole - but overall the film is a high-jinx, slapstick dysfunctional family vehicle with many star turns, some better than others. Basic plot: 40ish woman laid off from her job (for some reason they keep saying she was “fired” when that’s clearly not the case) goes home to family in Boston (apparently filmed in Md., tho) where sisters and brother converge and squabble; the house itself is a madcap jumble, a complete crowded mess at the outset and you wonder how they’ll ever clear up the post-dinner wreckage. A major plot line involves the “gay marriage” of the brother (Robert Downey Jr. in an over-the-top, nearly unbearable manic performance), making the film somewhat ahead of its time and suitably progressive. The lead is Holly Hunter - far too young (or young-looking) for the role, and for some dumb reason she speaks throughout in her native Southern accent, which makes no sense here (her mother, Ann Bancroft, speaks in a NY/Jewish-Italian accent so go figure). Some of the scenes are hilarious, most are head-scratchers - the family never seems credible or even bearable, but the idea, I guess, is to just write them off as lovable eccentrics. The movie feels as if it’s adapted from a play, but the credits tell us it’s from a short story - and many of the passages of dialog sound more “authorial” than natural. Overall, the film won’t kill you to watch it once, but this - some 20 years down the road (and the technology of the era gets a few laughs inevitably) this has not become a TGiving staple nor will it.
Chris Marker’s film, La Jetee (1962) is sometimes called a sci-fi film though I think it’s more of a dystopian film with some speculative elements of the supernatural woven throughout. Marker’s film has the advantage of being short - 28 minutes - and that seems just about right, as the film makes its point and then moves on, unlike similarly ambitious apocalyptic films of recent years which belabor the narrative to the point of nausea, and that’s not even counting the inevitable sequels. In brief, Marker’s film posits the outbreak of a 2nd WW, in this case a nuclear, which leaves the entire nearly depopulated through radiation contamination; some of the survivors (German?) who’d taken refuge in underground crypts and caves beneath what once was Paris, embark on experiments (why?) that culminate in sending resuscitated man to the past and, in a 2nd “voyage,” to the future; in both narratives he meets and falls in love with a young woman. I won’t give away all plot twists, but it’s worth noting that this film, for all its apparent pretentiousness, is designed to make us think: Is anyone I know actually an emissary from the past? from the future? Am I a robot? The most striking feature of this short is that it is (with a minor exception) composed of b/w stills, many of them quite imaginative (the postwar ruins of Paris), and a few are quite beautiful in and of themselves. I think the film has been oversold by some rapturous critics - it does feel a little dated - but it’s worth a look, especially given its run time.
Anyone watching the HBO series Black and Missing will be informed, troubled, and moved by the issue this series takes head-on: For too many cases of missing children are Black, missing Black children draw far less media (and police?) attention than other missing children, too many missing children are labeled “runaways” rather than victims of abduction and exploitation. The series focuses on a foundation, staffed largely by Black retired law-enforcement officers, that takes on cases of missing Black children, providing materials (posters etc.), expertise, and support to families or single parents seeking their missing children. The series does a great service and may help to shift priorities and assumptions on this issue. All that said, this series, based on the first episode at least, doesn’t have the dramatic focus we have come to expect from doc-dramas; it’s hard if not impossible to follow a case front to finish - like, say, the recent French series about a missing adopted daughter. There are way to many talking heads in the first episode, and only one case that we learn much about. Perhaps other episodes will be more dramatic, in the traditional sense (beginning, middle, end), but I feel I’ve got the message from episode one and can’t really bear further episodes of sorrow and loss.
