Mexican cinema was responsible for a glorious run of full-blooded melodramas in the 1940s, and I’ve already covered a few in recent posts, including Another Dawn (1943) with Andrea Palma and Twilight (1945) with Gloria Marín, both directed by Julio Bracho, and the wonderful Dolores del Río in La otra (1945). I mention the female leads because it’s the women who really define this period in cinema, and before we move on to Ninón Sevilla, it’s worth mentioning my favourite restoration at the 2018 London Film Festival, Emilio Fernández’s Enamorada (1946), which stars the glorious María Félix, who not only dominates the film but steals every single frame she’s in, a definite highlight of the era.
Ninón Sevilla as Violeta comes across a bit like Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls (1995), and like that film this is a melodramatic ride through the sleazy underworld of a (Mexican) city. Still, director Emilio Fernández shows a great deal of sympathy and generosity towards his nightclub dancers forced into street work thanks to the dangerous and violent vicissitudes of low-class gangsters like Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta). He is introduced in the opening scenes and, without any dialogue required, his character is perfectly set up: big suit, concerned about appearances, cheap with his barber but flashy with his money, he struts out into this underworld with the brio of a man who is clearly not only going to fall but ensure that he pulls down with him as many others as he can. Throughout, the grimy sweaty reality of inner city life is stressed, the vast plumes of smoke from the steam trains that pass by crowd the frame like a bleak Turner painting (and like a lot of red-light districts, this one is tucked up alongside railway lines). The women of this film aren’t victims of their own sin, but very much that of the men around them, who are violent and, with a few exceptions, thuggish brutes. If anyone here survives, it’s only by the slenderest margins, but those margins are what the film is all about.
CREDITS Director/Writer Emilio Fernández; Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa; Starring Ninón Sevilla, Tito Junco, Rodolfo Acosta; Length 90 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Tuesday 2 July 2019.
Herewith some brief thoughts about films I saw in May which I didn’t review in full.
Aventurera (1950). A short series at the Barbican focused itself on the ‘Golden Age’ of Mexican melodrama in the 1950s, and sadly this was the only film I made it along to. However, it is entirely delightful, dealing with Elena, a young woman (the ‘adventuress’ of the title) who finds herself alone in the world as the film starts, with only her wits to get her by, as she moves to the big city to make her way as a dancer. She’s entrapped by a dubious offer, and finds herself in the employ of shady brothel-keeper Rosaura, but there’s a TWIST and soon Elena is back in a position of power. There are double-crosses and twists of fortune, which at times suggest a rather more delicate staging of Showgirls (a classic ingenue-corrupted-by-the-system movie). There are also a handful of song numbers punctuating the melodrama, just to keep us going.
Belle Époque (1992). A lightly comedic historical romp set not in fin-de-siècle France, but pre-Civil War Spain of the 1930s, which amounts to much the same thing I suppose. It’s a nostalgic time in which people take sides and fight for what they believe, though our republican hero has deserted his military posting and now finds himself holed up at a country home where he woos each of the four daughters of an elderly gentleman he has met. It’s all self-consciously light-hearted, and pleasantly diverting. It won Best Foreign Language Oscar that year, so that probably gives some idea of its artistic achievement.
The Expendables (2010). A thoroughly overblown exercise in action film narcosis, which is somewhat enlivened by its star-studded cast of genre greats, led by director Sylvester Stallone, still game for a bit of running around and blowing sh1t up. It goes through the set pieces and fulfils the usual expectations, but I can’t pretend it’s not forgettable, because I can’t really remember very much of it at all. However, it does feature Jason Statham, for whose work I always have time.
Hanna (2011). Director Joe Wright has shown himself to be something of a film stylist with literary adaptations like Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Anna Karenina (2012), both of which I rather liked. However, this original screenplay seems to lack a certain something, maybe a sense of anything particularly personal. I love Saoirse Ronan as an actor, and she’s excellent here as in every role she’s played, but her teenager taught by ex-CIA father to be a lethal killer seems a bit by-the-numbers. Wright’s style is still in evidence—this is no straight action thriller, but indulges plenty of other expressive elements—though it is all carried along by a propulsive score in a post-Bourne style.
Hit So Hard (2011). A fairly straightforward talking-heads and music-clip documentary charting the career of Patti Schemel, primarily known for her time as a drummer in Hole, of which band this film functions as something of an encomium. You get a sense of some of the tumult of the early-90s grunge scene, and especially touching are the home videos of the band with Kurt Cobain and his daughter with Courtney Love. Yet despite my love for the band and their music, there’s nothing especially inspiring in the filmmaking.
Intimidation (1960). You’ll have seen my Criterion Sunday series, working through all of the Criterion Collection releases in spine order week by week. Well, Criterion have their bare-bones sub-label Eclipse as well, but I shan’t take to doing an Eclipse Monday or anything, though one result of watching all these Criterion films is I’ve picked up a few Eclipse releases along the way. Intimidation is the first film in the five-film set by director Koreyoshi Kurahara, whose work (and indeed name) I must admit to being entirely unaware about before now. This film is a short feature (around 70 minutes) and an engrossing psychological thriller, focusing on a bookish bank clerk and his lackadaisical boss, the latter of whom due to various personal circumstances finds himself in the position of holding up his own bank. For the most part it’s tautly told through close-ups of the lead characters, who seem to be constantly calculating their meagre options.
John Wick (2014). Like The Expendables above, in truth this taut revenge thriller does nothing particularly new, but the pleasure is in the way it does so, emphasising the physicality of the fight scenes—understandable, given the directors (one of whom, David Leitch, is uncredited) come from a background in stunt choreography. Indeed, unlike many such films it has a direct approach to conflict, emphasising the brutality underpinning the genre, as our eponymous protagonist (played by an ever-laconic Keanu Reeves) methodically despatches his adversaries, and even has to reload his weapon. It’s also nicely paced, starting out slowly, building Wick’s character and anguished personal life, before launching into the inevitable violence of the protracted denouement.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). I never got around to writing a fuller review of this film, mainly because I struggle to find the kinds of superlatives which a lot of people have heaped on it. Undoubtedly it is a spare and at times electrifying chase movie within a dystopian sci-fi desert world—one in which water is a scarce resource, hoarded by a cadre of genetically-deficient mutant creatures who need the blood of the underclasses to survive. It’s in this context that we meet the title character (Tom Hardy), though his central role is swiftly supplanted by that of convoy driver Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). She is on a mission to liberate her enslaved concubine compatriots, and it’s her character that has understandably excited the internet. Quite whether this all amounts to some kind of feminist victory is unclear to me, though at the least it offers the rare prospect in this context of a kickass (yet believably human) female action hero with agency, and who is not reliant on the help of others (i.e. men) to succeed. Still, this is all but window-dressing to the almost unrelenting forward momentum of the thundering vehicular chase that is at the film’s heart, not that I mean that as a criticism exactly. It fulfils its action remit and does so in a way that largely avoids offensive stereotyping, which sometimes seems like victory enough.
Tomboy (2011). Director Céline Sciamma’s most recent film Girlhood hit cinemas recently, giving me the opportunity to revisit an earlier film of hers. It again picks up on gender issues, but refracted through the story of Laure, a young girl who moves to a new neighbourhood as the film starts out, who amongst her new friends begins to play at being a boy under the name Mickaël. It’s a very subtly balanced film which avoids the expected moralising and overdetermined plot points, preferring a far more naturalistic ambiguity to some of the relationships (such as Laure/Mickaël’s affection for local girl Lisa).
The Tribe (2014). Another recent film that’s picked up plenty of critical love is this brutal, nasty film about a dystopian society of the underclasses in Ukraine, which has the novel quality of being entirely in un-subtitled (Ukrainian) Sign Language. Our characters are all deaf-mute and largely confined to the crumbling premises of their special school, which seems at the outset to have teachers and administration but is soon, we learn, largely operated by a cabal of brutally bullying students aided by a number of key members of staff. One, for example, exploits a couple of the girls as prostitutes to the local trucking community, and it’s into this milieu that newcomer Sergey is recruited. In some respects, The Tribe reminds me of Alan Clarke’s film Scum, dealing with English borstal life in the 1970s, and there’s plenty here that visually harks back to that decade, if only because one senses that everything we see has been left to decay since then. However, the film is vivified by bold directorial flourishes, including long tracking shots lifted from the Dardenne’s repertoire, as well as a casual brutality and dispassionate carnality that calls to mind Haneke. For all this—or perhaps because of it—The Tribe seems to me to be a hard film to really love.
CREDITS
Aventurera (1950) [Mexico] — Director Alberto Gout; Writers Alvaro Custodio and Carlos Sampelayo; Cinematographer Alex Phillips; Starring Ninon Sevilla, Andrea Palma, Tito Junco; Length 101 minutes. Seen at Barbican Cinemas, London, Friday 1 May 2015.
Belle Époque (1992) [Spain/Portugal/France] — Director Fernando Trueba; Writer Rafael Azcona (based on a story by Azcona, José Luis García Sánchez and Trueba); Cinematographer José Luis Alcaine; Starring Jorge Sanz, Penélope Cruz, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Maribel Verdú, Ariadna Gil; Length 109 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 30 May 2015.
The Expendables (2010) [USA] — Director Sylvester Stallone; Writers David Callaham and Stallone; Cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball; Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li 李連杰, Dolph Lundgren; Length 103 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Monday 18 May 2015.
Hanna (2011) [UK/USA/Germany] — Director Joe Wright; Writers Seth Lochhead and David Farr; Cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler; Starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Vicky Krieps, Tom Hollander, Cate Blanchett; Length 111 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 8 May 2015.
Hit So Hard (2011) [USA] — Director P. David Ebersole; Cinematographers John Tanzer, Larra Anderson and Mark Putnam; Length 103 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), London, Monday 11 May 2015.
ある脅迫 Aru Kyohaku (Intimidation, 1960) [Japan] — Director Koreyoshi Kurahara 蔵原惟繕; Writer Osamu Kawase 川瀬治 (based on a story by Kyo Takigawa 多岐川恭); Cinematographer Yoshihiro Yamazaki 山崎弘; Starring Ko Nishimura 西村晃, Nobuo Kaneko 金子信雄, Mari Shiraki 白木マリ; Length 65 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), London, Tuesday 12 May 2015.
John Wick (2014) [USA] — Director Chad Stahelski; Writer Derek Kolstad; Cinematographer Jonathan Sela; Starring Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Lance Reddick, Ian McShane; Length 101 minutes. Seen at Cineworld Wood Green, London, Thursday 30 April 2015.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) [Australia/USA, Sight & Sound 2022] — Director George Miller; Writers Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris (based on characters created by Miller and Byron Kennedy); Cinematographer John Seale; Starring Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Riley Keough; Length 120 minutes. Seen at Cineworld Wood Green, London, Sunday 17 May 2015.
Tomboy (2011) [France] — Director/Writer Céline Sciamma; Cinematographer Crystel Fournier; Starring Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana; Length 82 minutes. Seen at the ICA, London, Sunday 24 May 2015.
Плем’я Plemya (The Tribe, 2014) [Ukraine/Netherlands] — Director/Writer Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy Мирослав Слабошпицький; Cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych Валентин Васянович; Starring Grygoriy Fesenko Григорій Фесенко, Yana Novikova Яна Новикова; Length 130 minutes. Seen at the ICA, London, Sunday 31 May 2015.
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