I probably could enjoy Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes performing the Manhattan phone directory—which might be almost as edifying as this partly fictionalized HBO movie about Doris Duke, the socialite and philanthropist who died in 1993, and Bernard Lafferty, the gay Irishman who became her butler and best friend. Director Bob Balaban, known mainly as an actor, performed wonders with his features Parents (1989) and The Last Good Time (1994); he’s been directing TV ever since, and he does what he can with Hugh Costello’s arch script. 102 min. (JR) Read more
Just as Woody Allen now omits the early What’s Up, Tiger Lily? from his filmography, Japanese director Shohei Imamura might have been insulted by the idea that anyone could prefer this modest farce (1958) to his vastly more ambitious comedy The Profound Desire of the Gods, made a decade later. But its story about the dream life of a henpecked nerd who works at his wife’s Tokyo pharmacy is perfectly suited to the director’s high-spirited vulgarity. The performances of the title pop tune, with its borrowings from the Western alphabet, are especially giddy. Also known as Nishi Ginza Station. In Japanese with subtitles. 52 min. (JR) Read more
One of the best and most ambitious features by Shohei Imamura, this farcical fable (1968), set on a tropical island, probably won Read more
Turkish filmmaker Reha Erdem has a feel for the light, shade, colors, and textures of a scenic mountain village, which he shoots gracefully in ‘Scope, often following people along various passageways. He also has a leisurely and not always convincing way of dealing with the troubled lives of three village kids, and his taste for pretentious music and portentous section headings suggest he doesn’t always know when to leave well enough alone. This 2006 feature works better in terms of mood than storytelling. In Turkish with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
After making his best and smoothest drama (Match Point) in England, Woody Allen returns there for one of his most clueless and awkward, outfitted with a standard-issue Philip Glass score. In both cases Allen’s usual hang-ups about class and money lead to conventionally complicated murder plots. Two economically challenged cockney brothers in south Londona garage mechanic and compulsive gambler (Colin Farrell) and a more settled sort who runs the family restaurant (Ewan McGregor)get pushed into killing a businessman who’s threatening to expose their rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson). With Hayley Atwell and Sally Hawkins. PG-13, 108 min. (JR) Read more
Shohei Imamura’s fourth feature (1959) was his last assigned project before the more personal Pigs and Battleships. Based on the diary of a ten-year-old Korean girl, which became a best seller in Japan, it focuses on her and her three siblings’ impoverished life in a coal-mining town. Imamura shot in black-and-white ‘Scope, doing a great deal with the scenic mountain and seaside settings, but he also lays it on rather thick at times with melodramatic overacting, especially among the adults. A former assistant to Yasujiro Ozu who often tried to be as unlike his former master as possible, Imamura tended to revel in excess of this kind even with relatively impersonal projects. I might have appreciated the social nuances more if I Read more
As the title suggests, this video documentary about Elias Syriani, a North Carolina man who stabbed his wife to death in 1990, and his four children, who forgave him years later and appealed his death sentence, has all the makings of a real-life soap opera. Yet despite its force as a polemic against capital punishment, and for all the public displays of emotion, I came away feeling that parts of this potent story weren’t being told. Syriani, a devout Catholic from Jordan, isn’t among the storytellers, so his emotional problems and religious awakening are left to others to explain (or not). And on two occasions video maker Linda Booker employs piano music when one daughter starts to cry, which suggests she isn’t sure when or how to let the story speak for itself. 83 min. (JR) Read more
This short article was written for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and published there in Spanish on January 9, 2008. More recently, I’m happy to report, Portabella’s 1970 Vampir-Cuadecuc was written about by James Naremore in the Summer 2008 issue of Film Quarterly as his second favorite film of 2007. And Portabella, who has recently established his own web site, is currently in the latter stages of putting together a sizable DVD box set devoted to his work, to be released next year in Spain by Sherlock Films — a massive package including nine discs and a book that I’m contributing an essay to — and is also planning subsequently to make his work available for downloads on the Internet. — J.R.
Portabella in the U.S.
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
It was over 36 years ago, in Cannes, that I first encountered the singular cinema of Pere Portabella, a revelation that came via his second feature, Vampir-Cuadecuc. Living at the time in Paris, I knew absolutely nothing about Catalan culture under Franco, and had only the film’s sounds, images, and Portabella’s wit in juxtaposing the two as my guides. The only contextual information I had was that Portabella was one of the producers of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, and that he couldn’t be present because the Franco government had taken away his passport as punishment for this caprice. Read more
After reading a news story about the death of another woman filmmaker, Revital Ohayon, during a terrorist attack on an Israeli kibbutz, experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs made this 2005 documentary, in which she exchanges thoughts about Ohayon with an Israeli friend, interviews members of the woman’s family, incorporates excerpts from Ohayon’s films, and shows her own children and home in the U.S. The film has many strengthsbeautiful shots, poetic insights, moving details, original modes of expressionbut with no unifying strategy, these elements often compete with or undermine one another. In English and subtitled Hebrew. 63 min. (JR) Read more
Two European documentaries from 2005 about the construction of two large, innovative, and controversial buildings. Fredrik Gertten’s 59-minute The Socialist, the Architect, and the Twisted Tower, in English and subtitled Swedish, concerns the Turning Torso, a residential high-rise by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in Malmo; it has the more interesting subjectconflicts between class and aesthetic issuesbut the filmmaking is dull. Dutch director Mirjam von Arx’s 52-minute Building the Gherkinin English, about Norman Foster’s pickle-shaped office tower on the site of an IRA bombingis something of an industrial, but it’s an adept and entertaining one. (JR) Read more
I recoil from most allegorical films, so it’s hard to watch Hiroshi Teshigahara’s heavy collaborations with writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Yet the third of their efforts (1966) is more palatable than its predecessors (Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes) because its philosophical focus and thrillerlike story overpower the allegory, allowing Teshigahara’s eclectic mix of styles and forms to move beyond artiness. The embittered victim of an industrial accident (Tatsuya Nakadai), who has to hide his scarred face in bandages and has been rejected sexually by his wife (Machiko Kyo), gets fitted with a lifelike mask that encourages him to try to seduce her as a stranger. Though the story becomes almost as overloaded with ideas as Pitfall, the theme is brilliantly and imaginatively explored, and the acting is potent. In Japanese with subtitles. 124 min. (JR) Read more
Mikio Naruse’s first talkie (1935)a melodramatic tale about three sisters working as samisen street musicians, based on a story by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabatais characteristically downbeat and downscale but uncharacteristically experimental in terms of sound and image. Clearly Naruse was still getting accustomed to sound in movies, with interesting but uneven consequences; some of the camera setups detract from the story but are striking nonetheless. In Japanese with subtitles. 74 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 6, 2008). — J.R.
No important American filmmaker in recent years has divided audiences more than writer-director Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line), and his fourth feature in 35 years pushed me for the first time into the skeptics’ corner. The subject matter is partly to blame: after four centuries of Anglo denial about the genocidal conquest of America, I was hoping for something a little more grown-up and educational about John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (the striking Q’Orianka Kilcher). Malick still has an eye for landscapes, but since Badlands (1973) his storytelling skill has atrophied, and he’s now given to transcendental reveries, discontinuous editing, offscreen monologues, and a pie-eyed sense of awe. All these things can be defended, even celebrated, but I couldn’t find my bearings. With Christopher Plummer, David Thewlis, and Christian Bale. PG-13, 135 min. (JR)
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Krzysztof Kieslowski’s major work (1988) consists of ten separate films, each running 50-odd minutes and set mainly around two high-rises in Warsaw. The films are built around a contemporary reflection on the Ten Commandmentsspecifically, an inquiry into what breaking each of them in today’s world might entail. Made as a miniseries for Polish TV, these concise dramas can be seen in any order or combination; they don’t depend on one another, though if you see them in batches you’ll notice that major characters in one story turn up as extras in another. One of Kieslowski’s best ideas was to use a different cinematographer for each film (with the exception of the third and ninth), though the script is more important here than the mise en scene. In Polish with subtitles. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 3, 2008). I much prefer this film to Paul Thomas Anderson’s next feature, The Master, an incoherent mess with fewer compensations (despite the heavy breathing from some of my colleagues, who have compared it to Herman Melville); but for my money, neither film holds a candle to Magnolia. — J.R.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature, a striking piece of American self-loathing loosely derived from Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, is lively as bombastic period storytelling but limited as allegory. The cynical shallowness of both the characters and the overall conception — American success as an unholy alliance between a turn-of-the-century capitalist (Daniel Day-Lewis) and a faith healer (Paul Dano), both hypocrites — can’t quite sustain the film’s visionary airs, even with good expressionist acting and a percussive score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Day-Lewis, borrowing heavily from Walter and John Huston, offers a demonic hero halfway between Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and James Dean’s hate-driven tycoon in Giant (shot on the same location as this movie), but Kevin J. O’Connor in a slimmer part offers a much more interesting and suggestive character. This has loads of swagger, but for stylistic audacity I prefer Anderson’s more scattershot Magnolia. Read more
