Criterion Sunday 636: Heaven’s Gate (1980)

Given the extent to which this film was used as a byword for what defined Hollywood overreaching in the 1980s, it’s difficult not to lead with the naïve question of why it should have been that way. I can see that its bloated budget and runtime can’t have been great news for film executives, but the rest of us are just people watching a film, and from my point of view this is a lot better than the nasty mess that is The Deer Hunter. It does still feel messy, of course — it’s a sprawling story with a large number of characters — and the sound design feels particularly loud and bombastic (I couldn’t much make out what a lot of people were saying, but it feels weirdly close to Days of Heaven a few years earlier in that respect) but it’s a beautiful film with a real sense of place and a heartbreaking central narrative involving one of her (and our) generation’s finest actors, Isabelle Huppert. Perhaps I might assume some of the bad feeling was towards the film’s loose, dismissive relationship towards the historical events it’s based on — it has almost no overlap with what really happened amongst the characters who share these names in the part of the world and the time when it was made — but in that case perhaps it best be seen as a sort of recreation of what might have happened, an alternative history that still honours the land and the aspirations of the people. Sure, it’s long, and I wouldn’t wish to try and rehabilitate the reputation of Michael Cimino himself, but this particular movie is a fine, epic story.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Michael Cimino; Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond; Starring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, John Hurt; Length 216 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Sunday 23 April 2023.

Criterion Sunday 633: I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972)

The second film in Pasolini’s so-called “Trilogy of Life” is another film based on an episodic text of classic literature, in this case Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English stories of pilgrims, in which once again Pasolini himself plays a key artistic figure (in this case, Chaucer himself). Like The Decameron, there is no shortage of bawdiness and tawdry sexuality, shitting and farting too. Here of course the setting is England, and while the primary language on the film is Italian, there’s also an English dub that makes more sense given the film itself is populated by English actors speaking in that language, which is why I watched it with that setting. Certainly you get to see a lot more of the fourth Doctor than perhaps you were hoping, but many of the key figures are the same Italian actors who were in Pasolini’s film of the year before, like Franco Citti as The Devil and his partner Ninetto Davoli as a foolish Chaplin-like figure. It’s all put together with a broad comic energy that is a bit wearying after a while, but there’s certainly plenty to enjoy in the film, in a series of tales largely drawn from Chaucer, but also with a bit of extra content to suggest the contemporary era of Pasolini’s production, and to heighten the hypocrisy and repressiveness of the era.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini (based on the collection of short stories by Geoffrey Chaucer); Cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli; Starring Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Hugh Griffith, Josephine Chaplin; Length 111 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 9 April 2023.

Criterion Sunday 624: Quadrophenia (1979)

This is a classic of British cinema, based on a ‘rock opera’ by The Who — which I’m guessing is just a fancy way of saying it was a concept double album — telling a story of Mods and Rockers in 1960s London (and, memorably, Brighton). This film adaptation though, to be clear, is not an opera, not even a musical, though music looms large in the protagonists’ lives. The source is also perhaps a hint to something of a studied disconnect to it: despite coming over as a gritty urban realist drama, there are constant hints towards the affectedness of it all. These characters could burst into song at any moment (one of the main actors is even Sting), and sometimes they do repeat refrains from their favourite tracks, but mostly it relies on a very clean, precise aesthetic and the heightened emotions conveyed well by all the actors, but especially Phil Daniels in the lead role of Jimmy.

In a generally unlikeable group of bored and angry kids, Jimmy is the most unlikeable — and yet compulsively watchable — of the lot, and the by the denouement the story has moved away from its gritty roots into something surreal, almost folkloric (like a lot of great 1970s British cinema), with a sequence of songs on the soundtrack finally eclipsing the spoken word, and a grandly staged finale that feels like an end and at the same time, leaves things open for Jimmy. However grim it seems to become for him as a character, the film has the careful poise of a musical (or maybe a Dennis Potter TV drama) in just slightly standing back. Perhaps I’d have fully embraced it if they had broken into song, but it’s still a fine evocation of an era and an introduction to a lot of 80s acting talent.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Franc Roddam; Writers Dave Humphries, Roddam, Martin Stellman and Pete Townshend (based on the album by The Who); Cinematographer Brian Tufano; Starring Phil Daniels, Leslie Ash, Philip Davis, Sting, Ray Winstone; Length 120 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 16 December 2022.

Plus que jamais (More Than Ever, 2022)

The fourth film I saw at the Europa! Europa Film Festival was the one I had heard a little about (and is from the German-French-Iranian director of 3 Days in Quiberon), but it turned out to be the one I liked the least. However! It is very much a film for Vicky Krieps to further blossom into the grand actress of European cinema that she has threatened to become the last few years. She really is one of the best.

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For a film that could easily be a disease-of-the-week mawkish tearfest made for TV, this drama about a woman dying of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis steers clear of a lot of the particular pitfalls of that genre, though it can never entirely escape it. However, it’s about the way that Hélène (Vicky Krieps) come to terms with her future, such as it is, and the way she has to hurt the ones she loves in order to protect both herself and them. Of course, it comes inbuilt with its own terrible additional layer of heartwrenching irony, in that it’s the film’s co-star Gaspard Ulliel (playing Hélène’s husband Matthieu) who died in real life shortly after this film was made. If Krieps reminds me a bit of Julianne Moore, it’s only because she’s every bit as fine an actor as Moore (who hasn’t shied away from similar roles), and indeed has become one of the more dependable European actors in recent years (whether in films like Bergman Island, Corsage or of course the fine-toned comedy Phantom Thread).

CREDITS
Director Emily Atef; Writers Atef and Lars Hubrich;  Cinematographer Yves Cape; Starring Vicky Krieps, Gaspard Ulliel, Bjørn Floberg; Length 123 minutes.
Seen at the Classic, Melbourne, Sunday 26 February 2022.

Amanda (2022)

Another excellent film I saw at the Europa! Europa Film Festival was this film about a young woman who doesn’t care to take part in society (which is a good and convenient characteristic to have when you’re presumably filming during a pandemic, but I think says a bit more generationally and as a response to the world).

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The thing I’ve found in tending to go only to films by women directors in any given selection of film festival films (for want of any other way of narrowing down a list of films I’ve never heard of and may never see again), is that you get to see a range of responses to familiar genres. The subgenre of films about young women who just don’t give a f*ck, often deploying deadpan humour and absurdist premises, is thankfully expanding, and this film reminded me a little of the Spanish film El Planeta or the Korean film Heart, both with “unlikeable” protagonists who are actually compelling in their resistance to narrative expectations. Perhaps there’s also a slight hint of Wes Anderson too in the frontal shooting style and shot-reverse shot dialogue sequences that are so striking and can’t help but imbue a certain humour just in their style, even if the characters are undemonstrative. It makes a nice change, too, from a lot of Italian cinema that I’ve seen that tends towards operatic melodrama, and while there’s certainly a fair bit of shouting and bad behaviour here, I’m left with the sense of disconnectedness from society, a sadness or depression even that its title character is trying to resist. It’s an ongoing process for her, so the film just sort of stops mid-shot, which makes some sense; I hope Amanda is doing well, though it probably doesn’t hurt that she looks a bit like Alison Brie (everyone is rich and glamorous here, and her friend’s home is a terrifying palace to brutalist modernity).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Carolina Cavalli; Cinematographer Lorenzo Levrini; Starring Benedetta Porcaroli, Galatéa Bellugi; Length 94 minutes.
Seen at the Lido, Melbourne, Friday 17 February 2022.

Criterion Sunday 621: Rosetta (1999)

The opening of this film is iconic, and to a certain extent it’s what put the Dardenne brothers — already in their middle age and having had years of documentary and film experience behind them — on the map. Our title character just barges forward relentlessly, getting into a fight with her employer (who has just let her go at the end of a probation period), and in the first few minutes we don’t even see her face, just the arch of her shoulders, her propulsive forward movement, the determination that the back of her head implies, the anger at not having a job anymore. This defines the film and while it does slow down at moments, for meals, brief tender passages between people, for the most part it’s this forward momentum that carries it. Obviously it’s a style that the brothers were working on in their earlier film La Promesse but it comes to fruition here, in a film that delves into the lives of those living outside of established social safety nets, a hard-scrabble existence of living paycheque to paycheque, needing work to survive and doing anything they can to get it, a generation Rosetta exemplifies and had such a strong effect there was even a belief it led to a law protecting the minimum wage in Belgium (it didn’t, but it certainly must have galvanised opinion). It still holds up all these decades later, and the Dardenne brothers still have strong careers on the back of its impact, but it’s hard to get over the way this central character is introduced, the force with which that swing door is pushed as this film begins.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors/Writers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne; Cinematographer Alain Marcoen; Starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux; Length 93 minutes.

Seen at the Paramount, Wellington, Friday 28 July 2000 (and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Melbourne, Friday 3 March 2023).

Criterion Sunday 620: La Promesse (1996)

By all accounts, certainly by that of the filmmakers themselves, this is where it all began for the Dardenne Brothers. They’d made documentaries, even a couple of features, beforehand and had built up a bit of a career since the 1970s, but here is where they applied those techniques to fiction in a way that would become their trademark — a restless camera constantly following their protagonists, eschewing careful blocking and marks in favour of this documentary-like verisimilitude, using unknown actors (often non-professionals) and of course following often overlooked working class lives. So here we are introduced to Roger, played by the actor who would probably most closely be linked to the Dardennes, Olivier Gourmet, as an apparently nice boss, and his son Igor (Jérémie Renier, who would return in L’Enfant), though it soon becomes clear Roger is a dodgy operator, exploiting immigrants, using them for construction work, and then when one dies by accident, covering it up despite his widow (Assita Ouedraogo) and baby living in one of his properties. So this leads to the promise of the title, between the dying man Hamidou and Igor, an ethical dilemma of the nature that would also come to define the Dardennes’ filmmaking. It’s all beautifully shot and composed, with a breathless headlong rush into danger, as Igor defies his father and starts to make his own choices in life.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a short piece with more recent interviews with both Gourmet and Renier reflecting on making the film, being there at the start of the Dardenne brothers’ journey into successful filmmaking.
• There’s also a much longer interview with the brothers by an American film critic at their office, which really gets into the detail of their career and work on the film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors/Writers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne; Cinematographer Alain Marcoen; Starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo; Length 94 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 26 February 2023.

Criterion Sunday 611: Being John Malkovich (1999)

I can’t really be considered part of the cult following of Charlie Kaufman. The tone of his work just doesn’t resonate with me so much, and there’s a lot here too, in what must surely be considered his foundational work, that leaves me a little cold (though it clearly works for a lot of people). That said, like plenty of classic comedies (albeit with an ironic 90s tone), this film throws so much at the screen that plenty of it does hit, and some of it really is quite affectingly off the wall. Specifically, the way that the film utilises Cameron Diaz is very much against type, and Catherine Keener too has never been more striking (usually those two actresses would be playing these roles the other way round, you feel), but together they create an emotional bond via the mediation of the titular figure that almost erases John Cusack’s puppeteer from the film entirely. By the final third, things have been put in motion that pull the film off in all kinds of weird directions, and the constant accrual of detail makes for a rather rich and perplexing series of thematic explosions that have a cinematic pyrotechnic value at the very least, though some even achieve emotional resonance. It remains a film I still admire more than fully love, but that’s on me; it’s a singular American achievement both coming out of the 1990s and drawing a line under it for a new decade.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Spike Jonze; Writer Charlie Kaufman; Cinematographer Lance Acord; Starring John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich, Orson Bean; Length 113 minutes.

Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 27 May 2000 (and on VHS at home, Wellington, May 2001, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Sunday 29 January 2023).

Nope (2022)

Continuing my round-up of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here) and there was no shortage of opinions in either direction about Jordan Peele’s third feature, after Get Out and Us. In a sense, that’s what it was made for, so it succeeded brilliantly well, in conjuring up all kinds of conversations, not all of them particularly positive, but in the end it worked for me.

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I’ve seen some fairly underwhelmed reviews of this film, but I do wonder if that’s not just from elevated expectations. The pace is somewhat lugubrious, although I do think it consistently builds tension throughout, and there’s a subplot involving Steven Yeun as a child star in a sitcom which doesn’t quite sit very comfortably with the rest of the film to my mind. However, its central premise — of a family of Black horse trainers whose history is deeply tied into filmmaking, trying to figure out a mystery happening around their homestead high out above Hollywood. There are evidently (maybe) aliens involved, possibly hiding behind a cloud, and the way this unfolds is nicely grounded in comedy, as one might expect. Its central conceit is grounded in the idea of looking, about the terrors and dangers of the image, and thus is tied pretty strongly into filmmaking, but while it never truly horrifies, it looks gorgeous and holds together nicely.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Jordan Peele; Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema; Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun 연상엽, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea; Length 130 minutes.
Seen at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema New Mission, San Francisco, Wednesday 10 August 2022.

రౌద్రం రణం రుధిరం Roudram Ranam Rudhiram (aka ఆర్.ఆర్.ఆర్ RRR, 2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. So on the penultimate day of the year I caved to the clamouring voices online telling me that this was a fun film. I’m hardly resistant to popular Indian films either, but I’d hoped it might get a cinematic screening (then again, I’m in NZ, so of course not). It still works fine on the small screen but you can see it’s made for an audience.

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People have been talking up this film all year, and, to be fair, it’s pretty clear why. Watching it is not three hours of your life that you’ll regret, I don’t think. Not that it necessarily does things differently from other big Indian productions I’ve seen (and technically, as an aside, this is not Bollywood but Tollywood as it’s originally in the Telugu language — not that Netflix cares one bit about that kind of fidelity, meaning I had to watch it in Hindi and you probably will too, though it’ll default to English dubbing).

But what it does as a film, it does bigger! And more! And… uh, bigger, have I mentioned that? It is undeniably a lot, and I think towards the end it becomes pretty mired down by some problematic weighting — it has a hard-on for torture like no film since that Mel Gibson one about that guy on a cross, and so I suspect its politics lean rather hard into nationalism. However, at least at the historical level of the film’s plot, we’re dealing with freedom from colonial oppression, and who can’t get behind booing a giddily awful British aristocracy, a group of feckless oppressors delighting in misery, division and bloodshed (except for Jenny; she’s nice).

So, seen as a story about getting out from under the thumb of some bad guys (who are also bad actors), this hits all the buttons and does it with the kind of bold maximalism you come to expect from this kind of production, with gleefully non-naturalistic animal fights (all CGI-rendered), explosions, and some thrilling camerawork. It passes the time quite nicely.

CREDITS
Director S.S. Rajamouli ఎస్. ఎస్. రాజమౌళి; Writers Rajamouli and V. Viyajendra Prasad కె. వి. విజయేంద్ర ప్రసాద్; Cinematographer K.K. Senthil Kumar కె.కె.సెంథిల్ కుమార్; Starring N.T. Rama Rao Jr. జూనియర్ ఎన్.టి.ఆర్, Ram Charan రాం చరణ్ తేజ, Ajay Devgn अजय देवगन, Alia Bhatt आलिया भट्ट; Length 182 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Friday 30 December 2022.