In 1955, the year Satyajit Ray’s beautiful first feature won the Grand Prix at Cannes, no less a humanist than Francois Truffaut walked out of a screening, declaring, I don’t want to see a film about Indian peasants. Time and critical opinion have been much kinder to this family melodramaderived, like its successors in the Apu trilogy, Aparajito and The World of Apu, from a 30s novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerjeethan to Truffaut’s remark. Yet there’s no question that Ray’s contemplative treatment of a poor Brahman family in a Bengali village, made on a small budget and accompanied by the mesmerizing music of Ravi Shankar, is a triumph of mood and character rather than an exercise in brisk Western storytelling. In Bengali with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
The docudramas of Judit Elek are barely known in the U.S., but this Hungarian filmmaker has been acquiring a reputation abroad, including a recent retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise. Her most recent film is set in the mid-19th century, 17 years after the failed revolution of 1848-49, and centers on the events of one day during an aristocratic family gathering. Read more
A very low-budget ($7,000) first feature by Robert Rodriguez (1993) that’s juicy, adroit, and likablean action picture set in a town on the Mexican border, where a mariachi musician (Carlos Gallardo) and a hit man (Reinol Martinez) arrive at the same time, both carrying guitar cases. Not only are they mistaken for each other by the various henchmen working for an Anglo drug baron (Peter Marquardt) who wants the hit man rubbed out, but the musicianwho’s already being shoved out of his traditional art by Muzakwinds up becoming a killer simply to stay alive. The whole thing can be read as a potent satirical allegory about an independent third world filmmaker like Rodriguez forced to imitate and sell out to his Yankee exploiters to survive: the drug baron, like a Hollywood producer, spends most of his time lounging around a pool served by a bimbo in a bikini, and the film itself was distributed by Columbia, which promptly signed Rodriguez to shoot a $6 million English-language remakea form of humiliation that obviously constitutes ultimate success in many people’s minds. Consuelo Gomez plays the feisty heroine. (JR) Read more
Apart from Crumb, this film by Steven M. Martin may be the best American documentary feature of 1994. It’s certainly one of the most fascinating, taking as its subjects the electronic musical instrument known as the theremin; Leon Theremin, the Russian visionary who created it; and all the remarkable things that have happened to inventor and invention over the past seven decades. In a way, the film also describes the complex history of a concept in this country: how a particular sound gave birth to electronic music (Robert Moog is one of the many people interviewed here, along with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and various classical musicians) and wound up being used in Hollywood, mainly in SF films. Then there’s the hair-raising story of Theremin being kidnapped by Soviet agents in 1938, his romance with a Russian violin prodigy, and much, much more. I shouldn’t leave out the fascination of watching a theremin being played; just as it’s difficult to play a vibraphone without dancing, it’s hard to play a theremin without conducting. 104 min. (JR) Read more
