Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Feb 06: The Tudors: Season 4
★★★★★When I don't have time (or energy) to watch a whole film, I like to squeeze in a TV episode or two. That's how I've been watching my way though this last season of the Showtime series, The Tudors.
One of my biggest pleasures here is the way it lets me touch base with the European history classes I did as an undergrad and grad student. I remember a lot of the history, but some of the details are always vague, so I like half-anticipating what is happening. The part around the abolition of the monasteries was pretty clear; the Pilgrimage of Grace was almost new.
I’d have to say that the series has at least partly changed the way I think of European history, too: it’d never occurred to me that many of the monarchs were young, spoiled brats and that many must have grown up under terrible pressure and experienced terrible tragedy. Rys-Meyers plays such a character to the hilt with his Henry VIII, and his portrayal has a logic that makes sense to me; early Henry is self-absorbed and spoiled, while later Henry is resisting aging, trying to recapture his youth. As the series has gone along, it’s seemed the Henry character has lurched from one point to another sometimes, but the initial season certainly pushed me to think of how their childhood – and, later, youth – could have accounted for the ridiculous waste that monarchs inflicted on so much of Europe. I wouldn’t discount the impact of
politics, religion and power as factors in the wars, but the personalities of the monarchs would certainly have had a major impact.
I refer to The Tutors as “Baywatch in the Renaissance” because of its emphasis on soft core sex, and I think some of the characters, unfortunately, get the depth of treatment that a character in Baywatch would get, too. Tamzin Merchant’s Katherine Howard, for example, would be best popped into a bikini and put on a beach in California; her flighty-young-thing act is annoying, not to mention her painfully anachronistic language and gestures. Suffolk (Henry Cavill) moves from playboy to brooder to lover with relatively little graduation in between. On the other hand, Natilie Dormer manages some depth and growth to Anne Boleyn. There’s a range of depth here, partly due to the acting and partly due to the scope that the series is trying to encompass.
I loved the set décor here, though, an engaging mix of Tutor with some contemporary taste for luxury. I want the sheers with embroidery that appear around the bed in several places; what a great idea for a mosquito net! Ditto for
the costumes, which manage to be sexy on the handsome actors.
So this is a fun series, and the graphic nature of characters’ interactions, costuming and environments have left me with an image of some of these characters I’m apt to carry with me for awhile: Henry, Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves, Sir Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey, Mary and Cromwell. I not only enjoyed the television, but I’m also glad for the sense of the time I got that I can carry around and modify as I learn more. And since this is the last season, I have to add that I’m going to miss seeing Mary and Elizabeth grow up (yeah, I know the HISTORY….would be interesting to see how the producers handle them, though).
One of my biggest pleasures here is the way it lets me touch base with the European history classes I did as an undergrad and grad student. I remember a lot of the history, but some of the details are always vague, so I like half-anticipating what is happening. The part around the abolition of the monasteries was pretty clear; the Pilgrimage of Grace was almost new.
I’d have to say that the series has at least partly changed the way I think of European history, too: it’d never occurred to me that many of the monarchs were young, spoiled brats and that many must have grown up under terrible pressure and experienced terrible tragedy. Rys-Meyers plays such a character to the hilt with his Henry VIII, and his portrayal has a logic that makes sense to me; early Henry is self-absorbed and spoiled, while later Henry is resisting aging, trying to recapture his youth. As the series has gone along, it’s seemed the Henry character has lurched from one point to another sometimes, but the initial season certainly pushed me to think of how their childhood – and, later, youth – could have accounted for the ridiculous waste that monarchs inflicted on so much of Europe. I wouldn’t discount the impact of
politics, religion and power as factors in the wars, but the personalities of the monarchs would certainly have had a major impact.I refer to The Tutors as “Baywatch in the Renaissance” because of its emphasis on soft core sex, and I think some of the characters, unfortunately, get the depth of treatment that a character in Baywatch would get, too. Tamzin Merchant’s Katherine Howard, for example, would be best popped into a bikini and put on a beach in California; her flighty-young-thing act is annoying, not to mention her painfully anachronistic language and gestures. Suffolk (Henry Cavill) moves from playboy to brooder to lover with relatively little graduation in between. On the other hand, Natilie Dormer manages some depth and growth to Anne Boleyn. There’s a range of depth here, partly due to the acting and partly due to the scope that the series is trying to encompass.
I loved the set décor here, though, an engaging mix of Tutor with some contemporary taste for luxury. I want the sheers with embroidery that appear around the bed in several places; what a great idea for a mosquito net! Ditto for
the costumes, which manage to be sexy on the handsome actors.So this is a fun series, and the graphic nature of characters’ interactions, costuming and environments have left me with an image of some of these characters I’m apt to carry with me for awhile: Henry, Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves, Sir Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey, Mary and Cromwell. I not only enjoyed the television, but I’m also glad for the sense of the time I got that I can carry around and modify as I learn more. And since this is the last season, I have to add that I’m going to miss seeing Mary and Elizabeth grow up (yeah, I know the HISTORY….would be interesting to see how the producers handle them, though).
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Jan 29: Barocco (1976--Andre Techine)
* * 
OK…I’ll say it. I didn’t like this movie. I didn’t get engaged in it because it felt so deliberate, almost schematic. As I watched the predictable, contrived plot crank though with its bookend parallel scenes, I wanted even a small surprise. This is early Techine, so I have to think he was working from some kind of theoretical prescription – why else the flat, uninvolving delivery by Isabelle Adjani? the casting of Depardieu as both killer and victim? (a Brechtian gesture?) the paired bad sets of guys? the flat secondary characters?
Despite the occasional visual quotes from other crime movies, Barocco isn’t Chinatown, which oddly enough, I kept thinking of. In fact, I came away with more appreciation for the Polansky film.
This film is nearly ten years from Rendez-vous, the film I first saw some character focus, and 15 years from his great run of mid-90s movies. Barocco helps me see those films in better perspective. Thanks to Barocco, I grasped the range of Techine’s evolution in filmmaking, from contrived, intellectual filmmaker here to the later, greater humanist; always skilled in his technique, Techine gradually develops the art of depicting life in rich, overabundant complexity. The best thing about Barocco is the perspective it gives on how far Techine traveled afterwards.
OK…I’ll say it. I didn’t like this movie. I didn’t get engaged in it because it felt so deliberate, almost schematic. As I watched the predictable, contrived plot crank though with its bookend parallel scenes, I wanted even a small surprise. This is early Techine, so I have to think he was working from some kind of theoretical prescription – why else the flat, uninvolving delivery by Isabelle Adjani? the casting of Depardieu as both killer and victim? (a Brechtian gesture?) the paired bad sets of guys? the flat secondary characters?
Despite the occasional visual quotes from other crime movies, Barocco isn’t Chinatown, which oddly enough, I kept thinking of. In fact, I came away with more appreciation for the Polansky film.
This film is nearly ten years from Rendez-vous, the film I first saw some character focus, and 15 years from his great run of mid-90s movies. Barocco helps me see those films in better perspective. Thanks to Barocco, I grasped the range of Techine’s evolution in filmmaking, from contrived, intellectual filmmaker here to the later, greater humanist; always skilled in his technique, Techine gradually develops the art of depicting life in rich, overabundant complexity. The best thing about Barocco is the perspective it gives on how far Techine traveled afterwards.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Jan 27: The Kids are All Right (2010--Lisa Cholodenko)
* * *I thought this was a good movie with better-than-average acting. It's about a family that is threatened when an interloper tries to usurp the head-of-the-family role and fails.....but rather than the head of the family being a man, it's Annette Benning. If the film had been about a heterosexual family, and had some of the lesbian elements been reinterpreted as straight elements, it would have been a much more typical movie.
But that's what's interesting: this film is about a lesbian family. And that's enough to keep it from being cliche as it portrays -- in a very understated way -- tensions like those between lesbian partners, straight men/butch lesbians, straight men/femme lesbians. How often do you see THAT in a movie? I liked the way you Nic stomped down her analytical, controling, bossy path while the more sensitive Jules responded to what she encounters. That relationship is good writing.
I also think All Right is an interesting American film because as the viewer seeks a center of authority, that center becomes the kids. I felt ambivalent about Paul, who gives good advice to Laser and recognizes that Joni has grown up at the same time he is seducing Jules and undermining Nic; in fact, I half-felt sorry for him as an aging dilettante until I realized that his affair with Jules had hurt the kids. The kids' pain and anger gave me the moral center to judge (and ultimately forgive) Paul. In many ways, his is one of the more interesting characters. And his is the one that's left with the least closure in the film.
That's not to say the film doesn't seem a bit clunky at time. I thought I could reduce most scenes to a particular (and obvious) narrative or character purpose, and Moore was occasionally flat in her delivery. There were some nice editing flourishes, though, as when we had the departure to the second dinner nicely condensed. Overall, the film seemed more deliberate and controlled than rich in detail that might or might not be relevant to the main flow, detail that might have given us more uncontrolled depth. It felt more like Philadelphia than Brokeback Mountain to me.
But all the specificity about lesbianism aside, The Kids are All Right is about love and family, and that's enough for anyone to be able to enjoy this film. I loved the part where Nic finally tells Paul to piss off and find his own family rather than stealing hers; I could see myself in that role. As for the lesbian specificity of script, I enjoyed seeing a portrayal of the pressures a same-sex couple might face, done in its detail. This is the kind of insight that cinema can provide so abundantly. The film doesn't have the range or emotional depth of Techine at his best, but it's still a worthwhile watch.
And it made me wonder what other national cinema would be capable of producing a similar film.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Jan 22: Rendez-vous (1985--Andre Techine)
* * *
Of Techine’s 80s films, the other ones I've seen are Le lieu du crime and Hotel des Ameriques, and Rendez-vous is at the high end of that gamut.
I remember how Lili’s personality in Lieu swings from one orientation to another and how Gilles’ personality suddenly veers off into far left field in Hotel; the personalities in Rendez-vous have a similar volatility to them and can seem unmotivated, unexpected or out of proportion.
I feel this a little in Paulot, who starts the film as a noodle-y assistant to an overbearing female boss. He falls in love with Nina and wants to have sex with her, but he’s the only person in the film she won’t accept; she’s aware that she uses sex to get her way with men and protests that she loves him and doesn’t want to manipulate him with sex. However, rejection alters Paulot, and his love first becomes obsession and then anger and then rejection. Both Quentin and the usher boyfriend have had Nina, and losing at that male completion makes Paulot even more aggressive and angry. Nina ultimately offers herself to him, but that’s the end of the relationship; not only does her act imply her need overcoming her love, but the rape-like quality of the scene shows that Paulot’s real concern at that point is power more than love. There are two pairs of scenes which, (perhaps heavy-handed) measure of the change in Paulot. Nina offers herself to Paulot twice, and he reacts differently at each invitation, declining out of shame or love the first time and accepting out of a need to exert power the second. In the second pair, Nina gives Paulot theater tickets twice. The first time, he gratefully accepts and attends; the second time, he tears up the tickets and throws them away. Such parallels are a little contrived, but they serve as indices of change in Paulot’s character. Like in the other two 80s films, the character tangent here is somewhat fast. But at least it has some motivation.
I wasn’t able to fill in all the gaps in Nina’s character at all, and the info in those gaps would have been important. First, I don’t understand why Nina “loves” Paulot. He’d done nothing to inspire love in her when she first turns him down, and having sex would not have been a major deal to Nina. I also found her sudden love of Quentin unmotivated, even unconvincing. Maybe she wants to rescue him from his problems despite his protestations about not wanting help. But I saw nothing in the suddenness of that love that would make it deep enough to lead to her having visions of him after he dies or of her fixation on playing Juliette. And I didn’t get why she wants
Paulot in her life so badly in the latter part of the film. Perhaps her (unconvincing) love of Quentin had shaken her and she wants Paulot as a crutch. Nina is the center of this film, and she is the part that holds together the least for me.
I like Lambert Wilson as Quentin. He is a perfect Heathcliff -- enigmatic, disturbed, threatening, tortured, self-destructive. His psychology isn’t much of a question here because he doesn’t change. He’s another of these major characters like Manu in Temoins and the boyfriend in RER who drops out in the middle of the movie, setting up the character theme of how to deal with loss; it’s a brave plot structure and theme that Techine uses several times. I like it.
Since I never got the Nina-Quentin love, the last part of the film about the production of Romeo and Juliet wasn’t very compelling or satisfying. Nina’s role as Juliet certainly takes a toll on her non-professional life, but her motivation is so unclear to me that this section of the film falls flat. Perhaps both Nina and Scrutzler are working through their grief by using the play to conjure their lost loves. In any case, it was interesting to discover here a film that looks at some of the same issues as Aronofski’s Black Swan,. The artistic project in both films soon begins to creep beyond the performance an into the performers' daily lives, and in both films, the performance is a sort of therapy or enactment of a desire. But while the motivation of Aronofski’s Nina is evident, I just didn’t get why Techine’s Nina is doing Romeo and Juliet. (hmmmm...two Ninas?….it might be worth pondering whether Romeo and Juliet informs the structure of Rendez-vous the way the structure of Swan Lake informs Black Swan…..)
I remember how Lili’s personality in Lieu swings from one orientation to another and how Gilles’ personality suddenly veers off into far left field in Hotel; the personalities in Rendez-vous have a similar volatility to them and can seem unmotivated, unexpected or out of proportion.
I feel this a little in Paulot, who starts the film as a noodle-y assistant to an overbearing female boss. He falls in love with Nina and wants to have sex with her, but he’s the only person in the film she won’t accept; she’s aware that she uses sex to get her way with men and protests that she loves him and doesn’t want to manipulate him with sex. However, rejection alters Paulot, and his love first becomes obsession and then anger and then rejection. Both Quentin and the usher boyfriend have had Nina, and losing at that male completion makes Paulot even more aggressive and angry. Nina ultimately offers herself to him, but that’s the end of the relationship; not only does her act imply her need overcoming her love, but the rape-like quality of the scene shows that Paulot’s real concern at that point is power more than love. There are two pairs of scenes which, (perhaps heavy-handed) measure of the change in Paulot. Nina offers herself to Paulot twice, and he reacts differently at each invitation, declining out of shame or love the first time and accepting out of a need to exert power the second. In the second pair, Nina gives Paulot theater tickets twice. The first time, he gratefully accepts and attends; the second time, he tears up the tickets and throws them away. Such parallels are a little contrived, but they serve as indices of change in Paulot’s character. Like in the other two 80s films, the character tangent here is somewhat fast. But at least it has some motivation.
I wasn’t able to fill in all the gaps in Nina’s character at all, and the info in those gaps would have been important. First, I don’t understand why Nina “loves” Paulot. He’d done nothing to inspire love in her when she first turns him down, and having sex would not have been a major deal to Nina. I also found her sudden love of Quentin unmotivated, even unconvincing. Maybe she wants to rescue him from his problems despite his protestations about not wanting help. But I saw nothing in the suddenness of that love that would make it deep enough to lead to her having visions of him after he dies or of her fixation on playing Juliette. And I didn’t get why she wants
Paulot in her life so badly in the latter part of the film. Perhaps her (unconvincing) love of Quentin had shaken her and she wants Paulot as a crutch. Nina is the center of this film, and she is the part that holds together the least for me.I like Lambert Wilson as Quentin. He is a perfect Heathcliff -- enigmatic, disturbed, threatening, tortured, self-destructive. His psychology isn’t much of a question here because he doesn’t change. He’s another of these major characters like Manu in Temoins and the boyfriend in RER who drops out in the middle of the movie, setting up the character theme of how to deal with loss; it’s a brave plot structure and theme that Techine uses several times. I like it.
Since I never got the Nina-Quentin love, the last part of the film about the production of Romeo and Juliet wasn’t very compelling or satisfying. Nina’s role as Juliet certainly takes a toll on her non-professional life, but her motivation is so unclear to me that this section of the film falls flat. Perhaps both Nina and Scrutzler are working through their grief by using the play to conjure their lost loves. In any case, it was interesting to discover here a film that looks at some of the same issues as Aronofski’s Black Swan,. The artistic project in both films soon begins to creep beyond the performance an into the performers' daily lives, and in both films, the performance is a sort of therapy or enactment of a desire. But while the motivation of Aronofski’s Nina is evident, I just didn’t get why Techine’s Nina is doing Romeo and Juliet. (hmmmm...two Ninas?….it might be worth pondering whether Romeo and Juliet informs the structure of Rendez-vous the way the structure of Swan Lake informs Black Swan…..)
Friday, January 21, 2011
Jan 21: Les voleurs/Thieves (1996--Andre Techine)
* * * * 
Right after Ma saison preferee and Wild Reeds is Les voleurs, and it’s part of that great run Techine had in the mid-90s. There are so many things that are engaging in this film. While this is a crime movie….and you gotta love the way the French do them….it’s mostly another humanistic view of personalities and relationships. Marie and Alex love Juliette, and when Juliette vanishes from the movie midway through, they’re left to cope with their loss. It’s another example of the Techine plot structure where we get to like an important character and then lose the character half way through the film. I think of Temoins as the archetype of that style in Techine.
This verson is a little different from that in Temoins, though, because the shifting perspectives of the story give us, temporally, different focuses. We don’t see a group of people move forward in time here. In Voleurs, the first part of the film shows us Alex, his brother and his family. We get more on Alex as Juliette enters the story and we learn about that relationship; we start to settle into a story about the jaded, aloof detective. The story then takes an unexpected turn when we meet Catherine Deneuve’s Marie half-way through and Marie becomes a major character as we lose track of Juliette. I like this irregular plot structure that won’t fit the intro-rising action-climax-denouement story we’re so used to. It's fresh, and it works.
Like in Saison preferee, the relationship of Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil becomes the central focus of the film, and Deneuve, if anything, is better here than in Saison. She has great range this film, and she tempers every emotional swing into the creation of the academic Marie, who is cracking under the stress of losing her unexpected, intense love of Juliette. Likewise, Saison and Voleurs have put Auteuil on my map as an actor. His is a consistent, underplayed, inscrutable character who, like Marie, has a hard shell that is penetrated by Juliette. We see
more of Alex than Marie in the film, so we understand that his emotional repression comes from his family history and his job, and we get his interior as we watch his frank sexual relationship with Juliette. And we come to see that he’s lying to us (and to himself) about it. Soon after Juliette left the film, I was caught a little off-guard when Alex began to take an interest in Marie, but that interest makes sense now after my having seen the whole film. Alex feels; he has heart. I missed that because I’m so used to buying into the surface I see in a film that I don’t question enough. Alex’s inviting Marie to dinner – and seeing the pains he’s gone to in order to dress it up – would have surprised Marie as much as it did me. Richly realistic character that she is, Marie blows the evening because she has her own issues to deal with and doesn’t really care about or look into Alex much either. That dinner is a seminal moment in the film to me.
And there is the character range and richness here I like so much in Techine. We see the family in detail, and all that info makes us care about them even though they are outside the main flow of the film. The same is true of the surplus we get around Juliette with her brother and their friends. And I enjoyed the opening and closing focus on the little boy. The story here reminded me slightly of As I Lay Dying, with the perspective of the film shifting among characters; AILD shifts into unusual points of view like Jewel’s and even the dog’s, while here we get the perspective of an angry, repressed child, trying to cope with the loss of a parent; he may become an Alex. And there's a little French play with Barthesian suspense as this kid hides a gun early in the movie…..but never returns to or uses it.
This is a deep, warm, thoughtful movie and deserves more attention than it gets.
Right after Ma saison preferee and Wild Reeds is Les voleurs, and it’s part of that great run Techine had in the mid-90s. There are so many things that are engaging in this film. While this is a crime movie….and you gotta love the way the French do them….it’s mostly another humanistic view of personalities and relationships. Marie and Alex love Juliette, and when Juliette vanishes from the movie midway through, they’re left to cope with their loss. It’s another example of the Techine plot structure where we get to like an important character and then lose the character half way through the film. I think of Temoins as the archetype of that style in Techine.
This verson is a little different from that in Temoins, though, because the shifting perspectives of the story give us, temporally, different focuses. We don’t see a group of people move forward in time here. In Voleurs, the first part of the film shows us Alex, his brother and his family. We get more on Alex as Juliette enters the story and we learn about that relationship; we start to settle into a story about the jaded, aloof detective. The story then takes an unexpected turn when we meet Catherine Deneuve’s Marie half-way through and Marie becomes a major character as we lose track of Juliette. I like this irregular plot structure that won’t fit the intro-rising action-climax-denouement story we’re so used to. It's fresh, and it works.
Like in Saison preferee, the relationship of Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil becomes the central focus of the film, and Deneuve, if anything, is better here than in Saison. She has great range this film, and she tempers every emotional swing into the creation of the academic Marie, who is cracking under the stress of losing her unexpected, intense love of Juliette. Likewise, Saison and Voleurs have put Auteuil on my map as an actor. His is a consistent, underplayed, inscrutable character who, like Marie, has a hard shell that is penetrated by Juliette. We see
more of Alex than Marie in the film, so we understand that his emotional repression comes from his family history and his job, and we get his interior as we watch his frank sexual relationship with Juliette. And we come to see that he’s lying to us (and to himself) about it. Soon after Juliette left the film, I was caught a little off-guard when Alex began to take an interest in Marie, but that interest makes sense now after my having seen the whole film. Alex feels; he has heart. I missed that because I’m so used to buying into the surface I see in a film that I don’t question enough. Alex’s inviting Marie to dinner – and seeing the pains he’s gone to in order to dress it up – would have surprised Marie as much as it did me. Richly realistic character that she is, Marie blows the evening because she has her own issues to deal with and doesn’t really care about or look into Alex much either. That dinner is a seminal moment in the film to me.And there is the character range and richness here I like so much in Techine. We see the family in detail, and all that info makes us care about them even though they are outside the main flow of the film. The same is true of the surplus we get around Juliette with her brother and their friends. And I enjoyed the opening and closing focus on the little boy. The story here reminded me slightly of As I Lay Dying, with the perspective of the film shifting among characters; AILD shifts into unusual points of view like Jewel’s and even the dog’s, while here we get the perspective of an angry, repressed child, trying to cope with the loss of a parent; he may become an Alex. And there's a little French play with Barthesian suspense as this kid hides a gun early in the movie…..but never returns to or uses it.
This is a deep, warm, thoughtful movie and deserves more attention than it gets.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)