An enjoyable and well-crafted 1995 dance film from Spain by Carlos Saura that left me feeling unsatisfied, perhaps because the decision to film the dancers, singers, and musicians (gathered from all over the world) in an abstract space cuts this material off from its social and historical roots. In this respect, Saura’s movie follows an aesthetic that’s precisely the reverse of that found in the Gypsy musical Latcho Drom, a cult masterpiece. However, if you care about flamenco, you probably shouldn’t miss this. The great Vittorio Storaro contributed the lush cinematography. In Spanish with subtitles. 100 min. (JR) Read more
William E. Jones’s audacious and often compelling experimental essay film (1997) recounts his personal investigation into the life of a young gay porn star, Alan Lambert, who committed suicide at age 25 in Montreal. What’s most audacious is that Jones refuses to include porn footagealthough many of Lambert’s films are described and discussedthereby defying genre expectations and aiming at something more introspective. Sometimes Jones avoids certain tired conventions only to seize upon others (e.g., focusing at length on ocean waves to accompany ruminations on mortality), but the seriousness of this haunting meditation is never in question. (This is one of the last American experimental films to receive NEA funding, but contrary to rumor, the funding had nothing to do with the absence of porn footage.) 75 min. (JR) Read more
In 1977 Istvan Darday and Gyorgyi Szalai (the couple who went on to make the remarkable and comparably lengthy Documentator in 1989) codirected this 270-minute experimental feature with nonprofessional actors and no script. (JR) Read more
A feature-length compilation of clipsif memory serves, more fun than scholarlyput together by Saul J. Turrell and Graeme Ferguson in 1966 and revised in 1972 for a theatrical rerelease. Among the featured actresses are Marilyn Monroe, Theda Bara, Jean Harlow, Mae West, Claudette Colbert, Rita Hayworth, and Dorothy Lamour. (JR) Read more
Danish-born Paul Alexander Juutilainen wrote and directed this informative, passionate, and moving 1996 video documentary about Frankfurt-school philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse during his final teaching stint at the University of California at San Diego during the late 60s and 70s. The treatment of Marcuse’s thought and writing is sketchy to say the least, but the accounts of radical campus activities during this era and Marcuse’s role within them are instructive and highly evocative. Among those interviewed are Angela Davis, Fredric Jameson, William McGill, Reinhard Lettau, Page DuBois, and Herbert Schiller. (JR) Read more
Not a total loss but not really a finished film either, Claire Denis’ seventh feature (1996) is much too coy and nonspecific for its own good. Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri, who played siblings in Denis’ 1994 TV feature U.S. Go Home, are reunited as the title characters, a troubled brother and sister living in Marseilles. Boni is a horny 19-year-old pizza worker lost in masturbation fantasies; his 15-year-old sister Nenette, seven months pregnant, flees her boarding school to stay with him. Both detest their father, and Denis strongly hints but never confirms that the unborn child is his. More defensibly, the film refuses to discriminate between the 19-year-old’s fantasies and his daily life. Basically the film is a collection of funky surface distractions, and as such it’s quite watchable; just don’t go looking for too much more. Read more
Also known as For Fun, a title I prefer, this is a delightful comedy from mainland China (1992) about grumbly old men, directed and cowritten by a very young woman, Ning Ying, who studied film in both Beijing and Italy, was assistant director on The Last Emperor, and subsequently became head of the Beijing Film Studio. An old man is obliged to retire from his job as house manager for a local Peking Opera troupe, and after he finds a few opera buffs around the same age in a park, he organizes an official club that meets in an abandoned hall. Working mainly with nonprofessionals, Ning shows a genuine flair for documentary-style shooting and humorous observation; this is only her second feature, but she’s clearly someone to watch. Adapted with Ning Dal from a novella by Chen Jiangong; with Huang Zongluo and Huang Wenjie. (JR) Read more
There’s enough here of what critic Manny Farber once called oily overdefinition of the working class to keep a service station running all year. Bette Midler plays the small-town virago whose car lands in the river when her brakes fail; everyone in town, including her husband and son, hates her so much that police chief Danny DeVito spends the whole movie careening from one suspect to the next. The problem is, why should we care who killed her? Everyone here is made to seem ugly and stupid, and the movie’s one joke is to slime them all over and over again. Though it pretends to be in love with its own bad taste, there’s a world of difference between this nasty piece of work and There’s Something About Mary, and it’s hard to believe that the characters’ economic bracket has nothing to do with the movie’s attitude. For whatever it’s worth, I didn’t laugh once. With Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Affleck, and William Fichtner; Nick Gomez directed from a labored script by Peter Steinfeld. (JR) Read more
A straight yoga instructor (Madonna) and a gay gardener (Rupert Everett) who are best friends get it on one drunken night and she becomes pregnant; she decides to have the kid, and they live together as parentsuntil she meets and falls in love with an east-coast investment banker. The first part of this opulent soap opera is well-intentioned and reasonably entertaining (if simplistic) propaganda about alternative lifestyles; then the whole thing becomes a very rickety and contrived tearjerker, with Everett playing the Joan Crawford part. The swank surroundings wind up signifying about as much as the characters, mainly because neither Thomas Ropelewski’s script nor John Schlesinger’s direction can establish a comfortable through line in terms of either style or content. With Michael Vartan, Josef Sommer, and Lynn Redgrave. (JR) Read more
The Trial
Though in certain respects debatable as an adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel, Orson Welles’s nightmarish, labyrinthine expressionist comedy of 1962–shot mainly in Paris’s abandoned Gare d’Orsay and various locations in Zagreb and Rome after he had to abandon his plan to use sets–remains his creepiest and most disturbing work, and it’s been a lot more influential than people usually admit. (Scorsese’s After Hours, for example, is deeply indebted to it, and arguably the two costume store sequences in Eyes Wide Shut are as well.) Anthony Perkins gives a somewhat adolescent temper to Joseph K, an ambitious corporate bureaucrat mysteriously brought to court for an unspecified crime. Among the predatory females who pursue him are Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli; Welles himself fills in as the hero’s tyrannical lawyer, and Welles regular Akim Tamiroff is his usual remarkable self as one of the lawyer’s oldest clients. Welles adroitly captures the experience of an unsettling and slightly hysterical dream throughout, and the dovetailing locations, disembodied sound, and dizzying shifts of scale add to the overall disorientation. A newly restored 35-millimeter print will be shown, and given the impact of screen size on what Welles is doing, you can’t claim to have seen this if you’ve watched it only on video. Read more
A Moment of Innocence
One of the best features by the prolific and unpredictable Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, this 1996 film also happens to be one of his most seminal and accessible–a reconstruction of a pivotal incident during his teens that landed him in prison for several years during the shah’s regime. A fundamentalist and activist at the time, Makhmalbaf stabbed a policeman; as a consequence he was shot and arrested. Two decades later his politics were quite different, but while he was auditioning people to appear in his film Salaam Cinema, he encountered the same policeman, now unemployed, and the two wound up collaborating on this film about the incident involving them, trying (with separate cameras) to reconcile their versions of what happened. Though no doubt prompted in part by Abbas Kiarostami’s remarkable Close-up (1990)–another eclectic documentary reconstructing past events with two cameras, in that case a hoax involving Makhmalbaf himself–this is no mere imitation but a fascinating humanist experiment and investigation in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery. The original Persian title, incidentally, translates as “Bread and Flower.” Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 18 through 24.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Raul Ruiz’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past can’t be regarded even remotely as an adequate substitute for the original, even though the director sensibly concentrates on the last of its seven parts. But this 1999 film is still a lot more imaginative and entertaining than one might have thought possible. Ruiz ingeniously tries to convey the transports of Proust’s labyrinthine sentences through camera movement and the displacement of characters and scenery, almost as if he were constructing a theme-park ride. The result isn’t as emotionally potent as one might have wished, but it’s never boring, and its very inadequacy and occasional obscurity are part of its charm. Ruiz and Gilles Taurand wrote the script. With Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Vincent Perez, Pascal Greggory, Marie-France Pisier, Chiara Mastroianni, Marcello Mazzarella as Proust, and John Malkovich as the eccentric gay artistocrat Charlus. In French with subtitles. 165 min. (JR) Read more
A brisk and breezy if formulaic comedy-thriller from Japan about a shy car-rental employee (Masanobu Ando) and an equally timid nurse (Hikari Ishida) thrown together while fleeing with a lot of yen from yakuza thugs. Most of the thugs are amusingly played by the half-dozen members of a comedy troupe called Jovi Jova, and writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi seems to have as much fun standardizing their bumbling goofiness as he does standardizing the meekness of his hero and heroine. As disposable fun, this 1999 feature is every bit as enjoyable and forgettable as most Hollywood equivalents. In Japanese with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more
For many years now, William Friedkinmacho director of The French Connection, The Exorcist, Cruising, and To Live and Die in L.A.has been languishing in relative obscurity, and this well-crafted courtroom drama with a couple of strong early action sequences may be his first good chance to reinstate himself. Retired lawyer Tommy Lee Jones defends his old pal Samuel L. Jackson, a much-decorated marine officer court-martialed for ordering his troops to fire on civilians storming the U.S. embassy in Yemen. The movie could be described as a thinking person’s version of The Ballad of Lt. Calley. It’s a highly effective piece of right-wing propaganda, though the villain isn’t a dove but a Washington bureaucrat, and Friedkin does a superb job of serving up the well-appointed script by James Webb and Stephen Gaghan. But in fact what we get is the illusion of thought, which is central to its ideological agenda. With Ben Kingsley and Anne Archer. 128 min. (JR) Read more
Michelangelo Antonioni’s farewell feature (1995, 115 min.), combining four sketches from his book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, is minor only by his own standards. He made it when he was 83, after a stroke ten years earlier left him partially paralyzed and largely unable to speak; to placate the film’s insurers Wim Wenders collaborated on the script and direction, but only on the brief segments linked by a filmmaker (played by John Malkovich) who roams around looking for material. (One of these segments, featuring Jeanne Moreau and the late Marcello Mastroianni, focuses, ironically, on the theme of artistic imitation.) It’s the most directly erotic of Antonioni’s features, its stories all revolving around the possibility of sex between strangers, and Antonioni takes advantage of all the existential mysteries involved. It’s also set in different parts of Italy and France (with English, Italian, and French spoken at different junctures), and Antonioni characteristically intertwines his eroticism of the flesh with an even more precise eroticism of place. With Sophie Marceau, Irene Jacob, Vincent Perez, Peter Weller, Chiara Caselli, Fanny Ardant, Kim Rossi-Stuart, and Ines Sastre. (JR) Read more
