Gateway Cinephiles

In the Very Temple of Delight

Bright Star
2009 (UK / Australia / France)
Director: Jane Campion
Viewed: September 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Jane Campion’s new film, Bright Star, is positively swollen with exquisite sorrow.  Unabashed and yet sober in her embrace of the romantic, Campion exhibits a shrewd talent for blending personal and cultural understandings of love, and Bright Star is further, devastating proof of her instincts.  In presenting the tale of the relationship between seamstress Fanny Brawne and the English poet John Keats, Bright Star relies on the viewer’s own romantic reference points as well as their understanding of generic tropes.  The film slathers on the components of a textbook romantic tragedy: a soul in creative torment, attraction concealed behind bickering, social barriers that suffocate the lovers, a meddlesome third party, emotions that quickly veer from ecstatic to distraught, and a world that seems almost malevolent to love.  Campion assembles these well-worn elements into a whole that is not only deeply affecting, but also visually and aurally compelling.  Bright Star does not ask for our indulgence.  It earns it, by sweeping us along into a world where poetry expresses what blunt declarations, and even physical intimacies, cannot.  It operates much like poetry itself.  To borrow a phrase from Campion’s masterpiece, The Piano, it is not so much an account of a chaste love affair as it is a mood that passes through you.

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In the Eye of the Beholder

Everlasting Moments (Eviga Ögonblick)
2008 (Sweden)
Director: Jan Troell
Viewed: May 2, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Fundamentally, I am a sucker for any film that approaches the romantic impulse as an agonizing phenomenon that bears unbearably fragile dividends, when it bears anything at all save tears.  For me, there is something unaccountably attractive in the bliss of thwarted love.  It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Everlasting Moments, Jan Troell’s scrupulously reverent tale of stifled artistic expression and romance, proved to be emotionally engrossing despite its schematic narrative and discursive character.  The relationship between Swedish housewife / amateur photographer Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) and camera shopkeeper Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christensen) is tragic, succulent stuff.  Their unconsummated love, exquisitely formal yet accented with moments of profound tenderness, is so plainly rife with repressed yearnings and resentments that it’s a wonder mere Scandinavian starch can restrain such ache.  In part, familial obligations keep the couple apart, but it wouldn’t be a textbook romantic tragedy without a violent and jealous spouse, a role played here by Maria’s mercurial, monstrous husband Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt).  It’s not sufficient that Sigfrid restrain Maria within a living hell of drunkenness, infidelity, abuse, and murderous threats.  He also attempts to quash her blossoming creative longings behind the camera, a desire that serves as both a gateway to and an expression of her feelings for the gentle Sebastian.  Love doesn’t come much more virtuous—or more doomed—than this.

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Quick Review: Moscow, Belgium (Aanrijding in Moscou)

2008 (Belgium)
Director: Christophe Van Rompaey
Viewed: March 26, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Scruffily endearing and accented with a gratifying guilelessness, Christophe Van Rompaey’s Moscow, Belgium is a working-schlub dramedy with a clear sense of its operating parameters. The tale of separated forty-something working mom Matty (Barbara Sarafian) and her fumbling affair with a twenty-something truck driver (Jurgen Delnaet) is played for mellow laughs and cringing melodrama. The film paints an emotionally detailed but tightly framed portrait of middle-aged confusion and longing, and that’s about all it does. Hence the absence of any substantial thematic aims, counter-balanced somewhat by a studious regard for its characters. The peripheral roles are cartoonish, but the principals are plump enough to reveal fresh layers in each successive scene. With the exception of Sarafian, who uses her eyes, mouth, and even hair to delicate effect, the performances don’t exactly dazzle, nor does the script. There’s uncertainty in the story, and refreshingly so, but there is also triteness and contrivance. What makes Moscow, Belgium more pleasurable than slicker romantic fare is the loose structure of it conversations and its penchant for subdued observation elsewhere. These don’t make the film a marvel or anything, but do render it more appealing than the genre’s usual ephemera.

Betty or Veronica?

Two Lovers
2009 (USA)
Director: James Gray
Viewed: February 24, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Two Lovers reaffirms director James Gray’s solemnly precocious talent for telling discreetly compelling stories that should, by all rights, be outright stifling in their familiarity. In We Own the Night, Gray lent both a Shakespearean howl and a profoundly personal coloring to the tale of a man tugged by competing loyalties until tragedy pushes him over a threshold. Now Gray, returning with Joaquin Phoenix to the marvelously sagging Brooklyn landscape, provides his spin on a creaky romantic trope: a man’s choice between a stable brunette and a free-spirited blonde. The sensory pleasures on display elevate Two Lovers, as do Gray’s infusions of thematic and metaphorical texture, rescuing it from the sheer unpleasantness of its characters and a gnawing sense that we’ve heard this song before. The quiet, observant qualities to Two Lovers stand in contrast to the alleged seriousness of clumsy, oh-so-serious contemporary pap such as Frost/Nixon and The Reader, but the sheer willfulness of the film’s sedate “adultness” results in an unfortunate aura of dreariness and obsequious modesty. It’s an easy film to enjoy and even admire, but will anyone remember it in three months, let alone three years?

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First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified

Sita Sings the Blues
2008 (USA)
Director: Nina Paley
Viewed: February 14, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Sita Sings the Blues was featured in a limited engagement on February 13-15, 2009 as a part of the Multicultural Film Series at the Webster University Film Series.]

Nina Paley’s magnificent Sita Sings the Blues is an endlessly appealing treasure that weds animation’s myriad visual possibilities to a witty, painfully personal howl of frustration and liberation. Recalling Yellow Submarine in its delirious blending of storytelling, music, and design, Sita proudly admits to its own conceptual simplicity. It presents a familiar story–one of the oldest, really–of love weakened by crisis and shattered on the shoals of mistrust and betrayal. But, oh how it tells that story!: With wondrous Flash-style animation whose captivating design can only be described as “Game Boy Bollywood.” With pop art-inspired compositions and low-key chuckles that echo the Children Television’s Workshop in its finest moments. With whorls and bursts of pure color. With ingeniously re-imagined jazz ditties that elicit sighs of delight. Paley offers that rarest of animated works: one that thrives on its own dazzle. Sita’s unexpected luster extends to every crevice of its intricate yet natty form. Its joys emerge from the accumulation of a multitude of stylistic embellishments united by the vision of a passionate and furiously inventive auteur.

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Quick Review: Beauty in Trouble (Kráska v Nesnázích)

2006 (Czech Republic)
Director: Jan Hrebejk
Viewed: February 11, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The sly success of Jan Hrebejk’s blackly comic melodrama, Beauty in Trouble, lies in its gently provocative probing of human behavior within a soap opera framework drunk on guilty pleasures. Borrowing from the Robert Graves poem for its title and tragic seed, Herbejk’s film discovers a refreshing stance towards its characters, particularly Marsela, a stubborn Czech redhead who promises a sunny, skanky eroticism. Beauty’s heroine finds herself tugged and provoked by bullies, saviors, obligations, and lusts, but Hrebejk shrewdly avoids both finger-wagging and chilly distance. Instead, the film challenges assumptions about how weary, battered people reconcile their conflicting motivations, all while maintaining a tone of puzzled affection even for its ostensible villains. Allegorical readings abound, especially with respect to the Czech Republic’s place in tomorrow’s Europe. This thematic complexity complements Beauty’s most memorable scenes, which are soaked in pure, giddy drama: an unbearably tense confrontation over cookies; a furious, regretful bout of coitus above a chop shop; and the slow, stupid realization that a sleeping figure is stone dead. Not even a soundtrack that notoriously passes around songs with John Carney’s Once distracts from Beauty’s lurid baubles and restless musings.

Quick Review: Were the World Mine

2008 (USA)
Director: Tom Gustafson
Viewed: February 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The most striking aspect of Tom Gustafson’s determinedly affable queer high school musical, Were the World Mine, is the slick manner in which the director grafts his lightweight contemporary political message to the elemental bliss of his source material. That would be A Midsummer’s Night Dream, for which the film has the dreamy reverence of an enthralled sophomore literature geek (appropriately enough), but also a scrappy grasp of its timeless themes. Thus, Gustafson is able to juggle an obligatory liberal scolding of intolerance alongside the play’s more traditional facets: the giddy thrill of romance, the tragicomical nature of human relations, and a certain meta-textual impishness. Unfortunately, this nimbleness is nowhere else to be found in Were the World Mine. The amateurish acting aside, Gustafson just isn’t that skillful of a director, and the clumsy editing, sound, and choreography in particular make for some frustrating and baffling stretches. One wonders what Julie Taymor might have done with the concept and a $30 million budget. Still, Gustafson’s enthusiasm for the material and his cast shine through, and Tanner Cohen as the tale’s Puck / Helena propels the film with his alluring looks and soaring voice.

The Man from the Fourth Dimension

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2008 (USA)
Director: David Fincher
Viewed: January 23, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cleaves to the form and tone of an epic fairy tale, albeit one infused with a densely melancholy aura. On the heels of Zodiac, Fincher’s masterful police-procedural deconstruction / treatise on existential dissatisfaction, Button perhaps inevitably reads as a lesser work, but it’s still a remarkably rich and affecting film, given its gimmicky premise. Certainly, it prominently exhibits the director’s fascination with the way significant moments swarm through the human experience. Screenwriter Eric Roth, who penned that satirical-schmaltzy Boomer behemoth, Forrest Gump, has mostly shed his inelegant urge for directionless nostalgia and unwarranted pathos. Roth has more than atoned for Gump with the likes of The Insider and Munich, and Button at least confirms that he can now return to a familiar well with far more intricate and interesting results. Granted, there are ghosts of Gump’s grating Hallmark trappings in Button, chiefly a half-hearted noodling with a limp buzzphrase (”You never know what’s coming for you”? Meh.) and a determination to march with downcast eyes through a filmic museum of twentieth-century America. However, the comparison also highlights Button’s superior qualities: its deft and light approach to the aforementioned historical tour; its fresh-yet-familiar variation on Fincher’s dazzling mise-en-scène and tenebrous visual signatures; and chiefly its unexpectedly pointed rejoinder to the hoary notion that youth is wasted on the young.

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Local Boy Made Good

Slumdog Millionaire
UK / USA (2008)
Directors: Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
Viewed: November 15, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

[This is one of several full reviews I am posting on some of the films that were featured at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival and which have now opened in wide or limited release.]

Best approached as a morsel of spun sugar and spice that’s easy on both eyes and mind, Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire is a contemporary fairy tale pitched at a music video tempo. Unfortunately, it’s also a work so preoccupied with the sizzle of motion and the cleverness of its structure that it flits heedlessly into the worst offenses of the form. Slumdog’s characters never scan as anything but wobbly archetypes, their motivations hastily drawn where the film-makers bother with motivation at all. Boyle and Tandan substitutes ghetto grubbiness and gloss for the shading that would lend the film volume. Consequently, Slumdog is sustained on manic energy and little else. While its shallowness and slipshod nature distract, the film still proves to be a pleasurable tale. In its most engaging moments, it permits the viewer to forget its threadbare credibility, urging us to giggle in delight as it crackles like a string of candy-colored firecrackers.

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Spanish Fly

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2008 (USA / Spain)
Director: Woody Allen
Viewed: August 26, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

I’ve kept my distance from Woody Allen’s output since Mighty Aphrodite, never successfully seduced by the rare acclaimed feature (Match Point), nor by the notorious belly-flops (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Therefore I can’t comment from an informed place on the praise that Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to have reaped as some kind of return to form for the venerable Manhattanite. Certainly, VCB is steeped in wistful adoration for the Spanish locale of its title, echoing the lovestruck regard Allen’s earlier films evidence for New York City. The new film is self-consciously a Spanish travelogue, stuffed to the gills with breathtaking sights, rarefied culture, and delectable food and drink. If the Condé Nast slideshow feels a touch ludicrous, it also seems a natural fit for the film’s amorous story. VCB is unabashedly sexy, in a way that few American films ever manage, and without so much as a glimpse of Scarlett Johannson’s assets, or Javier Bardem’s for that matter. Allen employs the appeal of sun-dappled locales and the arousal of gorgeous people in the throes of temptation to tug VCB towards a destination that proves oddly ambiguous. The film underlines its themes with relentless desperation in places, favors contemplative melancholy in others, and far too often clunks along on contrivance and wincing dialog. At its most successful, it’s a kind of cinematic holiday: an exotic getaway for pleasure and perspective, ephemeral in essence and bittersweet in its conclusion.

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