February 2: Le Havre (2011 -- Aki Kaurismäki)

★★★★

February 1: Shadows in Paradise/Varjoja paratiisissa (1986 -- Aki Kaurismäki)

★★★

January 31: Volver (2006 -- Pedro Almodovar)

★★★★

January 29: Bad Education/La mala educación (2004 -- Pedro Almodovar)

★★★★

January 28: Ajami (2009 -- Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani)

★★★★

January 16: The Artist (2011 -- Michel Hazanavicius)

★★★★

I had yet another pleasant movie surprise of 2011 when I saw The Artist tonight.  The publicity talks about how the film is a contemporary silent movie, but I didn’t see it that way at all.  It uses intertitles and very little sound, but it most definitely isn’t a silent movie.

I’m sure most viewers feel a little awkward in the opening as we don’t hear anything.  This audience feeling is perfectly justified because The Artist is actually a contemporary film with no sound but for music--it's not a silent film.  Silent films don’t have long stretches of silence, the takes are fairly short, and the camera is nearly static.  The Artist, though opens with a long period of silence – not even music -- the camera lingers for long and short takes and the camera pans, soars and glides.  The film also progresses with fast-paced modern editing.  With all these elements, we’re conditioned to expect sound, and that desire is perfectly justifiable; our early discomfort in the film is a function of the way we naturally link certain cinematic elements to sound.

So The Artist is not a silent movie and has mostly superficial reference to the genre.  Instead, it’s a contemporary film that is experimenting with sound and using the historical setting of the transition between silent and sound movies as its setting and theme.     The movie plays with the soundtrack throughout, going totally mute as we’re watching a delighted audience applaud at one point – an action that would have had soaring music in a real silent movie – and containing sounds like that of a glass bottle chinking as it touches a table in a dream sequence.  When we don’t have music, we have a loud hissing present to remind us that there’s no other sound.  We soon realize in The Artist that sound is important to contemporary film.

Another strong aspect of the film for me is its art direction and cinematography.  The décor moves from 20s silent to 30s talkie as we see furniture, accessories and costumes change.  And every image in this 1:33 frame ratio is bathed in even, three-point lighting that highlights our principals while letting the eye take in every in the full frame.  Jewelry sparkles here in soft focus.  Even the make-up is  effective at recreating period cinema.  Peppy has huge eyes that are accented with liner, and she looks like Betty Boop when she cuts a view to the side; George has a strong nose that gets occasional backlight accent, and his hair is gelled down and swept over.  And we get to see the actors in close-up black-and-white.  The Artist is a beautiful film that’s a great homage to the films of the late 20s-early 30s.

The two main actors are also engaging.  George owns the camera when he’s in front of it, capturing our attention with his strong eyes and physicality.  Peppy, too, communicates strongly with her expressive eyes and her lithe agility.  The two take us through every nuance of their thought as they move through the story and certainly seem to tap into acting style of the silent era.

The Artist is a fun, and brave, film about sound.  It highlights sound throughout, as a gag at the end highlights.  As the film approaches it's conclusion, we see a gun, then an inter-title with “BANG!” on it.  Of course we see believe the gun has fired, but the next image is of a car crash.  We grin as we realize the "bang!" is the car and not the gun, and the gag again highlights how The Artist, rather than being a silent film, is actually one that highlights how sound works.  Such a joke couldn't exist in a sound film.  And what are we to make of the end of The Artist when we begin to get diagetic sound and discover that George has a very heavy French accent?  Again, the lack of sound has enabled the movie to communicate in a way that a talking film couldn’t; we’d have known George’s national origin right away in a sound film, and we’d have known why he didn’t welcome the arrival of talkies, but silence  gives us a different film and a different character.

This is a touching and thoughtful movie.   Another good film to come out of 2011.  

January 14: The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1965 -- Martin Ritt)

★★★★

After Tinker, Tailor, I wanted to watch the 45-year-old Spy Who Came in From the Cold.  And I’m glad I did.  It’s good.

There’s some continuity to these two Le Carre adaptations.  The atmosphere and mood are similar since both have an oppressive darkness to them.  While the desaturation in Tinker, Tailor sets it’s mood, a perpetual, omnipresent rain creates a feeling of bleakness in the black-and-white Spy .  And there’s a tawdriness in both, too, with Alec Leamas being a drunk who makes ethnic slurs, feels sorry for himself, and works in a tedious job reshelving books.  He runs up a tab he never pays at his local grocer and spends his money on alcohol, and we follow him though the unemployment line.  Even his co-worker lives in a tiny apartment devoid of grace or elegance.  Neither the London of the film nor its characters provide much uplift to viewers.

The storytelling here prefigures that in Tinker, Tailor, too.  We don’t get a clear, straightforward story in Spy but rather have to read between the lines until the gaps are filled in.  The most obvious example of this is early in the film when Control tells Alec he wants him to stay in the cold a bit longer, to remain in the Circus, solitary and disconnected from any special relationships.  We soon see Alec drinking too much, looking for work, being bitter and assaulting his grocer.  The film doesn’t tell us how these two situations are related until much later when we hear that Alec is trying to draw the attention of German espionage.  Tinker, Tailor has similar gaps – and many more of them -- but the director of this film feels the need to fill in his 1961 audience with a few more connections.  Despite Ritt’s feeling that he has to complete the story for his audience, he leaves enough jumps in the story to make the audience engage to figure out what’s happening before he ultimately give it to them as exposition.

Among the many good qualities of the film, my favorite is its bravura camera work, cinematography that the later film doesn’t match.  There’s a long crane shot in the opening of Spy that hearkens back to Touch of Evil (released only three years before) as Ritt’s camera follows a car as it exits the border control at the Russian sector of Berlin and comes to the American Checkpoint Charlie.  The Orson Welles reference is so explicit here that I half expected the car to explode.  Another outstanding piece of camera work occurs as Alec is released from jail.  The camera is inside a bus, and we see him with Nan, who the camera follows as she walks in front of the bus and runs up the side to the door and inside.  And while we watch this shot, a face in the crowd stand out that we’ll soon get to know much better.  It’s a camera tour-de-force. 

 It’s probably worth noting, too, that the gay characters come off better in the more recent Tinker, Tailor than in this film.  Here, we get the impression that the man outside the prison might have been cruising to try to pick up recently-released convicts.  Soon, he’s peremptorily dismissed from an important conversation and meekly, effeminately withdraws, being called queer by Alec.  He couldn’t be a bigger contrast to the gay men in Tinker Tailor, who figure in the center of the plot and have well-rounded, sympathetic personalities.  Forty-five years has made a big difference in the portrayal of gay characters in these Le Carre films.

I see many  ways that The Spy who Came in From the Cold prefigures Tinker, Tailor, and the earlier film actually has better camera work than the later.  Both, though, create an effective, dark mood and communicate a pessimism about humanity that impresses.