Week of 8/22/11-8/28/11

Cinema

Le grand voyage (Ismael Ferroukhi, 2004)
Hard to say where Ferroukhi’s heart is: awkwardly rendered father-son bonding, or chilly disaffection? Perhaps the flimsiness of the former is intentional, but it seems to me the accidental result of a mawkish score and occasionally laughable dialogue. (Sample exchange: “I’ve learned a lot.” “Me too.”) That said, the score is often at odds with the movie’s frigid emotional undercurrent: despite their shared traits, Mohamed Majd’s patriarch is undeniably passive aggressive and borderline-senile, Nicolas Cazale’s son whiny to the point of being miscast. (Cazale’s bland handsomeness is an odd match for the character’s single-minded petulance.) Sometimes, the characterizations are powerfully structured: the father’s impulsivity manifests itself in a humanistic gesture here, reckless endangerment there, and in between sporadically. It’ll be interesting to see whether integrity or false sentiment wins the day in Ferroukhi’s latest, Free Men, a considerably higher-budgeted film from the looks the trailer.

Crime Story (Abel Ferrara, 1986)
The pilot contains smidgens of Ferrara’s early brashness, but its main appeal is Torello, a corrupt antihero who lies regularly, disrespects both emotionality and order, and shamelessly propositions a slut in the manner of Raphael ou le debauche. Judging from this 90-minute intro, if Farina outdid McNulty’s S5 low points on The Wire, one wouldn’t bat an eye.

Fucking Amal (Lukas Moodysson, 1998)
Waiting over a decade to catch up with Moodysson’s debut has dated it, but also shown what fine, subtle use is made of its own era’s orientation politics. While his uplifting conclusion—the final scene approximates a flickering applause sign for festival audiences—is shared with a number of late-‘90s, early-‘00s GTLB films, he does a terrific job of leaving Elin to straddle the line between humiliation and pride, Agnes to lugubriously overstate her angst. But the film’s secret weapon is Elin’s second-choice boyfriend Johan, whose tragic failing is an inability to manage desires and convictions. At the party, his unexpected sweetness is nonetheless a prelude to a hookup; hanging out with Elin and her friends, he is cowardly for fear of losing his own social support. Elin performs the movie’s most heroic gesture, but her cruelty towards Agnes and Johan remains pronounced.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)
With its steady vacillation between reverie, torment and musical numbers, Davies’ film is on one level a joyous heartbreaker to rival Make Way for Tomorrow. But silence and music perform precisely the same function here, masking a brutally complicated brand of pain particular to those raised with a mixture of extreme abuse and tenderness. The film’s Resnais-esque chronology is, at times, maddening; Davies clearly prioritizes beauty above comprehensibility, but so, I discover upon revisiting this film, do I.

Literature

A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul, 1979)
My first experience with Naipaul, who initially struck me as a little too much of an essayist for my taste. Nice thing is, protag Salim perpetually debunks his own observations: attempting to conceive of a newly sophisticated Africa, he needs to overlook degradation, corruption and his own weaknesses in order to envision success.

Week of 8/15/11-8/21/11

The Silence Before Bach (Pere Portabella, 2007)
Aita (Jose Maria de Orbe, 2010)
The Westerner: "Brown" (Sam Peckinpah, 1960)

A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe, 1964)
The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (Naguib Mahfouz, 1983)

6.11.11

Virginity (Otakar Vavra, 1937)

Le jeune Werther (Jacques Doillon, 1993)

Le jeune Werther and Virginity end on notes that, at first glance, seem virtually identical. The protagonists, having renounced their true love for some greater virtue, march on stoically as narration hints at some inner trembling. Hannah recounts what a friend told her about “getting used to” a bad marriage, and as Ishmael continues to compulsively stalk his crush, Miren, he remembers musings from The Sorrows of Young Werther. The ironies implied are opposite in nature: Hannah is virtually defined by coldness towards her future husband, and Ishmael is, on the whole, far too carefree and powerful for his self-concept to ring true.

But while Virginity engages directly with romantic notions of sacrifice, Doillon’s film is the more interesting movie for having Ishmael only experience romanticism through surrogates, such as Werther, or his fallen classmate Guillaume. Ishmael’s grief is real—as one classmate complains, he is “getting sentimental”—but the sly dominance with which he is introduced overshadows any attempts to make him a tragic figure. His rejection of Fay renders his own longings somewhat inert, but also makes for an oddly balanced, melancholy portrait. Ishmael observes the incompatibility between his identity and his tragic circumstances unfold right before his eyes. As many characters observe throughout the film, this stuff is sad, but it’s also normal.

5.17.11

Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, 1962) - pro

A film of submerged emotion: a scenario that initially seems conceived to stimulate jealousy basically ends up quashing it altogether. But despite the off-hand look, the visual precision on display is Polanski's strongest asset. The intensity of his visual plan tends to depend here on momentary ignorance of the identification figure, such as the unflinching long take in which the hiker plays the knife game. Because undertones enter only to be dismissed, victimhood and sadism, as well as attraction and contempt, subtly intertwine amongst the characters. When a character has a moral epiphany, it coincides with panic. Goodness is a source of anxiety here.

Knightriders (George A. Romero, 1981) - mixed

Romero has dramaturgical intelligence to spare, and yet the visual messiness of his films makes them a tough sit for me. Harris's idealism is sympathetic by default, so the film has to tip the scales against him to generate tension, and it largely does. Romero's is a universe of moral chaos, in which hysteria goes both ways (but especially the way of the righteous): Tuck and Harris broach propriety in equal measure, the former disgusting and the latter idealistic to a fault. That Harris's passion is directed towards such a trivial endeavor makes the movie a hard sell, but that's why it works: it's like a Herzog film about high-functioning nerds rather than psychos, where declining to sign an autograph and a noble unwillingness to sell out are one and the same.

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939) - pro

Flirts frequently with propaganda. If not for Joad's murderer status, there'd be little moral weight beneath the anti-capitalist monologues. One perceives Steinbeck's writing as painstakingly naturalistic first, a refined emotional experience second, thus not altogether vindicating him of didacticism charges. It's still a conflicted vision, albeit one oversaturated with purpose.