Anna (1967)

One last French film this week, again not from any French film festival but instead from the opening season of this year’s Melbourne Cinémathèque. They did a season of musicals (and films somewhat tangential to musicals), of which this is the only one I’ve not already reviewed on this blog, because it’s fairly obscure. Apparently originally made for TV, though looks pretty good on the big screen too.

This film, called Anna, stars Anna Karina as a young woman called Anna, working in a Parisian ad agency. Elsewhere in the company Jean-Claude Brialy is a photographer tasked with creating an iconic advertising image. As the film opens, we see him shooting a… let’s just say very 60s scene at a railway station (think lots of colourful models running around like a cut scene from Antonioni’s Blowup or something). I think it’s the Gare du Nord, but it looks a lot different these days. Anyway, from a train alights the bespectacled title character, removing her glasses at just the moment one of Brialy’s gang of photographers takes a snap. Later, when he’s looking at these photos, he picks out Anna’s face, which he blows up to poster size and places all over Paris, albeit without any obvious product info, meaning it just functions as a sort of constant reminder of his quest to find this woman.

That’s the entire plot of the film: he really wants to find this mysterious woman but try as he might, as far as he searches, as many woman as he accosts in streets and cafes, he cannot. Unbeknown to him, she works on another floor of his very office building, but despite meeting cute several times, he doesn’t SEE her, because of her glasses. It’s a ploy that’s worked for any number of superhero movies, making her basically Clark Kent I guess, but that’s what this film is leaning on.

I suppose this would make it all quite tedious, except that it’s a musical. You can get away with thin plots in musicals (the entire operatic artistic form is basically predicated on thin plots), because the pleasures lie elsewhere, and there are (to my mind) definitely pleasures here. These lie of course in the music, and not just in the knowing winks to Karina and Brialy’s on-screen history, such as their pairing in Godard’s Une femme est une femme six years earlier, though this is delightfully recalled by Karina’s extremely unappetising taste for bland fried egg dishes and her inability to pour wine without splashing it everywhere, amongst other visual touches.

What I had truly been unprepared for, though, was the Serge Gainsbourg of it all. He is co-credited as a screenwriter, wrote all the music, and seems to be singing a lot of it. Brialy’s character is called Serge, after all. But Gainsbourg himself also appears as a work colleague of Serge’s, and despite having enjoyed his music over the years I’d never fully appreciated his physical charisma before (he’s so weird looking in photos). Turns out that the film really comes to life whenever he’s on screen, which makes me regret having to watch so much of tedious lovelorn Brialy wandering around. Still, that’s a minor critique. Karina is fairly delightful and the film really pushes non-naturalistic stylishness to its limits, which is all by way of obviating the lumpiness of the plot, but I didn’t get the sense anyone much cared about that.

CREDITS
Director Pierre Koralnik; Writers Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Loup Dabadie; Cinematographer Willy Kurant; Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Serge Gainsbourg, Marianne Faithfull; Length 87 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Wednesday 7 February 2024.

Two Films and a Short by Merata Mita: Patu! (1983) and Mauri (1988)

I must return again to Aotearoa New Zealand for my week of films by and about indigenous peoples. One of the country’s key directors is the late Merata Mita, a recent documentary about whom (made by her son), I’ve already reviewed. Her output covers documentary and fiction filmmaking, and it’s her 1980s films that remain key texts, along with (her then sometime partner) Geoff Murphy’s 1983 film Utu, on which she worked.

It’s difficult to write about Patu! (1983) dispassionately, and I suppose because it’s a documentary you feel expected to approach it that way. However, it’s a film made in anger about events that exposed something of the soul of New Zealand that has never really gone away. I say it’s angry, because it focuses on people who are angry, but it’s clearly expressed and many of the participants in the protests (against a tour by an apartheid South Africa rugby team) are strikingly eloquent in the way they speak about this pain and outrage despite everything. It also has its own point of view with respect to the legacy and articulation of racism in New Zealand that I think it more subtly puts across.

Patu! starts out with a series of scenes in which very white groups of middle-class people debate their responses and coordinate their attempts to frustrate and stop the proposed tour, and there are earnest demonstrations by school children to bring home the reality of racism (with only a bit of blackface involved), and I don’t think the film is mocking them—they are earnestly doing the work—but it’s not until we’re well underway that we start to see and hear voices from South Africa, and from indigenous Maori who have joined the protest (and some of these, like Tame Iti, speak Te Reo and are unsubtitled), which gives further depth to some of the criticisms. Eventually it’s not just apartheid in South Africa which comes under scrutiny but the whole carapace of well-meaning liberal society in the West and the settler colonialist past of NZ.

In all of this the film never loses its focus on documenting the 1981 events, and there is some great footage of clashes with police and clearly unequal displays of power that feel so contemporary to other quashed social justice protests that you can see why this continues to resonate and get quoted in New Zealand, and will seem familiar to anyone who has been engaged in protest elsewhere. It’s a wonderful film.

Bastion Point: Day 507 (1980) is a short film that was made a few years before about another protest, though still dealing with a racist colonialist project after a fashion. The two feel very different though, as the anger in that later film is instead replaced by an implacable peace that goes along with a sense of hopelessness. Everyone involved in this occupation protest (of land that traditionally was Maori owned but had been seized by the state) knows how it’s going to play out in the end, with PM Robert Muldoon sharing no particular interest in the cause and eventually sending in huge numbers of police and army to clear the protest, and they react with steadfastness and dignity but not with violence. As such, perhaps, it’s a shorter work but it reveals plenty of lasting divisions that confront the audience with issues that only over the following decades would start to be addressed in a more systematic way within NZ society.

Though Patu! proves the strength of its documentaries, I would consider the 1980s still to be the infancy of narrative filmmaking in New Zealand. It’s very clear from Mauri (1988), for example, that some of the acting is a little, er… broad, not looking at Geoff Murphy in particular. It’s not that I have a problem in principle with a one-note caricature of an elderly racist pākehā with strong overtones of Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo (truly the 1980s archetype of deranged colonialist), it’s just not very well executed. Some of the Māori actors too have a slight rawness too (though a young Temuera Morrison certainly makes a splash as a small town cop), but I think that all adds to the pathos of the story, along with some of the more on the nose directorial choices: the music that soundtracks some of the sweeping shots (including a few punchy helicopter set-ups), or the pathetic fallacy that marks tragic moments. But that’s all part of the distinctive warp and weft of what feels like a deeply traditional tale, of characters whose lives are rooted in the land of their ancestors, but also the scars of the settler colonialists who have disrupted this lineage. The film could therefore have been angry but it finds empathy in most of these characters, while painting a portrait of community in the 1950s (which in its details feels like UK in the 40s or the US in the 30s) that allows each person their humanity and their place, their mauri I suppose you might say.

CREDITS



Patu! (1983) [certificate PG] — Director Merata Mita; Cinematographer Barry Harbet; Length 112 minutes. Seen at the Rialto, Wellington, Sunday 20 August 2000 and at ACMI, Melbourne, Wednesday 26 July 2023.

Bastion Point: Day 507 (1980) — Directors Leon Narbey, Merata Mita and Gerd Pohlmann; Length 27 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Wednesday 26 July 2023.

Mauri (1988) — Director/Writer Merata Mita; Cinematographer Graeme Cowley; Starring Anzac Wallace, Eva Rickard; Length 101 minutes. Seen at the National Library, Wellington, Wednesday 25 August 1999 and at the Embassy, Wellington, Monday 5 July 2021.

L’assassino (The Assassin, 1961)

There’s plenty of classic Italian cinema I can cover, but in looking at things I’ve seen over the last few years, I thought maybe I would highlight a director whose work I’ve not already covered, in this case Elio Petri. His best known film is probably 1971’s Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion, which is in the Criterion Collection and won the Foreign Language Picture Academy Award. This particular film, which shouldn’t be confused with other films of the same title, was screened on 35mm by a local film society, the Melbourne Cinematheque, in a strand dedicated to screenwriter Tonino Guerra. As it so happens, it once again stars stalwart Marcello Mastroianni.

The Assassin makes for a fascinating murder mystery thriller when I think about it, because Marcello Mastroianni’s guilt or innocence is never really clear, indeed seems rather beside the point to most of the characters. Mastroianni is surely legally required to be described as “suave” whenever he is mentioned in the context of this film (or indeed most of his appearances, but especially here), impeccably tailored and immaculately coiffed (including some interesting use of a candle to maintain that). Yet nevertheless he certainly convinces as a borderline sleazy character, a slightly shady antiques dealer seen marking up prices on an antique clock when first introduced, and later encouraging his housemaid to get undressed for an equally dubious doctor (so maybe he’s not so borderline). At length, we find out he’s under suspicion of murder, but that takes its time to come out, and the film uses an elegant flashback structure to pull out the threads of his life, playing around with a number of women and compulsively lying about everything. Even when everything seems to be cleared up at the end, nothing is every really clear; there never quite seems to be an objective truth being uncovered, just a number of stories, of which the investigation just seems to be one more for Mastroianni to regale the ladies with in future.

CREDITS
Director Elio Petri; Writers Tonino Guerra, Petri, Pasquale Festa Campanile and Massimo Franciosa (based on a story by Guerra and Petri); Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma; Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Micheline Presle, Cristina Gaioni; Length 106 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Wednesday 22 February 2023.

Nostalghia (Nostalgia, 1983)

Another entry in my Italian cinema week that is a co-production, this time being the first film directed by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky outside his home country (he went on to direct his final film, The Sacrifice, in Sweden). It takes the Italian settings as a way to prompt Tarkovsky’s memory and it all works in a very poetic register.

Tarkovsky’s penultimate film is also, like Mirror the previous decade, a very personal work—after all, it follows a poet called Andrei travelling in some form of exile in Italy thinking back on his past. Moreover, it seems to take elements from many of Tarkovsky’s own films, a home by pool of water within a larger structure redolent of Solaris, or outdoor landscapes recreated inside, with soft gentle hillocks of earth like in Stalker (the nostalgia of the title that overtakes our central character is a sort of Zone, I suppose), or the very opening with its misty outdoor setting that recalls Mirror.

So much of Tarkovsky is bound up within this film, and however much I might consciously try to resist his Great Man of Images stance, crafting these monumental tales with their striking visuals and oneiric narrative non-structure (that’s a bit unfair: there is structure here, but it is primarily in a poetic register), I still can’t help but feel overawed by the grand images all the same. You might never quite grasp what’s happening, but you can certainly feel it deeply, it’s a futile yet beautiful journey to hold onto one’s essence, one’s memories, writ large and perfectly at home of the biggest of screens.

CREDITS
Director Andrei Tarkovsky Андрей Тарковский; Writers Tonino Guerra and Tarkovsky; Cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci; Starring Oleg Yankovsky Оле́г Янко́вский, Erland Josephson, Domiziana Giordano; Length 125 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Wednesday 15 February 2023 (and probably some time on VHS at home, Wellington, in the 1990s, or maybe in the university library).

LFF 2020: 日子 Rizi (Days, 2020)

This was my second film at the London Film Festival this year, and while I do not generally post reviews of films I have not fully seen, sadly I was thwarted a little by this new world of online film festivals. I cannot speak of the ending because my session “expired” 20 minutes from the end, for reasons that elude me (I think there was only a limited time to watch once you click play, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on the site). Still, I think enough was clear from the first 105 minutes, and I will certainly be seeking out future opportunities to see it (hopefully on a big screen some day given its typically Tsai qualities of beautiful stillness).

Director Tsai, especially in recent years (such as in the remarkable 2013 film Stray Dogs), has been slowly stripping back his cinema more and more, and this film, although a narrative feature, is almost abstract in its rhythms, like his ‘Walker’ series of short films or documentaries like Your Face (2018). It’s “intentionally unsubtitled”, though the only words we hear are mixed very much in the background (and aren’t heard until half an hour into the film). The film shows two men going about their days (one of whom is of course Tsai’s partner and regular collaborator Lee Kang-sheng), a slow accretion of details of two different lives. These two come together (literally) about two-thirds of the way in, and then drift apart again. The images are beautiful, dark, sometimes completely empty and still, and often water-laden (of course, because it’s Tsai), but it’s captivating and shows his continued mastery of the ‘slow cinema’ form.

UPDATE 2023: Like a lot of people, I first saw this film during some form of lockdown (see above). It is, however, far more a film that works on the big screen, in a darkened room where you can’t get up to do something else, because like a lot of his films it works through the slow rhythms of its unfolding. The two lives we see—that of Hsiao-Kang (I’m assuming, since that’s the role Lee Kang-sheng usually seems to portray in his partner Tsai’s films) and Non—are at first two lives quite separate, as one lives in the city and the other in a crumbling industrial building somewhere in the outskirts (presumably the same building he filmed in his VR work The Deserted, or one like it). But they meet in an austere hotel room, a space that does not have water plummeting through the ceiling as so many Tsai living spaces seem to have (or indeed awash across the bathroom floor, as we watch Non wash his vegetables prior to cooking), and there’s a certain rapture to that extended coupling. But this is a film Tsai has made after a long period of non-narrative filmmaking, and while this does have characters after a fashion, it does without language (there is some speaking, but it is “intentionally unsubtitled”), and the way it unfolds is in long sequences of people just moving about their lives, so it feels closer to documentary in some ways, or perhaps to gallery art.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮; Cinematographer Chang Jhong-yuan 張鍾元; Starring Lee Kang-sheng 李康生, Anong Houngheuangsy 亞儂弘尚希; Length 127 minutes. Seen at home (BFI Player streaming), London, Friday 9 October 2020, and [UPDATE] later at ACMI, Melbourne, Wednesday 14 June 2023.