Blindspot 2012: Umberto D.

Directed by Vittorio de Sica (1952)

Starring: Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari

This is exactly the kind of movie dog lovers would bawl their eyes at.  And look at that dog!  Adorable.  But Umberto D. is firmly located in a time and place – Rome, post World War II, when there was still rubble to clean away and mandatory retirement has left Umberto Domenico Ferrari in a very tight situation.  The movie opens with a protest for higher pensions, reminiscent of the Occupy movement.  Umberto is a tenant behind on his rent with a callous woman as his landlord.  His only friends are his dog Flike and the maid, Maria, although she’s concerned about her pregnancy.

It’s an Italian Neorealist masterpiece, and it is so sad.  Umberto is crushed by his circumstances, trying desperately to find enough money to pay for his back rent.  It’s a case study of being nickeled-and-dimed by societal pressures: from buying food and rent to paying for a doctor.  Even the landlady rents out rooms for couples, although for her it is to maintain her lifestyle.  She wants to remove Umberto just to make her sitting room larger.

It’s beautiful in its starkness – whether around the streets or in the apartments,  the clean lines juxtapose against the crumbling areas of characters’ lives.

I can’t rank Umberto D. comfortably against the other films of  this movement.  It’s not as relatable as The Bicycle Thieves, but I remember it better than Rome, Open City.  I’m just not at the point that Umberto is in his life.  Even Maria’s problem – getting a soldier to take responsibility for her pregnancy seems pretty distant.  The lynchpin of the movie is the dog.  I was so much more concerned about Flike than any other character in this movie, which means I’m terrible, but damn that dog!  That dog broke my heart.

Film Club: Day for Night

Jake, from Not Just Movies, and I were talking on the twitter about a Book Club for film blogging.  For our first pick, we discussed Day for Night or La Nuit Americaine (1973), directed by Francois Truffaut.  It’s about the production of Je Vous Presente Pamela, a family melodrama that takes place in Provence, but the hectic job of working on a movie set takes center stage.

A: Opening thought: I think Alphonse might have been inspiration for Max Fischer.  He’s the spitting image of Schwartzman on a go-cart.

J: I’m so glad we’re starting on the Wes Anderson connection. I kept thinking of that American Express commercial Wes made throughout the film, and I saw a lot of Max in Alphonse too. And I laughed about as hard at the look Léaud contemptuously throws at the crew member who comes to get him precisely because it reminded me of Max. It’s a petulant, sheltered, almost stunted childishness, the inverse of the very real angst exhibited by Léaud in the Antoine Doinel character he developed with Truffaut over several films.

I also think the film’s color palette, although captured with more improvisational flair than Anderson’s immaculate compositions, was an influence. Those flat but vibrant pastels certainly recur in Anderson’s filmography.

A: Oh, most definitely. I didn’t make the connection between that commercial, but now that you mention it, it’s the exact same feel, down to choosing which gun to use.

I loved that they chose to set the movie in the Riviera, since you’ve got that warm color palette, but at the end you’ve got a small town coated in snow with palm trees sticking up behind the set.  It matches the chaotic tone of working on set, where just about everything occurs.

J: Yeah, it’s so chaotic, in fact, that it’s hard to know where exactly to start when discussing the film’s overview of film production. Truffaut really stresses the surreality, even the solipsism, of filmmaking. He casts his little production area as a sort of self-contained world of artifice, where one can constantly see the falsity of it in long shot, only for it to feel so real up-close.

What’s interesting about this film as opposed to, say, 8 1/2 or The Player, is its resolute focus on the actual feeling of production. Those films about film approach the subject by way of the artistic process and workplace politics, respectively. Day for Night, on the other hand, is very much about the simple ordeal of coordinating and executing a film shoot, of finding practical solutions for everything from quick rewrites to unruly actors. For someone who helped put forward the auteur theory, Truffaut certainly shows just how much work, and by how many people, it takes to put even a modestly scaled film together.

A: He really emphasizes the nature of film as an artistic industry.  He did something similar with The Last Metro, only that focused on theater in war time.  But I like that there’s the apparent artificiality when all of the characters act so genuine around each other, whether they’re on set or behind scenes.  Even viewing their flaws, they all seem very likable people with the energy to create a film.

J: That’s the curious dichotomy of the film. Every character is, when viewed through a normal prism, completely insane. They’re all narcissistic, stunted and divorced from reality. Nevertheless, they’re linked by this shared madness. I love how casually some of the crew respond to the actors’ histrionic promises to leave show business. They don’t brush off these threats with cynical awareness that the actors couldn’t hack it in the “real world” (though that’s probably true); they just know that this life means too much to the people for them to just quit it.

That’s why I’m especially fascinated by the partners some of these people have who come from outside the industry. Julie’s husband, Liliane and Lajoie’s wife are all vastly different characters, but they share the common trait of exposing, in their own ways, the lunacy of the binds that tie the cast and crew. But they also show how genuine and deep those connections are.

A: I think they’re all connected by this love of film too.  All Alphonse wants to do is go to the movies and when they’re recording chatter their sound guy has to ask the crew not to talk about film.  It’s that drive that gets the crew to handle all of these histrionics.  Everyone works to their own goal.

The outside-spouses’ opinions seem just as off-kilter, even if they’re supposed to resemble the reality outside of production.  There’s the production manager’s wife who won’t give him a bit of peace and then Liliane is willing to run off with a stunt guy she just met.  It’s acknowledging a level of craziness in everyone.

J: I agree, though I think the madness of their own reactions stems at least partially from the effects of the industry. I think Truffaut is saying that the pull of the movies affects everyone. The production slowly absorbs civilians, from the cop who gave permission for a certain shoot to the restaurant patron invited by Severine to join the wrap party. Some people, like the wife or Liliane, just can’t handle the stress and surreality of this tight-knit world, but Truffaut’s view of the industry is never negative. After all, that industry is so attractive because it idealizes the world in which we live.

A: And film is never criticized for the flaws in the actors.  The admiration for it is underlined when Ferrand has dreams of when he stole the lobby cards from Citizen Kane.  That was easily one of my favorite scenes.  It’s such a tender moment of loving film.

So even when it creates these crazy people, they’re likable by default, since they’re working to create more of that.

J: Agree completely. Truffaut always claimed that the cinema saved his life, which it did first as the kind of fan who would steal lobby cards out of love and later as a critic and director. I think he shows how that feeling extends to everyone who works in film. They have their squabbles, their breakdowns, their flights of preening diva behavior, but they always rally to get the work done because it is their lifeblood.

I think that plays to Truffaut’s unique approach to New Wave  postmodernism. All of the Cahiers gang loved movies, but they responded in different ways with their filmmaking. Godard focused on the intellectual and contextual possibilities of  cinema. Rivette went the opposite way, creating sealed-off worlds to explore the structure of film qua film. Chabrol fed his quotation into more old-school, crowd-pleasing fare. But all of Truffaut’s references are emotional, celebrating film as something that links us all. Day for Night embodies that better than perhaps any of his other works.

A: That’s another connection between Wes Anderson and the Cahiers I’d say: there’s this completely apparent love for film in their own works, even if they use it differently.  Truffaut is probably the most sentimental of the group, but I appreciate that.  It adds such affection to the production.

I’m ashamedly not that familiar with the French New Wave auteurs, but I will say that I prefer Truffaut’s humanist approach to Godard’s political one.  I feel like that’s the major stand off in French film: make art that’s personal, or make art that’s challenging in both subject matter and form.

J: Absolutely, and I think Truffaut and Godard embodied that schism better than anyone, their friendship eventually growing incredibly frosty when Godard’s own sentimentality turned to full-on cerebral filmmaking.

I don’t think Truffaut was apolitical (heck, just watch The 400 Blows), but he still saw cinema as his guiding light. Even when Day for Night is at its most uncomfortable, it’s never anything less than elated to be making a movie. So many of his peers were breaking down every component of filmmaking and how the pieces fit together. Truffaut just loved the feeling it gave him.

A: And that is why I will always be a Truffaut Girl: his characters are zany and I love his view of cinema.

J: It’s been quite a while since I’ve watched a Truffaut film—and in the interim, I’ve become much more acquainted with Godard—and I’d forgotten just how pleasant he could be at his best. I do think he could sometimes be too precious by half, but Day for Night displays the best of Truffaut. I’d actually be hard-pressed picking it or The 400 Blows as my favorite of his. It’s chaotic and cheeky but sweet and joyful, and perhaps the least hung-up film about film ever made.

I think I’m all out of big points to say, but there are a few odd observations that I loved and wanted to mention:

-A drunken Severine getting so worked up during a shoot that she asks to just say numbers on-set and overdub the proper lines later like she did with Fellini.

-The you-go-girl response to Liliane running off with the stuntman: “I’d drop a guy for a film. I’d never drop a film for a guy!”

-How Julie’s husband subverts expectations. He’s the character you instantly distrust, the doctor now seeing his patient, having left his family to be with a woman who appears to be decades younger. But he’s so considerate and wise and genuine that I think he provides as much a rock for some of the other actors as he does Julie.

-That scene where they have to get the cat to drink from a saucer. I don’t think I stopped laughing the entire time, from the look of barely checked fury on the part of the handler who kept tossing the poor, uncooperative stray at the cream to the exasperated cry, “Listen, it’s very simple. We’ll stop and begin shooting again when you find me a cat who knows how to act!”

A: I like all of those scenes too.  And it’s fun how Dr. Nelson winds up not playing to type, but just genuinely loves Julie.

Some of my favorites include:

- Julie and Alexandre bonding over an old story about Hollywood.

- The go cart scene! (I can’t resist not bringing it up again).

-There’s this simple gesture when they’re going over the footage of the stuntman and the car, when they pause for the frame when he’s jumping out.  It’s a simple square off, then cutting motion with the fingers and it works so well with that particular montage.

-I also love that scene at the end when they shoot the death scene in the snow.  It’s so melodramatic and Hollywood, but it’s broken down in the same way the crowd scene was at the beginning. It becomes dramatic for the moment, but also for the careful choreography that goes into it.

Time Crimes

Directed by Nacho Vigalondo (2007) Starring: Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernandez, Barbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo

Time Crimes is one of a slew of smart science fiction from the past decade that is making me wonder if we’re going through a genre revolution the same way the late sixties had a stylistic change in film.  Instead of the American Independent movement, I think this one will be international in scope.  As a genre, Science Fiction will become known for its sharp plots, which for Time Crimes is its selling point.

As one sustainable time loop, set in the same location the film introduces a lot of itself within the first fifteen minutes.  Hector (Elejalde) has just moved into his new house with his wife Clara (Fernandez).  He gets a mysterious phone call that afternoon, but ignores it.  Later, he spies a woman in the woods and follows her, but is attacked by a man wearing a bandage across his face.  While trying to escape, he runs into a mad scientist and gets caught up in his time travel experiment.

While we don’t get a big glimpse into a future filled with flying cars or a mining station on the moon, Time Crimes is every bit as imaginative.  It takes the idea of time travel and controls it to a tight loop, where every event has to occur exactly as it happened to Hector originally.  He has to deal with the idea that there are multiples of himself existing in one time frame and it drives him a little nuts.  It’s a tight Spanish thriller and an excellent watch for a summer night.

Visual Films: Kamikaze Girls

Ah!  I went a little bit overboard with this Visual Films post.  But who cares, it’s Kamikaze Girls. Who doesn’t like Kamikaze Girls? Answer: No one.

Ponyo

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki (2008) Starring: Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Liam Neeson, Tina Fey, Frankie Jonas

Oh, ouch Netflix Instant only had the dub on Instant Watch.  They really should give options for this sort of thing.  That said, the dubbing here certainly could have been worse.  What I can never understand with studios when doing vocal casting is the weird insistence on using child-actors for acting roles.  That has succeeded maybe once in the history of animation, and that was the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.  I also don’t really understand the need for celebrity casting at all in a film whose marketing is already limited with only select theaters getting it, but WHATEVER DISNEY!  Clearly, you do not have the best decision-making record in Hollywood.

To change gears and shift the focus over to the good things in Ponyo is enormously easy: Studio Ghibli has crafted another little beauty of a film, creating an especially gorgeous underwater world.  Sosuke (Jonas) [SIDEBAR: I'm sooo glad they made sure to pronounce the Japanese names right!] lives in a small seaside community, in a more-or-less self-sufficient house.  When he goes down to the water before school one day, he finds a goldfish and names her Ponyo (Cyrus).  However, by giving her human food and tasting human blood, via a small cut on Sosuke’s hand, Ponyo is able to develop human attributes.  After being re-captured by her father, Fujimoto (Neeson), Ponyo makes a break for it in order to become human, causing catastrophic weather along the coast.

Storywise, it’s certainly not one of Ghibli’s better fare, but since it was described to me as Super Environmentalist, I was pretty surprised to see how little environmentalism played into the plot.  If anything, it was much more subtle and kept in-theme with other products by Ghibli, and it melded nicely with the adaptation of The Little Mermaid fairytale.

It is cuter-than-cute and I was able to write off the weird inexplicable stuff as just that–weird and inexplicable.  Such as when the fish that should be long extinct have resurfaced with the high waters in the second half.  There isn’t really a point to it, besides to show how the waters have begun reclaiming the land.  The animation in those scenes is just so pristine that I didn’t care– leaves on the trees were as visible as the fish floating under them.

The real issue I had with Ponyo was the rushed resolution.  Well, more like all-over pacing issues.  While we’ve got a fairly slow introduction to the characters and the crazy weather inspires a really dramatic car ride, there’s a slow aftermath where not much happens.  They’re on a boat and greet others who are on boats, and it does not seem like the disaster it would be, THEN BAM RESOLUTION!

It’s fun and it’s pretty as hell, but it’s not the best Miyazaki film.

 

The Science of Sleep

Directed by Michel Gondry (2006) Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsborough, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou

This was one of those movies that got hyped up a lot when I was in high school, but ended up on my list of Indie Disappointments.  Michel Gondry creates an interesting premise of a young man who gets his dreams and reality confused while he lives in France after his father’s death.

Gael Garcia Bernal plays Stephane in a tri-lingual role, which is impressive in itself, but he’s given pointedly childish material to work with.  While Stephane is stuck with a job he hates and reluctantly falls in love with his neighbor Stephanie (Gainsborough), he is extremely petulant.  His dreams take place in a TV studio, where he’s the host for a cooking or music or talk show.  He’ll venture into the office of his boss or explore the stop-motion animated world, which is at once a cave.

Gondry crafts the unreality of Stephane’s dreaming very well.  Set pieces tend to fold together while the dream logic is paramount, between what the water is made of (cellophane) and how the dream-characters act.  When Stephane begins to act outside of his dreams, such as leaving Stephanie a letter he wrote while asleep, he gets caught in problems.  Stephane is childish in everything: He hates his mother’s boyfriend and his boring coworkers.  He continues to sleep in his childhood bed even though he’s outgrown it.  Most notably, he keeps up the charade of not-being the neighbor of Stephanie, even after she’s found out.

What’s genuine are the scenes where Stephane and Stephanie share their imaginations.  They’re sweet little sets with a flexible reality as the characters come up with brilliant ideas.  However, these ideas never come to fruition, and it’s the fault of both characters.  Stephane won’t make a move, while Stephanie is reluctant to get hurt.

The dream sequences won me over, but they didn’t make up for the thin, character-driven plot in reality.

God is Brazilian

Deus e Brasileiro

Directed By Carlos Diegues (2003) Starring: Antonio Fagundes, Wagner Moura, Paloma Duarte

Taoca (Moura) has dreams that he is being hunted by a loan shark at Heaven’s gate.  One day, as he lays about in his boat, he runs into an old man, claiming to be God (Fagundes).  God is sick of dealing with the mistakes humans make on earth and is looking for a saint in Brazil while he takes a little vacation.  He’s chosen Quinca of the Mules, but the guy is hard to track down, so he enlists Taoca on a journey through the country.  On the way, they meet Mada (Duarte), a virtuous woman who became lost when her mother left for Sao Paulo.

Taoca complains almost the entire time he is with God and God complains back, always harking back to his vacation and finding Quinca.  Taoca is responsible for lying, creating an alias for God as a Professor from Sao Paulo doing research.  Mada initially follows them in order to see where her mother escaped to, but she becomes devoted to the Professor as they make their way further into the interior.

Something I Really Appreciated: The film showed a lot of Brazil, from the tropical island where Taoca lives to deserts, forests, slums, and small towns.  Most films will focus just on one of the big coast cities, usually Rio, so seeing so much of Brazil’s landscape was pretty amazing. God insisted that he couldn’t do miracles without some kind of consequence, which I thought was an interesting spin and also complicated how they got from place to place.  Usually, they would conveniently be able  to earn money through “Magic Tricks”, which through a loophole, aren’t miracles or hitch rides.

While Taoca’s character was mostly annoying, he often had some great insights on the human condition, including his own critique of how God saw the world and humans, which was a nice counter to all of the negative viewpoints that God had.  That said, there was a lot of evil shown in the movie, which was usually pointed out by Mada.  Every character they meet usually has some flaw, whether big or small, but it usually stemmed from their conditions.

The movie is funny and unique with it’s twists on the God Coming to Earth theme, though it is very Catholic-centric, if that’s the sort of thing you worry about in a Religious film, from a Catholic country.  Lord knows, that was one of my biggest concerns.

 

The Perfect Husband

Directed by Beda Docampo Feijoo (1993) Starring: Tim Roth, Ana Belen, Peter Firth

Loosely based off stories by Dostoevsky– my thirty-seconds of research lead me to his novel The Eternal Husband– The Perfect Husband is about an affair and the long wait for a duel.

Milan (Roth) is a lothario who has fought in 29 duels.  He receives a visitor, Franz (Firth), and had an affair with his wife several years prior.  The film cuts between the current visit in Prague and flashbacks, which detail the affair.

As a whole, it’s a very nice looking costume picture, though the DVD I got was showing it’s age.  The picture quality was pretty terrible.  It looks like they shot on location in the Czech Republic, which I like.  And again, costumes.

Nothing about the writing or the acting was especially original, although the psychologies of the two men came across very well.  They’re well-tailored foils for one another and each has a particular action that characterizes them: Franz tosses a woman’s dog out the window of a moving train when she bothers him about his pipe.  Milan holds his hand above a candle flame in front of women, in order to show how his love for them distracts him from the pain.

The film ends with a duel, well made and photographed.  The story borrows a lot of traditions from Russian Literature, from Milan’s comment that in 29 duels, he’s never fought over anything meaningful to the homunculi of the woman on the train and Milan’s brother in law.

It’s alright for a brooding costume drama, but not one of the best for that subgenre’s genre.

Russian Ark

Russkiy Kovcheg, Directed by: Aleksandr Sokurov (2002) Starring: Sergei Donstov, Aleksandr Sokurov

Russian Ark is almost single-mindedly ambitious in it’s structure.  By using over three thousand actors and shutting down the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, two time travelers are able to experience roughly three hundred years of Russian history, all in a single take.

While the film opens to a black screen and an unseen protagonist, the camera adopts the narrator’s perspective as he follows soldiers into the museum.  He sees masked women and productions and guesses that he is watching some kind of theater, put on for him.  When he meets the European (Donstov), a mysterious man in black who is surprised that he is in Russia at all, the man refers to Russian history as theater.

If there are rules to following these travelers, they are loose.  While we open up sometime in nineteenth century, the narrator becomes witness to a scene with Peter the Great.  He follows the European through hallways and past stages, where they walk past a young Catherine the Great.  Later, they jump to present day, then back into the eighteenth or nineteenth century.  Briefly, they come across a man who is building his own coffin during World War II.

No one can see them, unless for some reason, the rules change and then they are suddenly apparent.  Often the European gets gestured off by annoyed servants.  The narrator follows, often drawing the European’s ire with his nationalism.  One part that made me smirk was when the narrator asks “Was that short fellow Pushkin?”  The European replies “Your nation’s poet? I read him once, in French.  Nothing special.” “Sir.”

The one-take action for Russian Ark is fairly incredible.  I wouldn’t believe that they could do it, except that the camera movement is fluid.  The costumes are sumptuous and treat the various time periods well.  The ending drags a little, whether from the long ball scene or the sudden push towards the doors at the end, though it provides a decent denouement for such a rambling film.

 

Talk to Her

Hable Con Ella

Written & Directed by Pedro Almodovar (2002)

Starring: Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores

Talk to Her opens with Benigno (Camara) telling a story to a coma patient.  The last time he was at the theater, the man next to him was crying because he was so moved by the play.

That man was Marco (Grandinetti), a journalist who has decided to do his next profile on the female bullfighter Lydia Gonzalez (Flores), who had recently broken up with her boyfriend.  After a time card passes, they are in a serious relationship, and she has a fight lined up before her.  Unfortunately, she is gored by the bull and is admitted onto the same ward that Benigno works that.

On the ward, Benigno and Marco form an unlikely friendship.  Marco watches from balconies and hallways as Benigno talks to his patient Alicia (Watling) as if she was awake.  Before she had fallen into a coma, Benigno had watched Alicia dancing from across the street, following her home one day.  He begins to stalk her, right before she had the accident that left her comatose.

Almodovar created a very ambitious story with Talk to Her.  While Benigno’s actions are reprehensible, his character’s situation is given a sympathetic light.  The tenuous friendship he develops with Marco establishes him as, while not sane, not a complete monster. It’s impressive that Marco continues this relationship while his own with Lydia comes apart at the seams.

This film abandoned the more retro-stylization seen in other Almodovar films, but retains a brilliant color palette.  The visuals are stunning, something I’ve come to expect.  All main characters had been fully realized, replete with phobias and travels, old loves and dreams.  Talk to Her hits all the right notes, but it didn’t impress me as much as other films Almodovar has made.