FILM FILINGS 9-30-23
CONTENTS
Adrian’s Movie Adventures
Jordan Poss
Chris Witty
Sam Stephens
Nathan Gilmore: Three Reviews
TARANA CINEMA:
In the first installment of Film Filings we started chronicling Adrian Bernard’s filming of Raymar, a Medieval-set epic they made in Louisiana. Well, Things Have Happened. The pilot (it’s now a series pilot) is being reviewed by Steven Soderbergh and his film company, and Adrian has now been hired to direct a second film. Best way to check out what’s going on (because he’s so busy) is to follow him on Instagram here, including some very tantalizing film stills in the story archive titled “Raymar”. Please check it out—this looks to be a very exciting release.
JORDAN POSS:
Over at his blog Jordan Poss digs into the Disney live action rarity (relatively-speaking) The Great Locomotive Chase. A snippet:
But performance-wise, The Great Locomotive Chase belongs to two secondary characters—Campbell and Fuller. It’s easy to see why. York and Hunter are certainly excellent in their parts, especially Hunter, whose physicality and sympathetic performance make him a worthy adversary but not a bad guy, but the characters themselves are more compelling than the lofty and distant Andrews. Both Campbell and Fuller are tough, tenacious, and physically brave, both are driven by implacable hostility toward their enemies, and both reliably follow through in a crisis. Both also have full character arcs, with their intense aggression transformed into respect in the conclusion—which, again, I don’t want to give away.
CHRISTOPHER WITTY:
Over at his substack blog Chris Witty does for British screenwriter Nigel Kneale what he did for Val Lewton at this magazine last year. Although I’d heard of a number of the films Kneale was involved in, I didn’t know anything about him. This paragraph by Witty intrigues us into the world Kneale creates:
“Less is more here, but only up to a point. And when the jump scare comes, it doesn’t pull any punches. I can honestly say that The Woman in Black contains one of the most frightening scenes in horror, and when it was broadcast at 9pm on Christmas Eve, viewers were understandably terrified but given a reprieve as Kneale included the scene to happen before an advert break. One can imagine that feeling of relief, but also the trepidation at having to go back in once the festive adverts had run their course. The bleak ending didn’t let them off so lightly.”
And please don’t neglect Witty’s FilmFolkUK instagram page where he is always reviewing films in shorter form. Here’s his review for 1955’s heist-caper masterpiece, Jules Dassin’s Rififi:
**This review contains spoilers to at least three great heist movies**
Hands down, this is the most influential heist film ever made. In fact, it's a perfect film in every way, from the performances by Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, and director Jules Dassin, to the crisp photography by Philippe Agostini (the elevator going up, those Parisian street shots) and an impeccable script by Dassin that transformed what is reputedly a very bad novel into a work of art.
The infamous twenty minute robbery that serves as the centrepiece of the film is adaciously shot, foregoing mood music and dialogue in favour of natural sound. It makes the entire sequence entirely believable; if it takes four men over three hours to rob a jewellery store without sounding alarms or attracting unwanted attention, they wouldn't say boo, sneeze or fart. It's an incredibly tense scene, and every time Jo (Möhner) accidentally hits a piano key, it sounds like fireworks going off.
Yet as groundbreaking and meticulously filmed as the heist is, it's the hour that follows it that really delivers. If it's a spoiler to reveal that things go awry, then you haven't watched many heist movies (at least not good ones). The colour coded criminals in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and Reservoir Dogs (1992) are doomed to failure because they both have a psychopath working with them. Sonny and Sal in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) are tragi-comic characters who we know are never going to make it to the finish line. And in Rififi, the robbers aren't going to get away with it because of one character: Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), a gang boss with a junkie for a brother (always a danger) who appears to be waiting in the wings for his time to strike. And when he does, the effect is both terrifying and heartbreaking. The scene of Mario (Manuel - my favourite of the bunch) pleading to his wife not to lead Grutter's gang to Tony (Servais) is genuinely distressing, made all the worse as the violence takes place off-camera (the low shot of a dangling phone packs as much wallop as Reservoir Dogs' off-camera ear severing).
The reason the gang is set to fall isn't because Tony is a bastard and should get his comeuppance, nor is it because the film is restricted by Hays Code messaging (this is a French film, so they can do whatever they like). They are set to fall because nine times out of ten, that is what happens to criminal gangs. There are too many players for the job to remain a secret, and at least one of those players has a woman he can't wait to impress with a diamond ring (which, goddammit, turns out to be a fake anyway).
As a footnote, the behind the scenes making of this film imbues a story about loyalty with an honest heart. Dassin, exiled from Hollywood by McCarthyism, was handed Rififi by Jean-Pierre Melville (this actually feels like a Melville picture) and the production designer, Alexandre Trauner, worked for a reduced fee as a favour to Dassin. As if it needs restating, this film is a masterpiece, and Dassin was a filmmaker of vision.
SAM STEPHENS:
Henry V (1989), dir. Kenneth Branagh. Like the play and film version by Olivier, this film begins outside itself and Derek Jacobi’s Chorus is there in a modern black peacoat, bridging the action. But he’s no stranger to the emotion of the drama—sometimes he shouts out the action of the play, windswept, as the deafening thunderings of the soundtrack overwhelm him and us. The music often takes over for the action, boosts us up when the words want operatic emphasis. The film’s genetic code is not just Shakespeare, but Romantic symphonic largesse.
We begin with dark mutterings that will bring war. The king is new enough, young and proud, perhaps impetuous but commanding complete loyalty. King Harry is not evil, but we see him glowering and threatening (“like a Jove”). He is not a warmonger, but he does not abide insult, and the counsel for war seizes the opportunity.
Although this movie holds my deepest love and admiration, I can still objectively say that one scene is undeniably awkward, though boldly done. The scene is the “once more unto the breach” speech at Harfleur. It’s a lot of words to spit out in so brief a moment. Branagh regulates it by cutting to the faces of Harry’s men as they behold him in awe. Brian Blessed looks enthralled, others smile too—a moment of thirsty bloodhound-ry with victory just a few words away. But it’s a victory they’ll lose sight of as they march across the muddy landscape.
Though the Harfleur speech was meant to occupy an empty stage that is now filled, the un-embarrassed blood-and-fire it communicates gives us more than Shakespeare could have hoped for. The framing: an arch under the breached wall; fiery explosions inside the walls. But we never enter Harfleur, we never see the women and children whose lives are threatened. It’s a powerful shot...and perfectly stagey because we see stay with the framing but never go beyond it.
In contrast, the rest of the film is filled with the realness of nature, or carefully framed interiors. My favorite is the opening in the English throne room: dimly lit by candles, with wide sweeping shadows. Contrast this with the French court which glows goldenly and intimately. They have good taste, these French kings.
Most of all, I love the extended single shot that takes place after the battle—King Harry moves between soldiers, carrying a dead pageboy. He stops and acknowledges the French captains as they kneel in defeat over a fallen comrade.
The movie's strengths are those of a great debut—this was Branagh's first film—and its weaknesses are those of excess. Sincerity and a thorough belief in the source material is what propels this movie to greatness. I hope, more than for any other film, that Criterion brings this movie into the collection.
NATHAN GILMORE: THREE REVIEWS
“The Grey Zone” (2001), dir. Tim Blake Nelson. Blood crieth from the ground. In the majority of films about the holocaust, there is a sense of hope. Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” ends with Wladislaw Spzilman’s triumphant return to the concert hall; “Schindler’s List” ends with modern-day footage of the Jews that were saved.
“The Grey Zone” lacks such a sense of hope, partly, I think, because it does not cast itself merely as an historical drama, but also as an ethical dilemma. The screenplay reads like a work of fiction, not of historiography. Dialogue is declarative, almost oratory. It is not as concerned with details of the historical record as it is with the massive moral crisis that made a historical travesty such as the Holocaust possible.
The major moral issue– the nature of coerced complicity in evil— is forced by survival. There is a hierarchy enforced that requires the rank and file of prisoners to collaborate with those slightly higher up in order to survive. Those slightly higher up have prostituted themselves to the Nazis in order to escape the nightmare of being a target of the Nazi system. It is at these middlemen and -women that “The Grey Zone” takes a close and unblinking look. They have no hope of superceding the system, so they accept a position within it slightly higher than the very bottom. They may survive in this way, or be rewarded, but they will not overcome. A prisoner performs a menial task for the brass and is rewarded with a wristwatch— after the watches’ original owner is beaten to death.
This is the system of annihilation that the Nazi machine perfected— a literal factory of death in which the proper and expected product is extinction. A glitch in the machine is life.
When a young girl by chance survives the gas showers, we reach the crux of the plot. Do the other prisoners let her die, or endanger their chances of escape by helping her survive? Why shouldn’t they let her die, since they’ve been aiding the Nazis in killing anyway? Why is this girl different? Because she accidentally survived?
The ethical answer seems clear; but the practical solution? That’s something darker. The moral atmosphere of the concentration camp is not one in which the ethical solution is easily or safely implemented. The evil that rules this atmosphere coerces people who are not evil into acting as its agents. The Obersturmfuhrer Muhsfeldt sneers “I never really despised the Jews until I realized how easily they could be persuaded [to kill] their own people.” There is a chilling conversation between Muhsfeldt and a doctor who now is forced to speculate how someone could have survived the gas— in effect, to streamline the murderous machinery that intends to destroy the doctor himself. The doctor’s knowledge allows him to live, to survive, but, as Muhsfeldt sneers, has quintupled the torture of inmates in the camp. Is his role in saving the girl enough to make up for that? Does the fact that he did it to survive weigh the equation in his favor? What Muhsfeldt ignores is the fact that he is the architect of a system in which such unthinkable questions may even be asked.
Throughout the film, there is the constant juxtaposition of atrocity and normalcy. A band of prisoners has formed an orchestra, and sit in the courtyard playing a jaunty air on fiddles and mandolins. The camera pans out to a smokestack vomiting a black fog, and we know that chimney is attached to the crematorium.
The music in this scene is incidental— it happens in the world of the narrative, so we hear it in this scene. But at other times, there is no music. Nude bodies are shoveled into the furnaces like so much cordwood, and the camera merely observes.The one sound that drones on in the background is the hum and the hiss of the gas chambers and the chimneys. Background noise. Incidental. Life taken and death imposed.
What does this normalization of barbarism eventually bring about in the human condition?
What, in other words, is the human outcome of a regime, a culture, that has reversed the very nature of morality?
Beyond that finer point, what is there to do in the face of such a monolithic evil? A few of the prisoners have formed a resistance group, even filched a few guns and grenades. The group discusses the two options: escape, or sabotage of one of the crematoriums. Both options are moral victories, as one leads either to death in the wilderness and the other to summary execution.
The final scene of the film will stay with me for a long time. I feel shaken by it now, as I sit and write. The dead, who are the inevitable result of this machinery of death, have the last word— their blood cries out.
Is that a victory? To acknowledge one’s own extinction? In the moral economy of such insanity as a Holocaust, maybe that is all they have.
***
“A Peck on the Cheek” (2002), dir. Mani Ratnam. There are certain movies that I am incapable of reviewing objectively. Certainly, there are levels of objectivity: I know a well-made movie when I see one, whether I like it or not. I can dislike a movie while understanding and acknowledging that it has any number of other merits.
That’s not the sort of objectivity I’m talking about. There are a few movies that act on my emotions in ways that prevent me from clearly expressing exactly what that effect is, even when it seems obvious to people that aren’t me. I avoid reviewing them because they mean something private and precious to me which I cannot adequately explain, and would rather keep secret about anyway. Patty Jenkins’ “Monster” is one. “Dumbo”, of all movies, is another.
“A Peck on the Cheek” (Kannathil Muttamithil) is another. Rather selfishly, I was glad that this Tamil indie film didn’t find a wide audience— it feels to me too secret and personal and dear to share with many others. I probably wouldn’t have discovered it except that a perspicacious librarian in college picked it off the new arrivals shelf and gave it to me.
The story is basic: Amudha, an orphaned young girl, one of thousands created as a consequence of the 26-year civil and ethnic war waged between the Sri Lankan government and a separatist movement of Tamils, has lost her family and been adopted by another. She grows old enough to start asking questions, and her adoptive family agrees to search for her birth mother.
That’s the plot. It’s not a complex one, nor particularly inventive. I suppose at this point in a review of a more complex movie, I would delve into thorny issues of the roots of the conflict, the myriad human rights abuses on both sides, a historical and cinematic contextualization of “Peck”. This isn’t that kind of movie. The difficult issues of Tamil statehood, the pogroms and the looting and the violence perpetrated by the government on Tamils are swept aside in favor of a softer “let’s all get along” ethos.
One reviewer has noted that the film generally favors the Tamil point of view, which is true enough— a suicide bomber has enough time before his death to chat with a child; neither Sinhalese civilians nor the opposing government forces are given much screen time to speak of. But political agendas aside, that point rings culturally true: the bomber isn’t trying to convert the child to his cause, he’s just a friendly guy, in the way that every single Sri Lankan I’ve ever met is, who happens to believe fanatically in that cause. I wish the movie had taken a bit more of a side.
Whether or not this film is “great art”— and I don’t think it is— it does one thing that all great art does: it reads to each viewer in their own emotional context. What do I love about this movie? I don’t know. I love the lilting, poetic theme song and the sensual beauty of its Tamil lyrics. (Traditional music is used, as well as upbeat pop songs, and both are equally effective). I love the little details in the dialogue, the way the characters tease each other, and poke fun at each others, and sprinkle random English words into their Tamil, because my mother and my maternal family do these things and they are precious to me. And when I see young women, actors though they may be, dressed in neatly-pressed fatigues with their jet-black double braids and suicide capsules on necklaces, my heart hurts.
“A Peck on the Cheek” is overly long. The harmonium soundtrack begins to grate after a while. It’s sentimental, bombastic, maudlin and unrealistic (awfully easy to find one guerilla fighter out of thousands in the middle of the Sri Lankan jungle). But, so help me, I can’t watch it without my eyes watering.
***
“Boyhood” (2014), dir. Richard Linklater. Life, goes the old saw, is what happens when you’re making other plans. The passage of time is a strange phenomenon that is only a phenomenon when you think about it.
Shot over a period of 12 years, “Boyhood” follows the emotional and physical maturation of a young boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane), his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, Richard’s daughter), and his divorced parents Mason Sr. and Olivia (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette). It is, as everyone knows by now, unique in conception and genesis, being shot a few days at a time every summer for a decade. Despite the production, it doesn’t feel like a documentary; it feels like a movie, especially because the performances have a certain polish to them (especially in the self-assured and confident-beyond-their-years turns from Coltrane and Linklater). You never quite forget that you’re seeing Ethan Hawke’s face, though as usual, he is adept at hiding in his role.
The engine that drives the movie is the kids. Their guileless presences onscreen (I do not want to use the word “performance”) are the absolute centerpiece of the film. You can see their characters, as children, pulling the adults into their small orbits, knowing that decisions are being made on their behalf and because of them, while being aware enough to know that the grownups are far above them. They observe the adult world with the brave and knowing equanimity of kids, who have an innate sense of the bigness of that world and their inability to control or influence it. The adults are imperious in the way that all adults are (“no video games at the table!”), insisting on chores— nagging. But are they nagging, or are they just being adults? Linklater’s direction is so sympathetic, so empathetic, to both sides that I felt uncomfortable watching these little conflicts happen. It felt too real, too close to home. The movie has a way of slipping in and out of self awareness, of being both about this particular family and about no family in particular, because all families are alike in so many ways.
Hawke plays the dad pitch-perfectly as a hard-luck everyman who just wants to be with his kids. He settles into the role of the “fun dad”, taking his kids to ball games and museums, while stepdad Bill (Marco Perella) draws the lines and lays down the law. Don’t we all know how this happens in real life? It’s nearly a cliche. But this movie avoids cliche so neatly and naturally that you aren’t thinking of that. The passage of time is marked by cultural references that are recognizable without being cheesy: a Coldplay song in the soundtrack, an Obama/Biden yard sign.
The movie has a trump card. If at times it drags, if at times it seems fixated on the boring humdrum of life, well, that’s because it is life. This could be a facile excuse, a get-out-of-criticism card, but just when you think the movie’s dragging, it throws in just the right touch of artifice— a snappy one-liner or witty dialogue— to remind you that there is a story. It’s a thin line to walk, but “Boyhood” dances along it. Time moves in a strange and achingly beautiful way in this movie. Earlier scenes become, for us and for the characters, more than scenes; they’re memories.
When you think about it, the entire movie is built on a thin line. You shoot a movie over 12 years— what happens when an actor’s personal life gets in the way? Gets busy, gets bored… grows up? I read that Lorelai, changing in the way that all teens do, asked to have her character killed off, as in a soap opera (Linklater refused). You realize just how tenuous and subject to circumstance such a project is, and thus, how tenuous and fragile is life.
And what a journey. Rereading the earlier paragraphs of this review, those scenes in the movie seem awfully long ago. So much has happened, so much has changed. Life has happened.
In the sweet, evocative final scene, Mason says “It’s like it’s always right now”. Of course, if “Boyhood” has a point, it’s that that statement is both true and false.
Time is both all we have and nothing that we can hold onto. The juxtaposition makes up what we call “life”.
“Boyhood” proves, subtly and beautifully, that time is all we have.
