From 1967 to 1974 Japanese documentarian Shinsuke Ogawa lived with the farmers of Sanrizuka, whose village was targeted for demolition to make room for Tokyo’s Narita airport. Supported by radical students, the farmers protested their eviction, and Ogawa joined in, recording both the long-term struggle and the everyday life of the village. His intense involvement eventually yielded five films with a combined running time of about 15 hours; the 146-minute Narita: Heta Village (1973) is the second and final segment included in Doc Films’ retrospective of virtuoso cinematographer Masaki Tamura. Ogawa emphasizes the lifestyle and traditions the farmers are fighting to preserve, and both he and Tamura (a farmer’s grandson himself) show a deep sensitivity and responsiveness to these people. My favorite sequences include an interview with a woman while she slices a radish into the shape of a phallus (which she jokingly attaches to sweet potato “testicles”), a candid and affectionate conversation with an 86-year-old woman seated on her porch, and an opening sequence in which Tamura’s camera roams around a field to illustrate a farmer’s anecdotes. Subjective and highly empathetic, this documentary is less a statement than a friendly conversation: Ogawa can be heard frequently as both narrator and interviewer, the periodic intertitles are no less personal, and the villagers repay the filmmakers’ warmth by freely sharing their lives with the camera. Read more
From the October 1, 1999 Chicago Reader. A personal note: This was the first film I ever saw in Chicago, when I was 17. I saw it at the Chicago Theater in between two train rides — the first from Sheffield, Alabama to Chicago, the second from Chicago to a Jewish camp in Wisconsin. — J.R.
Burt Lancaster on the Bible-thumping circuit, in Richard Brooks’s juicy (and considerably watered-down) 1960 adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel. Brooks was the ultimate vulgarizer of serious literature, as his versions of The Brothers Karamazov and Lord Jim made clear; this is somewhat better only because of Lancaster’s energetic performance, which won him an Oscar, and a few bits of colorful period ambience. Other Oscars went to supporting actress Shirley Jones and to Brooks for his highly dubious script. With Jean Simmons and Dean Jagger. (JR)
I have no current plans to see Oppenheimer and I’m already looking forward to seeing Barbie a second time. What’s infuriating about the usual press shorthand for this duo — including The Economist‘s — is the assumption that the former is “realist” and “adult” whereas the latter must be “escapist” and “childish”. But what if the reverse is true? [7/23/23]
From the Chicago Reader (January 15, 1999). — J.R.
An uncredited Jean-Luc Godard produced this 1997 third feature by the singular American independent Rob Tregenza (Talking to Strangers, The Arc), and along with Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, Godard is certainly a presiding guru over this powerful if enigmatic view of life in and around a psychiatric hospital somewhere in rural, snowbound America. Shot by Tregenza himself (one of the best cinematographers on the planet) in black-and-white 35-millimeter ‘Scope — mainly in extremely long, choreographed takes that transpire with a minimum of dialogue but with an extremely inventive and original Dolby sound track — the film offers not so much a plot in the usual sense as a series of interlocking characters and events governed, like the film’s title, by polarities: sound and image, interior and exterior, sanity and madness, freedom and institutional captivity, society and isolation. According to clues planted in the clothes and decor (especially the cars), the action begins around 1945 and ends in the present or near future, but to confuse matters further the characters and their behavior remain unaging constants. Tregenza’s background in existential philosophy serves him well: every shot comprises an event, and most of them were shot only once, in a single take (as in Talking to Strangers), allowing change and contingency to shape the material. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (December 24, 1999). — J.R.
Apparently Woody Allen can no longer even conceive of making a movie that isn’t derived from Bergman or Fellini; this one echoes the latter’s La strada in everything from Samantha Morton’s pantomime performance as a smiling mute to the melancholic ending. (To a smaller degree Allen also imitates his own Zelig imitating Warren Beatty’s Reds, by enlisting various jazz experts, himself included, to comment on his fictional hero.) But this absorbing picture is still about as good as Allen gets, a persuasive, nuanced, and relatively graceful portrait of an egotistical yet talented jazz guitarist of the swing era, astutely played by Sean Penn, with some pretty good solos dubbed by Howard Alden and lots of unobtrusive period flavor. The jazz milieu, combined with the fact that the Penn character is obsessed with Django Reinhardt just as Allen is obsessed with Bergman and Fellini, makes this one of his more personal projects as well. With Uma Thurman, Anthony LaPaglia, Brian Markinson, Gretchen Mol, James Urbaniak, and a bit by John Waters. Pipers Alley, Wilmette. — Jonathan Rosenbaum
With Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, Honor Fehrson, Rex Collett, Nicholas Moore, and Colin Jordan
Winstanley
Rating *** A must see
Directed by Kevin Brownlow
Written by Brownlow and Andrew Mollo
With Miles Halliwell, Alison Halliwell, David Bramley, Dawson France, Phil Dunn, and Terry Higgins.
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Music Box will be showing the only two features by English film historian Kevin Brownlow Tuesday through Thursday, April 27 through 29. Both are low-budget independent efforts in black and white, and both have been virtually lost to history because they fall outside what’s usually regarded as the history of English cinema, though their modesty makes them English to the core.
Brownlow is best known for his excellent English TV series, codirected by David Gill, about silent cinema (including Hollywood, Unknown Chaplin, Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, D.W. Griffith: Father of Film, and Cinema Europe) and for his books (including The Parade’s Gone By… and Behind the Mask of Innocence). He’ll never be remembered as a major filmmaker, because his methods of historical reconstruction are too fanatical to allow for the sort of dramatic shaping demanded of major period films. Read more
With Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard, Brendan Sexton III, Alison Folland, Alicia Goranson, and Jeannetta Arnette.
The Straight Story
Rating *** A must see
Directed by David Lynch
Written by John Roach and Mary Sweeney
With Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Jennifer Edwards-Hughes, James Cada, and Harry Dean Stanton.
The docudrama may be the key dramatic form of the 90s because of the extent to which its simplifications influence the way we make sense of the world around us. Not that we didn’t already have a habit of simplifying and therefore fictionalizing facts. There are perfectly good reasons most of us prefer to believe that one day in December 1955 Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, because her feet were killing her, thereby launching the civil rights movement. This story has a germ of truth, but Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. had mapped out their basic strategy for the Montgomery bus boycott at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee well before this incident. Still, the more folkloric, more dramatic version of the episode is the one that sticks — and the one that’s repeated by people who want to explain the civil rights movement in more forcible, more legible terms. Read more
A fascinating if irritating and ultimately unsatisfactory 1993 German documentary by Ray Müller about the remarkable filmmaker whose work provided Nazi Germany with its greatest propaganda. It’s important to know that this film was made at Riefenstahl’s own instigation, clearly designed to accompany her then recently published autobiography, and that she had veto power over who would be interviewed (don’t expect to see Susan Sontag here). Consequently this is more often self-portrait than portrait; like Hitler in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, she’s presented as a fully formed deity without family background or ideology except for a reverence for beauty and strength. Admittedly, compared to the Nazi industrialists who went unpunished, she has suffered disproportionately for her Nazi associations (albeit far less than any Jew who was gassed), and she deserves full recognition as an extraordinary woman; even in her early 90s she remained a courageous deep-sea diver, as the film shows. But at 182 minutes the film has only a few skeptical asides, and it shirks certain basic historical facts — allowing its subject to insist, for instance, that Triumph of the Will was a “straight” documentary, with no allusion to all the carefully crafted studio retakes. Read more
This review of a major film, Andre Téchiné’s Les voleurs (Thieves), that was (perhaps typically, at least for this period) completely ignored in The New Yorker — along with Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man from the previous year — appeared in the December 27, 1996 issue of the Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Thieves
Rating **** Masterpiece
Directed by Andre Téchiné
Written by Téchiné, Gilles Taurand, Michel Alexandre, and Pascal Bonitzer
With Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Laurence Côte, Fabienne Babe, Julien Riviére, Benoît Magimel, Didier Bezace, and Ivan Desny.
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Before Christ was a time of orgies. Then came love.”
“Love’s less fun.”
“Probably. In orgies you give your all. No more, no less. In love, it’s never enough. It’s always too much or not enough.” –a conversation in Thieves between a philosophy professor (Catherine Deneuve) and a policeman (Daniel Auteuil) in love with the same woman
When was the last time you saw a movie that was truly for as well as about grown-ups? Whatever the virtues of Breaking the Waves, a mature point of view certainly isn’t one of them. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 1, 1994). This film is available on a wonderful two-disc DVD release in Canada, Driver X 4: The Lost and Found Films ofSara Driver (see below), which includes (full disclosure) an extended interview with Driver about this film that I conducted in Ron Mann’s office in Toronto. — J.R.
Sara Driver’s principal films are surrealist works whose images tend to linger like half-remembered dreams. The ferocious You Are Not I (1982), adapted from a Paul Bowles story, unfolds inside the mind of a schizophrenic; the much gentler Sleepwalk (1986) is a dreamlike fairy tale set in lower Manhattan. The still gentler When Pigs Fly (1993) — set in an east-coast port town, though filmed in Gemany — is a whimsical ghost story inspired by Topper. If the tone seems light, the images, filmed by the great Robby Muller, nevertheless persist. The hero, beautifully played by Alfred Molina, is a sweet-tempered jazz musician who subsists mainly on the money he earns from giving music lessons and is sustained by the companionship of a dog (whose jazz-inspired dreams, rendered by Driver in full, are as lyrical as the hero’s). Some of the action takes place in a shabby Irish pub lorded over by Seymour Cassel, and when a barmaid gives Molina’s character an old rocking chair, he inherits a pair of ghosts (Marianne Faithfull and child actress Rachel Bella) along with it. Read more
Jacques Rivette’s alternate version of La belle noiseuse (1991) — running only a little over half as long (at 130 minutes) — uses alternate takes to tell basically the same story, though it and begins and ends somewhat differently and its tone is much lighter and more brittle. Freely adapted from Balzac’s story The Unknown Masterpiece, the film concerns a once-famous, long-inactive painter (Michel Piccoli at his best), living in the country with his wife and former model (Jane Birkin, ditto), who’s inspired to reembark on his most ambitious painting by the mistress (Emmanuelle Beart) of a young painter and admirer who comes to visit him. For all its limitations as a depiction of the way artists work, the longer version owes much of its power to its sense of duration, which ultimately brings one closer to the characters; this snappier, slicker version, more fluid as storytelling, has plenty of virtues of its own, but it’s less likely to linger as long in the mind. Both versions can be read as a sort of apologia on Rivette’s part explaining why he’s backed away from the obsessive intensity of his 60s and 70s work. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (February 1, 1994). — J.R.
I would nominate this authoritative 1962 adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel The King’s Ransom as Akira Kurosawa’s best nonperiod picture, though Ikiru and Rhapsody in August are tough competitors. It’s a 142-minute ‘Scope thriller in black and white, except for one partly colorized shot, about a kidnapping that goes awry: a chauffeur’s son is accidentally spirited away instead of the son of the businessman the chauffeur works for. The title refers to the topographical layout of the action as well as class divisions, and Kurosawa’s script and masterful mise en scene do a lot with both. Scorsese has been talking for years about doing a remake of this, but it’s hard to believe he could equal it. With Toshiro Mifune. In Japanese with subtitles. (JR)
This appeared in the March 3, 1995 issue of the Chicago Reader, under a slightly different title (“TV and Not TV”). — J.R.
Angèle
Rating **** Masterpiece
Directed and written by Marcel
Pagnol
With Orane Demazis, Fernandel,
Henri Poupon, Jean Servais,
Toinon, Delmont, and Andrex.
The Brady Bunch Movie
Rating * Has redeeming facet
Directed by Betty Thomas
Written by Laurice Elehwany, Rick
Copp, Bonnie Turner, and Terry
Turner
With Shelley Long, Gary Cole,
Michael McKean, Christine Taylor,
Jennifer Elise Cox, and Henriette
Mantel.
When it comes to Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) and The Brady Bunch (1969-1974), I’m strictly a novice. The Brady Bunch ran on prime time on ABC when I was living in Paris, but even if I’d been in the United States I would have found other things to do with my Friday nights; the show obviously made its deepest imprint on the preteens who had to stay home. I never saw any Pagnol movies during that period either: my French wasn’t fluent enough for me to follow the Provençal patois of the dialogue without subtitles, and anyway, the standard line on Pagnol’s movies back then was that they were “canned theater.” (Pagnol himself was the main culprit in fostering this impression: “Film is the art of imprinting, fixing, and diffusing theater,” he wrote in 1933.) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 7, 1994). — J.R.
Robert Redford’s best and richest directorial effort (1994, 130 min.) unpacks the TV quiz show scandal of the late 50s, when glamorous intellectual Charles Van Doren, star contestant on the quiz show Twenty-One, belatedly confessed that he’d been fed all the questions in advance. As played by Ralph Fiennes (Schindler’s List), Van Doren is lamentably not much more than a shallow icon (though Paul Attanasio’s script works overtime making him appear sympathetic), stripped of the real-life ambiguities and hidden depths that were apparent to everyone who followed the story at the time. Despite these and other predictable simplifications, the story is allowed to retain much of its resonance and suggestiveness — as an instance of ethnic and class conflict as well as a landmark in media bamboozlement — and even some of the network and corporate culprits in the original fraud are singled out and named. Rob Morrow is especially good as Richard N. Goodwin, the feisty and ambitious House subcommittee member who helped to uncover the scandal, even though it meant fingering a man he admired (though the film, based on a chapter in Goodwin’s book Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, exaggerates Goodwin’s role in the investigation), and John Turturro is effective as Herb Stempel, another Twenty-One contestant whose disgruntlement as an involuntary loser on the show was crucial in bringing Van Doren down. Read more
