Criterion Sunday 647: On the Waterfront (1954)

Undoubtedly a classic film, one that had a lasting impact on the film industry and on screen acting. That of course may be its greatest legacy, but it’s a film suffused with the craft of generations of American filmmakers, feeling of a piece in its carefully-toned monochrome with the films noirs of the decade before, and has all the hallmarks of a prestige drama, bolstered by a fine line-up of character actors all doing some of their best work. It’s a pity then that it feels like an attack on the idea of unions — which is a problematic message to take from Elia Kazan — as these dockworkers are shown in impotent thrall to the power plays of the criminal gangs who could have been union-busting thugs but instead feel like the unions themselves. In a sense I suppose the physical world of work on the docks is just a backdrop to an internal struggle, but it boils down to: whether to go to the cops when you’ve witnessed a crime; whether thereby to save your eternal soul (a rather heavy-handed part nevertheless laid down with conviction by Karl Malden). Still, it has some classic speeches, some great scenes and some arresting cinematography.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Elia Kazan; Writers Budd Schulberg; Cinematographer Boris Kaufman Бори́с Ка́уфман; Starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint; Length 108 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Monday 22 May 2023 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, September 2000).

Criterion Sunday 637: Plein soleil (Purple Noon, 1960)

Alain Delon in the early-1960s was a gorgeous man, and this film certainly shows that off. Being adapted from the same source material as the English language The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) means that watching it now inevitably is to compare it with the more recent film. It’s therefore difficult for me to get the more recent casting out of my mind (Hoffman in particular is perfect as the louche Freddy) but Jude Law shares a lot of similarities with Maurice Ronet here in the entitled Dicky/Philippe Greenleaf character around whom Tom Ripley’s machinations revolve. Plein soleil skips straight to the heart of Tom and Philippe’s relationship without the backstory that the more recent film indulges in; by the end they’ve got to much the same place, albeit with the addition here of an (entirely detachable) moralistic ending, which may have drawn the ire of Highsmith but which could be excised from the film without creating any internal inconsistencies, so can be viewed as a sop to the more sensitive viewers of the era. The use of the Mediterranean Italian settings is beautiful and apropos to the work, and there’s a great atmosphere which is surely down to the Highsmith source, although Delon excels in conveying Ripley’s enigmatic core.

(Written on 7 December 2015.)

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director René Clément; Writers Clément and Paul Gégauff (based on the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith); Cinematographer Henri Decaë; Starring Alain Delon, Marie Laforêt, Maurice Ronet; Length 115 minutes.

Seen at ICA, London, Sunday 29 November 2015.

Criterion Sunday 619: Le Havre (2011)

Even working in France, with French actors (and he has done so before), the very specific style and timing of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki is extremely clear here from the very first frames. The way every shot is lit, carefully placed splashy lighting with a high contrast almost noirish feel, but via comic books, the saturated blocks of colour in the set design, and the pacing and deadpan humour. It all comes together beautifully for what is ultimately a fairytale. We all know this isn’t how this story plays out but there’s also an inbuilt sense that people don’t want to see that, though in telling his story — of immigrants from Gabon trying to make their way to the UK, but discovered in a shipping container in the Normandy port town of Le Havre — he is also very much telling it from a European perspective, an idealised one of people just looking out for the best for their fellow humans (even the jaded police inspector). The Africans feel like set dressing to what is otherwise a perfectly pitched comedy — a comedy, partly because so abstracted from reality — of European tolerance to immigrants. So that — whether the film or reality — slightly sours what is otherwise a very lovely, laconic evocation of community.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Aki Kaurismäki; Cinematographer Timo Salminen; Starring André Wilms, Kati Outinen, Jean-Pierre Darroussin; Length 93 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Monday 27 February 2023 (and sometime on DVD at home, London, in the early-2010s).

Turning Red (2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. There aren’t too many animated films in there, because I don’t go to so many of those anymore, which it turns out is fine because Disney is barely making an effort to get them into cinemas, so most need to be watched via their streaming service. Hence this one, which I gave a shot to because it seemed to come from a more interesting perspective than fairytale princesses, and it is indeed very lovely.

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It’s somewhat sad to me that Pixar films are so rarely nowadays shown in cinemas, because the attention to detail in the design and the animation that shows in films like this, or the previous year’s Soul, deserve the big screen but instead we have to subscribe to Disney+, which somehow lessens them. It also leads to factoids like it being the biggest money loser for a cinematic release (even though I’m fairly certain it was barely placed in any cinemas worldwide).

However, Turning Red still strikes me as one of the better recent crop of animated films, which both tells a discernable story from a specific perspective (a young girl from a Chinese background growing up in Toronto, voiced by Rosalie Chiang), but makes it both metaphorically rich and also cartoonishly cute at the same time. A lot of elements feel familiar from any coming of age/high school American movie, with its cliques of friends and confected schoolyard drama, but there’s a real strength to its focus on the setting, the details of the family temple such that even the supernatural plot twist (and I think the posters and marketing make it fairly clear that a large anthropomorphic red panda is involved) feels grounded in an authentic expression of familial ties and Chinese-Canadian culture.

CREDITS
Director Domee Shi 石之予; Writers Julia Cho, Shi and Sarah Streicher; Cinematographers Mahyar Abousaeedi and Jonathan Pytko; Starring Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh 오미주, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Ava Morse, James Hong 吳漢章; Length 100 minutes.
Seen at home (Disney+ streaming), Wellington, 2 July 2022.

After Yang (2021)

I listed my favourite films of 2022 here but I’m trying to post fuller reviews of them as well. One that was again a 2021 favourite was one that showed up on streaming probably some time early in 2022 (maybe the year before, I don’t know; streaming seems so vague in terms of release dates), so I only caught up belatedly though in truth I was hoping for some cinema screenings. Fat chance I guess. Maybe one day in a retrospective, or if some enterprising soul does a season of mediaeval-set movies.

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Kogonada’s follow up to the well-reviewed (and well-liked by me) Columbus is a strange futuristic tale, albeit one that doesn’t overwhelm with its technological aspects (there are human-like cyborg robots, but we don’t get too much into how they’re engineered or even how widespread they are, beyond a sense that their existence is more or less a commonplace). It’s a future largely connoted by modernist architecture and a sense of calm (although partly that’s Colin Farrell’s father and his obsession with tea), and the film rarely attains the same sense of ecstatic joy that comes during the dance-based credits sequence near the beginning.

Although she’s not a major part within the whole film, in a sense it’s Sarita Choudhury’s museum curator who is the key to this film, as it feels at times like a film about museum curation as much as Columbus was about architects: a story that locates the human, lived experience that those professions are only abstractly about. And like many films that feature robots, it’s actually a way of talking about what it means to be human, what it means to love and to remember, and the strength of memories across a family and across generations, linking together people who don’t even know one another, which is in a sense what curating a museum exhibit or a gallery is about.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Kogonada 코고나다 (based on the short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang” by Alexander Weinstein); Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb; Starring Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H. Min, Sarita Choudhury, Haley Lu Richardson; Length 96 minutes.
Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Thursday 28 April 2022.

Criterion Sunday 594: ゴジラ Gojira (Godzilla, 1954)

You could probably argue that this monster movie is a bit too straightforward in its message — the dangers of a nuclear world can unleash terrifying consequences! — but given the context for the film, it’s pretty understandable. There’s a sub-plot about the moral qualms attendant on technological progress in the field of mass destruction, and at no point is it ever unclear what the reasons for all this hand-wringing are, so you can understand why it was heavily recut on original release for the non-Japanese market, given it hits perhaps a little close to home. Still plenty of other movies of the 50s were trading on the fears of an atomic age, including a number of the most prominent American sci-fi and horror features (along with noir gems like Kiss Me Deadly), so it’s not such a big gap to this Japanese film. Of course, the effects now look pretty dated, but the human drama is clear (this isn’t the only film of 1954 from the Criterion Collection that allegorises Japan’s place in the world and stars Takashi Shimura in a leading role, and it may be my favourite of those) and the sense of night-time Tokyo is strong.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Ishiro Honda 本多猪四郎; Writers Takeo Murata 村田武雄 and Honda; Cinematographer Masao Tamai 玉井正夫; Starring Akira Takarada 宝田明, Momoko Kochi 河内桃子, Takashi Shimura 志村喬; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 3 December 2022.

Criterion Sunday 586: Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Given when this was made, this remains a fairly terrifying film, but one that nevertheless retains a certain empathy (like the contemporaneous Freaks to a certain extent). That’s not to say it’s entirely unproblematic to modern audiences, but there’s a consistent theme within the film that actually the monsters of the film (its “lost souls”, if you will) are worth protecting and fighting for, as our hero does at several points, much to the annoyance of Charles Laughton’s gentleman scientist who is actually — perhaps itself a commentary on the myth of the enlightened colonial project — quite clearly a monster. Anyone who knows The Island of Dr Moreau knows how this plays out, and it suffers a little from its early sound era origins at times (seeming almost too quiet and slow for our modern tastes), but it’s a great and fascinating early horror movie.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Erle C. Kenton; Writers Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young (based on the novel The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells); Cinematographer Karl Struss; Starring Richard Arlen, Charles Laughton, Kathleen Burke, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi; Length 70 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

Criterion Sunday 575: The Killing (1956)

I imagine that Stanley Kubrick probably would have dismissed this film as juvenilia by the time he got to his imperial phase (he certainly did of his feature debut, Killer’s Kiss, at least). It’s a film noir that in some of its elements feels a little derivative of earlier noir crime films, along with similar elaborately-plotted French heist films of the same era. But to leave it at that would be to overlook just how tautly structured it is, and how much fun to watch. Not that it’s Ocean’s 11 or anything — this is still noir, nobody gets away with anything at a deeper existential level, but while the ending feels somehow fated, it’s also exactly perfectly judged. A voiceover tells us what’s going on, as we see each of the characters who together make up the individual components of a heist orchestrated by Sterling Hayden, and it’s that calmly dispassionate voice that leads us towards a certain inevitability. But along the way, the crisp monochrome photography and the memorable character roles make for a rich tapestry of lowlifes and grifters who each believes they’re set to make a killing on the races. (What they didn’t know is that… etc etc.)

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Stanley Kubrick; Writers Kubrick and Jim Thompson (based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White); Cinematographer Lucien Ballard; Starring Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Elisha Cook Jr., Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen; Length 84 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Thursday 6 October 2022 (and earlier on VHS in the unversity library, Wellington, September 1998).

Criterion Sunday 573: জলসাঘর Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958)

Probably still one of the world’s major filmmakers whose work I’ve never properly watched (aside from his debut feature, not even yet the trilogy), Satyajit Ray took some time to receive the critical acclaim that was his due, perhaps because his films were far outside the expectations for the local cinema. This is his fourth feature and it showcases the classical music of his homeland beautifully, as it revolves around a local aristocrat who basically spends up his entire income and sells off his wife’s jewellery, just to keep the talent and the guests coming through the opulent room of the film’s title that’s in his home. The film allows the performances the space to breathe, and along the way tells a story of class and privilege in this society, as he tries to retain his status even as his money dissipates and nouveaux riches non-aristocratic traders start to challenge his position. It’s all beautifully filmed and honestly every Ray film I see is another film I feel I need to have seen in a cinema (because at home, late at night, falling asleep a bit) is hardly the ideal viewing experience.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Satyajit Ray সত্যজিৎ রায় (based on short story by Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay তারাশঙ্কর বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়); Cinematographer Subrata Mitra সুব্রত মিত্র; Starring Chhabi Biswas ছবি বিশ্বাস, Padma Devi শ্রীমতি পদ্মা দেবী, Gangapada Bose গঙ্গাপদ বসু; Length 99 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Monday 26 September 2022.

Criterion Sunday 572: Léon Morin, prêtre (Léon Morin, Priest, 1961)

I’m not exactly certain what makes a Jean-Pierre Melville film a Melville film, what his particular touch is, but I do know that I really like just about all of them that I’ve seen. In his way he’s as singular a director as his contemporary (albeit slightly older) Robert Bresson, who also had an interest in religious themes. Melville didn’t really explore them quite as much as he did here, and maybe that’s what sets it apart from his gangster films, but it has all the essential elements of great drama — two people, drawn to each other despite the fact that one is a priest, at a time and place of great trauma (Nazi-occupied France) — and is filmed in austere black-and-white. Belmondo is an actor I’ve never fully connected with, but he brings something compelling to his priest, and the film becomes one of clandestine glances shared between him and Emmanuelle Riva. That said, the film is never quite as melodramatic as I’ve made out, and moves like a chamber drama, while giving enough life to the characters around this central pair that it threatens throughout to move off on another tangent, before being pulled back into these two, and their tangled, messy lives, but it’s a sympathetic portrait of what a good and moral church man might be at a time when such figures seemed to be sorely lacking.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Pierre Melville (based on the novel of the same name in French but usually translated as The Passionate Heart by Béatrix Beck); Cinematographer Henri Decaë; Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Paul Belmondo; Length 117 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 25 September 2022.