Criterion Sunday 520: Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick (Everlasting Moments, 2008)

There are a number of Jan Troell films in the Criterion Collection and this just happens to be the first of those titles to have been put out by them, but despite having constructed myself a rigorous schedule by which to watch them in order (two every Sunday, as you should know by now!), I still managed to put off this one because it sounded boring. In a sense, it is what I thought it would be — a slow, elegiac ode to a lost personal history — but it also stays clear of being boring by having some fine performances, anchored in a history that feels close to Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (a high bar), while also somehow being a film reflecting on what it is to be a journeyman artist. Our lead character Maria (played by Maria Heiskanen over a period of years) is seen from her youth through to old age, dealing with a moody husband and an increasing number of children while also occasionally showing some interest in photography. It’s a film that’s about the past enough that it looks like an old film, all sepia tones and earthy colours, but it’s the complexity in the characters and the way that what might become simple moral stories become more layered and complex, as Maria becomes stronger in herself but never quite does what people expect. It’s a very handsome movie, and that’s a fine thing, almost a lost art itself.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Jan Troell; Writers Niklas Rådström, Troell and Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell; Cinematographers Troell and Mischa Gavrjusjov; Starring Maria Heiskanen, Mikael Persbrandt, Jesper Christensen; Length 131 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 28 May 2022.

Criterion Sunday 443: La Ronde (1950)

A typically elegant Max Ophüls film that luxuriates in that fin de siècle Viennese atmosphere, fully revels in it indeed as Anton Walbrook leads us as viewer through the various pairings, addressing the camera, changing costumes and acknowledging the artifice of what began as a play by strolling past film cameras and even at one point “censoring” a scene by snipping the celluloid. This could of course come across as altogether too arch, but it feels like a way of making the material — which concerns a series of sexual trysts between various members of Viennese society — somehow more refined than a simple recounting of the plot might suggest. Perhaps if anything it’s just a little too sophisticated for such frolics, but it holds itself so elegantly, with a gliding camera and the glow of the lights, that I can forgive it its longueurs.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Max Ophüls; Writers Jacques Natanson and Ophüls (based on the play Reigen by Arthur Schnitzler); Cinematographer Christian Matras; Starring Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret, Simone Simon, Serge Reggiani, Danielle Darrieux, Jean-Louis Barrault; Length 93 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Wednesday 23 June 2021 (and earlier on VHS at the university library, Wellington, September 1999).

Criterion Sunday 422: The Last Emperor (1987)

It’s odd now to think of that era (which I suppose has never really ended, though I hope is a little more circumspect these days) when a grand multinational epic of another country could be mounted by a largely Western creative team, in English, and win all the awards. It’s certainly very strange to me watching again now, though I can’t deny the artistry that director Bernardo Bertolucci and director of photography Vittorio Storaro manage to bring together to tell the story of Puyi, the titular character.

Puyi was deposed (or forced to abdicate, somewhat in his absence, and seemingly unknown to him) in 1912, the last of the Qing dynasty, but whose story hardly ends there and Bertolucci does honour the sweep of it, cutting between scenes in 1950 China, when Puyi is being held in an internment camp after an abortive attempt to start a new empire in Manchuria, with his childhood ascending to the throne and then the strange events that followed. We see much of it from his eyes, so the real power in the court is only passingly glimpsed (we barely see his mother, or his father, the rest of his family fade into the background, and the most prominent character seems to be his English tutor, played by Peter O’Toole). This also means that key historical events in Chinese 20th century history have to be relayed by people telling him what’s going on, or helpfully rehearsing the events for the benefit of the viewer, because the little Chinese we hear (and see) isn’t translated on-screen. It would also be impossible to capture the intricacies of this period (or indeed extended Chinese history) so it necessarily takes a fairly clipped view of events, but it does give at least some time to the more contested ones, the events that one imagines various regimes would wish to forget.

Ultimately, however, if this film is about the last emperor, it also feels like the last vestige of an older style of film, sumptuous and grand but rather exoticised, an exemplar of a taste that’s been largely superseded. For all its evident weaknesses or rather old-fashioned ways, there’s still something grand that comes through clearly in the imagery and the staging, a lost art perhaps, a vanishing history like the one being depicted.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Bernardo Bertolucci; Writers Mark Peploe and Bertolucci (based on the autobiography 我的前半生 From Emperor to Citizen by Puyi 溥儀); Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro; Starring John Lone 尊龙, Joan Chen 陳沖, Peter O’Toole; Length 160 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 1 May 2021 (and several decades before on VHS at home, Wellington, probably).

Criterion Sunday 412: Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953)

There is, rarely, any film so bleak as one set in a travelling circus, it sometimes seems. This film predates Bergman’s travelling players of The Seventh Seal (a much funnier film), but is set closer to the contemporary world, and has some of the visual acuity he would continue to display in later films. There’s a gorgeous use of monochrome cinematography, deep and penetrating shadows and blown-out sunny shots (as in the flashback retelling of the clown’s humiliation) thanks to Sven Nykvist, his first collaboration of what would be many with Bergman. That early scene with the clown (Anders Ek), though, is very much a microcosm of what the film ends up being about: men and women humiliating one another in love. Our circus master Albert (Åke Grönberg) is desperate, it turns out, to leave behind the carny’s life, his younger girlfriend Anne (Harriet Andersson) finds herself attracted to an actor (Hasse Ekman) who turns out to be a creepy abuser, and some desultory fighting ensues that leaves everyone needing to pick up the pieces. There’s not much hope in the end, just ruined lives, and if the characters keep on living them, you get the sense that it won’t be long before they try again to get out by whatever means necessary.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s relatively little in the way of extras on this Blu-ray, but there’s a short introduction by Bergman filmed in 2003, in which he relates some scathing contemporary reviews he received, as well as the feeling that he quite likes this early film of his.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Ingmar Bergman; Cinematographers Hilding Bladh and Sven Nykvist; Starring Åke Grönberg, Harriet Andersson, Hasse Ekman, Anders Ek, Gunnar Björnstrand; Length 92 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 2 April 2021.

Az én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century aka My 20th Century, 1989)

If you’re looking to subscribe to the BFI Player there are no shortage of films directed by women, which they have collated into the useful Woman with a Movie Camera subscription collection. For example, amongst films I’ve seen and reviewed, there are: debbie tucker-green’s Second Coming; Naomi Kawase’s Sweet Bean; displaced-Iranian-in-London drama Gholam and the mindbending bit of French weirdness Evolution; Australian documentary Island of the Hungry Ghosts; great films by Lucrecia Martel and Annemarie Jacir; two of what I personally consider the films I’ve most underrated, Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark; the list goes on and on. I’ve seen the film I’m reviewing today twice since starting this blog, yet have managed not to write about it either time, which is a mistake because it’s great.

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A strange, at times disorienting, take on themes in European and Hungarian history. It ranges freely over themes, times and places that defined the 20th century (unsurprisingly, given its title) and yet it always retains a sort of light-hearted optimism, helped enormously by its double central performance by Dorota Segda as twins Dóra and Lili, separated in childhood, and living different aspects of the bourgeois struggle — one sexually libertine (and positively thrilled by it), the other with feminist anarchist ideals. Something about that Hungarian practice of post-synching dialogue gives a heightened sense both of diegetic sounds (not just words, but breathy little noises that the twins make) and also a sort of fantastic soundscape abstracted from the images, which combined with the diffuse ethereal electric lighting (Edison plays a key role) and the twinkling, chattering stars, has a beatific effect. You would never guess it was made in the 80s, having barely appeared to age. Indeed, on the big screen it truly shimmers with a radiant, crystalline yet slightly soft-edged monochrome beauty. It’s the kind of oneiric cinema that I wish were praised over the dark fantasies of Lynch, et al.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Ildikó Enyedi; Cinematographer Tibor Máthé; Starring Dorota Segda, Oleg Yankovsky Оле́г Янко́вский; Length 102 minutes.
Seen at Watershed, Bristol, Friday 27 July 2018 (and originally on DVD at home, London, Sunday 13 August 2017).

Three 1956 Films by Yuzo Kawashima: Suzaki Paradise: Red Light, The Balloon and Our Town

Continuing my films seen on Mubi week, it’s incredible now, but perhaps unsurprising, to reflect that Japan produced such a huge wealth of filmmaking talent after the war that has been so little appreciated (at least here) despite the many decades that have since elapsed. Mubi has inaugurated a retrospective dedicated to one such underappreciated talent (director Yuzo Kawashima), whose films are well-regarded by the Japanese film community, but almost unknown — and certainly largely unavailable — in English. Despite his lack of Western renown, his Bakumatsu Taiyoden (A Sun-Tribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era, 1957) has its acolytes, especially in Japan where it comes near the top of a lot of best-ever lists, but perhaps the titles just didn’t translate so well in English. It’s frustrating that in the UK only three of his many films were made available on Mubi; when I travelled earlier this month to Australia, I found a lot more of them, though sadly (being on holiday) did not take up the opportunity to watch them all.

Criterion Sunday 291: Heaven Can Wait (1943)

Ernest Lubitsch made some classic films, and there are plenty of moments of elegantly satirical comedy in this one too, starting with Don Ameche’s elderly philanderer Henry Van Cleve showing up to an appointment in Hades, but finding a bit of resistance from the gatekeeper there. Thereupon he recounts his story, which largely revolves around his likeable old codger of a grandfather (Charles Coburn) along with his stuck-up parents and cousin. Gene Tierney as his love interest Martha shows up altogether too late, and seems rather poorly used by both Henry and the director (especially as she ages during the film). The film rather coyly suggests Henry’s infidelity, but also lets him off the hook for it, hinting at a clear double-standard at play, which is all played for delightful laughs, even if it hasn’t exactly aged brilliantly. Still, it all looks fantastic, shot in lush Technicolor, and played with spirit by the supporting cast (including an ever amiable Eugene Pallette, playing pretty much the same character as in The Lady Eve).

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a half-hour 1982 TV episode dealing with writer Samson Raphaelson’s career, including some interviews with him, which touch on this film amongst others he worked with Lubitsch on.
• We also get a few minutes’ worth of snippets of home recordings featuring Lubitsch playing the piano, accompanied by some personal photos, introduced by his daughter (I think).

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Ernest Lubitsch; Writer Samson Raphaelson (based on the play Születésnap “Birthday” by Leslie Bush-Fekete); Cinematographer Edward Cronjager; Starring Don Ameche, Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette; Length 112 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Wednesday 29 January 2020.

Criterion Sunday 279: Der junge Törless (Young Törless, 1966)

This was one of those early feature films in the New German Cinema, in which Schlöndorff turned his elegantly monochrome camera inward on German society, through the story of a young man at an Austrian boarding school in the early part of the century. It’s not so much about a boy’s coming of age, as it is about him learning about the depths of his own and his society’s cruelty towards others, about becoming institutionalised, seeking explanations (at one point, through imaginary numbers in mathematics) for the irrational desires of the heart. That said, it all moves fairly slowly and methodically through its story, and though the acting is rather frosty and stilted, I think that’s how it’s supposed to come across. I think I admired it more than I loved it, but it’s a fascinating film all the same.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Volker Schlöndorff; Writers Schlöndorff and Herbert Asmodi (based on the novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß “The Confusions of Young Törless” by Robert Musil); Cinematographer Franz Rath; Starring Mathieu Carrière, Marian Seidowsky; Length 87 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 7 December 2019.

Bontoc Eulogy (1995)

Setting itself apart from other films about Filipino history is this striking hybrid documentary, or rather more of a pseudo-documentary that blends actuality with propaganda and staging to create a critique of historical representation on film. There are a huge number of ideas bubbling throughout this hour-long film.

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A strange hour-long piece that plays out as an earnest personal essay film about a Filipino-American man’s search for his grandfather, taken from the mountain region tribe of the Bontoc in the Philippines to be a performer at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis. This man, ostensibly the filmmaker Marlon Fuentes (indeed, played and voiced by him), reflects on his children and their lost ancestor, while Fuentes the co-director marshals archival footage to illustrate this (personal) historical lacuna. And yet, from the outset, there are hints that something more is going on — for example, the use of clearly fictional material (such as contemporary American propaganda representations of the US-Philippine war of 1898) without context, or implying their status as actuality film, or modern interpolations of ethnographic displays, tribal dancing, or images of his children holding cameras or doing magic tricks, as if representations of the filmmaker’s own practice. So this pseudo-documentary in fact interrogates the uses and purposes of image-making to shape historical representation, so sadly lacking in the education system not just of the US but the Philippines too (as seen in John Gianvito’s documentaries). In other words, there’s a lot going on here that’s worth unpacking.

CREDITS
Directors Marlon Fuentes and Bridget Yearian; Writer Fuentes; Cinematographers Rubén Domingo, Fuentes, Tommy Hafalla, Chris Manley and Yearian; Starring Marlon Fuentes; Length 56 minutes.
Seen at Genesis, London, Tuesday 30 January 2018.

Independencia (aka Independence, 2009)

Following on from my post about John Gianvito’s documentary diptych about the Philippines, which touches on Filipino independence in the late-19th cenutry, another film set touching on the same historical events was made by a Filipino filmmaker in 2009. It has a distinctive style, different from that of his more famous compatriot Lav Diaz, but captures something about how the past intertwines with the present.

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There’s a strange and haunting atmosphere imbued with the uncanny that haunts a lot of Guy Maddin’s similar pastiches on silent films, but with more poise and mystery. For a film so short it also nevertheless reminded me of Lav Diaz’s (much longer) film A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016), in that both are set around the turn of the 20th century, at the time just after the Philippines gained its independence from Spain, and which spend a lot of time in lush jungle terrains, though Independencia brings up the American occupation that came soon after independence (and whose effects are arguably still felt, as John Gianvito covered in his documentary epic, mentioned above). What sets Martin’s film apart is the style, which mimics that of early cinema, shot of sets using the sometimes harsh and inconstant natural light of the sun, lending that uncanny quality I mentioned earlier, a sense of a film dealing with a distant past and yet one which nevertheless persists.

CREDITS
Director Raya Martin; Writers Martin and Ramon Sarmiento; Cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie; Starring Tetchie Agbayani, Sid Lucero, Alessandra de Rossi; Length 77 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 26 November 2017.