An alternate version of my essay on the Costa film, written in May 2020 for Trafic. — J.R.
It isn’t necessary to have seen anything else by Pedro Costa before encountering his title heroine in a film of her own, but if you saw his previous feature, Horse Money, you’ve already met her—a striking, angry middle-aged woman from Cape Verde who finally found the money to fly to Lisbon to join her long-absent husband, only to discover that she just missed his funeral. Settling into his rickety, crumbling house and trying to come to terms with her grief, keeping company mainly with a semi-mad priest (Costa regular Ventura), she’s precisely the kind of person that the world and movies tend to ignore and evade, yet Costa’s epic portraiture, beautifully lit and framed so that it builds an exalted altar to her, invites us to luxuriate in her hushed presence. Audiences tend to have an easier time with this dark reverie than critics because it takes us somewhere very special and respects us far too much to tell us why.
How to explain the appeal of a movie named after a real person, a displaced “non-professional” who is also its star? Read more
Published in the Spanish newspaper El mundo as “El maverick impredecible” on May 1, 2015. — J.R.
Having some historical perspective on changing fashions in film taste is never easy, but it becomes necessary if one is to understand the fluctuating meanings of the career of Orson Welles. Just as one needs to recall a time in the early 20th century when the crime serials of Louis Feuillade such as Fantomas and Les Vampires were regarded with utter scorn by sophisticated cinephiles, and a time in the mid-20th century when Alfred Hitchcock was still considered an entertainer but not an artist, we have to consider that during the half-century constituting the career of Orson Welles, his audience swerved repeatedly back and forth between regarding him as a mainstream star and viewing him as an esoteric artist. Although the tendency to see him as a maverick has been constant, the issue of where he belongs as a maverick has never been entirely resolved.
Even before Citizen Kane, when at age 23 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine (1938) for his work in theater and as a radio actor, and shortly before he began a weekly radio series of his own, he already had the profile of a boy genius full of imagination and mischief, a reputation that was only enhanced about half a year later when he fooled part of his radio audience into believing, through an unorthodox adaptation of H.G. Read more
Written for a Criterion rerelease, released in November 2020.. — J.R.
Along with Dead Man, his previous narrative feature,Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai marks a quantum leap in the Jim Jarmusch universe — a discovery of history (both antiquity and tradition) that carries with it a sense of gravity and even tragedy missing from his first five features. And paradoxically, along with his embrace of antiquity comes an uncanny intimation of the future from a 1999 perspective — an anticipation of social media and their mythical assemblies ofidentitiesand fanciful hashtags, a full decade before Facebook and Twitter rose to prominence, all the more surprising from a committed Luddite who would subsequently opt for faxes over email and post only on Instagram.
Jarmusch’s special way of evoking contemporary online individualities is a mix-and-match game of movie-genre tropes (including a final shoot-out scene), references to particular films (e.g., pigeons kept on a New Jersey rooftop, from On the Waterfront), and diverse literary touchstones ranging from The Wind in the Willows to Frankenstein. It also involves mythical profiles that sometimes merge with (or at least suggest) star presences, something Jarmusch has long depended upon, including his evocations (and invocations) of Elvis in Mystery Train (1989) and Nikola Tesla in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), and his uses of, among many others, Roberto Benigni and Tom Waits in Down by Law (1986), Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder in Night on Earth (1991), Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer in Dead Man (the latter of whom briefly returns in Ghost Dog), Forest Whitaker and Henry Silva in Ghost Dog, Cate Blanchett (in two roles) in Coffee and Cigarettes, and Isaach de Bankolé, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray in several films each. Read more
