Written in September 2021 for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine‘s November issue. — J.R.
For an online weekly lecture series I’m giving in
Chicago, “World Cinema of the 1960s”, I can revisit
certain experiences I had in Manhattan six decades
ago, meanwhile exploring the relevance films such as
L’avventura, L’année dernière à Marienbad, and Le
Mépris might have today, especially for young people
seeing them for the first time.
How much have we learned since my discovery that a film like L’avventura could have the weight of a serious novel? I was already an aspiring novelist then, so it took longer to appreciate Antonioni’s mastery of mise en scène, composition, editing, and sound mixing. How many cinephiles today already know about such things without L’avventura reminding them?
I hardly had any notion of intellectual cinema in 1961, or that Michelangelo Antonioni and the very different Jean-Luc Godard were fast becoming its key European figures. Books about film history in English could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Yet the fact that L’avventura, booed at Cannes, placed second, after Citizen Kane, in an international critics poll conducted by Sight and Soundless than two years later, suggested that this hIstory was already being rewritten.Read more
The progression from Sweetie to An Angel at My Table to The Piano to this unsatisfying mess (1996) shows that the more money director Jane Campion has to spend, the more of her formidable talent she wastes. This time she all but drowns in a sea of production values and Monarch Notes. Almost everyone in the cast is good (except John Malkovich, who gives a tiresomely generic performance), and Martin Donovan as the heroine’s doomed cousin is especially affecting. But they’re all treading water, and neither the script (by An Angel at My Table‘s Laura Jones) nor the direction supplies them with any reason for being. It’s highly doubtful whether Henry James’s 1881 novel is filmable to begin with, as the book depends on a style of observation and nuance that proceeds with the methodical patience of a bricklayer. Campion has none of this patience and little discernible design or vision to replace it with, and she seriously mauls the novel. A coy New Age prologue, an early dream sequence, and a surrealist black-and-white interlude are at best provocative teasers for an alternative to James that never takes shape, and the dull use of a wide-screen format only increases the sluggishness. Read more
THE GUILTY: JAKE GYLLENHAAL as JOE BAYLER. CR: NETFLIX ?? 2021.
When I saw and marveled at Steven Knight’s Locke with Tom Hardy eight years ago, I assumed at the time that it was an unrepeatable tour de force. Writing about it in my DVD column for Cinema Scope (https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/04/conspicuously-absent-or-apt-to-be-overlooked/), I described it as “84 minutes of a guy driving from Birmingham to London, or thereabouts, meanwhile talking to colleagues, family, and acquaintances on the phone,” which doesn’t begin to do the film justice but at least describes its narrative and dramatic form fairly simply.
I certainly couldn’t claim that Antoine Fuqua’s no less sedentaryThe Guilty, a Hollywood/Netflix thriller, is any sort of remake of Locke, an English art film. (For one thing, The Guilty is actually is a remake of a Danish movie with the same title that I haven’t seen, released only three years ago.) But the parallels between the two features still striking, interesting, and multiple. Apart from a couple of bathroom breaks, the hero/antihero here is again constantly on the phone, like the construction manager in Locke, the prisoner of the same supposedly real-time construction (more fiddled with in The Guilty) and apart from a few brief cameos from colleagues, this cop answering and relaying calls on a 911 detail is seen alone, similarly jabbering away with and to a multitude of characters whom we never see, meanwhile trying to bring order to the chaos and confusion he’s confronting at the same time that his own life appears to be falling apart.Read more
